Graphic 9/11 Trial Exhibits Released

Photographs of the carnage of Sept. 11 and tape-recorded final phone calls from victims in the World Trade Center were posted Monday by a federal court, a total of 1,202 exhibits from the Zacarias Moussaoui trial.

The videos, photographs and taped phone calls on the court's website were graphic in some cases, leading the court to mark 18 of the exhibits "discretion advised."

The U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., said it is the first criminal case for which a federal court has provided access to all exhibits online.

Other trial exhibits range from motel receipts for the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers to photographs of the U.S. flight schools where some of the terrorists learned to pilot commercial jets. Also among the exhibits are the surveillance videotapes of some of the terrorists passing through airport security checkpoints before climbing aboard the jetliners they hijacked.

Indicted in December 2001, Moussaoui pleaded guilty last year to terrorism conspiracy charges, saying that he was to hijack a 747 jetliner and fly it into the White House at some later date if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik who is serving a life term for terrorist acts in New York.

When he testified in court this year, Moussaoui claimed that the 747 was to be a fifth plane hijacked on Sept. 11 and that Richard Reid, now imprisoned for a December 2001 shoe bombing attempt aboard a trans-Atlantic flight, was to be on his hijacking team.

Choosing between sentencing him to execution or life in prison, the jury in Alexandria, Va., found Moussaoui directly responsible for deaths on Sept. 11, but declined to give him the death penalty.

Professing surprise at the life sentence, Moussaoui moved to withdraw his guilty plea and appeal his sentence. Moussaoui said he lied on the witness stand March 27 when he reversed four years of denials and claimed he was to have hijacked a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001, and crashed it into the White House, "even though I knew that was a complete fabrication."

After the sentencing, Osama bin Laden said in an audio tape that Moussaoui had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.