Word: megrahi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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," he said...
...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 his expected appeal is heard, is likely to be among those wondering why the Libyan leader didn't speak up sooner...
...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...
...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...