A United States appeals court on Friday annulled a plea agreement for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, effectively reinstating the possibility of the death penalty and compelling a full trial in the long-stalled legal proceedings, AFP reported.
The invalidated agreement, which would have removed the death penalty as an option for Mohammed and two alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had drawn considerable condemnation from relatives of the 2001 attack victims. Last year, then-US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin moved to revoke the deals, asserting that both the victims’ families and the American public were entitled to see the defendants face trial.
In their ruling, Judges Patricia Millett and Neomi Rao affirmed Austin’s authority, stating, “Austin ‘acted within the bounds of his legal authority, and we decline to second-guess his judgment.'”
The plea deals, initially announced in late July of last year, had been perceived as a pathway to resolution for cases that have been mired for years in pre-trial maneuvers, with the defendants remaining incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. However, Austin withdrew the agreements just two days after their announcement, emphasizing that such a momentous decision fell within his purview.
He subsequently articulated his reasoning, declaring that “the families of the victims, our service members and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commission trials carried out in this case.”
A military judge had previously ruled in November that the agreements were valid and binding, a decision the government subsequently appealed. The appeals court judges on Friday vacated “the military judge’s order of November 6, 2024, preventing the secretary of defense’s withdrawal from the pretrial agreements.”
Furthermore, they prohibited the military judge “from conducting hearings in which respondents would enter guilty pleas or take any other action pursuant to the withdrawn pretrial agreements.”
Mohammed, once considered a top lieutenant to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was apprehended in Pakistan in March 2003. He subsequently spent three years in clandestine CIA prisons before his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006.
(Israel National News’ North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)
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