One of the five defendants in the 9/11 terror attacks has avoided the death penalty for now after a military judge ruled he wasn’t fit to stand trial.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, 51, was due to attend pretrial proceedings with the other four defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – regarded as the mastermind behind the horrific events that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
But in a dramatic twist, Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base in Guantanamo Bay decided to remove al-Shibh from the case.
However, the hearing for the remaining four defendants is expected to go ahead as planned.
Al-Shibh has now been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, associated psychotic features, and a delusional disorder.
Colonel Matthew McCall in the US base in Guantanamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba has accepted the diagnosis after doctors said last month that the defendant was too psychologically damaged to defend himself.
It was concluded by the medical board of doctors that he had become delusional and psychotic, the New York Times reported, making him incompetent to either face trial or plead guilty, according to a report filed with his trial judge on August 25.
The report stated that military psychiatrists had concluded al-Shibh’s left him “unable to understand the nature of the proceedings against him or cooperate intelligently”.
The five defendants are accused of conspiring in the plane hijackings on September 11, 2001 that killed scores of people in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania.
A year later Al-Shibh, who is from Yemen, was arrested in Pakistan and transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
He is accused of helping to organise the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany that hijacked one of the two passenger planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on that tragic day.
But his lawyers have long alleged their client was tortured by the CIA and “went insane as a result of what the agency called enhanced interrogation techniques, that included sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and beatings”.
The 51-year-old made his first court appearance in 2008 but he has proved problematic over the years, disrupting some of the hearings with furious outbursts.
The camp in Guantanamo Bay, which is on a US Navy base, was established in 2002 by George W. Bush, who was US president at the time.
Its purpose was to house foreign terrorism suspects following the 9/11 terror attacks in New York.
This camp has been widely regarded as symbolising the Bush administration’s “war on terror” because of the alleged torture methods that are used.
Critics have argued these amount to torture, and detainees are being held for long periods without trial.
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