Plea deals for accused 9/11 attackers revoked by U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin

U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked plea deals agreed to earlier this week with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, and two accomplices who are held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday the plea deals had been entered into but did not elaborate on details. A U.S. official said they almost certainly involved guilty pleas in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.

However on Friday, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself.

"Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements," Austin wrote in a memo.

Many Republican lawmakers, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, strongly criticized the plea deals.

Some families of the Sept. 11 attack victims condemned the deal for cutting off any possibility of full trials and possible death penalties.

Mohammed is the most well-known inmate at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, which was set up in 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush to house foreign militant suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Mohammed is accused of masterminding the plot to fly hijacked commercial passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon. The 9/11 attacks, as they're known, killed nearly 3,000 people and plunged the United States into what would become a two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Plea deals had also been reached by two other detainees: Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin 'Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi.

J. Wells Dixon, a staff attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented defendants at Guantanamo as well as other detainees there who have been cleared of any wrongdoing, had welcomed the plea bargains as the only feasible way to resolve the long-stalled and legally fraught Sept. 11 cases.

Dixon accused Austin on Friday of "bowing to political pressure and pushing some victim family members over an emotional cliff," by rescinding the plea deals.