Lockerbie bombing suspect taken into US custody

Scottish and U.S. authorities say a Libyan man accused of making the bomb that killed 270 people after it blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 is in United States custody.

Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi was taken into custody about two years after former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr first announced the United States filed charges against him.

A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed that the United States has custody of the suspect.

Mas’ud is expected to make his initial court appearance in a federal court in Washington.

Details about the timing of the hearing will be forthcoming, the spokesperson added.

Expert bomb maker

Court documents described Mas’ud as an expert bomb maker who joined Libya’s External Security Organization intelligence service in the 1970s and took part in a number of operations outside Libya, reaching the rank of colonel.

The families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told the suspect is in U.S. custody, a spokesperson for Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) said on Sunday.

The bomb on board the Boeing 747, which was flying from London to New York City, killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground, the deadliest ever militant attack in Britain.

Co-conspirators

In 1991, two other Libyan intelligence operatives were charged in the bombing: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.

At a Scottish trial before a court at Camp Zeist in The Netherlands, Megrahi was found guilty of the bombing and was jailed for life in 2001.

He was later released because he was suffering from cancer and died at his home in Tripoli in 2012.

Fhimah was acquitted of all charges, but Scottish prosecutors have maintained that Megrahi did not act alone.

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In 2020 the United States unsealed criminal charges against Mas’ud, a suspected third conspirator, adding he had worked as a technical expert in building explosive devices.

At the time of the bombing, U.S. investigators uncovered evidence that one of the possible suspects went by the name of “Abu Agela Masud,” but were unable to locate him, according to a sworn statement by an FBI agent in support of the government’s criminal complaint.

Decades later, the FBI obtained a copy of a Sept. 12, 2012, interview of Mas’ud conducted by a Libyan law enforcement officer while he was in custody there.

During the interview, Mas’ud “admitted to building the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 and to working with Megrahi and Fhimah to execute the plot,” the FBI agent’s statement says.

Mas’ud also told the interviewer he was involved in other similar plots and said the bombing was ordered by Libyan intelligence leadership.

He also said former Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi, who was killed by rebels in October 2011, “thanked him and other members of the team for their successful attack on the United States.”

 The agent who filed the statement said the FBI was able to corroborate Mas’ud’s confession through the course of its investigation.

Reuters /Zainab Sa’id