Paris - After a trial in absentia that lasted less than three days, a special French anti-terrorist court took just two hours yesterday to find six Libyan officials guilty of the 1989 bombing of a French airliner in which all 170 passengers and crew were killed.
The seven magistrates followed the demands of the state prosecutor and sentenced the six - including Abdallah Senoussi, a brother-in-law of Col Muammar Gadafy and head of Libya's external intelligence agency - to life imprisonment for the attack on UTA flight 772, which exploded over Niger while on route to Paris from Congo-Brazzaville. The prosecutor, Mr Gino Necchi, said in his summing up that all the evidence showed that Libyan authorities had orchestrated the attack on the DC-10 on September 19th, 1989.
He described in detail the roles of the six accused, from buying the detonators to preparing the suitcase containing the explosives and persuading a Congolese militant to carry it onto the plane.
Mr Necchi cited two possible motives for the bombing: "The desire to kill a Libyan opponent who was meant to be on the plane, or retaliation against France, which was at the time foiling Libyan designs in Africa." The two countries' forces had repeatedly clashed in the 1970s and 1980s in Chad, which France was backing against Libya.