MONTAUK, N.Y. (AP) — 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.“The grief, everything, stays the same, just like this. 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. “And so, the feelings don’t go away.”Lowenstein, whose son, Alex, was aboard Flight 103, is among many who have waited nearly four decades to see the culprits of the bombing — one of the deadliest terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens — face justice in a U.S. courtroom. 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.
