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William Barr: optimistic that the Libyan government will comply with the request
Photo: POOL / REUTERS
32 years after the Lockerbie plane attack, there is renewed movement in the investigation.
US Attorney General William Barr announced in Washington that the US wanted to bring another suspect to justice in the case.
It was a former Libyan intelligence worker who is said to have built the bomb for the attack, said Barr.
The man is in custody in Libya.
The US government will ask the Libyan leadership to extradite him so that he can be tried in the US, Barr said.
He is optimistic that the Libyan government will comply with the request.
A US airline Pan Am jumbo jet crashed into the Scottish village of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.
270 people died in the attack, including eleven villagers.
The machine was on its way from London to New York at the time.
Most of the fatalities were Americans.
Barr said the attack was clearly directed against the United States.
So far there has only been one conviction in the case: the Libyan secret service officer Abdel Bassit al-Megrahi.
He was released early from Scottish custody in 2009 because doctors had certified that he had a life expectancy of just a few months.
In 2012 he died of cancer.
His relatives appealed posthumously.
The appeal process is ongoing.
Another suspect from Libya was acquitted at the time.
Barr said the third man had been targeted by investigators in the past - but previously there was insufficient knowledge to take action against him.
The breakthrough was finally brought about by an interrogation of the Libyan authorities, which they transmitted to the USA.
According to the US Department of Justice, the suspect is also said to have been involved in other terrorist plans against the US and the West - including the deadly bomb attack on the West Berlin disco La Belle in 1986. Details were not given.
Russia, Hunter Biden, US election: Barr is against Trump
At what was probably his last press conference as attorney general, Barr, who recently had repeated differences with Donald Trump, kept his distance from the president: Like US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Barr also suspects Russia behind the massive hacker attack on American government institutions.
Barr said it was certain that it was the Russians.
Trump defended Russia on the issue over the weekend and brought China up for discussion as the possible originator of the cyber attack without any evidence.
Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday that Russia would always be suspected if something happened.
It could possibly also be China.
Trump also downplayed the scale of the hacking attack, stating that everything was under control.
According to previous knowledge, hackers infiltrated the systems of various ministries, federal agencies and companies many months ago.
Accordingly, they gained access to the systems using software from SolarWinds.
Barr also failed to comply with Trump's request to appoint a special investigator to investigate the president's baseless election fraud allegations.
The same applies to Trump's claims in the Hunter Biden case: the public prosecutor's office recently started investigations against the son of President-elect Joe Biden.
Here, too, Trump had campaigned for the appointment of a special investigator.
He does not see any need for such a step in the election fraud allegations or in the Hunter Biden case, Barr said.
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