A military judge on Tuesday set Aug. 10 for the opening of Canadian Omar Khadr's terror trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Army Col. Patrick Parrish issued the new date in a scheduling order to attorneys and "other interested parties" in the case of the Toronto-born captive who has spent a third of his life in the prison camps on suspicion he was a teen terrorist and murder.
Defense lawyers want all of Khadr's statements to U.S. and Canadian investigators excluded from the summer trial, arguing that he was involuntarily interrogated at age 15 and 16 in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
Khadr, now 23, was captured critically wounded in a July 2002 U.S. Special Forces raid on a suspected al Qaida safehouse near Khost, Afghanistan, in which Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, was fatally wounded by a grenade. Pentagon prosecutors alleged Khadr, 15 at the time, threw it.
Parrish, the judge on Khadr's military commission hearing, said in his single-page order that the suppression hearings in the case would resume July 12, potentially with mental health witnesses. The hearing was suspended last week after eight days to give Pentagon officials time to submit Khadr, held at Guantanamo since October 2002, to a mental health exam.
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