The American families of victims of the Lockerbie airliner bombing are to sue the Libyan government for up to $10 billion in damages, their lawyer said yesterday.
However, Mr Lee Kreindler, lead counsel and chairman of the plaintiffs committee for 150 families, conceded that they would probably have to settle for substantially less.
Mr Kreindler said a New York judge would meet representatives of the families to draw up a timetable for the action.
Judge Thomas Platt of the US District Court for East New York would also consider how long it would take to gather further evidence.
A Libyan secret agent, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted on Wednesday of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988, which killed 270 people, and sentenced to at least 20 years in a Scottish prison.
He is expected to appeal, but the hearing is unlikely to take place before July.
Mr Kreindler said: "It is premature to go ahead with a trial date. We have to await the outcome of the appeal. I could probably say that it would be six months before we go to trial."
He said the main defendant in the lawsuits was Libya itself and that Megrahi's murder conviction strengthened the case against the North African country.
Earlier, Mr Kreindler told the United Arab Emirates' English language Gulf News daily: "The written judgment concludes that what Megrahi did was in concert with the Libyan government. "He was a fairly high ranking officer in the Libyan Intelligence Agency and his activities appeared to have, and can be reasoned to have, government involvement," Mr Kreindler said.
"But we have to prove that now," he said, adding that it would take six months to put facts together.
He said the total damages came to more than $10 billion, although the families would probably have to settle for only a fraction of that.
Mr Kreindler added that Megrahi, who is still imprisoned in the former US military base at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, and his co-accused, Mr Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, who was acquitted and is now back in Tripoli, were yet to receive any writs.
"There was not enough evidence to convict Fahima. [But] that does not bar us from proceeding against him."
Earlier, Mr Kreindler's son Jim, also representing the families, told BBC Radio Scotland the conviction of Megrahi, as well as the finding he was an agent of the JSO - an arm of the Libyan government - meant the families could sue Libya as his principal or employer.
"This finding should facilitate our ability to obtain a very large judgment against Libya this year," Mr Jim Kreindler said.
"Our suit against Libya not only seeks additional compensation, but it seeks punitive damages to punish Libya, the JSO and its employees for the intentional murder of a plane[load] of its victims."