U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin rejected the latest plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks and two other defendants and restored their cases as death-penalty eligible, media reported.
This comes after a military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announced it had reached plea deals with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged accomplices Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, as reported by The Arab News.
In an order Friday night, Austin wrote that because of the seriousness of the decision, the authority to approve the plea agreements should be vested with him, thus canceling the previously reached agreements.
"I have determined that, as substantial as a decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the defendant is, such decisions must be mine," Austin wrote in a memo to Susan Escallier, the case manager overseeing the matter.
"I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements you signed on July 31, 2024, in the referenced case," the memo continued.
Letters sent to the families of nearly 3,000 victims from the Al-Qaeda attacks indicated that the plea deal would have meant life sentences for the three defendants.
Some relatives of the victims came out against the plea deal. This eliminated the possibility of full trials with potential death penalties.
The Republicans did not waste any time in lambasting the Biden administration over the agreement, to which the White House replied that it had no advance knowledge of the deal, reports Arab News.
Mohammed and the other defendants were expected to formally enter their pleas under the agreement as early as next week.
Preliminary hearings, pre-trial legal processes for the five accused in connection with the 9/11 attacks have been ongoing since 2008 by the U.S. military commission.
The torture of the accused at the hands of the CIA has paused the process of these cases, with complete trials and convictions still in uncertainty, part of which is because evidence retrieved through torture has been deemed inadmissible.
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