A US court has postponed the trial of a Libyan man accused of involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, citing the emergence of new evidence.
Jury selection was scheduled to begin next Wednesday in the federal trial of Abu Aqila Muhammad Masood Khair al-Maryami in Washington, D.C. This is his first trial in the United States regarding the December 21, 1988 bombing. The stay order issued by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich did not specify the nature of the newly discovered evidence. Al-Mirimi is a former Libyan intelligence official in the United States accused of making the bomb that brought down the plane, killing 270 people, most of them Americans.
Two other defendants, both Libyan intelligence agents, were tried before a panel of Scottish judges at a former US military base in the Netherlands in 2000. The court convicted one and acquitted the other, but the identity of the possible bomb maker remained a mystery for years.
