A man charged in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Boeing 747 airliner that killed 270 people is in U.S. custody, a Justice Department spokesperson said.
Prosecutors in Scotland identified the suspect as former Libyan intelligence officer Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, the Press Association news agency reported.
The U.S. has charged Mas’ud as a third alleged conspirator in the attack, citing “his role in building the bomb” that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. Everyone aboard and 11 people on the ground were killed.
The arrest is “going to help the victims’ families reconcile and maybe get a little peace and solace at the end of the day,” said Michael Sherwin, the former acting U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia who oversaw the filing of criminal charges against Mas’ud in December 2020.
“Without the bomb maker, you don’t have the bombing,” said Sherwin.
Sherwin said convicting Mas’ud will be challenging because witnesses have died, evidence is stale, and memories have waned. Still, he said, investigators assembled a powerful case on how the bomb was constructed and moved before the attack.
“There’s still plenty of evidence, both direct and circumstantial,” said Sherwin, now at the law firm Kobre & Kim. “This was the ultimate example of state-sponsored terrorism by the Libyan government.”
Mas’ud is expected to make his initial appearance in U.S. district court in Washington, the DOJ spokesperson said by email on Sunday, without specifying a date.
Scottish prosecutors and police, working with the U.K. government and U.S. officials, will continue to pursue the investigation, a Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service spokesperson said in an email to Bloomberg.
Flight 103 was traveling from London to New York when it disintegrated after what investigators say was a bomb planted in a radio cassette player exploded in the cargo hold.
Two other former Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were previously charged in the bombing. Megrahi was found guilty in 2001 and released in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. Fhimah was acquitted.
