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Spatial–temporal (ST) subspace-based channel estimation techniques formulated with $\ell 2$ minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion alleviate the multi-access interference (MAI) problem when the interested signals exhibit low-rank property. However, the conventional $\ell 2$ ST subspace-based methods suffer from mean squared error (MSE) deterioration in unknown interference channels, due to the difficulty to separate the interested signals from the channel covariance matrices (CCMs) contaminated with unknown interference. As a solution to the problem, we propose a new $\ell 1$ regularized ST channel estimation algorithm by applying the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to iteratively examine the signal subspace and the corresponding sparse-supports. The new algorithm updates the CCM independently of the slot-dependent $\ell 1$ regularization, which enables it to correctly perform the sparse-independent component analysis (ICA) with a reasonable complexity order. Simulation results shown in this paper verify that the proposed technique significantly improves MSE performance in unknown interference MIMO channels, and hence, solves the BER floor problems from which the conventional receivers suffer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]