U.S. said to be near charges for another suspect in 1988 Lockerbie bombing
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.
Now the Justice Department under Barr plans to unseal criminal charges against another suspect in the bombing, a Libyan bomb expert named Abu Agila Mas’ud.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Mas’ud’s exact whereabouts is unknown.
The case against Mas’ud in part relied on the work of a journalist named Ken Dornstein, who was working 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 that came at a low point in its relations with Libya. President Ronald Reagan had ordered airstrikes against Libya two years earlier in retaliation for the bombing of a German nightclub frequented by American armed service members. American authorities concluded the Pan Am bombing was Libya’s response.
The Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute the first two suspects, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, were initially stymied when Libya refused to extradite the men. Eventually, the Libyan government agreed to let them stand trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law.
Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison, while Fhimah was acquitted. Nearly a decade later, Scottish officials granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release because he had cancer. Al-Megrahi died in 2012.
Al-Megrahi and Mas’ud were thought to have possibly known each other, but al-Megrahi told his lawyers repeatedly that he did not know Mas’ud.
But a Libyan informant working for the CIA told the spy agency about Mas’ud and his connection to al-Megrahi before the bombing.
In 2015, in a documentary Dornstein wrote, directed and produced, he helped identify Mas’ud as a key remaining suspect in the case.
Dornstein said Mas’ud most likely installed the timing device on the bomb that detonated shortly after Pan Am 103 took off. The bomb had been placed inside a portable cassette player put aboard a plane in Malta and transferred twice before being put on Flight 103.