America’s top prosecutor announced charges against the suspected Lockerbie bomb builder on the 32nd anniversary of the terror attack.

US Attorney General Bill Barr said Monday that his new suspect Abu Agila Muhammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi also helped organize the December 1988 plot to destroy the Pan Am flight 103 – a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, killing 270.

A press release issued by the US Justice Department, which is headed by Barr, said: ‘According to the criminal complaint affidavit, Masud built the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 and worked with Megrahi and Fhimah to carry out the plot.’

He was referring to fellow Lockerbie bombing suspects Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. al-Meghrai was convicted of the attack in 2001, and freed on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2009. He died in 2012, amid claims from some victims’ relatives that al-Meghrai was not the bomber, and that he had suffered a miscarriage of justice.

Fhimah was charged with the same offense, but acquitted.

Barr continued: ‘The affidavit also alleges that the operation had been ordered by the leadership of Libyan intelligence and that, after the downing of the aircraft, Qaddafi had thanked Masud for the successful attack on the United States.’

That was a reference to former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who is said to have ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

The US Attorney General explained that investigators pinpointed Masud as a suspect after he was arrested and questioned in the wake of the collapse of Qaddafi’s regime in 2012.

Masud is currently serving a separate 10 year sentence in Libya for bomb-making, with US prosecutors set to request his extradition to America to face trial.

A total of 190 Americans were killed aboard the Pan Am jet, whose destruction was the worst terror attack aimed at the US until the 9/11 terror attacks in September 2001.

Monday’s charging announcement holds special significance for Syracuse University in New York. It lost 35 students who were headed home from an exchange program for Christmas.

The plane, named Clipper Maid of the Seas, was delayed in its departure from Heathrow.

The timer-operated bomb, which was concealed within a radio, is widely believed to have been intended to detonate after the plane had begun its journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

That would have made it far harder for investigators to find wreckage and probe what had happened.

Barr said: ‘There is no question that the Pan Am 103 attack was aimed at the United States, and this heinous assault lives in infamy in the collective memory of the American people.’

He added: ‘To the families of those who died in the sky above Lockerbie all those years ago, I know that the small step we take today cannot compensate for the sorrow you feel to this day. 

‘But I hope that you will find some measure of solace in knowing that we in the United States Government, on behalf of the American people and in partnership with our counterparts in Scotland, have never relented, and will never relent, in the pursuit of justice for you and your loved ones.’

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