Abu Talb

Mohammed Abu Talb ( (alt. transliteration: Muhammad Abu Talib), born 27 June 1954) is an Egyptian-born militant who was convicted on 21 December 1989 of a series of bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam in 1985, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden. He has also been investigated in connection with the 21 December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 (the Lockerbie disaster).

In October 2009, Abu Talb was reported to have been released from jail in Södertälje, Sweden, several weeks after Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing) was granted compassionate release from jail in Scotland to return to Libya.

Background Abu Talb was born in Port Said in Egypt. He was a soldier in the Egyptian Army and also received training in the Soviet Union. He joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1970. He has asserted that he deserted from the Egyptian Army in the mid-1970s and thereafter fled to Lebanon via Jordan with a false passport. He joined the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) in 1974 and participated on its side during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War.

1985 bombings On 21 December 1989, Abu Talb and three other men were convicted by a court in Uppsala for a series of bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam in 1985. In the 22 July 1985 Copenhagen bombings by Hezbollah, a bomb exploded outside the offices of Northwest Airlines in Copenhagen, killing an Algerian citizen and injuring over twenty people. A second bomb exploded at the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen, injuring seven people.

In addition to these bombs, the men were convicted for bombings of the Israeli airline El Al offices in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which left no injuries. Abu Talb and Marten Imandi (a Syrian-born Palestinian man who had been granted Swedish citizenship) were sentenced by the court to life in prison (which in Sweden generally means 20 years at most) while the other two men – the brothers Mahmoud and Moustafa al-Mougrabi (who are Abu Talb's brothers-in-law), Abu Talb denied he was involved in the bombing and said his trip to Malta was for "business".

In June 2007, the Crown Office denied that Abu Talb had immunity and declared that he could still face prosecution for the Lockerbie bombing.