The alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York has blamed the United States, saying the country’s foreign policy had made the strike inevitable. In an 18-page letter to former US president Barack Obama, Khalid Sheik Mohammed mentioned US policies on Iraq, Iran, Vietnam and Hiroshima, Japan, to justify the 9/11 attacks, Miami Herald reported.

“It was not we who started the war against you on 9/11. It was you and your dictators in our land,” he said in the letter, addressing Obama as “the head of the snake”. The letter is dated January 8, 2015, but was delivered to the White House only recently. Mohammed, who is one of the five inmates in Guantánamo prison facing trial, also attached a 50-page manuscript, “The Truth about Death”, along with a picture of a noose with the letter.

Mohammed claimed he would be rather happy to be sent to the gallows where he would meet “my best friends whom you killed unjustly all around the world and to see sheik Osama bin Laden”.

The 51-year-old blames Obama in particular for the plight of Palestinians. He described the former US president as a “smart attorney who can kill his enemy without trial and throw his dead body into the sea instead of giving him to his family or respecting him enough as a human being to bury him”.

Defence Attorney David Nevin told Miami Herald that the letter was “in the context of violence in Gaza and the occupied territories”. “Your hands are still wet with the blood of our brothers and sisters and children who were killed in Gaza,” Mohammed writes in the opening of the letter.

Marine Corps Major Derek Poteet, who represents Mohammed, said his client started writing the letter in 2014. “It appears to be a continuation of a consistent theme that he believes Americans do not count the casualties experienced by others around the world, perhaps especially Muslims, as being valuable,” he told AP.