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The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year from going ahead.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often referred to as KSM, was due to deliver his pleas at a war court on the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for almost two decades.
Mohammed is Guantanamo’s most notorious detainee and one of the last held at the base.
But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening halted the scheduled proceedings to consider requests from the government to abandon plea deals, which it said would cause “irreparable” harm to both it and the public.
A three-judge panel said the delay “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits”, but was aimed at giving the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments “on an expedited basis”.
The delay means that the matter will now fall into the incoming Trump administration.
At a hearing beginning on Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the 11 September 2001 attacks, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. Another plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
Mohammed has been charged with offences including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed on the charge sheet.
He has previously said that he planned the “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda, in the mid-1990s.
If the deals are upheld and the pleas are accepted by the court, the next steps would be appointing a military jury, known as a panel, to hear evidence at a sentencing hearing.
Pre-trial hearings, held at a military court on the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, complicated by questions over whether torture Mohammed and other defendants faced while in US custody taints the evidence.
Following his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammed spent three years at secret CIA prisons known as “black sites” where he was subjected to simulated drowning, or “waterboarding”, 183 times, among other so-called “advanced interrogation techniques”.
Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World’s Most Notorious Prison, says the use of torture has made it “virtually impossible to bring these cases to trial in a way that honors the rule of law and American jurisprudence”.
Even if the pleas go ahead, it would be many months before these proceedings would begin and a sentence ultimately delivered.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed the senior official who signed the deal. But he was travelling at the time it was signed and was reportedly caught by surprise, according to the New York Times.
Some families of those killed in the attacks have also criticized the deal, saying it is too lenient or lacks transparency.
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