Nations Hope Veil Lifts From Libya’s History of Terrorism
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: August 29, 2011
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LONDON — Television footage of the only man convicted in theLockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader’s war with the Western world?
LONDON — Television footage of the only man convicted in theLockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader’s war with the Western world?
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The issues range far beyond the bombing in 1988 that killed 259 people aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as well as 11 people on the ground, though many questions remain about who, including Colonel Qaddafi himself, may have ordered it.
Two-thirds of the Lockerbie victims were Americans, and their families have petitioned for years for an accounting, including prosecutions, for those in the Libyan chain of command who knew of the plans for the Pan Am attack, and commissioned the events that led eventually to Abdel Basset Ali el-Megrahi, the convicted bomber, facing a Scottish court.
There are Americans and Germans, victims or relatives of victims in a 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing, who have pressed for years for answers about that attack, and for compensation from Libya. Irish victims and their families have petitioned for years for an accounting for Libya’s shipment of arms and explosives to the Irish Republican Army used in some of its bombings.
In Britain, the government wants help in identifying, and extraditing, the Libyan diplomat who used an AK-47 rifle in 1984 to shoot from the Libyan Embassy and kill a 25-year-old police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, as she monitored anti-Qaddafi protests outside. In Lebanon, powerful members of the Shiite community want Libya to account for the disappearance in Tripoli in 1978 of a prominent Shiite religious leader, Moussa al-Sadr, who visited Libya at Colonel Qaddafi’s invitation.
Two years after Mr. Megrahi was released amid acrimony from a Scottish prison and flown to Tripoli aboard Colonel Qaddafi’s personal aircraft, the prospects of any further punishment for him appear slim — and not only because of his medical condition. Although questions remained about the Megrahi family’s claims that he was “close to death,” other factors seemed stacked against any further accounting, at least outside Libya.
Britain’s Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, took office last year and apologized at the White House for the previous government’s role in the release of Mr. Megrahi, which he described as “completely wrong.” But on Monday, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, Andrew Mitchell, said that with Mr. Megrahi’s death apparently near, the issue was “academic.” In a separate news conference, William Hague, the foreign secretary, focused his attention on the case of Ms. Fletcher, the police officer killed in London.
A weekend report in The Daily Telegraph, citing a leaked Scotland Yard document, said the police had witnesses identifying the killer as Abdulmagid Salah Ameri, one of 30 Libyans deported from Britain after Ms. Fletcher’s killing. The report said Mr. Ameri had vanished after returning to Libya. Mr. Hague said the Transitional National Council, the rebel authority now recognized by Britain as Libya’s new government, had given assurances that it would cooperate in investigating the Fletcher killing.
Any chance of Mr. Megrahi facing a return to Britain was dismissed by the Scottish government on Monday. Scottish officials were condemned in Britain and the United States for the 2009 decision to release Mr. Megrahi on compassionate grounds only eight years into a 27-year minimum sentence, a step they justified with medical reports saying he was unlikely to live more than three months. But now that Mr. Megrahi has defied that prognosis, Scotland’s prime minister, Alex Salmond, is still saying his government will resist calls for Mr. Megrahi’s extradition.
“Mr. al-Megrahi remains under Scottish jurisdiction, and the only people with any legal entitlement to call for his return to Scotland are the Scottish government,” he said. “Whatever the U.K. prime minister or deputy foreign minister or American senators or lawyers have to say about the matter is neither here nor there.”
“This is a new day in Libya,” the spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said on Monday. “This is a guy with blood on his hands, the lives of innocents. Libya itself under Qaddafi made a hero of this guy. Presumably, a new, free, democratic Libya would have a different attitude towards a convicted terrorist.”
James P. Kreindler, a lawyer in New York who has represented most of the American families in the Lockerbie case, said in a telephone interview that the families remained furious about Mr. Megrahi’s release and “would like to see him die,” though they would prefer to hear a confession “about who was giving him his orders and how it was planned.”
Mr. Kreindler said the United States could seek Mr. Megrahi’s extradition on the ground that releasing him was a violation of an agreement between the United States and Britain. But he said, “As a practical matter, I can’t see it ever happening, because it looks like Megrahi is almost dead and the new Libyan government, or would-be government, has its hands full.”
The mother of one Lockerbie victim said she hoped, at the least, that Mr. Megrahi would be questioned about Colonel Qaddafi’s involvement. “I’ll personally be very surprised if Megrahi is ever tried again,” said the mother, Susan Cohen, of Cape May Court House, N.J., who lost her only child, Theodora, 20. But for decades, Libya, she said, was a country where “you can’t cross the street without Qaddafi’s permission, and he must have given authorization for the bombing.”
In Libya on Monday, leaders of the provisional government clarified that although they would not extradite Mr. Megrahi, they were already beginning their own investigations into acts of terrorism sponsored by Colonel Qaddafi. Mohamed al Aleggi, justice minister in the provisional government, said it opposed extraditing Mr. Megrahi in part because of the principle that no one should be tried twice for the same crime. But he said the government intended to question him about the Lockerbie bombing and would share any new information.
“We fought this revolution to become a peaceful country, not to go back to being a country that condones terrorism,” said his colleague, Anwar Fekini, who acted as a translator.
Reporting was contributed by David D. Kirkpatrick from Tripoli, Libya, and Steven Lee Myers and Matthew L. Wald from Washington================================================
nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/africa/30megrahi.html?_r
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