HE MAY live to regret that he was not sentenced to death. Zacarias Moussaoui, 37, was told yesterday that he must spend the rest of his days at the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, the bleakest and most secure of all American jails.

There, he will be kept in an 8ft (2.5m) by 5ft (1.5m) cell, 23 hours a day. He will have no chance to mix with other inmates and only fleeting contact with staff.

His desk, bed and stool will be made of concrete, his mirror of steel. A tiny slit in the wall will be his only source of natural light. If he is allowed a television it will be black and white, showing only educational and religious programmes. His only comfort may be a copy of the Koran.

The prison, known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”, was built in 1994 at a cost of $60 million. It has 1,400 remote-controlled steel doors, motion detectors, pressure pads and gun towers.

ADX Florence is already home to Moussaoui’s friend, the British “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid.

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, jailed for conspiracy after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, are also there. But Moussaoui can forget about chatting with fellow terrorists.

He is expected to be kept in isolation, eating meals in his cell and spending his recreation hour in the concrete courtyard alone.

A taste of life ahead was offered by James Aiken, a former prison warden called as a defence witness during his trial. “We are not preparing him for a return to society. We are not even preparing him for a return to the general population. The mission here is incapacitation.

“Time takes a toll on all of us, something he doesn’t even know yet. I have seen them rot. They rot.”

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