ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The government completed its case against Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday with its single most chilling piece of evidence -- a tape from the cockpit of Flight 93 that recorded the terrorists overwhelming the pilots on Sept. 11, 2001, slashing their throats and praising Allah before crashing the jet into a Pennsylvania field.
The recording, more than 31 minutes of terror, begins at 9:31 a.m. with terrorists forcing the two pilots at knifepoint to give up control of the aircraft. Apparently dragged outside the cockpit onto the flight deck, the pilots can be heard begging for their lives. "I don't want to die!" one shouts.
Within two minutes, the pilots dead or dying, one of the hijackers proclaims, "Everything is fine. I finished."
For the next 20 minutes, the plane, originally headed west to San Francisco, turns east on a flight path toward Washington and the U.S. Capitol.
Two minutes after 10, passengers seem to be breaking through the cockpit door, fighting with the hijackers in a futile effort to take back the controls. "Go! Go!" they encourage one another. "Move! Move!" But the terrorists have flipped the plane upside down. They spin it downward.
In its final plunge, the hijackers shout over and over: "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!"
The tape ends.
The alternately frantic, pleading and brutal voices from Flight 93, heard by the public for the first time, made for an emotionally draining morning of testimony as prosecutors sought the death penalty for Moussaoui, an Al Qaeda member who has pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.
Prosecutors first showed jurors photos of the cockpit voice recorder. The red-and-white device was cracked but intact, embedded with much of the rest of the plane debris and human body parts along a line of trees near the strip-mining community of Shanksville, Pa.
James Cash, a National Transportation Safety Board official, explained to jurors how a small, open microphone sits in an overhead panel above the captain's seat. It is constantly recording on a solid-state memory loop, he said.
As the cockpit recorder played, the government also displayed a computer image on television monitors throughout the courtroom, synchronized with events on the tape. The images included the plane's altitude measurements and flight path and a small, simulated image of the plane itself, sometimes rocking back and forth when the terrorists jerked on the controls to keep the passengers at bay.
