By James Vicini
Washington - Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was indicted on Tuesday for conspiring with Osama bin Laden, the 19 hijackers and others in the murder of thousands of people in the first charges directly involving the September 11 attacks, US officials said.
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the six-count indictment exactly three months after the hijacked planes hit the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Centre. A fourth hijacked jet crashed in Pennsylvania before it could attack any other American landmarks. Nearly 3 300 people were killed in the attacks.
Moussaoui, 33, who faces a possible death sentence, will be tried in a federal court in Virginia, not in a military tribunal that has been proposed by President George W Bush for foreign terrorists involved in the attacks.
Ashcroft said a grand jury in Virginia returned the indictment against Moussaoui on charges of "conspiring with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to murder thousands of innocent people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11".
"Al-Qaeda will now meet the justice it abhors and the judgment it fears," Ashcroft said, adding Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network "stands accused of the brutal attacks of September 11".
Ashcroft said Bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, and other leaders of his al-Qaeda network were cited as unindicted co-conspirators in the 31-page indictment.
The indictment charged Moussaoui with conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, to commit aircraft piracy, to destroy aircraft, to use weapons of mass destruction, to murder US employees and to destroy property.
Moussaoui has said he is innocent, according to a letter to his mother reported in the French newspaper Le Monde last month.
US officials have said Moussaoui may have been preparing to be part of one of the four hijacking teams. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had only four hijackers, while the other three planes had five hijackers, US officials have said.
They suspect Moussaoui may have been slated to be the 20th hijacker after Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni national wanted by Germany, was prevented from entering the United States.
The charges said Moussaoui trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and received funds from sources in the Middle East and Germany.
"The indictment issued today is a chronicle of evil... (an account) of a terrorist conspiracy that gathered both force and intensity in the weeks before September 11. Zacarias Moussaoui is alleged to have been an active participant in this conspiracy," Ashcroft said.
"The United States alleges that Moussaoui engaged in the same preparation for murder as the 19 co-conspirators who carried out the September 11 hijackings," the nation's top law enforcement official told a Justice Department news conference.
Moussaoui initially was arrested in Minnesota on August 16 on immigration violations after he aroused suspicion by trying to buy time on a jumbo jet flight simulator at a flying school.
After the September 11 attacks, Moussaoui was arrested as a material witness and sent to New York for questioning.
Moussaoui, a resident of Britain before 2001 who held a master's degree from Southbank University in that country, will answer the charges in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 2, according to officials. - Reuters