Libya’s unity Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibé announced Thursday that he has dispatched a government team to follow the case of the alleged bomber who destroyed a Pan Am airliner with 270 people on board over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.
Abu Agila Mohamed Masud Masud Jeir al Marimi, a Libyan national, is in custody in the United States after proceedings were launched in 2020 to try him for the deaths of the 169 U.S. citizens on the plane.
Dbeibé has ordered Thursday to assign a law firm and facilitate the travel of the family of the implicated to the United States. «The cooperation and coordination for the extradition was carried out in accordance with international laws,» he has assured, according to several local media.
The Libyan unity prime minister explained that, following his classification as a terrorist and after an arrest warrant was issued against him, it was the duty of the internationally recognized authorities to extradite him in order to «cleanse» the country of terrorism, as reported by ‘The Libya Observer’.
According to the profile published at the time by the Justice Department, the defendant worked for Libyan Intelligence, including as a technical expert in the construction of explosive devices from approximately 1973 to 2011.
The U.S. Department of Justice also alleged that Masud was involved in the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle nightclub in West Berlin of the, at the time, Federal Republic of Germany, in which two U.S. servicemen were killed.
