Washington (AFP)
The trial of the five men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks, including the self-proclaimed attack brain Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, is scheduled to begin in January 2021 at the US military base in Guantanamo, New York reported on Friday. York Times.
The judge in charge of the case, Colonel Shane Cohen, set January 11, 2021 as the beginning of the selection of the military jury to try these five men who incur the death penalty.
The date appears in a document of about ten pages which fixes the calendar of the parts to be provided by this deadline, according to the daily newspaper.
Neither the Pentagon nor the parties' lawyers have confirmed this information in the immediate future.
The five defendants, who have been detained for about 15 years at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, on the southeastern tip of Cuba, were charged ten years ago, but the proceedings have been stagnant because of the extreme complexity of the file.
One of the difficulties is that the prisoners went through the secret CIA prisons, where some people were subjected to "extensive interrogation procedures" - a euphemism for torture - that were used to build the case. charge.
This is particularly the case for Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (known as KSM, his initials in English), arrested in Pakistan in 2003, who was subjected to numerous drowning sessions ("waterboarding"), before being transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
According to the Pentagon, the 54-year-old said he was the chief architect of the September 11, 2001 plot, which killed nearly 3,000 people after the hijacking of four airliners. Two of them caused the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York, one hit a Pentagon wing in Washington, and the last crashed into a Pennsylvania field.
Other defendants include the Yemeni Ramzi ben al-Chaibah, who the prosecution said should have been involved in the operation but did not get a visa for the United States, and Walid ben Attach, who was suspected of tracking before the attacks.
The Saudi Moustapha al-Houssaoui is accused of financing the attacks, and the nephew of KSM, Ammar al-Baluchi, also called Ali Abdul Aziz-Ali, of Pakistani origin as his uncle to have participated in logistics.
© 2019 AFP