Pan Am 103, Iran Air 655 and Christine Grahame MSP

[Christine Grahame MSP has over many years fought staunchly to have the truth about Lockerbie uncovered. Here is just one example taken from an item posted on this blog on this date in 2009:]

An SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament has called for an international inquiry to be established to examine the full circumstances that led to the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in December 1988 and the shooting down of Iranian Flight 655, by the US navy five months before the Lockerbie attack.

Christine Grahame MSP believes that the two incidents are “inextricably linked” and expressed a hope that an internationally backed inquiry would lead to the real perpetrators of both attacks being brought to justice. Ms Grahame said:

“Amongst all the furore surrounding Abdelbaset al Megrahi’s release from prison in August, the wider substantive issues have been left obscured.

“I and many others who have examined this case believe on the evidence we have seen that the murder of 270 people over Lockerbie in December 1988 was a revenge attack sponsored by the Iranians in response to the shooting down of one of their passenger jets, Flight 655, five months earlier by the US navy. That vessel, the USS Vincennes, entered Iranian waters in a deliberately provocative move, before firing a surface to air missile at a schedule passenger flight taking Iranian pilgrims [to] Mecca.

“The US claim that this incident was an ‘accident’ simply does not hold water. It was, like the attack on Pan Am 103 five months later, a crime against humanity that targeted civilians and in the Iranian incident led to the deaths of 290 passengers.

“I am today calling on an international inquiry to be established to consider and examine these two inter-related atrocities and I would hope that ultimately this may lead to some effort being made to bring to justice those responsible.

“I accept that the US failure to be a signatory to the International Court of Criminal Justice makes it unlikely that the officers of the USS Vincennes or their Commander in Chief at the time of the blowing up of Flight 655, will face any due legal process. That will also be the case for the Iranian Government officials who authorised and sponsored the attack on Pan Am 103. Nonetheless such an inquiry would help expose the reality of what took place and the hypocrisy of those who are arguing that justice has been served in the Pan Am 103 attack by the wrongful conviction of Abdelbaset al Megrahi.”

Ms Grahame has today (Monday) lodged a parliamentary motion at the Scottish Parliament which calls on an independent inquiry to be established and urges relevant Scottish public authorities, such as the Crown Office and police, to co-operate fully with it.

Text of parliamentary motion:

International Inquiry, Pan Am 103 and Flight 655

That the Parliament supports the establishment of an international inquiry into the circumstances that led to the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 that murdered 270 passengers and urges all relevant Scottish authorities to co-operate with it; further supports that such an inquiry should also consider the relationship of that atrocity to the shooting down of Iranian flight 655 over the Straits of Hormuz five months before by a US warship, which claimed the lives of 290 passengers, and urges the international community to pursue, investigate and bring to justice all those ultimately responsible for these two terrorist attacks, which it considers constitute crimes against humanity.

[RB: The motion appears to have received support only from the following MSPs: Dave Thompson, Bill Wilson, Bob Doris, Bill Kidd, Jamie Hepburn.]

Lib Dems, Malaysia Airlines 17, Iran Air 655 and Pan Am 103

[I do love a good rant. As a ranter, Hugh Reilly is up there with the best. Here is (part of) what he says in his column in The Scotsman today:]

Nick Clegg’s hand-wringing approach to unwelcome tidings such as the eviscerating of Gazan children by Israeli shells whilst playing on a sandy beach is in stark contrast to his reaction to a pro-Russia rag-tag militia shooting down a Malaysian airliner.

Clegg saved his bubbling ire to snipe at Vladimir Putin for the abhorrent action of a para military group over which he did not/does not have full control. The Lib-Dem leader demands that Russia be stripped of its right to hold the 2018 World Cup (...)

So here we have the man who is a heartbeat away from being PM – well, at least until the Tory party bids adieu to a departed David Cameron and elects a new leader. To be fair, Clegg is hanging on to the coattails of America where Putin is perceived to be the Devil incarnate. Hillary Clinton, a presidential hopeful who makes Sarah Palin seem a Harvard scholar, chipped in with her thoughts on the deplorable surface-to-air missile attack on an airliner that left 300 innocents dead. “Vladimir Putin, certainly indirectly, bears responsibility for what happened.”

It’s something of a pity that in 1988 she and Slick Willy hit the mute button when failing to condemn the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes. Flying inside Iranian airspace, the aircraft was blasted out of the sky by the US warship operating inside Iranian territorial water, with a loss of 290 people, 66 of them children. The captain of the ship faced no criminal action; indeed, George H Bush, spawner of Walker Bush, crowed that “the crew acted appropriately”. Just eight years later, Atlanta hosted the Olympic Games.

Unshockingly, the EU did not introduce sanctions against America in an effort to somehow shape its aggressive nature. It was left to the United Nations Security Council to pass Resolution 616 that, in no uncertain terms, expressed “deep distress” and “profound regret” for the callous brutality of the world’s policeman. Oh how the USA quaked on hearing these words.

Back then, of course, Nick Clegg was a callow fellow of some 21 years and an alleged member of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. Menzies Campbell does not have that excuse. He was the recently elected MP for North East Fife, the constituency of his holiday home. I’m certain Ming denounced the USA’s attack on the Iranian airline; after all, it is a matter of public record that this honourable man, like me, shows a keen interest in the deaths of air passengers blown out of the skies. Sir Ming has opined fulsomely on the Lockerbie bombing, declaring that “the decision to release Mr Megrahi was ill-judged”. One but can imagine what his thoughts are on the Iranian dead, or indeed, the decision of the US navy to later award the captain of the USS Vincennes promotion. What is known is that while Pan-Am 103 and MH-17 are forever etched into the consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon axis, the flight number of the equally doomed Iranian aircraft remains a tad anonymous (it was Flight 655, since you ask).

[I look forward with keen anticipation to a comment about Sir Menzies Campbell from Rolfe, who has strong views about the Lib-Dem grandee’s stance on Megrahi and Lockerbie.]

Anniversary of shooting down of Iran Air 655 by USS Vincennes

It was on this date in 1998 that Iran Air flight 655 was shot down over the Strait of Hormuz by the USS Vincennes. The story can be followed on this blog here and on Wikipedia here.

International probe call

International probe call into “linked” Lockerbie and Iranian passenger jet bombings

An SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament has called for an international inquiry to be established to examine the full circumstances that led to the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in December 1988 and the shooting down of Iranian Flight 655, by the US navy five months before the Lockerbie attack.

Christine Grahame MSP believes that the two incidents are “inextricably linked” and expressed a hope that an internationally backed inquiry would lead to the real perpetrators of both attacks being brought to justice. Ms Grahame said:

“Amongst all the furore surrounding Abdelbaset al Megrahi’s release from prison in August, the wider substantive issues have been left obscured.

“I and many others who have examined this case believe on the evidence we have seen that the murder of 270 people over Lockerbie in December 1988 was a revenge attack sponsored by the Iranians in response to the shooting down of one of their passenger jets, Flight 655, five months earlier by the US navy. That vessel, the USS Vincennes, entered Iranian waters in a deliberately provocative move, before firing a surface to air missile at a schedule passenger flight taking Iranian pilgrims [to] Mecca.

“The US claim that this incident was an ‘accident’ simply does not hold water. It was, like the attack on Pan Am 103 five months later, a crime against humanity that targeted civilians and in the Iranian incident led to the deaths of 290 passengers.

“I am today calling on an international inquiry to be established to consider and examine these two inter-related atrocities and I would hope that ultimately this may lead to some effort being made to bring to justice those responsible.

“I accept that the US failure to be a signatory to the International Court of Criminal Justice makes it unlikely that the officers of the USS Vincennes or their Commander in Chief at the time of the blowing up of Flight 655, will face any due legal process. That will also be the case for the Iranian Government officials who authorised and sponsored the attack on Pan Am 103. Nonetheless such an inquiry would help expose the reality of what took place and the hypocrisy of those who are arguing that justice has been served in the Pan Am 103 attack by the wrongful conviction of Abdelbaset al Megrahi.”

Ms Grahame has today (Monday) lodged a parliamentary motion at the Scottish Parliament which calls on an independent inquiry to be established and urges relevant Scottish public authorities, such as the Crown Office and police, to co-operate fully with it.

Text of parliamentary motion:

International Inquiry, Pan Am 103 and Flight 655

That the Parliament supports the establishment of an international inquiry into the circumstances that led to the blowing up of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 that murdered 270 passengers and urges all relevant Scottish authorities to co-operate with it; further supports that such an inquiry should also consider the relationship of that atrocity to the shooting down of Iranian flight 655 over the Straits of Hormuz five months before by a US warship, which claimed the lives of 290 passengers, and urges the international community to pursue, investigate and bring to justice all those ultimately responsible for these two terrorist attacks, which it considers constitute crimes against humanity.

[The above is the text of a press release issued today by Christine Grahame MSP.]

UK should remember prelude to Lockerbie bombing before joining any US attack on Iran

[This is the headline over an article by Kenny MacAskill in today's edition of The Scotsman. It reads in part:]

The USA is ramping up for war on Iran and the UK’s slavishly following, with memories of Iraq all too distant in the minds of some.

Shooting down a US military drone seems arguably legitimate, given the incursion into Iranian territory – and by a giant war machine, not an adult toy.

Besides, given past form of America in the area, it’s hugely suspicious. The prelude to the Lockerbie bombing after all was the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in July 1988. (...)

But the solution in Iran isn’t to wage war but support moderate reform. President Hassan Rouhani and others need encouraged, not disparaged. Iran’s president is a graduate of Glasgow Caley and, by all account, a Scottophile [sic]. Disparaging Iran will only driving people into the arms of the Mullahs.

Change is wanted in Iran by young people, who just want a better life and a bit of fun.

America should back off and the UK should stop supinely supporting them.

[RB: Kenny MacAskill had already made it clear that he did not believe that Abdelbaset Megrahi was responsible for placing the bomb on Pan Am 103: MacAskill: I’ve never believed Megrahi to be the bomber. Now he goes further and seems to accept that the trigger for the atrocity was not Ronald Reagan's 1986 bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi but the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 in July 1988 by USS Vincennes. In other words, it was an Iranian revenge attack, not a Libyan.]

Lockerbie bombing "commissioned by Iran" - bomb loaded at Heathrow not Malta

[Today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph contains a long article headlined Lockerbie bombing: are these the men who really brought down Pan Am 103? based on the material in Aljazeera’s new documentary.  It reads as follows:]

Evidence gathered for the aborted appeal against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's conviction points finger at Iran and Syrian-based terrorist group

In the 25 years that have passed since Pan Am 103 blew up in the sky over Lockerbie, one of the only facts that has remained uncontested is that a bomb concealed in a Samsonite suitcase exploded at 7.02pm on December 21, 1988, causing the loss of 270 lives.

From the day Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the UK’s smallest police force, began investigating the country’s worst terrorist atrocity, the truth about who was responsible has been hidden by a fog of political agendas, conspiracy theories and unreliable evidence.

The 2001 conviction of the Libyan suspect Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, (and the acquittal of his co-defendant Khalifah Fhimah) only served to raise more questions than were answered.

Quite apart from a number of problems with the prosecution’s case was the question of who else took part in the plot. All sides agreed that Megrahi had not acted alone, even if he was guilty.

Yet some of the investigators who sifted through the wreckage of the Boeing 747 and studied intelligence dating from the months before the attack have never wavered in their belief that it was Iran, not Libya, that ordered it, and that a Syrian-based terrorist group executed it.

Now, following a three-year investigation by a team of documentary-makers working for Al Jazeera television, a new and compelling narrative has emerged, in which previously troublesome evidence suddenly fits together like the parts of a Swiss clock.

It begins in Malta nine months before the bombing and winds its way through Beirut, Frankfurt and London leaving a trail of evidence that pointed to Iran, before a phone call from George H W Bush to Margaret Thatcher allegedly switched the focus of the investigation to Libya.

In March 1988, intelligence officers from Iran, Syria and Libya met in the back room of a baker’s shop owned by Abdul Salaam, the head of the Malta cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

They shared a common cause, and agreed to “join together in a campaign against Israeli and American targets”, according a witness who was at the meeting.

Classified US intelligence cables obtained by Al Jazeera suggest America was aware of the meeting. A Defence Intelligence Agency signal said that “Iran, Libya and Syria have signed a co-operation treaty for future terrorist acts”.

At that stage they did not have a specific target in mind, but three months later, on July 3, 1988, Iran’s hatred of America reached a new high after Iran Air flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes, which was protecting merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war.

During a skirmish with Iranian gunboats the American warship mistook the Airbus A300 on its radar for a fighter jet, and fired two radar-guided missiles which downed the aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children.

Iran’s leaders were convinced the aircraft had been shot down deliberately, and proclaimed that there would be “a real war against America”.

By the time the Iranian, Syrian and Libyan plotters next met in Malta in October 1988, their target was clear: to blow up an American airliner as payback for Flight 655.

A source who was present at the meetings was tracked down by Jessica de Grazia, a former Manhattan District Attorney who was hired by Megrahi’s defence team to explore alternative theories over the bombing. Her findings would have formed the basis of Megrahi’s appeal hearing, which he abandoned after he was released from Greenock prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds in 2009.

She said that among those present were “hard core terrorist combatants” trained in explosives, guns and military matters”.

One of those present was Mohammed Abu Talb, who headed the Swedish cell of PFLP-GC, and would later become one of the prime suspects in the Lockerbie bombing before the focus shifted to Megrahi.

Robert Baer, a CIA agent who investigated the Lockerbie bombing, told Al Jazeera that the PFLP-GC and Iran quickly became the main suspects.

He claims that six days after Flight 655 was downed by the USS Vincennes, at a meeting in Beirut representatives of the Iranian regime turned to Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian officer and head of the PFLP-GC, and tasked him with bringing down five American jets.

Jibril, who enjoyed the protection of the Syrian regime, had masterminded aircraft bombings in the past, and the DIA was aware of his mission.

According to another cable obtained by Megrahi’s defence team: “The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmed Jibril…money was given to Jibril upfront in Damascus for initial expenses – the mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight.”

Jibril placed one of his most trusted deputies, a Palestinian PFLP-GC member called Hafez Dalkamoni, in charge of the terrorist cell, and he travelled to Germany to prepare the attack with Marwan Khreesat, an expert bomb-maker.

While Khreesat busied himself making his devices, Dalkamoni flew to Malta for another meeting in the baker’s shop. Also present was Abu Talb. Their presence in October 1988 was reported by a Maltese newspaper, tipped off that members of the PFLP-GC were in town.

According to the witness spoken to by Miss de Grazia, the meeting was convened to discuss how to get a bomb on board a US passenger jet.

Malta would also become key to the prosecution case against Megrahi, after the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb was found to contain clothes bought in a shop in Malta.

One of the key prosecution witnesses at Megrahi’s trial was Tony Gauchi [sic], owner of Mary’s House boutique, who identified Megrahi as buying clothes from him before the bombing. His evidence was later thrown into doubt after it emerged he had seen a picture of Megrahi in a magazine before he picked him out at an ID parade. He was also paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice.

On his deathbed, Megrahi said: “As God is my witness, I was never in that shop. This is the truth.”

Intriguingly, the papers assembled by Megrahi’s defence team for his aborted appeal show that before Megrahi was ever in the frame, Mr Gauchi identified another of his customers from a list of initial suspects. That man was Abu Talb, who bears a clear resemblance to an artist’s impression of a dark-skinned man with an afro hairstyle which was drawn from Mr Gauchi’s initial recollections.

So was Abu Talb, who Tony Gauchi said had bought clothes in his shop, the man who put the bomb on Pan Am 103?

According to the judges who found Megrahi guilty, the bomb was placed on a flight from Luqa airport in Malta to Frankfurt, and then transferred onto a feeder flight from Frankfurt to Heathrow, where it was finally transferred onto Pan Am 103. But there was another problem for the prosecution: they acknowledged that they had no evidence of Megrahi putting the bomb on board the Air Malta flight at Luqa.

John Bedford, a Heathrow baggage handler, told the Megrahi trial that after he took a tea break on the day of the bombing, he recalled seeing a brown hard-shell case on a cargo trolley that had not been there when he left. He saw the case an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed at Heathrow. There had also been a break-in at Heathrow the night before: security guard Ray Manly told Megrahi's appeal that he found a padlock on a baggage store cut.

Cell leader Dalkamoni and bomb-maker Khreesat had been arrested by the time of the bombing, after German police rounded up terrorist suspects in two cities. But Talb was still at large.

When Talb was arrested until the following year over unrelated terrorist offences police who searched his home found clothing bought in Malta, circuitry and other potential bomb-making materials. For now, his exact role, if any, remains a mystery.

Dalkamoni and Khreesat had been kept under surveillance by German police, who were aware of their terrorist connections, and when the police raided 14 apartments in Frankfurt and Neuss in October 1988 the two men were among 17 suspects who were held.

The police discovered an arsenal of guns, grenades and explosives, and in the back of a Ford Cortina driven by Dalkamoni found a bomb hidden inside a Toshiba radio cassette player.

The bomb was specifically designed to bring down an aircraft, as it had a barometric switch which would set off a timer when the aircraft reached a certain height. Its design had a striking peculiarity: the plastic explosives had been wrapped in silver foil from a Toblerone chocolate bar.

The German police found four bombs in total, but had reason to believe there had been five.

Was the fifth bomb placed on board Pan Am 103? Bomb fragments recovered from the crash site showed that the bomb had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player identical to the one found in Germany.

Even more strikingly, the bomb fragments included tiny pieces of silver foil from a chocolate bar.

A German forensic officer told the Megrahi trial that the timer on the Lockerbie bomb was not switched on until seven minutes into the flight, suggesting a barometric switch had been used to set it off.

Despite so many pointers to Khreesat being the bomb-maker, he has never been charged over Lockerbie because the judges at the Megrahi trial said that there was “no evidence from which we could infer that [PFLP-GC] was involved in this particular act of terrorism”.

The suggestion of a barometric trigger did not fit the prosecution’s version of events, as they said Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, smuggled the bomb on board an Air Malta flight. But if a barometric switch had been used, the bomb would have detonated on take-off from Malta. Instead, the prosecution said the bomb was triggered at 31,000ft by a straightforward timer switch.

The forensic evidence against Megrahi depended on a tiny fragment of the bomb’s timer recovered from the crash site and said to be identical to a batch of 20 timers known to have been purchased by Libya.

But when Megrahi’s defence team obtained the bomb fragment and sent it to a metallurgist to be tested, he showed it was not one of the timers sold to Libya.

On December 5, 1988, a man with an Arab accent called the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, warning that a bomb would be planted on a Pan Am flight in two weeks time. Despite the warning, the bombers managed to smuggle their device on board Pan Am 103.

Another DIA cable obtained by Megrahi’s defence team stated that in early 1989 a cheque from the Iranian Central Bank was written out by an Iranian minister and handed to a middle-man who gave it to Ahmed Jibril. The pay-off was $11 million (£6.5m), according to former CIA agent Robert Baer.

When Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary began its investigation into the bombing, it believed the PFLP-GC was involved. A report written in 1989 by Supt Pat Connor identified 15 members of the organisation he wanted arrested and questioned, and the then Transport Minister Paul Channon invited selected journalists to an off-the-record briefing to set out the case against Iran and the PFLP-GC, adding that arrests were imminent.

But by the middle of 1989 the investigation had suddenly changed tack, reportedly following a phone call between President George H W Bush and Baroness Thatcher in March 1989. The two leaders, it is claimed, were anxious not to antagonize the PFLP-GC’s guardian, Syria - a key strategic power in the Middle East - and decided that Libya, which had taken part in the meetings in Malta, should be the focus of the investigation.

The following year Syria joined forces with the US and Britain to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Mr Baer said the FBI began investigating Libya “in complete disregard to the intelligence” and suggested Libya’s pariah status made it a convenient scapegoat.

Al Jazeera tracked down alleged bomb-maker Khreesat to Amman in Jordan, where he is kept under surveillance by Jordanian intelligence. He refused to discuss the affair on camera but a source close to him later told Al Jazeera that the attack had indeed been commissioned by Iran and that the bomb was put on board at Heathrow.

Abu Talb now lives in Sweden, having been released from prison four years ago following a 20-year sentence for unrelated terrorist acts. His son said he had “nothing to do with Lockerbie”.

For the families of the Lockerbie victims, the wait for the truth goes on.

Lockerbie: What Really Happened? is on Al Jazeera English at 8pm on Tuesday, March 11, Freeview 83, Sky 514.  

[An accompanying article in the same newspaper is headlined Lockerbie bombing: profiles of the men who were implicated before Libya took the blame; another is headlined Lockerbie bombing 'was work of Iran not Libya', says former [Iranian] spy.

A Press Association news agency report published on the Sunday Post website reads as follows:]

The Lockerbie bombing was ordered by Iran in retaliation for a US strike on an Iranian passenger plane, a documentary has claimed.

Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is the only person to be convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed more than 25 years ago. 

Megrahi, who was released from jail by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, died in 2012 protesting his innocence and h is family plan to appeal against his conviction.

But former Iranian intelligence officer Abolghassem Mesbahi has told an Al Jazeera documentary that the bombing was ordered by Tehran and carried out by the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) in retaliation for a US navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier, in which 290 people died.

The US ship apparently mistook the plane for an F-14 fighter jet.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr Mesbahi said: "Iran decided to retaliate as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

"The target of the Iranian decision makers was to copy exactly what's happened to the Iranian Airbus. Everything exactly same, minimum 290 people dead. This was the target of the Iranian decision makers."

US Defence Intelligence Agency cables at the time reported that the leader of the PFLP-GC had been paid to plan the bombing, the broadcaster said.

The Crown Office has previously said the alleged involvement of the PFLP-GC was addressed at the original Lockerbie trial.

A successful application from Megrahi's family to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission could start the third appeal into the conviction.

Megrahi lost his first appeal in 2002, one year after he was found guilty of mass murder and jailed for life.

The SCCRC recommended in 2007 that Megrahi should be granted a second appeal against his conviction. He dropped his appeal two days before being released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds.

In December, the Libyan attorney general announced he had appointed two prosecutors to work on the case. For the first time they met Scottish and US investigators who are trying to establish whether there are other individuals in Libya who could be brought to trial for involvement in the attack.

Lockerbie relatives to appeal Megrahi conviction

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

British relatives of victims of the Lockerbie atrocity are planning another attempt to overturn the conviction of the only person found guilty of the attack after a former Iranian spy went public with his claims that Syrian-based extremists recruited by Iran carried out the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Former Iranian intelligence officer Abolghassem Mesbahi told a TV documentary, screened last night and repeated tonight, that the December 1988 bombing was undertaken by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) on behalf of Tehran.

He claimed it was carried out in revenge for the mistaken shooting down in July 1988 of an Iran Air Airbus by the USS Vincennes, a US Navy cruiser in the Gulf.

Iran's then leader Ayatollah Khomeini had pledged the skies would "rain blood" in revenge.

During Al Jazeera's Lockerbie: what really happened? documentary, Mr Mesbahi said: "Iran decided to retaliate as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

"The target of the Iranian decision makers was to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian Airbus. Everything exactly same, minimum 290 people dead."

Campaigner Dr Jim Swire said yesterday that UK relatives of the victims, including himself, are preparing to apply to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al Megrahi to be overturned. Megrahi died in 2012 protesting his innocence.

Mr Swire, whose daughter Flora, 23, was on board Flight 103 said: "Some British relatives have decided that enough is enough and we will be applying within weeks for a further appeal against the Megrahi verdict. We have a right to know who killed our families and why the British Government and authorities responsible for the safety of the aircraft failed in their duty. We are not going away."

A successful SCCRC application could start the third appeal into Megrahi's conviction.

The Al Jazeera documentary fingered Ahmed Jibril, secretary-general of the PFLP-GC, as the key figure behind the attack, which was led by Hafez Dalkamoni. The bomb itself is alleged to have been made by Jordanin Marwan Khreesat.

In December 1988, an anonymous man took responsibility for the crash in the name of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution and in retaliation for the downing of the Iran Air flight.

Earlier that year, German police raided a PFLP-GC cell and found Toshiba cassette recorder bombs, and arrested Khreesat and Dalkamoni. The bombs were later found to be almost identical to the one used to blow up Flight 103.

But during the Lockerbie investigation, the spotlight turned from Iran to Libya when forensic examination of the suitcase that carried the bomb found it had contained a Maltese-made babygrow. Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci identified Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, as the man who bought the baby clothes and other items found in the suitcase.

In 1991 an indictment for murder was issued against Megrahi and Malta airport manager Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. The pair were handed over to Scottish authorities in 1999. Fhimah was later cleared of any involvement in the bombing.

Egyptian-born Abu Talb had also previously emerged as a key suspect, with his accusers alleging he had smuggled the bomb onto the flight. However, when Megrahi went on trial in 2000, Talb was called as a prosecution witness.

New information about Talb and his activities in Europe was sent to the SCCRC during an earlier investigation. It claimed he was paid millions of dollars by Iran following the bombing. In 1989, a Swedish court convicted Talb of bombing a synagogue in Denmark and gave him a life sentence. He has since been released.

John Ashton, Megrahi's biographer, said: "There is very little that is new here. For about 18 months after the bombing Tehran got the blame, before attention focused on Libya. I am glad [Al Jazeera's] report has put the focus back on Iran."

A Crown Office spokesman said: "Mesbahi's claim that Iran was responsible was first reported in the media in the late 1990s and was available to the defence before the trial but they did not call him as a witness.

"The wider alleged involvement of the PFLP-GC has been repeatedly reported over many years but was addressed in full and rejected at the original trial."

He added that Megrahi was convicted and that the verdict was upheld following an appeal.

[The Scotsman also today runs an article headlined New Lockerbie appeal to be launched ‘within weeks’.

An interesting article appears today in the Maltese newspaper The Times.  It contains the following:]

The latest documentary sheds light on events in Malta months  before the actual bombing. According to documentation gathered for the film, in March 1988, intelligence officers from Iran, Syria and Libya met at the Miska Bakery, in Qormi. The place was used by a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) that operated in Malta.

Foreign intelligence agencies knew of the cell’s presence on the island and were monitoring the bakery.

However, the information was not accurate enough for action to be taken.

The Iranian, Syrian and Libyan intelligence officers had agreed to a general campaign “against Israeli and American targets” but Pan Am 103 was not yet in the picture. Things changed three months later when, on July 3, the USS Vincennes, a military ship patrolling the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iranian passenger plane killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children.

The ship mistook the airliner for a fighter jet but the US refused to issue an apology even after the tragedy was revealed. Iran wanted revenge and a plan was hatched to destroy an American aircraft. In October 1988, terrorists from the PFLP-GC met in a St Julian’s apartment to discuss the final details of its execution.

Information on this meeting came from a source who was present. The source was tracked down by Jessica de Grazia, a former Manhattan District Attorney working for Mr al Megrahi’s defence. Her findings would have formed the basis of his appeal hearing, which he abandoned on being released in 2009 from Greenock prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds.

One of those present for the Malta meeting was Mohammed Abu Talb, who headed the Swedish cell of PFLP-GC, and would later become one of the prime suspects in the case before the probe shifted to Libya and Mr al Megrahi.

Journalist Joe Mifsud had reported on the meeting in the wake of the Lockerbie attack. Speaking to Times of Malta yesterday, Dr Mifsud was not surprised by the findings of the documentary. “It confirms what I had reported on, even before the Lockerbie trial, that Abu Talb was the prime suspect in the case,” he said.

Dr Mifsud, who was present for Mr Abu Talb’s testimony at the trial, said the Swedish police had found clothes from Malta in the Palestinian’s apartment in Sweden and a calendar with December 21 circled.

In fact, the theory that the Lockerbie bombing was executed by the PFLP-GC on behalf of Iran was in line with the original leads pursued by Scottish and American investigators.

Al Jazeera tracked down the alleged bomb maker, Marwan Khreesat, to Amman in Jordan, where he is kept under surveillance by Jordanian intelligence. He refused to discuss the affair on camera but a source close to him later told Al Jazeera the attack had indeed been commissioned by Iran and the bomb was put on board at Heathrow.

Megrahi was innocent, says Lockerbie victim's father, Martin Cadman

[What follows is taken from a report published today on the EDP24 website:]

For more than 20 years Norfolk man Martin Cadman has fought to uncover the true story behind his son Bill’s death in the Lockerbie disaster. Now Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted bomber, is dead - but in this interview published in the EDP in April, Mr Cadman and the author of a new book explain why they believe he was innocent.

As Martin Cadman prepared to leave a meeting at London’s US Embassy just over a year after his son’s death aboard Pan Am flight 103, a member of the American Presidential Commission drew him to one side. “Keep up the fight,” he said. “Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they are never going to tell.”

Since then he has kept fighting and today, more than 23 years after Bill Cadman and 269 other people were killed, Mr Cadman has a filing cabinet in the study of his Burnham Market home crammed with folders relating to the disaster and the subsequent investigation. Despite this dogged research, exactly what happened remains a mystery to him, though he has his suspicions. But one thing of which he is certain is that it did not involve Libya or Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man who was convicted for the Lockerbie bombing in January 2001 at a trial under Scottish law in the Netherlands, spent eight years in a Scottish prison and was released on compassionate grounds after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer.

Now comes the publication of a book, co-authored by Megrahi, that presents new evidence seemingly undermining what many considered an already flimsy case for is prosecution, and this strengthens Mr Cadman’s view that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

“I don’t think that Megrahi or Libya had anything to do with it,” he said. “He has been made a scapegoat.” The bulk of Megrahi: You are my Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence is written by John Ashton, a Brighton-based author who has studied the case for 18 years and worked as part of Megrahi’s defence team between 2006 and 2009. Italicised passages written by Megrahi in the first person are interspersed through Ashton’s detailed analysis of the bombing and its aftermath. The book draws from a long-suppressed 800-page report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which was compiled in 2007 and would have featured in Megrahi’s second appeal against his conviction – but as is well known, he dropped his appeal and accepted a quicker release on compassionate grounds while remaining tainted with guilt as the convicted bomber.

Three major points emerge from the report and Mr Ashton’s own research. First, the most significant new evidence concerns the Toshiba cassette player that is believed to have been converted into an explosive device and stowed within a brown Samsonite suitcase in the luggage hold. This device featured a timer supposedly identical to those known to have been purchased by Libya from a company called Mebo, which purchased its circuit boards from a German firm called Thuring.

Mr Ashton said: “This is something that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission miss, and it relates to the forensics. The crucial forensic item in the case that really ties Megrahi and Libya in was this fragment of circuit board. We can demonstrate forensically that the prosecution claim that this originated from a timing device that was supplied to Libya is not true, because in the circuit boards in those timing devices, the copper circuitry was coated with an alloy of tin and lead. The Lockerbie one was coated with pure tin, which requires a completely different manufacturing process, and one that was not used by Thuring, the company that supplied those circuit boards.”

The second point concerns the Crown’s most important witness, a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci who, two months before the bombing, sold a man some clothes that were later used to wrap the tape-recorder bomb within the suitcase. In Mr Ashton’s words, Gauci’s initial “descriptions of the clothes purchaser all suggested the man was around 50 years old, 6ft tall and with dark skin, whereas Megrahi was 36, is 5ft 8in and has light skin”.

But in 1991, Gauci identified Megrahi as the man who entered his shop, selecting him from a line-up of photographs, and in 1999, he picked Megrahi out again, this time in person. “Before picking him out of the identity parade it turns out he’d had a magazine that featured Megrahi’s photo for months, so he would have been familiar with him. He’d had other newspaper and magazine articles as well, it turned out.”

The SCCRC report also established that he only gave evidence after asking for a $2m reward, and that the Scottish police persuaded the US Department of Justice to pay this sum, along with $1m for his brother, Paul. This fact was not disclosed to the defence during the trial, and would have been of great value as they sought to cast aspersions on the quality of Gauci’s evidence.

So if Mr Cadman, Mr Ashton and Megrahi are correct, who really was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing? Herein lies the third major aspect of the book’s case.

In July 1988, an American warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down Iran Air flight 655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai as it flew over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 passengers.

“This Iranian airbus was taking people to the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca,” said Mr Cadman, aged 87. “We never got an answer from the Americans as to why they shot down an innocent airbus.”

Instead of issuing an explanation or apology for the loss of innocent lives, the Ronald Reagan administration gave the USS Vincennes crew the Combat Action Ribbon. Five months after this attack, on December 21, 1988, came the Lockerbie bombing.

“It was a revenge thing, probably – Iran saying ‘we’re going to have the same number of yours as you killed of ours’,” said Mr Cadman. The investigators’ initial suspicion was indeed directed at Iran – specifically an Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). This group had splintered from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and had already massacred civilians in Israel and Europe. In particular, the focus was on one man, Mohammed Abu Talb, who was given a life sentence in 1989 for attacks on Jewish targets. He is believed to have been freed from prison in 2009, shortly after Megrahi.

Mr Ashton said: “The key things about this group are: one, they built bombs into Toshiba radio cassette players; two, they built bombs that were designed to blow up aircraft; and three, the cell was based in West Germany, which is where the flight began its journey. There was a feeder flight called Pan Am 103A, and the flight that exploded was Pan Am flight 103.

“Although some of the group were rounded up two months before Lockerbie, some of their bombs went missing and some of the personnel were not rounded up. There was a warning issued in December 1988... The State Department circulated a warning which said that a group of Palestinian militants were heading to Europe and were planning to target Pan Am.” Mr Ashton said that that warning’s existence was not revealed until seven years after the Lockerbie disaster. He added: “So those things combine to make me think they did it – and Iran, of course, had the motive.”

Bill Cadman and his girlfriend were among 259 people to have died in the aeroplane on December 21, 1988, along with 11 more at the crash site in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. Bill was 32 and building a successful career as a sound engineer responsible for the audio quality at West End musicals such as Les Miserables. He and his girlfriend were en route to America for Christmas. “They shouldn’t have been on the flight,” said Mr Cadman. “I think my son was trying to buy the tickets last minute, and he hadn’t got the money, but his girlfriend produced the money, otherwise they wouldn’t have been on the flight.”

Over the years he and his wife Rita, who now lives in a care home in Fakenham, had the support of a number of politicians such as Henry Bellingham, the Conservative MP for North-West Norfolk, and Tam Dalyell, the former Labour member for Linlithgow.

Both politicians had great respect for Mr Cadman – as does Mr Ashton. “I’ve dealt with Martin, he’s a very good man,” he said. “He’s been very dogged over the years. He deserves better than he’s got, all the relatives do. It’s only with the help of people like him that we keep all this on the agenda.”

Mr Ashton’s hope is that this book will result in a public inquiry in Scotland. “I think the chances of getting the people who really did it are very slight. The best we can hope for is a full inquiry. At the very least it needs to look into why all this evidence was withheld, but what we really need is the full inquiry which will answer the questions of Martin and others, which are: why were the warnings ignored, and what happened within the investigation that led to the PFLP-GC and Iran being dropped as suspects. And, on top of that, we need to get Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. There is a mechanism for doing that – an application could be made to the SCCRC, and his family are being encouraged to do that.”

However, he is sure that Megrahi will not live to see this happen. When Megrahi returned home to Libya to die, his arrival prompted scenes of joy that disgusted many Britons and Americans, not least the many victims’ relatives who believe that he is a murderer.

Megrahi’s heroic status in his home country, however, owed nothing to the idea that he had struck a murderous blow against an American airliner; instead he is seen as an innocent man who sacrificed his liberty for the sake of the nation’s economy. In 2003, Muammar Gadaffi accepted Libyan responsibility for the atrocity and paid compensation to the victims’ families in order to have crippling sanctions lifted – and at the same time let it be known that he was doing so as an economic tactic rather than a true acceptance of guilt.

Megrahi describes his release from prison in the book: “The decision provoked a carnival of political pointscoring, which kept the issue at the top of the news agenda for over a fortnight. The controversy was entirely founded on the assumption that I was the Lockerbie bomber. Very little of the media and political comment acknowledged that I had had an appeal pending and that the SCCRC considered the original verdict was ‘at least arguably one which no reasonable court, properly directed, could have returned’.”

Mr Cadman does not know whether he will see someone else convicted for his son’s murder. He is sure of one thing, however, after that conversation at the embassy.

“I remember that he said ‘There are some things that you will hear about that are right, but you won’t hear all of it. And no one here is going to tell you everything.’ And that is rather frightening. There are these few people who are in the know, and the rest of us who are not.”

Megrahi: You are my Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence, by John Ashton, is published by Birlinn at £14.99.