Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (inset) is accused of orchestrating the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC on September 11, 2001.
A US military judge has ruled that confessions made by alleged 9/11 attacks mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to FBI agents are inadmissible and cannot be used against him at trial, The New York Times reported.
The ruling comes before the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3000 people
died in terrorist incidents in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
This week, the trial date for Mohammed and three other accused plotters was set for June 5, 2028, at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mohammed, also known as “KSM”, was considered one of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants before he was captured in March 2003 in Pakistan.
Prosecutors have already excluded statements that Mohammed made after his capture when he was held by the CIA in overseas prisons and subjected to brutal treatment, including waterboarding, before his transfer in 2006 to Guantanamo, the Times reported.
But the trial judge, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, has concluded Mohammed’s subsequent interrogations in 2007 at Guantanamo were also inadmissible.
Schrama’s ruling was not immediately released to the public but the Times said its unclassified contents were confirmed by several lawyers who had seen it.
Schrama wrote: “The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr Mohammad’s statements to the FBI were voluntarily given.”
A spokesman for the US military court did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.
Schrama cited an “unbroken continuation of the CIA’s psychological conditioning and severe coercion”, and also found that FBI agents intentionally failed to tell Mohammed he had a right to be silent and to consult a lawyer.
Mohammed’s trial has been repeatedly delayed and a plea deal that would have led to the death penalty being taken off the table was withdrawn last year after protests from relatives of some victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Much of the legal jousting in the 9/11 defendants’ cases has focused on whether they could be tried fairly after having undergone torture at the hands of the CIA.
