© AFP Photo / Janet HamlinCourtroom sketch by Janet Hamlin, shows terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 46, who was arraigned at Wednesday's hearing on charges related to the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
Pre-trial hearings in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals have been delayed to address the disappearance of defense legal documents from Pentagon computers, military officials said on Thursday.
A weeklong hearing was scheduled to start on Monday for Abd al Rahim al Nashiri - a Saudi Arabian citizen alleged to be the mastermind of the bombing of the USS
Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000. The attack killed 17 US soldiers aboard the ship and wounded 37 others.
But the trial has now been pushed back to June 11, the US naval base said in an order on Thursday.
It comes just one day after Nashiri's lawyer, Ricard Kammen, urged Army Colonel James Pohl - who oversees the war crimes court - to cancel this week's hearing.
He said that officials mishandled more than 500,000 defense lawyer emails and appear to be monitoring their internet searches as they prepare their cases. Kammen also addressed the disappearance of documents, which he blamed on a Pentagon server failure.
"We want to put the case on hold...to find the scope of the intrusions," Kammen said in a Wednesday statement quoted by Reuters. "Was this the product of negligence or something worse? Also, we need to have the problem fixed."