The mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the first suspect to be indicted in the United States over the September 11 terrorist attacks, said Wednesday she fears her son will not have a fair trial.
"They say they have proof of him belonging to a terrorist group. But Zacarias told me in a letter that he was sure they were going to fabricate evidence and produce witnesses against him," his mother Aicha said in an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien.
"If that is the case, what can be done to prove the contrary? Because my son also says that he has his own proofs," she said.
"They (the US authorities) are capable of everything. They have up to now kept him in prison without charging him. They say they have ways of proving that he has relations with the terrorists who were in Germany, that he was getting ready to take part in the attack and that he had false papers.
"I hope that he will have the chance to defend himself".
She said she had been relatively optimistic about the fate of her son, until news fell on Tuesday that he had been charged, becoming the first alleged member of top terror suspect Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network named in a US indictment.
Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan origin, faces six conspiracy charges. Four of these could bring the death penalty: conspiracy to destroy an aircraft, commit air piracy, commit acts of terrorism and use weapons of mass destruction.
The other 19 hijackers who died in the attacks were named as co-conspirators.
Moussaoui's mother said she had not managed to establish contact with the lawyer assigned to her son and she did not know whether a letter she had sent two weeks ago.
According to US authorities, the 33-year-old was "an active participant" in the al-Qaeda network. Moussaoui participated in training identical to that of the other 19 hijackers who carried out the suicide jet attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Born on May 30, 1968, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz in southwestern France, Moussaoui grew up in a Muslim family headed by a divorced mother who did not regularly practice her religion.
She told Le Parisien: "I am just a mother who loves her children. Today I find myself in an impossible spiral. What can I say? What can I do? Frankly, I don't know. I tremble," she said -- AFP
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