The accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US will no longer plead guilty on Friday, after the US government moved to block plea deals reached last year from going ahead.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants reached agreements in July to plead guilty to all charges in exchange for not facing a death penalty trial.
In a filing with a federal appeals court, the justice department argued that the government would be irreparably harmed if the pleas were accepted.
In its decision, the court said it needed more time to weigh the case and put the proceedings on hold. It has not yet ruled on whether Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has the power to walk back the plea deal.
The ruling comes after a military judge and appeals panel rejected a previous move by Austin to revoke the agreements, which had been signed by a senior official he appointed.
Families of some of those killed in the 9/11 attacks had criticised the deals, while others saw them as a way of moving the complex and long-running case forward.
In its filing, the government said going ahead with the deals would mean it was denied the opportunity to “seek capital punishment against three men charged with a heinous act of mass murder that caused the death of thousands of people and shocked the nation and the world”.
“A short delay to allow this Court to weigh the merits of the government’s request in this momentous case will not materially harm the respondents,” it said.
Almost 3,000 people were killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks, when hijackers seized passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside of Washington. Another plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
The three men have been in US custody for over 20 years and the pre-trial hearings in the case have lasted for more than a decade.
Arguments have focused on whether evidence has been tainted by torture the defendants faced in CIA custody after their arrests.
Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning, or “waterboarding”, 183 times while held in secret CIA prisons following his arrest in 2003. Other so-called “advanced interrogation techniques” included sleep deprivation and forced nudity.
Several family members of victims had criticised the deal struck last year as being too lenient.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today Programme last summer, Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom, died in the attacks, described the deals as “giving the detainees in Guantanamo Bay what they want”.
Others said they were disappointed by further delays to the case.
Stephan Gerhardt, whose younger brother Ralph was killed in the attacks, flew to Guantanamo Bay to watch Mohammed plead guilty.
He said that while the deals were “not a victory” for the families, he had accepted them as a way of moving forward.
“It’s not the conclusion to this case that anyone wanted… [But] it is time to find a way to close this, to convict these men because they’re not getting younger, they’re not in great health,” he said.
“Let’s convict them so they don’t die innocent because that would be the bigger moral tragedy that they die innocent and the families don’t even have a conviction.”
