Pre-trial hearings will decide if Lockerbie case can go ahead

TODAY, ON a wind-battered former US military base 20 miles from Amsterdam, perhaps the most awaited criminal trial of a generation will begin.

It is 11 years since Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people and forever linking the previously little-known border town with grief and horror. Now, after strenuous efforts by Western authorities and the families of the victims, the process of trying to bring about some sort of justice will proceed.

This morning two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 47, and al-Amin Khalifah Fhimah, 43, are due to be brought into the specially constructed court where they are to be tried under Scottish law. They face charges of murder, conspiracy to murder and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. They deny all the charges.

The two-day pre-trial hearing that starts today will focus on the jurisdiction of the court. Defence lawyers will claim that any alleged conspiracy must have taken place outside Scotland, so such a charge should not be presented to the three Scottish judges hearing the case.

The trial proper, due to start in February, is expected to last up to a year. It is understood that the defence will rely on the Scottish special defence of incrimination - namely that another group and not the defendants were responsible for planting the bomb that exploded in the hold of the aircraft en route to New York.

But the prosecution lawyers, headed by Norman McFadyen,will argue that the two men are actually members of Libyan Intelligence who indeed planned and carried out the planting of the device, hidden inside a cassette player.

As revealed yesterday in The Independent, the prosecution plan to call a Libyan witness who will claim that he saw Mr Fhimah and Mr Megrahi prepare the device, believed to contain up to 400g of Semtex explosive.

The witness, whose identity is known to this newspaper, has been under a special protection programme in the US since he defected in the early Nineties. He will claim both men were in the pay of the Libyan security services and were working under cover at a Libyan Arab Airlines office in Malta.

It is alleged that the men put the cassette recorder - hidden inside a suitcase - on to a feeder flight from Malta that joined flight 103 at Frankfurt on its way to London and then New York.

The expectation in the build-up to the trial has been immense, but despite the twists in the process - not to mention the countless theories as to who else may have been responsible - those closest to the trial are trying to remain calm.

Jim Swire, a tireless campaigner whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was among the dead, said: "We are just hoping that finally we may find out who murdered my daughter."