US revokes plea deals with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 2 accomplices

The US has revoked plea deals with 9/11 accused, including mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that would have spared them a death penalty, according to the Pentagon.

US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin relieved Susan Escallier, the person in-charge of the Pentagon’s Guantanamo war court, of her authority to reach pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself. “Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements,” Austin wrote in a memo.

The plea deals drew sharp criticism from a number of Republican legislators, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The US’s move came just two days after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his accomplices, held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, agreed to plead guilty.

The plea deals almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty out of the equation.

Mohammed is the most well-known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by then-US President George W Bush to house terror suspects following the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Plea deals were also reached by two other detainees: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, according to a Pentagon statement.

The Pentagon statement said the three men were initially charged jointly and arraigned on June 5, 2008, and then again charged jointly and arraigned a second time on May 5, 2012.