Word: al-megrahi
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...southwestern Scotland for every scrap of debris from Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up on Dec. 21, 1988 and crashed in a horrific fireball on the town of Lockerbie. The evidence-10,232 pages of testimony, 235 witnesses-was enough for the court to convict Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 48, for the murder of 270 people and sentence him to life imprisonment in a Scottish jail. His co-defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 44, was found not guilty...
...Beyond the court's remit lay the biggest questions, the ones that have not been subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of any judge, Scottish or otherwise, and may never be. Who besides al-Megrahi decided the plane should come down? Was Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader and guardian of his country's perpetual revolution, the man who gave the nod? Might al-Megrahi and others have been set on their murderous task by others, such as the Iranians or a Palestinian terrorist group with close ties to Syria and Iran? What role if any did the realpolitik of the West...
...Tony Gauci, who described a man who seemed strangely not to care just what clothes he was buying when he stopped in at Gauci's shop on a rainy day in late 1988. While acknowledging that Gauci "never made what could be described as an absolutely positive identification" of al-Megrahi as the purchaser of those clothes, later found imbedded with Toshiba parts in Scotland, it was "nevertheless satisfied that his identification ... was reliable...
...That, together with al-Megrahi's trip to Malta under a false name on Dec. 20 and his association with Edwin Bollier, the Zurich electronics expert the court believes manufactured the timer for the bomb, was enough to dispel any reasonable doubt as to his guilt. The judges felt the prosecution's case was insufficient against Fhimah, former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta. Though entries in his diary suggest he gave Air Malta luggage tags to al-Megrahi, the court wasn't convinced he was "necessarily aware" that they would be used to spirit a bomb onto...
...NETHERLANDS Lockerbie Appeal Five Scottish judges began hearing an appeal by the man convicted of planting the bomb that killed 259 people aboard a Pan Am flight in 1988. Lawyers for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi told the special court at Camp Zeist that new evidence would "tear holes" in the ruling, which jailed al-Megrahi for 20 years. They said statements from a security guard at London's Heathrow Airport showed that the bomb could have originated there, and that the trial judges had erred in relying on the evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper who identified the accused...