Did Ghadafi Order Lockerbie?
The order came from the top.
That's what a London newspaper says about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, reports CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan.
The Sunday Times says Libyan leader Moammar Ghadafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing in retaliation for U.S. air strikes in Libya, and that the British government has known about this for years.
The newspaper says the government tried to put the brakes on the story by slapping a gag order on it to keep the paper from publishing key evidence.
All of this leaves the victims' families with more questions.
"Why are we playing games with Ghadafi?" says Susan Cohen, who lost her daughter in the tragedy. Why are we allowing him to get away with this? Why are we pretending that this trial is going to bring any kind of justice? It's little more than a farce."
Two men, both suspected Libyan intelligence agents, are being held in the Netherlands, awaiting trial on charges of planting a bomb that caused the explosion, which killed all 259 people aboard the plane, along with 11 people on the ground. Most were Americans and Britons.
Libya surrendered the pair to international authorities in April. Within hours, the United Nations suspended sanctions that were imposed on Libya in 1992 and 1993 for refusing to hand over the pair.
"We have known for a long while that Gadhafi gave the order. It is a sham for him to pretend otherwise and it is an even bigger sham for the British government to let him off the hook," the Times quoted an unidentified former senior intelligence officer as saying.
The newspaper said it had established that British and Libyan officials had met in Rome after the handover of the suspects in a diplomatic initiative that "promises billions of pounds in orders for British companies."
The newspaper said British intelligence services learned of Gadhafi's personal involvement in the bombing from two intelligence sources between 1990 and 1995. The information was circulated to a restricted number of officers within MI5, the agency responsible for domestic counter-terrorism.
The Times said Gadhafi ordered Abdallah Senussi, his brother-in-law and then No. 2 man in Libya's intelligence agency, to arrange the attack.
Senoussi and five other Libyans were convicted in absentia of the 1987 bombing of a French passenger jet. Libya had refused to turn over the suspects in that attack, which killed 170 people.