U.S. judge throws out confessions of alleged 9/11 mastermind: report

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 ruling comes just before the 25th anniversary of the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

According to the Malay Mail, Mohammed, also known as “KSM,” was captured in March 2003 in Pakistan and was considered one of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Prosecutors had already excluded statements made by Mohammed after his capture when he was held by the CIA in overseas prisons and subjected to brutal treatment, including waterboarding.

The trial date for Mohammed and three other accused plotters has been set for June 5, 2028, at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The judge, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, concluded that Mohammed’s interrogations in 2007 at Guantanamo were also inadmissible, stating that the prosecution failed to prove that Mohammed’s statements to the FBI were voluntarily given.

Brief written by urgent.news from National Post, Malay Mail — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.