The terrorist is 53-year-old Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, serving a life sentence in Scotland's Greenock prison for destroying an American passenger airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988.
Al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court ruled that he organized the explosion on board a Boeing 747. A cassette recorder with a hidden bomb was placed in the cargo hold of the airliner. All 259 people on board died in the attack. Falling wreckage of the Boeing 747 killed another 11 people on the ground.
Initially, Libyan authorities refused even to discuss extraditing the suspects. But a thaw in relations between Libya and the West eventually allowed the Lockerbie case to be closed. In 1999, the suspects were extradited to Britain, and al-Megrahi remained in prison after the trial. In 2003, Libya agreed, at the request of Washington and London, to pay $10 million each to the families of the victims.
Now the Lockerbie case may help close another case in which Tripoli is the victim. In December 2006, a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death. The verdict states that the nurses used untested plasma for blood transfusions and sold quality serum on the market. According to the medics themselves, the children were infected due to unsanitary conditions at the Al-Fateh clinic in the Libyan city of Benghazi.