LONDON, 29 June 2007 — A Libyan man jailed for the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, won the right to a new appeal yesterday, after a judicial panel said he may have been wrongly convicted.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed Al-Megrahi renewed his assertion that he is innocent after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) said he “may have suffered a miscarriage of justice” based on new evidence.
“I reiterate today what I have been saying since I was first indicted in 1991: I was not involved in the Lockerbie bombing in any way whatsoever,” he said in a statement.
The SCCRC referred his case to the Appeal Court in Edinburgh, Scotland’s highest court, which could eventually quash his conviction, throwing the case wide open and reviving speculation as to who was behind the bombing.
Megrahi, now 55, was convicted by a trio of Scottish judges sitting in a special court in the Netherlands of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988 by means of a bomb smuggled on board in a suitcase. He was jailed for a total of 27 years.
The explosion on the New York-bound flight killed all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground in the southern Scottish town of Lockerbie in what was Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity.
Megrahi’s legal team has pointed to a figure linked to the Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) as being the real culprit.
