Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life in prison for his supposed role in the 11 September terrorist attacks, wants to recant his guilty plea and have a new trial, Tamam Ahmed Jama reports from Paris When Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty to six charges of terrorism conspiracy last year -- four of which carry the death penalty -- the judge asked him whether he understood the charges against him and the possible sentences that could be imposed. He replied that he did, adding "I don't expect any leniency from the Americans." The jury verdict on 3 May sparing his life seems to have changed Moussaoui's earlier perception. He said he was "extremely surprised" that the jury did not opt for his execution. "I had thought that I would be sentenced to death based on the emotions and anger toward me for the deaths of 11 September," he said in a 6 May affidavit accompanying a motion filed by his court- appointed lawyers. Encouraged by the jury decision to spare his life, Moussaoui now wants to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial again on the original charges. "After reviewing the jury verdict and reading how the jurors set aside their emotions and disgust for me and focused on the law and the evidence presented during the trial ... I now see that it is possible that I can receive a fair trial even with Americans as jurors and that I can have the opportunity to prove that I did not have any knowledge of and was not a member of the plot to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on 11 September, 2001." he said. "I wish to withdraw my guilty plea and ask the court for a new trial to prove my innocence of the 11 September plot." Judge Leonie Brinkema has dismissed Moussaoui's request, saying it was too late. Under United States federal law, a defendant does not have the right to change a guilty plea after a sentence has been imposed. Moussaoui was found eligible for the death penalty in April for his role in the 11 September attacks, the deadliest terrorist strike on American soil in history. In his guilty plea last year, he said that he was not part of the 11 September plot. But in a dramatic turn in the trial in March, he contradicted his earlier testimony -- by which he stood for four years -- by confessing that he was part of the 11 September plot and was supposed to fly a fifth hijacked plane into the White House on that day. He now says that this "was a complete fabrication" and wants to reinstate his earlier testimony -- that he did not know about and had nothing to do with the 11 September terrorist plot. In his affidavit, he explains his frustrations and that he had no confidence in the American criminal justice system nor did he trust his court-appointed lawyers. "I was sure that... in the end, I would be given death," he says. "Solitary confinement made me hostile toward everyone and I began taking extreme positions to fight the system." Moussaoui also says in the affidavit that at the time he entered his guilty plea, his "understanding of the American legal system was completely flawed". Moussaoui has often been referred to as the "20th hijacker" who would have joined the 19 men responsible for the carnage of 11 September had he not been arrested three weeks prior to the attacks. The 37- year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent was detained on immigration charges in August 2001 after he aroused suspicion in a flight school in Minnesota. Moussaoui has filed a notice for appeal of his sentence and the judge's ruling refusing him retrial. Robert Turner, co- founder and associate director of the Centre for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, told Al-Ahram Weekly that, in the absence of a proof of an reversible error in the trial or significant new evidence coming into light, it is unlikely that the case will be reconsidered. "The purpose of an appeal is not to second-guess the jury; there need to be legal grounds for it. It would surprise me very much if he got another day in court." Meanwhile Moussaoui began serving his life in prison term over the weekend, without chance for parole, in a maximum- security prison known as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" in Florence, Colorado, where some of the most notorious criminals in the US are serving life imprisonment terms. The French justice minister, Pascal Clement, earlier welcomed the verdict sparing Moussaoui's life. France had previously made its opposition to the death penalty known to the American authorities. Speaking to the French daily Le Monde, Patrick Baudouin, the French lawyer of Moussaoui's mother, Aicha Al-Wafi, said she was greatly distressed over the fate of her son, whose innocence she has always maintained. Baudouin said that life imprisonment was extremely severe punishment, given that Moussaoui had been in jail for weeks when the attacks took place. He added that, if Moussaoui had been tried in France, the maximum sentence that he would have received would have been 10 years. Execution would not have been an option as France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
