A Libyan man accused of making the bomb that destroyed a Pan Am flight over Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people, has been taken into US custody, authorities said on Sunday, according to AFP.
The man, Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, was charged by the United States two years ago for the Lockerbie bombing, in which Americans made up a majority of the victims. He had previously been held in Libya for alleged involvement in a 1986 attack on a Berlin nightclub.
The US Justice Department confirmed in a statement that Masud was in American custody, following an announcement by Scottish prosecutors, without saying how the suspect ended up in US hands.
A department spokesperson said Masud was expected to make an initial appearance, at a time yet to be specified, in a federal court in the US capital.
The New York-bound aircraft was blown up 38 minutes after it took off from London on December 21, 1988. The bombing killed 259 people including 190 Americans on board, and 11 people on the ground.
Masud was reputedly a leading bombmaker for Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. According to the US indictment, he assembled and programmed the bomb that brought down the Pan Am jumbo jet.
The investigation was relaunched in 2016 when Washington learned of Masud's arrest, following Qaddafi ouster and death in 2011, and his reported confession of involvement to the new Libyan regime in 2012.
Only one individual has so far been prosecuted for the bombing: Former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, who spent seven years in a Scottish prison after his conviction in 2001.
He died in Libya in 2012. The United States and Britain both asked the Libyan rebels, who took over after the ouster of Qaddafi, that al-Megrahi be extradited so that justice could be done, but were told that Libya would not extradite any citizen to a Western nation.