Lockerbie bomb suspect is in US custody LONDON (AP)December,11– On Sunday, US and Scottish authorities announced a Libyan man suspected of destroying the bomb that dropped a passenger plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
A man said he was in U.S. custody. The Scottish Crown Office and the Prosecutor’s Fiscal Service said in a statement: “Families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been made aware that suspect Abu Agera Massoud Kiir al-Malimi is in custody in the United States. The US State Attorney General confirmed the information, adding, “He is scheduled to appear for the first time in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.”
There was no information on how Masoud was detained by the United States. On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, on its way from London to New York, exploded over Lockerbie, killing all 259 of his people on board and 11 of them on the ground. It remains the worst terrorist attack on the British mainland. The US Department of Justice announced new indictments against Masoud in December 2020, the 32nd anniversary of the bombing.
At a press conference, then-Attorney General William Barr said, “Finally, this man responsible for the murder of Americans and many others is on trial for his crimes. In 2001, former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of an in-flight bombing, the only person ever convicted of the attack so far. He died of cancer in 2009. I lost one appeal and gave up another before being released on compassionate grounds because I was terminally ill.
The breakthrough for the investigation came in 2017 when Mas’ud, an explosives expert with the Libyan Intelligence Service, published a copy of an interview he gave to Libyan law enforcement agencies in 2012 after he was detained after the collapse of Libya. It was when the US authorities got it. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, leader of the country.
In that interview, a US official said Massoud admitted to manufacturing the bomb used in the Pan Am attacks and to working with two of his other co-conspirators to carry it out. He also said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence services and that Gaddafi thanked him and the rest of the team after the attack, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case. Masoud is now the third Libyan intelligence operative to be indicted in the United States in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, but he is the first to be tried in a US court.
The Crown Office said in a statement: “Scottish prosecutors and police, working with the British government and their colleagues in the United States, are continuing this investigation with the sole purpose of bringing to justice those who collaborated with Al-Megrahi. I will,” he added. “
