Word: libya
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...LIBYA: Libya has always walked a fine line over its role on the bombing. Despite its official acceptance of some responsibility for the attack, its leaders have always maintained they had nothing to do with it, and that accepting blame was the political price for getting back into the U.S.'s good graces. "Until now the perpetrators are unknown," Gaddafi told TIME in 2006. The Libyans reiterated their denial of guilt following Thursday's SCCRC report. "We believe that our citizen is innocent and we have nothing to do with Lockerbie," Gaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam, told TIME...
There may be no more controversial terrorism case. Yesterday's SCCRC report has implications for the U.S., Libya, Iran, Syria, and, of course, Scotland, where Flight 103 crashed down on Dec. 21, 1988, killing everyone on board and 11 on the ground, spreading debris for miles around the small town of Lockerbie. Since that day, the case has been shrouded in mystery. A massive international investigation - run jointly by American and Scottish law-enforcement agencies - eventually nabbed two Libyan suspects. The motive: they were supposedly acting with their country's blessing in retaliation for 1986 U.S. air strikes that killed...
...Libya's recent return to the fold of nations depended on that country turning over its Lockerbie suspects in 1999, and then, after the trial, accepting responsibility and compensating the victims' families, a settlement hammered out in 2002 and 2003. Libya agreed to pay out $2.7 billion for the bombing. But only one of the Libyans, Megrahi, was convicted - a verdict several parties have disputed, including a U.N.-appointed observer who complained of a "political aura" at the initial trial...
...defense to the SCCRC, transferred $11 million to the PFLP-GC just days after the attack on Flight 103. A wide range of conspiracy theorists speculate that U.S. authorities somehow pushed the investigation away from Syria and Iran in exchange for cooperation during the first Gulf War. Libya, the skeptics claim, was just a convenient political target at the time. The Scottish Commission considered and rejected this scenario. No one now expects that Western governments will seriously entertain the idea again. But by calling into question the evidence in the case, the SCCRC left the door open to the ever...
...wording of the SCCRC report, it's hard not to take "miscarriage of justice" as criticism of the three-judge panel that convicted Megrahi. Robert Black, the Scottish lawyer who designed the court structure at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands (a political compromise between Scotland, the U.S. and Libya so the case could be heard) calls Megrahi's 2001 conviction "an absolute and utter outrage." But if, indeed, Megrahi has suffered a miscarriage of justice, the appeal may be a chance for Scotland to redeem itself, says Black. Some changes have been made already. First, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review...