Lockerbie bomber's appeal to be filed on Oct 15
( 2001-08-28 13:40 ) (7 )

US and British lawyers who have represented former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega and Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet will file an appeal in October on behalf of the Libyan convicted of murder in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, one of the lawyers said on Monday.

Miami attorney Frank Rubino said he and the other lawyers would file the appeal on Oct. 15 at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands on behalf of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

In January, Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. He was tried under Scottish law before a three Scottish judges at Camp Zeist.

Rubino, who represented Noriega at his trial in Miami on drug-trafficking charges, said the other lawyers handling the appeal included Plato Cacheris. Cacheris represented Monica Lewinsky during the scandal over former US President Bill Clinton's relations with the ex-intern. He was also the attorney for veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who pleaded guilty last month to 15 counts of spying for Moscow.

Also on the team are two British Queen's Counsels, Michael Mansfield and Clive Nichols, who represented Pinochet during unsuccessful attempts to extradite him from Britain to Spain for trial on torture charges.

Rubino said the appeal would focus on allegations that evidence was improperly removed from or planted at the crash site and on the judges' handling of witnesses' testimony, among other things.

"We haven't written the whole appeal," Rubino said. "The collection of evidence was a very important issue."

SECURITY TO BE QUESTIONED

"Another issue was ... security at both the Frankfurt airport and the Malta airport, to determine whether, in fact, the bag had gotten on board in Malta," he said.

The trial judges found that a bomb was placed aboard Flight 103 in unaccompanied luggage loaded at the Luqa Airport in Malta and later routed through Frankfurt to London's Heathrow Airport. The bomb exploded over Lockerbie 33 minutes after the plane left Heathrow for New York, killing 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

Megrahi was linked to the bomb through the testimony of a Maltese merchant who said he sold Megrahi the clothes in the suitcase.

"Part of our appeal will allege that the court took selectively certain portions and accepted it and took certain portions and rejected it and built the verdicts on that," Rubino said.

The appeals team was chosen by Ibrahim Legwell, the lawyer in charge of Megrahi's defense from the beginning, Rubino said.

Megrahi, 49, was sentenced to life in prison. The three judges who heard evidence in the trial recommended that he serve at least 20 years before being considered for release.

Megrahi is still being held at Camp Zeist, and his appeal will be heard by a panel of five Scottish judges. If his appeal fails, he will be transferred to a prison in Scotland.

A co-defendant, Al-Amin Khalifa Fahimah, 44, was acquitted after the three judges decided that there was not enough evidence to show that he was aware of any plan to destroy Pan Am 103.