The monumental collection of 76 statues in Suse Lowenstein’s backyard captures the moment she and other women learned their loved ones were killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Each nude, life-size creation represents a mother, wife, sister or other female relative in her darkest grief -- weeping, praying, screaming, collapsing. This is always here,” the 82-year-old artist said, walking through the rust-hued monuments in the New York beach town of Montauk recently.
Now, they'll have to keep waiting. The terrorism trial of the alleged bombmaker, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, was set to begin Wednesday in Washington, D.C., but was postponed Monday. A judge cited the discovery of new evidence, though she didn't say what that evidence was.
Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence officer who had been imprisoned in Libya for years, is the first to be prosecuted on American soil in connection with the attack on the New York-bound flight, which killed 270 people, a majority of them Americans. Eleven of the dead were on the ground in Lockerbie. The case had a breakthrough in 2017, when U.S. officials obtained a 2012 interview in which they say that Al-Marimi admitted building the bomb and working with two conspirators to carry out the attack.
According to an FBI affidavit, he said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence and that the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi thanked the team afterward. A mother honors her late daughter’s photography dreams Aphrodite Tsairis, whose daughter, Alexia, perished on Flight 103, had planned to travel to Washington for the start of the trial, along with other family members of victims. She said the delay wasn't surprising.
"So it is not surprising to hear there are more impediments to justice being carried out.” Tsairis said the court proceeding was more of “an academic exercise” than an emotional journey, at this stage in her life. She and other family members of victims had attended the 2000 trial in the Netherlands, which resulted in the conviction of one of Al-Marimi's alleged accomplices and the acquittal of another. Their 20-year-old daughter, who had dreams of becoming a documentary photographer, was among the 35 Syracuse students returning from a semester abroad on the ill-fated flight.
The retired school teacher and administrator from New Jersey says he believes other nations were involved and should still be held responsible, even though the Libyan government formally accepted responsibility in 2003 and agreed to pay nearly $3 billion to victims’ families. This was an act of war.” Stephanie Bernstein, who lost her husband, Michael, in the attack, said it’s “astonishing” that evidence apparently not known by either side in the case would emerge all these decades later and on the eve of the trial. Is there more?’” he said.
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