Abu Agila Masud is due to go on trial later this year in Washington DC over the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, keeping one of the most painful cases in Lockerbie history alive more than three decades after the plane exploded. The trial will centre on whether he made the bomb that brought the aircraft down in December 1988.
The attack killed all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, and it has never stopped casting a shadow over the families left behind. One of them is Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the bombing and who has spent years arguing that the story most people settled on was wrong.
Swire believes Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent and says the real answer points elsewhere, to Iran rather than Libya. He befriended al-Megrahi up until his death in 2012 and has said the burning issue was always to get to the truth. That is why he says he will not shut up about what he knows to be true.
The case matters now because it is not only history. A conviction in 2001 did not end the arguments around the bombing, and the appeal process that followed did not settle them for everyone. Al-Megrahi died in 2012, but the dispute over what happened, who was responsible and what evidence can still hold up in court has never gone away.
That is the friction at the heart of Lockerbie. Most victims' families do not agree that al-Megrahi’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice, while Swire remains convinced the blame was misplaced. The deeper the case is examined, the more complicated it becomes, with the bombing sitting in a line of regional violence that includes the shooting down of a commercial airliner by a US battleship five months earlier and a foiled militant cell in Frankfurt before Pan Am flight 103 exploded.
What comes next is straightforward, even if the history is not. Masud’s trial later this year in Washington DC is the next formal test of the evidence, and it will decide whether the case moves another step toward closure or opens the old arguments all over again.
