May 5, 2006	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 6, 1427

WASHINGTON, May 4: Zacarias Moussaoui, formally sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday over his role in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, will almost certainly live out his days in a soundproofed cell, seldom having direct contact with other human beings.

Moussaoui was expected to be sent to the super maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, known as the ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’.

If so, he will spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, in a 3.5-by-2 metre soundproofed cell. The remaining hour he will have the chance to exercise, also alone, in a concrete chamber.

Whenever he does leave his cell, Moussaoui will be in leg-irons and with his hands cuffed behind his back.

Furniture in the cells, according to those who have seen them, is made almost entirely of poured concrete. It includes a concrete stool, desk and bed covered by a thin mattress.

A small black-and-white TV in each cell shows closed-circuit classes in subjects like anger management and literacy and religious services of numerous denominations, which are broadcast from a small chapel within the prison.

Moussaoui will seldom if ever see any of the other roughly 400 inmates in the prison. These include high-profile criminals such as Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”; Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheik” involved in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993; Richard Reid, the “Shoe Bomber”; Eric Rudolph, convicted of bombing abortion clinics and setting off a bomb in a park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

Florence is included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most secure prison. It has 1,400 remote- controlled steel doors and many motion detectors and hidden cameras. The area between the prison walls and the razor-wire perimeter is monitored by laser beams and pressure pads and guarded by attack dogs.—Reuters