It's been more than thirteen years since a bomb ripped apart a Pan Am jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 passengers, crew and people on the ground in Britain's bloodiest terrorist attack. Most of the victims were Americans were heading home for the Christmas holidays.

For the relatives and friends they left behind, Thursday was a crucial day. The man convicted for planting the bomb on the airplane and sentenced to life imprisonment had appealed the court ruling.

But the appeals judges at a special court in Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, announced they would uphold the original verdict.

49-year old Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is likely to spend his life sentence at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison, Scotland's largest jail.

Judges consider new evidence irrelevant

Megrahi had appealed to the court to quash his guilty verdict as a miscarriage of justice. During 14 days of appeal hearings this year, a panel of five High Court appeal judges heard what Megrahi's legal team described as "new evidence".

Megrahi's lawyers had based their appeal on evidence that emerged after the Lockerbie trial ended last year. They raised the possibility that the bomb was placed on Pam Am flight 103 at London's Heathrow airport and not in Malta, as previously supposed.

In 1988, Megrahi worked at Malta airport as head of operations for Libyan Arab Airlines. In the Lockerbie trial, he was found guilty of secretly loading a suitcase bomb onto the Pan Am jetliner in Malta.

But the five-judge panel on Thursday decided the alleged security breach at Heathrow airport was irrelevant.

"We have concluded that none of the grounds of appeal is well-founded," said the presiding judge Lord Cullen. "Accordingly the appeal is refused."

Mixed reactions

Megrahi showed almost no reaction to Thursday's verdict. Throughout the Lockerbie trial and the appeals case, Megrahi has always maintained that he is innocent. His wife, who was present for the ruling of the appeals panel, burst out in tears and rushed out of the court room as the judges read out their verdict.

There is just one final legal door open to Megrahi now. He could ask Britain's final appeal body, the Privy Council, to re-examine the case.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw welcomed Thursday's ruling. He said he hoped the upheld conviction would give victims' relatives "some solace and comfort", though it could not make up for their suffering.