US judge reinstates negotiated sentence deal for 9/11 ‘mastermind’. This could spare him and two others from the death penalty.
A US military judge declared valid the negotiated sentence agreement for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the “mastermind” of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, a US official said Thursday. The decision was revoked at the beginning of August by the Pentagon after the strong emotion caused by many relatives of the nearly 3,000 victims.
“The military judge ruled that the pre-procedure agreements for the three accused are admissible and applicable“, this official explained to AFP, on condition of anonymity. This agreement, validated on Wednesday by the judge according to the same source, should avoid the death penalty for three men detained on the American military base at Guantanamo.
They avoid the death penalty
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, are accused of terrorism and the murder of nearly 3,000 people in one of the most traumatic episodes in United States history. In exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment – according to American media – Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, who had boasted to investigators of having imagined and organized the deadliest attacks in History, avoids, thanks to to this agreement, a trial where he would face the death penalty. However, this decision announced at the end of July shocked many relatives of the victims and sparked virulent criticism in the Republican camp, in a country in the middle of the presidential campaign.
The three men were never tried. The proceedings to bring them to trial had become bogged down by the question of whether the torture they suffered in secret CIA prisons tainted the evidence against them.
Most people know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from the photo taken of him the night he was captured in 2003, with tousled hair and bushy mustache, dressed in white pajamas.
9/11 attacks twin towers
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