US delays Lockerbie bombing trial over new evidence / Photo: © GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP
US delays Lockerbie bombing trial over new evidence
A US federal judge postponed on Monday the trial of a Libyan man accused of making the bomb that destroyed a Pan Am flight over Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people, citing new evidence.
Jury selection for the trial of Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, who allegedly worked as an intelligence operative for the government of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi between 1973 and 2011, had been due to start on Wednesday.
Judge Dabney Friedrich cited "newly discovered evidence" and "evidence located in other countries" as the reason for postponing the trial.
No new trial date was set but a court hearing was scheduled for September 1 to discuss the status of the case.
Masud, who has been in US custody since 2022, has pleaded not guilty to charges related to the "destruction of an aircraft resulting in death." If convicted, he could face life in prison.
Pan Am Flight 103, bound for New York, was blown up 38 minutes after it took off from London, sending the main fuselage plunging to the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie and spreading debris over a vast area.
The bombing -- which is the deadliest-ever terror attack in Britain -- killed all 259 people on board, including 190 Americans, and 11 people on the ground.
Only one person has so far been convicted for the bombing.
Two alleged Libyan intelligence operatives -- Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah -- were charged with the bombing and tried by a Scottish court in the Netherlands.
Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 and spent seven years in a Scottish prison. Fhimah was acquitted.
Al-Megrahi was released by Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds in 2009 as he was suffering from terminal cancer. He died in Libya in 2012, maintaining his innocence.
Gaddafi's government officially acknowledged responsibility for the attack in 2003 and paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the victims' families.
After Gaddafi's fall in 2011, American and Scottish investigators went to Libya in search of new evidence in the case.
British media at the time identified Masud and Abdullah Senussi, the former head of the Libyan intelligence services and Gaddafi's brother-in-law, as possible suspects.
The investigation was reopened in 2016 when US authorities learned that Masud had been arrested following Gaddafi's fall, and had confessed his involvement in the bombing to the new Libyan authorities.
Masud was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Libya in 2015 after being accused of using remote-detonated bombs against Libyan opposition members in 2011, The New Yorker reported at the time.
He also confessed his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, as well as an attack on a nightclub in Berlin in 1986, to Libyan authorities during an interrogation in 2012, according to US court documents.
Masud was extradited from Libya to the United States in 2022.
(L.Møller--DTZ)
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