Officials: Lockerbie bomb suspect is in US custody

[Emrys]

LONDON (AP) — U.S. and Scottish authorities said Sunday that the Libyan man suspected of making the bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 is in U.S. custody.

Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said in a statement that “the families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told that the suspect Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi is in U.S. custody.”
...
A breakthrough in the investigation came when U.S. officials in 2017 received a copy of an interview that Mas’ud, a longtime explosives expert for Libya’s intelligence service, had given to Libyan law enforcement in 2012 after being taken into custody following the collapse of the regime of the country’s leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

In that interview, U.S. officials said, Mas’ud admitted building the bomb in the Pan Am attack and working with two other conspirators to carry it out. He also said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence and that Gadhafi thanked him and other members of the team after the attack, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case.

https://apnews.com/article/london-scotland-united-kingdom-government-states-libya-e195e6bf1c18be0ff102a54219ac9d1f

The long-running saga of efforts to unravel who was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing continues.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who'd served as head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and was suspected of working for the Libyan intelligence services, was convicted of planting the bomb in 2001 and was imprisoned in Scotland, then after a series of appeals had run their course and he abandoned his final appeal, he was released to Tripoli in 2009 on compassionate grounds because he was suffering with terminal cancer. He finally died in 2012.

There's a strong feeling among some of those familiar with the case, along with some of the bereaved families, that Megrahi was wrongly convicted and the true perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Those suspicions have included the theory that Libya was not responsible. Efforts to clear his name have continued even after his death.

Much of the evidence on which Megrahi was convicted was unreliable, and some of it was fabricated:

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing and who has been a spokesman for UK Families Flight 103, which represented British relatives, has said that he believes Megrahi is innocent. Swire is also concerned by comments attributed to the former lord advocate Lord Fraser, which appeared to doubt the credibility of the key prosecution witness, Tony Gauci. Swire said "the scandal around Megrahi is not that a sick man was released, but that he was ever convicted in the first place. All I have ever wanted is to see the people who murdered my daughter are brought to justice."

Professor Robert Black, an expert in Scots law who devised the non-jury trial that saw the Lockerbie case heard in 2000, has called Megrahi's murder conviction "the most disgraceful miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years". Prof Black said he felt "a measure of personal responsibility" for persuading Libya to allow Megrahi and his co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima, who was acquitted, to stand trial under Scots law.

I have written about this and nobody is interested. Every lawyer who has ... read the judgment says "this is nonsense". It is nonsense. It really distresses me; I won't let it go.

The non-profit religious think tank Ekklesia noted that "all of the Crown's witnesses in the 36-week trial, which took place at a specially convened Scottish Court in the Netherlands, have subsequently been discredited. In the latest revelation, a prosecution expert misled judges about key evidence, according to a classified police memo published by the Sunday Herald on 17 July [2011]", cautioning that

Dr Swire, other UK relatives of the victims, and a range of legal campaigners, including Professor Black, say that the May 2000 trial of two Libyan suspects, the other of whom was not convicted, amounts to a cover up and a serious miscarriage of justice. Their concern is that the truth has not come out, and that the guilty have not been brought to justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelbaset_al-Megrahi

We'll have to wait and see whether Al-Marimi's trial, due to be held in Washington, DC, sheds any more light on these issues or adds even more confusion.

[Duppers]

1. Horrible day is etched in my mind from many reasons...

My plane flew over the bombing site just a little over 4 hours after it happened on our way to London.

My mother had called the airline I flew and had me paged when we landed. She had to know if I was safe.

[Emrys]

2. My wife and I were visiting my mother in Wales when the bombing happened.

We passed by Lockerbie on our way back to Scotland. There were restrictions on the motorway at that point as they were still clearing up the aftermath. Nothing really to see, but it was an eerie feeling.

One of my wife's friends was due to be on that flight. My wife went spare trying to find out if she'd been on it, then eventually managed to contact her by phone.

Her friend hadn't been following the news and didn't even know about the bombing. She'd cancelled her flight at the last minute.