North News
Chandigarh, August 1
The man accused of masterminding the September 11, 2001 attacks, along with two of his accomplices, has agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for life sentences instead of facing a death-penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This decision, reported by The New York Times, aims to bring “finality and justice” to the case, especially for the families of the nearly 3,000 victims who perished in the attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.
The defendants, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, reached this agreement after 27 months of negotiations with prosecutors at Guantánamo, with the deal being approved on Wednesday by a senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court.
The men have been in U.S. custody since 2003, but the case was bogged down by over a decade of pretrial proceedings concerning whether their torture in secret CIA prisons had compromised the evidence against them. News of the plea deal surfaced in a letter from war court prosecutors to the families of September 11 victims, according to The New York Times.
