Flight 93 Hijack Transcript

APRIL 12--This the transcript of the final moments of United Airlines Flight 93, as captured by the plane's cockpit voice recorder on September 11, 2001.

While the actual 31-minute audiotape was played this morning for jurors in the federal death penalty trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, Judge Leonie Brinkema refused to publicly release the tape, opting instead to provide only a transcript, a copy of which you'll find here.

The tape begins with a hijacker's announcement that, 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain...we have a bomb on board, so sit.' As the recording continues, the hijackers can be heard praying to Allah and warning passengers to 'Shut up' and 'Don't move.' Transcript excerpts in bold were translated from Arabic by government officials.

At one point during the mayhem, someone in the cockpit says, 'Please don't hurt me. Oh God!' Then, moments later, 'I don't want to die' is repeated three times by an unknown passenger. Flight 93, which the hijackers apparently planned to ram into the U.S. Capitol, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers sought to storm the cockpit and recapture the plane from the four hijackers.

The cockpit flight recorder, seen above in a government photo introduced yesterday at Moussaoui's trial, was recovered near the crash site.

In addition to the cockpit recording, prosecutors today presented jurors with an oversize exhibit containing photos of all but 92 of the nearly 3000 victims killed during the 2001 terrorist attacks. Click here to see a scaled-down version of that assemblage. (9 pages)