WASHINGTON (AFP) - In the first step towards trying the alleged plotters behind the devastating September 11, 2001 attacks, five men including the accused mastermind will be arraigned June 5 before a US military judge in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Nearly seven years after the attacks and at least five years after their capture, Pakistan-born Kuwaiti Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the purported key 9/11 planner, and four others will formally be charged with murder, terrorism and other war crimes, launching the process of trying them under special military commissions at the US naval prison at Guantanamo. All face possible death sentences, but the question of whether the trials will ever get underway and how long they could last still looms darkly over the process. To be arraigned alongside Khalid are Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, a Saudi Arabian; Ramzi Binalshibh of Yemen; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Khalid's nephew also from Kuwait; and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, of Saudi Arabia. In the June 5 hearing judge Ralph Kohlmann, a US marines colonel, will formally read the charges against them and allow each to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty, or postpone the plea. Until charges were first officially set in February, the detainees were unable to meet with lawyers, as the military had designated the men themselves with top secret classifications. Faced with such barriers defence lawyers had asked for a continuance, or postponement, of the arraignment, but on Thursday Judge Kohlmann rejected the request.