Washington. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked a plea deal reached this week with the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, according to a memo signed by the official on Friday.
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week that the deals were almost certain to involve guilty pleas in exchange for eliminating the death penalty. He added that a request for life imprisonment was possible.
Mohammed is the most high-profile inmate at the Guantanamo Bay prison, set up by then-US President George W. Bush to house suspected foreign militants after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Its population peaked at about 800 inmates before shrinking to a current population of 30.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to hijack commercial passenger jets and crash them into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they are known, left nearly 3,000 dead and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade war in Afghanistan.
His interrogations have long been the subject of scrutiny. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” claimed that Mohammed had been waterboarded at least 183 times.
Two other detainees also reached plea agreements: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, according to a Pentagon statement released this week.
The three men were initially jointly indicted and indicted on June 5, 2008, and then jointly re-indicted and indicted on May 5, 2012, the Pentagon statement said.
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– 2024-08-07 09:07:21
