The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US will not enter a plea on Friday, after the US government blocked the implementation of a plea agreement reached last year.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants reached a plea deal plead guilty to all counts in July in exchange for not facing a death penalty trial.
In a filing with a federal appeals court, the Justice Department argued that the government would be irreparably harmed if the pleas were granted.
In its decision, the court stated that it needed more time to weigh the case and put the proceedings on hold. He has not yet ruled on whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has the authority to withdraw the plea deal.
The ruling comes after a military judge and appeals panel rejected Austin’s previous move cancel agreementssigned by a senior official appointed by him.
Families of some of those killed in the 9/11 attacks criticized the deals, while others saw them as a way to move the complex and protracted case forward.
In its filing, the government said that proceeding with the deal would mean it was denied the opportunity to “seek the death penalty against the three accused in a heinous act of mass murder that left thousands dead and shocked the nation and the world.”
“A brief adjournment to allow this Court to weigh the merits of the government’s claim in this important case will not materially prejudice the defendants,” it said.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the attacks on September 11, 2001, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. Another plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
The three men have been in US custody for more than 20 years, and pretrial hearings in the case have lasted more than a decade.
The arguments centered on whether the evidence was tainted by the torture the defendants faced in CIA custody after their arrest.
Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning or “waterboarding” 183 times while held in secret CIA prisons after his arrest in 2003. Other so-called “advanced interrogation techniques” included sleep deprivation and forced nudity.
Several members of the victims’ families criticized the agreement reached last year as too lenient.
Speaking on the BBC’s Today Program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, was killed in the attacks, described the deals as “giving the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay what they want”.
Others said they were disappointed by further delays in the case.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, flew to Guantanamo to watch Mohammed plead guilty.
He said that while the deals were “not a win” for the families, he accepted them as a way to move forward.
“The conclusion of this case is not what anyone wanted… [But] It is time to find a way to close this, to convict these people because they are not getting younger, they are not in good health,” he said.
“Let’s sentence them so that they don’t die innocent because it would be a greater moral tragedy if they die innocent, and the families don’t even have a conviction.”
