A military judge has set June 2028 as the date for the oral hearing against the alleged 'brain' of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, on the island of Cuba, since 2006.
"The trial on the merits of the case will begin on Monday, June 5, 2028," decided Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, the military commissions judge in charge of this proceeding, in which Walid Muhamad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi will also be tried.
The new date is set after Schrama rejected the initial proposal from the prosecution, which suggested starting the process in January 2027, and opted to postpone the start of the trial by about 17 more months.
It is worth noting that Mohammed and two of the defendants, Bin Attash and Al Hawsawi, reached a plea agreement at the end of July 2024 that contemplated life imprisonment instead of the death penalty. However, that statement was put on hold in January 2025 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Although the three have been in U.S. custody since 2003, the proceedings have been delayed for years to clarify whether the torture suffered in secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) facilities could compromise or invalidate part of the evidence gathered against them.
In the case of Mohammed, a Pakistani engineer trained on U.S. soil and accused of conceiving the plan to hijack the planes and crash them, Washington had announced its intention to seek the death penalty. In fact, prosecutors argue that he conveyed the idea to Osama bin Laden in 1996 and subsequently collaborated in the training and direction of some of the hijackers.