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'Life in London made my boy a terrorist'
Zacarias Moussaoui's family in France blame the British for what happened to a once-carefree youth.They trace the great change in Moussaoui's life to the moment the 23-year-old arrived in Britain in 1992, to attend a business studies course at South Bank University, after graduating in engineering in Perpignan in southern France. Until then, his family and friends agree, the young man had been full of smiles. He had gone to bars and drunk beer and had a French girlfriend, with whom he ultimately shared a flat. The couple even won a dance contest. He vowed to make his fortune in London and after a few months managed to get a place to study for an MA in international business studies. But in the ultra-tolerant atmosphere that existed in London before the September 11 attacks, such "wayward" young Muslims were exactly the material being sought by radical Islamists. Young men like Moussaoui were fed into the machine and emerged as hardline religious terrorists, primed for slaughter. His mother, Aicha al-Wafi, who along with her husband was born in Morocco, has echoed the complaints of the French counter-intelligence service, the DST, accusing the British authorities of being far too permissive in the years before 2001. "I would say that England is responsible for many things because it allowed this fever to spread around the country," she told the Canadian television channel CBC. "These young people go to England, and then they scream hatred and vengeance in front of mosques. They let the fever spread." His brother, Abd-Samad, agreed: "I believe that Britain has fed a snake at its bosom, and has been bitten by the snake.'' The statements clearly contain some truth. But during his trial the court heard that Moussaoui had a "violent and unstable" childhood in France, spent large amounts of time in orphanages, saw his mother beaten by his father, a boxer, and was rejected by his girlfriend's family as "a dirty Arab". Both his sisters later were to suffer from schizophrenia and his father remains heavily sedated in a psychiatric hospital in Nanterre. Psychologists say the family has a history of mental illness going back at least four generations. Whatever his reasons, Moussaoui began to attend Brixton mosque and was quickly drawn into a group of young extremists, including the "shoe bomber" and former mugger, Richard Reid. He attended speeches by Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican convert who studied in Saudi Arabia and was banned from the mosque after calling for the murder of Hindus, Jews and Americans. He moved into a flat in Brixton which he shared with David Cortellier, who was later convicted in France of assisting terrorism. Increasingly at odds with the moderate religious elders in Brixton, the group moved to Finsbury Park mosque, where they listened to the radical outpourings of Abu Hamza, the hook-handed preacher ultimately jailed for seven years this February for inciting murder and race hatred. They also heard the preachings of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born zealot who is facing possible extradition to his homeland. At some point during this period, Moussaoui was "turned". He took a terrorist training course in Afghanistan in 1995 and then went to Chechnya, the war-torn Russian province which has become a training ground for jihadists. By 1998 he was back in Afghanistan and then returned to London. The following year, the DST asked MI5 to watch him. But he was not considered an experienced terrorist. After his arrest at a flight training school a month before the September 11 atrocities, the British were asked for information by the FBI and CIA on five occasions. There was no response until two days after the attacks, when the British said they had new information indicating that Moussaoui attended al-Qa'eda camps. America's September 11 commission noted: "Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense and much higher-level attention." Life for Moussaoui Posted by: tipper 2006-05-04 |
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