Word: libyans
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...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...
...sure, the Libyan leader has been known to temper his bluster with conciliation, particularly in the last few years. Libya has already agreed to pay $33 million in compensation to families of the 171 people killed when a French airliner was shot down over Niger in 1989; six Libyan officers, including Gaddafi's brother-in-law, received life sentences in absentia from a French court in 1999 for that attack. An investigative judge, Jean-Louis Brugui?re, was given the go-ahead late last year to pursue Gaddafi for "complicity in voluntary homicide," complicating France's advocacy...
...however, the law has been changed to allow suits against certain states, including Libya. While they have been on hold pending the outcome of the Scottish criminal case, they are likely to get some impetus from the guilty ruling. According to plaintiff's lawyer Mark Zaid, $1 billion in Libyan assets are frozen in the U.S. and could be seized in case of a judgment; the plaintiffs are demanding far more than that...
...Lockerbie trial's star witness, Libyan double agent Abdul Majid Giaka, was a good catch. "He wasn't just a one-time asset," says a U.S. intelligence official. "He was providing information to us on other matters." But to the Scottish judges in Camp Zeist, he was hopeless. "We are unable to accept Abdul Majid as a credible and reliable witness," they ruled. For his contradictory and unconvincing performance on the stand, they rejected Giaka's testimony linking the Libyan defendants to the bombing; as a direct result, one of the two accused, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, walked free...
CONVICTED. ABDEL BASSET ALI AL-MEGRAHI, former head of Libyan aviation security, of the murder of 270 people killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; by a Scottish tribunal in the Netherlands. Al-Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison. His co-defendant, LAMEN KHALIFA FHIMAH, was acquitted owing to insufficient evidence...