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Lockerbie Prosecutors Go For Murder Conviction
by Kevin McElderry
CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (AFP) - Prosecutors in the Lockerbie trial went for an all-or-nothing murder conviction against two Libyans charged over the 1988 mid-air bombing as they began summing-up their case Tuesday.
As the marathon trial entered its final phase, deputy prosecutor Alastair Campbell asked for two of the three charges, conspiracy to murder and breach of aviation security, to be dropped.
Only the murder charge would remain. It carries an automatic life sentence but is the most difficult to prove.
"In my submission," he told the court here, "the Crown has proved the case against each of the accused beyond reasonable doubt."
The hearing was later adjourned and will resume early Wednesday.
In slow, deliberate terms, Campbell sought to give the first comprehensive picture of how the bomb plot was conceived, planned and carried out, from the purchasing of electronic timers to how the bomb was placed on the jet.
The evidence was largely circumstantial, he admitted, but it came "from a number of sources which when taken together provide a corroborative case both as to the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrators.
"Mathematical certainty is neither necessary nor achievable."
Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, 44, and Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 48, both deny the murder charges. They are said to have been working for Libyan intelligence at the time of the bombing.
They are accused of planting the bomb which exploded on December 21, 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and 11 people on the ground as blazing debris rained down on Lockerbie, southwest Scotland.
Clare Connolly, an expert in Scottish criminal law following the case here, said dropping charges was significant. "It shows that the prosecution is very confident."
The trial opened on May 3rd last year at Camp Zeist, a former U.S. base in the Netherlands where a special court is sitting under Scottish law.
The prosecution says the accused smuggled the device, contained in a radio cassette recorder in a suitcase, onto a plane from Malta to Frankfurt.
Records showed that an unaccompanied bag was then transferred at Frankfurt from that plane onto the doomed Pan Am flight via London to New York.
In his summing-up, Campbell pointed to key evidence from earlier stages in the trial.
Edwin Bollier, a co-owner of Zurich firm MEBO, admitted selling electronic timers to Libya and elsewhere in the 1980s.
Campbell said it was clear Megrahi was "a high-ranking officer" in Libyan intelligence who "would have had access to such a timer in December 1988."
Tony Gauci, a Maltese trader, testified seeing Megrahi, or someone like him, buying clothes from his shop on December 7th that year.
According to the prosecution, those clothes were later proved to have been in the bomb suitcase.
Abdul Majid Giaka, a Libyan double agent working for the CIA, testified to seeing Fhimah and Megrahi at Malta's Luqa airport on December 20th with a brown hard-case suitcase similar to that which contained the bomb.
However, he did not mention seeing a bomb or the case being put on board a plane.
Defense lawyers say there is no proof Megrahi and Fhimah were involved and that a Palestinian group, not Libya, was probably behind the bomb.
They claim a document they failed to get from Syria would have implicated the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) and another group.
The prosecution will conclude Wednesday morning. Defense lawyers will then have their final say, which could last to Monday.
No verdict is expected for several weeks.
There are three possible verdicts - guilty, not guilty or "not proven," a peculiarity of Scottish law that basically amounts to an acquittal.
Connolly said it was unlikely the judges would give a "not proven" verdict.
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