Witnesses Call Moussaoui Suspicious

A flight-school instructor testified Thursday that he urged his bosses to call the FBI in August 2001 after his new student, Zacarias Moussaoui, responded angrily to innocent questions about his religion and paid for his training in $100 bills.

The instructor at the Minnesota flight school, Clarence Prevost, told Moussaoui's death-penalty trial it was strange that his student was seeking training on a complex commercial jetliner with hardly any pilot experience, but he assumed Moussaoui was a rich guy who was "just fulfilling a dream."

But on the first day of classes, when Moussaoui responded to a question about his religion with a terse "I am nothing," Prevost became suspicious.

"I said, 'Should we be doing this?"' Prevost told the court. "'We don't know anything about this guy and we're teaching him to throw the switches on a (Boeing) 747."'

He said he raised his concern the next morning with a school official but was told not to worry. Prevost said he responded, "We'll care when there's a hijacking."

Prevost said he became even more concerned after learning Moussaoui paid $6,800 for his training in $100 bills. Eventually, the school agreed to call the FBI and Moussaoui was arrested two days later, Aug. 16, 2001, on immigration violations.

On cross-examination, Prevost resisted attempts by attorneys to get him to say that Moussaoui had acted in a nutty manner or had been "a bit of a knucklehead," as defense attorney Ken Troccoli put it, reports CBS News' Beverley Lumpkin. But Prevose said there was no problem with Moussaoui's intelligence; it was his lack of experience that had alarmed him. He even resisted the use of the word "suspicious" for his reaction to Moussaoui.

Prosecutors presented testimony Thursday from Prevost and another flight instructor as they sought to build their case that Moussaoui was a credible terrorist threat — not the hopeless malcontent portrayed by his lawyers.

Oklahoma instructor Shohaib Kassam said he flew more than 50 hours with Moussaoui and believed he could have obtained his private pilot's license with more practice, although he said he was a decidedly below-average student.

According to earlier testimony, Moussaoui dreamed in his sleep about piloting a plane and crashing it into the White House, and told his supreme commander, Osama bin Laden, about it.

That dream has taken on a significant role in Moussaoui's death-penalty trial. Prosecutors say Moussaoui took flight training to try to make his dream come true. The defense argues those thoughts were the fanciful musings of a deranged mind and maintained he was a disaster as a flight-school student in Oklahoma.

If Moussaoui was capable of attaining his license eventually, he was apparently no standout. Despite his more than 50 hours in the air, he was never allowed to fly solo, Kassam said, even though student pilots can normally do so after 10 to 15 hours of training.

But, as Lumpkin reports, Kassam said he got along well with Moussaoui, whom he called Zack. He said sack told him he wanted to be a private jet pilot and claimed to be an import/export businessman.

Kassam agreed with defense attorney Troccoli's assertions that Zack could be "argumentative," "stubborn," and would "blame others for his failings," reports Lumpkin.

Kassam said Moussaoui acted normally and occasionally talked about Islam but did not appear to be a radical. Born into the Muslim faith in Pakistan, the instructor said Moussaoui occasionally encouraged him to attend mosque and pray regularly but did not proselytize aggressively.

An Islamic radical testified Wednesday that Moussaoui told him about the dream during a visit Moussaoui made to Malaysia in 2000. The radical, a top official in an al Qaeda affiliate group called Jemaah Islamiyah, also said during a November 2002 videotape deposition that was played Wednesday that Moussaoui said he had shared his dream with bin Laden.