Brian Bouffard, counsel for Nazir Lep, said the judge had ordered the trial postponed until qualified and competent translators were available as his client and the other accused had found the previous translators provided by the government to be incompetent.

“Our hearing was cancelled and the reason for the cancellation is that the government says it cannot find qualified Malay translators.

“The judge has cancelled all hearings until the government fixes this problem,” he told FMT in an email response.

During their arraignment on Aug 30 and 31 last year, Nazir and Farik Amin, together with Indonesian Encep Nurjaman, more commonly known as Hambali, refused to enter a plea citing bias and incompetence of the interpreters, which had resulted in inaccurate translations.

In a strongly worded reaction to the postponement, Bouffard said the fact that the prosecution was not ready to conduct a simple hearing in 2022 because of this self-created problem was “ridiculous as it is disgusting”.

“The US government has known for two decades now that Nazir doesn’t speak English.

“In fact, he was tortured by people too stupid to realise that screaming at someone in English doesn’t work if the person doesn’t understand the language being used.

“The Central Intelligence Agency admitted in the redacted Senate Special Committee on Intelligence report that this mistake resulted in additional abuse that they otherwise might not have inflicted upon him,” he said.

So, he added, the government had been fully aware for quite some time that Nazir spoke Malay and not English.

“We are furious that they are delaying Nazir’s trial yet again, and we still insist that this legal process be a fair one. We will not stop fighting for that, ever.”

All three suspects, who were referred to as “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents” more than a dozen times in the affidavits, face eight charges, including seven related to twin bombings that killed 202 people in Bali in October 2002 – Indonesia’s deadliest terror attack to date – and a bombing at the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta in August 2003.

The eight charges are conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, terrorism, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects and destruction of property.

All three men were arrested in Thailand in 2003 and sent to secret CIA-operated “black sites” before being moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2006.