After August 7, 1998: Moussaoui’s Flat Allegedly Raided After Embassy Bombings

Zacarias Moussaoui’s flat in Brixton, London, is raided after the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998), according to a statement made by Moussaoui in a pre-trial motion. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/2/2002 ] There are no other reports of this and it is unclear why his flat would be raided, although there were raids in London following the embassy bombings, as bin Laden faxed a claim of responsibility to associates in the British capital (see Early 1994-September 23, 1998 and July 29-August 7, 1998). In addition, Moussaoui may be linked to a man named David Courtailler, who trained at radical camps in Afghanistan and is questioned in France in the wake of the embassy bombings. Courtailler lived in London and frequented the same mosques as Moussaoui, and intelligence agencies believe Courtailler lived with Moussaoui at one point. However, Courtailler will deny ever having met him. French authorities requested a raid of Moussaoui’s previous flat in 1994, but the raid was not carried out at that time (see 1994). [Los Angeles Times, 10/20/2001] Note: the actual text of the handwritten motion by Moussaoui is, “It is not the case that my address 23 A Lambert Road was raided after the Embassy bombing in Africa.” However, this appears to be a frequent grammatical error by Moussaoui, who is not a native speaker of English. For example, he may have been intending to ask a rhetorical question, but got the words “it” and “is” in the wrong places. Moussaoui uses the same formulation—“it is not the case that”—for events which did occur and which he seems to believe occurred, for example, “It is not the case that Mohammad Atta flew out of Miami to Madrid Spain for a week,” and, “It is not the case that Coleen Rowley, an FBI Agent in Minneapolis, sent a letter to the Congress,” so presumably he also alleges his flat was raided after the embassy bombings. [US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, 7/2/2002 ]