On July 22, Britain denied that it was not cooperating with the United States on a new initiative for a trial in The Hague against two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. A total of 270 people were killed when a bomb ripped through Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. File photo from December 22, 1988 shows rescue workers lifting a body out of the water. Lockerbie crash site.
NS | Reuters
US and Scottish authorities said on Sunday that a Libyan man suspected of making a bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 is in US custody.
Scotland’s Office of Public Prosecutions and Financial Services said in a statement that “the families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been informed that suspect Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi is being held by the United States. detention.”
The US Department of Justice confirmed the information, adding that “he is scheduled to make his first appearance in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.” It does not provide information on how Mas’ud was held in US custody.
Pan Am Flight 103, traveling from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 others on the ground. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil.
The US Department of Justice announced new charges against Mas’ud in December 2020, the 32nd anniversary of the bombings.
William Barr, the attorney general at the time, said at a news conference: “Ultimately, the man responsible for killing Americans and many others will be brought to justice for his crimes.”
In 2001, former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of bombing a flight. He is so far the only person convicted in the attack. He lost one appeal and gave up another before being released in 2009 out of compassion because he had terminal cancer.
He died in Libya in 2012, still protesting his innocence.
A breakthrough in the investigation came when US officials in 2017 received a transcript of an interview Mas’ud, a longtime explosives expert for Libya’s intelligence agency, had handed to Libyan law enforcement in 2012 after being taken into custody following the fall of the country’s leader, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi.
In that interview, US officials said, Mas’ud admitted to making the bomb in the Pan Am attack and collaborating with two other masterminds to carry it out. He also said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence and that Gadhafi thanked him and other team members after the attack, according to an FBI affidavit in the case.
Although Mas’ud is currently the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the US in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, he will be the first to appear in court in an American courtroom.
The Crown Office in its statement added that “Scottish prosecutors and police, working with the UK government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the aim of only to bring those who acted with al-Megrahi to justice.”
