Three men accused of involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attack – including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – have agreed to plea deals at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Related: This 9/11 suspect spent 20 years in Guantánamo. Is he getting closer to a deal with the US?
“Military Commissions Convening Authority Susan Escallier entered into pre-trial agreements with Khalid Sheikh MohammedWalid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, three of the co-accused in the 9/11 case,” the Pentagon said in a brief statement.
The New York Times reported that the three will plead guilty to conspiracy charges in exchange for a life sentence instead of a death penalty trial.
The men have been in US custody since 2003 and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is widely seen as the main conspirator in the terrorist attacks.
Over the years, the case became bogged down in lengthy pretrial proceedings. Defense lawyers argued that the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons made the evidence against them unusable in court proceedings.
The agreement avoids the prospect of an extremely long and complex trial, or the possibility that confessions considered crucial to the case will be rejected. The New York Times reported that news of the settlement came in a letter from prosecutors to families of victims of the devastating attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three defendants have agreed to plead guilty to all of the crimes charged, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed on the charge sheet,” the letter said, according to the document. the newspaper.
Prosecutors said Mohammed, who was an engineer and studied in the US, took the idea of flying planes into buildings to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and then helped train and direct some of the hijackers who carried out the devastating attacks in the US. ground.
Mohammed and Hawsawi were captured together in Pakistan in March 2003. The two were tortured by their American interrogators, including subjecting Mohammed to a record 183 rounds of mock drills.
