US court postpones hearing of Lockerbie suspect

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday on the Libya Review website. It reads as follows:]

The trial of the Libyan intelligence operative suspected of making the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, has been delayed to 28 February, his family told local media.

The family of Abu Ajila Masoud told Libya Al-Ahrar that a session was scheduled to be held on 23 February, but was postponed until next week.

The family said that the court did not clarify the reason for the postponement, noting that the attorney assigned by the American judiciary “will follow the course of the next session, until the defence team’s fees are secured.” They expressed their hope to secure the first fee payment before the next hearing.

Masoud has pleaded not guilty before the Federal Court in Washington. 270 people were killed in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in US history, according to Washington Post.

“At this time your honour we would enter a plea of not guilty,” said Whitney Minter, a US federal public defender, according to the Washington Post.

Masoud, 71, entered his plea in federal court in Washington. This follows his extradition in December by one of Libya’s rival factional governments.

US authorities said they would seek Masoud’s continued detention pending trial at a bond hearing on 23 February, if his defence sought to argue for his conditional release. He possibly faces two counts, including the destruction of an aircraft resulting in death, punishable upon conviction by up to life in prison.

The US Justice Department has alleged that Masoud confessed his crimes to a Libyan law enforcement official, in September 2012.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the United States and Libyan authorities to clarify the legal basis for the “abusive arrest” and subsequent extradition of Masoud.

“It appears that no Libyan court ordered or reviewed Masoud’s transfer to the US, and he had no chance to appeal, raising serious due process concerns,” said Hanan Salah, associate Middle East and North Africa director at HRW.

The Tripoli-based Prime Minister, Abdel-Hamid Dbaiba said his Government of National Unity (GNU) collaborated with the US on the extradition. However, judicial authorities have challenged the handover’s legality, and opened an investigation.

Trial of kidnapped Libyan could unravel entire US Lockerbie bombing narrative

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Mustafa Fetouri published in the current issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It reads in part:]

Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, 74, a Libyan national, appeared in a federal court in Washington, DC, on Dec 12, 2022, charged in connection with the bombing that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland while flying from London to New York.

 According to US prosecutors, Mas’ud made the bomb that blew up the plane on Dec 21, 1988, killing 270, including 11 people on the ground. Two other Libyans have been tried for the same crime: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted while his co-accused Lamin Fahima was acquitted in 2001. Al-Meghrahi protested his innocence until his 2012 death from prostate cancer in his Tripoli home. In fact, his conviction was widely criticized by the legal community and by United Nations observer Hans Kochler, who cited “foreign governmental and intelligence interference in the presentation of evidence.” 

Mas’ud’s kidnapping and subsequent “extradition” to the US started in the poor suburb of Abu Salim, south of the Libyan capital Tripoli, where armed militias roam freely. 

On the night of Nov 16, 2022, Mas’ud was getting ready for bed when half a dozen unmarked cars pulled up in front of his home. Four masked and armed men forced their way into his bedroom, dragged him out in his pajamas, shoved him into one of the cars and drove away. One of the masked men told the small crowd that quickly formed in the street that Mas’ud would be back soon. Abdel Moneim Al-Maryami, the family’s spokesman and Ma’sud’s nephew, described the shock for onlookers who “watched helplessly.” 

That evening Mas’ud had just returned from his third visit to the hospital in a week. The septuagenarian suffers from a host of illnesses made worse during his decade-long incarceration in the notorious Al-Hadba prison in Tripoli, accused of preparing car bombs in Libya’s 2011 civil war. The US Justice Department alleges that Mas’ud first confessed to making the Lockerbie bomb in Al-Hadba prison, but the former director of that prison, Khalid Sharif, denies that Mas’ud ever made such a confession while he was there. Sharif, now living in exile in Turkey, was one of the top leaders of the organization known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. In 2004 the US listed this Afghanistan-based group as terrorists but unlisted it in 2015 after it participated in the 2011 US-NATO supported armed revolt that toppled former leader Muammar Qaddafi’s government.

The following morning the family started searching for Mas’ud, a daunting task because different militias have different detention centers. After a week and multiple visits to the headquarters of different militias, the offices of the prime minister and the prosecutor general, and different detention centers around Tripoli, Abdel Moneim was told where he was and allowed to visit him. 

In detention Mas’ud told his visitors that nobody “interrogated him,” let alone explained why he was detained or by whom. Family members continued visiting until one day his son, Essam, went for a visit but was told his father had been taken to Misrata, some 186 miles (300 km) east of Tripoli. “He was handed over” to Joint Force, a notorious and powerful militia, Essam said. 

No one mentioned the idea of handing him over to the US. In fact, Essam said, “they assured us that he was being kept there for his own safety.” Other family members had filed a kidnapping report with the police. Government officials denied knowing anything about the kidnapping. The prosecutor general denied issuing an arrest warrant and promised to investigate the matter. 

Mas’ud made headlines on Dec 21, 2020, the 32nd anniversary of the bombing, when then-US Attorney General William Barr accused him of assembling the bomb and handing it over to Al-Megrahi in Malta. 

Libyan laws do not permit the extradition of its citizens to stand trial abroad, and it has no extradition treaty with the US. In a BBC interview in 2021, Libya’s US-educated foreign minister, Najla El-Mangoush, said her government was “open” to the idea of extraditing suspect Mas’ud but “within the law.” Faced with a huge public outcry, El-Mangoush denied that she ever said she was open to Mas’ud’s extradition, forcing the BBC to release the video clip of the interview in which she made that claim.

The US and Libyan governments knew that Mas’ud could not legally be transferred to the US so they colluded with Joint Force, a militia loyal to Tripoli’s government, to grab him.

Just before midday on Dec 11, 2022, some Pan Am Flight 103 victims’ families received an “urgent update” email from the Scottish authorities updating them on their efforts to prosecute Mas’ud. The message’s closing line said the US “has obtained custody” of him. 

I was in Paris, waiting for news because a friend had already alerted me to expect some. His family first heard the news from me after I spoke to their spokesman Abdel Moneim that morning.

On Dec 12, Mas’ud limped into Judge Robin Meriweather’s DC courtroom where he told the judge that he “cannot talk” before meeting his attorney. A day later, a Libyan businessman told me that he was ready to fund a defense team. But appointing the right defense team thousands of miles away is not an easy task for his family who are still in shock and confused by the conflicting advice they are getting from friends and volunteers trying to help them. 

The fact that he was kidnapped should be reason enough to halt any further legal proceedings against him. But the US has a history of kidnapping suspects and sending them for interrogation to countries that use torture liberally. 

On two previous occasions, US commandos kidnapped suspects from Libya to try them in the US. Ahmed Abu Khatallah,  was kidnapped in 2014, and tried and convicted in the US for participating in the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. In 2013 Abu Anas al-Libi was snatched and taken to US for trial accused of planning the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He died of cancer in custody days before his trial. For this third kidnapping the US outsourced the dirty work to a local militia.

The news that Mas’ud had been kidnapped was condemned by Libya’s parliament, High Council of State (a consultative body), the national security adviser and the minister of justice. They also warned that handing him over to the US would be illegal and an infringement of Libyan sovereignty. However, none of them knew exactly what happened, and Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Debeibeh kept silent. The uproar was repeated when Mas’ud was reported to have been sent to the US.

The public reaction has been supportive of Mas’ud and critical of the government in Tripoli. In a clumsy televised speech, Debeibeh attempted some damage control but instead made things worse. He said that “this man [Mas’ud] killed 270 innocent souls in cold blood,” but did not provide any evidence. Most Libyans mocked him and asked whether more Libyans would be sent to the US for Lockerbie bombing trials. 

Rumors of more extraditions of Libyans intensified in the wake of a Jan. 12, 2023 unannounced visit of CIA Director William Burns. (...)

A second Lockerbie bombing trial is very unlikely. US prosecutors will try to avoid such a scenario because it could lead to re-examining the whole Lockerbie trial evidence of 2001, as well as evidence that has emerged since Al-Megrahi’s conviction. Doing so could unravel the entire case and cast serious doubts about the evidence used to convict Al-Megrahi 22 years ago and raise questions about Libya’s responsibility for the bombing.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing and now represents UK victims’ families, argues that the United Nations, not the US, should try Mas’ud. He said “no one country can be the plaintiff, the prosecutor and the judge” in this case. His compatriot, law professor Robert Black, thinks Mas’ud can still “get a fair trial” in a US court. The professor believes that US prosecutors must prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Mas’ud made the device that destroyed the jumbo jet on that cold December night in 1988, that his bomb, and no other, caused the disaster and that Mas’ud knew that his bomb would be used for that purpose.

Professor Black, the primary figure behind the previous Lockerbie bombing trial in Camp Zeist under Scots law in The Netherlands, thinks it is not “essential” for US prosecutors to show how the bomb got on the plane in order to get a conviction. In such a scenario the evidence to convict Mas’ud will rest, heavily, on the analysis of the fragment of circuit board that the US claims was part of the timer that set the bomb off in midair. That tiny fragment, US investigators claim, was found in a Scottish field where debris from the plane was scattered. However, since that first Lockerbie trial, evidence has emerged demonstrating that the fragment was actually planted to frame Libya.

George Thompson, a former Scottish police officer turned private investigator, who has worked extensively on the case, claims to have the evidence to show exactly that. Thompson told me that he is ready to be a witness in the upcoming US trial, whenever that might be.

If convicted, Mas’ud is certain to face life imprisonment. In his first court appearance on Dec 12, prosecutors told him that they will not be seeking the death penalty. US former Attorney General Barr, in a BBC interview published the next day, said Mas’ud should receive the death penalty. Barr also said that Mas’ud’s alleged confession, should be admissible in court, despite concerns by others that it may have been coerced. 

Mas’ud’s trial could take months to start and weeks to end. Regardless of the outcome, most Libyans believe it will not bring us any closer to the truth about Lockerbie.

Human rights concerns in Lockerbie suspect’s rendition

[What follows is excerpted from a report published today on the Human Rights Watch website:]

United States and Libyan authorities should clarify the legal basis for the abusive arrest and subsequent extradition to the US of a Libyan suspect in the 1988 deadly airplane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, Human Rights Watch said today. US authorities on December 12, 2022, announced that they had custody of and intended to prosecute Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former official of the government of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, after an armed group seized him from his home in Tripoli.

“It appears that no Libyan court ordered or reviewed Masud’s transfer to the US, and he had no chance to appeal, raising serious due process concerns,” said Hanan Salah, associate Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The political impasse and chaos in Libya don’t allow US authorities to disregard violations of fundamental rights.”

The Tripoli-based Libyan prime minister, Abdelhamid Dabeiba, said his Government of National Unity (GNU) collaborated with the US on the transfer, while Libyan judicial authorities have challenged the handover’s legality and opened an investigation. Libya and the US have no extradition treaty.

The US should uphold international fair trial standards and grant Masud access to his family members, including by promptly processing visas for them. US authorities should also grant him the right to challenge his extradition. As Prime Minister Dabeiba promised, Libyan authorities should provide consular visits, help Masud get effective legal counsel, and coordinate his family’s visits. They should also investigate and hold accountable members of the armed group responsible for violently seizing Masud from his home.

Masud is the third Libyan in the last decade transferred to the US under murky legal circumstances to stand trial on a terrorism-related charge.

The US had long sought Masud’s arrest for his alleged role in the Lockerbie bombing. The apparent basis for the charges are confessions he allegedly made in 2012 to a Libyan interrogator. A relative of Masud told Human Rights Watch that family members had no prior notification of the extradition, and learned about it from social media posts about his appearance in a US court on December 12. They said they knew of no judicial procedures before he was sent from Libya, and spoke with him by phone for the first time on February 10, two months after his transfer to the US. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. (...)

Masud was not under an arrest warrant in Libya, said his relative, when he was seized on November 17 in his home in the Abu Salim district of Tripoli by an armed group whose members refused to identify themselves during the arrest, wore no insignias, and came in cars that were unmarked. They took him to an undisclosed location, his relative said. However, Abu Salim district is controlled by the Stability Support Apparatus, which also controls parts of the Libyan capital and is aligned with the GNU prime minister.

Armed group members arrived at around 1:30 a.m., the relative said. The group stationed armed men in front of the homes of Masud and of other family members nearby, barring everyone from leaving. Members of the group shoved Masud’s wife and beat his daughter, who needed medical attention for her hands after the incident, the relative said. They also beat one of Masud’s sons with a rifle. They dragged Masud, 71, whose mobility was reduced due to illness, across the floor, refusing help from family members to carry him.

The Abu Salim police refused to record a kidnapping complaint brought by the family the next day, prompting the family to contact armed groups and the General Prosecutor’s Office to try to find out where he was, the family member said.

On November 24 or 25, a week later, Masud called to tell his family he was being held in Misrata, 200 kilometers east of the capital, by an armed group allied with Prime Minister Dabeiba known as the Joint Force, and under Omar Bughdada’s command. The group permitted Masud to call his relatives and permitted the family to visit him twice in Misrata before his transfer to the US. On December 11, authorities in Scotland announced that Masud had been taken into US custody.

On December 12, the US Department of State announced that Masud had been taken before a court in Washington, DC, to face two criminal counts, including destruction of an aircraft resulting in death, based on charges filed by the Justice Department in December 2020.

US authorities gave no details on Masud’s arrest and transfer in the absence of an extradition treaty. The US Embassy in Tunis, which covers Libya, tweeted that Masud’s transfer “was lawful and conducted in cooperation with Libyan authorities,” and that it “followed Interpol publishing a Red Notice for Masud in January 2022,” requesting member countries to arrest him for transfer to the US.

In a Statement of Facts from 2020, the US Justice Department maintains that there is probable cause that Masud conspired with others, and aided and abetted them, in causing the destruction of Pan Am flight 103. This affidavit, submitted to support the charges, said that the US appears to build its case around a confession allegedly made by Masud to an unidentified Libyan operative on September 12, 2012, while Masud was detained in Libya. US authorities obtained an English translation of the transcript of the interrogation in 2017. Anti-Gaddafi fighters had detained Masud in 2011 after the revolution in Libya. In 2015, following a mass trial marred by serious due process violations, a Tripoli criminal court sentenced him to 10 years in prison for his role in booby trapping cars during the 2011 revolution and 31 other former Gaddafi officials to various prison terms. Masud was ordered released in 2021 on medical grounds.

During his years in Libyan custody, Human Rights Watch documented the use of torture, intimidation, and other abuses in Libyan facilities, often to extract confessions. Libya’s justice system was and remains marked by serious due process violations. US authorities should ensure that no coerced confessions, including confessions made under torture, are used as part of the prosecution, in violation of US and international law, Human Rights Watch said.

Libyan authorities did not respond to the allegations that they participated in a possibly unlawful extradition until December 16, when Dabeiba stated on TV that he had cooperated with US authorities in the transfer. Dabeiba called Masud a “terrorist” but did not clarify the legal basis for the extradition. In a statement on December 14, Libya’s general prosecutor confirmed that his office had not been part of the extradition and that he had opened an investigation into whether Masud was extrajudicially transferred.

While Prime Minister Dabeiba pledged in the TV statement that Masud would get consular and family visits and that the Libyan government would pay his legal costs, this has yet to happen. Masud’s family has hired only a temporary legal counsel who met with Masud upon his arraignment in the US. (...)

“Justice for the many victims of Pan Am flight 103 risks being tainted unless the US and GNU governments clarify the legal basis for Masud’s transfer to US custody,” Salah said.

Man accused of making the Lockerbie bomb denies all charges

[This is the headline over a report published this evening on the ITV News website. It reads in part:]

A 71-year old man suspected of making the bomb that brought down a jumbo jet over Lockerbie in 1988 has denied all the charges in court.

Abu Agila Mas'ud Al-Marimi, from Libya, is charged with the destruction of an aircraft, resulting in death.  

He appeared in court in Washington DC to face three charges related to the destruction of Pan Am flight 103. Through an interpreter, he pleaded not guilty to all of them. (...)

According to the US Department of Justice the accused worked for the Libyan External Security Organisation as a technical expert, including building explosive devices.

It is claimed he took the bomb to Malta and a few days afterwards set the timer so that the explosion would happen 11 hours later when it had been transferred from an Air Malta flight to the Pan Am aircraft. 

It is more than 20 years since Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, was found guilty of mass murder in connection with the Lockerbie disaster. He was sent to prison but later released on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with incurable cancer. He died in 2012. 

It is claimed that he and Al-Marimi were working together to destroy the flight, along with others from the Libyan regime. 

Following the fall of the Gaddafi regime Al-Marimi was arrested and imprisoned by the new regime in Libya. It is claimed that he confessed his involvement in the Lockerbie attack at that time. 

In December he was extradited to the United States to stand trial. [RB: He was not extradited: Libyan law does not countenance extradition of Libyan citizens. If they stand trial overseas it should be because they voluntarily agreed to do so, as Megrahi and Fhimah did. There is not a scintilla of evidence that Masud volunteered.]

If convicted he faces life imprisonment. He's due in court again on the 23rd of February for a hearing to decide whether he should stay in prison until his trial.

Lockerbie bombing suspect's arraignment deferred amid delays securing a lawyer

[This is the headline over a Reuters news agency report published this afternoon. It reads as follows:]

The arraignment of a Libyan intelligence operative suspected of making the bomb that blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and killed 270 people was deferred on Wednesday due to delays and challenges securing a defense attorney.

Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi, 71, is the first suspect in the attack to face criminal charges in the United States.

The bomb exploded aboard a Boeing 747 over Lockerbie as it flew from London to New York in December 1988. All 259 people on board were killed, and another 11 people died on the ground.

US Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya formally appointed federal public defender Whitney Minter to represent him on Wednesday, after Minter said Mas'ud's family was unable to retain a defense lawyer on their own.

Minter said Mas'ud has no substantial assets and has not been employed for a decade. He makes mortgage payments on a home in Libya, and his children help cover his living and medical expenses.

[From a Fox News report:]

Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi's arraignment was (...) pushed back to Feb 8.

US Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya formally appointed federal public defender Whitney Minter to represent him Wednesday, Reuters reported. (...)

Upadhyaya also set a Feb 23 date for a detention hearing.

CIA Director's Libya visit prompts speculation about Senussi handover

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined CIA Director’s visit to Libya Not Just a Visit published yesterday on The Libya Update website:]

The visit of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency William J Burns to Libya was surrounded by a halo of mystery and a lack of details about its reasons, which opened the door to wide speculation, especially about its timing. The visit came weeks after the handover of Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, suspected of making the bomb that destroyed a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 that killed 190 Americans, amid rumors that more suspects will be extradited. (...)

The head of the Libyan government in Tripoli, Abd al-Hamid al-Dbeibeh, had received Burns, accompanied by the Chargé d’Affairs of the US Embassy and his accompanying delegation, in the presence of Libya’s Foreign Minister Najla El Mangoush, and the head of the intelligence service, Hussein al-A’eb. This was amid remarkable secrecy on what was discussed or agreed upon during the visit.

According to the media office of the Libyan government, Burns stressed “the need to develop economic and security cooperation between the two countries.” (...)

Ned Price, the Spokesperson for the US Department of State said he cannot comment on the visit of US Intelligence Director William Burns to Libya. (...)

This American secrecy about the reasons for this visit increased the interest of observers in Libya, with anticipation of its results soon. This is especially regarding the extradition of more suspects in the “Lockerbie” case, such as Abdullah al-Senussi, the former intelligence chief and brother-in-law of Colonel Gaddafi. He was the second man in the Gaddafi regime, who is currently in a prison in the Libyan capital. (...)

The visit of an American official of this level to Libya for the first time since 2012, amid a complex situation in the country, and weeks after the controversial handover of Mas’ud to Washington, all of this makes the visit worth the attention that has been focused on it, according to the Libyan academic and analyst, Abdul Ghani Atia.

“This visit will completely shuffle the cards in the Libyan scene. On the one hand, it was no surprise that many talk that Abdullah Al-Senussi will be handed over to the US,” Atia believes.

“If Al-Senussi, who is accused of war crimes inside Libya and considered a controversial figure in the country, is extradited, this will represent a cave of treasures in the Lockerbie case. The man was Gaddafi’s right arm, and he is even more dangerous than Saif al-Islam, the son of Gaddafi himself.” Atia said.

[A further article about the implications of the visit can be found in US spy chief gives his support to Libya PM as part of a deal over Lockerbie? by Martin Jay on the Strategic Culture Foundation website.]

Politics has obstructed justice for victims of the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Kim Sengupta published today on the website of The Independent. It reads in part:]

The appearance of Agila Mohammad Masud al Marimi in an American court last month after being held captive in Libya has been portrayed as a vital breakthrough in the long pursuit of justice in the Lockerbie bombing.

It is nothing of the kind. It is, instead, continuation of a course of action which had resulted in a shameful miscarriage of justice; one which brings us no nearer to establishing the truth about the terrible atrocity in which 270 people were killed when their Pan Am flight was blown up just before Christmas in 1988.

The Libyan government – such as it is in the currently fractured country – has ordered an investigation into the abduction of the 71-year-old man from his home in Tripoli by a militia before he turned up in the US. The country’s attorney general did not issue an arrest warrant, and says the handover to American authorities is likely to have been illegal.

The “confession” that he was the Lockerbie bombmaker which Masud – a former Gadaffi regime agent – allegedly made to Libyan officials after he was seized in Libya a decade ago, has long been considered dubious by many with knowledge of the bombing and its subsequent investigation.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the rendition of Masud was the “product of years of cooperation between US and Scottish authorities and the efforts of Libyan authorities over many years.” Officials in Washington have refused to furnish any details of how the transaction took place.

But it is not just possible abuse of procedure which is the main issue in this. The prosecution of Masud is predicated on the narrative that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was responsible for the attack.

But many of those closely involved in the case are convinced that his conviction, by a Scottish court, was fundamentally unjust, should have been overturned and have been campaigning for this over the years.

I saw Megrahi in the winter of 2011 in Tripoli, where he had been sent from his prison in Scotland after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was lying in bed attached to a drip, oxygen mask on his skeletal face, drifting in and out of consciousness. The medicine he needed had been plundered by looters in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of the Gaddafi regime; the doctors treating him had fled.

The vengeful pursuit of Megrahi, the feeling that he had escaped justice by failing to die in a cell, persisted among those who were adamant that he was guilty. He was faking his illness, they claimed right until his death; there were demands that the post-revolutionary Libyan government should arrest and send him back to Scotland or on to the US.

Megrahi died a few months later.

Members of some of the bereaved families in the bombing have long been convinced that his conviction was wrong. Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora was clear: “I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out thinking he had been framed. I am very afraid that we saw steps taken to ensure that a politically desired result was obtained.”

I reported from the specially constituted Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, where Megrahi and his fellow Libyan defendant, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, were tried and the flaws in the prosecution case became apparent very early.

The two men were charged with what amounted to joint enterprise, yet Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was freed. The prosecution evidence was circumstantial and contradictory. Key prosecution witnesses were shaky under cross-examination.

The evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka (codename “Puzzle Piece”) – who turned up in court wearing a drag queen’s costume in an attempt to hide his identity – was widely ridiculed. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed to the defence lawyers by the Crown.

There was scathing criticism from international jurists about the proceedings. Professor Hans Köchler, a UN appointed [observer], described them as an “inconsistent, arbitrary and a spectacular miscarriage of justice”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission subsequently identified six grounds where it believed “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.

Cynical realpolitik had played a key role in the prosecution. Both British and American officials initially claimed that Iran commissioned the attack on the Pan Am flight using the Palestinian guerrilla group PFLP (GC), based in Damascus, in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US.

That changed suddenly, however, after the first Gulf War when Syria joined the US sponsored coalition against Saddam Hussein: the same Western officials now held that Libya was the culprit state.

Colonel Gadaffi’s regime eventually paid out (...) compensation to the families of the victims; but that was seen by those unconvinced by the new theory as one just of the deals which, at the time, brought him back into the international fold.

An appeal to clear Megrahi’s name, backed some of the bereaved families and eminent lawyers, was turned down by the Appeal Court in Edinburgh in 2015 because the law was “not designed to give relatives of victims a right to proceed in an appeal for their own or the public’s interest”.

The US case against Masud is that he had colluded with Megrahi and Fhimah to carry out the bombing. It is claimed that he met the two men in Malta with the bomb which went on to the hold of the Pan Am plane through a connecting flight.

But, as we know, Fhimah was acquitted by the Lockerbie court, where the prosecution had insisted that he and Megrahi were the two bomb plotters in Malta.

Robert Black, KC, an eminent law professor born in Lockerbie who played a key role in organising the Camp Zeist trial, and subsequently became convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice warned back in 2013 that British officials were trying to retrospectively manipulate information implicating Masud and buttressing the case against Megrahi. “It looks like the Crown Office is trying to shore up the Malta connection, which is pretty weak,” he said.

Much of the information implicating Masud as being linked to Megrahi is coming from a former Libyan security official called Musbah Eter, who the FBI has been interviewing.

Eter has had a chequered life. He was convicted of the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin in 1986; an attack which prompted Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya, with some of the warplanes flying from British bases. A German TV investigation subsequently revealed that Eter was a CIA “asset”.

We do not know why it took him more than two decades to come forward with the Lockerbie information, or what influence his relationship with US intelligence played in this.

As well as Masud, the Americans hold that Abdullah al-Senussi – who was both Muammar Gaddafi’s chief of intelligence and his brother-in-law – is involved in the bombing. He is in prison in Libya, and may also end up in the US.

We will see Masud, and probably Senussi as well, end up facing Lockerbie charges at a court, and we may yet see another CIA operative – Eter this time – doing a court turn in a drag queen’s wig. None of this, however, will bring us nearer to knowing the truth about the terrible Lockerbie massacre.

[RB: Further pieces on the Lockerbie case by Kim Sengupta can be accessed here.]

Steps taken to cancel out voices which contradict the official narrative

[Today's edition of The Times contains an article headlined Lockerbie Iran claim was cut from TV interview. It reads in part:]

A filmed discussion between Sir Salman Rushdie and a spokesman for the Lockerbie bombing families “vanished” from a UK broadcast after it was suggested that Iran, rather than Libya, had been responsible for the atrocity.

Dr Jim Swire, a GP who became the public face of the campaign to hold an independent inquiry into the bombing, took part in a live interview with the author of The Satanic Verses on Irish TV.

Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and Rushdie, who was the subject of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, used the platform to argue that the Iranian regime had blood on its hands.

Their interview went out live and uninterrupted on The Late Late Show, a long-running chat show, but newly declassified documents show that it was excised when the programme was later shown on Channel 4. Swire believes that it was removed because of political pressure. (...)

Correspondence between Swire and Douglas Hogg, then a Foreign Office minister, has been opened and placed in the National Archives at Kew. In one letter, from February 1993, Swire wrote: “On the 15th of January I took part in The Late Late Show broadcast live by the Irish RTE TV network.

“Without any forewarning the next guest turned out to be Salman Rushdie, with whom I had some discussion on air concerning the nature of the Iranian regime. It was far from complimentary and was omitted when the programme was rebroadcast on Channel 4 in this country.

“I was impressed by [Rushdie]. The meeting renewed my conviction that Iran had a hand in Flora’s murder.”

Iran was initially suspected of having contracted a Syrian-based terrorist group to carry out the Lockerbie bombing, in revenge for the US downing an Iranian airliner, killing 290 passengers and crew, in July 1988.

However, the US and UK turned their attention to Libya. The intelligence officer Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi remains the only person to be convicted in connection with the atrocity. Mohammed Abouagela Masud, another Libyan suspect, was taken into US custody this month.

Swire, now 86, and other family members continue to believe that crucial evidence was withheld from Megrahi’s trial and that his conviction was wrongful.

“It still seems extraordinary to me that an exclusive interview involving Salman Rushdie — a hugely influential global figure — was removed when the programme was shown to a British audience,” he said. “I can offer no explanation as to why that might have been done. However, I have become accustomed to steps being taken behind the scenes by the authorities to cancel out voices which contradict the official narrative on Lockerbie.”

In 2018, declassified documents emerged showing that Margaret Thatcher had been warned in 1988 that the Lockerbie families were becoming increasingly organised and needed “careful watching”.

Swire and the Rev John Mosey, a church minister who lost his teenage daughter Helga in the bombing, alleged that their phone calls and mail were monitored after they spoke out publicly.

Their stories were corroborated by Dr Hans Koechler, who was appointed by the United Nations as an independent observer at Megrahi’s trial. He said that his computers had been accessed and data was removed after he had compiled reports on the case.

UK government "doing their best to support the US in a cover up"

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Martin Jay headlined Lockerbie: Papers reveal Mandela didn’t buy Blair’s Libya ruse published today on the Maghrebi.org website:]

Confidential documents which became released in the UK might be the reason why the Americans recently kidnapped a third Libyan suspect who they have framed for the Lockerbie bombing.

On December 29th, it was revealed that documents held in the national archive showed that Nelson Mandela actually told the UK it was wrong to hold Libya responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to reports. 

They reveal discussions between former British prime minister Tony Blair and his cabinet and Mr Mandela, who was acting as an intermediary for Libya, after the Lockerbie bombing with the South African icon firmly believing that Libya had no hand in the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

In the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Mandela on April 30, 2001, Mr Mandela opposed the UN stance.

“Mandela argued it was wrong to hold Libya legally responsible for the bombing,” the cables revealed.

“He had studied the judgment from the trial and was critical of the account the judges had taken of the views of the Libyan defector, even though they had described him as an unreliable witness.

“He had discussed it with Kofi Annan [former secretary general of the United Nations] as he felt the Security Council resolution requiring that [Libya’s president Muammar] Qaddafi accept responsibility were at odds with the legal position. (...)

In May 2003 that Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and had previously agreed to set up a $2.7 billion fund to compensate families of those killed in the explosion, although few experts even believe that Gaddafi accepted culpability but was trying to find a diplomatic solution.

Al Megrahi being found guilty and the compensation package was a way out for the Libyan leader.

The Libyan intelligence agent was framed and was the only man convicted over the attack. He was sentenced to life until his release on compassionate grounds in 2009 after a cancer diagnosis. He died in Libya in 2012. [RB: The only evidence that Megrahi was involved with Libyan intelligence came from Majid Giaka. The judges found Giaka to be a fantasist, wholly incredible and unreliable, but (with no explanation) accepted his evidence on this one issue.] 

The efforts by Margaret Thatcher, John Major and finally Tony Blair to support the Libyan angle are highly suspicious though, as a number of experts believe that the UK governments were simply doing their best to support the US in a cover up.

If American families knew the truth about the Lockerbie bombing – that the Pan Am flight was carrying drugs and money under the supervision of CIA officers on board as part of a whacky scheme of Ronald Reagan to cooperate with terrorists in Beirut – then the legal cases would be unprecedented in US history.

Because of this gargantuan cover up, America, still to this day needs to keep the Libyan ‘story’ alive.

Consequently, a Libyan man, Abu Agila Masud, was recently accused of making the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am flight and was taken into US custody through an illegal rendition helped by rogue militias in Libya believed to have been paid by the US. Some sceptical analysts might conclude that the date of the released documents was known by the US, hence the timing of the kidnapping of Masud.

Will Libya extradite ex-spy chief to US over Lockerbie?

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday on Voice of America's VOA Africa website. It reads in part:]

The recent handover of a former Libyan intelligence officer by the Tripoli-based government to the US for his alleged involvement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has sparked speculation that an ex-Libyan spy chief could be next.

Questions about the potential extradition of former Libyan spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi have been circulating after US authorities earlier this month announced Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi, accused of making a bomb that killed 259 people aboard a Pan Am flight and 11 on the ground in Scotland, was in their custody.

The potential extradition of al-Senussi, currently serving time in Tripoli for his involvement in crimes committed under the Gaddafi regime, could lead to a trial for his alleged involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. This would mark a significant turning point in the long-standing investigation into the 1988 terrorist attack.

Al-Senussi's family has appealed to Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah to release him.

"This is the final warning to the Libyan government: If Abdullah al-Senussi and his comrades are not freed, all viable resources in the south will be put to a halt," al-Senussi's son told local news on Monday.

Al-Senussi, who is also the brother-in-law of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, hails from al-Magarha, a tribe renowned for its ties with the former regime and its influence in southern Libya.

During a recent interview with Al Arabiya, a pan-Arab news channel, Dbeibah denied any intention of extraditing al-Senussi to the US.

"All of these are fabrications and media exaggeration," he said.

Political analyst Ibrahim Belgasem told VOA said that “Libyan law does not allow the extradition of Libyan citizens for trial in a foreign country,” adding that Libyan citizens “feel very sensitive about this case as they suffered years of sanctions and were isolated from the world.” (...)

In 1992, after Libya refused to extradite suspects al-Megrahi and Fhimah, the United Nations imposed an air travel and arms embargo on the country. This embargo was later broadened to include an asset freeze and a ban on the export of certain goods to Libya. (...)

In 1999, the Libyan government agreed to transfer the two suspects to the Netherlands for trial, following negotiations led by Nelson Mandela and the Saudi government with the US and UK.

In 2001, al-Megrahi was found guilty while Fhimah was acquitted and returned home.

In 2008, Libya reached an agreement with the US to establish a process for resolving claims by American citizens and companies against the Libyan government, thanks in part to the Libyan Claims Resolution Act (LCRA), a bill sponsored by then-Senator Joe Biden.

The LCRA was passed following the settlement reached between the Libyan government and the families of the victims, which included a payment of $2.7 billion.

Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, was the sole individual to be convicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. Despite maintaining his innocence, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison and ultimately served only seven before being released on compassionate grounds due to terminal illness. He died in Libya in 2012.

In 2020, US Attorney General William Barr announced new charges against a former Libyan intelligence operative, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, for his role in building the bomb that killed 270 people.

Earlier this month, US law enforcement officials confirmed Al-Marimi was in custody for his alleged role in Pan Am Flight 103.

"The United States lawfully took custody of Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi and brought him to the United States where he faces charges for his alleged involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103," the White House said in a statement on Dec 14.

Libya has no extradition agreement with the US and details about the handover remain unknown. (...)

It took the Libyan government three days to admit its role in the extradtion, causing hundreds of Libyans, including Al-Marimi's family, to protest condemning the prime minister.

Abdulmonem Al-Marimi, nephew and spokesperson of Masud’s family told The Associated Press that "everyone knows that this thing must be done according to Libyan laws, but unfortunately the government handed him over, bypassing all Libyan laws.”

"Our demand is from the Attorney General that we hope that he will take measures regarding the Prime Minister [Abdul Hamid Dbeibah], who admitted and said that he's the ones who extradited him,”Al-Marimi added.

If the possibility of extraditing al-Senussi to Washington arises, "there is concern that his supporters, who hold significant sway in sensitive areas of Libya such as the oil fields and water resources in the south, could cause unrest in the country," Belgasem said.

This concern is supported by the fact that al-Senussi's family has twice disrupted the water supply for over 2 million people in the city of Tripoli, once over the kidnapping of al-Senussi's daughter and the other when the family attempted to secure his release.

Political analyst Salah Al-Bakoush, however, told VOA that might not happen this time around and if it did, "General Khalifa Haftar controls the south, so the US could push him not to allow al-Sanussi's family to create any trouble in that region."

Al-Bakoush also said al-Senussi's extradition to Washington is "highly unlikely" at least until the public outrage over the extradition of Al-Marimi subsides.

Libya aborted plan to hand Gaddafi spy chief to US at last minute

[This is the headline over a report in today's edition of The Guardian. It reads in part:]

Extradition of Abdullah al-Senussi over Lockerbie bombing would have closely followed that of Mohammed Abouagela Masud

The extradition to the US of Muammar Gaddafi’s most trusted and notorious aide was abruptly halted by Libya at the 11th hour this week for fear of public anger after the handover of another ex-senior Libyan intelligence operative, officials in Tripoli have told the Guardian.

Abdullah al-Senussi, a former intelligence chief and brother-in-law of Gaddafi, is blamed for a series of lethal bombings directed at western aviation as well as other targets.

The US want the 72-year-old, currently held in prison in Tripoli, to answer questions connected to the attack which brought down a US-bound aircraft over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988. Senussi has long been suspected of masterminding the operation, which killed 270 people.

Earlier this month the US announced that another Libyan suspect in the Lockerbie bombing, Mohammed Abouagela Masud, was in its custody. Masud was taken from his Tripoli home by armed men on 17 November, held for two weeks by a militia and then handed over to US government agents in the port city of Misrata.

His family said he had been unlawfully abducted. In a statement on Tuesday, the US embassy in Libya said the process had been “lawful and conducted in cooperation with Libyan authorities”.

The handover of Masud has provoked outrage in Libya, putting the government of interim prime minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh under severe pressure and leading to the shelving of plans to transfer Senussi to US custody.

“The idea was to have Masud sent to the US first and then give them Senussi. There have been discussions for months about this. But then officials got worried,” said one Libyan official source with knowledge of the case. A second said Senussi was meant to be handed over at the weekend.

Known as “the butcher”, Senussi is being held in the Rawawa prison in Tripoli and is thought to be in ill health. He was sentenced to death in a mass trial that concluded in 2015.

Senussi was considered Gaddafi’s most trusted aide. (...)

The effort to secure the transfer of Masud and Senussi was launched under Donald Trump’s administration but has been revived over the last nine months through discussions between US officials and the Libyan government, the sources said.

In August an agreement about the transfer of Senussi and Masud was reached with Dbeibeh. Dbeibeh’s mandate expired last December and he has a clear incentive to win favour with the US, analysts say.

As Senussi is currently behind bars, a transfer by Libya to the US would have been administratively more straightforward than that of Masud, who was detained without a warrant by militia loyal to a commander accused of systematic human rights abuses.

“This is a completely different case,” said one Libyan official.

Senussi is also a widely reviled figure in Libya, and cannot be portrayed as a pawn simply following orders, as Masud has been by his supporters.

In the early 1980s, while Senussi ran Gaddafi’s internal security services, many opponents of the regime were killed in Libya and overseas. Libyans hold him responsible for the 1996 massacre of about 1,200 inmates at the Abu Salim prison while a court in France convicted him in absentia in 1999 for his role in the 1989 bombing of a passenger plane over Niger that killed 170 people.

Senussi, then head of Libya’s external security organisation, has long been accused of recruiting and managing Abdel-Baset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. (...) [RB: In August 2011 The Wall Street Journal published a letter from Megrahi to Senussi that was found in the latter's archives after the fall of the Gaddafi regime. Megrahi wrote "I am an innocent man" and blamed his conviction on "fraudulent information that was relayed to investigators by Libyan collaborators".]

Successive Libyan governments insisted on prosecuting Senussi on home soil. The ICC decided in 2013 that as Libya had put Senussi on trial it would halt its own proceedings against him. The former intelligence chief was eventually condemned to death in July 2015 in a process that was severely criticised by human rights campaigners.

It is unclear if the transfer of Senussi to the US has been shelved indefinitely, or merely postponed.

Alia Brahimi, an expert on Libya with the Atlantic Council, said the case demonstrated a tension between the demands of the law and the demands of justice.

“Senussi is suspected of a great many crimes and the possibility that he might answer for one of them, an act of mass murder no less, is extraordinary,” Brahimi said. “Any transfer would generate enormous controversy, whatever the circumstances, as did that of Masud, and rightly so. But the lasting story will be about the long arm of American justice, and it will be heard around the world.

“Successive transitional governments [in Libya] have struggled to hold members of the old regime accountable in a transparent and ordered way, because of the chaos which has prevailed since the revolution but also because of the continuing power of regime interest groups.”

The family of Senussi and tribes still loyal to him have threatened unrest if he is transferred to the US.

What might a second Lockerbie trial look like?

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Mustafa Fetouri just published on the website of the Middle East Monitor. It reads in part:]

Libyan Abu Agila Muhammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi will appear for the second time before a federal court in Washington DC next Tuesday where he will be told formally of the charges against him. Mas'ud first appeared in court eight days ago after he was kidnapped from his bedroom in Tripoli on 12 December. The US law enforcement agencies colluded with a notorious local militia to snatch the old man and take him to America.

In his first appearance in court the suspect refused to talk to the judge because he claimed that he did not have a lawyer. It was reported that he rejected the lawyer appointed by the court to represent him. His family is working to provide their own lawyer.

The 71 year old will face charges relating to his alleged part in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people were killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. (...)

The US has always insisted on trying the Lockerbie case in its own courts but it failed to get access to the suspects as Libya refused to hand over its citizens to the Americans. After a decade of negotiations and political wrangling by the late Nelson Mandela and others, it was agreed to have the trial in Camp Zeist, in the Netherlands.

Today, 34 years later, the US appears to have its long-awaited Lockerbie bombing trial, the second in a case that is not only very old but also very complicated.

So what might second Lockerbie trial look like in a US court? What are the chances of Mas'ud being found guilty or acquitted? Furthermore, what will be the implications of the verdict on the whole case, particularly on the conviction of the late al-Megrahi whose lawyer, Aamer Anwar, has been trying to overturn his conviction, posthumously, since 2014 without success? Will Mas'ud's defence be able to convince the American jury that his client had nothing to do with the bomb that destroyed the doomed flight?

The US prosecutors have to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, many things. For a start they have to establish a link between Mas'ud and the bomb in the first place and that he did, indeed, make the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988. The US alleges that he confessed to this in 2012 while being interrogated in Libya's notorious Al-Hadba Prison, south of Tripoli. Many question if such a confession is admissible in court given the conditions in which it was extracted. Former US Attorney General William Barr insisted recently that the confession is admissible in a US federal court. He even called for the death penalty if Mas'ud is convicted after prosecutors said that they will not seek capital punishment.

Al-Hadba has a terrible reputation. In 2015, Human Rights Watch questioned the methods used to interrogate detainees, including senior former Gaddafi officials, one of whom was Gaddafi's son Saad. A Tripoli-based legal expert who requested anonymity said, "Only a kangaroo court might accept anything let alone a confession from Al-Hadba Prison."

Moreover, to get a conviction, US prosecutors must convince the jury that it was a bomb made by Mas'ud, and no other device, that destroyed the Boeing 747 Jumbo jet on that cold evening as it flew at 31,000 feet. The prosecution apparently rests on the US allegation that Mas'ud handed over a Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb to Fhima, who dropped it into the Pan Am Flight 103 luggage feeder at Luga Airport in Malta. Proving that Mas'ud was in Malta on 21 December 1988 might be easy, but proving that he actually took the explosive-laden suitcase and handed it over to Fhima is a difficult one. Any evidence presented here will be circumstantial as there are no witnesses to testify to seeing Fhima and Mas'ud at the airport or anywhere else in Malta 34 years ago.

One expert on the case, Scottish law Professor Robert Black, told me that he thinks the "crux of the case" against Mas'ud will be whether it "can be proved beyond reasonable doubt" that he manufactured the bomb that destroyed the aircraft. This would lead to issues connected with the timer alleged to have been used to detonate the bomb. Tiny fragments of that timer were, allegedly, found among the wreckage in a field almost a year after the disaster. More evidence emerged after the first trial in Camp Zeist, though, suggesting that that "evidence" was planted by US investigators to frame Libya. According to George Thompson, a private investigator who worked on the case, the type of timer said to have been used in the bomb was not in production in 1988.

The third issue is that the US prosecutors have to explain, convincingly, how and where the bomb got into the luggage hold area of the Boeing 747. The 34-year-old official US narrative is that the suitcase with the bomb inside came from Malta and was fed into Pan Am Flight 103A at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. The plane then left for London Heathrow Airport ... However, since the 2001 trial more evidence and testimonies have emerged challenging that theory.

Mas'ud's best chance of acquittal or getting a lenient sentence rests on his defence team's ability to reopen the entire Lockerbie issue. For any trial to be fair it must consider the Lockerbie bombing as a single case and the US should not cherry-pick what it likes to advance in its line of argument.

I believe that it should be an international court that tries Mas'ud, not a US federal court. The late Nelson Mandela, who mediated between the US, Britain and Libya to arrange the 2001 trial, once said, "No one country should be complainant, prosecutor and judge." However, that is exactly what the US is in Mas'ud's case. Is that fair? And does it mean that his chance of a fair trial is very, very small indeed?

So what might a second Lockerbie trial look like? A "kangaroo court" perhaps?

[RB: I am not an American lawyer, but in my view the precise mechanism whereby the bomb got onto Pan Am 103 won't loom large in the US trial. As I understand it, under the relevant Federal legislation (see US Department of Justice outlines allegations against Masud) all the prosecution has to prove is (a) that Masud made the bomb (b) that he knew it would be planted on an aircraft and (c) that his bomb was so planted and led to the destruction of Pan Am 103. Proving precisely how the device got onto the aircraft would not be essential to getting a conviction. Establishing Masud's guilt does not require proof of how his bomb got onto the plane, whether via Malta, Frankfurt or Heathrow ingestion.

I think the crux of the case will be whether it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was a Libyan bomb, manufactured by Masud, that brought the plane down. So the evidence that has emerged since Zeist about the metallurgy of the fragment of circuit board alleged to have formed part of the bomb timer will be vital: Lockerbie: Bomb trigger or clever fake?]

A new chapter in Lockerbie bombing horror story

[This is part of the headline over a long report just published on the Arab News website. It reads in part:]

For some, the arrest last week of a Libyan man charged with having made the bomb that downed the jumbo jet over Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988, offers the prospect of long overdue justice for the 270 victims of the disaster and their families.

For others, though, confidence in the judicial system and the joint US-Scottish investigation that has led to the latest arrest was shaken long ago by uncertainties that continue to hang over the trial and conviction in May 2000 of another Libyan, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, who in 2001 was found guilty of carrying out the bombing. (...)

Last week, 71-year-old Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, an alleged former intelligence officer for the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, appeared in a US court accused of being the bombmaker.

It is a stunning development in a case which, for many relatives of the dead, has never been satisfactorily settled. Masud’s anticipated trial represents an unexpected opportunity for the many remaining doubts surrounding the Lockerbie disaster to be resolved once and for all.

Key among them is the suspicion, which has persisted for three decades, that the Libyans were falsely accused of a crime that was actually perpetrated by the Iranian regime.

Iran certainly had a motive. On July 3, 1988, five months before the bombing, Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 carrying Iranian pilgrims bound for Makkah, had been shot down accidentally over the Strait of Hormuz by a US guided-missile cruiser, the Vincennes.

All 290 people on board were killed, including 66 children and 16 members of one family, who had been traveling to Dubai for a wedding.

In 1991, a subsequently declassified secret report from within the US Defense Intelligence Agency made it clear that from the outset Iran was the number-one suspect.

Ayatollah Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister, was “closely connected to the Al-Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups,” it read.

He had “recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and ... paid the same amount to bomb Pam Am flight 103, in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus.”

The evidence implicating Iran piled up. It emerged that two months before the bombing, German police had raided a cell of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and seized a bomb hidden in a Toshiba cassette player, just like the one that would be used to blow up Pan Am flight 103.

Yet in November 1991 it was two Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who were charged with the murders. The case against them was circumstantial at best.

After years of negotiations with Qaddafi’s government, the two men were eventually handed over to be tried in a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands. Their trial began in May 2000, and on Jan 31, 2001, Al-Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted.

The crown’s case was that an unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb had been carried on an Air Malta flight from Luqa Airport in Malta to Frankfurt. There, it was transferred to a Pan Am aircraft to London, where it was loaded onto flight 103.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in clothing, was the Toshiba cassette player containing the bomb.

A small part of a printed circuit board, believed to be from the bomb timer, was found in the wreckage, along with a fragment of a piece of clothing. This was traced to a store in Malta where the owner, Tony Gauci, told police he remembered selling it to a Libyan man.

Gauci, who died in 2016, was the prosecution’s main witness, but from the outset there were serious doubts about his evidence. He was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before he finally identified Al-Megrahi — and only then after seeing the wanted man’s photograph in a newspaper article naming him as a suspect.

In their judgment, even the three Scottish judges conceded that “on the matter of identification of the … accused, there are undoubtedly problems.”

Worse, in 2007 Scottish newspaper The Herald claimed that the CIA had offered Gauci $2 million to give evidence in the case.

Another part of the prosecution’s case was that the fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage, believed to have been part of the timer that triggered the bomb, matched a batch of timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss company in 1985.

However, the company insisted the timer on the aircraft had not been supplied to Libya, and in 2007 its CEO claimed that he had been offered $4 million by the FBI to say that it had.

Many have denounced the trial as a sham, suggesting that Qaddafi agreed to surrender Al-Megrahi and Fhimah, accept responsibility for the attack and pay compensation to the families of the victims, only because the US promised that the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya would be eased.

After Al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction was rejected in March 2002, one of the independent UN observers assigned to the case as a condition of Libya’s cooperation condemned what he called the “spectacular miscarriage of justice.”

Professor Hans Köchler said that he was “not convinced at all that the sequence of events that led to this explosion of the plane over Scotland was as described by the court. Everything that is presented is only circumstantial evidence.”

It remains to be seen what evidence will be presented in the upcoming trial of Masud.

Reports say that he was released only last year from prison in Libya, having been jailed for a decade for his part in the government of Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.

Last week, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah said that his government had handed Masud over to the Americans.

“An arrest warrant was issued against him from Interpol,” he said on Dec 16. “It has become imperative for us to cooperate in this file for the sake of Libya’s interest and stability.”

As Dbeibah put it, Libya “had to wipe the mark of terrorism from the Libyan people’s forehead.”

From the very beginning, one of the strongest advocates for the innocence of Al-Megrahi was Jim Swire, a British doctor whose daughter Flora died in the bombing on the eve of her 24th birthday. Now 86, Swire has spent the past three decades campaigning tirelessly to expose what he believes was a miscarriage of justice.

Al-Megrahi, suffering from prostate cancer, was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. Shortly before his death in Libya in 2012, he was visited in his sick bed by Swire, who in an interview last year recalled Al-Megrahi’s last words to him: “I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.”

Last week, Swire called for the trial of Masud not to be held in the US or Scotland.

“There are so many loose ends that hang from this dreadful case, largely emanating from America, that I think we should … seek a court that is free of being beholden to any nation directly involved in the atrocity itself,” he said.

“What we’ve always been after amongst the British relatives is the truth, and not a fabrication that might seem to be replacing the truth.”

"Even a facade of legality was not maintained"

[What follows is excerpted from a report headlined US accused of illegal abduction of Lockerbie bomb suspect from Libya published in today's edition of The Observer:]

The abduction of a former Libyan intelligence operative accused of preparing the bomb that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and his transfer into US custody raises concerns about a renewed willingness in Washington to flout international law to hunt alleged terrorist fugitives.

The family of Mohammed Abouagela Masud, who appeared in a US courtroom last week, have described how the 71-year-old was “kidnapped” from his home in Tripoli’s Abu Salem neighbourhood around 1am on 17 November by armed gunmen sent by a notorious local militia commander. He was then held by another militia for two weeks before being handed over to US agents.

The case recalls the excesses of the “war on terror” which saw dozens of so-called renditions – clandestine, illegal transfers of suspects by US intelligence services.

Abdel Moneim al-Muraimi, Masud’s nephew, told the Observer that his uncle had been unlawfully abducted. “We have filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office and demanded an investigation of the people who kidnapped him and those who handed him over. We want them to face justice. This is an assault on a citizen in his home,” al-Muraimi said. (...)

Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “We have long called for accountability for crimes [including the Lockerbie attack] under international law but this has to be done in a manner that respects due process and upholds fair trial rights. In this case even a facade of legality was not maintained … there was no hearing for [Masud] to challenge the lawfulness of his detention and transfer.”

The exact legal justification for the transfer of Masud is unclear. Libya does not have an extradition treaty with the US, no court is known to have considered any request from Washington nor from the government of Libya, and there is no record of any warrant issued for Masud’s detention. Libyan officials have cited an Interpol warrant.

“This is clearly illegal under Libyan law. It was very obviously an extraordinary rendition contrary to international law,” said Jason Pack, author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder. But in a televised broadcast on Thursday evening, Libya’s prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, said Masud’s extradition was lawful and his government was cooperating with an “international judicial framework to extradite accused citizens”.

Libyan officials with knowledge of the case told the Observer that Masud was seized by gunmen loyal to Abdel Ghani al-Kikli, known as “Gheniwa”, an infamous local militia commander who controls the capital’s poor, crowded Abu Salem neighbourhood.

“Several armed vehicles filled with armed men arrived at his house … and kidnapped him. My father and my uncle’s other brothers live on the same street so we went out to see what was going on, but they threatened us with weapons. It was terrorism, real terrorism,” said al-Muraimi.

Al-Kikli has been accused of human rights abuses. Amnesty has documented disappearances, torture and unlawful killings while a UN report earlier this year described “beating by guards, denial of medical care, starvation and enslavement practices” by al-Kikli’s militia at a migrant detention centre west of Tripoli.

Libyan sources in Tripoli said Donald Trump’s administration officials had been in discussions with local authorities about bringing Masud to the US to stand trial since 2019. These “conversations” had continued under Joe Biden.

In July, powerful individuals within the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU) contacted US government officials and offered to hand Masud over despite his recent release from prison. The 71-year-old had been serving a 10-year sentence for crimes while an intelligence operative under the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, who was ousted in 2011,

After being abducted from his home, Masud was transferred to a heavily armed paramilitary unit called the Joint Force in the port city of Misrata. The Joint Force was set up a year ago by Dbeibeh to act as a personal praetorian guard and has been accused of human rights abuses, including an extra-judicial execution earlier this year, torture, arbitrary detention and forced disappearances.

After around 10 days in Misrata, Masud called his family who were allowed to visit him in a militia base. “They said, ‘Don’t worry about him, we are taking care of him and will not hand him over’,” al-Muraimi, told the Observer. Two weeks later, US officials collected Masud and flew their captive to Malta on a secret flight and then on to the US, Libyan officials said. (...)

Dbeibeh’s mandate expired last December and he may have hoped to win favour from the Biden administration by giving Masud to the US.

Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said last week that Masud had been brought to the US “in a lawful manner according to established procedures”. But Amnesty’s Eltahawy said that relying on “commanders of abusive militias and armed groups … for law enforcement or special operations only further entrenches their power and emboldens them to commit further horrific crimes”.

Masud’s relatives are concerned about the health of an “old, sick man”. “As a family, we have been in complete shock. We did not expect this to happen at all,” al-Muraimi said.

Magnus at it again

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Magnus Linklater headlined A chance to challenge Lockerbie conspiracy theories published in today's edition of The Times:]

Suspect’s extradition to the US represents a pivotal moment in a case that has long been dogged by doubt

For those who have followed the tortuous Lockerbie trail, this is a key moment, the first chance to test not just Masud’s involvement but to challenge the long list of conspiracy theories that have dogged the case since the outset. It is almost conventional wisdom to argue that the one man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was innocent; that Libya had nothing to do with the attack and that agencies on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to fix the evidence so as to shift blame away from the most likely perpetrators, a Palestinian terrorist group sponsored by Iran.

Many thousands of words have been devoted to sustaining a sequence of events that has US intelligence agents planting or altering a bomb fragment to implicate Libya, then coaching a Maltese witness into identifying Megrahi as the man who came into his shop in December 1988 to buy clothing later used to wrap the bomb. So dodgy was the witness and so conflicting his evidence, say Megrahi’s defenders, that the charge against him is unsustainable and the Scottish judges and lawyers who convicted him are guilty of a miscarriage of justice.

As with all conspiracy theories, this one requires a massive suspension of disbelief. Not just the falsifying of evidence, or the manipulation of a witness, but the number of people who would have to know about it yet have remained silent — intelligence agents and detectives on both sides of the Atlantic, Scottish lawyers and judges, bomb specialists and other technicians — a rogue’s gallery of experts, all subscribing to a lie.

There is one fact, however, that no conspiracy theory can quite explain. Present in Malta the day when, prosecutors say, the bomb was loaded on to a connecting flight from Luqa airport, was not only the Libyan intelligence officer Megrahi, but a shadowy figure who, like Megrahi, left the island later that day to return to Libya.

A long and detailed investigation to find out who was behind the attack was embarked upon by Ken Dornstein, an American film-maker whose brother died on Pan Am 103. His inquiries began with a bomb exploding in a Berlin nightclub in 1986, killing two US servicemen. Dornstein succeeded in identifying the man who made the bomb and was sent a picture from Libya that confirmed it. That man was Masud. His presence in Malta with Megrahi is confirmed by passport records. Later he appears as a blurred figure behind bars in a Libyan court, facing charges on a separate bombing offence. He is seen again, in the back of a car, among the welcoming party when Megrahi returns to Libya after release from a Scottish jail in 2009.

Those who claim Megrahi was wrongly convicted have a lot of explaining to do. Why, if he was innocent, was he in Malta with a known bomb-maker? And how did all those clever US agents manage to ensure the men they would later frame were in the right place at the right time? I am sure the conspiracy theorists will come up with an answer. It had better be good.

[Magnus Linklater has a long history of branding as conspiracy theorists those of us who remain unconvinced of the legal justification for the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The manifold replies to this repeated Linklater slur can be found here. His silence in response to challenges to answer the points raised in them is eloquent. Examples of such rebuttals by John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr are to be found in Lockerbie and the claims of Magnus Linklater.]