FBI Testimony Starts Defense in Lockerbie Trial
An FBI agent read interviews with a Palestinian bomb maker in the Lockerbie trial Tuesday as lawyers opened their defense of two Libyans charged in the 1988 downing of a Pan Am jetliner that killed 270 people.
FBI operative Edward Marshman read from transcripts he gathered during Lockerbie investigations in November 1989, almost one year after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Marshman’s interview with Jordanian double agent Marwan Khreesat was introduced by the defense to deflect the blame to two radical Palestinian groups.
Khreesat told the FBI that he supplied five explosive devices to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, one of two groups the defense has implicated in the bombing.
The Popular Front was the focus of early Lockerbie probes before the two suspects, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were indicted in 1991 on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder.
The trial is being conducted at a special Scottish court on a former U.S. air base in the Netherlands.
Under Scottish law, the defendants only have to create sufficient doubt about the accusations to result in a “not proven” ruling, which would be tantamount to an acquittal.
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