The man accused of masterminding the 11/XNUMX attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two accomplices, who are being held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have agreed to plead guilty, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
The Pentagon did not provide details of the plea agreement.
A US official, who asked not to be named, said the deals almost certainly included a guilty plea in exchange for the death penalty being lifted.
Mohamed is the most famous inmate of the Guantanamo prison, which was established in 2002 by the administration of the then US President George Bush Jr., to house suspects in the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.
There are currently about 30 prisoners in Guantanamo.
Mohammed is accused of masterminding a plan to crash a hijacked commercial airliner into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. About 3.000 people were killed in the attacks, after which the USA entered the war in Afghanistan, which lasted almost two decades.
The way Mohammed was interrogated at Guantanamo was under the scrutiny of many institutions. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the use of water-drowning techniques by CIA agents stated that the method was used on Mohammed at least 183 times.
Plea agreements were reached by two more detainees: Walid Muhamed Salih Mubarak Bin Atash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsavi, according to the Pentagon press release.
The three men were jointly charged and arraigned in June 2008 and again on May 5, 2012, according to the Pentagon.
US Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the plea deals.
"The only thing worse than negotiating with terrorists is negotiating with them while they are in custody," McConnell said in a statement, accusing Democratic President Joe Biden's administration of "cowardice in the face of terror."
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