U.S. military prosecutors have requested the death penalty yesterday for a Saudi man at Guantanamo, who is allegedly the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS Cole battleship that killed 17 U.S. sailors in 2000. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 47 people were injured in the al-Qaeda attack that incapacitated the $1 billion destroyer.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent being imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, faces eight charges, including murder, terrorism, conspiracy and supporting terror, for the attack in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000.

"Five of the eight charges carry the maximum penalty of death," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the body that supervises the military commissions system set up to put on trial terrorism suspects.

Al-Nashiri is accused of testing explosives and equipping what seemed like a small civilian garbage barge with bombs for two suicide bombers who appeared friendly as they came alongside the Cole. They then detonated their bomb boat, killing themselves and making a 40-foot hole into the hull of the warship.

U.S. military prosecutors have also charged the Mecca-born Saudi citizen over an unsuccessful attack on another U.S. warship, the USS The Sullivans, also in Aden in January 2000 and an attack on the SS Limburg, a French supertanker, in the Gulf of Aden in October 2002.

The 11-page charge sheet seeks to try al-Nashiri by military commission at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba and execute him if convicted. The next phase is for a designee at the Defense Department to analyze the charges and determine on which to proceed and whether to keep it as a capital case.