US overturns plea deal with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two others

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has cancelled a plea deal for the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases. The US Defense Department said in a statement, "Today, Secretary Austin signed a memo reserving for himself the specific authority to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the 9/11 military commission cases. In addition, as the superior convening authority, the Secretary has also withdrawn from the pre-trial agreements that were signed in those cases."

In an order released Friday night, Lloyd Austin wrote that "in light of the significance of the decision," he had decided that the authority to accept the plea agreements was his. He nullified Escallier’s approval. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements…," Austin wrote in a memo.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's move comes just a few days after the US announced that it has entered into a pretrial deal with the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-Pakistani engineer, and two other co-accused in the 2001 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The agreement – reached after 27 months of negotiations – took the death sentence off the table for Mohammed, Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, prosecutors said in a letter sent to the families of 9/11 victims and survivors shortly before the Department of Defense announced the news in a press release Wednesday.

Mohammed and his co-defendants have spent almost two decades in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked passenger planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A third plane struck the Pentagon in Washington. A fourth plane, heading to Washington, crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back with the hijackers.

The three accused, along with Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then were again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012, in connection with their alleged roles in the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, the release said.

Before his birth, Mohammed’s parents immigrated to Kuwait from Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Mohammed, a US-educated engineer, was captured on March 1, 2003, in Pakistan and held with other Al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

(With PTI inputs)

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