WASHINGTON — A US appeals court upheld Monday the conviction and life prison sentence of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national, for complicity in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit rejected claims by US lawyers for Moussaoui, the only person charged in the United States over the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, that his guilty plea and sentence were invalid.
It also struck down their efforts to refer the case back to a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where he pleaded guilty in 2005 of complicity in the suicide hijackings of passenger planes that crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
“We affirm Moussaoui’s convictions and sentences in their entirety and deny his motion to remand,” the three-judge panel said in its ruling.
Moussaoui’s attorneys had asked that their client’s sentence and conviction be remanded because the government had failed to provide classified evidence he could have used for his defense.
After dodging the death penalty during a months-long trial in the Alexandria court, Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison. The court of appeals upheld that sentence.
President Barack Obama’s administration has announced it would try five accused 9/11 plotters — including self-proclaimed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — in US federal court in New York.
Moussaoui, who later recanted his testimony only to claim he was part of another Al-Qaeda plot, is serving a life sentence in solitary confinement at a maximum security prison in Colorado.
He can still ask the appeals court to examine his request in plenary session and then make a final appeal before the US Supreme Court.
Arrested several weeks before the Al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, the French national was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release in May 2006.
It is normally forbidden to rescind a guilty plea after a sentence has been imposed, and the minimum punishment was life in prison.
But the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handed Moussaoui a possible unintended lifeline in November 2007 by admitting that it provided false information to the court when the defense team requested interrogation tapes of two terror suspects.
The CIA had said in May 2005 that it did not have any recordings, adding it has since found an audio tape and two videos.
In court papers filed in November 2007, the prosecution argued that Moussaoui’s name is not mentioned in any of the three recordings and that therefore the CIA’s mistake was not detrimental to the defendant.
The recordings still exist — unlike interrogation videos of two Al-Qaeda suspects that the CIA has admitted destroying in 2005, a revelation that triggered charges the agency was trying to cover up possible torture.
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