Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001, will be tried from June 5, 2028 at Guantanamo, where he has been detained for twenty years, announced Thursday, August 27, a spokesperson for the military tribunal in charge of the case.
This Pakistani raised in Kuwait, also known by his initials, KSM (S for the English version of his title: sheikh), was one of Osama Bin Laden’s main lieutenants within the jihadist organization Al-Qaeda, until his capture in March 2003 in Pakistan. He was transferred in September 2006 to the prison of the American military base of Guantanamo, on the island of Cuba, where he is still detained.
Khalid Cheikh Mohammed will be tried with three other defendants, Walid Ben Attash, Mustafa Al-Hawsawi and Ammar Al-Baluchi, also called Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, for terrorism and murder of nearly 3,000 people in these attacks committed on American soil, according to the decision of a military judge communicated Thursday to Agence France-Presse (AFP) by a court spokesperson.
The four men, who are among the very last detainees at Guantanamo, have never been tried, the proceedings having been bogged down around the question of whether the torture they suffered made the evidence against them inadmissible.
The military judge specifies in his decision that the prosecution had requested that the trial begin on January 11, 2027 but concludes that this date is not “realistic” taking into account the need to first decide the admissibility of these incriminating elements. The defense calls in particular for the exclusion of confessions extracted under torture or duress.
Maneuvering thirty other operations
In July 2025, an American appeals court overturned the agreement to plead guilty obtained by Khalid Cheikh Mohammed and his two co-defendants, which would undoubtedly have spared them from incurring the death penalty.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is best known for the photo taken of him on the evening of his capture in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 2003, with tousled hair and bushy mustache, dressed in white pajamas. Before his transfer to Guantanamo, he passed through the CIA’s secret prisons in Poland to undergo interrogation sessions under torture. It has been submitted 183 times to waterboarding (simulated drowning) in four weeks.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z”Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proudly declared before a military court.
KSM also said it was responsible for thirty other operations, including attacks linked to Al-Qaeda in Bali, Indonesia and Kenya, as well as the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
