Libyan faces charges in Pan Am 103 bombing
1988 explosion over Scotland killed 270 people
Attorney General William Barr was serving his first stint in the job nearly three decades ago when two Libyan intelligence officials were indicted in the 1988 bombing of a U.S. jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans. Thirteen victims had ties to the Capital Region.
“This investigation sends a powerful message,” Barr said when he announced the charges in 1991. “We have the resolve and ability to track down, no matter how long it takes, those responsible for terrorism against Americans.”
Now the Justice Department under Barr plans to unseal criminal charges in the coming days against another suspect in the bombing, a Libyan bomb expert named Abu Agila Mas’ud, according to two people familiar with the case. Monday is the 32nd anniversary of the attack.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. Mas’ud’s whereabouts are unknown. At one point, he was imprisoned in Libya for unrelated crimes.
The case against Mas’ud relied on the work of a journalist named Ken Dornstein, who worked at Public Broadcasting Service news show “Frontline” when he began his own investigation into the bombing. His brother, David, was among those killed aboard the plane, Pan Am Flight 103.
The bombing was the worst terrorist attack in British history and a devastating strike against the United States. President Ronald Reagan had ordered airstrikes against Libya two years earlier in retaliation for the bombing of a German nightclub frequented by American armed services members. American authorities concluded that the Pan Am bombing was Libya’s response.
Dornstein approached the FBI in 2012 with new information about Mas’ud, a former Libyan intelligence operative who appeared to have played a major role in the bombing.
The case represents a bookend for Barr, who plans to step down next week. Beyond bringing cases against Lockerbie suspects three decades apart, both of Barr’s tours as attorney general have been defined by cases overseen by Robert Mueller, who was the head of the department’s criminal division during the initial Lockerbie inquiry and served as special counsel investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia’s election interference.