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The US authorities are expected to release charges against a Libyan they accuse of being the master bomb maker behind the Lockerbie bombing, just days before the anniversary of the UK’s deadliest terror attack.
William Barr, the outgoing United States Attorney General, is expected to publicly confirm within days that the United States has indicted a former Libyan intelligence officer, Mohammed Abouagela Masud, accusing him of completing the device that blew up Pan Am 103 on the Scottish town on December 21. 1988.
The bomb killed all 259 people on the flight, mostly Americans who were returning home for the Christmas holidays. A large part of the plane’s fuselage fell on Lockerbie, destroying homes and killing 11 people on the ground.
Barr is expected to retire next week. His move comes as five of Scotland’s top judges are considering a posthumous appeal filed by the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the attack.
Aamer Anwar, the attorney for the Megrahi family, said the US Justice Department’s decision was designed to influence the Scottish court.
“It sounds extreme desperation that on the eve of a decision on the appeal and the 32nd anniversary of the attack, they came up with an accusation against Masud. What have they been doing for the last 32 years?
“It’s a weak and tenuous bond, trying to connect Megrahi with him,” Anwar said.
The latest appeal, the third against Megrahi’s conviction in 2001, was launched after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred her case to the court of appeal as alleged judicial error earlier this year.
The three-day appeal hearing, chaired by Lord Carloway, the Lord Justice General and Scotland’s highest ranking judge, ended on 26 November and a ruling is expected soon.
Professor Robert Black QC, the lawyer and legal scholar who designed the plan to hold Lockerbie’s original trial in 2000 in a neutral country, the Netherlands, said he doubted the timing of Barr’s decision would affect Scottish judges weighing the Megrahi’s appeal case.
“I honestly don’t think that has an influence on the Scottish judiciary,” Black said. There have been numerous occasions where conflicting claims have come up before with Lockerbie hearings outside of the courtroom setting, which has not swayed the court, he said.
Masud appears in the original indictment against Megrahi and his then co-defendant Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah and charged by the Scottish prosecution with traveling with Megrahi to Malta on the day the bomb was allegedly planted on a connecting flight to Frankfurt, on December 21, 1988. Fhimah was acquitted by the court.
The charge against Megrahi said he traveled from Tripoli “with a passport under the false name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad, while traveling with Mohammed Abouagela Masud, also a member of the Libyan intelligence services.”
Barr revealed the US charges against Megrahi and Fhimah in 1991 while he was acting attorney general in the George HW Bush administration. It took almost ten years of bickering before the Muammar Gaddafi regime handed over the two men to stand trial.
Despite being named once in the indictment, Masud’s alleged role as a co-conspirator in the Lockerbie attack only surfaced during investigations into the case in 2012 by Ken Dornstein, a journalist working for the US broadcaster PBS. , whose brother David was murdered in Lockerbie. attack.
Dornstein interviewed another Libyan intelligence officer who said Masud was involved in a 1986 bombing at a West Berlin nightclub that killed two US servicemen; that attack had been planned and carried out by Libyan agents.
The same source named Masud, then in prison in Tripoli, as the Lockerbie terrorist, Dornstein said. Masud was already being investigated by the FBI and the Crown Office in Edinburgh.
