Why Did Moussaoui Have the Blackwater Phone Number in His Contacts?

by Leonardo Salvaggio. The original Italian version is available here.

Among the evidence produced by the prosecution in the trial against Zakarias Moussaoui are several notebooks handwritten by Moussaoui himself, one of which contains the phone number of the training center of the private military company Blackwater.

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by former Navy SEAL Eric Prince, in collaboration with mercenary entrepreneur Al Clark, and following 9/11 it was employed by the U.S. forces as a contractor during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The first task assigned to Blackwater was to defend two CIA bases in Afghanistan engaged in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but the most significant events involving the company, now known as Constellis, in the War on Terror are related to Iraq. In 2004, a Blackwater convoy was ambushed by a group of Iraqi insurgents, during which four military personnel were killed and their bodies were burned and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates. The Iraqi government revoked the license of Blackwater in 2007 following what is now known as the Nisour Square Massacre, when employees of the military contractor fired on a crowd in Nisour Square, Baghdad, while escorting a convoy of the U.S. embassy. An FBI investigation concluded that the shooting, which resulted in the deaths of seventeen civilians, was entirely unjustified, yet two years later Blackwater was still operating in Iraq despite the government ban.

As to why Moussaoui had that phone number in his contacts, we can only make assumptions, but we must start from the necessary assumption that it is a public phone number. A simple search on Google confirms that the number 252 435 2488 still corresponds to the training center of Constellis. According to journalist John M. Berger, the simplest explanation is also probably the most correct: Moussaoui wanted to attend personal combat training courses, and Blackwater was one of the companies that could provide such training.

There is still some confusion about what Moussaoui wrote after Blackwater Training Center 252 435 2488. It seems that there is an open parenthesis, with no corresponding closing parenthesis, followed by the name Mel (which can be either male or female), followed by a surname that is difficult to decipher, which could be anything from Deon to Crain. The uncertainty regarding the surname makes it impossible to search for the identity of this person whose name Moussaoui had written down.

At this time, there is no certainty as to why Moussaoui had the phone number of Blackwater in his contacts, but the most likely explanation is that there is nothing mysterious about it.