BBCThe accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States will no longer be convicted on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals advanced last year.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often known as KSM, is set to enter his plea in a court-martial at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba, where he has been held in a military prison for nearly two decades.
Mohammed is Guantanamo's most notorious prisoner and one of the last detainees at the base.
But a federal appeals court on Thursday evening suspended scheduled proceedings to consider the government's request to abandon plea deals for Mohammed and two co-defendants, which it said would cause “irreparable” harm to both it and the public.
A three-judge panel said the delay “should in no way be construed as a judgment on the merits”, but was intended to give the court time to receive a full briefing and hear arguments “on an expeditious basis”.
The delay means the matter will now fall to the incoming Trump administration.
What was supposed to happen this week?
In a hearing that began Friday morning, Mohammed was scheduled to plead guilty to his role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon outside Washington. Another plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
Mohammed was charged with crimes including conspiracy and murder, with 2,976 victims listed in the indictment.
He previously said he had planned the “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – conceived the idea of training pilots to fly commercial airliners into buildings, and took those plans to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamist group al. Qaeda, mid-1990s.
Friday's hearing was scheduled to take place in a courtroom on the base, where family members of the victims and the press sat in a viewing gallery behind thick glass.
Why is all this happening 23 years after 9/11?
The pre-trial hearings, held in a military court at the naval base, have been going on for more than a decade, complicated by questions about the torture Mohammed and the other defendants faced while in US custody.
After his arrest in Pakistan in 2003, Mohammad spent three years in a secret CIA prison known as the “Black Site” where he was subjected to 183 simulated drownings or “waterboardings”, which included other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Sleep deprivation and forced nudity.
Karen Greenberg, author of The Last Worst Place: How Guantanamo Became the World's Most Infamous Prison, says that the use of torture “has made it virtually impossible to prosecute these cases in a way that respects the rule of law and American jurisprudence”.
“It is apparently impossible to present evidence in these cases without using evidence obtained from torture. Moreover, the fact that these people were tortured adds another layer of complexity to the prosecution,” she says.
The case also falls under a military commission, which operates under different rules than the conventional US criminal justice system and slows down the process.
The plea agreement was reached last summer after nearly two years of negotiations.
What does the plea agreement include?
The full details of the deal reached with Mohammad and his two co-defendants have not been released.
We do know that a deal means he will not face the death penalty.
At a court hearing on Wednesday, his legal team confirmed that he had agreed to plead guilty to all charges. Mohammed did not address the court personally, but was involved with his team as they went over the agreement, making minor revisions and wording changes with the prosecution and the judge.
If the agreements are upheld and the pleas are accepted by the court, the next step is to appoint a military jury, known as a panel, to hear the evidence at the sentencing hearing.
In court on Wednesday, it was described by lawyers as a form of public trial, where survivors and family members of victims would be given a chance to speak.
Under the agreement, families will also be able to ask questions of Mohammed, who must “answer their questions fully and truthfully”, lawyers say.
Central to the prosecution's agreement to the deal was a guarantee “that we could present all the evidence that we thought was necessary to establish a historical record of the defendant's involvement in what happened on September 11,” the prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr. Dr. in court on Wednesday.
Even if the applications proceed, it will be many months before the proceedings begin and ultimately a sentence is handed down.
ReutersWhy is the US government trying to block the application?
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appointed the senior official who signed the agreement. But he was traveling when it was signed and was reportedly surprised, according to the New York Times.
A few days later, he tried to retract it, saying in a memo: “As the higher authority, the responsibility for such decisions should rest with me.”
However, both a military judge and a military appeals panel ruled that the contract was valid and that Mr. Austin had acted too late.
In another bid to block the deal, the government this week asked a federal appeals court to intervene.
In a legal filing, it said Mohammed and two other men accused of “committing the most heinous crimes on American soil in modern history” and enforcing the deals “would deprive the government and the American people of public justice.” Respondents' felonies and the possibility of the death penalty notwithstanding that the Secretary of Defense had legally revoked those agreements.
After the deal was announced last summer, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, then the party's leader in the chamber, released a statement describing it as “an outrageous abdication of the government's responsibility to protect America and deliver justice.”
What did the family of the victims say?
Some families of those killed in the attack also criticized the deal, saying it was too lenient or lacked transparency.
Speaking to the BBC's Today program last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the attack, described the deal as “giving the detainees at Guantanamo Bay what they want”.
Ms Strada, national chair of the campaign group 9/11 Families United, said: “It's a victory for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other two, it's a victory for them.”
Other families see the agreements as a path to convictions in complex and lengthy proceedings and are frustrated by the government's latest intervention.
Stefan Gerhard, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attack, flew to Guantanamo Bay to plead guilty to Mohammed.
“What is the end goal of the Biden administration? So they get a moratorium and drag it into the next administration. To what end? Think about the families. Why are you prolonging this story?” He said
Mr Gerhardt told the BBC that the deals were “not a victory” for the families, but “it's time to find a way to close, to convict these people”.
Families on base were meeting with the press after news of the delay broke.
“It was supposed to be a time of healing. We'll get on that plane still feeling that deep pain – there's no end to it,” said one.
Why is the case in Guantanamo?
Mohammed has been held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
The prison was opened 23 years ago – on 11 January 2002 – during the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks, as a place to hold terrorist suspects and “unlawful enemy combatants”.
Most of those held here have never been charged, and the military prison has faced criticism from rights groups and the United Nations for its treatment of prisoners. The majority have now been repatriated or resettled in other countries.
The prison currently holds 15 inmates – the smallest number at any time in its history. All but six of them have been accused or convicted of war crimes.