The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case Not Closed

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The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case Not Closed
William Blum - 5/16/2005
The newspapers were filled with pictures of happy relatives of the victims of the December 21, 1988 bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. A Libyan, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, had been found guilty of the crime the day before, January 31, 2001, by a Scottish court in the Hague, though his co-defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. At long last there was going to be some kind of closure for the families.

But what was wrong with this picture?

What was wrong was that the evidence against Megrahi was thin to the point of transparency. Coming the month after the (s)election of George W. Bush, the Hague verdict could have been dubbed Supreme Court II, another instance of non-judicial factors fatally clouding judicial reasoning. The three Scottish judges could not have relished returning to the United Kingdom after finding both defendants innocent of the murder of 270 people, largely from the U.K. and the United States. Not to mention having to face dozens of hysterical victims' family members in the courtroom. The three judges also well knew the fervent desires of the White House and Downing Street as to the outcome. If both men had been acquitted, the United States and Great Britain would have had to answer for a decade of sanctions and ill will directed toward Libya.

One has to read the entire 26,000-word "Opinion of the Court", as well as being very familiar with the history of the case going back to 1988, to appreciate how questionable was the judges' verdict.




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