In a gambit surely unprecedented in US legal history, Zacarias Moussaoui, awaiting trial for conspiracy in the September 11 attacks, has set the US attorney general a multiple choice quiz, offering a seat at his execution as a mock reward for getting the right answer.
The suspected apprentice hijacker set the test in one of a string of bizarre scrawled notes to the judge overseeing his pre-trial proceedings in Virginia. Seventeen of the letters were released yesterday.
Under the heading ”September 11 Lottery Case”, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is asked to tick a box alongside one of four options describing his theory about Moussaoui’s role:
20th hijacker
5th plane missing in action
I, Ashcroft, don’t know
Let’s kill him anyway
Below, the defendant writes: ”1st prize: 1st Class seat at Zacarias Moussaoui execution” but then adds: ”Only JOKING, it is not going to happen”.
The legal point behind the quiz is an apparent change in the prosecution theory about his role in the September 11 plot.
Moussaoui was detained less than a month before the attacks, when he was taking flying lessons and his instructors suspected his motives.
After September 11, he was charged as a conspirator and justice department officials referred to him as the ”20th hijacker”.
They speculated that five conspirators were on each of the hijacked planes, except United Airlines flight 93, on which there were only four. They were overcome by a passenger revolt that brought the plane down in Pennsylvania.
The original theory was that Moussaoui would have been on that flight had he not been arrested.
However in a recent court order, the government adjusted its account, suggesting he would have piloted a fifth plane.
The justice department said yesterday that Ashcroft was unlikely to fill in his questionnaire.
Moussaoui, a French citizen who studied in London, has been assigned a defence lawyer despite wanting to conduct his own case.
In his notes to the court, Moussaoui accuses his lawyer, Frank Dunham, who he sometimes calls ”Fat Megalo” (possibly short for megalomaniac) of being in league with Ashcroft (generally referred to as ”slave of Satan”) to have him executed.
His rambling notes refer to the USA as the United Sodom of America, and the judge, Leonie Brinkema as ”Death Judge” or ”Grand Nanny”.
In one, he challenges President Bush to ”stop playing chicken and … come out and fight hand-to-hand combat with knife if he want to kill me.” – Guardian Unlimited Â