Moussaoui case may move to tribunal

WASHINGTON -- The White House is weighing a proposal to abandon the Justice Department's prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui in a federal court, remove him from the United States and place him before a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, administration officials say.

They said the proposal to shut down the civilian prosecution of Moussaoui, the only person charged in a U.S. court with involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, reflected a growing fear in the government that legal problems faced by the Justice Department in pursuing the case might be insurmountable.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while there had been no final decision on moving Moussaoui to the U.S. military base in Cuba, the proposal had been discussed in recent weeks among lawyers at the White House counsel's office, the Pentagon and the Justice Department.

Test shows radios worked before tower collapse

NEW YORK -- A tape of firefighters' communications during the World Trade Center attack showed that equipment previously blamed for malfunctioning and boosting the death toll may have worked properly, according to a published report.

The 78-minute tape indicated the signal-boosting repeater used to amplify and retransmit radio signals did, in fact, effectively pass transmissions on Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Times reported in its Saturday editions.

The finding contradicts an earlier emergency response study that was endorsed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta.

That study attributed part of the problem to the destruction of a signal-boosting repeater in the attack. The repeater was mounted atop neighboring 5 World Trade Center to amplify and retransmit radio signals and was destroyed when the first tower collapsed.

Although very few communications from the north tower are heard on the tape, the Port Authority said that firefighters in the south tower can be heard speaking over their radios until the building falls, indicating that the system worked.

Officials at the Port Authority, which was responsible for the equipment, have maintained that complaints about the communications system they installed have been used to deflect blame.

"The existence of the recording and its contents clearly show that the repeater was working," Port Authority spokesman Allen Morrison said Saturday.

Prosecutor in slain reporter case resigns

KARACHI, Pakistan -- The government said Saturday it had received a resignation letter from the chief prosecutor in the trial of the kidnappers of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Raj Quereshi did not say why he wanted to step down, Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said, but his assistants told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity that Quereshi had received threatening letters and phone calls.

Quereshi told reporters on Friday he would explain his reasons for leaving later.

He successfully prosecuted four Islamic militants who were convicted on July 15 in the kidnapping and murder of Pearl, the Journal's South Asia bureau chief. All four appealed.

Pearl disappeared in Karachi while working on a story in January about Muslim militants. His dismembered body was found in May in a shallow grave in Karachi.

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