The Persistence of Memory

The man suspected of fashioning the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 is in U.S. custody—so U.S. and Scottish authorities reported on Sunday, 11 December 2022.

A Department of Justice spokesman confirmed Abu Agila Mohammad Masud—a longtime explosives expert for Libya's intelligence service—had been taken into U.S. custody and is “expected to make his initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia."

Kara Weipz, president and spokesperson of the group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, called Masud’s arrest "an amazing feat for the families, and finally justice for our loved ones who were innocent."

Weipz, whose brother perished aboard Pan Am flight 103, added: "To have one of the people responsible for the murder of our loved ones stand trial in the U.S. is one of the most important things to the families and to all of us.”

While Masud is the third Libyan intelligence official U.S. prosecutors have charged in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, he will be, presumably, the first to stand trial in a U.S. courtroom.

In March 1986, after years of escalating tensions between the two nations, the armed forces of Ronald Reagan’s United States and Mummar al-Qaddafi’s Libya fired upon each other in disputed Mediterranean waters off the Libyan coast. Weeks later, a bomb fashioned by Libyan sympathizers was detonated in a West Berlin discotheque popular with American servicemen. The blast killed two U.S. soldiers and injured more than two-hundred others. The event provoked retaliatory U.S. air-strikes of which President Reagan asserted: “We believe that this preemptive action … will not only diminish [Qaddafi’s] capacity to export terror, it will provide him with incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behavior.”

Qaddafi, regrettably, lacked the circumspection and temperance to curb his churlish proclivities, and bided his time while Libyan agents in Malta allegedly cobbled together a Semtex explosive device and concealed it within a radio-cassette player. Veiled in the borrowed raiments of an innocuous electronic device, the bomb was transported to London, where it was loaded—as an unaccompanied article of baggage—on the Clipper Maid of the Seas, a Pan Am Boeing-747-121 registered N739PA acting as Pan Am flight 103.

At 18:25 on the evening of 21 December 1988, the Clipper Maid of the Seas departed Heathrow Airport’s (LHR) Runway 27R bound for New York’s JFK Airport with continuing service to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW). Thirty-seven-minutes later, while northwest-bound at FL310, Pan Am 103’s single radar echo fragmented into five distinctive returns. The bomb had detonated.

None of the 259 souls aboard Pan Am flight 103 survived the explosion and the aircraft’s subsequent disintegration.

The 747’s fuselage, wing-box, and inboard wing sections came to ground in a residential neighborhood of the Scottish town of Lockerbie, destroying three homes, igniting an estimated 200,000-pounds of jet fuel, and killing 11-people.

In all, the destruction of Pan Am flight 103—broadly known as the Lockerbie bombing—claimed 270 lives. The tragedy stands as the deadliest terrorist attack in U.K. history and set into motion a multi-year investigation that resulted in the 2001 conviction and imprisonment of Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was found guilty of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing.

On 21 December 2020, the 32nd anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Abu Agila Mohammad Masud—a Libyan previously convicted in his home country for crafting terrorist bombs—was charged in the U.S. for having built the explosive device that brought down Pan Am flight 103. The criminal complaint brought by U.S. prosecutors was based largely upon a 2012 interview in which Masud confessed to Libyan law enforcement personnel that he’d built the Lockerbie bomb and worked with two co-conspirators to carry out the atrocity. Masud alleged the operation had been ordered by Libyan intelligence, and that he and his accessories had been personally thanked by Qaddafi for orchestrating the attack.

Libyan media outlets reported Masud had been kidnapped from his Tripoli home by armed men on 16 November 2022. The reports cited a public statement in which Masud’s family insinuated Libya’s government had been complicit in the abduction. Asked by a BBC interviewer if Masud’s extradition were possible, Libyan foreign minister Najla Mangoush remarked: "We, as a government, are very open in terms of collaboration in this matter.”

U.S. officials—notwithstanding the peripheral miasma of Libyan media reports and political intrigues—affected an air of reticence, declining to comment upon  the manner in which Masud came to be taken into U.S. custody.

In a comparatively transparent statement, Scotland’s Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service set forth: “Scottish prosecutors and police, working with U.K. government and U.S. colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the sole aim of bringing those who acted along with al-Megrahi to justice.”

FMI: www.victimsofpanamflight103.org