The US Defense Secretary has cancelled the deal made with the alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his two other associates.
United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has canceled the deal made with the mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks and his two associates. This step has been taken two days after the announcement of the deal, under which the provision of death penalty was allegedly abolished.
The deals, linked to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s most trusted aides, were cancelled on Friday after some relatives of the victims were upset.
Austin also relieved Suzanne Escalier, who oversees the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war court, of the authority to negotiate pre-trial settlements in the case and took that responsibility upon himself.
“I have determined that in view of the importance of the decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement with the accused … the responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Austin said in a memo addressed to Escalier.
“I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-mentioned case,” the memo said.
The Pentagon announced the plea agreements on Wednesday but did not provide details.
The New York Times reported that Mohammed and his accomplices, Walid Mohammed Saleh Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi, had agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy in exchange for life sentences rather than face trial, which could have also resulted in the death penalty.
Mohammed is the most high-profile inmate at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which was established by then-US President George W. Bush after the 2002 attacks.
They are accused of plotting to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they are known, killed nearly 3,000 people and pushed the US into a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.
The cases against them were entangled in pre-trial moves for several years while the accused remained detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Much of the legal battle has centered on whether they could receive a fair trial after suffering systematic torture at the hands of the CIA in the years following 9/11.
J. Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented defendants at Guantanamo as well as other detainees who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, welcomed the plea agreements as the only viable way to resolve the long-pending and legally complex 9/11 cases.
On Friday, Dixon accused Austin of causing emotional distress to some victims’ family members by bowing to political pressure and canceling plea agreements.
