Moussaoui Starts Serving Life Sentence in Colorado

Convicted Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui began serving his life sentence at the nation’s most secure prison on Saturday after U.S. marshals flew him overnight to southern Colorado from Virginia.

Marshals brought Moussaoui before dawn to the Supermax federal prison, where he is to spend 23 hours a day in his cell and have little to no contact with other criminals at the facility.

“He has now begun serving his sentence of life without the possibility of release,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement.

Moussaoui was the only prisoner aboard the small jet operated by the agency as he flew with a special team of deputy marshals to Florence, Colo., 90 miles southwest of Denver.

“All the inmates transferred there are handled with the highest level of security,” said Ken Deal, chief deputy U.S. marshal in Denver. Deal said he did not know whether the 37-year-old French citizen made any statements during the transfer.

At the prison, Moussaoui exchanged his green jumpsuit for a tan prison outfit.

The $60-million Supermax, formally called Administrative Maximum, was built in 1995 in a town of 3,600 people. The prison was designed for inmates once held at the U.S. Penitentiary in Marion, Ill., which had replaced Alcatraz when it closed in 1963.

Among the inmates at the prison are Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Eric Rudolph, Theodore Kaczynski and Terry L. Nichols. Also there is Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber Moussaoui said was to help him fly a fifth plane into the White House. The Bureau of Prisons said the Supermax currently housed 398 “of the nation’s most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates.”

The transfer came on the day that Moussaoui’s court-appointed lawyers appealed his life sentence and the denial of his request for a new trial.

In a one-paragraph notice of appeal, the lawyers said Moussaoui wanted the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to review the final judgment and sentence he received May 4 and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema’s denial on Monday of his request to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial on the original charges.

Since Moussaoui’s sentencing, he has said he lied when testifying at his sentencing trial that he was to hijack a fifth jetliner on Sept. 11, 2001. He has returned to claiming -- as he had for four years before the trial testimony -- that he had nothing to do with the suicide hijackings that took nearly 3,000 lives.