Bomber charged with air raid on Lockerbie in 1988

The US Department of Justice has announced new charges against a Libyan bomb maker for the 1988 terrorist attack on a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.

The charges were announced on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing and at the final press conference of Attorney General William Barr’s term, underscoring his personal attachment to a case that unfolded during his first term at the Justice Department.

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He announced a series of previous charges against two Libyan intelligence officials in his capacity as acting attorney general nearly 30 years ago, and promised that the investigation would continue. Although Barr had not appeared at a press conference in months, he led this two days before his departure as a career closing.

By filing new charges, the Justice Department is reviewing a case that deepened the chasm between the United States and Libya, exposed the threat of international terrorism more than a decade before the 9/11 attacks, and produced global investigations and punitive sanctions. .

The case against the alleged bomb maker, Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, is at this point more theoretical than practical, as Masud is not yet in US custody, but it is nonetheless one of the most popular counter-terrorism prosecutions important laws brought by the Justice Department of the Trump administration.

“At last, this man responsible for killing Americans and many others will be brought to justice for his crimes,” Barr said.

A major breakthrough in the investigation came in 2016 when US officials learned that Masud was in Libyan custody after the collapse of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

In an interview Masud gave to Libyan police several years earlier, US officials said, Masud admitted building the bomb in the Pan Am attack and working with the other two defendants to carry out the plot.

In 1992, the UN Security Council imposed arms sales and air transport sanctions against Libya to pressure Gaddafi to hand over the two suspects. But the Libyan government resisted handing over the men to the United States, skeptical that they could receive a fair trial. Libya eventually handed them over for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges meeting in a Dutch court.

One man, former Libyan intelligence official Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, was convicted and a second Libyan suspect was acquitted of all charges. Al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, but Scottish authorities released him on humanitarian grounds in 2009 when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Later he died in Tripoli.

The Pan Am flight blew up over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on December 21, 1988, en route to New York City and then Detroit. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 students from Syracuse University who were flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.

The attack was the latest outbreak of tension between Libya and the West. In the years leading up to the flight, for example, Libya was blamed for the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub that killed two American soldiers and injured dozens of others.

It was not until 2003 that Gaddafi and Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am disaster, and the country formally took the blame and reached a $ 2.7 billion compensation agreement with the families of the victims. Sanctions were lifted and, in 2006, the Bush administration removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and restored diplomatic relations.

In addition to Barr, another key figure in the Lockerbie investigation was Robert Mueller, who was the Justice Department’s crime boss at the time the first round of charges was announced. Mueller would later become director of the FBI and special counsel in charge of the investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The Russia investigation sparked a rift between the men after Mueller complained to Barr that he had mischaracterized the severity of his team’s findings in a letter he made public before the investigation report was published. Barr said Monday that he did not invite Mueller to be present for the announcement of the new charges.

– AP