A Case of Where, Not What

When FBI and immigration agents arrested Zacarias Moussaoui at his motel in suburban Minneapolis on Aug. 16, they suspected he might be a potential airline hijacker.

He wanted to fly “the Big Bird,” he’d said. He was in a hurry to learn. And despite more than 50 hours at the controls, he couldn’t even solo a single-engine Cessna.

But the only direct evidence of his breaking the law were technical violations of his visa.

More than seven months later, U.S. prosecutors say they have sufficient evidence to warrant that the French-born Moussaoui should die. He is, they say, a conspirator in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorism network and in the Sept. 11 attacks that killed thousands in New York, Pennsylvania and Arlington, Va.

But while the investigation into Moussaoui has revealed a global odyssey that intersected a world of terrorism, prosecutors have yet to produce direct evidence that he ever committed a terrorist act. Nor have they presented direct proof that Moussaoui was involved in planning the Sept. 11 hijackings or that he was the intended 20th hijacker before his arrest, as authorities have privately suggested.

In fact, Moussaoui appears to be little more than a bit player in his own indictment. The conspiracy charges that were handed down Dec. 11 by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., mostly outline the government’s case against Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda forces and the renegade Saudi terrorist leader himself.

Yet Moussaoui’s movements--from his attendance at Al Qaeda’s Khalden training camp in Afghanistan in 1998 to his pilot training last year in Norman, Okla.--form a virtual map of key arteries in Al Qaeda’s global network.

Interviews with scores of law enforcement agents on three continents, as well as religious leaders and friends, relatives and colleagues of Moussaoui’s, show that his trail alone testifies to Al Qaeda’s far reach, its roots, recruitment and regional leadership.

Several of Moussaoui’s key contacts--from London to Kuala Lumpur--have emerged since his arrest as major Al Qaeda players. The group’s name is Arabic for “the Base.”

An ethnic Moroccan, Moussaoui trained at a terrorist camp at the same time as an Algerian who would later plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport and a Briton who would try to set off a shoe bomb on a Miami-bound flight from Paris, government officials say.

In London, Moussaoui was steeped in radical Islam by firebrand imams. And in Malaysia, he had been the guest of Bin Laden’s operations chief for Southeast Asia, an Indonesian cleric who also was host to two Sept. 11 hijackers and oversaw a massive bombing plot in Singapore, according to authorities in the region.

Moussaoui’s three-member defense team, led by federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr., declined to comment on the case. They have asserted in court that Moussaoui is innocent and that the case against him is circumstantial at best. Moussaoui announced in court that “in the name of Allah,” he was offering no plea.

On balance, the case against Moussaoui so far is built only in small part on what he did, and far more on where, when and with whom he did it.

A Time of the ‘Big Noise’ in London

Zacarias Moussaoui never spoke seriously of God, of Islam or the holy war Muslims call jihad, when he left France in 1993 at the age of 25, his mother, Aicha, said. In September of that year, he enrolled in the graduate program at London’s South Bank University, majoring in international business.

But just as he arrived, South Bank, an urban campus of sooted windows and aged brick a mile south of the London Bridge, was on the brink of becoming a hotbed of Islamic extremism--an era Muslim leaders in London called “the Big Noise.”

From 1993 to 1995, Islamic groups were forming chapters at more than 50 university campuses throughout the United Kingdom. And South Bank, with a large percentage of foreigners among its 17,000 students, was an ideal incubator for a new generation of self-aware young Muslims like Moussaoui.

Even today, after Britain has banned such groups from its campuses, light poles and trash bins surrounding South Bank are plastered with leaflets protesting the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and promoting such events as a fundamentalist Islamic gathering at Trafalgar Square.

One gathering in London’s Wembley arena by the now-banned Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of Liberation, in August 1994--midway through Moussaoui’s studies--drew an estimated 8,000 fist-shaking, feet-stamping Muslims. They rallied behind the twin causes of creating a global Islamic state and destroying Israel. Ideas, witnesses say, Moussaoui would espouse at mosques from London to Oklahoma years later.

After he graduated from South Bank in June 1995, Moussaoui started attending Imam Abdul Haqq Baker’s services at South London’s Brixton Mosque, an unadorned set of weather-worn brick row houses across from the Brixton Police Station.

Baker, a classmate at South Bank, said Moussaoui attended the mosque regularly until 1997. Then, Baker said, Moussaoui was politely told he wasn’t welcome anymore.

The reason was Moussaoui’s advocacy of violent struggle against Israel, Russia, India, the U.S. and other nations that he and other young worshipers saw as the enemies of Islam.

“Those views were incompatible with those of the mosque,” Baker said. “He [Moussaoui] was very arrogant and aggressive about his views. So we asked him to please stay away.”

It was then, Baker and other sources said, that Moussaoui and similarly minded Brixton congregants turned to more radical preachers, such as Sheik Abu Hamza, a one-eyed, handless, Egyptian cleric, and his Finsbury Park mosque 11 subway stops to the north.

Western law enforcement agents said Moussaoui attended the Finsbury Park mosque in 1997 at the same time as Richard Reid, the man now in custody for trying to detonate bombs hidden in his shoes on an American Airlines flight to Miami in December.

Hamza, a British-trained civil engineer, said he had just returned to London from Afghanistan that year after losing his hands and eye to a land mine while serving with the Taliban. He has run the Finsbury Park mosque ever since.

In a rare interview recently, the cleric said that he is “very much against the American government” but denied preaching violence. He said he couldn’t recall whether Moussaoui was a member of his flock, but added, “It’s not only him. It’s everyone who was here at the time. The more they dream, the more their heart is open, and the more zealous they become.”

The cleric said he thinks Bin Laden “is a good guy.” And his mosque’s small bookshop is still selling jihad journals and a CD-ROM, “Beginners Guide to Unarmed Combat,” which teaches how to kill enemies with household items or brute force.

Also on sale: Years’ worth of videos of Hamza’s weekly Friday sermons, praising and recruiting for “Sheik Osama.”

In one typical entreaty, Hamza encourages his followers to go to Afghanistan and pledge the bayat oath of loyalty to Bin Laden.

“Osama gives the bayat to show that we are all one people and all one country,” Hamza said in the video, spreading the stumps of his arms at the dais and fervently urging the faithful to join Afghanistan’s then-ruling Taliban.

“You go there,” he told them.

And in April 1998, government officials say, Moussaoui did--the culmination, his mother would later call it, of years of “brainwashing” by “those phony imams” in Britain.

Camp Mates Included Ressam and Reid

When Moussaoui walked into Al Qaeda’s introductory Khalden camp in remote eastern Afghanistan, the terrorism sanctuary was teeming with scores of new recruits. They came from more than half a dozen countries.

Ahmed Ressam, a 34-year-old Algerian later dubbed “the millennium bomber” for his plot to blow up LAX on the eve of 2000, was there.

So was alleged shoe bomber Reid, according to government officials’ accounts of interviews with Al Qaeda suspects now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. Moussaoui and Reid trained in the same group at the camp that year, they said.

Khalden’s class of 1998-99, those officials say, included “the hardest of the hard-core” radicals. Most of the recruits were young, ambitious and inspired to follow a fatwah, or religious decree, issued by Bin Laden earlier that year. The fatwah called on Muslims “to kill Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world where they can be found,” U.S. prosecutors say.

Ressam left Afghanistan in February 1999 for Canada with sophisticated detonators in hand. There, he would spend most of the year assembling materials for the bomb meant for Los Angeles. The plot failed when U.S. Customs agents, who suspected he was a drug smuggler, discovered the explosives in his car as he crossed the border at Port Angeles, Wash., in mid-December.

Moussaoui returned to London, where his trail disappeared. He resurfaced in September 2000 in Malaysia.

A Rogues’ Gallery at Malaysian Condo

When Moussaoui arrived at Yazid Sufaat’s condominium in the secluded evergreen park complex 20 miles south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s Special Branch intelligence service already was well aware it had been used by terrorism suspects in the past.

Sufaat, a 1987 biochemistry graduate of Cal State Sacramento, bought the three-room condo with his wife as a weekend retreat, Malaysian officials say.

Eight months before Moussaoui’s visit, Special Branch agents had followed a Yemeni to the condo. The Yemeni was on the CIA’s terrorist watch list. He stayed there three days in early January 2000, sometimes in the company of two other Arab men.

The Yemeni later was identified as a key suspect in the October 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port city of Aden. The other two were future Sept. 11 hijackers.

But neither Malaysian nor U.S. officials had a clue at the time that any such plots were afoot, they say. And Moussaoui, they say, was on no one’s watch list when he arrived in September 2000.

His visit didn’t attract notice until Sept. 11, when Moussaoui was already in U.S. custody and a search of his belongings in Oklahoma and Minnesota uncovered the Malaysian connection.

Sufaat had signed three letters vouching for Moussaoui’s employment. They were dated October 2000 on the stationery of Infocus Tech, a software and computer firm in Kuala Lumpur.

The letters, seized by the FBI in Moussaoui’s Norman apartment, identified Moussaoui as an Infocus marketing consultant for the U.S., Britain and Europe with a $2,500-a-month allowance. The company’s lawyer says Sufaat holds no position with the company, but corporate records show his wife is an officer and part owner of Infocus Tech.

Meanwhile, a company half-owned by Sufaat was linked to another terrorism plot. Green Laboratory Medicine, a Malaysian government subcontractor that tested blood and urine samples of foreign workers for drug use, was identified by investigators in neighboring Singapore as having ordered several tons of urea, a potentially powerful bomb ingredient. Malaysian and Singaporean authorities say several Western embassies and a visiting U.S. warship were among potential targets.

Sufaat was detained Dec. 9 under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, which allows authorities to hold terrorism suspects without charges indefinitely. He soon started cooperating with authorities.

Sufaat identified an Indonesian businessman and part-time cleric named Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, as the man who instructed him to provide lodging to Moussaoui. Further investigation revealed Hambali was the director of Al Qaeda operations in Southeast Asia, Malaysian officials say.

Hambali was a business partner of Wali Khan Amin Shah, one of three men convicted by a federal jury in New York City in a January 1995 plot to blow up 12 U.S. jumbo jets within 48 hours over the Pacific Ocean. Hambali also led the plot to blow up Western targets in Singapore this year, officials said.

Today, Hambali is a fugitive wanted in at least three nations. He left Malaysia, investigators say, soon after he ordered Sufaat to look after Moussaoui.

Before Moussaoui left town, Sufaat also helped him set up an Internet address: https://www.pilotz123@hotmail.com.

And in the months ahead, Moussaoui used that account again and again, apparently with a singular purpose:

He wanted to learn how to fly.

An Urgency to Start Flight Training

“Hello, Mrs. Brenda,” Moussaoui wrote in broken English in an Oct. 22, 2000, e-mail to Brenda Keene, admissions director at the Airman Flight School in Norman.

“I was very busy latelly [sic] to prepare my departure to the U.S. I hope to come in the next mont [sic] (maybe two weeks) if everything goes well. I think that when we meet (hopefully) we will have the opportunity to discuss further the financial situation, so for the moment I leave this . . .

“Fly well, bye, bye.”

Moussaoui had begun his e-mail relationship with Keene three weeks before, requesting basic information about the school and its professional pilot program, a package that includes everything from a private license to commercial ratings for jetliners.

Back in London on Oct. 22, Moussaoui was following up with the first of four more e-mails. Not once did he use his full or real name. Each was signed “zuluman tangotango.” And all betrayed not only a difficulty with English but also an urgency to begin flight lessons.

Moussaoui’s indictment states that Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who once shared an apartment with suspected hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta in Germany, had been trying, yet failing for months, to enter the U.S. Bin al-Shibh’s aim was to attend a Florida flight school where two Sept. 11 hijackers were training.

By the end of October 2000, Bin al-Shibh had been denied a U.S. visa for a fourth and final time. Through timing alone, the indictment implies that Moussaoui may have been Bin al-Shibh’s replacement as a hijacker.

In perhaps the strongest link in the official case against Moussaoui, the indictment says that Bin al-Shibh, who is named as a co-conspirator, wired Moussaoui $14,000 from Germany, and Moussaoui called Bin al-Shibh’s German phone number from pay phones in Oklahoma.

Bin al-Shibh also wired money to Atta and other future hijackers while they were studying at flight schools in Florida throughout 2000.

And by Feb. 10 last year, when Moussaoui again e-mailed “Mrs. Brenda” in Oklahoma, prosecutors say he had made at least one trip to Pakistan--the entry point for visitors to the then-Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that was Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda base.

“First I wish a happy new year (a bit late I admit) and I hope that everybody in your school is in the best of healt (sic) and flying mood.

“I do apologize for the long delay but life is never as you plan.

“Hopefully this time I am ready.”

Moussaoui was interested in the $21,999 complete package, he wrote, but insisted on paying first for a private pilot’s license and “if I succeed I will carry on paying the rest on a monthly basis.”

Then suddenly, in a second e-mail 12 days later on Feb. 22 headed, “URGENT flying to you tomorrow,” Moussaoui wrote that he was leaving from London and landing in Oklahoma City at 5:35 p.m. Friday, Feb. 23.

“It will be nice,” he wrote, “if someone will be receiving me.”

Chances of Success at School Looked Dim

When Juan Carlos Merida wheeled the Airman Flight School van up to the arrival hall at Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers Airport, he recognized Moussaoui instantly.

Merida, a veteran pilot from Panama, had seen hundreds of Moussaouis come and go in his years of working at the Norman flight school as an instructor and jack-of-all-trades. The school has trained an average of 600 pilots--many of them foreigners--each year since 1989.

Yet as Merida drove Moussaoui to the Sooner Hotel he wasn’t optimistic about the young Frenchman’s chances of success.

“I could barely understand him through his accent,” Merida said. “I wondered how he was going to get through the course. . . . And after I took him to the hotel, where many of our students stay, he said it wasn’t good.

“It was too expensive, and too public. He wanted an apartment to himself, with a private entrance. And cheap.”

A few days later, Moussaoui found one. He traded his $32.25-a-night mini-suite at the Sooner for an upstairs one-bedroom apartment in an aging house half a block from the Oklahoma University campus. Keene said it rents for about $325 a month.

Moussaoui had arrived with more than $35,000 in cash, declaring it to U.S. Customs at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Soon after he moved into the apartment, he opened a bank account with $32,000. He bought an old beaten-up white sedan for about $1,000.

He told Keene that first day that he’d pay only the $4,995 for the private pilot lessons and the rest if and when he soloed and passed.

“He was very secretive,” Keene said. “He didn’t speak about his private life at all. He didn’t even let on what he wanted to do with his license.”

In the end, he never got it.

On May 29, when Moussaoui still couldn’t solo despite more than 50 hours of flying time with an instructor, the school’s operations director, Dale Davis, took him aside and broke the bad news “in a nice way.”

“The main thing we talked about was his English,” Davis said. If he wanted to continue lessons, Moussaoui would have to start paying by the hour--at $100 an hour--Davis told him. And he’d need about 25 hours more.

Moussaoui opted out.

In the following weeks, Moussaoui spent his time in Oklahoma, much of it with two Muslims he had met through a mosque in Norman, according to those who knew them and government officials. Both men now are in federal custody, presumably held as material witnesses against Moussaoui.

One of those friends, Hussein al-Attas, who was detained with Moussaoui in Minnesota, said Moussaoui talked to him for hours about the plight of Muslims and their need to fight the West, official sources say. A 19-year-old Yemeni who had memorized the Koran cover to cover, al-Attas would accompany Moussaoui on the next--and final--leg of his journey.

The other, another fellow worshiper at the mosque named Mukarram Ali, lent Moussaoui a Compaq laptop computer that would briefly be the focus of federal investigators’ efforts to determine whether--and what--Moussaoui was plotting.

Moussaoui took his next step by e-mail, as pilotz123.

‘Mrs. Zacarias’ Gets Ready to Fly

“Hello,” Moussaoui’s e-mail to the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Miami began, “I am Mrs. Zacarias! [sic]

“Basically, I need to know if you can help to achieve my ‘Goal’ my dream. I would like to fly in a ‘professional’ like manners [sic] one of the big airliners. I have to made my mind which of the following: Boeing 747, 757, 767, or 777 and or Airbus 300 (it will depend on the cost and which one is the easiest to learn).

“The level I would like to achieve is to be able to takeoff and land, to handle communication with [Air Traffic Control], to be able to successfully navigate from A to B (JFK to Heathrow for example).

“In a sense, to be able to pilot one of the Big Bird, even if I am not a real professional pilot. . . . I have around 55 hrs of fly in a [Cessna] 152, and I passed my written [private pilot license exam] last month.

“I know I could be better but I am sure that you can do something.

“After all we are in AMERICA, and everything is possible.

“Have a nice day, waiting for a positive fly.

“Thanks you

“Zac”

Two months later, Moussaoui was on the road north.

Al-Attas drove him from Norman to Minneapolis on Aug. 9. He had waited more than two months for an opening at one of Pan Am’s four regional centers that offered such programs, according to school Vice President Marilyn Ladner.

The previous month, Moussaoui made a down payment to Pan Am by credit card. In late July and early August, Moussaoui made the pay phone calls from Oklahoma to Bin al-Shibh’s number in Germany. And on Aug. 1 and 3, Bin al-Shibh wired the $14,000 in money orders to Moussaoui in Oklahoma from train stations in Dusseldorf and Hamburg.

On Aug. 10, Moussaoui checked into the Residence Inn near Pan Am’s flight school in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul. The next day, he paid the school about $6,300 in cash. He only meant to stay five or six days.

His first class was Aug. 13. On Aug. 16, Moussaoui was in jail.

“Our people there recognized Mr. Moussaoui’s behavior as not right,” Ladner said in a telephone interview from the academy’s Miami headquarters.

Here was a student with bad English who couldn’t fly solo in a single-engine Cessna after more than 50 hours of dual air time, who wanted to learn to fly a Boeing 747 and the inner workings of air traffic control, Ladner said. Program managers and instructors at the Minneapolis school feared Moussaoui could be a potential hijacker. They called the FBI.

Agents showed up at Moussaoui’s motel the next day. He was arrogant and combative when they questioned him, sources said. One of the agents was a former military pilot, who immediately shared the flight school instructor’s concerns.

The agents asked Moussaoui about his immigration status. As a French citizen, he told them, he had been admitted for a 90-day stay under the U.S. visa waiver program when he landed Feb. 23 at O’Hare. Then, he said, he formally applied for an extension.

He invited the agents into his room, where he produced documents to show his status was legal. The documents included an application dated March 23, 2001, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to extend his stay. With the Airman school’s endorsement, Moussaoui had asked the INS to allow him to remain in the U.S. for another year.

He even sent the INS a $120 check to pay for the extension, and he showed the agents an INS reply acknowledging it.

But the FBI agents decided that wasn’t enough. Technically, Moussaoui couldn’t extend his 90-day visa waiver entry permit to study at a flight school, government officials said. He would have had to leave the country and reenter on a student visa, they told him. Then, they asked Moussaoui if they could search his belongings, which included Ali’s borrowed Compaq computer.

Moussaoui refused. The FBI turned him over to the INS, impounded his duffel bag and computer and began an intensive effort to get a warrant to search the computer’s hard drive.

Yet Moussaoui had committed no crime. Justice Department officials in Washington determined that no judge would find sufficient probable cause to grant a warrant. The FBI worked up a plan to deport Moussaoui to France, where counterterrorism laws would permit French investigators to hold him for three days while they probed his computer.

Just days after Moussaoui’s arrest, the French government forwarded a report to Washington quoting the parents of a young Frenchman who had died fighting alongside Islamic rebels in the Russian territory of Chechnya. The parents blamed Moussaoui for recruiting their son.

Finally, just hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, federal judges in Oklahoma City and Minneapolis granted the FBI search warrants for Moussaoui’s belongings.

The FBI served them almost simultaneously at the Residence Inn in Minnesota and Moussaoui’s apartment in Oklahoma, where agents found a flight manual and pilot software for a 747. They also found the Infocus Tech letters there, along with a hand-held aviation radio and a notebook that listed Bin al-Shibh’s telephone numbers in Germany.

But when they turned on the laptop and searched its files in Minneapolis, the only suspicious item they found was a file on crop-dusting--a discovery that led to an emergency order grounding crop-dusters throughout the country as a precaution against a potential chemical weapon attack.

The ban on crop-duster planes lasted for days, drawing the ire of farmers and pilots throughout the country. But federal investigators concede they still have no idea what--if anything--Moussaoui planned to do with the information.

The crop-duster evidence was circumstantial, but sufficient to justify the ban under post-Sept. 11 circumstances. And now, prosecutors are counting on the same circumstances to win a conviction at Moussaoui’s trial.

Jury selection begins Sept. 30.

*

Fineman reported from Malaysia, Britain, Oklahoma, Washington and New York. Times staff writer David Zucchino in France contributed to this report.

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Moussaoui Timeline

1993

Moussaoui enrolls in a graduate program at South Bank University in London. He graduates with a master’s degree in business.

June 1995

He begins to worship at the Brixton mosque in South London.

1996

Moussaoui sees his mother in southern France for the last time until his appearance in federal court in Virginia in January 2000. He upbraids her for not wearing a traditional Islamic veil.

1997

The Brixton mosque asks Moussaoui to leave because of his radical views. He starts worshiping at North London’s Finsbury Park mosque around the same time a preacher returns to London from Afghanistan to take over the mosque. Alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid attends both mosques around the same time as Moussaoui.

April 1998

Moussaoui trains at Al Qaeda Khalden camp in same group with Reid.

Sept. 4, 2000

Moussaoui arrives at the same condo in Malaysia where future Sept. 11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi stayed in January 2000. Two days later, he sets up an e-mail account with the address pilotz123@hotmail.com.

Sept. 29, 2000

Moussaoui e-mails Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., about the school’s program.

Oct. 31, 2000

Back in London, Moussaoui gets a new passport at the French Embassy.

Dec. 9, 2000

Moussaoui flies from London to Pakistan. He returns to London on Feb. 7, 2001.

Feb. 22, 2001

Four days before he begins flight training at Airman, Moussaoui sends the school an e-mail marked ‘URGENT’ stating he will be arriving in Oklahoma the next day.

May 29, 2001

Moussaoui washes out at Airman after failing to solo despite more that 50 hours in the air with an instructor.

Aug. 1 & 3, 2001

Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, who had sent money to future Sept. 11 hijackers, wires $14,000 to Moussaoui in Oklahoma from railroad stations in Dusseldorf and Hamburg, Germany.

Aug. 10, 2001

Moussaoui arrives with Yemeni friend, Hussein al-Attas, at a Minnesota flight school where he has been accepted in a Boeing 747 training program.

Aug. 15, 2001

Officials and instructors at the Minnesota school call the FBI’s Minneapolis office when they become suspicious of Moussaoui’s motives.

Aug. 16, 2001

FBI agents question Moussaoui and decide to hold him on immigration charges. He protests, producing documents to show he legally applied to extend his 90-day stay. He refuses to allow agents to search his belongings.

Aug. 16-Sept. 11, 2001

The FBI attempts unsuccessfully to secure a special national security search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop computer and start planning to deport him to his native France, where investigators could hold him for three days and search the computer.

Sept. 11, 2001

Search warrants are issued and FBI agents comb through Moussaoui’s belongings, hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. They find crop-duster information on his laptop, and at his apartment in Oklahoma, agents find two knives, Boeing 747 flight manuals, and other materials.

Dec. 11, 2001

Moussaoui is indicted by a federal grand jury on six counts of conspiring to commit acts of international terrorism, aircraft piracy, destroy aircraft and murder. Jan. 2, 2002

Jan. 2, 2002

Moussaoui appears in federal court in Virginia, but refuses to enter a plea; his defense attorneys plead not guilty on his behalf.

March 28, 2002

Federal prosecutors file a notice of intent to seek the death penalty for Moussaoui if he is convicted by a federal jury in a trial scheduled to begin in October.