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Keys Terror Defendant Seeks Delay After Orlando Shootings

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  Attorneys for Harlem Suarez, the 24-year-old Key West man arrested last year on a charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction, are seeking to delay his trial after the shootings at an Orlando nightclub.

  Suarez was arrested last year after federal agents said he made a recruitment video for the Islamic State. Suarez bought materials and worked with an undercover agent to make a bomb that was planned to go off on a beach or under a police car, according to the arrest affidavit.

His trial is currently scheduled for July 11. Defense attorneys last week filed a motion to continue the trial and this week filed another, citing the mass shooting in Orlando by a self-indentified supporter of the Islamic State.

Since the attack, "news media has flooded the public nationwide" with accounts, including "tearful and heart-wrenching accounts of eyewitnesses and victims' family members and loved ones," according to a motion filed by Richard Della Ferra, one of Suarez's attorneys.

That publicity — and the fact that Suarez is accused of being an Islamic State sympathizer who "accepted what he was told was a detonator bomb that was planned to be buried in the sand on a beach in Key West and set off while the beach was populated" -- would make it " impossible to get a fair and impartial jury to hear his case," Della Ferra wrote.

He requested that the case be continued "until such time as the heated reporting on the Orlando incident has subsided."

Prosecutors have not objected to the requests for a delay before trial. Della Ferra has also filed a motion asking to be removed from the case. That motion states that Suarez "refuses to listen to counsel and to accept his advice to such an extreme extent as to make it impossible for counsel to continue to effectively represent defendant."

The questions of whether to delay the trial and remove the attorneys from the case have been referred to U.S. Magistrate Lurana Snow.

Nancy Klingener was WLRN's Florida Keys reporter until July 2022.
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