PARIS, 17 November 2002 — French Justice Minister Dominique Perben, in Washington on a three-day visit, has told his American counterpart US Attorney General John Ashcroft that France has decided to “block” all future exchanges of information with regard to accused Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, and notably as concerns his relationship with Pakistan.
The decision — taken by Perben in order to “respect the spirit of French law that does not provide for the death penalty” — concerns in particular a secret file on Moussaoui compiled by the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST, the French equivalent of the FBI) which contains information that US justice officials admit they do not have and which would be useful in their making their case against the French Al-Qaeda member whose trial should open next June 30 in Arlington, Virginia.
According to anti-terrorism specialists in the French prosecutor’s office, the file contains detailed information on all of Moussaoui’s career, everything from his early education near Montpellier, through his first flirtation with Muslim extremists on French soil, and his eventual decision to leave France to undergo training in Pakistan.
Indeed, it is understood that US interrogators would like to know more about Moussaoui’s relationship with Pakistan, where the DST investigators were able to establish that he spent a good deal of time, a country with which he remained in contact at least until his arrest in August of 2001 on US soil where he was allegedly preparing to take part in the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States.
Perben is understood to have planned to use the document as a bargaining chip, in hopes that in exchange for the file US authorities might promise that Moussaoui would not be subject to the death penalty if convicted.
But if the French justice minister chose, says a member of his entourage, to block all further collaboration with US authorities, it was because he was advised by them that the document, if communicated to the Americans, would simply have been used to help the United States make a better case against Moussaoui, not reduce his eventual sentence.
