CAIRO — A number one rights group urged the U.S. and Libya Monday to elucidate the authorized foundation of a shock extradition of a former Libyan intelligence officer accused of constructing the bomb that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

U.S. authorities introduced in December that they’d arrested Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi on allegations that he was behind the bomb that introduced down the New York-bound flight simply days earlier than Christmas in 1988. The assault killed 259 individuals within the air and 11 on the bottom.

Mas’ud’s arrest and extradition has raised questions in regards to the authorized foundation of how he was picked up, simply months after his launch from a Libyan jail, and despatched to the U.S. American officers have stated his switch was lawful and described it as a end result of years of cooperation with Libyan authorities.

Libya and the U.S. don’t have a standing settlement on extradition, so there was no obligation at hand Mas’ud over. Libyan officers advised The Related Press in December that militias loyal to the Tripoli-based Authorities of Nationwide Unity have been behind his detention and handover to the U.S.

Human Rights Watch stated Mas’ud’s saga has raised rights considerations.

“It seems that no Libyan court docket ordered or reviewed Mas’ud’s switch to the US, and he had no likelihood to attraction, elevating critical due course of considerations,” stated Hanan Salah, affiliate Center East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

Mas’ud was picked up from his dwelling in Tripoli’s Abu Salim district, which is managed by a community of militias allied with Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah. Libya’s public prosecutor’s workplace has challenged the transfer and opened an investigation.

Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie lower than an hour after takeoff from London on Dec. 21, 1988. Of these killed on the flight, 190 have been Americans.

A breakthrough within the decades-long investigation got here in 2017 when the U.S. Justice Division acquired a replica of an interview that Mas’ud, a former explosives skilled with Libya’s intelligence companies, had given to the North African nation’s regulation enforcement in 2012, whereas in custody following the collapse of Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s decades-long rule.

Libya has been torn by civil warfare since a NATO-backed rebellion toppled and killed Gadhafi in 2011. The North African nation is split between Dbeibah’s authorities and a rival authorities primarily based in japanese Libya headed by Prime Minister Fathi Bashagha.

Human Rights Watch stated it documented that Mas’ud suffered from abuses together with torture and intimidation to extract confessions whereas in Libyan detention. It known as the U.S. to make sure that “no coerced confessions, together with confessions made underneath torture, are used as a part of the prosecution.”

Mas’ud is the third Libyan intelligence official charged within the U.S. in reference to the Lockerbie assault however the first to look in an American courtroom. U.S. officers haven’t defined how he was taken into their custody.