By The opinion
31 Jul 2024, 21:53 PM EDT
Three of the five defendants in the terrorist act of September 11, 2001including the alleged mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, reached a deal with prosecutors, the Pentagon announced.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is considered the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack in US history, which is why, along with Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, he was held in Guantanamo prison.
The proceedings against them, who have been in custody at Guantanamo since 2003, could have resulted in a death sentence, which they would avoid.
The case had been embroiled in more than a decade of pretrial proceedings centering on the question of whether torture in secret CIA prisons had tainted the evidence against him.
News of the settlement came in a letter from prosecutors at the war tribunal to relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The New York Times reported.
“In exchange for the elimination of the death penalty as a possible punishmentthese three defendants have agreed to plead guilty to all of the crimes charged against them, including the murder of the 2,976 individuals listed in the indictment,” said the letter signed by Rear Admiral Aaron C. Rugh, chief prosecutor for military commissions, and three attorneys on his team, according to the paper.
The letter states that the defendants could present their arguments in a public hearing starting next week.
The guilty plea avoids what was expected to be a 12- to 18-month trial or, alternatively, the possibility that the military judge would throw out confessions that were key to the government’s case.
The detainees are accused of organizing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. On that day, 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners: two of them were crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, another into the Pentagon outside Washington; and another in a field in Pennsylvania.
In addition to the conspiracy charge, they were charged with committing murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians and terrorism.
Mohammed, a U.S.-educated engineer, was accused of coming up with the idea of hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. Prosecutors said he pitched the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996, and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers.
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