Plans to charge six over 9/11 attacks

Six Guantanamo Bay detainees could be charged over the September 11 terror attacks.

The Pentagon is seeking to lay murder and conspiracy charges against the alleged planner of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and five others.

Military prosecutors will ask that the men be executed if convicted.

If sent for trial, the six would be the first detainees to be brought before a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay in connection with the attacks.

The charges against Mohammed will include conspiring with al-Qaeda to attack and murder civilians and about 3,000 counts of murder for those killed.

Mohammed, a Pakistani national better known as KSM, has said he planned every aspect of the attacks.

He also said he was responsible for a 1993 attack on New York's World Trade Center, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, and an attempt to down two US planes using shoe bombs.

And Mohammed has claimed he was responsible for the beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl.

But his confessions could be problematic if used as evidence because the CIA has admitted it subjected him to "waterboarding" - a simulated drowning technique widely considered to be torture.

The charges, if approved by a Pentagon appointee who oversees the war court at Guantanamo, are the first from that court alleging direct involvement in the 2001 attacks on the US, and the first involving the death penalty.

The widely criticised Guantanamo tribunals were established after the September 11 attacks to try non-US captives whom the Bush administration considers "enemy combatants" not entitled to the legal protections granted to soldiers and civilians.

They currently operate under authority of a law Congress passed in 2006, after the US Supreme Court struck down the first version.

© Independent Television News Limited 2008. All rights reserved.

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