In federal court, Mr Hodes said, that is routinely done the day a defendant is charged.
Prosecutors charge the three detainees – Mr Nurjaman, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin – with murder, terrorism and conspiracy in the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, and in the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia, which killed at least 11 people and injured at least 80.
The defendants were captured in Thailand in 2003 and spent more than three years in the secret CIA prison network, where they were tortured, according to their lawyers. They were taken to Guantánamo Bay in 2006. Monday marked their first return to court since a two-day indictment in August 2021.
At the back of the courtroom, in a spectator’s room, prosecutor guests pasted pictures of four men in four empty seats in the front row, apparently victims of the Bali bombing. Colonel George C. Kraehe, the lead prosecutor, announced that relatives of the victims “have traveled a long distance to participate in this proceeding here.”
The defendants, in traditional tunics, trousers and yarmulkes, said little in court but complained to the judge about the translations of the hearing, a problem they also had during their only other court hearings, in 2021.
Sometimes the Malays heard the Indonesian dialect through their headphones, and sometimes the Indonesians heard translations intended for the Malays. Also, their lawyers protested, the Army’s contract interpreters sometimes resorted to English if they forgot a keyword. For example, an interpreter could not remember how to say “interpreter” in Malay dialect.
