WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Monday postponed a trial in the U.S. 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, D.C. His trial will be the first in the U.S. for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s order didn’t specify the nature of the newly discovered evidence.
Al-Marimi’s lawyers say prosecutors disclosed the new evidence to them on Saturday and added that their “constitutional and ethical obligations require the defense to investigate this development.” Defense attorney Laura Koenig, an assistant federal public defender, declined to elaborate in response to an Associated Press inquiry.
The judge scheduled a Sept. 1 hearing in Washington to discuss the status of the case. Friedrich’s brief order cited the complex nature of the case, the newly discovered evidence and “the need for the defense to determine how best to defend this case” as reasons to postpone the trial.
Al-Marimi is charged in the U.S. with making the bomb that downed the airplane, killing 270 people, most of them Americans.
Flight 103 was 31,000 feet (9.45 kilometers) 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 United Kingdom. The passengers included 35 Syracuse University students returning home from a semester abroad.
Prosecutors allege Al-Marimi and others carried out the bombing at the direction of Libyan leader 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 U.S. 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.
Al-Marimi, now in his mid-70s, is charged with two counts of destruction of an aircraft resulting in death. He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted.
Al-Marimi worked for the Libyan intelligence service from approximately 1973 to 2011, rising to the rank of colonel, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors believe he brought a suitcase containing a bomb to an airport in Malta and gave it to co-conspirators for a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. The suitcase traveled from Frankfurt to London, where it was loaded onto Flight 103, according to investigators.