A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a deal that would have allowed the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment.
The deal, negotiated over two years and approved one year ago by military prosecutors and the Pentagon’s senior official for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, stipulated life sentences without parole for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani national who was a leader of terrorist group al-Qaeda, and two co-defendants.
Mohammed is accused of orchestrating a plot to crash hijacked planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon building in Washington on Sept. 11, killing nearly 3,000 people. Another one of the hijacked planes crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. Since the attacks, Mohammed has been held in the naval base in Guantanamo Bay….