Moussaoui now says White House was his attack target on Sept. 11

WASHINGTON -- In stunning testimony yesterday, Zacarias Moussaoui told a federal jury that Al Qaeda's original plan called for him to pilot a fifth plane into the White House in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

He also said that Richard Reid, who was later convicted of trying to use a shoe bomb to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in December 2001, was to have been a member of his crew.

Moussaoui, testifying over the objections of his defense attorneys, also said that after he was arrested on immigration charges in August 2001, he lied to FBI interrogators so the plot to also fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Center towers could go forward.

The statements instantly revitalized a death-penalty case that had been left in shambles after Judge Leonie M. Brinkema barred a host of witnesses because they had been improperly coached by a government lawyer. The prosecution is seeking capital punishment for Moussaoui on the theory that his silence led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.

Arrested a month before the 9/11 attacks after he provoked suspicions while training to pilot a 747 at a Minnesota flight school, Moussaoui was being held on immigration violations at the time that 19 Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one, after a struggle with passengers, into a Pennsylvania field.

He told the court that he lied to the FBI after his arrest so that the plot could go forward, and asked to have a radio in his jail cell in Minnesota because he knew the attacks were imminent. When he heard that a plane had struck the first of the World Trade Center's twin towers on the morning of Sept. 11, he said, ''I immediately understood."

Moussaoui also said that he did not know precisely what date the attacks were to take place and knew little specific information about the plot when he was arrested on Aug. 16, 2001.

''I had knowledge that the two towers would be hit, but I didn't have the details," he said.

Moussaoui was initially suspected of being the intended ''20th hijacker" who would have filled out the team on the Pennsylvania flight, which had only three terrorists to control the passengers. The Sept. 11 Commission concluded that the plane was targeted for the US Capitol.

But investigators later decided that the intended 20th hijacker was more likely Mohammad al-Qahtani, a Saudi man who was turned away by a suspicious immigrations officer at Orlando International Airport in August 2001 while 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta waited in the airport lobby. Qahtani was subsequently taken into custody and is now being held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Instead, investigators came to believe that Moussaoui was training to be part of an intended second wave of lethal hijackings. When he pleaded guilty in April 2005, Moussaoui seemed to confirm those suspicions, bragging that Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had sent him to crash a hijacked jet into the White House as a follow-up plot at some point after 9/11.

But yesterday Moussaoui changed his story. Had he not been arrested on Aug. 17, 2001, he said yesterday, ''I was supposed to pilot a plane to hit the White House" on the same day as the attacks. Of his team, who would have controlled the passengers until the crash, he said, ''one definitely was Richard Reid. As for the others, it was not definite."

The changed testimony cast a new level of uncertainty over the official history of the worst terrorist attack in US history. Moussaoui did not explain why he had previously testified that he was intended to be part of a different, second hijacking plot. He also did not explain why he had never before named Reid as an intended accomplice.

Gerald Leone, a former first assistant US attorney in Boston who was the lead prosecutor in the shoe-bombing case against Reid, said yesterday that it is impossible to know whether Moussaoui is telling the truth. Moussaoui may finally be coming clean, he said, or instead is now embellishing his role. But Leone said Moussaoui's story is consistent with what is known about Reid.

Investigators know that Reid and Moussaoui knew each other, went to the same London mosque and the same training camps in Afghanistan, and had at least one Al Qaeda handler in common, he said. Reid was arrested after trying on Dec. 22, 2001, to blow up an American Airlines flight carrying 197 people from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his athletic shoe.

Reid was foiled when passengers and crew tackled him as he attempted to light a fuse on his shoe. The plane was diverted to Boston, where it landed safely, and the US attorney's office in Boston was charged with prosecuting him. Reid pleaded guilty in January 2003 and is now serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Colorado.

Leone said that Reid told his interrogators that he had been ''disappointed" that he didn't participate in the 9/11 attacks and that he had had a dream in which he missed a van carrying the 9/11 hijackers and thus could not join the plot.

''That was the closest Reid came to talking about any personal involvement in 9/11, but that doesn't mean Moussaoui is lying," Leone said. ''It just means that Reid never acknowledged any involvement."

Reid, he added, was vehement that he was never going to tell investigators anything that would help them capture or prosecute another Muslim. Reid may have stayed silent about being an intended hijacker, he said, to avoid giving investigators any leads.

Leone also said that Reid wrote a letter to Moussaoui urging him not to cooperate ''because Muslims don't cooperate against Muslims." Moussaoui also wrote a letter full of ''Islamist rhetoric" to Reid, Leone said.

By declaring so forthrightly that he knew even more about the 9/11 plot than he has previously admitted, Moussaoui yesterday may have signed his own death warrant, some observers of the case said. But Leone said that it is possible that dying is precisely what Moussaoui wants.

''It's just so difficult to tell with a guy like Moussaoui where his motivations and intentions lie," Leone said. ''I don't think anyone is even clear whether he considers the death penalty to be a badge of honor or not. He's clearly said he wants to die a martyr, but not at the hands of the government. So it's a mixed bag."

Material from Globe wire services was included in this article.