Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (Arabic: خالد شيخ محمد, Khālid Shaykh Muḥammad‎; also transliterated as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and additionally known by at least fifty aliases, born 1964 or 1965) is an international terrorist held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba for acts of terrorism including the mass murder of civilians. He was identified as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" by the 9/11 Commission Report.

Sheikh Mohammed was a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization, leading al-Qaeda's propaganda operations from around 1999 until late 2001. He confessed to FBI and CIA agents to a role in many of the most significant terrorist plots over the last twenty years, but the enhanced interrogation techniques used for high-value terror suspects, which a Senate Report in 2014 called brutal and ineffective, have put his confessions into question.

Mohammed was captured on March 1, 2003, in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi by a combined CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents, and immediately extradited to the United States. By December 2006 he had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In March 2007, while being interrogated, Mohammed confessed to masterminding the September 11 attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt to blow up an airliner, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the murder of Daniel Pearl, and various foiled attacks, as well as numerous other crimes. He was charged in February 2008 with war crimes and murder by a U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay detention camp and could face the death penalty if convicted. In 2012, a former military prosecutor criticized the proceedings as insupportable due to confessions gained under torture.