Q&A with Filmmaker Ken Dornstein on New Lockerbie Charges

30-two yrs to the day just after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the U.S. Section of Justice announced expenses Monday for terrorism-relevant crimes from a new suspect in the many years-outdated case: Abu Agela Mas’ud.

The name was common to filmmaker Ken Dornstein, who had established out in research of those people accountable for the 1988 terrorist assault — one particular of the deadliest assaults on Us residents before 9/11. Dornstein was 19 several years previous when he lost his older brother, David, in the bombing, which also killed 269 other individuals, which includes 189 American citizens.

My Brother’s Bomber, a a few-part FRONTLINE documentary collection that aired in 2015, was the products of Dornstein’s a long time-long hunt for responses.

Although filming the sequence, Dornstein uncovered refreshing details about Abu Agela Mas’ud, suspected to be a Libyan explosives specialist with a job in the Lockerbie bombing.

In a push meeting Monday, U.S. Attorney General William Barr explained the new felony criticism alleged Agela designed the bomb that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 and that Libya’s previous leader Muammar Qaddafi thanked Agela for a profitable attack on the United States.

Dornstein answered concerns about the new fees through electronic mail. This interview was edited for clarity and duration.

How did you find out about the achievable legal expenses against Abu Agela Mas’ud?

A reporter from The New York Occasions contacted me out of the blue after he read that the [Department of Justice] was likely to make an announcement on a major, outdated terror case. Just after a very little likely back again and forth, we have been satisfied that the DOJ need to be talking about Lockerbie. A reporter from CNN also called around the very same time. She’d also listened to the similar rumors.

It was extremely a lot a blast from the earlier. Back again in 2016, I gave my papers away to an archive at Syracuse College, and I’ve been doing work these very last few several years on tasks that couldn’t have been additional unique than trying to address an worldwide terror situation.

What was your response when you initial listened to about the expenses? Were being you reacting as a brother or as a journalist?

I reacted as a journalist. What new information and facts did the FBI find out that turned Mas’ud from a person of interest, in the weeks soon after My Brother’s Bomber aired, to turning out to be the subject matter of a legal criticism? Did they get Mas’ud’s fingerprint and match it to the Air Malta landing card that I’d uncovered in the proof? [Editor’s note: Neither Barr nor Acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin mentioned fingerprints during Monday’s press conference, although they did cite travel records.] Did they get a confession? [In the press conference, officials cited an interview between Agela and a Libyan law enforcement officer in September 2012.] If so, can we absolutely sure that a confession produced beneath existing problems in a Libyan prison would be reliable?

Have you talked to Barr or any individual from the Justice Department? Any concept why the rates are coming now? Is it mainly because Barr is leaving office shortly?

I have not heard from the DOJ right. In terms of the timing, I know that the DOJ was created informed that Mas’ud was alive in 2014, and they knew that he was remaining held in a Libyan prison. Maybe at some position they’ll provide an account of why it took a lot more than six several years to establish a satisfactory felony case.

Searching back again on your many years of investigating, and all the time and vitality you expended creating the 3-element documentary, how does it come to feel to have this result?

I wish there was a uncomplicated answer to that question, but, at this issue, I’m not even specific what the DOJ has figured out, so it’s challenging to say how I sense about it. I know that it’s normally a superior emotion to see a thing occur out of your reporting. I’m predominantly feeling grateful to the small workforce of people who were being with me on the floor in Libya and Berlin and Zurich and somewhere else: [co-producer and director of photography for My Brother’s Bomber] Tim Grucza and [camera person] Rachel Beth Anderson and [associate producer] Suliman Ali Zway.

At the extremely beginning of this, we ran all around Libya at a harmful time, pursuing a Libyan bombmaker, relying on tiny a lot more than a identify in some old papers — a title that, for all we knew, might have been made up, a title that could have gotten us in trouble with any individual who realized who we had been speaking about. And still Tim, Rachel and Suliman have been prepared to go the place the story took us — and to retain likely, irrespective of the recurrent useless finishes. It is the guidance of persons like that, as properly as my family members which is set up with this for so lots of decades, which is the top story for me, personally, at this minute.

I’m also imagining about the other household users and folks with a particular connection to this circumstance. I know what it is like to be having on with your lifestyle, and then out of the blue some thing comes about to provide it back again into the general public eye, resurfacing all of people outdated thoughts.

I’d hate to believe that my initiatives to settle this case, when and for all, would finally yield a second of renewed consideration to the situation that is unwelcome for some people. In the stop, it was not in my manage. I posted what I knew, and the DOJ took it from there, and we’ll all have to make our that means out of it.

What is your hope for how this turns out? What would necessarily mean justice for your brother David and all the other folks?

The DOJ is in charge of finding justice in this case, and I’ll wait with all people else to see how that goes. For me, personally, there’s an previous saying: The finest revenge is living perfectly.

 

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