A U.S. military judge has scheduled the long-delayed trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of planning the September 11, 2001, attacks, to open on June 5, 2028, nearly 27 years after hijacked airliners struck New York, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania.
Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, who presides over the case before the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, set the date in an 11-page order issued Wednesday. “Trial on the merits shall begin on Monday, 5 June 2028,” he wrote, according to ABC News.
Mohammed will be tried together with three alleged accomplices: Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. All four remain among the last detainees held at the U.S. naval base.
Prosecutors wanted an earlier date
Government lawyers had asked for the trial to begin on January 11, 2027. Schrama called that timeline “incompatible” with the pretrial litigation still to come, Military.com reported, and wrote that any realistic schedule “must account for the hearing and resolution of pretrial evidentiary and compliance motions.”
The judge’s start date is 18 months later than the prosecution’s request. CNN reported that the extra time is meant to settle disputes over what evidence the jury will be allowed to hear. The order also leaves room to rule on defense motions seeking to suppress statements the men made to FBI agents.
The schedule is not guaranteed. The 2028 date depends on the case hitting a series of deadlines along the way, and CNN noted that a trial was set once before, for 2021, only to be canceled.
Years of delay over torture evidence
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006. Before arriving there, he and his co-defendants spent years in secret CIA prisons overseas, and the treatment they received in those so-called black sites is at the heart of the legal fight that has kept the case in pretrial hearings for more than a decade.
A 2014 Senate report found that CIA interrogators waterboarded Mohammed 183 times. Defense lawyers have argued that the government has tried to keep details of the detainees’ treatment hidden, and the question of whether evidence linked to that period can be used at trial is among the issues Schrama must still resolve.
Mohammed is charged with conceiving and directing the plot to fly hijacked jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people were killed.
A plea deal that fell apart
The new schedule follows the collapse of an agreement that would have ended the case without a trial. In July 2024, Mohammed and two co-defendants reached deals with military prosecutors under which they would plead guilty to all charges, including the murders of 2,976 people, in exchange for the government dropping its pursuit of the death penalty. Mohammed would have served a life sentence at Guantanamo, and the men would have been required to answer questions that victims’ families still have about the attacks.
The arrangement drew sharp criticism from some 9/11 families. Days later, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin withdrew it, writing that responsibility for a decision of such significance “should rest with me as the superior convening authority under the Military Commissions Act of 2009,” ABC News reported.
Defense attorneys challenged the reversal, and the Biden administration went to federal court to keep the plea deals from taking effect. In July 2025, a divided appeals court in Washington ruled 2-1 that Austin had acted within his authority. With the agreements voided, the government is once again pursuing a capital case.
A separate court system
The men are being tried by military commission rather than in a civilian federal courtroom. The commissions were set up after the attacks to prosecute foreign terrorism suspects and are distinct from the courts-martial used for American service members. Repeated legal challenges to their rules have contributed to the slow pace of the 9/11 case.
The Defense Department did not immediately respond to Military.com’s request for comment on the schedule.
