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Judges Start Quest For Lockerbie Truth
CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (News Agencies) - The fate of two Libyans charged with the murder of 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing now rests with three seasoned Scottish judges plowing back through 10,000 pages of complex, circumstantial testimony.
After 84 days of courtroom drama, the High Court judges retired Thursday to decide whether Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah are guilty of downing Pan American Flight 103 over southwest Scotland on December 21, 1988.
"It is quite apparent that a very great deal of material needs to be considered," said presiding judge Lord Ranald Sutherland as the trial entered its climax stage.
In closing arguments, defense lawyers William Taylor and Richard Keen called for their clients to be acquitted, saying the circumstantial evidence on which Crown prosecutors have built their case is fundamentally flawed.
"We have inference upon inference upon inference, leading to an inference," Keen said Thursday. He also joined Taylor is challenging the honesty and credibility of key witnesses.
Sutherland said the court would reconvene January 30th, when the date for a verdict could be announced.
In the meantime, Sutherland and colleagues Lord Coulsfield and Lord MacLean will sift through 10,000 pages of testimony from 231 witnesses heard since the biggest murder trial in British legal history opened May 3rd.
Under an agreement between Britain, the United States and Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, the trial is being held at a former NATO air base in Holland that has been temporarily declared Scottish soil.
Megrahi, 48, and Fhimah, 44, remain inside a custom-built prison at Camp Zeist that is equipped with a small mosque and Arabic satellite television.
The trial so far is estimated to have cost 60 million pounds sterling ($90 million), with the United States picking up a big chunk of the tab. Most of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 were U.S. citizens.
It is alleged that Megrahi and Fhimah were Libyan secret agents who put an unaccompanied suitcase bomb on a flight out of Malta tagged for transfer via Frankfurt onto the New York-bound Boeing 747 at London Heathrow airport.
"The Crown's case is all circumstantial; therefore it was going to be difficult. They made the best they can of it, I think," said John Grant, an international law specialist at the University of Glasgow.
"We don't know what facts the judges are going to find established, which witnesses they're going to find credible and reliable," Grant said.
In his closing argument last week, Crown prosecutor Alastair Campbell acknowledged: "This is a circumstantial case. The evidence comes from a number of sources which, when taken together, provided a corroborated case."
But this week defense lawyers Taylor and Keen countered that the prosecution had never proven that someone else could have planted the bomb somewhere else.
From the very start of the trial they had suggested that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) might have been the real perpetrators.
But more details of this alternative theory failed to come to light in court, after the defense announced January 8th that it would not be calling witnesses.
Under Scots law, a murder conviction - which carries a life prison sentence - requires an exceptionally high burden of proof. Three verdicts are possible: guilty, not guilty, or an option of acquittal known as "not proven."
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