A military judge ruled on August 26, 2026, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the individual accused of orchestrating the September 11 attacks, will stand trial starting in June 2028. He will be prosecuted alongside Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, who are also suspected of conspiring in the attacks. Mohammed is alleged to have planned the hijacking of planes that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. A fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania during the attacks. Mohammed has been held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006.
Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, the military commissions judge, rejected the January 2027 start date proposed by prosecutors and set the trial date for approximately 18 months later. This announcement followed a split federal appeals court decision last summer that dismissed a potential agreement allowing Mohammed to plead guilty in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
Mohammed was charged and arraigned in 2008 with war crimes and murder related to the nearly 3,000 deaths from the 9/11 attacks. The prosecution process for Mohammed and the other conspirators has faced delays, with the military commissions system established during the Obama administration being tested for the first time. Defense attorneys have claimed that the delays stem from government efforts to conceal details regarding the torture of detainees at secret CIA facilities prior to their transfer to Guantánamo Bay.
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006. A Senate report from 2014 indicated that the CIA employed what it termed 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on Mohammed and other conspirators, including waterboarding him 183 times, which was described as 'a series of near-drownings.'