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Zacarias Moussaoui — Al Qaeda’s loose cannon

Moussaoui, 36, becomes the only person convicted in connection to the case, despite lingering questions about his involvement and mental competency

ZACARIAS Moussaoui is a late-blooming militant, inept pilot and failed terrorist who authorities say may have been the United States’ best chance to stop the carnage of September 11, 2001.

After pleading guilty Friday to conspiracy charges related to the attacks on New York and Washington, Moussaoui, 36, becomes the only person convicted in connection to the case, despite lingering questions about his involvement and mental competency. Already in custody on immigration charges when 19 hijackers flew planes into the twin World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Moussaoui followed a similar pattern of training and financing. The government originally alleged that Moussaoui was meant to be the “20th hijacker” that day, although its own expert has since said that was not the case.

According to the September 11 commission, captured Al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told interrogators that Moussaoui was not part of the plot but was instead to be used in a loosely planned “second wave” of attacks on the West Coast.

The commission, however, said that his rush to learn to fly in the summer of 2001 “lends credence to the suspicion that he was being primed as a possible pilot in the immediate planes operation.”

Friday’s plea marked the second time Moussaoui offered to admit guilt. In 2002, he recanted a guilty plea after the judge gave him a week to reconsider.

After sending rambling, handwritten court filings, including a passage saying that his public defender was “a professional liar, it should be stamped on his forehead,” the judge revoked his right to represent himself.

Observers have said the plea is illogical.

“I can conceive of no reason why someone in his circumstance would rationally plead guilty to these charges, ... unless you consider a desire for martyrdom rational,” said Robert Litt, a former senior official in the Justice Department’s criminal division.

On February 23, 2001, a heavy-set Moussaoui, sporting a shaven head and goatee, entered the United States on a student visa and quickly opened a bank account with 32,000 dollars in cash.

From late February to May, he took classes at Norman Oklahoma’s Airman Flight School, but even after months of study, instructors refused to let him fly solo.

Moussaoui left for Minnesota and a different flight school. There, he said he wanted to learn to fly from London to New York on a Boeing 747 flight simulator, paying 8,000 dollars in cash for the privilege.

Moussaoui proved such a poor student that it may have led to his arrest. Clancy Prevost, the flight instructor who alerted authorities to Moussaoui, told a Minneapolis magazine that while trying to teach Moussaoui, he thought to himself, “This is awful. We’re getting nothing out of this. This is stupid.”

Ultimately, it was Moussaoui’s cash payments, ineptitude and odd reaction to questions about religion that piqued Prevost’s interest. He suggested that managers ask the FBI if Moussaoui was legitimate. Two days later, Moussaoui was arrested. According to the September 11 commission, the FBI agent who handled his case believed Moussaoui had been planning to hijack a plane, but the connection with Al Qaeda was not made until after September 11. Born in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in southwestern France, Moussaoui grew up in a Muslim family headed by a divorced mother who did not regularly practice her religion.

Not academically gifted, Moussaoui enrolled in a trade school instead of an academic high school. Nevertheless, he went on to obtain a degree from London’s South Bank University.

While living in London in the 1990s, Moussaoui turned toward fundamentalism and, investigators believe, began to mingle with militant Islamists and terrorists.

According to the indictment against him, in April 1998 he was at Khalden Camp, an Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

Whether or not he was supposed to be a part of the September 11 attacks, authorities have said that statements from captured operatives have linked Moussaoui to the terrorists. In August, Ramzi bin al-Shaiba - who formed an Al Qaeda cell in Germany with hijackers Mohammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah - wired some 14,000 dollars to Moussaoui’s Oklahoma account.

In June 2001, Moussaoui inquired about starting a crop dusting company in Oklahoma, as Atta did in Florida.

At the time of his arrest, Moussaoui had a flight simulator computer program, fighting gloves and shin guards, knives and a computer disk with information about the aerial application of pesticides. afp

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