Only truth, not revenge, allows us to heal and forgive

[This is part of the headline over an article by Dr Jim Swire published in today's edition of Scotland on Sunday. A longer version of the article reads as follows:]

Looking at the situation in the Middle East, we may never have a better opportunity to decry the use of brute force, public deception and material power as a route to bettering our future than we have at this moment. 

On 3rd July 1988 the USS Vincennes a cutting edge American missile cruiser equipped with a state of the art Aegis weapons control system, and commanded by (the late) Captain Will C Rogers III was in the Persian Gulf. American warships then were busy protecting international oil tanker traffic in the straits of Hormuz from Iranian attacks. History repeats itself.

Back in 1988 the Vincennes’ helicopter had reported coming under fire from Iranian speedboats, and though unscathed was ordered back to the Vincennes. The ship herself turned into Iranian waters in order to fire back at the Iranian speedboats, known as ‘Boghammers’, with which she then immediately engaged. At this time the ship’s radar picked up the trace of an aircraft climbing out of Bandar Abbas Airport (Iran). This was Iran Air Flight 655 an airliner with 290 people aboard. The airport supported both civil and military aircraft. Those interested to learn more might attempt to get access to a copy of STORM CENTER the USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655 published by the (US) Naval Institute Press ISBN 1 755750 727 9, a personal account of tragedy and terrorism by Will and Sharon Rogers. It is a riveting account from the cutting edge by the Vincennes’ captain and his family.

Back on that 3rd of July 1988, the ship’s captain Will C Rogers III was led to misinterpret the radar trace of IR Flight 655 as being an attacking Iranian warplane, but it must be remembered this occurred in the tense circumstances of the fire from the Boghammers, and the restrictions placed on his ship’s duties from higher levels of the US navy. 

We humans do all make mistakes. 

Two of the ships missiles were fired and destroyed the airliner: the wreckage and the 290 bodies plunged into the waters of the Hormuz straits, killing all aboard; among cheers over the threat-resolution from the crew [and a from a media team who happened to be recording the amazing facilities of the ship and her technology that day.]

Captain Rogers remained in charge of his ship, and was later awarded the Legion of Merit decoration "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer of USS Vincennes from April 1987 to May 1989”, though IR655 was downed in 1988. The award was given for his service as the Commanding Officer of Vincennes, specifically highlighting his tactical skills and leadership in the Persian Gulf, including engagements with Iranian surface craft. There was no mention there of flight IR655.

Iranian sources immediately publicly swore revenge upon “The Great Satan”, over the tragic loss of IR655 with all those people aboard. 

In November 1991, Scottish and American prosecutors simultaneously indicted Libyans Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Both were identified as members of the Libyan intelligence service. This was a sudden dramatic reversal of the previous years of work between the disaster in 1988 at Lockerbie and 1991, in which time intelligence services had concluded, as do we now, that the Lockerbie bombing was a revenge attack by Iran in return for the fate of IR 655. 

Within some ten days of this startling about turn [published simultaneously in the USA and by Scotland’s Lord Advocate], to blaming Libya, for the Lockerbie disaster, two Western hostages, one of whom happened to be the British Terry Waite an emissary of the UK’s then archbishop of Canterbury and both having been held by Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, were released, others soon followed. 

Now that the Persian Gulf is again sporting US warships, with Iran’s leaders no doubt plotting how to manage the repercussions of being bombed this time by US and Israeli warplanes, and also with US marine groups on their way. We need to heed the words of German philosopher Georg Hegel: “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” 

For starters the subsequent bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 has been shown for our group ‘’UK Families-Flight 103’ by our own careful researches over more than 38 years, to have been the work of Iran, through the use of Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC terrorist group in Damascus acting as mercenaries and financed - just as Hezbollah in the Bekaa has always been - by the Iranian Ayatollas. The PFLP-GC workshop in Damascus was where a set of cunning IED bombs intended to destroy aircraft in flight was made, under Jordanian Marwan Khreesat meanwhile the capture of a terrorist intermediary had confirmed to us [through incriminating documents found on his person by CIA assets], the passage of funds from Iran to Jibril’s group.

We had also obtained in early 1989 access to an illustrated warning sent in July 1988 to the UK Government, [among many others], by the German BKA police group under Herr Rainer Gobel. Containing colour photographs and descriptions of bombs recovered by them from members of Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC Palestinian terrorist group now caught in the small German town of Neuss, convenient to Frankfurt airport.

Please study the story contained in our book LOCKERBIE: a father’s search for justice (ISBN 978 1 78027 920 6: Birlinn, Edinburgh, reprinted 2025) to understand how our search for the truth as to who had murdered our families was pressed forward over the decades, and how it came to fundamentally differ from the official account. It has had no driving force other than the need for us to know the truth about who really had murdered our family members, and to improve, if we could, the protection for other air travellers in the future. Many who have attempted to understand what is said to be the complex story of why Lockerbie happened, seem unaware of how it was shown that the one seemingly solid link between the bomb used at Lockerbie is nothing other than fake news. The link to Malta for the bomb simply did not exist. Its main support among the story tellers of the world was a tiny fingernail sized fragment of circuit board, named from the Zeist trial onwards as PT35b, and allegedly recovered from the crash debris at the site of the tragedy.

The first pointer we got as to the significance of this forensic element ‘PT35b’ found inside a Scottish police evidence bag and produced in court as proof of the concept of the bomb’s travel from Malta, was words from the USA attributed to Richard Marquise working on the tragedy for the FBI from the USA, who is alleged to have said that a court trial without this tiny piece of evidence would not have been possible.

This fragment now known as ‘PT35b’ was treated with great gravity by those attempting to defend the two accused Libyans. The fragment was submitted to electron microscopic and spectroscopic analysis. What that showed was that in the two surviving tracks on it’s small surface, the copper had been plated with pure tin.

At first this seemed part of the normal manufacturing processes used by a reputable Swiss firm ‘Turing’ who were supplying circuit boards to MEBO, who in turn had made the ‘MST13’ digital timers some of which were supplied by MEBO to the Libyans, and which the prosecution decided had been used for the Lockerbie bomb.

There were however two major problems: FIRST,During the intervening years between the disaster and the trial, the electronics industry had undergone a significant change. Those responsible at an international level for industrial and domestic waste disposal practices had become acutely aware of the risks to human health from the metal lead both in the domestic environment and when deposited in landfill. Rapidly it was decided that the metal lead must be removed from domestic use and in the platings on electronic circuit boards. With the cooperation of the EU, Japan and America in particular, it was agreed that all lead should be forbidden in the manufacture of electronic printed circuit boards. Meanwhile statements from Turing about their circuit board manufacture until after December 1988 confirmed that their output was universally made from boards plated in the standard electronic platings of the time, in which the blend of metals used always consisted of tin and lead.

Turing’s director Bonfadelli signed a sworn statement that his firm had been equipped solely for the application of tin/lead platings, before 1988 and so could not have made the board from which ‘PT35b’ would have had to have come. 

Second, the police evidence bag in which the fragment PT35b was found was unique in having had its label altered, and in such a way as to make it evident that debris within should be examined, rather than only the charred cloth also within, (which was readily shown to have originated from Malta). The Zeist court failed to have the details of who might have altered the label and what his/her motives might have been for doing so probed.

It was clear that neither the Scottish police nor any agent for the Crown Office were remotely likely to be responsible for originating ‘PT35b’, for we know that the investigating Scots police were in possession of pristine circuit boards given to them by MEBO, and that these were coated with a tin/lead alloy from which the lead could not be removed by the heat or blast of a Semtex explosion.

The likely origin for PT35b therefore seems to lie outwith the investigating team in Scotland, even though ‘PT35b’ was first revealed from a police evidence bag, and access to the police evidential bags seems to have been most generous for American agents from the FBI or intelligence agents also from the US. Without the ability to investigate the detailed behaviour of US agents in the investigation, we were made aware that a MEBO type timer had been acquired by the CIA from a site in Togo and that that evidence was passed from the CIA to the FBI, to an operative called James Thurman working in the FBI’s laboratories. This man broke the news to US media that he was the man who identified the CIA materials given to him which carried with them Libyan tainted details. He was lauded as man of the month, for establishing in many US minds the concept that this was a link to Libya. Unfortunately Mr James Thurman was soon removed from his position in the FBI labs after it came to light that internal investigations had shown persistent distortions by him of evidence in other FBI major investigations, his removal seems to have been the work of his superior ‘line manager’ Whitehurst. 

There can be no doubt that access to potentially evidential materials was gained by US agents right from the earliest hours following the disaster itself, and that this was found shocking by some who were honestly engaged in extensive searching of the disaster crash site. The late Labour MP Tam Dalyell had experienced the doubts of many who had been witnesses to the early evolution of the police investigations. We had hoped that people within the US would gather what evidence they could, and we never have wanted to disturb any ‘closure’ that American bereaved families might feel they had obtained for themselves.

Recent international political and military events, particularly some emanating from the USA have confirmed what we had already discovered the hard way: truth had been suborned into US foreign policy and there crushed underfoot along with the interests of those bereaved families in the UK who merely sought that truth. Inability to reach that truth is echoed in the subheading of the Washington Post newspaper: ‘democracy dies in darkness’.

Knowingly or not those currently assaulting Iran and her people from above will now find themselves embedded in asymmetrical warfare. The story of how Vincennes captain Will Rogers III’s wife Sharon came to escape miraculously from the shrapnel of a powerful pipe-bomb placed underneath the family’s van within the Continental USA itself in 1989 should leave no doubt about that prediction. American investigators were ‘unable to discover’ who had planted that pipe bomb.

Just so long as those in power in Iran, (Ayatollahs or not), remain in power and able to slake their lust for revenge, so long will the world be a needlessly dangerous place. The Iranian people on the other hand have tried to make their dissatisfaction with their regime known with the greatest bravery, losing around10,000 citizens' lives to the weapons of their own rulers recently.

It is a desperately sad aspect of humanity that the first visceral reaction that comes into so many of our human brains when we are attacked, or worse still those we love are killed, is to seek revenge. Yet it does not have to be so. We do not in our group ‘UK Families-Flight 103’ seek revenge against Iran for the Lockerbie atrocity. We have sought the truth, and not simply in ’Truth Social’ either. 

Knowledge of what the truth really is about the origins of the dreadful attack on Pan Am 103, has only reinforced the realisation for us that revenge is self-defeating and generates hatred and the lust for revenge. 

Revenge attempted by Iran against the family of the Captain of the Vincennes was amplified for many through the killing of 270 people at Lockerbie. Yet there still is another way; from accepting the truth of where blame lies could spring the roots of healing. If on the other hand, for reasons of State, of International Politics or simply from our own human nature we were to enlarge or repeat the words and acts of revenge, where then would be the route to forgiveness or healing? One cannot forget, but can forgive. Even for that, we need to know the truth.

Sometimes it is educational to remember days long past when young. As an eight year old boy, the writer living in the Scottish Island of Skye was aware of family links to Canada, whose current leader speaks so much free common sense nowadays. There, like so many in Scotland we had Canadian cousins, who unlike us in 1946 had freedom already to buy as much food as they required, and who sometimes were able to send to us food parcels to help fill the limitations of post World War 2 rationing. One day a large parcel from Canada arrived for us, inside were large packets of tea and white sugar, sent with love.

Seated around a dining room table in Skye our family were set to work, the younger ones with sharp eyes, but the adults also dedicated to the task of disentangling the contents of those bags, for they had burst and the sugar and the tea leaves so precious to us in those days had mixed in the jumbling of their travels. We were separating tea leaves from grains of sugar. It took all day, with the rain beating on the windows as though it disapproved of this affront to the limits of the post war rationing. Sometimes it is all too easy to think of people together as if all were to be tarred with the same brush and to think that all the parcel contents were good for would be to make cups of exceedingly sweet tea, or plates of sweet but tannin laden porridge. Dealing with Iran can be like failing to disentangle the sweet from the sour. It would be wise to think of Iranian people not as evil but like a mixed up parcel, just like we are here. Iran, after all is the remaining rootstock of one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen and its people of today may hold the seed-corn of a great future.

Not being Iranians ourselves we should not seek to distinguish between one Iranian and another, we are not this time best placed to tell the ‘sugar' from the 'tea leaves' and can only say that those who claim to run their Iranian 'theocracy’ have, over many years, held themselves free to attack and destroy the lives of others indiscriminately, whether or not those others appeared to have any connection other than just their nation or even just their common language with any acts of violence or hatred.

True, Iranians have emerged to find themselves governed by a ‘theocracy’ which they themselves may have summoned back from France, but which, given the reins of power, corrupted itself through the lust for even greater influence through militarism and terrorist-related bloody revenge.

Our Western bible does tell us stories of the life of Jesus, and at Easter we are there bidden to remember even stories of resurrection and glory. Let us though not forget, believers or not, how, in one such story when a woman was to be stoned to death for adultery, none of the accusing rabble of men could convincingly tell himself that he ‘at least’ was free of sin, and so they did not cast the first stone, but slunk away, and the woman lived. Elsewhere in that book we are told ‘judge not, that you be not judged, and forgive even those who have sinned grievously against us.

Both Iran and the UK whether Muslim, Christian, agnostic, or atheist can read or listen to the teachings which Jesus Christ left behind, namely that judgement of others should be the realm of God, not us, and that our privilege is to love one another.

By chance it so happens that only last week in England was enthroned a fresh Archbishop of Canterbury, for the first time ever in history a woman. How healing it would be if the people of Iran who have suffered so much already could somehow come to forgive their Western assailants. How hard that would be today with bombs and missiles being showered on them.

But meanwhile here in an act of amnesty towards our little group of Lockerbie victims, (‘UK Families - Flight 103’) now that the bonds between our own country and the USA have loosened considerably, and the truth has been so often crushed, perhaps the restrictions upon being allowed to know the contents of all the files that our own country keeps relevant to Lockerbie, but has kept out of public or media sight in Kew all these years, could be released for us to see. It was after all our loved ones who were killed, and time must have loosened both the need for security over the events of December 1988 and the need to protect any ongoing idea of prosecuting the guilty. We only seek to know the truth and after so many years surely the whole of the truth known, by our Government at least, about the atrocity over Lockerbie could be allowed out into the daylight? As the Washington Post heading proclaims ‘Democracy dies in Darkness'.

The truth died at Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a long article just published in English on the website of Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The original German language version was published on 14 June:]

Thirty-six years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, US prosecutors are pursuing a new case stemming from the terrorist attack. At the center of the investigation is a colorful entrepreneur from Zurich and his claims of conspiracy.

Edwin Bollier, now nearly 88 years old, sits in his office on Badenerstrasse in Zurich and says: "The book is written. All I have to do is pull it out of the drawer." In his book, Bollier finally wants to tell what he sees as the whole truth about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which more people were killed than in any terrorist attack in Europe since. (...)

Now, at last, US prosecutors are bringing their own case relating to what President Ronald Reagan called the "attack on America." Many years ago, a mid-level intelligence agent from Libya was convicted in Scotland of being involved in the attack. However, some observers never gave up their doubts about this guilty verdict. A figure accused of being an accomplice of the convicted man is currently in custody in the United States, and a new round of legal procedures is underway.

US prosecutors in Zurich

Last year, two prosecutors and a judge traveled to Zurich to question Bollier as a witness. He is confident that the American court will follow his lead when it ultimately makes its ruling. "I have provided all the information necessary to finally expose the conspiracy," he says.

Bollier argues that it was not in fact Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence service that was behind the bombing, but rather a Syrian-Palestinian commando group acting on behalf of Iran.

Bollier says he is waiting for the US court verdict to be issued before publishing his book. However, the court handling the case recently postponed the trial date originally set for May, citing, among other factors, the "complexity" of the case.

Bollier isn’t concerned. He says he is prepared to testify whenever the trial takes place.

No one knows PT/35 (b) as well

The Zurich entrepreneur is also one of the key figures in the US court proceedings. No one is as familiar with the piece of evidence with the file number PT/35 (b) as well as he is. This exhibit is no larger than a fingernail. It is only 1 millimeter thick, and weighs less than 1 gram.

For more than 30 years, the entire Lockerbie case has hinged on this tiny piece of evidence.

It comes from an electronic circuit board, the kind of technology found in every smartphone today. A circuit board is flat, made partially out of conductive metal, and serves as the foundation on which the components necessary for an electronic device are built. The circuit board to which the fragment in question belonged before being torn out by the explosion in the Boeing 747 was part of a timer-based detonator.

Out of the huge, several-ton pile of debris that was recovered in Lockerbie, PT/35 (b) is the only piece that points to Libya. Without this tiny fragment, the Libyan intelligence agent named Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi could not have been charged.

In his office on Badenerstrasse, Bollier is poring over files. He reads them without glasses, even the small print. When he talks about Lockerbie, which he usually does almost without pause for breath, he sometimes mixes up names or dates. Then his wife Mahnaz, a native Persian who came to Switzerland after the fall of the shah, comes to his aid.

It didn't take her long to became part of Team Bollier, and today she knows the Lockerbie case's ins and outs almost as well as her husband.

The film and TV industry has also been subjecting the crash of Pan Am 103 to a thorough reexamination. Several productions have called the Scottish court ruling into question, in some cases openly postulating a miscarriage of justice. The streaming platform Sky is showing an ambitious documentary on the subject, paired with a successful dramatization of the incident as a series starring Colin Firth in the lead role. Its rival Netflix will soon follow with a program produced in collaboration with the BBC.

Too sensitive for Al Jazeera

However, the most controversial production has proved to be a multipart series created by Arab television network Al Jazeera. One episode was withdrawn after broadcast, and the last episode was not broadcast at all. Apparently, it was too controversial for the network’s Qatari owners. The NZZ has viewed all episodes of this series. It reveals previously unknown information that adds weight to suspicions that Iran was behind the attack.

Sooner or later, every documentary filmmaker addressing this subject finds their way to Badenerstrasse 414 in Zurich – that is, to Bollier's office. The BBC has sent its film crews here, as have Sky and Al Jazeera. The multistory concrete building in Zurich's Nova Park gives the feeling of having been drawn from another era. Stepping into the third-floor office with the sign "MEBO LTD," a visitor might well feel that they had been transported back to the 1970s. (...)

Explosives in a cassette recorder

On the evening of Dec 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York, had just reached its cruising altitude of 9,000 meters when a bomb exploded in the cargo hold. A timer-based detonator built into a Toshiba cassette recorder had triggered the explosion. The plane crashed.

All 259 passengers and crew members, most of them US citizens on their way to their Christmas holidays, were killed. An additional 11 people at the crash site in Lockerbie also lost their lives.

The delivery to Libya

A few years previously, in 1985, Bollier's small electronics company Mebo had delivered 20 timer devices to Libya – of the same model that triggered the explosion. This delivery is a matter of record and is undisputed.

The name "Mebo" is drawn from the names of the two company founders, Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier. While Meister has long since withdrawn from public life, Bollier is still fighting on the front lines to defend his company's reputation.

Mebo Ltd. was a simple trading company with a focus on electrical appliances. It even developed a few devices itself. This included a timer with the model number MST-13. An engineer, Mebo’s sole employee, had developed the device in a small workshop. A third-party company manufactured the MST-13 timer according to his plans.

The Libyan army was almost the sole purchaser of these timers. A few additional units were sold to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police agency.

"But we didn't supply detonators to Libya. Just electronic timers," Bollier insists in an interview in his office.

This distinction is important to him – after all, a timer is not in itself a weapon. A timer becomes a weapon only if it is connected to a detonator. Mebo did not do that, Bollier says. Libya thus must have hooked up the detonator itself.

The business owner picks up a timer that is sitting on his desk in his office. The MST-13 is about the size of a fist. It is nothing more than a simple timer, he says. "Similar to an alarm clock or an egg timer, only a bit more robust, fireproof and waterproof."

Mebo had an export license for the delivery of the timer-based switches to Libya and the East German government. The Swiss agency in charge of overseeing such exports did not find that this contract violated the country’s Federal Act on War Materiel.

Because the issue is so important to him, we have agreed with Bollier to use the English word "timer" throughout this article, even in its German-language original – referring both to timers with and without detonators attached.

And what did the Libyan army use the timers from Switzerland for? Bollier insists that the army used them as defensive weapons. The sale came during the desert war against neighboring Chad. The timers were set in military camps where capture was deemed a possibility, he says. If a squad was able to retain its position, it would defuse the explosive. However, if a camp were to be captured by the enemy, the device would go off at some point.

Bollier has never been charged with any crime in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, either as an accomplice or an accessory, even though the Scottish authorities did consider doing so. In Switzerland, the Office of the Attorney General initiated criminal proceedings, but these were discontinued after four years.

Bollier has always appeared in court only as a witness. For more than 30 years, he has been saying the same thing: that the Lockerbie discovery, exhibit PT/35 (b), that tiny fragment of bomb-wrecked timer, differs in various details from the timers that Bollier’s firm delivered to Libya.

For example, he argues that the fragment exhibits characteristics that were introduced only in 1990, more than a year after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this, says Bollier: "Someone must have placed the find at the crash site after the fact, in order to lay a false trail pointing to Libya."

Brown instead of charred

When investigators from Scotland and the US first showed him a photo of the discovery, Bollier recognized it immediately. That was in 1990. "In the photo, the fragment was brown," he recalls. "But after the explosion, it should have been charred."

When he later saw the original of the PT/35 (b) fragment, it was no longer brown – it was charred, he says. From this, Bollier concludes that the alleged find is not only a forgery, but was also tampered with after the fact.

This is clearly an outrageous accusation. But Bollier stands by it. He refers to the alleged forgers and manipulators of the only piece of conclusive evidence from Lockerbie as "Group XXX." By this he means those within Scottish and American government agencies that he says were responsible for this falsification, in cooperation with the Swiss intelligence service, which was then a part of the Federal Office of Police.

However, as someone making such a serious accusation, Bollier has a problem: His credibility is in tatters.

Someone once said that Bollier was the worst witness imaginable, thanks to his dubious past. Anyone who did business during the Cold War with the secret police and intelligence services of Libya and East Germany, with Gaddafi’s «Jamahiriya» state and the Stasi, has inevitably seen their reputation permanently damaged.

Bollier's fight for the truth, as he calls it, is therefore also a fight for his own rehabilitation. Furthermore, if the trail to Libya does indeed turn out to be falsified and manipulated, this would do more than exonerate Bollier morally – he would also be entitled to the equivalent of millions of dollars in financial compensation.

However, Edwin Bollier is not alone in his assertion that exhibit PT/35 (b) was planted at the Lockerbie crash site after the fact. Jim Swire is convinced of this as well.

Bollier’s opposite

When it comes to credibility, Swire is the opposite of Bollier. The English doctor lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. With his clear independence and unimpugned integrity, he soon became a respected spokesman for the families of the British victims.

Bollier and Swire share the same view. But it is no coincidence that Colin Firth is playing the English country doctor rather than the Swiss wheeler-dealer in Sky’s dramatization of the events.

Since the crash of Pan Am 103, Swire has dedicated his life to finding his daughter’s murderers, as he consistently refers to them. At 89 years old, he still hasn't achieved his goal.

Swire once campaigned vigorously to bring Libyan defendant Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and his alleged accomplices to trial in Scotland. When, after much back and forth, that trial finally took place on neutral ground at the former Camp Zeist military base in the Netherlands, Swire did not miss a single one of the 85 days of proceedings.

Nothing would have made him happier than to know at last who had been responsible for his daughter's death. But at the end of the trial, he found himself convinced that al-Megrahi was innocent, and had nothing to do with the bombing.

Befriended the convicted attacker

On the day the verdict was announced, Swire was so distraught that he suffered a breakdown. He was shocked by al-Megrahi's conviction – along with the simultaneous acquittal of his alleged accomplice – and disappointed by the Scottish justice system.

Swire visited al-Megrahi several times in prison, and ultimately became friends with him. When the Libyan was diagnosed with cancer, Swire spoke out strongly in favor of his release. «The sooner he is released, the better,» he was quoted as saying in the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.

When al-Megrahi was dying in 2012, Swire traveled to Tripoli amid the unrest following Gaddafi’s fall. Even on his deathbed, al-Megrahi protested his innocence.

Swire fulfilled his last wish. In his book published in 2021, the key message is that fragment PT/35 (b) cannot have come from any of the 20 timers that Bollier's Mebo had once delivered to Libya – and that al-Megrahi's conviction was therefore a miscarriage of justice.

The FBI on board

The investigation into the bombing was led by the Scottish police. However, the United States' domestic intelligence service, the FBI, was also involved from the beginning – a concession made to the US by the Scottish authorities in view of the large number of victims from America.

The unusual collaboration made the enormous investigation – featuring a debris field alone that stretched over several dozen square kilometers – even more complicated. «We weren't used to not being in the lead,» says the self-assured FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise in one of the many documentaries about Lockerbie.

However, by tapping its global network, the FBI was able to open up various sources that would have remained closed to the Scottish police. "Even the CIA supported us," Marquise once said. Given the rivalry between the two major US intelligence services, this was unusual, he noted.

Yet despite years of investigation and a huge pile of files, the case ultimately led only to the disputed conviction of the single Libyan intelligence agent.

The trail to Iran

Initially, everything pointed in a different direction. Indeed, after just a few months, the Lockerbie case seemed to have been solved, with investigators regarding it as a probable act of retaliation by Iran.

On July 3, 1988, a few months before Lockerbie, a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf – accidentally, according to official statements. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, were killed.

Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly vowed revenge, saying that an American aircraft carrying many passengers would be shot down. There was subsequently much to suggest that the Iranian regime had commissioned a commando group from Syria known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, to carry out the retaliatory action.

The PFLP-GC operated from Syria under the command of Ahmed Jibril. In 1970, his agents had used a parcel bomb to bring down Swissair Flight 330 over Würenlingen, killing all 47 passengers. In that instance, the explosive was built into a radio and triggered by an altimeter.

Thanks to the investigations in the Würenlingen case, hardly anyone in the West was as familiar with the PFLP-GC as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General. Six months after Lockerbie, in late May 1989, three Scottish investigators thus traveled to Bern to exchange information with their Swiss colleagues.

The secret meeting lasted two days, turning up striking parallels. The plastic explosive used in the Lockerbie bombing had been Semtex, which was manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was the same material that had been used in Würenlingen. Even the bomb maker appeared to be the same individual, a Jordanian named Marwan Khreesat.

A few weeks before Lockerbie, in late October 1988, Khreesat had been arrested in Düsseldorf as part of a broad operation dubbed "Autumn Leaves." In total, German police arrested more than a dozen members of the PFLP-GC – dealing a serious blow to the terrorist group.

During the raid, police also seized four electronic devices, all of which had been rigged with explosives. One of these devices was a Toshiba portable radio.

It thus appeared that German police had foiled a planned series of attacks by the PFLP-GC. However, interviews with the detainees revealed that the terrorists had originally prepared five such devices, not just four.

The conclusion seemed obvious: The fifth electrical device must have been the Toshiba cassette recorder that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

When the Scottish delegation bid farewell to their Swiss colleagues on May 25, 1989, the case appeared to be solved. Investigators believed that the Toshiba cassette recorder containing the explosives had been loaded into the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 at Frankfurt Airport on the Pan Am 103 A feeder flight to London Heathrow.

This conclusion was stated in the minutes drawn up by the Swiss Office of the Attorney General following the meeting with their colleagues from Scotland. After a lengthy tug-of-war, the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine published these minutes a few years ago.

But then everything changed.

The shift to Libya

No arrest warrant was issued for Khreesat, the alleged bomb maker, or for any other member of the PFLP-GC initially suspected of involvement.

Instead, the Scottish police and the FBI, who had been focusing their part of the investigation on Iran, issued arrest warrants for two previously unknown Libyans: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and an alleged accomplice, the station manager of the Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

Exactly how these arrest warrants came to be issued remains unclear today. Apparently, they were based on secret information from the CIA and a somewhat shady agent in Malta.

In his office, Bollier rummages through one of the many piles that have accumulated in an adjoining room over the past decades.

He finds the newspaper article he is looking for, and offers a summary: The surprising turnaround in the investigation was the result of the geostrategic climate at the time, which was very different from today's. The United States and the United Kingdom, which at the time were at war with Iraq, did not want to spoil their relationship with Iran’s government as well.

Thus, the article argued, shifting blame for the Lockerbie bombing to Libyan leader Gaddafi and his intelligence agents proved a convenient alternative. After all, their April 1986 attack on a West Berlin discotheque frequented primarily by American soldiers had gone unpunished.

«It's that simple,» Bollier says, tossing the newspaper article back onto the pile.

It is possible that for the U.S. and the U.K., Libya was seen as a more convenient scapegoat than Iran at that point in history. However, like so much else in the Lockerbie case, this theory cannot be proven.

Gaddafi's photo on the side table

This difficulty doesn't impress Bollier. In his office on Badenerstrasse, the presence of long-deposed Libyan despot Gaddafi can still be felt everywhere. A framed photo of the young Gaddafi is placed on the side table next to the sofa, leaning against an iron palm tree.

During Gaddafi's more than 40 years in power, his regime systematically violated human rights. It engaged in countless arbitrary arrests, imprisoning and torturing opposition figures. Many of these individuals disappeared or were executed.

Bollier offers a kind of counterpoint, however. "Gaddafi may have blood on his hands," he says. But from the leader’s own point of view, he had been acting in the interests of the Libyan people, Bollier says. The entrepreneur counts off the gains: roads, housing, infrastructure – "everything in tiptop shape," he says.

It is jarring statements like this that undermine the image of Bollier as a fearless fighter for the truth.

An office for the alleged attacker

Another startling fact reveals just how close Bollier's relationship with Gaddafi's internationally ostracized regime was: Mebo temporarily rented an office at Badenerstrasse 414 to two employees of the Libyan intelligence services – one of whom was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Bollier plays this down. It was purely business, he says. And anyway, al-Megrahi visited Zurich only two or three times a year.

Bollier started doing business with Libya in the mid-1970s. Even before media pioneer Roger Schawinski shook up Switzerland's media landscape by founding his Radio 24 station – which broadcast as a pirate station from Pizzo Groppera in Italy before eventually becoming the country's first commercial radio station – the trained radio engineer Bollier had been operating his own pirate radio station in the North Sea. He had chugged around the international zone in a converted ship, competing in turn with the state broadcasters in England and the Netherlands.

"It was a lucrative business for a while," recalls Bollier – until the authorities shut the pirate station down.

$4.9 million from Gaddafi

That left Bollier sitting on an expensive ship crammed full of electronics that nobody wanted. Only one person showed any interest: Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan ruler paid Bollier $4.9 million for the former pirate radio craft.

Nor did this prove to be the only such deal. Although Bollier says he never met Gaddafi in person, the Libyan state became the Swiss entrepreneur’s most important customer. Contracts with the military and intelligence services soon followed. In the 1980s, Bollier installed Tripoli’s first fax machines, after purchasing them first from a distributor in Zurich. "For this, the Libyans, who had never seen a fax machine before, celebrated me like a hero," he says.

The fax machines were soon followed by the delivery of the MST-13 timers to Libya.

The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the fingernail-sized fragment PT/35 (b), which is supposed to have come from one of these timers from Zurich, are striking. Scottish police found it six months after the crash, in late May 1989, in a wooded area more than 30 kilometers from the crash site. The fragment was stuck inside the collar of a Salomon-brand shirt that had originally been purchased in Malta.

That shirt had wound up in a maroon Samsonite suitcase along with the Toshiba cassette recorder that was rigged with explosives.

No pieces belonging to the timer's significantly larger and more robust housing were ever found. In some official documents, the date of discovery is given not as May 1989, but rather as January 1990 – that is, more than a year after the crash. These dates are important for Bollier's argument.

The Scottish police initially had no idea what to make of their chance discovery. They searched unsuccessfully at 54 companies across 17 countries in hopes of tracking down the origin of the PT/35 (b) fragment.

Help from the FBI and CIA

In early 1990, the Scottish police asked their colleagues at the FBI for help. These investigators then quickly found what they were looking for: The fragment was an exact match with a timer-based detonator that the CIA had seized during a raid in Togo in 1985, they said. Through some convoluted means, a Mebo MST-13 timer had apparently found its way to the rebels in Togo.

However, over the years, investigative journalists have uncovered inconsistencies in this conclusion. One such reporter is Otto Hostettler from the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine. He has published several articles on the discrepancies in the Lockerbie case.

Like Bollier, Hostettler also concludes: "The item labeled PT/35 (b) cannot have come from the shipment to Libya that Edwin Bollier made in 1985." The fragment contains technical components that had not even been developed at that time, the reporter notes.

Moreover, in addition to Jim Swire, the representative of the victims' families, and investigative journalist Hostettler, there are still other unimpeachable figures who agree with Bollier that something is not right about PT/35 (b).

The odd role of Switzerland's intelligence service

The role played by one senior member of the Swiss Federal Office of Police, which was Switzerland's intelligence service at the time, is nothing less than striking. It is a matter of record that on June 22, 1989, six months after Lockerbie, this intelligence service agent appeared at the Badenerstrasse 414 building. On the third floor, rather than visiting the Mebo Ltd offices, he instead ended up in the workshop on the other side of the corridor. There he met with the engineer who had developed the MST-13 timer.

This is publicly known because Bollier later reported the intelligence service agent to the authorities. The entrepreneur accused this figure of stealing a timer from Mebo's inventory and passing it on to the FBI, all without a search warrant. Bollier demanded 6 million Swiss francs in damages from the intelligence service agent.

As part of the criminal proceedings, the Swiss Office of the Attorney General summarized the facts of the case in a written statement. That statement is dated July 30, 2012, and is signed by the head of the office's National Security division

According to this statement, the employee of the Federal Office of Police did indeed receive a timer from the Mebo engineer, "which he passed on to the American authorities."

"The evidence is said to have been subsequently tampered with," says the Office of the Attorney General’s written statement. Followed by: "This assertion by Bollier has not simply been pulled out of thin air."

The Attorney General’s Office explains why Bollier’s assertion could be correct as follows: "In any case, an expert opinion provided by the scientific service of the Canton of Zurich proves that the timer handed over to the Swiss federal police and the timer fragment presented as evidence by the Scottish authorities cannot be identical."

No other authority has adopted Bollier’s thesis that exhibit PT/35 (b) was falsified as clearly as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General, in this written statement.

However, the Zurich cantonal police report referred to in the Attorney General’s statement has never subsequently turned up. This is confirmed by respected Zurich lawyer Marcel Bosonnet, who represented Bollier in this case.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court never addressed the claim for damages – Bollier had submitted it too late.

"In my opinion, there was a lack of will to get at the truth," Bosonnet says. In so doing, Switzerland missed a unique opportunity to resolve the Lockerbie case, he adds.

Al Jazeera reports on secret meetings

This clue prompted the researchers at Al Jazeera's English-language service to work even harder. Their documentary series, which has since been withdrawn, describes how, over the course of 1988, a few months before the Lockerbie crash, several meetings took place involving representatives of the intelligence services of Iran, Syria and Libya, as well as of Hezbollah and the PFLP-GC. The common goal was reportedly a militant campaign financed by Iran against targets in the US and Israel, which was to include shooting down passenger aircraft.

According to Al Jazeera's reporting, these secret meetings took place between March and October 1988 in Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon.

In the documentary, Robert Baer is given considerable time to speak. This author, a former CIA agent, has long argued that Iran, not Libya, was behind the Lockerbie attack. He has been joined by other voices from within American intelligence circles.

Baer told Al Jazeera that he had evidence showing that a few days after the attack on Pan Am 103, in late 1988, $11 million had been transferred from Iran to a bank account in Lausanne. Some of this money was later transferred to the accounts of two leading members of the PFLP-GC, he contends.

Baer is no longer employed by the CIA. Nevertheless, he is bound by the principle that anything he makes public based on knowledge gained during his time in service must be approved in advance by the CIA.

In Al Jazeera’s withdrawn documentary series, he says that he had followed this process in order to divulge his information. He additionally says that there is consensus within CIA and FBI circles that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie crash.

So has Gaddafi's Libya been wrongly blamed, for more than 30 years, for one of Europe's most devastating terrorist attacks?

Despite the numerous proponents of this theory, the question is still not easy to answer. In fact, a new book published in early 2025 argues against this conclusion.

"Top secret" handwritten letters

In this book, the authors present previously unpublished archive material from the Gaddafi-era Libyan intelligence service. Handwritten letters marked "top secret" describe how, in October 1988, a division of the intelligence service in Tripoli carried out experiments with explosives, including detonating a suitcase.

At the time, the head of this division was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had protested his innocence on his deathbed.

Prosecutors in the US are aware of this archive discovery. The postponement of the ongoing trial is likely to be related to efforts to verify documents that were not previously part of the record.

Meanwhile, back in Zurich, Edwin Bollier is keeping his book in his drawer, ready to publish. Mr Lockerbie, as he calls himself in his email address, is at least willing to reveal his title: "The Truth Died at Lockerbie."

Jim Swire's 32-year worldwide fight for justice

[Today's edition of the Daily Mirror newspaper contains a long article headlined 'My 32-year worldwide fight for justice for the girl I lost in Lockerbie bombing'. It reads in part:]

The one thing Jim Swire treasures the most also causes him the most pain. A 50-year-old tape recording, now transferred on to a compact disc, and carefully stored away in a special drawer in his Oxfordshire house.

In it, Jim is singing along with and his seven-year-old daughter Flora as she plays the guitar during an idyllic break on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. (...)

Flora had been flying to the US to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, and from where she planned to surprise her parents with the news she had been accepted for a coveted place to complete her medical training at Cambridge University.

But she never got to do either. Thirty-eight minutes into the long-haul flight, the airliner exploded as it flew 31,000ft over Lockerbie, killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. (...)

His world suddenly torn apart by grief, Jim, a GP, was determined to find answers, and set off on an unforgiving journey that would take him all around the world – including inside the desert tent of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.

More than 32 years later, and now aged 85, Jim is finally releasing a full account of all he discovered in a new book, The Lockerbie Bombing. His memoirs are also being made into a TV series, released next year. (...)

Jim dealt with his grief by spending every waking hour searching for information. And it wasn’t long before he began to suspect a cover up.

First, he came across a communication sent from German police to the British government in October 1988 - two months before the attack, warning that Palestinian terrorists were planning to explode a bomb on a plane heading to the US.

The information came after the arrest of a Palestinian bomb maker Marwan Khreesat, who was later released by a German judge. 

Next, he discovered a classified telex sent by the then British transport secretary James Jack to Heathrow airport, two days before the bombing, with a photo of the type of bomb they believed would be used, hidden inside a radio cassette player to make it difficult to detect on X-ray equipment.

Incredibly, the message told airport staff that if they had suspicions about any object it should be “consigned to the aircraft hold” – exactly where the Lockerbie bomb exploded.

Jim also discovered that, days before the disaster, a notice had been put up in the US embassy in Moscow warning staff of a threat to Pan Am aircraft in the run up to Christmas and advising them to rebook with another airline. (...)

Jim’s investigations led him to believe the Lockerbie bombing was actually ordered by Iran, in retaliation for an incident in July 1988, when American warship The Vincennes destroyed an aircraft in flight containing 290 pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

He believes Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who publicly swore revenge, commissioned a Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], to take down an American plane.

He thinks that, despite knowing the truth, the US and the UK decided to blame Libya, an oil-rich country which was in America’s sights.

Convinced that Libya, and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in January 2001, wasn’t behind his daughter’s murder, Jim has visited the country, meeting Colonel Gaddafi several times and making friends with al-Megrahi.

Of his first meeting with Gaddafi, who was overthrown and killed in 2011, he says: “I was terrified. A GP from the middle of England shaking hands with the man who was supposed to be the devil incarnate. We met in his tent in the middle of the desert.

"We were surrounded by his female bodyguards holding AK47s and as I went over to him I could hear the safety catches all clicking off. We got on and even became friends.”

Does he now have all the answers he was so desperate to find? “Yes, but I don’t have the ability to do what I feel is desperately important to be done with those answers.

“I would love to go and talk to the Ayatollahs in Iran, and the men they used, and tell them I forgive them and explain why.

The house of cards that is the legal frame-up of Megrahi

[What follows is taken from an article by Steve James published today on the WSWS.org website:]

Five Scottish judges have upheld the 2001 verdict against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the only person convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.

Last week's decision is the second time an appeal on Megrahi's behalf has been rejected by the courts amid the continued suppression of contradictory evidence.

In 2002, an initial appeal was thrown out. In 2009, Megrahi, already terminally ill, was tacitly offered release from Greenock prison on compassionate grounds if a contemporary appeal was dropped as part of rapprochement between the Libyan and British governments. The most recent appeal was launched by Megrahi's son, Ali Al-Megrahi, to clear his father's name posthumously.

The appeal hearing heard from Claire Mitchell QC that Megrahi's original conviction hinged on Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci’s uncorroborated identification of Megrahi. She pointed to contradictions in Gauci’s testimony and challenged the trial judges' decision that the clothing was purchased on 7 December 1988, rather than 23 November, which was supported by the evidence. Megrahi was not in Malta in November.

Mitchell noted that while the trial verdict "cherry picked" items from a mass of conflicting evidence, no evidence existed that the bomb started its journey from Malta.

The appeal was allowed to go forward following a decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), that a miscarriage of justice may only have occurred because of the manner in which Megrahi was identified by Gauci. Gauci first identified someone else, appeared confused, and was found to have been coached by police in expectation of a huge reward. $2 million was duly paid, a matter about which the trial defence was not informed.

The SCCRC did not consider (...) analysis of the metallurgical characteristics of the alleged bomb timer--proving it was not part of a batch sold to Libya--or devastating evidence of the bomb suitcase entering the luggage system at Heathrow Airport, London, as grounds for appeal.

The reason for the appeal being restricted to Megrahi's identification by Gauci is increasingly clear. Any broader querying of the original verdict threatens to bring down the house of cards that is the legal frame-up of Megrahi.

It is worth recalling some of the contradictions and unconfirmed assertions in the official version of events leading to PA103's destruction, upheld at the 2001 trial and again on two subsequent appeals.

Megrahi was found guilty of loading a suitcase, containing a bomb armed with a complex electronic timer, in Luqa airport, Malta, onto a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. No viable evidence has been presented confirming that such a suitcase existed. No explanation has been given of how Megrahi overcame Luqa's tight security. (...) No explanation has been offered of how Frankfurt airport's X-ray scanning missed a bomb in a cassette recorder when staff had been advised to look out for one.

From Frankfurt, the feeder flight travelled to London’s Heathrow airport, where the bomb was allegedly transferred to Pan Am 103. No such suitcase has been identified.

Not accounted for is the fact that a suitcase closely resembling the one containing the bomb appeared unexpectedly at Heathrow airport before the feeder flight from Frankfurt arrived and was reportedly inserted onto PA103 at Heathrow.

This suitcase was seen by witnesses on the floor of the luggage container in which the explosion later occurred. No explanation or significance has been attached to a break in at Heathrow airport, where security was poor, the night before, adjacent to the luggage loading area for PA103.

The explosion that destroyed the Boeing 747 took place 38 minutes after take-off from Heathrow. This is exactly the time at which a well-known design of barometric bomb, triggered by a fall in air pressure, would explode had one been loaded at Heathrow.

Barometric bombs of this design were, at the time, being manufactured in Germany by a Syrian backed Palestinian group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a group with a history of aircraft bombing. Four of these bombs were seized by German police, a fifth went missing for unexplained reasons.

No explanation has been offered of why the stated design of electronic timer, an MST-13 manufactured by Swiss company MeBo-AG, would not be set to explode at a time much later, over the Atlantic, where any evidence would sink to the ocean floor.

Nor has an explanation been offered as to why evidence relating to the belated appearance of a fragment of MST-13 timer in the Lockerbie wreckage showed evidence of having been doctored, as had the records relating to its discovery. Or why this timer fragment has subsequently been proved NOT to be part of a consignment of timers admittedly sold to Libya by Mebo-AG.

Days before the appeal hearing, the judges ruled that documentation in the possession of the British government since shortly after PA103 was brought down should remain hidden, upholding a public interest immunity certificate signed by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in August this year. One of Raab's predecessors, Labour's David Miliband, signed a similar order in 2008 before Megrahi's previous appeal was dropped.

Carloway upheld Raab's view that the documentation was relevant but revealing it would "damage counter-terrorism liaison and intelligence gathering between the UK and other states".

The documentation is reportedly a letter from then Jordanian ruler, King Hussein, an ally of the Western powers and a CIA asset, implicating Jordanian intelligence agent and PFLP-GC supporter Marween Khreesat in making the bomb. King Hussein claimed the attack was revenge commissioned by the Iranian government for the US Vincennes' shoot-down of an Iran Airbus at the cost of 255 lives in July 1988. Khreesat was arrested as part of the group that was making bombs in Germany in 1988, but was quickly released. He died in Syria in 2016.

Another remarkable intervention on the eve of the appeal, which coincided with the December 21 anniversary of the disaster, came from outgoing US Justice Secretary William Barr.

Barr announced charges against the hitherto little-known Libyan, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi (Masud), whom Barr accused of helping Megrahi make the bomb used in the attack and whose extradition to the US is now being sought. Barr claimed the then-Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi personally thanked Masud for his efforts. Masud has been held in a Libyan jail since 2012. Gaddafi's government was violently overthrown by the US and European war machine, and Libya pitched into a catastrophic and ongoing civil war in 2011, but this claim of involvement only surfaced years later.

Barr has a history with the Lockerbie case. Prior to his installation by Donald Trump in 2019, he was known for a series of cover-ups arising from his first period as US Attorney General, between 1991 and 1993, during George H W Bush's term as US President, arising from the successive debacles of US foreign policy in the Middle East.

It was on Barr's watch that Bush handed out pardons to senior state officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, including former defence secretary Caspar Weinburger, who had been charged with crimes of perjury, lying to Congress and obstruction of justice.

Barr oversaw a fundamental shift in the focus of investigation into the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 from the PFLP-GC and Iran to Libya, and announced the November 14, 1991 indictments against Megrahi, and his then co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

The transition took place during US preparations for the assault on Iraq in the first Gulf War, launched earlier in 1991. Prior to the war, US officials shuttled around the various Arab regimes in the Middle East seeking support and acquiescence in the planned bloodbath. Then Secretary of State James Baker visited Syria repeatedly and extracted regime support for the assault on neighbouring Iraq. Iran remained neutral.

Speaking of Lockerbie when the war was over and days after the unexpected indictment of the two Libyans, Bush said, "A lot of people thought it was the Syrians. The Syrians took a bum rap on this."

None of this mattered to the Scottish judges. Instead, the 64-page verdict sought to strengthen the case against Megrahi by attributing sinister significance to entries in co-accused Fhimah's diary referring to "luggage tags". Fhimah, however, was acquitted in the original 2001 trial. Both men worked at the airport.

Speaking outside the court, lawyer Aamer Anwar said Megrahi's family were heartbroken by the verdict and intend to take the case to the UK Supreme Court. Jim Swire, 84, whose daughter Flora died in the disaster said, "For a long time I have been persuaded that it isn’t likely the truth will come out during my time left on the planet."

[RB: Another recent article can be read here: Lockerbie 32 years on: imperialism, framings and cover-ups.]

Lockerbie questions that US Attorney General William Barr needs to answer

[What follows is excerpted from an article by John Schindler published today on the Top Secret Umbra website:]

With just six weeks left for the Trump administration, speculation is swirling that Attorney General William Barr may step down before the official presidential transition on January 20. Barr has fallen out of favor with the White House since his admission last week that the Department of Justice’s investigation of our November 3 election has uncovered no significant voting fraud, contrary to the loud claims of President Donald Trump and his enraged surrogates. A longtime liberal bugbear, Barr suddenly became the Oval Office’s new whipping boy instead, and the attorney general is reportedly tired of the public presidential abuse. 

That would be the second time that Barr steps down as the attorney general (...)

Before we get to his decisions as Trump’s attorney general, we should first ask Bill Barr about what happened the last time he headed the Justice Department.

Above all, why did Attorney General Barr back in mid-November 1991 decide to indict two Libyan spies for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, a terrible crime that killed 270 innocent people. Barr’s announcement stunned our Intelligence Community, which had investigated that terrorist atrocity for nearly three years in voluminous detail, yet never suspected that Libya stood behind the attack.

Three decades ago, the Lockerbie tragedy loomed large in American news. A bomb inside a suitcase stowed in the Boeing 747’s forward left luggage container tore the airliner apart as it cruised at 31,000 feet, headed for New York. All 243 passengers and 16 crew on the Pan Am jumbo jet died, as did 11 people in the town of Lockerbie, which was showered by the flaming wreckage of the shattered 747. One hundred and ninety of the dead were Americans, including 35 Syracuse University students headed home for Christmas after a European semester abroad.

It didn’t take long for diligent British investigators to find the remnants of the Samsonite suitcase which contained less than a pound of Semtex plastic explosive manufactured in Czechoslovakia and hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder. That trail quickly led to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, a radical Arab terrorist group that was headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer. In the eyes of Western intelligence, the PFLP-GC was little more than an extension of Syria’s security services.

Intriguingly, less than two months before the Lockerbie attack, West German police rolled up a PFLP-GC bomb-making cell around Frankfurt, seizing four bombs made of Semtex hidden in Toshiba radios. Since Pan Am 103 originated in Frankfurt and that was the exact same kind of bomb which took down the doomed airliner, none of this seemed coincidental. Western intelligence circles heard chatter in the autumn of 1988 that the PFLP-GC, whose fifth Frankfurt bomb was never found by police, was planning to blow up U.S. airliners. Plus, one of the men taken into custody was Marwan Khreesat, a veteran bomb-maker who was believed to be behind the downing of a Swissair jetliner back in 1970, a terrorist attack which killed 47 people.

Before long, American intelligence believed that Iran was really behind the downing of Flight 103, given known close connections between Syrian intelligence and Iranian spy agencies. Neither was Tehran’s motive difficult to ascertain. A few months before, on July 3, 1988, the cruiser USS Vincennes, on station in the Persian Gulf, mistakenly shot down an Iran Air Airbus, a terrible accident which killed all 290 people aboard, including 66 children. Iran’s revolutionary regime promised revenge, and the Intelligence Community assessed that they got it over Scotland. As I explained on the thirtieth anniversary of the Lockerbie horror, that Iran stood behind the attack:

Was the conclusion of US intelligence, particularly when the National Security Agency provided top-secret electronic intercepts which demonstrated that Tehran had commissioned the PFLP-GC to down Pan Am 103 (...) One veteran NSA analyst told me years later that his counterterrorism team “had no doubt” of Iranian culpability. Bob Baer, the veteran CIA officer, has stated that his agency believed just as unanimously that Tehran was behind the bombing. Within a year of the attack, our Intelligence Community assessed confidently that Lockerbie was an Iranian operation executed by Syrian cut-outs, and that take was shared by several allies with solid Middle Eastern insights, including Israeli intelligence.

The IC was therefore taken aback on November 14, 1991, when Attorney General Barr announced the indictment of two Libyan spies, Abdelbaset el-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, for the downing of Pan Am 103. Libya denied the accusations, as did the two Libyan intelligence officers, and it took Britain almost a decade to bring the men to trial. In a unique arrangement, the trial was held in the Netherlands under Scottish law. In the end, the court did not convict Fhimah but did find Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder in early 2001. Megrahi maintained he was framed and, suffering from cancer, he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009. He returned to Libya and succumbed to cancer there in May 2012, protesting his innocence to the end.

Quite a few people who looked at the evidence believed that Megrahi really may have been innocent, including some relatives of Pan Am 103 victims. Many in intelligence circles had doubts too, particularly because the prosecution’s star witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, was another Libyan intelligence officer who became a CIA asset. Giaka claimed to have witnessed Megrahi and Fhimah’s preparations in Malta to take down Pan Am 103 with a bomb made by Libyan intelligence. The Scottish court found Giaka less than credible, yet his claims against Megrahi stood up adequately to produce a conviction.

CIA made Giaka available to the court as the star witness, while obscuring some of their clandestine relationship with the Libyan spy. Langley offered several of its own officers to the court as well, something CIA recounted with pride in its official telling of their support to the Lockerbie trial, but the agency was careful to only produce officials who endorsed the Libya-did-it hypothesis.

There was the rub. Some CIA officers who were close to Giaka did not find his claims about Pan Am 103 and his own intelligence service’s involvement to be credible; in fact, they considered their “star” to be an unreliable fabricator. However, this secret – which raises fundamental questions about the US government’s official position on Lockerbie since late 1991 – was kept confined to spy circles for decades. Until now.

John Holt, a retired CIA officer who served as Giaka’s handler three decades ago, has broken his silence, granting a detailed interview to British media about his role in this sensational case. The 68-year-old Holt spoke out for the first time about what really happened behind the scenes with Giaka, whom he dismissed as an asset who was prone to “making up stories.” Giaka was far from a reliable source and the former American spy opined that CIA kept Holt away from the trial, since agency leaders knew that his account contradicted the official US position on Lockerbie. As he explained:

I handled Abdul-Majid Giaka in 1989 for a whole year during which he never mentioned Libyan involvement in the bombing. My cables [back to CIA headquarters] showed he was a car mechanic who was placed by Libyan Intelligence as Malta Airport office manager with Libyan Arab Airlines and had very little information about anything to do with bombs – or Lockerbie. He felt humiliated by Megrahi, who was an official with the Libyan Intelligence Service. “I was treated,” he said, “like a dog when Megrahi came to the office.” That's all reported in my cables, so CIA knew Giaka had a grudge against Megrahi.

This was a personal vendetta, in other words, one that was driven by Giaka’s needs and his changing memory, as Holt elaborated:

Every time I met Giaka, which was each month or two, I would also ask him if he had any information at all about the Pan-Am bombing. All of us CIA and FBI field officers were asked by the CIA to keep pressing our assets for any answers or clues.  His answer was always: No.

I expressed my opinion to the FBI that Giaka was nothing more than a wannabe who was not a real Intel Officer for the Libyans. He had no information [about] Lockerbie, and I told the CIA all this in comments I made in my cables. He went back to Libya at the end of 1989 and I moved on to another assignment.  

In 1991, Giaka told the CIA that he had been exposed and the Libyans would kill him. When he was told he was useless to our intelligence services, he began making up stories. It was only when he needed desperately to get some financial and logistical support from the US to flee Libya in 1991 that he started telling the CIA things relevant to the Pan Am 103 bombing.

This fix was in, however, and Holt found his first-hand view of the case sidelined by his own agency. His cables which illuminated Giaka’s unreliability as a source were not shared by CIA with the Scottish court, while Langley declined to let Holt provide evidence at the trial. “We now all need to admit we got the wrong man, and focus on the real culprits,” Holt explained, pointing a finger at Bill Barr:

I have reason to believe there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and its bomb-making Palestinian extremist ally the PFLP—General Command. Now we should focus a new investigation on the Iranians and their links with the bomber…I would start by asking the current attorney general, William Barr, why he suddenly switched focus in 1991, when he was also attorney general, from where clear evidence was leading, toward a much less likely scenario involving Libyans.

In May of this year, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ordered a fresh look into Abdelbaset el-Megrahi’s conviction. So far, this review has revealed claims that the prosecution presented a distorted version of the late Megrahi’s alleged role based on “cherrypicked” evidence in order to obtain a conviction. Bill Barr won’t be attorney general for much longer and he ought to avail himself of the opportunity to explain why credible information from veteran intelligence officers like John Holt was ignored to make a case against Megrahi, who may not be guilty of his supposed role in the murder of 270 innocent people.

Nearly a year ago, Attorney General Barr delivered remarks about the Pan Am 103 tragedy at a memorial service held at Arlington National Cemetery. He commemorated the dead of Lockerbie: “The Americans who died that day were attacked because they were Americans. They died for their country. They deserve to be honored by our nation.” Barr added that the case remains far from over for him: “In 1991, I made a pledge to you on behalf of the American law-enforcement community: ‘We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice.’ That is still our pledge. For me personally, this is still very much unfinished business.” The thirty-second anniversary of the Lockerbie attack is two weeks from today. If Barr meant what he said about resolving that tragedy’s unfinished business, John Holt’s testimony is an excellent place to commence the search for the full truth about what happened to Pan Am 103.

Who made the bomb? The full truth about Lockerbie is still not being told

[This is the headline over a long report by David Horovitz published today on the website of The Times of Israel. It reads in part:]

Megrahi went to his grave protesting his innocence, and his family continues to fight to clear his name. This week, Scotland’s highest criminal court is hearing his relatives’ latest appeal against his conviction, after an independent review determined that he might have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Among other flaws, the defense is highlighting that the Maltese shopkeeper who identified Megrahi as the man who purchased the incriminating clothing in the suitcase, and whose evidence has always been controversial, was paid for his testimony, a fact that was not disclosed to the defense in the original trial.

I have followed the Lockerbie case since the time of the bombing, when I was working for The Jerusalem Post as its London correspondent, and when I happened to see material in the early stages of the investigation that pointed not to Col. Gaddafi’s Libya, but rather to Iran and the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP-GC — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Earlier in 1988, the US Navy’s guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes had shot down an Iran Air Airbus in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 passengers and crew, in a tragic case of mistaken identity. The US said it had misidentified the civilian airliner as a fighter jet. Iran had promised to avenge the deaths. Ayatollah Khomeini had vowed that the skies would “rain blood.” (...)

Just weeks before the Lockerbie blast, four devices strikingly similar to the one that would soon be utilized to such devastating effect on Flight 103 had been found in the possession of PFLP-GC members arrested in a Frankfurt suburb. That PFLP-GC cell was reported at the time to have been planning to blow up planes heading to the US and Israel. Its bombs, like those the PFLP-GC had used in the past, and like the Lockerbie device, were detonated by a barometric pressure device and timer, activated when a plane reaches a certain altitude. A fifth bomb in the Frankfurt cell’s possession was said to have disappeared; this was presumed to be the device that blew up Flight 103.

The Lockerbie investigators were initially following these leads; then they shifted their focus to Libya. In 2003, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the bombing — though he denied ordering it — and paid compensation to the victims’ families, in accordance with UN demands for the lifting of sanctions on his country.

Almost seven years ago, a colleague of mine at The Times of Israel noticed that a man named Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian national, maintained an Arabic-language Facebook page in which he had taken to posting pictures of the Lockerbie bombing. Khreesat was the PFLP-GC’s bombmaker-in-chief, the alleged maker of those barometric-pressure devices. He was one of those who was arrested by the German authorities in Frankfurt, only to be inexplicably released soon afterward. Now he was promising to reveal the truth about Lockerbie — to “write about Pan Am 103,” including “who was on the flight and the circumstances of the incident.”

In his posts, Khreesat also connected himself to the bombing of an El Al plane from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972, describing that attack as “a challenge to the Israeli intelligence agents who are responsible for searching luggage and everything that goes on a plane.” The 1972 El Al bomb — another barometric-pressure device — had been hidden in a record player that two British women were duped into carrying by two Arab men who were later arrested. Although the bomb exploded, the pilot was able to make an emergency landing. “It was a successful blow against the Israeli enemy,” Khreesat wrote in a March 14, 2014, Facebook post, in which he also described spending time with PFLP-GC chief Ahmed Jibril in Rome as they waited for the attack to unfold.

In several 2013-4 Facebook posts relating to Lockerbie, Khreesat recalled his arrest two months before the bombing. He posted pictures of the destroyed cockpit of the 747 after the explosion, the painstakingly reconstructed parts of the plane wreckage, and a radio-cassette recorder like the one that held the bomb. He also asked a series of unanswered questions about the attack. “Who did the operation?” he mused in a post on the 25th anniversary of the blast. “Israel? Iran? Libya? Who carried the Toshiba explosive device [in which the bomb was hidden]?… Did the explosive device come from Malta airport like the American intelligence agencies say?… When will these riddles be solved.”

This week’s appeal by the Megrahi family was green-lighted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in part because of “nondisclosure” of evidence to the defense team in the original trial. Some of that documentary evidence is widely reported to have been provided by Jordan’s late King Hussein and to not only to implicate the PFLP-GC in the Lockerbie atrocity, but to specify that Marwan Khreesat built the bomb.

On Friday, however, the head of the Scottish judiciary, Lord Carloway, ruled that the documents must still be withheld on the grounds of national security. Accepting a secrecy order signed by British Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb [sic], Carloway explained, “[Rabb’s] clear view is [that the release of the documentation] would cause real harm to the national security of the UK because it would damage counter-terrorism liaison and intelligence gathering between the UK and other states… The documents had been provided in confidence to the government. Their disclosure would reduce the willingness of the state, which produced the documents, to confide information and to co-operate with the UK.”

All manner of conspiracy theories surround the Lockerbie bombing, some of which do not rule out the involvement of Libya and Megrahi, most of which revolve around the fact that nobody has been prosecuted for making the bomb, and many of which focus on the PFLP-GC and Marwan Khreesat.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to raise the question of the Lockerbie bombing with several former Israeli intelligence figures, who were in office at the time of the bombing and well aware of the activities of the PFLP-GC at the time. Two of them insisted without elaboration that “Libya did it” and brushed away further questions. A third, by contrast, told me it was “clear that Jibril prepared the operation.”

Israel was “listening in” on the PFLP-GC during the months prior to Lockerbie, he said, and hearing about preparations for what “we thought was a plan to target an Israeli plane.” There was a “huge alert” in the Israeli security establishment because of indications that the PFLP-GC was about to strike, this source went on. “We told the British and the Americans what we knew, which was that there was an intention to hit an Israeli plane… We didn’t warn about a British or an American plane because we didn’t know that,” he said.

The new appeal hearing is expected to continue until Friday, with a ruling at a later date. “It is submitted in this case that no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned the verdict that it did, namely the conviction of Mr Megrahi,” the defense lawyer Claire Mitchell told the judges on Tuesday. But that argument will be harder to make without those “Jordanian” documents, which the defense has said are central to the appeal. If his relatives fail to have Megrahi’s conviction overturned, their allegation of a miscarriage of justice will linger.

Marwan Khreesat died in 2016.

His Facebook page is still online.

But he never did tell the truth about Lockerbie.