They came to Washington, D.C., in the middle of the night, the capital's streets empty as country roads and its parking meters still sound asleep, to witness the moment they had been working toward - and bracing for - for the past 12 years.
Inside a federal building in Franklin Park, three dozen relatives of victims from the Pan Am Flight 103 disaster watched on closed-circuit television as a Scottish court in the Netherlands, six time zones away, announced the verdicts against two Libyans charged in the blast.
The families cheered when the court found Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi guilty at 5 a.m. EST, they later told reporters, who were barred from the room. And they didn't stop cheering, even when the court found the second defendant, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, not guilty.
In the case against the defendants, many families said, one out of two would have to do. What mattered most, they said, was that the trial established a clear connection between al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, and Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Kadafi, the ultimate target of their anguish.
"I'm very pleased. Some think this is a split verdict; I consider it a total verdict because the one who was found guilty is tied directly to Kadafi," said George Williams of Joppatowne, whose only child, Geordie, a 24-year-old army first lieutenant stationed in Germany, was one of eight Marylanders killed in the blast. "Muammar el Kadafi is the one who did this, and we'll go after him tooth and nail."
The verdict was a long time in coming - one of the families' current lawyers was still in college when Flight 103 exploded Dec. 21, 1988 - but it is hardly the end of the effort that has dominated the past decade of their lives.
For many of the families, the next step is a $10 billion civil suit filed in U.S. courts against the Libyan government. The suit, relatives said, is motivated not by a desire for financial gain but by their need to affirm Kadafi's responsibility for the explosion.
At the same time, relatives will continue to monitor Western sanctions against Libya - sanctions they credit with having weakened Kadafi and with forcing him to produce the two underlings tried in the Netherlands. Such vigilance is particularly important today, they said, as energy crises make Libya's oil all the more tempting to industrialized states.
"Businesses are itching to have normalization with Libya," said Rosemary Wolfe, the stepmother of Miriam, a Severna Park High School graduate who died in the blast. "We can't let that happen."
