Freed Libyan Cheered at Homecoming

The Libyan cleared in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 flew home Thursday to a warm embrace from his leader, Col. Moammar Kadafi, while Scotland’s top prosecutor ruled out the possibility of bringing further criminal charges in the case any time soon.

Chief prosecutor Colin Boyd said that the Scottish court’s decision Wednesday acquitting Lamen Khalifa Fhimah and convicting Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi of murder in the 1988 bombing made it clear that Megrahi did not act alone. But Boyd said he didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges against anyone else.

The 48-year-old Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 20 years, for the explosion on the New York-bound flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, that left 270 people dead.

Boyd told the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh: “My judgment at present is that there is insufficient evidence to justify further proceedings at this time. Clearly, if new evidence becomes available, we will reassess the position.”

In the wake of the split verdict, U.S. and British families are pushing their governments to go after the key questions that the nine-month, nearly $90-million trial failed to answer: Who ordered, planned and paid for the bombing of a U.S. commercial airliner, and why did they do it?

British families called for a government inquiry.

“For many of us, it would help to know the identity and motives of those who ordered the murder of our loved ones,” said Jim Swire, a gaunt, gray-haired doctor who collapsed in the courtroom Wednesday. His daughter Flora died in the explosion.

Many of the U.S. families want to see Kadafi indicted as the mastermind of the crime, even though the United States and Britain in effect guaranteed Kadafi that they wouldn’t go after his government if he handed over the two suspects for trial. He did so in April 1999.

Several British families, however, lean toward the defense argument that the bombing was the work of Syrian-based Palestinian extremists.

Megrahi and Fhimah maintained their innocence throughout the trial, and Megrahi has two weeks to file an appeal.

Fhimah, 44, flew to Tripoli from the Netherlands, where he and Megrahi had been held at a former U.S. military base for the trial in a Scottish court there. He was greeted in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, by a crowd of cheering friends and relatives.

He was then taken to the downtown barracks that the United States bombed 15 years ago in retaliation for a fatal attack on a Berlin nightclub favored by U.S. troops. He received a hero’s welcome at the barracks from Kadafi.

Although Libyan diplomats have insisted that the government will honor the verdict and wants to turn over a new leaf in its relations with the United States and Britain, Kadafi insisted that Megrahi is innocent and said he would provide proof next week.

Kadafi said the West owes him compensation for the “years of sanctions” imposed on Libya by the United Nations, but he didn’t say whether his government would pay the reparations to the Lockerbie families that the United States and Britain have demanded.

The guilty verdict has been widely criticized in Tripoli and throughout much of the Arab world, where the media declared the Lockerbie case closed and demanded an end to the U.N. sanctions, which include a flight ban, arms embargo and diplomatic restrictions.

But British newspapers said Kadafi shares the blame.

The Sun, Britain’s top-selling tabloid, said: “The Lockerbie bomb trail leads directly to Colonel Kadafi’s door. . . . It is impossible that Kadafi did not know about the plot. So he must be brought to book.”