MADRID 10 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided this Thursday to suspend the guilty plea of the ‘mastermind’ of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, and two of his accomplices, Walid Muhamad Sali Mubarak bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hausawi.
The judges of said court have approved the request of the Department of Justice, which had requested a blocking of the agreements before the hearing that was scheduled for this Friday, which would allow them to come into force, according to the American newspaper ‘The Hill’. .
The three defendants reached a plea deal for life in prison (rather than the death penalty) in late July, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked them days later. However, a military commissions judge ruled in November that the Pentagon chief had no authority to revoke them, saying they were “valid.”
The three have been in US custody since 2003, but the case has been delayed for a decade to investigate whether torture suffered in prisons by the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, had contaminated the evidence against them.
Washington had said it would seek the death penalty for Mohamed, a US-trained Pakistani engineer who was accused of having the idea to hijack the planes and cause them to crash. Prosecutors claimed he proposed the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996 and later helped train and direct some of the hijackers.
Mohamed and Hausawi were captured in Pakistan in 2003 and held in CIA prisons until their transfer to Guantánamo, Cuba, in 2006.