11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Prosecution 'confident'in Lockerbie case
One day after the defence team for the two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing suddenly announced that they had concluded their case and would not call in any more witnesses, prosecutors also declared on Tuesday that they were dropping two of three charges against the defendants.
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. This carries an automatic life sentence but is the most difficult to prove.
"In my submission," Campbell told the court, "the Crown has proved the case against each of the accused beyond reasonable doubt." 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 committing 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 pleaded innocent to the charges. They are said by prosecutors to have been working on behalf of Libyan intelligence.
The defendants are accused of planting the bomb which exploded on 21 December 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew aboard PanAm flight 103 and 11 people on the ground when blazing debris rained down on Lockerbie in south-west Scotland.
Clare Connolly, an expert in Scottish criminal law following the case, said the dropping of charges was surprising. "It is very significant," she said, "It shows that the prosecution is very confident."
The trial opened on 3 May last year at Camp Zeist, a former US base in the Netherlands where a special court is presiding under Scottish law. This special arrangement was reached as a compromise between Libya, on the one hand, and the United States and Britain, on the other. The US and Britain insisted earlier that the trial had to take place in one of the two countries, and pushed the UN Security Council to impose an air and arms embargo against Tripoli in early 1992. Sanctions were suspended last year after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to hand over the suspects to the Netherlands.
In slow, deliberate terms, the prosecution on Tuesday sought to give the first comprehensive picture of how the bomb plot was conceived, planned and carried out, from the purchasing of electronic timers in the mid-1980s from a Swiss firm to how the bomb was placed on board the jet.
It was clear, he said, that Megrahi was "a high-ranking officer" in Libyan intelligence who "would have had access to such a timer in December 1988."
The prosecution says the accused smuggled the device, which was hidden in a radio cassette recorder in a suitcase, onto a plane which flew from Malta to Frankfurt. Records showed that an unaccompanied bag was then transferred at Frankfurt from that plane onto the doomed PanAm flight from London to New York. Campbell said fibres found on the bomb casing were traced to clothes that had been bought in Malta by Megrahi.
Defence lawyers say there is no proof that Megrahi and Fhimah were involved in the bombing and that a Palestinian militant group -- not Libya -- was probably behind the bomb. They claim a document they failed to obtain from Syria would have implicated the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and another group in the crime.
The PFLP-GC, led by Ahmed Jibril, is based in Damascus. He has denied his organisation was involved in the Lockerbie bombing. The defence team surprised observers on Monday when its members declared that they would not call any more witnesses after failing to get the alleged document. The lawyers had only asked three people to testify in front of the court, compared to more than 200 people summoned by the prosecutors.
The prosecution's summation was expected to conclude yesterday. Lawyers for the accused will then make their final arguments, which could last into next week.
No immediate verdict is expected. Instead, the three judges -- there is no jury -- will likely adjourn for several weeks before a ruling. There are three possible verdicts -- guilty, not guilty or "not proven." The last verdict is a peculiarity of Scottish law which basically amounts to an acquittal while not quite removing all suspicion. Connolly said it was unlikely the judges would hand down a "not proven" verdict as it is too controversial.
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