The US, Britain and Libya have formally ended a dispute at the World Court over the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing after more than a decade of legal wrangling, the court said on Wednesday.
They agreed to end the row days before an expected vote by the UN Security Council to lift sanctions imposed on Libya over the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, after victims' families agreed a compensation deal with Tripoli.
Despite a trial and conviction in the Lockerbie case, their dispute at the World Court formally remained open until they symbolically agreed to end the case.
"The governments of Libya and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and of Libya and the United States of America on the other, notified the court that they had `agreed to discontinue with prejudice the proceedings,'" the Hague-based court said.
The decision by the US, Britain and Libya to halt their battle at the UN's highest court, also known as the International Court of Justice, ends a complex dispute which went on for years in The Hague.
Libya first brought a complaint against the US and Britain at the court in 1992 to seek a ruling that London and Washington were wrong to insist that two Lockerbie suspects should stand trial in Britain or the US.
Basing its case on a 1971 international aviation treaty, the Montreal Convention, the Libyans argued that any Lockerbie trial should be held in Libya or a neutral country. Libya later turned over two suspects for trial in The Netherlands. One was convicted and the other acquitted.
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