The Libyan Abu Agila Masud has been handed over to the United States authorities to stand trial for the Lockerbie attack (Scotland), which caused 270 deaths on December 21, 1988. Libya, which kept him in custody, has agreed to his extradition .
Abu Agila Muhammad Masud Jeir Al-Marimi is accused of making the bomb that detonated a Pan Am jumbo jet Boeing 747 flying from London to New York at an altitude of about 9,500 meters.
The explosion killed all 259 people on board: 243 passengers and 16 crew members, including 190 Americans.
The crash of the plane's wreckage claimed the lives of 11 Lockerbie residents who were on the ground, many of them in their homes.
The attack remains the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom and the second deadliest for Americans, second only to that of September 11, 2001. Pieces of the plane were scattered over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers and the remains of 17 victims were never located.
The attack led to increased security measures and controls at airports.
The initial US-UK investigation already pointed to a man named Abu Agila Masud as a suspect early on, but he was not identified or located at the time.
A documentary broadcast by PBS in 2015 and produced by the brother of one of the victims pointed to him as responsible for the tempted.
A few years ago, investigators learned that he had been detained in Libya after the fall of Muammar al-Gaddafi's regime.
Masud remained in Libyan custody, detained for other crimes, and confessed to Libyan police in 2012 his involvement in the attack.
terrorism charges
In 2020, former United States Attorney General William P. Barr filed charges against him for crimes of terrorism.
According to the indictment, Masud made the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am plane and worked with two other accomplices (one convicted and the other acquitted) to carry out the attack.
The Justice Department maintains that the operation was ordered by the leadership of Libyan intelligence and, after the downing of the plane, Gaddafi thanked Masud for the success of the attack against the United States.
In addition to his participation in the Lockerbie attack, Masud was also involved, according to Barr, in the 1986 attack on the LaBelle nightclub in Berlin (West Germany), in which two US soldiers and a Turkish woman died.
The United States went to work to get him transferred to the United States.
According to the authorities, he is already in the custody of agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and must appear before a federal court in Washington.
So far, the only person convicted of the Lockerbie attack was Abdel Baset al Megrahi, also a Libyan, handed over by the Gaddafi regime in 1999 to achieve the lifting of international sanctions for his support for terrorism.
He was tried in the Netherlands under Scottish law, as Gaddafi refused to hand him over to the United States or the United Kingdom.
Al Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment in early 2001, but was later released in 2009 under pressure from Gaddafi, who claimed that the prisoner suffered from terminal cancer with only a few months to live.
He was greeted as a hero in Libya, much to the outrage of the United Kingdom and the United States, and ended up dying in 2012.
Although he always pleaded not guilty, according to the sentence that convicted him, he checked a suitcase at Luqa airport in Malta (the base of operations for Libyan airlines), where he worked, to Frankfurt, and from there to Heathrow, in London, where the explosive device, hidden in a boom box and with a timer activated, boarded Pan Am Airline Flight 103 bound for New York.
The main piece of evidence against Al Megrahi, a senior official of the Libyan secret services, was the statement of Anthony Gauci, a Maltese citizen in whose store the clothes found in the suitcase containing the explosive were purchased.
Another defendant was acquitted in the same trial.
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