Man charged with 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing in US custody
According to a report from Associated press.
The US Department of Justice first announced charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi in December 2020 following his arrest in Libya. Mas’ud would be the first person to face charges in US court for the terror attack.
The Pan-Am flight took off from London on December 21, 1988 and was heading for New York, but a bomb, engineered inside a Toshiba boombox, detonated less than an hour after takeoff. The crash killed all 259 people on board as well as 11 people on the ground where it crashed in Lockerbie destroying homes in the area.
As an AP Remarks, 190 of those on board were Americans, including 35 students from Syracuse University who had spent a semester in the UK. Residents of 20 other countries were also killed in the attack.
The Justice Department alleges that Mas’ud admitted to the bombing as a member of Libya’s intelligence services in the 1980s. Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s longtime leader before his death in 2011 at the hands of of a rebel militia following NATO airstrikes, reportedly thanked Mas’ud for his work building the bomb that destroyed the flight over Scotland.
Click through the slideshow for more photos from that day and aftermath. Viewer discretion recommended.
