Investigators from the United States and Scotland have identified two Libyan suspects believed to have been involved in the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing.
The bombing killed 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988 as it was traveling from London to New York.
Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was jailed for life in 2001, and remains the only person to have ever been convicted over the bombing. Megrahi, who always claimed his innocence, died in Libya in 2012 after being released by the Scottish government after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.
“The Lord Advocate has today … issued an international letter of request to the Libyan attorney general in Tripoli which identifies the two Libyans as suspects in the bombing of flight Pan Am 103,” a spokesman from the Scottish Crown Office said Thursday.
“The Lord Advocate and the U.S. attorney general are seeking the assistance of the Libyan judicial authorities for Scottish police officers and the FBI to interview the two named suspects in Tripoli,” he added.
In 2003, former Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi accepted his country’s responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to the victims’ families, but never actually admitted to personally ordering the attack.
Last year, Scotland’s top prosecutor said no new evidence had emerged to back up Megrahi’s family’s belief that he was wrongly prosecuted, but because of the violence throughout Libya after Gaddafi’s fall, attempts to find accomplices of the bombing were hampered.
Of the 270 total fatalities, 189 were American citizens and there were 16 crew members. The attack was the deadliest act of terror against the U.S. prior to the 9/11 attacks that would take place nearly 13 years later.
(h/t Reuters)
