Social worker, friends, family tell of abusive father, toll of racism

07:30 PM CDT on Monday, April 17, 2006

By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN / Associated Press

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – After an impoverished childhood with a violent, alcoholic father, Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui embraced radical Islam when anti-Arab racism and his background thwarted his desire to become a businessman, defense witnesses testified Monday.

Struggling to save Mr. Moussaoui from execution, court-appointed defense lawyers called a social worker, high school friends and his older sisters. Clinical social worker Jan Vogelsang testified it was not her purpose to make excuses for Mr. Moussaoui's actions but to understand how he reached that point.

They described a boy who endured five stints in orphanages by age 6, frequent moves and deep poverty yet became a fun-loving, engaging teenager. His Moroccan ancestry and lack of family money, however, helped block his ambitions in France and then in London. He withdrew from family and friends in 1995 and took up Islamic fundamentalism.

Jurors took notes as copiously as at any point in the trial during Ms. Vogelsang's testimony.

Leaving court for a break after the judge and jury had gone, Mr. Moussaoui said loudly, "It's a lot of American B.S."

Even Mr. Moussaoui couldn't take his eyes off most of the videotaped testimony from his sister Jamilla. She described her younger brother as "the little sweetheart of the family." But she also described the abusive atmosphere caused by their father, Omar, who repeatedly beat Jamilla and his wife, Aicha. "He almost killed me; he tried to kill me," she said. When her mother had money for food, "he ate everything and left us nothing."

As Aicha moved her four children from town to town, while struggling to learn French and hold multiple menial jobs, Omar followed them even after their divorce in 1972. "Each time he reappeared in our lives, it was to traumatize us," she testified. "He poisoned our lives."

Omar is now hospitalized in France with bipolar disorder. Jamilla has a guardian and is being treated for schizophrenia. The oldest sister, Nadia, also has a guardian and is being treated for psychosis with schizophrenic features, records showed.

Ms. Vogelsang said that children with such childhoods fail to develop normal resilience and adaptability to life's setbacks. They make poor choices of role models and fail to deal with feelings of aggression, she testified.

On cross-examination, prosecutor David Novak tried to undercut Ms. Vogelsang's tone of inevitability. He got her to acknowledge that Mr. Moussaoui's older brother, Abd Samad Moussaoui, emerged from the same family to become an engineering teacher rather than a terrorist.

Mr. Moussaoui wouldn't agree to be interviewed by Ms. Vogelsang, but she talked with 50 family members, friends, social service workers and teachers.

As a teenager, Mr. Moussaoui was rejected as a "dirty Arab" by the family of his longtime girlfriend, Ms. Vogelsang said.

Two high school buddies from France, Fabrice Guillen in court and Christophe Marguel on videotape, testified that Mr. Moussaoui liked to have fun, party and play sports. Mr. Guillen said his hero was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader. And both said he encountered racism in France. "He said it wasn't a big deal ... but we all knew it bothered him," Mr. Guillen said.

Gilles Cohen, who met Mr. Moussaoui when he was 18, said they talked regularly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "I am a Jew; he is an Arab, and we were best friends," Mr. Cohen said. "We were proud we exemplified how two peoples could come together."

But Ms. Vogelsang and all the French friends described Mr. Moussaoui as struggling to survive economically in England, where he went in 1992. By 1995, he had begun to study Islam and had fallen in with radicals who frequented London mosques.

The jury has found Mr. Moussaoui eligible for execution. Even though he was in jail in Minnesota at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, the jury ruled that lies he told federal agents a month before the attacks kept them from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers. The jury must choose between execution and life in prison.