Global Policy Forum

By Omar Shama

The judgment in the Lockerbie bombing trial was inconsistent and appeared to have been made under political influence from the U.S. and Britain, an official U.N. observer said Saturday.

Hans Koeschler, an expert on international law from Austria, criticized the court's decision to convict a former Libyan intelligence agent of murder and acquit his co-defendant "The present judgment is logically inconsistent," Koeschler said at the opening of a two-day conference on the Lockerbie trial at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo. "You cannot come out with a verdict of guilty for one and innocent for the other when they were both being tried with the same evidence," Koeschler said, emphasizing that the views were his own and not those of the United Nations.

Prosecutors changed the indictment twice during the trial in an attempt to dissociate the two defendants, he noted. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment for planting the bomb that blew up a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, a Libyan Arab Airlines official, was acquitted of all charges in the trial that ended Jan. 31.

Koeschler, a professor of philosophy at Innsbruck University, was one of five people appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to observe the trial, which was held at a former air base in the Netherlands to satisfy Libyan demands for a neutral venue. "In my opinion, there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict," Koeschler told The Associated Press after his speech. "My guess is that it came from the United States and the United Kingdom," he said. "This was my impression."

Koeschler said he had submitted his report on the trial to Annan, who forwarded it to the Scottish authorities. The conference, attended by Arab legal experts and government officials, is expected to address Libyan demands that sanctions be abolished.

The sanctions, including an air embargo, were suspended after Libya handed over the two indicted men in 1999. The United States and Britain have called for Libya to acknowledge responsibility for the bombing and pay compensation before the measures are scrapped.