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Richard Blystone

Richard Blystone: Long road to Lockerbie judgment nearing its end

CNN Senior International Correspondent Richard Blystone is at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, where judges Wednesday will render a verdict in the case of two Libyans accused of the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing.

Q: Is there any precedent for the kind of trial faced by the two Libyans accused in the Lockerbie bombing?

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Blystone: There's really never been a trial like this one before. Three Scottish judges, sitting in the Netherlands, trying two Libyans for murder in the bombing of an American plane that went down in Scotland, killing 270 people from more than 20 countries.

Britain has spent more than $18 million refitting this former NATO airbase to become a combination of courtroom, prison and armed camp.

Inside the court there are lounges for visitors to the accused and for the families of the victims -- and professional counseling for them if it's needed.

Q: What have these long-running proceedings been like -- from a spectator's point of view.

Blystone: Compared with the shocking drama of the crime itself, the trial has been very long and very dry. There have been 84 days of court proceedings spread over nine months.

It has been largely a test of the uses of circumstantial evidence. The prosecution in great detail traced a circumstantial web which it said was strong enough to convict Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, alleged to have been a Libyan intelligence agent, and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, a former station manager for Libyan airlines on Malta, of planting the bomb that exploded over Scotland.

The judges have to believe that web of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense took great pains to pick holes in it -- alleging that the prosecution had not even reliably established that the bomb began its journey in Malta.

Q: The prosecution has faced added difficulties establishing its case because of the passage of time since the 1988 bombing -- and the lack of what a layman might call "eye-witness" testimony.

Blystone: The case involved organization of tens of thousands of bits of evidence and interviews with 15,000 people -- and the result was a circumstantial case.

It's certainly testimony to the power of time to erase people's memories -- and to the difficulty of crafting what you might call the truth out of a collection of disparate, small pieces of evidence.

Over 12 years, witnesses have gone missing, some have been unavailable -- or did not want to testify. Memories have dimmed. So it's a very difficult task for the investigators and for the prosecution.

Lockerbie verdict to come on Wednesday
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