WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 (Xinhua) -- The Bush administration has setup a secret war room in a Virginia suburb where it is assembling evidence to prosecute high-ranking detainees from al Qaida including the man accused of being the mastermind of the September2001 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, The New York Times reported Friday.

    The effort to sift the classified files of the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies amounts to the first concrete steps that the government has taken to press ahead with war crimes trials of high-level terror suspects under a plan announced by President George W. Bush in a speech last September, the report said.

    Bush said at that time that Mohammed and 13 other high-level terror suspects had been transferred from secret prisons around the world to the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they would be held pending trial.

    Several government officials, who discussed the preparations with the Times this week, have been briefed on the effort in detail and represented several agencies, according to the report.

    Mohammed, whose alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks would make him the centerpiece of the government's effort to bring terrorists to justice in a court of law, could be held responsible for about 3,000 deaths in the attacks, officials have said.

    The prosecution of high-value detainees is separate from the long planned trials of lower-level Qaida figures, some of whom have been at Guantanamo since 2002 and who are expected to be tried before the more important terrorist suspects.

    However, both high- and low-level suspects will be tried under the same rules, which are contained in legislation approved in October, the report said.

    Officials said that they were hoping to bring the first charges against leaders of al Qaida this summer or fall and that trials could get under way in early 2008. The current plans are to use the new trial procedures first against some of the lesser Guantanamo defendants as kind of a test run beginning this summer.

    Those trials would involve some of the detainees who had already been charged under the previous system of military commissions that was struck down by the Supreme Court, the report said.