US scraps plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind

The US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has revoked a plea deal agreed to earlier this week with the man accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, according to a memorandum signed by Austin.

On Friday, Austin removed the military official who facilitated the agreement from the case, as it would have eliminated the death penalty as possible punishment.

"I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused ... responsibility for such a decision should rest with me," Austin said in a memorandum addressed to Susan Escallier, who oversaw the military court at Guantanamo Bay.

"I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024 in the above-referenced case," the memo said, referring to Mohammed and two alleged accomplices.

The agreements with Mohammed and two other accused on Wednesday was billed to move their long-running cases toward resolution. The cases have been bogged down in pre-trial maneuverings for years while the defendants remained held at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

Divisive plea deal proposal

Such a proposal was detailed by prosecutors in a letter last year but divided the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks, with some still wanting the defendants to face the ultimate penalty.

Much of the legal jousting surrounding the men's cases has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone methodical torture at the hands of the CIA in the years after 9/11 — a thorny question that the plea deals help avoid.

Mohammed was regarded as one of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden's most trusted and intelligent lieutenants before his March 2003 capture in Pakistan. He then spent three years in secret CIA prisons before arriving in Guantanamo in 2006.

The trained engineer — who has said he masterminded the 9/11 attacks "from A to Z" — was involved in a string of major plots against the United States, where he had attended university.

In addition to planning the operation to bring down the Twin Towers, Mohammed claims to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 with his "blessed right hand," and to have helped in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.