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The US has reached plea agreements in its Guantánamo Bay military tribunal with three defendants accused of conspiring in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks after years of legal wrangling and controversy.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi are expected to avert a trial, but the exact terms of their pleas were not disclosed. They were announced by the Pentagon on Wednesday.
The three defendants were charged alongside Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh. They have been held by the US for more than two decades.
Mohammed was accused of orchestrating the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda, including the plan to hit buildings with hijacked commercial aeroplanes, while the others were alleged to have played financial or organisational roles.
The attackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people and profoundly altering domestic security and US foreign policy.
A lawyer for Mohammed did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mohammed was raised in Kuwait and educated in the US. He was captured by the US in Pakistan in 2003, and told US military that he was behind the 9/11 attacks. The CIA admitted he was waterboarded — a form of torture — during questioning.
The military commissions at Guantánamo were established by the administration of George W Bush to try foreign terrorism suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and were continued by subsequent administrations. Barack Obama’s attempts to close it down during his presidency failed.
The three defendants will plead guilty in exchange for avoiding a lengthy trial that could have resulted in the death penalty. They are accused of charges including terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and murder in violation of the laws of war. Before being transferred to the US military base at Guantánamo, the defendants were held in secret prisons by the CIA.
The proceedings have been marred in legal and ethical controversy over the length of the defendants’ custody without trial and instances of torture. The cases have been bogged down in the pre-trial phase partly over whether the US government was introducing evidence gathered as a result of torture. The plea deals also avoided the possibility that confessions central to the government’s case could be thrown out for being illegally obtained.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz and Stefania Palma in Washington and Joe Miller in New York