Judges Begin Deliberating Lockerbie Case

After 84 days of courtroom testimony, attorneys for two Libyans accused of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 completed their closing arguments Thursday and the panel of judges hearing the case began deliberations.

Attorney William Taylor said the prosecution’s case was based on “frayed and broken” strands of circumstantial evidence, and he urged the three Scottish judges to find the defendants not guilty.

“The strands are mere threads,” Taylor said. “Some are frayed. Some were broken during examination, and others turned out not to have been joined at all.”

Defendants Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, 48, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 44, are accused of planting plastic explosives on the New York-bound flight that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people, most of them American.

Taylor, representing Megrahi, charged that “thoroughly unreliable” prosecution witnesses concocted evidence against the defendants.

The prosecution argued that Megrahi and Fhimah were Libyan intelligence agents working for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta when they executed the attack using a radio-cassette recorder filled with plastic explosives. They said the men sent the bomb in an unaccompanied suitcase from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was transferred to London and loaded onto Flight 103.

Fhimah’s lawyer, Richard Keen, said that the prosecution had failed to prove that his client was a party to any plot to blow up the aircraft and kill its occupants, and that the case required great leaps of faith.

“We have an inference upon an inference upon an inference upon an inference, leading to an inference,” Keen told the special court at Camp Zeist, a former U.S. air base in the Netherlands.

Taylor attacked the credibility of star prosecution witness Abdul Majid Abdul Razkaz Abdul-Salam Giaka, a former CIA double agent who is living in the United States under the federal witness-protection program. Giaka claimed that Fhimah once showed him a desk drawer full of explosives at his Luqa Airport office, and he said he was asked by another Libyan security agent to explore the possibility of putting an unaccompanied bag onto a British aircraft.

“He has the most suspect of motives,” Taylor said, suggesting that Giaka’s testimony came in exchange for a U.S. visa and a share of a multimillion-dollar FBI reward.

Taylor charged that Edwin Bollier, a Swiss manufacturer of timers who tied the Libyans to the timers used in the bombing, was a “liar and a fantasist--prone to invention.”

The defendants have suggested that the bombing was the work of Palestinian extremists in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a group with links to the former East German Stasi secret police. Taylor argued that Bollier had provided timers to the Stasi as well as to the Libyan government.

In their closing argument last week, prosecutors said they had made a sound circumstantial case against the defendants.

To the surprise of trial watchers, the defense didn’t mount its own case in support of the Palestinian scenario but focused on poking holes in the prosecution’s arguments.

The Libyans, who are being tried under Scottish law, face life imprisonment if convicted. Scottish law allows for three possible verdicts: guilty, not guilty and not proven.

Presiding judge Lord Sutherland said the court would reconvene Jan. 30 to announce a verdict date or at least any progress toward one.

“There is a great deal of material to consider, and it will take us some considerable time . . . to arrive at a verdict,” he said.

Relatives of the Lockerbie victims greeted news of deliberations with nervousness.

“At moments it seems we’ve definitely won, and at moments it feels as if we’ve definitely lost,” said Daniel Cohen of Cape May, N.J., whose only daughter, Theodora, died in the bombing.

“The case looked good to us,” he said. “It is a circumstantial case that would work in the U.S., where murderers can go to jail without a body. The question is whether the Scottish judges need fingerprints and DNA and video of the defendants putting the bomb in the bag. It was a good case, but is it enough?”