Zacarias Moussaoui was billed as 'the 20th hijacker', but his role in 9/11 remains uncertain, writes Denis Staunton.
Last Thursday, as Judge Leonie Brinkema prepared to sentence Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison with no possibility of parole, she asked if any of the victims of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks wanted to speak. After a pause, Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died on the plane that flew into the Pentagon that day, spoke directly to the 37-year-old defendant.
"I want you, Mr Moussaoui, to know how you've wrecked my life. You took the most important person in my life. We've all watched you twiddle your beard and make faces with no remorse. I hope you sit in jail without the sky, without the sun, without any contact with the outside world. I hope your name is never mentioned in the newspapers again," she said.
Moussaoui gazed around the Virginia courtroom before fixing Dillard with a stare.
"I destroyed a life and she lost a husband. Maybe one day she can think about how many people the CIA has destroyed. You have a hypocrisy beyond belief. Your humanity is a selective humanity. Only you suffer. Only you feel," he said.
The exchange came at the end of a trial that saw the worst and the very best of American justice, as a thoughtful jury rejected a bungled, tainted prosecution case against a man whose role in the 9/11 attacks remains uncertain.
Originally billed as "the 20th hijacker", by the end of the trial Moussaoui was revealed as an unpredictable fantasist whose hatred for America was never brought to full expression.
The prosecution claimed Moussaoui, who admitted coming to the US to take part in al-Qaeda operations, could have saved the lives of 3,000 people who died on September 11th, 2001, if he had told investigators all he knew about the plot to attack America.
A French citizen of Moroccan origin, Moussaoui was arrested at a Minnesota flying school on August 17th, 2001, after he asked to be trained to fly a Boeing 747. He was in prison on September 11th but three months later he was charged with six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts.
BORN IN THE south-western French fishing port of St-Jean-de-Luz in 1968, Moussaoui was placed in an orphanage at the age of three while his Moroccan-born mother tried to find work as a cleaner. His father was a violent drunk who terrorised the family and is now in an institution receiving treatment for bipolar disorder.
The young Moussaoui faced racial prejudice growing up but by the time he was 18, he had a circle of friends in the French city of Narbonne, including a young Jew called Gilles Cohen.
Cohen described Moussaoui as a clever young man with a big smile and a love for life, who lived with the Cohen family for a time during the mid-1990s.
"We were proud we exemplified the possibility for people from two different origins to come together and have an understanding," Cohen said.
The teenage Moussaoui showed little interest in religion and smoked, drank and spent time with girls as any young Frenchman might. By the time he moved to London in 1992, he had a degree from Montpelier University but he had fallen out with his mother, who wanted him to contribute more to the upkeep of the household.
As a business student at London's South Bank university, Moussaoui met a group of foreign students who invited him to join them at Brixton mosque. Within months, he was not only a devout Muslim, wearing a beard and often dressed in traditional robes, but had become more radical than most worshippers.
He made friends with Richard Reid, who was later arrested for carrying explosives in his shoe on a transatlantic flight. In 1995, Moussaoui went to Afghanistan for training and fought in Chechnya
After his arrest in 2001, Moussaoui claimed that he and Reid had been sent to the US to hijack a fifth aircraft on September 11th but evidence from the 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, suggested that Moussaoui was seen as too unreliable to be trusted with such an important mission.
SOON AFTER HIS trial began, Moussaoui fell out with the defence lawyers appointed by the court and insisted on representing himself. After a succession of bizarre appearances, the judge decided that Moussaoui was not fit to represent himself and in April last year he pleaded guilty to all six charges.
The trial almost collapsed earlier this year after a prosecution lawyer was found to have coached witnesses and shared confidential information, but Moussaoui himself rescued the prosecution case when he took the stand, declaring "I am al-Qaeda".
After Moussaoui's guilty plea, the only remaining question was what his punishment should be and the prosecution argued that he should be put to death for concealing information about the plot that killed 3,000 people on 9/11.
A succession of victims' relatives testified to the suffering caused by the terrorist attacks but the defence called other victims' relatives who argued that Moussaoui's life should be spared.
When the jury retired last week, most observers expected a quick verdict and most predicted that Moussaoui would be sentenced to death.
But as the deliberations stretched into last weekend and the jury asked for a dictionary (the judge refused) it became clear that the jurors were confused and that the unanimous verdict needed for the death penalty was becoming remote.
In the end, the jury was not convinced that Moussaoui was personally responsible for the deaths on 9/11 and nine out of 12 jurors thought his troubled childhood should be taken into account.
"America, you lost - I won," Moussaoui crowed when the jury delivered its verdict.
Moussaoui was spared execution but he will spend 23 hours of every day for the rest of his life alone in a small cell in a maximum security prison, handcuffed and escorted by two guards during his single hour of daily exercise.
Judge Brinkema told him that, instead of ending his life with a "big bang of glory", he would expire with a whimper and she cut off his protest that America was refusing to listen to the reasons behind the 9/11 attacks.
"You will never get a chance to speak again," she said, "and that's an appropriate ending."