Lamen Khalifa Fhimah

From Lockerbie to Camp Zeist: The Pan Am 103 Trial

By Raju Chebium
CNN Interactive Correspondent

(CNN) -- On December 21, 1988, New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 exploded 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, 38 minutes after taking off from London. All 259 people on board were killed, including 189 Americans. Eleven people on the ground also died as pieces of the plane, body parts and fire rained from the sky.

Armed with the fragments of a circuit board and a timer, U.S. and British investigators ruled that a bomb, not mechanical failure, had caused the explosion.

"It is the worst case of airline terrorism -- the largest mass murder in the world," said John Grant, a Lockerbie expert and a law professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

More than 11 years after the fact, verdicts were handed down on January 31, 2001, in the case of two Libyans -- Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah -- who were on trial in the Netherlands for the bombing.

Al-Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder. Fhimah was found not guilty.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have said the men, employed by Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, were also Libyan intelligence agents. Lesser charges of conspiracy to murder and violating Britain's 1982 Aviation Security Act were dropped.

The men repeatedly proclaimed innocence, saying they agreed to stand trial to clear their names. They also deny that they worked for Libyan intelligence.

"We are confident of our innocence. We are ready to appear before court because we ... have nothing to be afraid of," al-Megrahi said on a British television program in 1998.

The pair stood trial in a Scottish court in Camp Zeist, a former U.S. air base 20 miles south of the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. The Dutch declared 30 acres of the 100-acre base Scottish territory so that the trial could be held in a neutral country as Al-Megrahi, Fhimah and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had wanted. There was no jury; three judges presided, with a fourth as reserve. The case lasted the better part of a year and could ultimately cost as much as $90 million.