For decades, Lockerbie bombing families wanted attackers to face US justice. They're still waiting

Families who lost loved ones when a suitcase bomb detonated aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 had been preparing to attend the terrorism trial of the accused bombmaker

MONTAUK, N.Y. -- 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.

Aphrodite Tsairis, whose daughter, Alexia, perished on Flight 103, had planned to travel to Washington for the start of the trial, along with other family members of victims. She said the delay wasn't surprising.

“From the very beginning, we had to fight adversity,” the 83-year-old central New Jersey resident said Tuesday. "So it is not surprising to hear there are more impediments to justice being carried out.”

Tsairis said the court proceeding was more of “an academic exercise” than an emotional journey, at this stage in her life. She and other family members of victims had attended the 2000 trial in the Netherlands, which resulted in the conviction of one of Al-Marimi's alleged accomplices and the acquittal of another.

“This isn’t about closure,” Tsairis said. “This is more about putting the period at the end of the sentence kind of thing.”

She said she's found solace over the years working with her husband on The Alexia , a grant program supporting documentary photographers and filmmakers at Syracuse University.