NEW YORK, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- The U.S. government said it won't appeal a federal judge's ruling barring a key witness in the first civilian trial of a former Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainee.
Preet Bharara, a U.S. attorney in New York, disagreed with the ruling but said in a letter Sunday his office was ready to prove its case and didn't want to further delay the trial, The New York Times reported.
The trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New York.
The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, became the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be moved into the civilian system, where he faces charges of conspiring in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 in which 224 people died. Authorities said Ghailani later trained with al-Qaida and was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden but does not face charges for those activities.
Prosecutors said their witness, Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he sold Ghailani explosives used in one of the bombings, the Times reported. The government later said it first learned of Abebe through the interrogation of Ghailani while he was in an overseas CIA facility, where his lawyers said he was tortured.
The ruling on Wednesday by federal Judge Lewis Kaplan came as jury selection was ending and opening statements were to begin.
In the letter to Kaplan, the prosecutor said an appeal would have caused "a delay of uncertain, and perhaps significant, length" in the trial, and could have inconvenienced many foreign witnesses who either already arrived in New York or are to travel to the city with their plans based on the trial's anticipated schedule.
