Thursday 25 July 2013

What was thought about responsibility for Lockerbie in mid-1989

[I have just this morning discovered online a fascinating (and very long) profile of and interview with Colonel Gaddafi by T D Allman published in the July 1989 issue of Vanity Fair. On page 2 (of eight) it contains the following:]

It was here that Qaddafi burst out, saying that the Arabs also “must own, possess, nuclear weapons.” He quickly went on to tell me that he expected President Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown, and Egypt to repudiate its peace with Israel at “any moment.” He also ridiculed efforts by the Palestine Liberation Organization to negotiate with Israel. “The Palestinians are not Yasser Arafat, and what you call the PLO is not a fact,” he assured me.

Who are the Palestinians’ true leaders? Qaddafi singled out for praise and support Abu Musa, the renegade Palestinian commando leader who has consistently attempted to harden Israeli opposition to any peace concessions through attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers; Ahmad Jabril and his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command; and the Fatah Revolutionary Council, better known as the Abu Nidal Organization.

Nidal’s operations have included the September 1986 attack on an Istanbul synagogue, in which twenty-two mostly elderly Jewish worshipers were killed, and the December 1985 attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports— lauded by Libya as “heroic” actions—in which sixteen civilians, including a child, died. More recently, the same organization has kidnapped, among other foreign civilians, a pregnant French woman who, with her newborn infant, is still in captivity, as well as her two young daughters, whose release Qaddafi helped to arrange. As for Jabril’s group, it is believed to have been involved in the December 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 persons, including 189 Americans, were killed.

4 comments:

  1. According to David Walchover's brilliant article "Culprits of Lockerbie - Gaddafi or the Extremists of Palestine" Gaddafi had renounced terrorism in order to support Yasser Arafat's capitulation to the Zionist entity and therefore could not have been responsible for Lckerbie. I note this article is currently being revised - how can you improve on perfection?

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  2. You know they call it "the lowest form of wit", don't you Baz?

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  3. I thought this a tremendously interesting article from July 1989. I wonder how much it is directly linked to Lockerbie with Gaddafi expressing explicit support for terrorist groups notably Abu Nidal and the PFLP-GC. Perhaps Gaddafi's comments were the genesis of the creation of the "Libyan solution".

    The point is that Gaddafi was, in Mr Walchover terms, an "extremist of Palestine". While some claims were unsupported by evidence there was a lot of good stuff in his article - after all much of it is remarkably similar to my own article. However as his central claim "Gaddafi or the Extremists of Palestine" is an oxymoron he really needs a new title. Might I suggest "Lockerbie - the Heathrow Evidence"?

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  4. David Wolchover sails perilously close to plagiarism on many occasions, I fear.

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