THE Khalid Sheikh Mohammedthe Pakistani national identified as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, was arrested in 2003 and interned in a US military prison in Guantanamo where he has been held since 2006, he agreed after a negotiation to plead guilty, as did two other fellow prisoners, the US Department of Defense announced yesterday Wednesday.
Life sentence instead of death sentence
Although the Pentagon declined to provide details, the deal allows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to avoid a trial in which he would have faced the death penalty and serve life in prison, the newspaper said. New York Times.
The two co-accused
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two co-defendants who are also involved in the deal are Walid bin Atas and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.
All three have been held for the past two decades in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, on land that was leased in perpetuity in 1903 to the US.
All three faced charges of terrorism and the killing of nearly 3,000 people in the attacks in New York and Washington.
Torture in secret CIA prisons
They were never brought to trial: bringing them to justice was likely to face obstacles, especially because information was extracted from them through systematic torture suffered in secret CIA prisons.
The negotiation
In March 2022, defense lawyers for the prisoners had confirmed that negotiations were underway to agree their sentence so that they would not be tried before a military court.
The defendants sought and received assurances that they would remain in prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, not be transferred to a federal prison in the continental US, where they would serve their sentences in solitary confinement.
Source: APE – MEB
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