Zacarias Moussaoui, the man who investigators believe could have unravelled the al-Qaeda plot before the September 11 2001 attacks, pleaded guilty on Friday to terrorism and other charges carrying the death penalty.
Clad in a green prison jumpsuit, but unshackled, the bearded Moussaoui pleaded guilty to all six counts of terrorist conspiracy, air piracy and murder at a district court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, telling Judge Leonie Brinkema that he understood that the charges carried the death penalty.
In so doing, Moussaoui (36) becomes the first member of al-Qaeda to be convicted in a United States court since the attacks three years ago.
While he admitted membership of al-Qaeda, he told the court that he was not part of the September 11 plot, but was training instead for a ”broader conspiracy” to use aircraft as weapons that would have included a strike on the White House.
He told the judge he had received no promise of a lighter sentence in return for his plea.
”I don’t expect any leniency from the Americans,” he said.
Moments later, the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, announced that the federal government will show him no leniency in the separate sentencing hearing that now awaits him.
”We are seeking the death penalty in this case,” he said.
Gonzales noted that Moussaoui admitted in a signed statement to the court on Friday that he had been personally recruited by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, trained to fly hijacked aircraft into buildings, and had lied to prevent the authorities from uncovering the plot against the World Trade Centre.
His court-appointed defence lawyers had sought to block his efforts to enter a guilty plea, on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
After meeting with Moussaoui, Judge Brinkema dismissed those concerns on Friday, telling the court: ”He has a better understanding of the legal system than some lawyers I have seen in court.”
But moments after stating that he understood the implications of his guilty plea, Moussaoui demonstrated the volatile behaviour that has characterised his three-year journey through the US legal system, telling the court he has no intention of embracing his sentence.
”I will fight every inch against the death penalty,” he said.
He insisted, as he has for the past three years, that he did not have a role in the September 11 plot, but was training instead for other operations.
One such plot involved an attempt to free the blind Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdur Rehman, jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre, by threatening to fly a plane into the White House.
Since Moussaoui’s arrest on immigration charges in August 2001, investigators have come to regard him as an untapped intelligence asset, admitting that his capture could have helped to avert the attacks had the British and American authorities reacted in a timely fashion.
”Moussaoui was a missed opportunity for the US and a mistake by al-Qaeda,” Tim Roemer, a member of the congressional 9/11 investigative commission, told NBC television on Friday.
A French citizen of Moroccan extraction, Moussaoui had lived in Brixton, south London, for nine years, and was known to MI5 as an Islamist. After moving to the US in February 2001, he aroused the suspicion of FBI agents in Minnesota because he wanted to learn how to take off and land a Boeing-747, despite having barely 50 hours of flight experience.
The agent concluded that Moussaoui was ”an Islamic extremist preparing some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals”, according to the final report of the September 11 national commission.
However, FBI headquarters instructed the agents not to share their findings with the federal aviation authorities, and a CIA request for information to the British authorities went unanswered until two days after the attacks.
”Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense and much higher-level attention,” the congressional commission said. — Guardian Unlimited Â