Word: al-megrahi
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...international tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. But those special international courts can range more broadly than the Scottish one, which despite the oddity of being in the Netherlands had the fundamental task of judging a mass murder that occurred in Lockerbie. The court thus explicitly accepted testimony that al-Megrahi was a member of Libya's intelligence service but left it to others to draw further conclusions. Bert Ammerman, a New Jersey resident whose brother Tom was on the Pan Am flight, was quick to do so. "Al-Megrahi's conviction leads straight to the doorsteps of Gaddafi...
...deliver his singular reading of the verdict and the road ahead. With his arm draped over the acquitted Fhimah, he posed before the destroyed Bab Al Aziziya compound, which was bombed by U.S. planes in April 1986, killing Gaddafi's adopted daughter Hana and several dozen others. An ebullient Gaddafi challenged the verdict of the court he had vowed to respect, saying he would come forward with new evidence of al-Megrahi's innocence so compelling that the judges would be moved to "commit suicide, resign or admit the truth." Al-Megrahi, still in custody in the Netherlands until...
...Some Libyan officials intimated that compensation for Lockerbie might be paid after al-Megrahi's appeal. But that was before Gaddafi said his piece on the topic. Slamming his fist against the wall of his crumbling former home, plastered with posters of mutilated children, he called for compensation for the 1986 bombings and the crippling economic sanctions that followed. Gaddafi's words, which were much more strident than the initial Libyan response to the verdict, naturally found support in Tripoli editorials the next day. The Green March daily called the verdict "an open attempt to blackmail the Libyan people...
...Swire wonders whether one of those cruder timers, which he says can't be set for longer than 45 minutes, was used to bring down Pan Am 103. The more sophisticated timer the prosecutors linked to al-Megrahi and the Libyans, he says, could easily have been set to blow the plane up over the ocean, foiling efforts to trace the perpetrators. Swire says the "provenance was unusual" of the timer remnants found outside Lockerbie, thus raising again suggestions that they had been planted on the scene. He and some other families want to see politicians in power...
...Whether the continuing probe into the Lockerbie bombing proceeds by public inquiry in Britain or by civil suit in the U.S.-or both-there will, of course, never be perfect justice. If al-Megrahi's appeal fails, he will be up for parole in Glasgow in 20 years. Family members will be on hand to argue against his release. "It wasn't just one murder, it was 270 murders," says Brian Flynn, whose brother was one of them. "Twenty years in prison isn't nearly enough." But certainly nothing is enough. "My son is still dead, and that...