Libyan Bomb Suspects Appear Before a Judge

To prove to the world that the suspects are not dead and have not disappeared, as some U.S. intelligence sources speculated last week, the Libyan government on Tuesday paraded before invited Western reporters the two men accused by the United States and Britain in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

But a Libyan investigative magistrate assigned to the case said he will not allow the men--Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah--to be extradited to the West for trial because Libya does not allow its citizens to be extradited involuntarily.

In any case, said Ahmad Tahir Zawi, the bespectacled jurist, American and British officials have not provided him with evidence that he requested for his own investigation into the case.

But the judge did not rule out the possibility that the two men, both employees of Libyan Arab Airlines, might be tried before an “international and neutral commission” somewhere outside Libya but not in the United States or Britain.

Megrahi, 39, and Fhimah, 35, were also produced earlier in the week for smaller groups of Western reporters. But they had only cameo appearances in the chaotic media spectacle that unfolded Tuesday at the Libyan Supreme Court, a handsome marble-fronted building with its own orange grove and flower garden on Tripoli’s seafront.

The two Libyans were indicted on Nov. 14 by a federal U.S. grand jury in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 259 people on board and 11 on the ground when it exploded and crashed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie. The American indictment charges that they planted a suitcase containing a radio stuffed with plastic explosives on a flight bound for Frankfurt, Germany. Authorities say the suitcase was later loaded onto the fatal Pan Am plane that rained debris over a huge swath of the frozen Scottish countryside.

Last week, Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, cited Arab intelligence operatives in the Middle East to assert that Megrahi and Fhimah had disappeared and may have been executed on the orders of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi to prevent them from testifying in the Lockerbie case. The story had the effect of flushing the Libyans out of hiding for press appearances.

In an encounter on Monday, two reporters with the London Daily Mail newspaper, along with a British lawyer hired by the Libyan government to help in the defense of the two men, were invited into the homes of the accused terrorists.

“Two days ago,” Megrahi reportedly told the British reporters, “it was said that I had been killed. That was false information. There is more false information about the charges.”

Fhimah, alleged to be the author of a diary that Western investigators claim is key to their case against the Libyans, told the British reporters that he was saddened by his indictment in the Lockerbie case. “It hurt me because I am in the airline business,” he was quoted as saying.

On Tuesday, the men were allowed only a brief appearance before photographers. Only Megrahi responded to the relentless queries from the assembled journalists. “I just want to say we are not guilty,” he said in English.

Supposedly under house arrest, the men were escorted into the courthouse by guards with assault rifles strapped to their shoulders.

Zawi, the Libyan judge, gave a brief news conference. He said he meets regularly with the two men and has ordered their passports confiscated.