Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi (born April 1, 1952, Tripoli, Libya—died May 20, 2012, Tripoli) was a Libyan national who was the only person to be convicted in the 1988 Pan Am flight 103 bombing (also known as the Lockerbie bombing), in which 270 people died.

Megrahi gained fluency in English through studying in the United States and Britain in the 1970s. After marrying in the 1980s he settled in the suburbs of Tripoli with his wife, with whom he had five children. By 1988 he had been appointed chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA).

On the evening of December 21, 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded while en route from London to New York City. A bomb constructed of plastic explosive had been concealed in a suitcase and detonated by a timer as the plane flew over Lockerbie, Scotland. The death toll included the plane’s 259 passengers—the majority of whom were American—as well as 11 people on the ground who were killed by wreckage. Clothing scraps that were found with the remains of the bomb were traced to a shop in Malta, where a clerk identified Megrahi as having purchased the clothing items. It was later discovered that Megrahi had a number of false passports, which he had used to travel between Malta, where LAA had an office, and Zürich, where the bomb’s timing device had been procured. FBI officials came to believe that Megrahi’s position with LAA was a cover for his involvement with Libyan Intelligence Services.

In 1991 Megrahi was one of two LAA employees indicted by U.S. and British courts for involvement with the terrorist act. Initially Libya refused to turn over the men, and Megrahi took to living under armed guard. After nearly seven years of negotiations overseen by the United Nations, the Libyan government released the two men for trial in the Netherlands, to be conducted under Scottish jurisdiction. The trial began in 2000 and concluded in 2001 with the murder conviction of Megrahi and the acquittal of the second suspect. Megrahi was sentenced to a minimum jail term of 20 years (later increased to 27), and his 2002 appeal was unanimously rejected.

In 2008, while serving his term in a Scottish prison, Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. After his request for release on compassionate grounds was rejected, he embarked on a second appeal, buoyed by the 2007 findings of a Scottish judicial review that seemed to weaken the case for his conviction. He abandoned the appeal in 2009 in favour of a second request for compassionate release and, failing that, for transfer to a prison in his home country. After being informed by doctors that Megrahi was likely to die within three months, Scottish authorities opted in August 2009 to release him after just eight years of imprisonment—a decision that rankled U.S. authorities, particularly after he was received in Libya with a hero’s welcome. In fact, from the time of his release, Megrahi survived for almost three years, causing some medical experts to question the accuracy of the initial finding that he had three months to live.