Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will not be sentenced to death in the United States. Considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and detained in the American military base of Guantanamo, he accepted a negotiated sentence, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
This agreement allows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to avoid a trial where he would face the death penalty, in exchange for a sentence of life imprisonment, the New York Times.
Two other prisoners affected by the agreement
The deal also covers two of the prisoner’s co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who have also been held for two decades at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. They are accused of terrorism and the murder of nearly 3,000 people in the attacks on New York and Washington. The men have never been tried, as the process of bringing them to trial has been bogged down by the question of whether the torture they suffered in secret CIA prisons tainted the evidence against them.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as “KSM” (S for Sheikh), remains, after Osama bin Laden, the most reviled figure linked to the September 11 attacks. Most people know the 59-year-old from the photo taken of him on the night of his capture in 2003, with tousled hair and a bushy moustache, dressed in white pajamas. A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, he is said to have suggested the idea of crashing planes to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.
A graduate of an American university, he was working for the Qatari government in the early 1990s when he began planning attacks with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who detonated a bomb in the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. Although he did not initially enlist in al-Qaeda, the official report on 9/11 called him a “terrorist entrepreneur” who had the motivation and ideas for attacks but not the funds and organization to carry them out.
KSM waterboarded 183 times
Captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003, KSM was taken by the CIA to secret prisons in Poland for interrogation. He was waterboarded 183 times in four weeks.
He was the detainee who focused the attention of the entire intelligence agency and who, consequently, was tortured the most: beatings, the wall technique, sleep deprivation, rectal rehydration sessions, painful positions. According to the Senate report, a significant amount of information gathered during these sessions turned out to be false. But after his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, he proudly confessed before the military tribunal: “I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”