(Washington) Behind the 3,000 victims of the September 11 attacks hovers a shadow that America is struggling to shake off: that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of these attacks who, more than twenty years later, avoided a trial where he would have faced the death penalty, in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as “KSM” [S pour Sheikh en anglais]boasted to investigators that he had imagined and organized the deadliest attacks in history. He has languished for 18 years in a cell at the ultra-secure Guantanamo prison.
He was never tried because the process that was supposed to bring him to trial was stalled by the torture he suffered in secret CIA prisons, which could have tainted the evidence against him.
PHOTO ARCHIVES FBI, PROVIDED BY AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it had accepted a plea deal, sparing him a trial that could see him face the death penalty.
After Osama bin Laden, he remains the most hated figure linked to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
A “killer” who stood out from other members of the jihadist group Al-Qaeda for his “deranged” plans, according to former FBI agent Ali Soufan.
“Terrorist Entrepreneur”
Most people know the 59-year-old from the photo taken of him the night he was captured in 2003, his hair disheveled and his moustache bushy, wearing white pajamas.
A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, he is said to have suggested the idea of crashing planes to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.
A graduate of an American university, he was working for the Qatari government in the early 1990s when he began planning attacks with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who detonated a bomb in the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.
Although he did not initially enlist in al-Qaeda, the official 9/11 report called him a “terrorist entrepreneur” who had the motivations and ideas for attacks but not the funds and organization to carry them out.
“Highly educated and equally at home in a government office or a terrorist hideout, KSM used his imagination, technical and interpersonal skills to design and organize an extraordinary array of terrorist projects,” the report said.
Torture
Captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003, KSM was taken by the CIA to secret prisons in Poland for interrogation. He was waterboarded 183 times in four weeks.
He was the prisoner who focused the attention of the entire intelligence agency and who, consequently, was tortured the most: beatings, wall technique, sleep deprivation, rectal rehydration sessions, painful positions.
According to the Senate report, a significant amount of information gathered during these sessions turned out to be false.
But after his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2006, he proudly confessed before the military tribunal: “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”
He also said he was behind 30 other operations, including al-Qaeda-linked attacks in Bali and Kenya and the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.