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"Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Algerian origin, was arrested in the United States on 16th August. He is allegedly linked with the attacks on the World Trade Centre..." My hands gripped the steering wheel. I clung to a faint hope: my Zacarias Moussaoui, my brother, is not of Algerian origin. We're French, but of Moroccan origin. The Moussaoui they were talking about had to be someone with the same name. That had to be it. But deep down I knew it wasn't impossible; I knew it might be my Zacarias. "Hailing from Narbonne, in southern France, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, while he was attending flying school..." My mother, Aïcha, had just turned 14 when she met my father, Omar Moussaoui. He was a tiler from Fès, some 40 miles from where she lived. Aïcha wanted to get married right away. In a southern Moroccan village, marrying off daughters that young was not uncommon, and my grandmother finally agreed - my mother stopped going to school there and then. That, anyway, is the story as told by my grandmother. It's not my mother's version. Throughout our childhood, Aïcha kept telling us that she had been "forced" to marry at the age of 14. By the time she was 20, she had two daughters, Nadia, my elder sister, and Jamila. When my father heard about the possibility of work in France, the Moussaoui family set up home in Bayonne. I was born in 1967, and my brother Zacarias was born in St-Jean-de-Luz on May 30, 1968. Three years later my parents were divorced. I don't remember my mother ever explaining why. The fact was we simply weren't living with him any more. We spent that summer of 1971 in the Dordogne, and in September we moved on to Mulhouse in Alsace where my mother had found a job. No sooner had we arrived than my mother put my two sisters, my brother and me in an orphanage. So from one day to the next we found ourselves both fatherless and motherless. I spent all my time with my brother. Thank God they didn't separate us. Zacarias was quite small, still only three or four years old. My sisters lived in the girls' building but we would meet during the day. Every day, we would nag my big sister Nadia to find out when our mother was going to come and fetch us. And every time, Nadia answered: "Soon..." One day, she really did come and get us. Aïcha found a job as a cleaning woman in the central post office in Mulhouse. She worked early in the morning and late at night. Nadia, now aged 12, did the shopping and the cooking and the housework and looked after us. And once again the family moved house, this time to an apartment on the Bourtzwiller estate - "a problem neighbourhood". Many of us on the estate came from north Africa. We all got on well together, except with those families renowned for their dislike of foreigners. We got called "dirty niggers". Not "dirty Arabs", but "dirty niggers". They didn't make any distinction between Arabs and blacks; we were just not whites. Our father came to see us now and then - or rather, he tried to see us. My mother told us that our father had hurt her, that he was a hard man and that she would be greatly upset if we agreed to see him. He would come and we would run off - just as she told us. Not long after that, my mother met another man, Saïd, who moved in. He was like a stepfather to us. At least, he was the guy who stayed longest. Zacarias was an ideal younger brother. He was smart, clever and kind - a really nice boy. He and I were very close. I think that we just knew, without ever saying as much, that we could only count on each other. In 1974 we discovered Morocco, our country of origin, for the first time. I was seven and Zacarias five and a half. I remember huge watermelons, prickly pears and playing in the streets with our cousins. Our grandmother and our aunt gave us pastries that they made themselves, makrouds, honey and almond cakes, and zlabias, colourful, translucent sweets. There were always lots of us at mealtimes, and a tajine or two was always simmering on the fire. On Sundays, we went with our cousins to the Koranic school. Zacarias and I hardly knew what the Koran was. We liked it well enough but found it strange: all those children in a large room, repeating after the teacher the verses of that holy book, which neither our mother nor stepfather ever talked to us about. It was a wonderful holiday. Usually we'd spend our school holidays and Wednesdays at a drop-in centre. One day Zacarias and I had had enough, and we badgered our mother to sign us up for sport on Wednesdays. First we did judo and karate, then Zacarias played handball and I played basketball. For Zacarias, handball quickly became more than a sport - it was his passion. He was brilliant. Everyone recognised it - his trainers, his team-mates, even his opponents. For Zacarias, the future was all mapped out. He would study and play sports. Towards the end of the year, my mother gathered us all together one weekend to tell us that she wanted to apply for a job transfer. She wanted "to go somewhere sunny". Zacarias was immediately against it: "I won't go. Next year I want to study sports at Mulhouse." My mother decided to get us to vote on it, and Zacarias was the only one opposed to moving. With hindsight, I think that after the ordeal of the orphanage, that move to Narbonne was another great wrench for him. It meant the end of his dream of becoming a professional handball player and then perhaps a coach. In Narbonne, we rediscovered the "charms" of the housing estate. At that time the Razimbaud estate had a number-one enemy: the neighbouring estate, where pretty much only people of French origin lived, which was called the Pastouret. We were a bunch of about 15 kids whose families had moved into the apartment block at the same time, and we formed our own gang. In our block there was a "bike specialist" called Jean who would steal bicycle and motorcycle parts and use them to assemble his own. Jean had a brother and two half-brothers, really big guys who were our "comprehensive insurance policy" in the neighbourhood. The bike thieves introduced us to other thieves, one of them being David, the estate's daredevil. He spent his time breaking into telephone kiosks, or stealing motorbikes, cars... anything he could get his hands on. It was David who told us you could go to jail for thieving from the age of 13 onwards. That was a warning for us. I should mention that neither Zacarias nor I looked like hoodlums. If anything, we were scared stiff of not being able to study if we got a criminal record. If there was one thing we were really sure about, it was that we wanted to go to university. Zacarias enrolled in a handball club when we arrived in Narbonne, but came back from the first training session saying that the standard was too low. He was very ambitious, very demanding. At his new school, Jules-Ferry, he'd made some good friends, the children of middle-class people, managers and teachers, who had their futures all mapped out. At the end of his fourth year, I was surprised when he requested a move to a vocational school to do the Certificate of Technical Education as a mechanic and fitter. Finally I realised that he quite simply lacked self-confidence and felt humiliated because of his social roots. The son of a Moroccan cleaning woman in the midst of sons of company directors? So he switched schools and joined me at the vocational college. In no time he realised he'd made a mistake. Meanwhile our mother and stepfather had bought a corner shop. They made enough money to buy a plot of land at Roche-Grise, a fairly sought-after area on the edge of Narbonne. With a small loan they began building a large detached house. It was a neighbourhood for architects, engineers and civil servants. Lots of our neighbours had swimming pools and tennis courts and some even had horses. We were the only north Africans in the area. We went from one swimming pool to another, tried our hand at tennis and even, sometimes, pony-riding... thanks to Zacarias who was quickly accepted in this circle. My brother was smart, fun to be around, quick-witted and a charmer. His sense of humour, which was sometimes scathing, would have people laughing until they cried. And among our neighbours there were, of course, girls. Fanny was a pretty blonde, with white skin and pale eyes. She lived 200 yards from our house. Zacarias met her at a friend's house. She was 15, like him. That meeting would be the start of a real love story, a story that lasted 10 years. Little by little, he told Fanny about his pain and suffering, and about the tension at home with mother. Her father had a high-up job in a big company. Her mother was a civil servant. Fanny's father was racist, in a distressingly predictable way. Both parents called Fanny's friendship "disgraceful". Until then, Zacarias acted as if he hadn't realised they didn't approve of him. Like me, he thought some people were racists more out of fear than because of any malice. He was quite sure that Fanny's family would get to know him and change their minds. It was a charitable way of looking at things - but way off the mark. Fanny's parents felt their daughter deserved better than an Arab. At home, things between Zacarias and Aïcha had never been easy. I managed to let the storm pass when shouts and screams filled the house, until she calmed down. Zacarias, though, seemed to have run out of patience completely. Little by little, I think he stopped feeling any love for her. Aïcha never talked to us in Arabic. So we felt discriminated against even among the north African community, because we didn't speak its language. When we went on at our mother to teach us a few words, she would laugh at our accents and lousy pronunciation, so we ended up not saying a word. Nor did she teach us anything about Arab customs, or Muslim culture. Zac and I asked her several times how you prayed and why. She told us it wasn't what people of our age did. I was 25 when I went into a mosque for the first time, in Montpellier. I think the first mosque Zacarias went into was in Britain. When we were in our teens, my mother started to celebrate Christmas. All our north African friends at school seemed quite happy to celebrate Muslim festivals, whereas we hardly knew what they meant. What we understood only too well was that our family wasn't like any other. We didn't feel French, and we realised as much every time we came up against racism. We didn't live like Moroccans, either. Thus a void insidiously formed in us, an abyss that Zacarias and I would try to negotiate, in different ways. The school cafeteria was a place of petty, day-to-day aggro. Even if we didn't know anything about religion, we still didn't eat pork. Every day, we were obliged to ask the question: "Do you have anything other than pork?" And every day we would get the same response: "Why?" "Because I'm a Muslim. I don't eat pork." "Oh for heaven's sake! Can't you Muslim people be like everybody else?" Once, Zacarias went to a disco with his girlfriend. I tried to talk him out of going because I knew all too well the risks he would face, but Zac was pig-headed. If he wanted to go to a club, he went. Inside a guy tapped on my brother's shoulder and punched him even before Zac had turned around. Blood poured from his mouth. Zacarias lashed back with a head butt and the guy fell to the floor. A second guy came up, then a third. My brother really got beaten up. And all the time he's being hit, what does he hear? "Had it with these niggers! They're even taking our women!" Throughout the brawl, Fanny was beside Zacarias, sobbing, afraid for him. When Zacarias was faced with humiliation, he reacted differently from me. He locked himself away in his suffering, nurtured it, it gnawed away at him quietly. Despite his problems, Zac got his vocational Baccalauréat, and passed the entrance exams for an advanced diploma in Perpignan, taking mechanical and electrical engineering. He took a room in a hall of residence. Fanny enrolled at Perpignan, too, and rented a small apartment in the city centre. So they more or less lived together. For my brother this was the beginning of the student's "good life". University meant freedom, but you had to be motivated: nobody was forced to attend lectures. Beneath his assertive exterior, Zacarias needed to be guided and supported by his teachers. Being left to his own devices wasn't right for him. Some of his friends went on to business school, but that was unthinkable for him because the fees were very high. Others found jobs. He, too, looked vaguely for work. But he tended to be very quickly discouraged and suspected that each refusal was racially motivated. Some bosses were quite frank; their line was, "I don't want any Arabs." The year passed like that, a mix of frustration and uncertainty. The evenings we spent with our friends were full of laughter, but also discussion: it was the period of the Gulf war. In classes, students quickly split into two factions: the pro-Americans, who applauded the bombings in Iraq and chanted, "USA! USA!", and the pro-Arabs, or rather those who were touched by the plight of Iraqi civilians. For hours we talked about the legitimacy of the intervention in Iraq. That war crystallised feelings against American imperialism, be it political or economic. We had the feeling that the France that sent in troops to fight alongside the Americans was not our France. I think it was at that moment that Zacarias started to feel that he belonged to the "Blacks", whereas people of French extraction were "Whites". By now, Zacarias spent hardly any time with born-and-bred French people. His new friends seemed to cultivate an attitude of rebellion. They were forever denigrating politicians and intellectuals - French ones in particular. There were probably Muslim Brotherhood members among them. At the university they had a nickname: "Kid Brothers". Zacarias turned up for lectures less and less. He became more and more disillusioned and cynical. When it came to Algeria, he would now say that the political elite was responsible for the civil war and the massacres. When it came to France, he would argue that the system was rotten and made solely to serve a corrupt middle class. He would often repeat pessimistically: "I studied so that I could manage better, and what's the result? I'm stuck." Since he had left our mother's house, he hadn't set foot in it again. The only thing he wanted to do was "leave Narbonne". For Zac, it now seemed crucial to add something "extra" to his training, which would make a difference in the eyes of a potential boss. If we improved our language skills, he believed we could work abroad. At that time he spoke just broken English, and he still didn't speak Arabic, so he bought textbooks and worked away at English grammar. He thought he might find a job as a school supervisor in England, as he had in France.Then he would look for a relevant course. Later he would have a chance to learn Arabic, and thus be able to work in export between French-speaking countries, English-speaking countries and the Emirates. When his ideas focused once and for all on England (the US was too expensive and too far away), I encouraged him to go. Naively, I reckoned that it could only do him good to get away from the "Kid Brothers". Fanny wasn't at all in agreement. She had just been taken on as an assistant in a bank, and all she dreamed about was having a quiet life - living with Zacarias somewhere nearby. She encouraged him to go on looking for work. Zac reproached her for not being realistic and not understanding that the colour of his skin was a real drawback. As I saw him off at the airport, I was at once proud of him, sad and anxious - he was my little brother. When he arrived in England, his first task was to find a place to stay. He'd thought he would easily find a simple youth hostel. But when he phoned a few days after he arrived, he told me he'd ended up in a centre for the homeless. He wanted to get in touch with social services and find ways of getting state benefits. Most important, he wanted to find work. After six months he came back for a visit, and he admitted that at first his poor English had paralysed him. He told me about his day-to-day life, and it seemed very hard to me. In the hostel there was a shared dormitory, with several dozen homeless guys, mainly English, sleeping there every night. Zacarias had an iron bed, with his clothes rolled in a bundle under his pillow. By day, needless to say, there was no question of leaving your personal effects there. Gradually Zacarias started to feel more at ease in London. Every day he forced himself to work on his English, alone with his books in a library. Finally, after successfully taking a whole battery of tests, he managed to get into South Bank University, where he would work towards a Master of International Business degree. Every time Zacarias came back to France, I felt him becoming harder. He didn't like British society, describing a country that was grey, rainy and closed. In Britain, he said, all ethnic communities were tolerated, but they didn't mix. He accused the English of being tolerant only on the surface. He told me he had got a scholarship, the equivalent of 150,000 francs, to pay for his year at university and for lodgings, a fully furnished flat in the centre of London. When Zacarias came home, he stayed with us. He never talked to us about religion. Yet it was in that same period that I started to practise Islam. He could have shown a dash of curiosity, but he didn't. In 1994 I suggested he come with me to Friday prayers at the mosque. He refused, preferring to go into town. At that moment, he probably hadn't yet met the people who would become his "gurus". Or at least he hadn't yet been truly recruited. Things were getting difficult with Fanny. The last time I saw them together was in 1993 in Montpellier; they were spending the weekend in a cottage they had rented. Fanny wanted to have a family and a normal life. She probably asked him to come back to France, but Zacarias's goal was to get rich. "I must keep moving on, and earn money," he would often repeat. He asked her to go to England. But Fanny knew that life was hard over there. Zacarias was deeply wounded by her refusal to follow him. That period marked the end of their love affair. When Zacarias came back the following year, I found him quite different. Until 1994, Zacarias and my wife Fouzia had always had very deep conversations. Zacarias would encourage her to take her studies as far as she possibly could. But now his argument had radically altered. He would say over and over to Fouzia: "Studies aren't important for women. You'd be better off staying at home." One night, when the three of us were watching a film on TV, in which a woman was hit by her husband, Zacarias said ironically: "Serves her right. That's what women need." Fouzia and I were aghast. He could spend a whole day slumped in an armchair, barely speaking. I thought he had lost his bearings and that a serious depression was imminent. But I felt helpless. He'd become a stranger. Zacarias went back to London where, so he said, he was going to get his degree. That was 1995. The next time I saw him was in a photo, a few days after September 11, 2001. Just before leaving for a trip to Morocco in 1996, I'd seen my sister Jamila, who had let me in on a secret: the year before, Zacarias had been to see her and said: "Abd Samad and Fouzia are doing tawassul, they're heathens. Be on your guard with them, but whatever else happens don't say anything to them." (For Sunni Muslims, tawassul is an invocational formula whereby a person asks Allah to grant him a favour by citing the name of a prophet or saint. Wahhabis reject tawassul and use it as a pretext for declaring that all other Muslims are heathens and idolaters. Of more than one billion people in the world who adhere to Islam, 95% are Sunnites, 4% are Shiites, and slightly more than a million - ie, 1% - are Wahhabis; a small percentage, but they have the backing of Saudi Arabia, which has the world's largest oil reserves.) When Jamila told me what my brother had said, I was taken aback. It made me feel sick. I'd never suspected that my bright, well-educated brother could possibly be taken in by the Wahhabi ideology; and the fact that he had insisted that Jamila say nothing about it showed he was wary of me. Now, all the oddness of his behaviour came flooding back. Now, I could make a different analysis of his silences, and his sadness. Certain people told me that earlier that year my brother had made a whirlwind visit to Morocco and his behaviour was more than strange. Everything for him was forbidden ( haram ), but he was contradictory. He would forbid others to smoke and yet he'd go to a corner of the building to smoke cigarettes. People told me they felt uncomfortable with him. A few weeks later we returned to France and we went to Narbonne to see Jamila. She told us that Zacarias had just been staying with her for a few days. To start with she had been taken aback by his appearance. He wore a full beard and had a shaven head, and was wearing trousers that came halfway down his calves. But it was above all his behaviour that shocked her. One morning, she told us, she put on quite a long, short-sleeved dress and got ready to go shopping. But Zacarias snapped at her: "You're not going to go out looking like a whore!" Jamila froze. Zacarias then mumbled a few incomprehensible words and went to his room. A few moments later he came back out crying and collapsed on the sofa, asking her to forgive him. He went to the Friday sermon in the Narbonne mosque. "I'm going to give you a lesson," he declared. The congregation was surprised but polite, and let him speak. Zacarias started to explain the Wahhabi creed to them. The discussion became heated. Just as Zacarias was reciting verses of the Koran in French, the imam walked into the mosque. He listened to my brother for a few seconds and then asked: "Can you speak Arabic?" Zacarias answered, no. "So how do you know that what you are saying is the true meaning of what is said in the Koran?" Zacarias lost his temper. He got to his feet and tried to hit the imam. The young people intervened and threw him out. Zacarias walked off hurling insults at them and calling them kouffar - heathens. Why was Zacarias attracted by extremists? "Recruiters" invariably proceed in the same way. First of all, they pick out young people who have been estranged from their families, the strong moral anchors that are their father, mother, brothers and sisters, and even friends. I was Zacarias's only safeguard. But in London he was far away from me. In the early stages of what can only be called an exile, we talked often on the phone and he returned regularly to France. Then he changed. He had always been discreet, but now he became secretive. He also changed physically. I put these changes down to the problems of living abroad, but I got it all wrong: Zacarias was in the process of ripping up his roots. For my brother, brainwashing must have been involved. I am convinced that someone, even several people, had the task of distancing my brother from his family. Zacarias did not just wake up one day and decide that I was a "heathen". The thoughts he expressed to our sister were the culmination of a long process of denigration. There was an urgent need to separate him from me, a Sunni. His enrolment was obviously greatly helped by his total ignorance of religion. He had no references and no moral weapons with which to defend himself. How did my brother have his first contact with those responsible for his transformation? In London, nothing could be easier. Until September 11, the British government more or less put up with extremist groups expressing themselves in the street on the sole condition that they respected British institutions. And today, outside certain mosques in London, every Friday you can still come across fanatics who, for example, are allowed to justify loud and clear the attacks of September 11. As long as they don't say anything against Britain. The British call this "freedom of speech". Some London mosques are also renowned for the extremist sermons of their imam. These sermons fill the heads of young people with the suffering of Muslim people. In the case of Zacarias, that particular antenna was already sensitive before he left France. It just needed honing and manipulating. After several months spent usually exclusively within extremist groups, the young recruit is ripe for action. This mysterious "action" is presented to him as a duty and an honour. He becomes "eligible" to go abroad. He may be directly invited to "go for training" in a camp. Once in the camp, it is easy, as in any sect, to make him lose his bearings. First of all he is put through athletic training, and then training in weapon handling. He is set challenges that are increasingly difficult to meet. The young recruit is not well fed. He becomes exhausted. In his own eyes, he is belittled: he feels guilty because he is incompetent. And yet he is told over and over again that others before him have succeeded and gone on to "great things". At this stage there are two possible scenarios. Either the recruit retains his survival instinct and finds a way to go back to his country of origin, broken and disgusted, but most of the time rid of this ideology. Or he carries on. And if he carries on, it is to the bitter end. Because he is "incompetent", the only thing he can do to help the cause is to give his life to it. And this will also prove to others that, at the end, he met their expectations. He is now ripe for suicide. Zacarias broke off contact with me. In 1996, I didn't know where he was. Nor did my sister. He phoned her now and then, and he sometimes called our mother. But his phone calls became ever rarer, and he never answered their questions. He just said to them: "I'm fine. I can't tell you where I am." For me, all this pointed to one thing: the sect had won. How can someone so open, so communicative and warm, so involved in working towards his degrees, let himself be swallowed up by such scum? How come it worked with him? Other people have childhoods and adolescences that are worse than ours - of this I am well aware. But those who emerge unscathed are rare exceptions. All four of us brothers and sisters have been affected. Today, my sisters Nadia and Jamila are traumatised. My brother Zacarias stands accused of a horrendous crime, and is rotting in an American prison · This is an edited extract from Zacarias Moussaoui: The Making Of A Terrorist by Abd Samad Moussaoui and Florence Bouquillat. The book will be published by Serpent's Tail, price £12, on May 22.