2024-08-01 00:03:14
Life in prison rather than risk the death penalty. Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who pleaded guilty to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, accepted a plea deal, announced, Wednesday 31. July, Pentagon.
The agreement also involves two accused prisoners, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, who were held like him for two years in the ultra-secure Guantanamo prison, on the island of Cuba. They are accused of terrorism and the killing of nearly 3,000 people in the attacks in New York and Washington.
The deal allows Khalid Cheikh Mohammed to avoid a trial where he would face the death penalty, in exchange for a life sentence, explained New York Times.
These men were never tried, with proceedings to bring them to justice clouded by the question of whether the torture they suffered in secret CIA prisons outweighed the evidence against them.
“Distorted” project
In March 2022, the prisoners’ lawyers confirmed that negotiations were taking place towards a possible negotiated settlement, instead of a translation before the Guantanamo military court. The defendants even wanted to receive the guarantee of dying in Guantanamo, rather than being transferred to a federal prison, in the United States, in a solitary cell.
Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, known as “KSM” (S for Sheikh in English), boasts to investigators of imagining and organizing the deadliest attacks in history. He is, after Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the most notorious figure linked to the September 11 attacks. “killer” who distinguished himself from other members of the jihadist group by his projects “confused”according to former FBI agent Ali Soufan.
Most people know the 59-year-old from a photo taken on a date night taken in 2003, with tousled hair and a bushy moustache, dressed in white pajamas. A Pakistani who grew up in Kuwait, he is said to have suggested the idea of crashing planes to Osama Bin Laden in early 1996.
A graduate of an American university, he was working for the Qatari government in the early 1990s when he began planning attacks with his brother Ramzi Yousef, who detonated a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York. in 1993.
The prisoner who suffered the most
Although it did not start in Al-Qaeda, the official report on September 11 described it as“Terrorist businessman”who have the motivations and ideas for the attack but not the funds and necessary planning to carry them out. “Highly educated and equally at home in a civil servant’s office as in a terrorist hideout, KSM uses his imagination, technology and interpersonal skills to conceive and organize extraordinary projects of terrorist activities”news report.
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Arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003, the CIA took KSM to secret prisons in Poland for interrogation. In particular, he has bowed to the simulated waters 183 times (183).waterboarding) in four weeks.
It is the detainee who faces the attention of the entire intelligence agency and who, as a result, has suffered the most: beatings, wall procedure, lack of sleep, rectal rehabilitation sessions, painful conditions. According to the Senate report, a significant amount of information collected during these periods turned out to be false.
But after his transfer to Guantanamo in September 2006, he proudly confessed before the military court: “I am responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” He is also said to be behind thirty other operations, including attacks linked to Al-Qaeda in Bali and Kenya, and the assassination of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
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