A Libyan man accused of constructing the bomb that exploded on a civilian aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 individuals, has been transferred to U.S. custody, in accordance with a report from the Associated Press.
The U.S. Department of Justice first introduced expenses towards Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi in December of 2020 after he was arrested in Libya. Mas’ud could be the primary particular person to face expenses in a U.S. court docket over the terrorist assault.
The Pan-Am flight took off from London on Dec. 21, 1988 and was headed for New York however a bomb, designed within a Toshiba boombox, exploded lower than an hour after takeoff. The crash killed all 259 individuals on board in addition to 11 individuals on the bottom the place it crashed in Lockerbie, destroying houses within the space.
As the AP notes, 190 of the individuals on board had been Americans, together with 35 college students from Syracuse University who had been spending a semester within the UK. Residents from 20 different nations had been additionally killed within the assault.
The Justice Department alleges Mas’ud admitted to the bombing as a member of Libyan intelligence within the Eighties. Moammar Gadhafi, the longtime chief of Libya earlier than his dying in 2011 by the hands of a insurgent militia following NATO airstrikes, reportedly thanked Mas’ud for his work constructing the bomb that destroyed the flight over Scotland.
Click by means of the slideshow for extra photographs from that day and the aftermath. Viewer discretion is suggested.