A military judge ruled the statements were involuntary in a decision that could further complicate the decades-long wait for a trial
A military judge on Friday threw out a confession made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In his ruling, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, a military judge, wrote that statements made by Mohammed to investigators in 2007 were not given voluntarily, the New York Post reported.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2003. (AP)
The ruling could complicate what has already been a decades-long wait for the suspected plotter to stand trial. The move wasn’t initially made public, but sources familiar with its contents told the newspaper that Schrama had axed Mohammed’s confessions from the case in the ruling.
Earlier this week, just days before the 25th anniversary of the deadly attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, Schrama set a trial date for June 2028 for Mohammed and three co-defendants — Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin ‘Atash, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.
Schrama rejected a request by prosecutors to open the trial in January 2027, saying it would leave too little time for the “resolution of pretrial evidentiary and compliance motions.”