U.S. prosecutors have reached a deal with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Pentagon said Wednesday, reportedly involving a guilty plea in exchange for avoiding a death penalty trial.
The agreement with Mohammed and two other defendants moves their long-running cases toward resolution. The cases have been bogged down by years of pretrial maneuvering while the defendants remain detained at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.
A Pentagon statement said no details of the deal would be made public at this time. But The New York Times reported that Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy, in exchange for life sentences, rather than go to trial where they could face the death penalty.
Such a proposal was detailed by prosecutors in a letter last year, but it has divided the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Some families still want the defendants to face the harshest sentences.
Much of the legal wrangling surrounding the two men's cases has focused on whether they could be given a fair trial after enduring methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11, a thorny question that was avoided by their guilty pleas.
Mohammed was considered one of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. He then spent three years in a secret CIA prison before arriving at Guantanamo in 2006.
The trained engineer, who said he masterminded the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z,” was involved in a series of major plots against the United States, where he studied.
In addition to planning the operation to bring down the Twin Towers, Mohammed claims to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 with his “blessed right hand”, and to have assisted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people. (ns/ab)
