ALEXANDRIA, Feb 6: Sept 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui was twice ordered out of his death penalty trial on Monday after branding US justice a ‘circus’ and pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda.

A first hearing in front of prospective jurors was barely two minutes old when Judge Leonie Brinkema told marshals to take the 37-year-old Frenchman back to his cell following a contempt-filled outburst.

“This trial is a circus,” he said, as he was led from court, hands above his head, wearing a green jumpsuit.

Less than an hour later, Mr Moussaoui, the only man charged over the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, was later ejected from a separate courtroom being used for a second pool of potential jurors, after another show of defiance.

The trial is starting with the selection of a jury to decide if Mr Moussaoui should face the death penalty for his role in the attacks on New York and Washington.

He has admitted six charges of conspiring with Al Qaeda and prosecutors now want to prove he deliberately withheld details of the Sept 11 attacks after he was arrested just weeks before they were launched.

Mr Moussaoui, who has refused to talk to his court-appointed defenders, stood up during the first appearance and said loudly: “I want to be heard ... I do not want to be represented by these people, these people do not represent me.”

He went on: “They are not my lawyers, I am Al Qaeda, they do not represent me. This trial is a circus.”

Mr Brinkema urged Mr Moussaoui to wait for his turn to speak before ordering him out of the hearing.

At a separate hearing seeking to whittle down the 500-strong pool of potential jurors, Mr Moussaoui said he had been trying for four years to divest himself of court appointed defence lawyers.

“These people are not my lawyers, I do not want them to represent me,” he said before Mr Brinkema cut him off again.

Mr Moussaoui was marched out of both hearings with his hands on his head.

He at first denied he was part of the Sept 11 plot, but finally made a formal guilty plea last April on six charges of conspiracy with Al Qaeda to hijack planes which brought down the World Trade Centre towers in New York and hit the Pentagon in Washington.

A fourth jet crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

In his plea, Mr Moussaoui said Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had told him to fly a plane into the White House, but as part of a follow-up wave of attacks.

Police clamped tight security around the court in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. The whole trial is expected to last up to three months.

Roads were closed off, and armed police patrolled outside the courthouse, and on apartment blocks overlooking the building, which is close to the Pentagon.

This final phase of the Moussaoui prosecution is likely to see relatives of Sept 11 victims testify in a bid to bolster the prosecution case that Mr Moussaoui should get the death penalty.

Jurors will be first asked to rule on whether Mr Moussaoui deliberately lied about his knowledge of the planned attacks, and is therefore eligible to be put to death.

Secondly they would have to decide if he should be sentenced to death.

His lawyers look set to argue that their client is mentally ill and so should not be put to death.

Neuroscientist and author Nancy Andreasen will testify that Mr Moussaoui ‘suffers from a major thought disorder, most likely schizophrenia’, and other witnesses will relate what the defence says was a deeply troubled childhood in France.

The US government wants a death penalty for Mr Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota on Aug 16, 2001, after overstaying his visa and arousing suspicion at a flight training school.

The detainee’s mother has also attacked the US judiciary for the way her son is being handled.

“Zacarias is an ideal culprit because he is poor, educated and Arab,” the mother, Aicha el Wafi, said while talking to reporters in the French city of Montpellier.

“My son is refusing to speak to the lawyers or to the defence because he sees that there is no way out, that the prosecutor wants a culprit and that there is no way to defend himself.

“My son is an extremist. He should be judged for that — but not for the things he did not do. He did not take part in the Sept 11 attacks,” El Wafi said.

Born in southern France in May 1968, Mr Moussaoui studied economic administration in Montpellier before obtaining a degree in management at South Bank university in London in 1995.

In London he is believed to have fallen under the sway of radical preachers. —AFP