WASHINGTON: The Justice Department plans to unseal new charges in the coming days in connection with the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, according to a person familiar with the case.
The bombing of Flight 103, whose victims included dozens of American college students, spurred global investigations and produced sanctions against Libya, which ultimately surrendered two intelligence officials for prosecution before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.
The announcement of a prosecution against an additional individual would carry personal significance for Attorney General William Barr, who is leaving the position next week but held the same job when the Justice Department nearly 30 years ago revealed criminal charges in the US against the two Libyans. Monday is the 32nd anniversary of the bombing.
“This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice,” Barr said at a 1991 news conference announcing the charges. “We have no higher priority.”
The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division at the time was Robert Mueller, who went on to serve as FBI director and as special counsel in charge of the investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
Libya refused to extradite the men to the US but ultimately agreed to a deal to put them on trial in the Netherlands.
News of the expected criminal case was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. A person familiar with the Justice Department’s plan who was not authorized to discuss it by name confirmed it to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The New York-bound flight exploded over Lockerbie less than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Among the Americans on board were 35 Syracuse University students flying home for Christmas after a semester abroad.
The attack, caused by a bomb packed into a suitcase, killed 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground.
In 1992, the UN Security Council imposed arms sales and air travel sanctions against Libya to prod Muammar Qaddafi, the country’s leader, into surrendering the two suspects. The sanctions were later lifted after Libya agreed to a $2.7 billion compensation deal with the victims’ families.
One man — former Libyan intelligence official Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi — was convicted in the Netherlands of the bombing, and a second Libyan suspect was acquitted of all charges. Al-Megrahi was given a life sentence, but Scottish authorities released him on humanitarian grounds in 2009 when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He later died in Tripoli.
US plans new charges in 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing
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US plans new charges in 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
