Dec 21, 1988, seems like a million years ago, but my memories of that day are as fresh as ever.

The Pan Am 747 had just lifted off, full of fuel, and was on its way from London’s Heathrow Airport to New York’s JFK. 55 minutes later, it blew apart mid-air over Scotland and the little town of Lockerbie. All 259 people aboard – including 190 Americans – plus 11 residents of the city below were killed. Let me change that to murdered because it was intentional.

…Scottish bricklayer Stuart Kirkpatrick was getting ready to watch “This is Your Life” on TV when he saw a fireball through the living-room window. Within minutes the body of a young woman lay at the bottom of his front steps. In Lockerbie, he testified 12 years later, “there were solemn faces and no smiles for a long, long time.”

Bert Ammerman, a New Jersey high-school principal whose younger brother Tom was on board Flight 103, later said, “I was imagining Tom nursing a scotch and soda, settling back relieved that he’d be seeing his daughters in six hours or so…and then being blown out of the air.”

The bomb had been in a suitcase that had been checked luggage from another flight transferred onto the Pan Am aircraft in Frankfurt. It would take 8 long years before Libya would extradite any of the identified suspects to face justice.

…Scottish and American investigators ended up reaching a different conclusion after following up on clues found in an exhaustive search of a debris field that extended for almost 1,000 square miles. In May 1991, Mr. Barr, who was then the acting attorney general, in parallel with Scotland’s chief prosecutor, announced charges of murder and conspiracy to murder for the death of 270 people against Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, described as operatives of the Libyan Intelligence Agency.

…That device was put in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with clothing bought in Malta, tagged with purloined Malta Air luggage tags and placed aboard a Malta Air flight to Frankfurt, where it was transferred into the luggage hold of a London-bound Boeing 727 that flew the first leg of Pan Am 103. At Heathrow the container bearing that bomb was then transferred into the hold of the Boeing 747 that exploded some 6 miles over Lockerbie.

It took another eight years of United Nations sanctions and protracted negotiations with Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi to get the accused out of Libya and on trial. Libya refused to extradite the two to Scotland so the U.N.- brokered a compromise for the trial to be held at Camp Zeist, a former NATO air base in the Netherlands that was declared to be Scottish territory for the duration of the proceeding. The trial began there before a trio of Scottish judges in May 2000.

Only one man, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, was ever convicted of the attack but he was released in 2009 for humanitarian reasons with supposedly only 3 months to live. After arriving to a hero’s welcome back in Libya and living in peaceful retirement, he died in 2012.

…Previous trials of Lockerbie suspects have delivered mixed verdicts. Two other Libyan officials, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who dies in 2012, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were charged in the attack by Scottish authorities in the 1990s. After years of resisting extradition, Libya eventually agreed to extradite both in 1999. Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 but released after serving eight years of a life sentence, while Mr. Fhimah was acquitted.

The families have received monetary compensation, never anything approaching justice. The United States has never closed the criminal investigation and, in 2020, Bill Barr announced charges against a new suspect, Abu Agila Masud – the bomb maker himself. Who had, in fact, confessed to being the same.

An alleged bomb-maker for the late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has admitted to assembling the device that blew up a commercial jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, shedding what Justice Department officials said Monday was new light on a long-stalled inquiry into a terrorist attack that killed 270 people.

U.S. prosecutors made the new details public on the 32nd anniversary of the attack on Pan Am Flight 103 as they unsealed charges against the alleged bomb-maker, Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, who is currently serving a separate 10-year sentence for bomb-making in Tripoli, the Libyan capital. They said he confessed his role in the Lockerbie bombing to a Libyan law-enforcement officer in 2012.

At a press conference announcing the case, Attorney General William Barr said U.S. officials were working to bring Mr. Masud to face the charges in federal court in Washington, adding he felt the prospects of such a trial were “very good.”

Two years later, WE have him. Not the Scots, not the Brits, not the Libyans.

We have him.

…“The United States has taken custody of (the) alleged Pan Am flight 103 bombmaker,” a Justice Department spokesman said Sunday.

“Scottish prosecutors and police, working with UK Government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation,” a spokesperson for the Scottish Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said in a statement.

Mr. Masud’s arrest raises the possibility that families of the victims could for the first time see a suspect prosecuted in the U.S. Two other suspects were tried in Europe more than 20 years ago.

He is expected to make an initial appearance in a Washington, D.C., federal court in the coming days.

If there is ever justice to be done, may it be swift and merciless here.