ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Prosecutors said al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui killed Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, by lying to federal agents weeks earlier to keep the plot secret. Defense attorneys called him an “al-Qaida hanger-on” who only dreamed he had a role in the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
Summarizing 10 days of testimony in a tumultuous sentencing trial, lawyers painted sharply divergent views of whether the 37-year-old Frenchman was responsible for any of the nearly 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11. Then a jury of nine men and three women retired to decide whether he should be eligible for the death penalty.
They went home after an hour of deliberations.
Prosecutor David Raskin told the jurors they could be sure of Moussaoui’s lethal intent “because he admitted it right here in this courtroom” in bombshell testimony Monday. Defense attorney Edward MacMahon countered that Moussaoui had told “a plethora of lies to aggrandize himself. You can’t believe anything this man says.”
MacMahon said FBI headquarters refused to investigate what one “tremendous” field agent discovered about Moussaoui after his Aug. 16, 2001, arrest at a Minnesota flight training school. Agents also ignored far better leads about the Sept. 11 plotters during the summer of 2001, he said.
“There’s no evidence the government would have behaved any differently than it actually did no matter what Moussaoui said or what he did,” MacMahon said.
On rebuttal, prosecutor David Novak responded, “We’re not here to tell you FBI headquarters did a good job.” But he said the verdict form does not ask jurors to “grade the FBI (or) … grade the CIA.”
“All Moussaoui had to do is say, ‘I’m al-Qaida,’” Novak argued. The prosecutors said they had showed that if Moussaoui had confessed, when he was arrested, to the facts he admitted when pleading guilty four years later, the FBI would have identified 11 of the 19 hijackers within weeks and the Federal Aviation Administration would have kept them off airplanes.
Moussaoui watched the closing arguments impassively but shouted “Victory to Moussaoui! God curse America!” after the judge and jury had left for a brief recess.
If this jury unanimously decides Moussaoui is eligible for the death penalty, it will reconvene to hear more testimony about whether he actually deserves to be executed. Their only other choice is life in prison without possibility of release. That second phase would be a forum for aggravating and mitigating evidence about his role, including the testimony of families of Sept. 11 victims.
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