U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked plea deals reached earlier this week with the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two accomplices, who are being held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Pentagon said Wednesday that plea deals had been reached, but gave no further details. One U.S. official said they almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty off the negotiating table.
But on Friday, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon's Guantanamo war tribunal, of her authority to enter into pretrial agreements in the case and took responsibility himself.
“Effective immediately, in exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from all three pretrial agreements…” Austin wrote in a memo.
Many Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, sharply criticized the plea deals.
Mohammed is the most high-profile inmate at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, which was set up in 2002 by then-US President George W. Bush to house suspected foreign militants following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to crash hijacked commercial passenger jets into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks, as they are known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade war in Afghanistan.
Two other detainees, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, also reached plea deals.
