Prosecutor: Moussaoui's lies led to 9/11
(AP)
Updated: 2006-03-07 07:25

Frequently ejected from the courtroom earlier because of his outbursts against his court-appointed attorneys, Moussaoui sat quietly through the opening of his trial, gazing often at the jurors or the gallery.

At the end of the morning hearing, he spoke to one member of his defense team: "Just to let you know, you're not my lawyer, thanks a lot."

His mother, Aicha el-Wafi, spoke up for her son in a CNN interview. "All they can have against him is the things that he said, the words that he has used," she said, "but actual acts that he committed, there aren't any."

But D. Hamilton Peterson of Bethesda, Md., who lost his father Donald and stepmother Jean on hijacked Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, declared, "I want accountability."

"I believe Moussaoui is an excellent candidate for the death penalty," he said outside the courtroom. "He is nothing less than a mass murderer."

The jury included a high school math teacher who has traveled widely in the Middle East, a Sunni Muslim woman who was born in Iran and a man who served as a Navy lieutenant in the Persian Gulf during the Desert Storm war with Iraq in 1990-91.

Only two of the 21 prospective jurors with some connection to the Sept. 11 attacks made it on the final panel of 17.

One was a woman whose brother-in-law works for the New York City Police Department and helped with rescue at the World Trade Center. The math teacher had a more remote connection: The fathers of two of her pupils are firefighters who responded to the 9/11 crash at the Pentagon. She helped freshmen make a quilt to give to the fire department.

One woman who was seated said earlier that she would tend to assume an al-Qaida member is evil. Jurors also included a mental health researcher, a man whose father retired from the CIA just before 9/11, a man who serves in the military reserves and a federal government employee who said he thought there was a lack of communication between the FBI and CIA before 9/11.

The defense and prosecution, whittling down prospects from a pool of more than 80, both managed to avoid the jurors they objected to the most.

After the jurors were seated and sworn in, one asked to speak to the judge and after a bench conference, she was excused for unspecified personal reasons. That left 10 men and seven women to hear the case.