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WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (AP) — A Libyan man suspected of involvement in the 1988 airliner bombing has been taken into U.S. custody, Sunday’s announcement refocused attention on the notorious terrorist attack and the long-running effort to track down those responsible .
The suspect, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is accused of making the bomb that destroyed a Pam Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
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The attack killed all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. Most of the victims were Americans.
Thirty-four years later, public memory of the attack has largely faded, though developments in the case have intermittently brought it back into the headlines. To recap:
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How did the Lockerbie attack happen?
On December 21, 1988, less than half an hour after Pam Am Flight 103 departed London Heathrow Airport for New York, a bomb planted on Pam Am Flight 103 exploded.
The attack destroyed jets carrying citizens of 21 countries. Among the dead were 190 Americans. They included 35 students from Syracuse University in upstate New York who were flying home after completing a semester abroad. To this day, the bombing remains the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil.
Investigators were quick to link the bombings to Libya, whose government has long been hostile to the U.S. and other Western governments.
The attack came about two years after Libya was blamed for a bombing of a discotheque in Berlin that killed three people, including two U.S. soldiers, and wounded dozens more.
Who is responsible?
In 1991, the United States accused two Libyan intelligence agents of planting a bomb on a plane. But the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, has refused to hand them over. After protracted negotiations, Libya agreed in 1999 to hand them over to be prosecuted by a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands.
One of the men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Another, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was found not guilty. In 2009, after Al-Megrahi was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Scottish officials released him on humanitarian grounds. He died in Libya in 2012.
Meanwhile, families of the victims have filed lawsuits against Gaddafi and his regime, demanding that they be held accountable.
In 2003, Gaddafi reached a settlement with Libya, formally acknowledging responsibility for the bombing, giving up terrorism, and paying compensation to the families of the victims.
Despite the rapprochement with the U.S. government, the hunt for others responsible for the bombing largely stalled until Gaddafi was ousted in 2011.
What led investigators to MASUD?
After Gaddafi’s ouster, Masood, a longtime explosives expert for the country’s intelligence service, was detained by Libyan law enforcement. In 2017, U.S. officials received copies of interviews with Libyan authorities shortly after Masood was arrested.
In that interview, U.S. officials said, Masood admitted to making the bomb used in the Pan Am attack and cooperating with two men charged earlier to plant it on the plane. He said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence, and Gaddafi thanked him and others after the attack, according to an FBI affidavit.
In late 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against Masood.
Still, with Masood in Libya’s custody, his indictment remains largely theoretical. US and Scottish officials have pledged to work towards his extradition so he can stand trial.
It was unclear Sunday how Masood was detained by the United States. He will be the first to appear in a U.S. court to prosecute the assault. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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