WASHINGTON – A military judge Tuesday indefinitely postponed indictments against three Guantánamo Bay prisoners who were due to appear in court for the first time after 17 years in prison. The coronavirus pandemic made traveling to the naval base too risky.
Indonesian prisoner Hambali, who has been held as a former leader of a Southeast Asian extremist group since 2003, and two accused accomplices were due to appear before the court martial on February 22nd. But Colonel Charles L. Pritchard Jr., the military judge who was due to travel to Guantanamo this week, ruled that “the various lawyers’ beliefs that travel is a serious threat to their health” was baseline.
Colonel Pritchard is the youngest military judge to join the Bank of Guantánamo Military Commissions and the youngest to postpone a trial deemed too risky in almost a year of the coronavirus repeal. The capital punishment pre-trial hearings against five men charged with planning the September 11, 2001 attacks have been delayed by a year.
The judge, court staff and attorneys in charge of the hearing began quarantine in the Washington area the weekend before a charter flight to the base Thursday.
Once there, the passengers should be quarantined individually for 14 days according to a plan worked out by the public prosecutor’s office in order to protect the residents of 6,000 inhabitants and in prison from the risk of infection.
“The risk to the health and safety of those involved in the legal proceedings due to the global Covid-19 pandemic is high,” the judge wrote in a seven-page order on Tuesday. “The government’s proposed mitigation measures lower the risk, but the risk remains.” He suggested that traveling to the base may not be safe until the end of summer.
Updated
Apr. 2, 2021, 7:52 p.m. ET
The case had been inactive throughout the Trump administration, but on day two of the Biden administration, a senior Pentagon official appointed under the Trump administration in charge of military commissions cleared the prosecution.
The defendants include Mr. Hambali, charged as Encep Nurjaman and the former leader of the extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah, and his accused accomplices, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, who are Malaysians.
The three men were captured in Thailand in 2003 on charges of conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, and in the 2003 Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombing in which at least 11 people were killed and at least 80 injured were indicted for their first three years on the CIA’s secret network of prisoners before being brought to Guantánamo for trial in 2006.
Military commission rules require an inmate to be tried within 30 days of the charges being approved, but the judge’s decision appeared to suspend this watch.
Colonel Pritchard, the head of the Army’s southeastern judicial district, was forced to travel to Washington last week to be quarantined before traveling to Guantánamo. In his decision, he noted that most of the people traveling to the court hearings have not yet been vaccinated against the virus, and neither have the prisoners.
He also noted Saturday’s decision by the Biden government to suspend a plan to offer vaccines to the 40 inmates in the prison this week. Under the original plan, the three defendants could have voluntarily received their February 1 shots and boosters in time for the February 22 trial.
By Tuesday, all soldiers and other service members working on the prison operation had been offered the Moderna vaccine, said Maj. Gregory J. McElwain, an Army spokesman, and declined to say how many of the estimated 1,500 troops are refused to receive this one shot. The Navy’s medical staff has been gradually vaccinating volunteers among residents of the base since Jan. 9.
This week, as part of the tiered program, the vaccines were offered to school teachers and foreign workers of the base commissioner and bars, as well as the naval forces guarding the perimeter of the base.
Prosecutors suggested that the hearing be postponed to April 3. The judge wrote that he would issue a new court order “in due course”.
