New Embassy Bombing Charges Filed Against Gitmo Detainee

A Guantanamo Bay detainee was charged Monday with war crimes.

Military prosecutors allege Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was previously held in a CIA secret prison, planned the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania. Eleven people were killed, and many others were injured in the attack, the New York Times reports.

Ghailani already has been indicted in New York. But with the new charges, he could face the death penalty following at tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Times quotes Jennifer Daskal, the senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, who was critical of the new charges.

“This seems like an attempt to subvert and do an end run around the existing criminal justice system,” Daskal says.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment to the Times on the new charges.