NEW YORK, Oct. 6 (UPI) -- A federal judge has ruled that prosecutors in a major terrorism trial set to begin in New York cannot use a key witness.
The ruling by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan could be a setback for the Obama administration's aim of trying former terror detainees in civilian courts because it would constrain the types of evidence prosecutors can introduce, The New York Times reported Thursday.
The trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was scheduled to begin Wednesday in Federal District Court on charges he conspired in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
The attacks, orchestrated by al-Qaida, killed 224 people.
Ghailani was captured in 2004 and spent almost five years in CIA custody and later at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Last year he became the first detainee to be transferred into the civilian court system for trial.
The government has acknowledged it learned about its key witness from the defendant while he was being interrogated in a secret overseas jail run by the CIA
Ghailani's lawyers argue he was tortured while in CIA custody and any statements he made or evidence derived from those statements was tainted and should be inadmissible.
Prosecutors say the witness, Hussein Abebe, sold Ghailani the explosives used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam.
They say Abebe agreed voluntarily to testify against Ghailani.
In his ruling, Judge Kaplan wrote that "the government has failed to prove that Abebe's testimony is sufficiently attenuated from Ghailani's coerced statements to permit its receipt in evidence."
Kaplan delayed the trial's opening until Oct. 12 to give the government time to adjust its strategy or to appeal the ruling, the Times reported.
