Moussaoui arrives at Supermax prison
DENVER – Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui began serving his life sentence at the nation’s most secure prison on Saturday after U.S. marshals flew him overnight to southern Colorado from Virginia.
Marshals brought Moussaoui, prisoner 51427-054, before dawn to the Supermax federal prison, where he will spend 23 hours a day in his cell and have little to no contact with the other notorious criminals.
“He has now begun serving his sentence of life without the possibility of release,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.
Moussaoui was the only prisoner aboard the small jet operated by the agency as he flew with a special team of deputy marshals to Florence, Colo., about 90 miles southwest of Denver.
Moussaoui arrived at 5:17 a.m. EDT, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement. Prison spokesman Todd Javernick refused to say whether Moussaoui made any comments.
The transfer came on the same day that Moussaoui’s court-appointed lawyers appealed his life sentence and the denial of his request for a new trial.
In a one-paragraph notice of appeal, the lawyers said Moussaoui wanted the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the final judgment and sentence he received May 4 and Judge Leonie Brinkema’s May 8 denial of his request to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial on the original charges.
Since Moussaoui’s sentencing, he has said he lied when testifying at his sentencing trial that he was to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001. He has returned to claiming – as he had for four years before the trial testimony – that he had nothing to do with the suicide hijackings that took nearly 3,000 lives.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April 2005 to six counts of conspiring with al-Qaida to fly planes into U.S. buildings. A jury considering the three counts that carry the death penalty decided he was eligible for execution. They could not agree unanimously that he deserved it, so he was automatically sentenced to the lesser and only other penalty permitted: life in prison.