Editor’s Observe: Peter Bergen is CNN’s nationwide safety analyst, a vice chairman at New America and a professor of apply at Arizona State College. Bergen is the creator of “The Price of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed on this commentary are his personal. View extra opinion on CNN.
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Simply days earlier than Christmas in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 flying from London to New York blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 folks – together with 190 People. Thirty-five victims have been Syracuse College college students going house for the vacations after learning overseas. It was essentially the most deadly terrorist assault in opposition to American civilians till the September 11 assaults of 2001.
On Sunday, the US Division of Justice introduced it had taken custody of a Libyan man, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, who’s alleged to have been concerned in making the bomb that blew up the passenger jet. The DOJ described him as a former senior intelligence officer within the regime of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Al-Marimi hasn’t entered a plea within the case. One other Libyan intelligence officer working for Gadhafi, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted in 2001 of the bombing of Pan Am 103. Megrahi died in 2012.
Virtually three and a half many years have handed since Pan Am 103 was introduced down, and lots of could also be questioning why Gadhafi and his intelligence officers carried out this bombing and why they thought they could get away with it.
The context for the bombing of Pan Am 103 was that the administration of former President Ronald Reagan and Gadhafi have been at conflict – not a declared typical conflict, however a conflict nonetheless – fought with terrorist bombs by the Libyans and with airstrikes by the Reagan administration.
Gadhafi was a Soviet navy shopper who espoused an obscure revolutionary philosophy, which made him anathema to the Reagan administration.
Early in his first time period in Might 1981, Reagan ordered the closure of the Libyan embassy in Washington, DC, and the expulsion of Libyan diplomats in america due to “Libyan provocations and misconduct, together with assist for worldwide terrorism.”
On April 5, 1986, a bomb went off within the La Belle discotheque in Berlin that off-duty US servicemen frequented. The bombing killed two US troopers and a Turkish girl, and injured greater than 200 others.
The Reagan administration shortly decided that Libyan intelligence brokers more than likely carried out the assault. In response, Reagan ordered the bombing of a number of targets in Libya, telling the American folks in an handle from the Oval Workplace on April 14, 1986, “At 7 this night Japanese time, air and naval forces of america launched a sequence of strikes in opposition to the headquarters, terrorist amenities and navy belongings that assist Moammar Gadhafi’s subversive actions.”
Gadhafi claimed that his toddler daughter was killed in these strikes (though, lately, this declare about his daughter has been questioned). Different Gadhafi relations have been reported to have been wounded within the strikes, one in every of which hit one of many dictator’s residences.
It took greater than two years for Gadhafi to actual his revenge on the US. Throughout that point, Libyan intelligence brokers assembled a complicated bomb secreted in a radio cassette participant.
The bomb labored on a timer and was hidden in a suitcase. Within the days earlier than rigorous airport safety, the bomb-filled suitcase was positioned by a Libyan agent on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, and the suitcase was then “routed to a feeder flight in Frankfurt sure for London’s Heathrow Airport, the place it was finally loaded onto the doomed jet,” in line with the FBI.
The terrorist plot labored, sadly, very nicely for the Libyans however for one essential element: The bomb was on a timer, and when it blew up, Pan Am 103 was nonetheless flying over land relatively than over the Atlantic. If the aircraft had blown up barely later the jet would have been flying over the ocean, which might have made a forensic investigation of the crash website almost unattainable.
As an alternative, Scottish authorities painstakingly reassembled each piece of the aircraft and its contents that they may get well on their soil. That led investigators to the suitcase that had contained the bomb and, in an astonishing piece of detective work, finally led them to the Libyan intelligence brokers that had overseen the bombing.
On Sunday, the US Division of Justice introduced that Al-Marimi, the alleged bomb maker, was now in American custody. He’ll make an preliminary look at a courtroom in Washington, DC, virtually precisely 34 years after Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all on board and eleven others on the bottom.
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