Word: scottishly
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...murderous policy, not just its executors-has become imperative since the war crimes trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, and it stands at the heart of the ongoing international 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...
...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...
...Scottish judges didn't get into any of that. In its closely reasoned ruling, the court laid out why it believed evidence that the bomb, concealed in a Toshiba radio-cassette player, was placed in a brown Samsonite suitcase amid clothes purchased in Malta. Exactly how that suitcase was spirited aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt is unknown, but the court was convinced that it had been, that it was transferred to a Pan Am flight in Frankfurt and then in London again to the New York-bound plane. The court put ample credence in Maltese shopowner Tony Gauci...
...going nowhere after the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that a sovereign state like Libya was immune from U.S. jurisdiction. Since then, 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...