ALEXANDRIA, Virginia, 7 March 2006 — After a four-year delay, the death penalty trial of the only man charged in connection with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has begun. Final jury selection and opening statements began yesterday afternoon, the first witnesses also took the stand.

The 37-year-old Frenchman of Moroccan descent pleaded guilty last April when he said Osama Bin Laden ordered him to train to fly a jetliner into the White House. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers but insists he did not know their plans.

Under a 1991 Supreme Court ruling giving juries the right to take the pain and suffering of relatives into account, prosecutors are expected to call witnesses who lost relatives in the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The trial will simply determine Moussaoui’s punishment, and only two options are available: Death or life in prison.

Whatever the jury decides, Moussaoui’s impact here has been both unexpected and peculiar: Once thought to be a missing 20th hijacker, he generated only a false alarm: The nation’s 3,500 crop-dusters were temporarily grounded based partly on what FBI agents found on his computer. But Moussaoui is no longer believed to be a 20th hijacker, and the government-deleted references to his interest in crop-dusters from its indictment.His case was central to the finger pointing, investigations and reforms that followed the attacks.

An obscure FBI lawyer in Minneapolis, Coleen Rowley, made the cover of Time magazine as a person of the year for her whistle blowing complaint that the FBI was negligent in investigating Moussaoui. Rowley is now running for Congress.Prosecutors contend Moussaoui could have prevented the Sept. 11 attack by telling investigators what he knew when arrested.

The defense argues that Moussaoui knew less about 9/11 than the government, citing investigations that turned up multiple missed opportunities to possibly prevent the attacks.Moussaoui’s mother, Aicha el-Wafi, 59, arrived from France Saturday to attend the opening days of her son’s trial in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va.

She refused to speak to journalists at the airport, but told AFP last week that even if Moussaoui was an Al-Qaeda member, he never committed any crime. “I hope that the American people are not blind to the point of swallowing what the prosecutor says. He has admitted he is an Islamist. He has admitted he is with Al-Qaeda.

But he has not committed any offense at all,” she said.

El-Wafi has struggled since being branded by some as the mother of one of the world’s most famous terrorists — and for most of her life. Married at 14, she arrived in France from Morocco with two young daughters before she was 20. She had two sons before leaving her husband, who she said was violent, in 1971. She put her sons in an orphanage, did cleaning for the post office, and eventually became a civil servant. She then pulled her children back together in an apartment near Narbonne in southern France, when “Zac” was still a boy.

But today, both of her daughters suffer from psychological problems.

Another son, Abd Samaf Moussaoui, has published a book, “Zacarias Moussaoui, My Brother” which paints their mother as a manipulator, short-tempered and violent, whom Zacarias escaped too late. “It would have been illusory to expect a tender word from her,” he wrote. Moussaoui’s lawyers have called him a “probable schizophrenic.”