Prosecutors Ask Court for Murder Convictions in Lockerbie Bombing

Prosecutors summarizing their case in the eight-month Lockerbie trial Tuesday urged Scottish judges to drop lesser charges and convict the two Libyan defendants of murder for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Attorney Alastair Campbell acknowledged that the prosecution case was circumstantial but said that the accused had been proved guilty “beyond reasonable doubt” by the evidence and testimony of more than 200 witnesses.

“Mathematical certainty is neither necessary nor achievable,” Campbell told the panel of Scottish judges at a special high-security court in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, he insisted, “the evidence comes from a number of sources which, when taken together, provided a corroborated case both as to the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrators.”

The case brought by the United States and Britain alleges that Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah are Libyan intelligence agents who worked for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta when they sent an unaccompanied, bomb-laden suitcase to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was transferred to London and loaded onto the New-York bound Pan Am flight. The Boeing 747 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, most of them American.

Megrahi, 48, and Fhimah, 44, deny any involvement in the bombing, which they claim was the work of Palestinian extremists based in Syria.

Legal experts said Tuesday that while it is common to amend an indictment at the end of a trial, the fact that prosecutors were going for a murder conviction over easier-to-prove charges of conspiracy and violation of aviation security signaled their confidence in winning the case.

“This is a very significant move because murder is harder to prove than conspiracy,” said law professor Clare Connelly of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who has monitored the trial. “It suggests they are confident that enough evidence has been heard to prove that the accused are guilty of planting the bomb.”

However, defense lawyers had seemed to signal their own confidence Monday when they abruptly closed their case after calling just three witnesses. They had been expected to put Megrahi on the stand but suddenly opted not to--a move widely interpreted to mean they felt the prosecution’s case was so weak that his testimony was unnecessary.

Another explanation may be that defense attorneys were rebuffed in their efforts to enlist the Syrian government’s help in proving Palestinian involvement. Syria refused to cooperate with a request to turn over what had been billed as a key document, leaving the defense without a “smoking gun.”

In summing up the prosecution case Tuesday, Campbell began with the Dec. 21, 1988, explosion at 31,000 feet that spread flaming wreckage across “vast tracts of countryside” in Scotland and northern England.

He took the judges through the evidence they have heard since the trial began May 3, including the recovery of fragments of a Samsonite suitcase said to have contained the bomb planted in a radio-cassette recorder, and pieces of the clothing in which the music player allegedly was wrapped.

Campbell reminded the judges of the testimony of Maltese shop owner Tony Gauci, who identified Megrahi as the man who had bought the clothing.

The prosecutor also said evidence linked Megrahi, a “high-ranking officer” in Libyan intelligence, to timers meant for use with explosives that had been purchased from a firm in Switzerland.

“Given Megrahi’s relationship with officers who ordered the timers, his relationship with the manufacturers of the timers and with officers involved in testing them, it may be concluded that Mr. Megrahi and others would have had access to such a timer in December 1988,” Campbell said.

He said the prosecution had shown that Fhimah and Megrahi traveled together to Malta on the eve of the bombing and that Fhimah’s diary had included a reminder to himself to pick up Air Malta luggage tags and give them to Megrahi.

“The only inference to be drawn from obtaining the tag was to send a bag unaccompanied,” he said.

Campbell is to conclude his closing argument today, and the defense is to begin its argument Thursday.

The judges have a choice of three verdicts: guilty, not guilty and not proven.