CIA interfered with Lockerbie case, says former US prosecutor

[This is the headline over a report by John Davison published late yesterday evening on the Exaro News website.  An accompanying report on the same website is headlined Lockerbie probe was ‘directed off course’, say top investigators. An article based on these two reports and headlined Is this the real Lockerbie bomber? appears on the website of the Mirror newspaper and in The Sunday People. It reads in part:]

A shock report called Operation Bird alleges a CIA cover-up points the finger at Mohammed Abu Talb, who was later convicted of a campaign of bombings

If it is correct, Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi may have been wrongly jailed for the pre-Christmas blast on board Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland that killed 270 people in 1988.

The material, seen by The Sunday People and investigative news website Exaro, alleges a cover-up by the CIA led to a travesty of justice.

Other devastating findings claim a key piece of evidence in the prosecution case against al-Megrahi – a fragment of circuit board for a timer – was faked and remnants of a Slalom-branded shirt in which the timer fragment was supposedly found had been doctored.

Furthermore, the bomb was allegedly planted in luggage that was put on the plane at London’s Heathrow airport, NOT, as the prosecution claimed, loaded by al-Megrahi in Malta to connect to a feeder flight from Frankfurt to London.

The new theory was put forward by a London-based team of private investigators, Forensic Investigative Associates.

They were commissioned by lawyers for al-Megrahi, who died of cancer last year aged 60.

And their findings will spark calls for the case to be re-opened.

The report places Talb in key meetings with other Middle East terror suspects in the run-up to the attack.

It also reveals he was a suspect in the initial investigation.

But he ended up giving evidence against al-Megrahi at his trial in 2001 in return for ­immunity from prosecution.

The new report will be aired in an Al Jazeera TV documentary this week.

Its respected authors are Jessica de Grazia, a former New York chief assistant district attorney, and Philip Corbett, who was chief security advisor to the Bank of England after a career as a top-ranking Met police officer.

They conclude: “We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a consistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case.”

The report was written in 2002 and was due to form part of al-Megrahi’s appeal in 2009. But it was never used and its sensational contents have been kept under wraps until now.

Part of the document details the wicked past crimes of Talb.

He was jailed for life in Sweden in 1989 after being convicted of carrying out terrorist bombings in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Amsterdam, Holland, in 1985.

The attacks – on offices of Northwest Airlines and El Al, the Israeli airline – killed one person and reportedly injured another 20 people.

A further seven people were injured in an attack on the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen.

Talb, now 59, has always denied any involvement with the Lockerbie bombing. But the report alleges that he had close links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], which was initially blamed for Lockerbie.

It also places Talb in Britain on the day an explosion tore a Boeing 747 apart over the town of Lockerbie 25 years ago next Saturday.

He is alleged to have met other terrorists to place the bomb on the plane at Heathrow.

Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has tracked down Talb, who has been living a quiet life in Sweden since his release. But he refused to comment on claims in the Operation Bird report.

The allegations are spelled out in this week’s documentary, If not Megrahi, then who?

Al-Megrahi’s conviction on the basis that the bomb was placed on a flight from Malta was key to the case.

It was then allegedly transferred in luggage at Frankfurt on to a feeder flight for Pan Am 103, which left Heathrow bound for New York on December 21 1988.

But the private investigation uncovered evidence that Talb had previously bribed a Heathrow worker to smuggle a suitcase through security.

And the report says that is how the Lockerbie bomb could have been planted.

Operation Bird also points to claims by Robert Baer, a retired CIA expert on the Middle East, that Talb was paid 500,000 dollars months after Lockerbie.

In his book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, Baer also raises the possibility that Iran made the payment.

The 2002 report would have been central to a second appeal by al-Megrahi – had it not been abandoned because of his controversial release from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds in 2009.

Former Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi has been accused of ordering the Lockerbie atrocity.

But the investigators concluded that police were misled in their investigation into the bombing – and that a government agency, probably the CIA, was to behind the cover-up.

De Grazia and Corbett wrote that their five-month inquiry “leads us to believe the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing was ­directed off-course as a result of government interference”.

They go on: “In our experience, the decision to intervene would have been made at the highest level of government, most likely a top executive of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

“The decision would have been communicated in both blunt and subtle ways down the chain of command to the line investigators.

"Since political interference in investigations runs counter to the professional ethos of US and UK law-enforcement agents, superiors would have played on fear, timidity, gullibility, greed, ambition, patriotism, and other human frailties to silence the qualms of the line investigators.”

It is not clear what the motive for a cover-up might have been.

But British doctor Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died aged 23 in the Lockerbie bombing, told Exaro: “Talb is a life-long, proven terrorist.

“He has completed 20 years in prison for bombings in Scandinavia, and is now out of prison and living in Uppsala in Sweden.

"I believe he played a crucial part in causing the Lockerbie disaster.

“My elected government actively prevented me from obtaining my human rights to know why my daughter’s life was not protected, and who it was who killed her.

“That still makes me extremely angry and also very sad.” 

[These disclosures should be read along with this caveat from John Ashton.]