A military judge has ordered jury selection to begin on 5 June 2028 for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and three alleged co-conspirators accused of plotting the 11 September 2001 attacks, setting a possible trial date nearly 27 years after the atrocities.
The proceedings will take place before a military commission at Guantánamo Bay, where the defendants have remained caught in years of pre-trial litigation over evidence, interrogation practices and the legal framework governing their prosecution.
Mohammed, widely described by US prosecutors as the principal architect of the attacks, is charged alongside Walid bin Attash, Ammar al-Baluchi – also known as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali – and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. All four face charges including conspiracy, terrorism, hijacking and murder in violation of the law of war, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty.
The judge, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schrama, rejected a prosecution request for the trial to begin in January 2027, ruling that there was insufficient time to resolve outstanding evidentiary and procedural disputes.
Under the timetable, a panel of service members will be selected to act as the jury from 5 June 2028. Opening statements are expected roughly a month later, followed by the presentation of prosecution evidence, defence submissions and a sentencing phase if the defendants are convicted.
Why the 9/11 trial has taken so long
The case has been stalled since the men were arraigned in 2012. Schrama is the fifth judge to oversee the proceedings, while legal teams, prosecutors and court staff have repeatedly changed during the years of hearings at the US naval base in Cuba.
Michael Lebowitz, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who spent about a decade working as a Guantánamo prosecutor, said the case had become unusually complex because the United States chose to prosecute the alleged al-Qaida operatives through military commissions rather than the federal court system.
The commissions were created as a hybrid system for terrorism cases, with rules and procedures that have been repeatedly challenged in court. Hearings also require judges, lawyers, witnesses, court officials and relatives of victims to travel from the United States to Guantánamo on chartered flights.
Routine questions, including access to lawyers and the conditions under which detainees could meet their legal teams, have at times had to be litigated afresh as personnel rotated in and out of the system.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was initially charged with the other men, is no longer part of the case after a military judge ruled that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
Dispute over torture and alleged confessions
Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and held in secret CIA custody before being transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. His treatment in detention has become central to the prosecution, with defence lawyers arguing that statements he later gave to US investigators were tainted by years of coercive interrogation.
His CIA detention included waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The resulting disputes have led to prolonged hearings over classified evidence, disclosure and whether prosecutors can rely on statements made after the interrogation programme ended.
In August, Schrama ruled that the government had not proved that statements Mohammed made to the FBI in 2007 were voluntary. He excluded the statements from evidence.
The prosecution decided not to appeal, partly because another appeal could have placed the 2028 timetable at risk. Prosecutors are instead expected to rely on documentary, communications and other evidence linking the four defendants to the plot.
Lebowitz said he believed there was enough evidence to secure convictions without Mohammed’s FBI statements, although he acknowledged that the case would be more difficult to present without them.
The issue follows the collapse of a plea agreement in 2024 that would have seen Mohammed and two of his co-defendants plead guilty in return for avoiding the possibility of execution. A US appeals court later ruled that the agreement could be withdrawn, returning the case to a path towards trial.
Families wait for a verdict
The attacks killed 2,977 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, while many others have since died from illnesses linked to the recovery operations and the aftermath of the attacks.
For relatives of the victims, the latest date offers the prospect of a courtroom reckoning but also recalls a succession of abandoned or delayed deadlines.
Gordon Felt, whose brother Edward was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, said families were frustrated that the defendants had yet to face a trial. He said many relatives had grown older while waiting for a court to determine responsibility for the attacks.
“They’ve set dates before,” Felt said, adding that about 90 rulings still had to be made before the case could proceed. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Plans to prosecute Mohammed in a federal court in Manhattan were abandoned after political opposition intensified following the trial of another Guantánamo detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, over the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa.
Ghailani was acquitted of most of the charges against him but convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. Congress subsequently restricted the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the United States, leaving the 9/11 case in the military commission system.
Felt said the objective was no longer simply to set another date but to bring the proceedings into court and reach a verdict. The scheduled start remains dependent on the parties meeting a series of pre-trial deadlines, leaving open the possibility of further delays.
