New York: Former Libyan intelligence officer Abu Aghila Muhammad Masoud, accused in the December 21, 1988 bombing of an airliner in Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, is in American custody. It is not clear how he was brought to America. In 2020, on the 32nd anniversary of the disaster, the US Department of Justice announced that Masood had been indicted.
Lockerbie is considered the second deadliest air raid in US history. Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, crashed in a bomb blast over Lockerbie, Scotland. 243 passengers, 16 cabin crew and 11 Lockerbie residents were killed. 189 of the passengers were American citizens. The Simtex bomb, hidden in a cassette player and placed in the cargo hold area of the plane, detonated at an altitude of 31,000 feet.
The bomb is believed to have been planted at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. In November 1991, British and American agencies stated that Libyan citizens named Abdul Basit Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khaifa Fima were behind the explosion. After a 10-year trial, Megrahi was sentenced to death by Scottish judges in an impartial court in the Netherlands. Megrahi, who had been imprisoned in Scotland since 2001, was released in 2009 following battling cancer and died in 2012. In August 2003, Libya, which denied involvement in the conspiracy, admitted its guilt and agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims and the airlines.
The Libyan Prime Minister later said that the charges and compensation were to lift the embargo. Some see the Lockerbie incident as revenge for the 1986 US missile attack on Libya that killed Gaddafi’s young daughter and the 1988 accidental shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US.
