The wreckage of the airliner that exploded and crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland
Credit: ROY LETKEY /AFP
For decades, Abu Agila Mas’ud was such a shadowy and elusive figure that investigators wondered if he should be called “The Ghost”. Yet the FBI eventually tracked down the man they plan to charge with making the Lockerbie bomb, partially through the unwitting help of East German intelligence, and dogged detective work by a Lockerbie victims brother, The Telegraph can reveal.
During years of painstaking detective work, the FBI agents felt he lived up to this other-worldly sobriquet because they had no image or reports of what The Ghost looked like, or even of his real identity.
December 21, 2020, update: At a press conference today, U.S. Attorney General William Barr announced the filing of criminal charges for terrorism-related crimes against a third conspirator, Abu Agela Mas’ud, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
The charges jointly brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia and the Counterterrorism section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division were announced on the 32nd anniversary of the terrorist attack.
Barr said Agela built the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, according to the criminal complaint affidavit. “The affidavit also alleges that the operation had been ordered by the leadership of Libyan intelligence, and that after the downing of the aircraft, [Libya’s former leader Muammar] Qaddafi had personally thanked [Abu Agela] Mas’ud for the successful attack on the United States.”