Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and held at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, has accepted a plea bargain, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
This agreement allows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to avoid a trial where he would face the death penalty, in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment, the New York Times.
The agreement also covers two of the prisoner’s co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who have also been held for two decades at Guantánamo, on the island of Cuba.
They are accused of terrorism and the murder of nearly 3,000 people in the attacks in New York and Washington.
The men were never tried, with proceedings to bring them to trial bogged down over whether the torture they suffered in secret CIA prisons tainted the evidence against them.
In March 2022, lawyers for the prisoners confirmed that negotiations were underway for a possible plea bargain, rather than a trial before the military tribunal at Guantánamo.
The defendants sought, in particular, a guarantee that they would remain in Guantánamo, rather than being transferred to a federal penitentiary on the American continent, in solitary confinement.
Self-proclaimed mastermind of the terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as “KSM” (S for Sheikh in English), has boasted to investigators that he imagined and organized the deadliest attacks in history. He has languished for 18 years in a cell at the ultra-secure prison at Guantánamo.
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 by 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 subjected to the ” waterboarding » (simulated drownings) 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.