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32 years after the Lockerbie plane attack, there is a renewed movement in the investigation. United States Attorney General William Barr announced in Washington that the United States wanted to bring another suspect to justice in the case. It was a former Libyan intelligence worker who is said to have built the bomb for the attack, Barr said. The man is detained in Libya.
The US government will ask Libyan leaders to extradite him so that he can be tried in the United States, Barr said. He is optimistic that the Libyan government will comply with the request.
A Pan Am jumbo jet crashed on December 21, 1988 in the Scottish town of Lockerbie. 270 people were killed in the attack, including eleven villagers. The machine was on its way from London to New York at the time. Most of the deaths were American. Barr said the attack was clearly directed against the United States.
So far there has only been one conviction in the case: Libyan secret service officer Abdel Bassit al-Megrahi. He was released early from Scottish custody in 2009 because doctors had certified that he had a life expectancy of a few months. In 2012 he died of cancer. His relatives appealed posthumously. The appeal process is ongoing. Another suspect from Libya was acquitted at the time.
Barr said the third man had been targeted by investigators in the past, but previously there was insufficient knowledge to take action against him. The breakthrough was eventually achieved through an interrogation of the Libyan authorities, which they relayed to the United States.
According to the US Department of Justice, the suspect is also said to have been involved in other terrorist plots against the US and the West, including the deadly bomb attack at the La Belle nightclub in West Berlin in 1986. No details were given.
Russia, Hunter Biden, US Elections: Barr Is Against Trump
In what was probably his last press conference as attorney general, Barr, who had recently repeated differences with Donald Trump, stayed away from the president: like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Barr also suspects that Russia is behind the massive attack by hackers against American government institutions. It seems certain it was the Russians, Barr said.
Trump defended Russia on the issue over the weekend and brought China up for discussion as the possible perpetrator of the cyber attack without proof. Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday that Russia would always be suspected if something happened. Possibly also China. Trump also played down the scale of the hacking attack, stating that everything was under control.
According to previous knowledge, it has been many months since hackers infiltrated the systems of various ministries, federal agencies and companies. Consequently, they gained access to the systems using software from SolarWinds.
Barr also failed to comply with Trump’s request to appoint a special investigator to investigate the president’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud. The same applies to Trump’s claims in the Hunter Biden case: the prosecution recently launched an investigation against the son of President-elect Joe Biden. Here, too, Trump had campaigned for the appointment of a special investigator. Barr said he saw no need for such a step in either the voter fraud allegations or the Hunter Biden case.
