A US Army judge announced Friday that the scheduled September trial of a soldier accused of leaking a vast trove of classified documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks would not start before November.
Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, a former intelligence analyst suspected of transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, will now face trial in November or January, after a September 21 start to his trial was scuttled, the Defence Department said after a three-day pre-trial hearing concluded Friday.
The trial, slated to take about three weeks, was postponed after Manning's lawyers requested more time to prepare. Army Colonel Denise Lind, the judge presiding over the case, ruled Friday against defence requests on constitutional and technical grounds to throw out 10 of the 22 charges against Manning, 24.
Manning could face up to life in prison if found guilty on all the charges. While stationed in Iraq, he allegedly downloaded documents from US government computers about military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus diplomatic cables from US embassies that contained embarrassing information about governments around the world. Manning faces charges including aiding the enemy, theft of public records, transmitting defence information and computer fraud. The next hearing in the case was scheduled for June 25.