The judges hearing the Lockerbie trial today retired to consider their verdict as evidence closed on Day 84 of the long-running case.
The judges will return to the court in Camp Zeist, Holland, on January 30 when they will set a date for returning verdicts.
Earlier, the lawyer for one of the two Libyans on trial in the case has said prosecutors have failed to prove his client Mr Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima was a mass killer.
Mr Richard Keen QC argued in summing-up the case against his client, accused of co-plotting the Lockerbie airline bombing, that the prosecution had piled inference upon inference.
He said prosecutors had failed to prove his client was willing or able to plot and commit mass murder to further the purposes of Libyan intelligence, as the indictment asserts.
Mr Fahima and fellow Libyan Mr Abdel Basset al-Megrahi are charged with plotting the blast that blew up New York-bound Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
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Mr Abdel Basset al-Megrahi
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Mr Keen said the Scottish Crown prosecutors' case required far too many leaps of faith on the part of the judges sitting at a special Scottish court in the Netherlands.
The prosecution says Mr Megrahi was a Libyan secret agent who along with Mr Fahima used cover as Libyan Arab Airlines employees in Malta to plant the improvised bomb on a Frankfurt-bound flight at Malta's Luqa airport, using stolen baggage tags.
In Frankfurt, the suitcase bearing the bomb was allegedly transferred to a Pan Am flight to Heathrow, where it was loaded on to the Pan Am flight 103.
Mt Keen said it was unclear why Fahima, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa, would want to further the interests of Libyan intelligence and even if he did, it was deeply questionable that he had the expertise to ease the passage of the bomb bag onto the Frankfurt-bound flight.
Libyan intelligence had its own personnel, not only in Malta but within the staff of Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa, he said.
Even if he had possessed the sort of expertise the Crown attributes to him, the Libyan Intelligence Services would not have gone to him for the furtherance of the alleged plot, he told the court.
Mr Keen said the fact Mr Fahima maintained his airport pass even after he stopped being station manager proved nothing. He simply used it as an identity card for everyday business and did not try to pretend he was still station manager, he said.
Mr Keen contended that there was not even any evidence Mr Fahima was at Luqa on December 21, 1988, when prosecutors say he helped mr Megrahi get the bomb bag on to the Frankfurt-bound flight.
He questioned the prosecution contention that Fahima and Megrahi were constantly in each other's company in the days leading up to the Lockerbie bombing.
Nor could any decisive proof be drawn from a diary allegedly belonging to Mr Fahima, he said. Numerous entries in the diary, heard in evidence at the trial last October, mentioned Mr Megrahi and an entry made just days before the bombing read:
Take/collect tags from Air Malta followed by the note O.K..
One might write in one's diary 'bomb plane on Tuesday' but it's unusual in a criminal case to record events of a crime in one's diary, Mr Keen said.
The defence argues that German-based Palestinian radicals with links to the former East German Stasi secret police could have been the true Lockerbie culprits. They have named two groups, the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and the lesser-known Palestinian Popular Struggle Front.
Reuters