The alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks may agree to help victims' families open a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, if the US doesn't seek the death penalty against him.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's proposition was revealed on Friday in New York, when victims' families spearheaded a federal lawsuit against Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The lawsuit accuses the Saudi Government for helping to coordinate the 2001 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Centre.
However, Saudi has denied their involvement in the attacks.
Lawyers have contacted three of the five detainees held at Guantanamo Bay who are suspected of organising the terrorist attacks to interview them over the atrocities.
Mohammed’s counsel told lawyers that he would not consent to a deposition “at the present time", according to a status letter to U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in New York.
But the lawyer said that “the primary driver” of this decision is the “capital nature of the prosecution” and that “[i]n the absence of a potential death sentence much broader cooperation would be possible.”
Mohammed, 53, was captured by CIA and Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
The suspect was then transported to prison sites across Afghanistan and Poland where he was interrogated.
In December 2006, he was transported to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
He shortly confessed to being the mastermind behind the 9/11 bombings, including a number of other crimes - the British Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up a plane, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl.
In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which could carry the death penalty if convicted.
