A few days before Christmas in 1988, Pan-Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in an act of international terrorism that killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.
It remains the worst ever act of terrorism in Great Britain’s history.
Then based in London as the Toronto Sun’s European bureau chief, I was one of the first journalists to arrive on the scene — the air was permeated with the stink of jet fuel for kilometres on end, and a huge crater on the edge of town had burned into the ground by a still-smouldering wing.
Now word from the U.S. Justice Department has come down that a Libyan intelligence official accused of making the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over a farmer’s field in that small Scottish town has been taken into U.S. custody and will face federal charges in Washington.
The only person to have been convicted over the atrocity was Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, who was jailed for life in 2001 and released on compassionate grounds in 2009 after being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He died three years later.
The arrest of Abu Agela Masud Kheir Al-Marimi is a significant milestone in the decades-old investigation into the attack.
American authorities in December 2020 announced charges against Masud, who was in Libyan custody at the time. Though he is the third Libyan intelligence official charged in the U.S. in connection with the attack, he will be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution.
The Libyan government initially balked at turning over the two other men, al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, before ultimately surrendering them for prosecution before a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands as part of a special arrangement.
Fhimah was acquitted.
U.S. officials did not say how Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody, but in late November, local Libyan media reported that Masud had been kidnapped by armed men (CIA?) on November 16 from his residence in Tripoli.
He is expected to soon make an initial court appearance in Washington on charges leveled two years ago in which federal prosecutors charged Masud, specifically, with the destruction of an aircraft resulting in death and destruction of a vehicle of interstate commerce with an explosive.
At the time the charges were announced, then-Attorney General William Barr, who helped lead the initial investigation during his first stint as U.S. attorney general, said a “breakthrough” in the case came in 2016, when federal investigators learned that Masud, a long-suspected co-conspirator, had been arrested and interrogated by Libyan authorities in 2012 after the collapse of the Moammar Gadhafi regime.
A copy of the interview and other evidence was provided to U.S. authorities, allegedly linking Masud to the assembly of the explosive.
According to court documents, the operation had been ordered by Libyan intelligence officials, and Gadhafi thanked Masud for “the successful attack on the United States.”
U.S. officials believe Masud was also involved in the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle Discotheque in Berlin, West Germany, which killed two American service members and a Turkish woman.
The New York-bound Pan Am flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London’s Heathrow Airport on Dec. 21, 1988. Citizens from 21 different countries were killed. Among the 190 Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.
When I left Lockerbie on that Christmas Eve 32 years ago, my taxi drove by the sad but poignant spectacle of hundreds of discarded Christmas trees already littering the streets of the town.
Christmas would not be celebrated in Lockerbie that year, nor in the traditional way for years to come.
It had been forever hurt, forever scarred.
