Word: libyans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Libyan intelligence agents accused of bombing Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie have told a Scottish court they're not responsible for the atrocity - and even if Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima are convicted, few observers and family members of the victims believe that the real author of the crime is in the specially constructed courtroom in the Netherlands. Twelve years after the bombing that killed 270 people (189 of them Americans), the trial finally got under way Wednesday with the men entering a not guilty plea, and offering a list of individuals connected with various...
...Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi finally agreed last year to hand the men over, in a bid to break out of the international isolation and U.N. sanctions imposed on his country as a result of the case. "He held off for years out of fear that he would be personally implicated in the case," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "Now he's cut these people loose and is more concerned about getting Libya back on line than with what happens to these individuals. And he's obviously encouraged by signs that influential interest groups in the West favor restoring ties...
...believes that two of the strongman's intelligence agents would have independently conceived and executed a terror attack of such dramatic consequence, Ghaddafi appears to have somehow satisfied himself that the current trial would be unlikely to implicate him directly. And while it was conceivable, given the cycle of Libyan-sponsored terror attacks and retaliatory U.S. bombings of Libya during the '80s, that the attack on Pan Am 103 was authored in Tripoli, analysts have long speculated that the Libyans might have been subcontracted by a third party such as Iran or Syria. But with proceedings focused narrowly...
Chalk it up to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's charm offensive. The Libyan leader has not only agreed to cooperate with the Pan Am trial; he has also signaled through official and unofficial channels that he is ready to do business with Washington. For starters, he has booted a number of radicals out of his country, including the infamous Abu Nidal. It may come as a surprise to those who remember the '80s--when Libya was implicated in the bombing of a discotheque in Germany that killed two American servicemen--to hear a senior U.S. official say, "At this moment, [Gaddafi...