9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed agrees to plea deal to avoid Guantánamo Bay death penalty trial

Life sentence plea deals over murder of 2,976 victims have reportedly been under discussion since 2022

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who planned the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 people, has accepted a plea deal for a life sentence, according to prosecutors.

Mohammed, along with two accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, will avoid the death penalty as part of the agreement to end the conspiracy case against them, according to The New York Times, which reported on the deal.

News of the plea came in a letter from military prosecutors to family members of those who died in the attacks.

“In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet,” the letter reads, according to the paper.

Some of those who were impacted by 9/11 disapproved of the deal.

This photo obtained 01 March, 2003, shows, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged organizer of the September 11, 2001, attacks, shortly after his capture (HO/AFP via Getty Images)

“I am very disappointed. We waited patiently for a long time. I wanted the death penalty — the government has failed us,” Daniel D’Allara, whose brother, NYPD officer John D’Allara, was killed on 9/11, told The New York Post.

The Office of Military Commissions (OMC) told the Post the terms of the agreement were not immediately available, and that the pleas will be officially announced on Thursday, with sentencing set to begin on August 5.

A military commission will still need to be empaneled to accept the pleas, consider evidence used in the sentencing, and hear testimony from victims.

Terry Strada, national chairperson of 9/11 Families United, told The Associated Press she wished the case had gone to a full trial.

“For me personally, I wanted to see a trial,” she said. “And they just took away the justice I was expecting, a trial and the punishment.”

“They were cowards when they planned the attack. And they’re cowards today,” she added. Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born Al-Qaeda terrorist, often referred to by his initials KSM, was born in Kuwait, educated in the US, and later fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

In 1996, he presented Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with the plan to hijack commercial airliners and fly them into sensitive sites across the US for the attack that later became 9/11. The eventual plot targeted the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as well as the Pentagon. A third hijacked plane, bound for the US Capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania.

KSM was hunted down and captured in Pakistan in 2003, and subject to torture at secret CIA “black site” prisons, including rectal rehydration, stress positions, and sleep deprivation, as well as waterboarding, an interrogation technique meant to simulate the experience of drowning.

The conspiracy case against the trio of plotters has been in pretrial proceedings for more than a decade.

Defense lawyers argued that the government’s repeated use of torture in the men’s detention — Mohammed alone was waterboarded 183 times — contaminated the evidence that would appear at a future trial.

“At the heart of the commissions’ problems is their original sin, torture,” John Baker, former defense counsel at the Military Commissions Defense Organization, testified at the Senate in 2021. “The United States chose to secretly detain and torture the men it now seeks to punish.”

The process to try KSM and his accomplices at a military court at Guantánamo, which operates under different rules than the normal US criminal legal system, has been beset with other delays, including an 18-month pause during the height of the Covid pandemic, and an Obama administration plan to try the plotter in New York, which was rejected by local officials and Congress.

Amnesty International praised officials for securing a form of “accountability” in the 9/11 attacks, but condemned the glacial pace of the case against the attackers and called on the US to shut down the military prison.

A U.S. Army soldier stands at the entrance to Camp Delta where detainees from the U.S. war in Afghanistan live April 7, 2004 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (Getty Images)

Guantánamo has long been criticized for the use of torture on detainees and the fact that many of those detained there have been in military custody for years without formally being charged with crimes.

“Finally, after more than 20 years, there will be some accountability for the 9/11 attacks, and justice for the victims and survivors of those horrific crimes,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement to The Independent. “We are also pleased that there is finally an outcome for at least some of the accused, who were tortured and then languished in detention without trial for more than two decades.”

Last year, Joe Biden rejected parts of a potential plea deal for the detainees, over demands the men be spared solitary confinement and receive trauma care for their torture at the hands of the CIA, the National Security Council said at the time.

Negotiations over a potential plea reportedly began in 2022.

Two others accused in the 9/11 case, are not part of the plea deal.

Last year, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of organizing the 9/11 plot’s Hamburg cell, was found not mentally competent to stand trial.

Alleged plotter Ammar al-Baluchi could still face trial, though torture issues will likely complicate that process as well.

The CIA detainee, once held in Afghanistan, was used as a human prop to teach interrogators torture techniques and had his head repeatedly slammed against a wall by trainees so they could receive certification, leaving him with head injuries, according to declassified documents.