April 24, 2005 (TOI)

A defiant Zacarias Moussaoui vowed to "fight every inch of the way" to avoid execution after pleading guilty to taking part in a broad al-Qaida conspiracy masterminded by Osama Bin Laden. He intends to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

The issue could turn on whether the 36-year-old French Moroccan — who turned to radical Islam when he lived in London during the 1990s — was directly responsible for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001.

Moussaoui plans to renew his efforts to call top al-Qaida detainees, including Ramzi Binalshibh, to testify that he had no part in that particular plot.

His previous attempts to do this bogged down his case for two years.

Leonie Brinkema, the judge who ruled him fit to plead guilty last week, said the question of access to
witnesses was "highly relevant to the sentencing phase"and constituted "mitigating evidence"that could spare him execution.

Moussaoui’s guilty pleas to six terrorist charges on Friday failed to clear up a mystery over whether he had been trained to crash a plane into the White House on September 11 or was supposed to participate in a follow-up plot.

Anticipating his ultimate defence, Moussaoui said: "I came to the United States of America to be part, okay, of a conspiracy to use an airplane as a weapon of mass destruction ... but this conspiracy was a different conspiracy from September 11."

Moussaoui said his mission was to free the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, jailed for his part in a bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993.