Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was the Libyan intelligence officer and airline security chief convicted in 2001 by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands of murdering the 270 people who died when Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, the only person ever convicted for it; he served eight years of a life sentence in Scotland, was released on compassionate grounds in August 2009 with a diagnosis of three months to live, was received in Tripoli with a celebration that Gaddafi's government had promised would not happen, and died there in May 2012, protesting his innocence to the end. He was born in Tripoli in 1952, trained in the United States and Britain in the 1970s, and by the 1980s was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and, the prosecution said, an officer of the Jamahiriya Security Organisation, with a Swiss-registered company that had bought timers from the firm in Zurich whose fragment was found in the wreckage. The case took three years to build. It took ten to bring to court. The indictment of November 1991 named him and a second Libyan, the airline's station manager at Malta, and Libya refused for seven years to surrender them, under United Nations sanctions that cost the country perhaps thirty billion dollars, until Gaddafi accepted in 1998 a trial by Scottish judges without a jury on neutral ground. The trial at Camp Zeist lasted from May 2000 to January 2001, and turned on the evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper who identified Megrahi as the man who had bought the clothes packed round the bomb. The judges convicted him and acquitted Fhimah. An appeal failed in 2002, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found in 2007 six grounds on which a miscarriage of justice might have occurred, and he abandoned the second appeal days before his release, which the Scottish government said was unconnected. The release, in the months when Britain was negotiating oil contracts with Libya, was condemned by Washington and by the families, most of them American, and he lived not three months but nearly three years. Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing in 2003 and paid the families; a posthumous appeal by his family was refused in 2021, and a third Libyan, accused of building the bomb, went on trial in Washington in 2025.
- Lived: 1952 CE – 2012 CE
- Nationality: Libyan
- Roles: intelligence officer
