OT FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 28 2001
Profile of an extremist
How fanatics brainwashed my brother
FROM ADAM SAGE IN MONTPELLIER
AN INTELLIGENT young Frenchman was indoctrinated into becoming a hate-filled would-be bomber after moving to Britain, his brother said yesterday.
Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, did not pray or go to mosque before leaving France for London hoping to study, learn English, get a job in international commerce and earn a good salary. Today he is in custody in the United States suspected of being the twentieth member of the hijack gang who killed thousands in the suicide attacks on New York and Washington.
“He began to change when he went to Britain. It was there that he got drawn into an extremist group,” his brother, Abd-Samad Moussaoui, said.
Zacarias, lonely in London’s hostels filled with alcoholics and the mentally ill, turned to mosques for friendship because his English was so poor. “I told him to watch out because I had seen reports about Muslim extremists in London on French television,” Abd- Samad said. “I knew that there were dangers.”
But it was too late. “I noticed a change in his attitude when he came back to France. He became racist, a black racist, and he would use the pejorative African word toubab to describe white people.”
Wahabites, a fundamentalist sect originating from Saudi Arabia, had started the indoctrination process, inviting Zacarias to talk and study with them. “He had no contact with the English so he fell back on this community,” Abd-Samad, said.
The fate of Zacarias would have been unthinkable in 1992 when he moved to London with a cherished but ordinary dream to make his fortune. A decade later, the dream has vanished, to be replaced by thoughts of hatred, ostracism and violence.
Not even Abd-Samad realised the full extent of the indoctrination until September 11. He was driving through the open fields of the Languedoc-Roussillon region in southern France when he heard on the radio that Zacarias was in custody in Minnesota.
In August, instructors at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minnesota had told police of the strange behaviour of the pupil who did not want to learn how to take off or land, only to navigate in the air.
Zacarias was questioned by detectives, detained on an immigration offence and was due to be expelled to France, where intelligence agencies had him classified as an Islamic fanatic who had been active in Chechnya and Afghanistan. Then came the September 11 attacks. Zacarias, notoriously, cheered in his American prison as he watched television pictures of aircraft crashing into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
He was interrogated again, this time by the FBI, which suspects that he would have been the fifth member of the team in the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania. His flat was raided and detectives found crop-spraying manuals, heightening fears that there were plans for a chemical or biological attack.
Back in Languedoc-Roussillon, Abd-Samad was horrified. “This was my little brother, the boy I used to play with, the adolescent who was always with me. We were close. I loved him. I would not wish anyone to go through what I am going through now.”
Their parents are Moroccan and came in the 1960s to southern France, where the children were born. The couple divorced in 1974 and their four children were brought up by their mother.
Unlike her, Abd-Samad, 34, is a practising Muslim but is opposed to the fanaticism into which his brother has fallen. “I want people to know how these extremists operate, what their strategy is,” he said. “And I want them to know these groups have nothing in common with millions of ordinary Muslims like myself.”
When Zacarias moved across the Channel in 1992 after obtaining his Baccalauréat, he was anything but religious. “I had never seen him pray and I had never seen him at the mosque,” Abd-Samad said.
That all changed when Zacarias became involved with the fanatics. “I saw how they operate when my brother came back to France with a friend he had met in Britain. He was indoctrinating the friend, just as he had been indoctrinated himself, and his aim was to control all aspects of his life. He had become a little guru. It was tiring and distressing.”
In the mid-1990s, Abd- Samad tried one last time to persuade his brother to enter the mainstream Muslim religion. “He turned his back on me, walked out and I have not seen him since.” He learnt indirectly of Zacarias’s travels to Kuwait and Turkey, to Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and to Chechnya. |
