The only person convicted in a US court of a role in the 9/11 attacks has to stay in a US prison, the Justice Department has decided. Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes called the "20th hijacker," filed a request in May to serve the rest of his life sentence in his native France, the Independent reports. On Wednesday, relatives of two victims of the terrorist attacks were told that the request had been rejected days earlier, reports the New York Times. Last week, a dozen Republican senators urged President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to deny Moussaoui's request.
"No consideration whatsoever should be given to this convicted terrorist's preferences for where to serve his sentence for his heinous crimes, and we demand that you swiftly deny his transfer request and force him to spend the remainder of his pathetic life imprisoned in the country he and his fellow terrorists attacked 23 years ago," the senators wrote. Moussaoui, 56, was arrested a month before the attacks. In 2006, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He is being held in solitary confinement in the ADX Florence supermax federal prison in Colorado.
In a letter to a Virginia judge in May, Moussaoui said there was the "possibility" that if Donald Trump was reelected, "he will sentence me to death by presidential executive order." Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas Oxman said Moussaoui is serving a life sentence for terrorism offenses, and the department "plans to enforce this life sentence in US custody," the Times reports. (In a 2020 court motion, Moussaoui renounced Osama bin Laden and said he wanted Rudy Giuliani or Alan Dershowitz to represent him as a lawyer.)
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