Scottish court officials arrived in Amsterdam on Sunday RELATED VIDEO CNN's Richard Roth talks with residents of the Dutch town of Zeist, where the trial will take place Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K

April 5, 1999
Web posted at: 2:14 a.m. EDT (0614 GMT)

In this story: Police, journalists arrive Plane blew up over Lockerbie RELATED STORIES, SITES

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (CNN) -- Preparations continued Monday for the trial of two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie airliner bombing.

Scottish prosecutors and journalists waited in Amsterdam while in Libya, international delegates gathered to witness the handover of the two accused -- Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah -- to a United Nations team.

Sheriff Graham Cox, the regional judge who will oversee pre-trial proceedings, was expected to arrive in the Netherlands on Monday. Scottish prosecutors Norman McFadyen and Jim Brisbane are already there.

Arab League Assistant Secretary-General Ahmed bin Hilli and Egypt's Administrative Development Minister Mohamed Zaki Abu Amer entered Libya at the Tunisian border post of Ras Jedir, diplomats said.

"We know that the Libyans are intensively preparing the departure. It is now a question of hours," a diplomat said.

Arab League Secretary-General Esmat Abdel-Meguid said on Sunday all the indications pointed to the handover taking place in "the next 24 or 48 hours."

Tripoli has pledged to transfer the men to the charge of the United Nations by Tuesday, paving the way for the lifting of punitive U.N. sanctions against Libya.

More than 100 Scottish policemen and court officials plus scores of press have descended on the former U.S. airbase Camp Zeist, the venue for the trial, near the Netherlands' sleepy village of Soesterberg.

Some area residents told CNN they were worried about personal safety because of the impending trial, but others were not concerned.

The two accused will be airlifted to the Netherlands and "extradited" to the unused U.S. military base of Camp Zeist, near the city of Utrecht. The site is to be considered British soil for the trial.

The United States and Britain have accused the two Libyans of planting a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing a total of 270 people, mostly Americans, in the air and on the ground.

Washington and London say they have evidence that the two men planted a bomb inside a suitcase aboard the Pan Am flight, which blew up at 31,000 feet over Lockerbie in southern Scotland as it flew from London to New York.

The bombing sparked a 10-year manhunt that now looks close to ending. Last August, Britain and the United States dropped their insistence on a trial in either of their countries and agreed to a neutral, third country.

Once the men are in the Netherlands, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to write a letter to the Security Council that would suspend sanctions imposed on Libya in 1992 and tightened in 1993. The council can vote to lift them 90 days later.

The trial of the accused will probably drag on for months and will be preceded by extradition proceedings between Britain and the Netherlands. The extradition proceedings themselves could be over in minutes, or they could take months.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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