A Pentagon appointee Friday spurned a prosecutor's request for a death penalty trial in approving war crimes charges against a former CIA-held captive at Guantánamo accused of a role in al Qaeda's 1998 East Africa embassies bombings.

Ahmed Ghailani, in his 30s, can go to trial on nine war crime charges -- including terrorism, conspiracy and murder of protected persons, according to the charge sheet signed by Susan J. Crawford, the Defense Department's Convening Authority for Military Commissions.

But the charge sheet made public the same day Crawford signed off on it made life in prison the maximum penalty for conviction -- not military execution.

A Defense Department announcement did not explain why Crawford changed the charge sheet beyond saying she was ''exercising her independent judgment'' and her "sole discretion.''

Ghailani's 15-page charge sheet alleges the 5-foot-4 Zanzibar native traveled between Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the summer of the 1998, met with suicide bombers and engineers and helped acquire a truck bomb before the blasts that killed 11 people on Aug. 7, 1998, in Tanzania.

A simultaneous al Qaeda suicide attack in Nairobi, Kenya, killed more than 200 others.

A war court prosecutor first swore out charges against Ghailani in March following his September 2006 transfer to a classified prison camp at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

Before his transfer he spent about two years in secret CIA custody.

Pakistani forces captured Ghailani in raids on suspected al Qaeda lairs in July 2004, and turned him over to the CIA. At the time of his capture and interrogation, a Manhattan federal court already had a indictment on the books against Ghailani, Osama bin Laden and others as co-conspirators in the bombings.

In his sixth month at Guantánamo, he reportedly confessed to unwittingly assisting in the embassy bombing during a hearing before a panel that certified him as an enemy combatant.

''It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them,'' Ghailani told the panel in March 2007, according to a Pentagon transcript. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones.''

Pentagon officials have not explained why Ghailani will go to trial at the war court rather than in federal court but have noted that trial in one proceeding does not disqualify him from being tried in another.

Friday's announcement means that of the 21 Guantánamo detainees so far named for possible trial, six are facing capital charges. Five are accused as co-conspirators in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, chief among them confessed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Also facing possible death penalty charges is Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 43, a Saudi accused of engineering the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors.

Crawford has yet to decide whether to proceed on that case, for which Pentagon prosecutors also seek military execution as the ultimate punishment.

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