The suspect of Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack has been arrested after 34 years.
A spokesman for the US Department of Justice confirmed that Abu Aqeel Muhammad Massoud, the bomb maker who was accused of killing 270 passengers of a plane in British soil in 1988, has been arrested and will be tried in the District Court of Columbia.
This bomb, which is said to have been made by Massoud, killed 259 passengers and 11 crew members of Pan Am Flight 103; The flight was flying over Lockerbie in Scotland at the time of the explosion.
Although US officials have not provided details on how Massoud was captured, it was announced last month that gunmen had abducted him from his residence in Tripoli.
Massoud was not charged until 2020 for this terrorist attack, which is considered the deadliest attack on British soil, but following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s government in 2012 and the arrest of Massoud at that time, the United States demanded his extradition based on the confession he made before the Libyan authorities. He became According to the American authorities, Massoud has confessed to making a bomb and collaborating with two other people to carry out a terrorist attack under the supervision of Libyan intelligence.
Massoud’s tracking began after the death of Abdulbasit Ali al-Maqrahi, the previous suspect in the case, who was a Libyan intelligence agent. Abdul Basit, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, was released in 2009 under the so-called compassionate provisions due to cancer and died three years later.
Another suspect, Al-Amin Khalifa Fahimeh, who was accused of involvement in the bombing, was acquitted, and now Masoud is the only remaining suspect among the three main suspects. He was previously sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a bomb to be used in another terrorist attack.
