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Lockerbie Trial Put Off Again
The Lockerbie trial was postponed again for yet another week to allow studies on new evidence and witnesses, reports reaching in Brussels said on Wednesday.
The postponement was requested by the defense team to make time for investigations on new information on who had manufactured and planted the suitcase bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people.
The trial of the two Libyans accused of the terrorist attack was thus postponed for a fourth week after less than an hour of hearings on Tuesday at Camp Zeist, The Netherlands.
Defense Attorney Bill Taylor told the Scottish court on Dutch soil that investigators were interviewing witnesses in the Middle East, the United States, Germany and an unnamed European country.
The new information established a link between the mid-air bombing and a Palestinian group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the attorney said.
He added that a request to subpoena a number of individuals needed to produce evidence might be made this week.
Court hearings have been postponed time and again since the prosecution and the defense were given 90 volumes of new information from two unidentified foreign countries, sources said.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah are accused of planting a suitcase bomb onto a Frankfurt-bound Malta airplane and the unaccompanied suitcase was transferred to the Pan Am airliner in the German city.
The two accused Libyans were working as Libyan Arab Airlines employees in Malta at the time of the incident.
The panel of three Scottish judges must eventually choose between three verdicts: guilty, not guilty or not proven, at the end of this marathon trial that got underway on May 3 this year after almost 12 years of investigations and preparations.
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