|
Libyan Lodges Appeal Against Lockerbie Verdict
EDINBURGH, Feb 7 (News Agencies) - Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, lodged an appeal Wednesday against last week's guilty verdict, the Scottish courts service said.
A spokeswoman for the service said the formal notice of intention to appeal was lodged at the Justiciary Office in Edinburgh.
Megrahi was found guilty by three Scottish judges in Camp Zeist a week ago of the murder of 270 people killed when a Pan Am jet blew up over the town of Lockerbie, southwest Scotland, in December 1988.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but had been expected to appeal.
His co-accused, fellow Libyan Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted and was celebrated as a national hero when he returned home a day after the verdict.
Jim Swire, a spokesman for the British relatives of Pan Am 103, said: "We anticipated that this would happen and the matter is now back in the hands of the Scottish court."
Megrahi, for his part, remains in custody in Camp Zeist, a former military base in the Netherlands converted into a Scottish court for the marathon case, which began in May last year.
Under Scottish law, defense lawyers have two weeks from the verdict date in which to lodge notice of intention to appeal. In this case they did it within one week.
They then have a further six weeks in which to deliver full details of the appeal, outlining the grounds on which it is based.
It is then considered by a single judge who weeds out worthless appeals.
If he or she grants permission to appeal the case will proceed to the High Court. If this happens, five judges will hear the case at Camp Zeist, where Megrahi will remain until it concludes.
The judges hearing the case decided that Megrahi was a Libyan intelligence agent, obtained electronic timers and somehow smuggled the suitcase bomb onto an Air Malta plane from Valetta to Frankfurt.
There it was transferred onto a Pan Am plane to London's Heathrow airport, and finally onto the doomed jet bound for New York.
The explosion ripped open the plane, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 people in Lockerbie itself as blazing debris rained down.
Libya is adamant that Megrahi is innocent.
On Monday, Libyan leader Moamer Qaddafi insisted the judges had wrongfully convicted Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing after pressure from U.S. and British intelligence.
He added: "We thus consider him abducted and taken hostage to terrorize the Libyan people and to blackmail them even more."
Clare Connelly, an expert in criminal law who followed the Lockerbie trial, said Wednesday's notice of intention to appeal was a formality.
"In Scotland there are only two grounds for appeal - where there's been a miscarriage of justice or where new evidence has come to light.
"When the grounds [of any appeal] are lodged they will not be made public," she added.
|
