A military judge ruled Wednesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, will stand trial beginning June 5, 2028, nearly 25 years after the attacks killed close to 3,000 people.
"Trial on the merits shall begin on Monday, 5 June 2028," Lt. Col. Michael Schrama decided, according to ABC News. Prosecutors had pushed for a 2027 start date, but the judge ruled that was too soon.
Mohammed was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2006. The case has been tangled in legal disputes for more than a decade, with the admissibility of evidence gathered through torture at CIA detention sites cited as a central obstacle. Mohammed and other alleged plotters had been held at those so-called black sites before their transfer to Guantanamo.
The road to a trial date has not been straight. In July 2024, Mohammed and two other 9/11 defendants reached a plea agreement with military prosecutors. Under that deal, they would have pleaded guilty to all charges, including the murder of 2,976 people, in exchange for life sentences rather than the death penalty. The agreement drew sharp criticism from some 9/11 families.
Just days after the deal was announced, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked it. "I have determined that, in light of the significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009," Austin wrote at the time.
Defense attorneys challenged the revocation, and the Biden administration took the matter to federal court in an attempt to block the plea deal from being reinstated. Last July, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled 2 to 1 that Austin had acted within his authority when he voided the agreement.
The September 11 attacks began on the morning of that day in 2001, when two hijacked passenger jets flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Two other hijacked planes struck the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured in the coordinated attacks carried out by the Afghanistan-based terrorist group al-Qaeda.
With the 2028 trial date now set, the case moves toward what would be one of the most significant military commission proceedings in American history, more than two decades after the attacks it concerns.
