GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A United States military judge has scheduled Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three other men to stand trial on charges arising from the September 11 attacks. Proceedings are expected to begin on June 5, 2028.
The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial will begin nearly 27 years after hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and another plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
The scheduling order, signed on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, also applies to Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi.
All four are accused of participating in the conspiracy that led to the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, the military commissions judge overseeing the case, rejected the prosecution’s request to begin the trial on January 11, 2027.
Schrama ruled that the proposed date did not allow sufficient time to resolve outstanding disputes over evidence and other pretrial matters.
His order established a series of procedural deadlines leading to the June 2028 opening.
More Than Two Decades in Custody
Mohammed is accused of organising the operation in which hijackers commandeered four commercial aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001.
He was captured during a raid in Pakistan in 2003 and transferred to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay three years later.
Mohammed was charged and arraigned in 2008 on war crimes and murder counts connected to the attacks.
The case has since moved slowly through the military commission system as lawyers challenged its procedures, rules governing evidence and the treatment of the defendants before their arrival at Guantánamo.
The other three defendants will be prosecuted alongside Mohammed as alleged participants in the plot.
Appeals Court Rejected Plea Agreement
The new trial date follows the collapse of a proposed agreement that could have ended the case without a full trial.
Under the arrangement, Mohammed would have pleaded guilty in return for protection from a possible death sentence.
A divided federal appeals court rejected the agreement during the summer of 2025, leaving the prosecution to continue towards trial.
The ruling returned the case to a process that had already been delayed for years by legal and procedural disputes.
CIA Interrogations Remain Central to Disputes
Defence lawyers have argued that part of the delay resulted from government efforts to withhold information about the treatment of detainees at secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay.
A United States Senate report released in 2014 found that the CIA subjected Mohammed and other detainees to methods the agency called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
According to the report, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. The document described the treatment as repeated episodes of near-drowning.
Those interrogations have complicated disputes over what statements and other evidence may be admitted during the proceedings.
The June 2028 schedule is structured around the completion of continuing evidentiary hearings, compliance requirements and other pretrial motions.
