The trial of a Libyan man linked to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has been postponed at the 11th hour after new evidence emerged just days before jury selection was due to begin in Washington.
Two hundred and fifty-nine passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground, were killed when Pan Am flight 103, from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, southwest Scotland, on 21 December 1988. It remains the UK’s worst ever terrorist attack.
Who was behind the bombing?
The bombing was “one of the largest and most complex acts of international terrorism ever investigated” by the FBI. “Solving the case required unprecedented international cooperation.”
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Painstaking analysis of 319 tons of wreckage and thousands of pieces of evidence from a crime scene covering 845 square miles, along with thousands of interviews in 16 countries, eventually led investigators to two Libyan intelligence operatives.
In 1991 the UK and US governments charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah with the murders, which were velieved to be retaliation for a series of confrontations between the US and Libya in the 1980s. A decade later Megrahi was found guilty at a trial held in a Scottish court specially built on a former US army base in the Netherlands and jailed for life. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and returned to Tripoli to a “hero’s welcome” before dying in 2012. Fhimah was acquitted at the trial and returned to Libya.
In 2003, the Libyan government formally “accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials” and agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to the victims’ families. “It never admitted Megrahi’s guilt directly”, though, said STV News, and “questions over the evidence, competing theories about who ultimately ordered the attack, and the involvement of only one convicted individual for an operation understood to have required a state intelligence apparatus have all persisted for decades”.
Then in December 2020, 32 years to the day after the bombing, the US charged Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi as a “third conspirator”. He was taken into custody in the US two years later and has awaited trial ever since.
Why has his trial been postponed?
US prosecutors alleged the Libyan and Tunisian dual national, now in his mid-seventies, was a long-time bomb maker for Libya’s External Security Organisation, and built and primed the explosive device placed in a radio cassette player hidden inside a suitcase on flight 103.
The trial of Al-Marimi, the first person to face justice for the bombing in a US court, was due to start in May 2025 but was delayed after his lawyers said they needed more time to work through more than 400,000 files of evidence.
Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled earlier this month that an alleged 2012 confession given to a Libyan investigator could be used as evidence at the trial that was finally due to begin this week. But the trial was again pushed back, this time to early next year, after “newly discovered evidence” previously unknown to the defence and prosecutors emerged on Friday.
The fact that Friedrich “would have been extremely reluctant to allow an 11th hour postponement after months of preparation and marathon pre-trial legal battles” underlines “the potential importance of the new evidence”, said the BBC.
For the families of those killed in the attack, the trial “represents something rare in this case: a chance for evidence gathered over nearly four decades to finally be tested, cross-examined and argued over in open court, in front of a jury asked to reach a verdict”, said STV News. This would provide some closure even though a conviction “would not, on its own, resolve the wider questions that have followed the case for decades about who else was involved in ordering and directing the operation”.
