Judge Delays Pan Am 103 Trial

A federal judge on Monday postponed a trial in the US for a former Libyan intelligence official charged in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, citing the discovery of new evidence that defense attorneys want to examine in the nearly 40-year-old case. Jury selection was scheduled to begin Wednesday for the federal trial of Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi in Washington, DC, the AP reports. His trial will be the first in the US for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing over Scotland. US District Judge Dabney Friedrich's order didn't specify the nature of the newly discovered evidence.

Al-Marimi's lawyers said that prosecutors disclosed the new evidence to them on Saturday and that their "constitutional and ethical obligations require the defense to investigate this development." The judge scheduled a Sept. 1 hearing in Washington to discuss the status of the case. Al-Marimi is charged in the US with making the bomb that downed the airplane, killing 270 people, most of them Americans. Flight 103 was 31,000 feet over Lockerbie when a bomb in the plane's forward cargo area exploded 38 minutes after takeoff from London Heathrow Airport. The flight was bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

The blast killed all 259 passengers and crew members and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, where the wreckage destroyed an entire city block. Citizens of 21 countries were killed, including 190 Americans and 43 from the UK. The passengers included 35 Syracuse University students returning home from a semester abroad. Prosecutors accuse Al-Marimi and others of carrying out the bombing at the direction of Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi, who was ousted and killed during a 2011 civil war. Two other Libyan intelligence agents were tried by a panel of Scottish judges on a former US military base in the Netherlands in 2000. The tribunal convicted one official and acquitted the other, but the bombmaker's possible identity remained a mystery for years.