Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

His father, Shaikh Muhammad Ali Dustin al-Baluchi, was a Deobandi imam in Al Ahmadi, who moved with his family from Balochistan to Kuwait in the 1950s.

His mother was Halema Mohammed.

Mohammed was raised in Badawiya, a neighborhood of the Fahaheel suburb of Kuwait City.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (sometimes also spelled Shaykh; also known by at least 50 pseudonyms; born 14 April 1965), often known by his initials KSM, is a Pakistani terrorist and the former Head of Propaganda for al-Qaeda.

He is currently held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges.

Mohammed was born on 14 April 1965, in Balochistan, Pakistan or Kuwait.

According to U.S. federal documents, in 1982 he had heard Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's speech in which a call for jihad against the Soviets was declared.

At age 16, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood.

After graduating from high school in 1983, Mohammad travelled to the United States and enrolled in Chowan University in Murfreesboro, North Carolina.

He later transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and received a Bachelor of Science (BS) in mechanical engineering in 1986.

The following year, he went to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he and his brothers, including Zahed, joined the mujahideen forces engaged in the Soviet–Afghan War.

He attended the Sada training camp run by Sheikh Abdallah Azzam, and after that he worked for the magazine al-Bunyan al-Marsous, produced by Sayyaf's rebel group, the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan.

In 1992, he received a master's degree in Islamic Culture and History through correspondence classes from Punjab University in Pakistan.

Mohammed is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted on terrorism charges for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Ammar Al Baluchi, who is accused of involvement in multiple terror plots.

By 1993, Mohammad had married and moved his family to Qatar, where he took a position as project engineer with the Qatari Ministry of Electricity and Water.

He began to travel to different countries from that time onward.

The United States 9/11 Commission Report notes that, "By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel."

Mohammed was in the Philippines in late 1994 and early 1995; he then identified as a Saudi or a Qatari plywood exporter and used the aliases "Abdul Majid" and "Salem Ali."

Mohammed traveled to the Philippines in 1994 to work with his nephew Ramzi Yousef on the Bojinka plot, a Manila-based plot to destroy 12 commercial airliners flying routes between the United States, East Asia, and Southeast Asia.

The 9/11 Commission Report says that "this marked the first time KSM took part in the actual planning of a terrorist operation."

"Using airline timetables, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef devised a scheme whereby five men could, in a single day, board 12 flights—two each for three of the men, three each for the other two—assemble and deposit their bombs and exit the planes, leaving timers to ignite the bombs up to several days afterward. By the time the bombs exploded, the men would be far away and far from reasonable suspicion. The math was simple: 12 flights with at least 400 people per flight. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 deaths. It would be a day of glory for them, calamity for the Americans they supposed would fill the aircraft."

Bojinka plans included renting or buying a Cessna, packing it with explosives and crash landing it into CIA headquarters, with a backup plan to hijack the twelfth airliner in the air and use that instead.

This information was reported in detail to the U.S. at the time.

In early 1996, Mohammed returned to Afghanistan to avoid capture by U.S. authorities.

In his flight from Qatar, he was sheltered by Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani, who was the Qatari Minister of Religious Affairs in 1996.

Mohammed was a member of Osama bin Laden's Pan-Islamist terrorist organization al-Qaeda, leading al-Qaeda's propaganda operations from around 1999 until late 2001.

Mohammed was captured on 1 March 2003, in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi by a combined operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Immediately after his capture, Mohammad was extraordinarily rendered to secret CIA prison sites in Afghanistan, then Poland, where he was interrogated by U.S. operatives.

He was named as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report.

By December 2006, he had been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

In March 2007, after being subjected to torture during interrogations, Mohammed confessed to masterminding the 11 September 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 the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which could carry the death penalty if convicted.

A 2008 decision by the United States Supreme Court had also drawn into question the legality of the methods used to gain such admissions and the admissibility of such admissions as evidence in a criminal proceeding.

However, on August 29, 2009, The Washington Post reported from U.S. intelligence sources that Mohammed's time in the U.S. contributed to his radicalization.

"'KSM's limited and negative experience in the United States—which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills—almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,' according to this intelligence summary. 'He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.'"

In 2012, a former military prosecutor criticized the proceedings as insupportable due to confessions gained under torture.

On 30 August 2019, a military judge set a trial date of 11 January 2021, for Mohammed's death penalty trial.

His trial was further postponed on 18 December 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mohammed's trial restarted on 7 September 2021.

However, as of 2023 his trial has been postponed again, further into 2023, with a possible plea deal that would take the death penalty off the table.