[On this date in 2008 a long article entitled Lockerbie: The Man Who Was Not There by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer was published on the OhmyNews International website. It is full of interesting material, including extensive quotes from Richard Marquise, the FBI’s chief Lockerbie investigator. The following is just one short excerpt from the article:]
Atef Abu Bakr is a former spokesman for the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) and one of Nidal's closest aides between 1985 and 1989. In a series of interviews published in the Arabic Al Hayat newspaper Bakr said that Abu Nidal told him that his organization was behind the explosion on Pan Am flight 103*.
"Abu Nidal told a meeting of the Revolutionary Council leadership: I have very important and serious things to say. The reports that attribute Lockerbie to others are lies. We are behind it."
"If any one of you lets this out, I will kill him even if he was in his wife's arms,"' Abu Nidal added, according to Bakr.
Having become persona non grata in Syria, Abu Nidal started his move from Syria to Libya in the summer of 1986. His operations, and those he falsely claimed, were bringing discomfort to Damascus. His move to Libya was completed by March 1987.
Settling in Tripoli, Abu Nidal and Libya's leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, allegedly became close friends sharing, according to some observers, "a dangerous combination of an inferiority complex mixed with the belief that they were men of great destiny."
In the aftermath of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, Gaddafi, seeking to distance himself from Nidal, expelled him in 1999**.
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