He was captured in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002. But the Yemeni, 49, failed to get a US visa to take part, and instead he helped coordinate between the cell and Al-Qaeda. A year later, he told a closed-door hearing that he was responsible not only for the 9/11 attack but also Al-Qaeda-linked bombings in Bali and Kenya, the failed 2001 "shoe-bomber" attempt to bring down a US airliner, and the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl.Īl Shibh trained in an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan with some 9/11 hijackers in 1999, and became part of the "Hamburg Cell" that included lead hijacker Mohammad Atta and two others. In September 2006 he was sent to Guantanamo. He was subjected to waterboarding 183 times over four weeks, as well as other harsh interrogation methods. He was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in March 2003 and taken by the CIA to black sites in Afghanistan and then Poland for interrogation. When Bin Laden finally approved the 9/11 plot, Mohammed was put in charge. The first attempt failed, and Yousef was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the US. In 1994 the two planned to blow up US-bound airliners from the Philippines. A Pakistani citizen raised in Kuwait, Mohammed, 56, is believed to have first proposed crashing jets in the United States to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.Ī graduate of a US university, he was working for the government of Qatar in the early 1990s when he began fashioning plots with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who detonated a bomb in New York's World Trade Center in 1993. Mohammed, dubbed "KSM," is called the mastermind of 9/11. The five are charged with conspiracy, terrorism, and the murder of 2,976 people in the attacks, charges which can bring the death penalty. The case, occurring in a highly secure courtroom on the US naval base in southeast Cuba, is mired in the defense's effort to demonstrate that the government's evidence is tainted by the torture that defendants underwent in CIA captivity.
After a 17-month halt for the COVID-19 pandemic, the case is restarting Tuesday with a new judge, the eighth to preside.
Since then, dozens of hearings have taken place, all in the pre-trial phase. The case was withdrawn, and then refiled, and the first hearing took place on May 5, 2012.
The trial of five men accused of participating in the SeptemAl-Qaeda plot to attack the United States has moved extremely slowly before the military commissions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since the original charges were announced in February 2008.