Flight 93 Tape Airs At Moussaoui Trial

Prosecution Rests After Jury Hears Desperate Final Half Hour In Plane

(CBS/AP) 

The 30-minute tape begins with a hijacker saying in English: "Please sit down, keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit." There follows several minutes of commands like: Don't move. Shut up. Down, down, down, sit down.

Nearly six minutes in, a voice in English tells the passengers "we are going back to the airport and we have our demands. So please remain quiet." The San Francisco-bound plane then turns over western Pennsylvania back toward the East Coast.

During a period of quiet, apparently unbeknownst to the hijackers, passengers with cell phones learn that jets have crashed into the World Trade Center. But the hijackers detect something is up. One says in Arabic: "The guys will go in, lift up the (unintelligible) and they put the axe in it. So, everyone will be scared."

The transcript gives no further clues about the "unintelligible" object. But the Sept. 11 Commission says the hijackers may have killed or silenced a flight attendant by this point.

Four minutes later, the hijackers notice a fight in the cabin. One says in Arabic: "Let's go guys. Allah is greatest." After grunts and shouting, another says in Arabic: "They want to get in here. Hold, hold from the inside." The hijacker pilot begins wagging the wings up and down, apparently to knock the passengers off balance.

Another minute of shouts in English: Hold the door. Stop him. Sit down. Much is unintelligible.

Then 30 seconds past 9:59 a.m., an enormous crash: metal against metal, glass breaking, plastic cracking. The Sept. 11 Commission theorized passengers used a drink cart to ram the cockpit door. More unintelligible shouting.

Seven seconds after 10 a.m., in Arabic: "Is that it? Shall we finish it off?"

Another hijacker, also in Arabic: "When they all come, we finish it off."

Six seconds later in English: "I'm injured."

Ten seconds later in English: "In the cockpit. If we don't, we'll die." Followed quickly by a second loud crash of metal, glass and plastic rammed together hard.

The hijacker pilot is pushing the steering yoke forward and back, perhaps to throw the attacking passengers to the floor. The tail sags, sounding the stall alarm. Then the nose comes back down, silencing it.

Then just 123 seconds before the crash, one hijacker asks again in Arabic "Is that it?" A cacophony of new voices joins the shouting over the next two minutes. The plane rolls belly up and noses over, then crashes.

Prosecutors also called Lorne Lyles. a Fort Myers, Fla., policeman whose wife, Cee Cee, was a flight attendant on Flight 93. He played a voicemail message she left him from the plane on 9/11. She told him her plane had been hijacked and she knew a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. "Please tell my children that I love them very much. ... I hope to be able to see your smiling face again," she said, crying.

Later the judge rejected prosecutors' request to display a running presentation of the names and photos of nearly all the 2,972 victims of Sept. 11. Prosecutors were instead allowed to show one large poster with the pictures of all but 92 of the victims.

CBS' Laura Haim reports that Moussaoui's French lawyer said that he is "more agitated that usual. More nervous. He seems ready to lose his temper in a clinical way."

The lawyer refused to confirm if Moussaoui is going to testify tomorrow, but he advised the French press corp. to "arrive earlier tomorrow for a very big day."

Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with al Qaeda to fly planes into U.S. buildings. A week ago, the jurors ruled him eligible for the death penalty even though he was in jail in Minnesota on 9/11. They decided that lies he told federal agents a month before the attacks led directly to at least one death that day by keeping agents from identifying and stopping some of the hijackers. Now they must decide whether he deserves execution or life in prison.