A total of 2,977 people were killed in the United States on September 11, 2001, when 19 al-Qaeda* terrorists seized four commercial airliners, crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
In October 2017, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions allegedly called US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to oppose exploratory talks about a plea deal in the 9/11 case, Fox News quoted defense attorneys as saying.
During the phone conversation, Mattis ostensibly voiced concern that the plea deal could scrap the death penalty for the alleged terrorists who are currently behind bars at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, according to the attorneys.
They pointed to the fact that Mattis had fired Harvey Rishikof, who oversaw military commissions trials, after it came to light that Rishikof had been secretly exploring the possibility of guilty pleas to resolve the 9/11 terror trial.
It is specifically related to alleged plot mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other suspected terrorists who allegedly collaborated with Al-Qaeda as accomplices to stage the 9/11 attacks.
In this vein, the defense attorneys blamed the Trump administration for interfering in the guilty plea negotiations, which they claimed was aimed at making the 9/11 case a non-capital trial.
The attorneys said that they had asked a military judge to order Mattis and Sessions to testify in court on what they described as an unlawful influence in the case.
*Al-Qaeda is a terrorist group banned in Russia.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
