US reaches plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed & two others

Washington: The US has announced that it has entered into a pretrial deal with the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-Pakistani engineer, and two other co-accused in the 2001 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The agreement – reached after 27 months of negotiations – takes the death sentence off the table for Mohammed, Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, prosecutors said in a letter sent to the families of 9/11 victims and survivors shortly before the Department of Defense announced the news in a press release Wednesday.

Mohammed and his co-defendants, who have spent almost two decades in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will enter guilty pleas at a plea hearing that could come as early as next week, according to the letter obtained by CNN.

The settlement agreements with the Pentagon bring partial closure to a case that has dragged on for years and become mired in legal delays over whether the evidence extracted through torture during their interrogations was admissible in court.

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A third plane struck the Pentagon in Washington. A fourth plane, heading to Washington, crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back with the hijackers.

Many family members of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the September 11, 2001, attacks want the 9/11 defendants put to death. Since a trial became increasingly unlikely, plea bargains were widely viewed as the only way to resolve the case, the US media reported.

The Convening Authority for Military Commissions, Susan Escallier, has entered into pretrial agreements with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case, the US Department of Defence said in a press release.

"The specific terms and conditions of the pretrial agreements are not available to the public at this time," it said.

The three accused, along with Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then were again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012, in connection with their alleged roles in the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, the release said.

The letter says that the families now have 45 days to submit questions to be answered by the alleged co-conspirators by the end of the year.

Before his birth, Mohammed's parents immigrated to Kuwait from Pakistan's Balochistan province. Mohammed, a US-educated engineer, was captured on March 1, 2003, in Pakistan and held with other Al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Prosecutors argued that he came up with the idea of hijacking and flying planes into US buildings to al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, and later helped recruit and train some of the hijackers.

Meanwhile, an official with Amnesty International USA called the pre-trial agreement "welcome news" that will prompt some accountability for the 9/11 attacks and justice for its victims and survivors.

"We are also pleased that there is finally an outcome for at least some of the accused, who were tortured and then languished in detention without trial for more than two decades," Daphne Eviatar, director of the group's Security with Human Rights programme, said on Wednesday.

Eviatar said the announcement should mark the "beginning of the end" for the military prison.

The Biden administration has sought to close Guantanamo prison facility quietly. By last year, the number of people held at the facility was 30, down from the nearly 800 who were there at its peak, NBC News reported.