Key 9/11 trial to be shown live

Guantanamo Bay: The US military will televise the Guantanamo trial of accused September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and five other suspects so relatives of those killed in the attacks can watch on the US mainland.

"We're going to broadcast in real time to several locations that will be available just to victims' families," Army Colonel Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the controversial war crimes court, said at the naval base recently.

In February, military prosecutors charged Mohammad and five other captives with murder and conspiracy and asked that they be executed if convicted of plotting to crash hijacked planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.

No trial date has been set but they are the first Guantanamo prisoners charged with direct involvement in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Morris said several of the victims' relatives asked to watch the trials at the detention centre set up in Guantanamo Bay naval base to try foreign terrorism suspects.

The base sits on a dusty patch of the island of Cuba and does not have many flights, beds or courtroom seats to accommodate spectators.

The trials will be beamed to closed-circuit television viewing sites on military bases at Fort Hamilton in New York, Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, Fort Meade in Maryland and Fort Devens in Massachusetts, Morris said.

Borrowed page

The military is borrowing a page from the civilian court sentencing hearing of Zacarias Moussaoui, a flight school student who is the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the September 11 plot. He pleaded guilty to conspiring with Al Qaida and was sentenced to life in prison.

US federal courts normally ban cameras. But through an act of Congress, Moussaoui's 2006 court hearing in Virginia was shown by closed-circuit television to victims' families at courthouses in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"We got much more information from those hearings than we ever got from the 9/11 Commission," said Lorie Van Auken, whose husband Kenneth died in the World Trade Center, referring to the investigation the US Congress launched into the attacks.

Some of the victims' relatives praised the US military for ensuring they had access to the Guantanamo proceedings. Others urged the trials be televised nationwide without restriction because of the sweeping impact of the attacks.