Pain, Disbelief for Suspect’s Mother

Aicha Moussaoui had been up all night, weeping and pacing inside her red-roofed villa overlooking the Mediterranean. Her eyes were swollen, and she struggled to fight off the dizzying effects of the sedative she had just swallowed.

“I am wounded,” she said.

Moussaoui was enduring her first full day Wednesday as the mother of an alleged conspirator in terrorist crimes. Her youngest son, Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, had been indicted Tuesday in faraway America, accused of plotting with the Sept. 11 hijackers to kill thousands of Americans.

For three hours, over coffee and homemade Moroccan sweets, the woman known locally as Madame Moussaoui stoutly denied that her son was a terrorist. At worst, she said, he was “brainwashed,” first by a female cousin who filled his head with “a false Islam,” and later in London by “phony imams” preaching hatred and violence.

“For me, it’s as if he had died,” she said of her son, whom she said she last saw in 1996 when he visited from London and upbraided her for not wearing a veil. “It was like he was taken into a sect.”

That was particularly galling for a woman who had raised four children by herself and built a solid middle-class life after emigrating from Morocco at age 18.

But for all her protestations of her jailed son’s innocence, Moussaoui also acknowledged that he was the type of young man who could have been manipulated into doing something terrible.

“I want to see him so I could ask my son: Why? How? Is it true?” she said. That was as close as she came to accepting that he might have plotted to slaughter thousands of people.

Moussaoui said she “felt like the roof fell in on me” Tuesday, when she saw a TV report on the six-count indictment accusing her son of joining the Al Qaeda terror network and using Osama bin Laden’s money to pay for flying lessons. As if proffering evidence, she pulled childhood photos of a smiling Zacarias from her living room walls and unfolded a letter he sent from his U.S. prison cell.

For Moussaoui, 55, who had supported her family on a cleaning woman’s salary, the indictment represented a reversal in the trajectory of assimilation and success she had envisioned for her son as a French citizen.

It pained her, she said, that she had lost him to London, where police say he was a devoted follower of Omar Abu Qatada, who Spanish authorities say is Al Qaeda’s chief European organizer. It was also in London, police say, that Zacarias Moussaoui grew close to two French converts to Islam who trained in Afghan camps. One of them has been arrested on suspicion of plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

She Fears U.S. Will Execute Him

Now Moussaoui fears her son will be executed, for some of the U.S. charges carry the death penalty. She would prefer that he be tried in France, where justice officials on Wednesday objected to the fact that if convicted, he could be executed.

“I don’t trust America,” she said, mentioning a recent French TV documentary about African-Americans and Hispanics freed from death row after DNA tests cleared them.

Yet she said she was appalled by the Sept. 11 attacks and sympathized with the pain, anger and rage she sensed from watching TV reports from the U.S.

She said she blamed “those false imams in England who brainwashed my son and allowed all this to happen.” And she said she feared American anger will be focused on her son, and that he would be punished for the actions of the 19 dead hijackers. Zacarias Moussaoui is represented in France by Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who is well known for representing--and later promising to marry--Illych Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal.

The son described in the indictment is a mystery to her, Aicha Moussaoui said. She claimed to know nothing of her son’s trip to Afghanistan, where the indictment said he attended the Khalden terrorist training camp in 1998. Nor, she said, was she aware that he moved to the United States in February, enrolling in two flight schools and inquiring about crop-dusting, as the indictment alleges.

And she certainly did not know, she said, that her son was arrested in August in Minnesota after a suspicious flight school official called the FBI.

In fact, she knew nothing of his life, she said, until Sept. 12 or 13, when she heard a TV news report that someone named Zacarias Moussaoui was a suspect in the terror attacks. She thought it was probably someone else by the same name until she phoned French anti-terrorism police and learned the truth.

French intelligence officials say they had been watching Zacarias Moussaoui in London since 1994, when his name came up in connection with the assassinations of three French consular officials in Algeria. Later, they said, they warned British authorities of Moussaoui’s trip to the Afghan camp. British officials say they were never told that Moussaoui was a suspect in a specific case.

Girlfriend Also a Terror Suspect

Zacarias Moussaoui, who moved to London in 1992, earned a degree in international business studies from South Bank University, a London trade school, in 1995. He lived in a ground-floor flat in Brixton, an Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in South London, with a North African girlfriend. Police say they are looking for the girlfriend, whom they suspect of terror-related activities.

Aicha Moussaoui said a French intelligence officer called her in late 1999 and said her son’s name was in the address book of a man named Yannick who had died fighting for the Muslim cause in Bosnia.

The last time she heard her son’s voice, she said, was when he left a message on her answering machine in 1996, saying: “I love you and send you a kiss.”

Unfolding the letter from her son, written in blue ballpoint on yellow legal paper, she spoke of his devotion to her despite the many years he did not contact her. The letter, posted with two blue Statue of Liberty stamps, was addressed in Zacarias Moussaoui’s hand to his mother’s villa on Rue de Acanther in the terraced hills above Narbonne. It arrived already opened, she said.

“For My Mother,” the letter began in English before switching to French written in a tight, flowing script. “If Allah wills it, I hope you’ll forgive me for all the worries I give you. . . . Don’t worry. I have done nothing and will prove it in due time.”

Zacarias Moussaoui wrote that prison “allows you to see clearly into your life.” He said he did not have telephone privileges and warned her not to write, saying her letters would be read by prison officials.

“Inshallah [God willing], I’ll be out soon,” he wrote. But he seemed to anticipate the indictment, adding, “The trial should take place in a year’s time. I know them--they need to go fast to justify the massacre of Muslims in Afghanistan.”

Aicha Moussaoui said she was not surprised that her son wrote of his refusal to speak to authorities, a claim confirmed by the FBI. “That’s his character,” she said.

After rereading the letter, Moussaoui wiped her handkerchief over the framed photos of her son. They showed him as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in a yellow sweater, looking much thinner and smaller than the bull-necked 200-pounder in his current mug shot. There were also photos of him in his crimson graduation robes in London, and as a teenager on a beach with his mother and two sisters.

“He was such a beautiful, gentle child,” his mother said. “If only I could go back in time.”

In defense of her son, she found herself describing him as a young man who smoked marijuana, drank alcohol and hosted loud parties in his mother’s garage. She seemed to believe that such behavior somehow stood as proof that he was no Islamic extremist capable of violence.

Her family has been cleaved by religious differences. Her oldest son, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, has told French reporters that he was appalled by Zacarias Moussaoui’s militant brand of Islam and had stopped speaking to him. Aicha Moussaoui said she and her oldest son had not spoken in months because she believes that even his religious beliefs are too radical.

In Islamic terms, Madame Moussaoui is a liberated woman. Forced into an arranged marriage in Morocco at age 14, she said, she divorced her husband when Zacarias was 2. She took a cleaning job with the French national telephone company, retiring as a mail room clerk.

She supervised the construction of the villa, she said, building the fireplace herself. She made and sold children’s clothes and sold homemade Moroccan sweets.

Aicha Moussaoui said she clashed with her Moroccan-born niece, who lived with the family when Zacarias was a teenager and pressed fundamentalism on him.

The niece told Zacarias Moussaoui that as a Muslim man he should not do housework or let his mother run the household, she said. Moussaoui said she confronted her niece and forced her to leave. She said he heard later that Zacarias had a long romantic relationship with the girl, who is his cousin.

British newspapers have reported that Zacarias’ London girlfriend sought by police is his cousin.

Late Wednesday, with one son in an American prison and another estranged from her in her adopted country, Aicha Moussaoui was left with her letter and her son’s childhood photographs. As the sun faded behind the grape arbor and fruit trees outside, she rehung the photos on the walls of the house where her son had grown to manhood.

Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in Paris and Marjorie Miller in London and Sarah White of The Times’ Paris Bureau contributed to this report.