Two Malaysian prisoners at Guantánamo Bay pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring in the October 2002 nightclub bombings in the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, that killed more than 200 people.
The guilty pleas were the first step in a slowly unfolding proceeding that began when the men, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, 48, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, 47, were charged in 2021 — 18 years after their capture in Thailand. Sentencing is scheduled for next week.
The pleas were also seen as a breakthrough for military commission prosecutors, who had been seeking deals to resolve long-running cases against former C.I.A. prisoners. Similar talks with the accused plotters of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ended last year after the Biden administration declined to consider health care and confinement conditions sought by the prisoners.
Both defendants were held for years in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network. They were transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006 for trial at the special national-security court that President George W. Bush set up after the Sept. 11 attacks. While in agency custody, according to their lawyers, they were tortured, along with their accused ringleader Encep Nurjaman, an Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali.
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