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'.

Did Israel just settle Lockerbie’s oldest score?

[This is the headline over an article by barrister David Wolchover published today on the website of Jewish News. It reads in part:]

As the Iran conflict intensifies, fresh scrutiny is falling on the true architects of the Pan Am bombing, which killed 270 people aboard Flight 103 and 11 Lockerbie residents, and on Israel’s long-delayed reckoning with them

With the world focused on the joint US/Israel war against Iran, this may be a timely moment to recall an episode years ago which has had an intriguing outcome in the new conflict.

At the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, American warships were engaged in protecting tanker movements in the Persian Gulf. On 3 July, 1988, the missile cruiser USS Vincennes was involved in hostile exchanges with Iranian Boghammer fast patrol boats when an IranAir Airbus on flight IR655 took off from Bandar Abbas and was ascending on route to Dubai.

The facts are complex, but by a combination of computer and human error, the airliner’s profile and trajectory were misinterpreted as that of two Iranian F-14A Tomcats descending towards the cruiser. A missile was launched, and all 290 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus died.

The next day, President Reagan referred to the terrible human tragedy but provocatively added that it was a “proper defensive action”, and Vice President Bush subsequently rubbed further salt in the wound. As revealed by contemporary American and Israeli intelligence gained from telecommunications intercepts and mole infiltration, the Iranians were so enraged that they resolved to take revenge.

To do so, they enlisted Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (General Command) to destroy an American airliner using a bomb of the kind the faction had perfected and used previously. Such bombs were typically detonated by an ingenious barometric device triggered by the drop in air pressure as the aircraft gained altitude.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1988, Israel had incurred Whitehall’s wrath when Israeli agents were found to be treating the UK as their own private intelligence fiefdom and four diplomats were expelled. Then, in November, Israel tipped off MI6 that, as security was lax at Heathrow during the reconstruction of Terminal 3, the airport had been chosen by terrorists to plant a bomb on board an American airliner in revenge for IR655.

The tip-off was dismissed as a facile attempt by Israeli intelligence to worm its way back into Britain’s good books, but it proved to be disastrously prescient.

On 21 December, Jibril’s nephew Marwad Bushnaq flew into Heathrow aboard an IranAir freighter, bringing a suitcase containing a small barometric bomb. He was able to place the bag in a portable luggage container due to be loaded into a Pan American Airways 747 designated for flight 103 to New York JFK, positioning it precisely where it would need to be, up against the hull, to blast a hole in the fuselage.

The bomb detonated over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of all 270 passengers and crew and 11 Lockerbie residents.

In the months which followed, there was little doubt as to the identity of the conspirators – highly placed members of Iran’s government and their agents, the PFLP-GC – but priorities moved on. The US government was under pressure to secure the release of American and other Western hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A scapegoat for Lockerbie had to be found, and these were the Libyans Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhima. American indictments were obtained against them in November 1991, and within days, the hostages were released.

The case against the Libyans, which culminated in their trial before a special Scottish judge-only tribunal in the Hague in 2001, was utterly ludicrous. It was contended that the suitcase containing the bomb travelled as unaccompanied luggage from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a Pan Am feeder flight to Heathrow.

There, it was alleged, it was hurriedly transferred by innocent baggage handlers on the tarmac to the doomed aircraft, where it happened to end up quite by chance in the exact position necessary to avoid its going off like a damp squib.

The prosecution had to get around the awkward facts (a) that the bomb exploded after exactly the time from take-off at a normal climb rate, which a typical PFLP-GC barometric device would have detonated, and (b) that such a device would have anyway detonated on the first leg. So they alleged the perpetrators used an electronic timer. Yet with the vagaries of pre-Christmas scheduling, that might well have resulted in detonation between flights, a complete waste of effort.

Furthermore, the microchip fragment of a timer, which featured as a key plank in the prosecution’s case, has been decisively exposed as a fake, probably planted at a later date to prop up the Malta origin story. The British were only too delighted to go along with the charade because it got them off the hook for ignoring the Israeli tip-off and exonerated Heathrow.

The Iranian conspirators responsible for commissioning the PFLP-GC included a number of prominent officials, but overall executive responsibility for authorising the atrocity rested with the then president of Iran. It may be some consolation for the Lockerbie victims’ families that he was none other than Ali Khamenei, later Supreme Leader, who finally got his comeuppance courtesy of an Israeli air strike on 28 February.

What Lockerbie meant for Libyans

[This is the headline over an article by Owen Schalk just published in the July/August 2025 issue of the Scottish Left Review. The following are excerpts:]

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit exploded over the rural Scottish town of Lockerbie, raining hellfire on the community’s inhabitants. Eleven people were killed by falling debris. All 259 of the plane’s occupants died.

The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom pointed the finger at Libya. In 1992, the United Nations Security Council imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Libya over the bombing, including an air embargo, an arms embargo, and a ban on the sale of oil equipment to the country. In 1996, the US Congress tightened sanctions by passing the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act. These sanctions deprived the Jamahiriya of billions in revenue and contributed to the Libyan leadership’s ill-fated decision to “open up” economically to the West in the early 2000s.

37 years after the Lockerbie bombing, two TV shows aired in Britain: Lockerbie: A Search for the Truth (Sky Studios) and The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (BBC). The production of two TV series about Lockerbie almost four decades after the bombing shows the continued public interest in the case’s many ins, outs, and inconsistencies. Despite this, the retrospectives around Lockerbie leave out one important piece of the story: the Libyans themselves, namely, how they experienced the economic sanctions that resulted from the Lockerbie bombing.

The bombing and the trial

Initial investigations into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 implicated members of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), based in Syria. The group had apparently executed the bombing on behalf of the Iranian government, which sought revenge for the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988. 290 civilians died in the US warship’s attack.

On November 13, 1991, the Lockerbie investigation abruptly shifted focus from the PFLP-GC/Iran to the Libyan government. Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the bombing of Pan Am 103, recounted his shock at the sudden turn of events: “There were hints from various sources of surprises to come, but nothing has prepared me for this. Today Iran is forgotten; it’s all about Libya.”

An “official story” was provided to the public: the bombing was revenge for the Reagan administration’s assassination attempt against Muammar Qadhafi in 1986, a US attack that had killed dozens of civilians and the Libyan leader’s infant daughter Hana.

According to the main counternarrative of the Lockerbie bombing, the US and UK decided to shift blame for the attack to Libya because Libya, unlike Iran, was more vulnerable to destabilization and less likely to retaliate.

The Libyan government maintained its innocence. After years of diplomatic wrangling, a trial was held for the accused in the Hague. Two Libyans went to trial: Lamin Khalifah Fhimah and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fhimah was acquitted. Circumstances surrounding the trial remain highly questionable.

The Lockerbie case is a window, albeit a cloudy one, into the tense relationship between the West and Qadhafi’s Libya. Readers in the West have a general awareness about what the case meant to the US and the UK. However, they have little knowledge of what Lockerbie meant for Libyans themselves.

The sanctions period

In Libya, the Lockerbie sanctions resulted in constricted state revenues, which meant unpaid salaries, diminishing subsidies, and goods shortages. Inflation rose, public infrastructure decayed, while a growing number of smugglers and black marketeers sought to resell subsidized goods at higher prices in neighbouring countries. Corruption became increasingly normalized, a system of “favours” and “bribes” running through the public administration, damaging Libyans’ confidence in their socialist-oriented political system. As Matteo Capasso writes, the process of egalitarian development that characterized the early Jamahiriya was “abandoned in the 1990s. The structure of the dominant class started to change, the effectiveness of the newly democratic structures decreased and this affected the entire political edifice of al-Jamahiriyah, leading to the dramatic increase of socio-economic inequalities.”  

Estimates have been made regarding Libyan economic losses from the Lockerbie sanctions. One found that between 1992 and 1999, “the oil sector lost between $18 billion and $33 billion both as lost opportunities and lost revenue.” Meanwhile, $8 billion in overseas assets were frozen, “denying [Libya] the cash needed to buy all kinds of equipment, expertise, machinery, food and medicine.”

A former Libyan deputy foreign minister recalled that “steps were taken” by the Libyan government to compile data on economic losses. One Qadhafi-era minister said the Lockerbie losses file contained “everything including the number of deaths” caused by the sanctions. Some of these deaths resulted from a lack of medical care, which forced Libyans to take tortuous routes abroad for treatment. “Because of the sanctions,” writes Libyan academic Mustafa Fetouri, “people wishing to leave Libya had to drive to Djerba in Tunisia for example and take a flight from there.”

Libya’s Lockerbie losses file was destroyed during the 2011 NATO war. Fetouri estimates that the sanctions cost Libya nearly $100 billion. These losses hit the oil sector, aviation, healthcare, agriculture, and industry, and caused thousands of deaths. The daily price of food rose by an estimated 40 percent and the cost of medicine rose by 30 percent (though most medicines were free). In 2003, the Libyan government paid another $2.7 billion in compensation as part of the agreement to have the sanctions lifted.

In the context of massive economic losses caused by the Lockerbie sanctions, many in the Libyan leadership, including Muammar Qadhafi himself, became sympathetic to the idea of economic opening to the West. They believed such an opening would appease the imperialist powers while giving an economic boost to the Jamahiriya, thereby stabilizing the Libyan political system. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

The failure of “opening up”

Libya’s “opening up” was a disastrous failure riven by internal tensions and external interventions, both overt and covert, by the US government. Unlike China’s reform and opening up after 1978, Libya’s was the result of economic strain imposed from the outside, namely, the Lockerbie sanctions and destabilizing interventions from imperialist powers. For an export-dependent, import-reliant country like Libya, these interventions had a wide-ranging impact. The liberalizing reforms would not have happened without the above factors. The sanctions in particular devastated Libya’s economy, hindered Libya’s revolutionary momentum, and set the bounds for internal debate on the Jamahiriya’s economic policy. In order to reach détente with the West and encourage foreign investment, Libya sacrificed its nuclear program and ended support for revolutionary activities abroad. The sanctions were lifted in the early 2000s.

Qadhafi and his allies viewed opening up as a means of encouraging foreign investment in the oil sector, while retaining majority state control, in order to strengthen the economy and thereby stabilize the Jamahiriya political system. Not all agreed with this approach. The reformists – including the Western-trained Mahmoud Jibril and Shukri Ghanem – sought wide-ranging privatizations that would undermine the leading role of the state. For his part, Ghanem declared the need to “change the thinking, the mentality and the culture of the [Libyan] people,” describing the Libyan mindset as “their general feeling that the state is their father and it is their guarantor that has to pay everything for them and provide them with housing, treatment, work and everything else.” In the context of desperation over massive economic losses, individuals like Ghanem were empowered within Libyan power structures.

The US government funded opposition civil society and established contacts with the reformist camp, whose economic policies would give US companies greater access to Libyan labour and resources. Persistent fissures between the revolutionary and reformist camps in the leadership weakened the Libyan state. When protests over housing policy in early 2011 avalanched into a NATO-backed revolution, prominent reformists including Jibril and Mustafa Abdul Jalil defected to the increasingly Islamist-led opposition. (,,,)

Lockerbie sanctions and the fall of the Jamahiriya

The Lockerbie sanctions cost Libya billions of dollars, and they led the Jamahiriya’s leadership to make security concessions to the West and liberalize the economy in order to encourage foreign investment. Various factions in the leadership had conflicting views on how far this liberalization should go, and in the context of continued Western interference in Libya, these divisions proved fatal. Indeed, the sanctions-imposed liberalization spelled the end of the Jamahiriya, leading directly to various wars that have caused thousands of deaths, impoverished hundreds of thousands and led hundreds of thousands more to flee the country.

The above reality cannot be ignored in retrospectives on the Lockerbie bombing. The horror of subsequent tragedies in Libya (the civil war, the open-air slave markets, the Derna floods) may divert attention from Libyans’ experience of the 1990s, but one should remember the steps by which Libya reached its current situation of state collapse and internal conflict. The Lockerbie sanctions – which, it should be recalled, were imposed following dubious legal proceedings – had a significant impact on straining the Libyan economy, which led directly to “opening up” and the fall of the Jamahiriya.

This is what Lockerbie means to Libyans. It should be what Lockerbie means to people in the West too.

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."

Why haven't all the Lockerbie documents been published?

[This is the headline over a letter published today on the website of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

Regarding your recent coverage of the transfer of Lockerbie debris to the US for the Abu Agila Mas'ud trial next year, such activities will no doubt attract greater interest to the trial if that trial does occur in May 2025. 

The debris may remind some people of the horrors of the night of December 21, 1988 in the unsuspecting town, when that preventable disaster occurred in those dark and wind-rent skies high above the borders. Others will never forget.

Might it not have at least been more economical to transfer all UK Government written materials relating to their past handling of the origins of the disaster to the internet, so that the younger generation could form its own opinion about how the UK and US governments have behaved over this terrible tragedy over the past 36 years? Perhaps there would then be a little honest openness.

Your great paper sailed as close to the wind as anyone dared many years ago to try to expose some of the contents of some files concerning the Jordanian based bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat and his bomb-making prowesses, as he worked in Damascus and Neuss for the PFLP-GC terrorist group, even as that group’s funding (by Iran) was renewed: you dared to come under immediate threat of closure, did you not, in attempting to expose truth?

In our group’s 36th year in our search for the truth we believe that only the truth will still suffice for you at The Herald.

We could perhaps press for a complete disclosure of all Lockerbie-related files still held at Kew and elsewhere now that 36 years have passed. 

Which politicians would now have to blush at the audacity with which all that material was kept clear of Freedom of Information requests from the media, the public and from our group? Most are dead or disabled now. Alas that the redoubtable, loveable Scottish MP for Linlithgow, Tam Dalyell, was taken from us so many years ago.

Can significant material about terrorist groups and their links really have remained a genuine reason for secrecy all this time?

Dr Jim Swire, spokesman UK Families – Flight 103, Gloucestershire.

Jim Swire is a force of nature

[What follows is excerpted from a report published yesterday evening on the website of The Sun:]

Retired GP Jim Swire is a force of nature – a man with balls of steel.

His search for justice after his daughter was murdered in the Lockerbie bombing has been so intense that at times he has put his own life in danger.

The 87-year-old campaigner faced down the late “mad dog” Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s guards armed with AK-47s, sneaked a fake bomb on a plane to expose security flaws and fears he could be a target for Iranian assassins.

But 35 years after 270 people were murdered in the attack over Scotland, on the Pan Am passenger jet flying from London to New York, thoughts of his 23-year-old daughter Flora break his indomitable spirit.

When Jim tries to remember the last words he said to medical student Flora before she left to catch the plane, tears flood his eyes and we pause the interview.

We are speaking in the conservatory of his Cotswolds home because he hopes an upcoming TV drama about the terror bombing will create the same public outcry seen when ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones highlighted the organisation’s IT scandal.

Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth will play Jim in the Sky series, Lockerbie, which is being filmed now. (...)

Apart from his grief — and bravery — there is also anger at the bungling officials who failed to stop the fateful bomb getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

He tells The Sun: “I am satisfied Colin will do his utmost to portray someone who has been searching diligently for the truth in the name of the murder of his daughter and all those other people.” getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

Jim, a BBC soundman turned GP, believes documents are still being withheld from relatives which could reveal either a cock-up in the investigation or a cover-up.

The worst terror atrocity ever to be visited upon the UK is still shrouded in mystery and controversy.

Only one person has been convicted of carrying out the attack — Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. His country-man Abu Agila Mohammad Masud is awaiting trial.

A call had been made to the US embassy in Finnish capital Helsinki warning that a bomb would be loaded on a Pan Am flight in Frankfurt, Germany, bound for Heathrow then New York.

That information was not passed on to regular travellers.

The threat should have been taken seriously because in October that year terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command were found with bombs in Neuss, Germany, designed to trigger once a plane reached a certain height. (...)

Understandably, Jim cannot hide his rage over this fatal delay. He says of the bomb: “It was in the baggage compartment, almost beneath the feet of my daughter and all of those innocent passengers. It exploded almost 48 hours from the warning having been passed on by the Department of Transport. Have we had an apology? No, we have not.

“Whatever you believe about Libya or all the rest of it, that’s where the explosion occurred, that was the warning they had and that was the way they handled it.

“If that doesn’t make a relative of anyone murdered in that atrocity angry, it bloody well should.” (...)

The late Paul Channon, Transport Secretary at the time, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, denied there had been a security failure but lost his job.

In the wake of Lockerbie, airlines claimed far more stringent inspections of luggage were put in place.

Keen to put that promise to the test, Jim, who had explosives training during a stint of military service, built a replica of the Lockerbie bomb with the Semtex explosive replaced by marzipan.

He managed to get it past Heathrow’s security even though a member of security found the Toshiba tape recorder containing the fake device.

Jim recalls: “The lady who opened up the suitcase said, ‘Sir, have you taken out the batteries?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and she put it back.

“That poor lady had not been trained in what might and might not be dangerous.”

The Lockerbie crime scene was the largest ever in UK history. (...)

Initially, the finger of suspicion pointed toward Iran, because it had close links to the PFLP-GC and its leaders had sworn revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 by a US warship.

Then the FBI investigation, carried out in unison with Dumfries and Galloway Police, pivoted instead toward Libya.

Detectives concluded that Libyan Arab Airlines security chief Al-Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were responsible for the atrocity. (...)

[F]ollowing pressure from sanctions, the two Libyan suspects were tried in Holland in 2000. As the trial went on Jim started to doubt they had been responsible for Flora’s murder. When Al-Megrahi was found guilty — although Fhimah was cleared and let go — he collapsed from shock.

Jim says: “My son sitting next to me in the courtroom thought that I had died.”

He now believes the late PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril was the true mastermind of the horror that claimed his daughter’s life.

Jibril died of heart failure in July 2021 in Syrian capital Damascus, and Jim says: “I can’t conceal from you I am delighted he is dead.”

He suspects that Jibril’s ultimate paymasters were Iran’s security services.

Pointing the finger at Tehran’s murderous ayatollahs shows how fearless Jim is. He says: “It has often occurred to me that I might get bombed. The more the truth comes out the more possible it is that I might get killed by Iran for wanting revenge.

“It seems to me the direct line came from Iran.”

But Scottish judges have twice upheld the murder convictions of Al-Megrahi, who died from cancer in 2012.

Next year US prosecutors will bring Masud to trial, accusing him of making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103.

Whatever any court decides, nothing will take away the pain from Jim and his wife Jane.

As Jim puts it: “When someone close to you in your family gets murdered, you get handed a life sentence.

“Jane and I will go to our graves still mourning the loss of Flora.”

The conspiracies are as plausible as the official explanation

[What follows is a review published in yesterday's edition of the London Evening Standard:]

For a disaster that happened 35 years ago, the story of Pan Am Flight 103’s destruction over Lockerbie has a very 21st-Century feel.

This bombing, which caused the deaths of 270 people over a quiet Scottish town, has a confused and controversial epilogue. Moving from the attack itself and the immediate aftermath, this four-part Sky documentary traces the hunt for the bombers and the personal and public struggles of the victims’ families. 

This sense of protracted tragedy is entangled with espionage and geopolitics of the most amoral and conflicted kind, where concepts of national interest supersede individual human lives, so it was inevitable that the bombing has become a focus for conspiracy theories. That the conspiracies are as plausible as the official explanation only makes it murkier. 

At 7.03pm on 21 December 1988, residents of Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway heard the explosion. Those out in the fields would have seen a fireball falling to earth. Those unlucky enough to have been in its path were vaporised by exploding aviation fuel.

The Boeing 747 crashed through the edge of the town spraying debris and the dead over many miles. All 259 on board died that night along with 11 on the ground. Even given the sensitivity of the producers, the cumulative grief is hard to watch and harder to forget.

Viewers have no reference point for a golf course strewn with a hundred corpses or bodies rained on to the roofs of terraced houses. The image of a red suitcase embedded in Scottish mud and the sound of screaming families at JFK airport conveys the unimaginable.

The intimate stories begin with the families and Lockerbie residents, traumatised yet finding an odd comfort in communal loss. Among them is the English doctor Jim Swire, who has spent his life since the crash in pursuit of the truth about those responsible for the death of his 23-year-old daughter Flora.

Swire’s grief evolves into obsession (in 1990 he smuggled a fake bomb on to a flight to New York to prove the inadequacy of Heathrow security) and his testimony, including how his interpretation of events changed over time, provides the moral frame of the film and a necessary touchstone of human dignity and love amid realpolitik at its most cynical. 

The film talks to FBI agents who began their investigation at the end of a decade of state-sponsored terrorism linked to anti-American regimes in the Middle East. The agents are led away from the prime suspects, Iranian proxies the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Council (PFLP-GC), towards Libyans via Malta and Frankfurt.

It had been suggested that Iran used this Palestinian group based in Lebanon (where US and UK hostages had been taken) to exact revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by an American warship a year before, but evidence from the crime scene lead the FBI to two Libyan intelligence agents, including the man eventually convicted of mass murder by Scottish judges in a Netherlands court, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. 

For eight years the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi (“Mad Dog”, as Ronald Reagan called him), refused to hand over the two suspects. Swire went to see him in an extraordinary act of recklessness. “I was pretty crazy because of the freshness of the bereavement and I’d have done anything I could.”

In Tripoli, surrounded by Gaddafi’s female bodyguards with AK47s, he showed the dictator a briefcase full of pictures of his daughter and he asked him to allow the two men to go on trial, before pinning a badge that said “Lockerbie, The Truth Must be Known” on Gaddafi’s lapel.

By the time of the trial in 2000, the consensus about who was guilty had collapsed. The CIA and the FBI operated in suspicion and sometimes outright contempt for each other, a Libyan supergrass was discredited, the shopkeeper who sold clothes in which the bomb was wrapped was paid $2m by the FBI and the Swiss manufacturer of timers allegedly used in the bomb changed his testimony at the trial.

That Gaddafi’s son Saif stated Libya accepted responsibility but didn’t admit to actually doing it does lend credence to the view that they paid $2.86bn in compensation as the price of readmittance to the global oil trade after years of crippling US sanctions. 

What is left behind are two starkly defined camps who believe either justice was served or there was a cover-up – and between them are families in a state of purgatorial uncertainty. Among the politics, the film shows one of the recurring visits to Scotland of the Ciulla family from New York, who come to remember Frank Ciulla and to be reunited with the Lockerbie couple Hugh and Margaret Connell who discovered Frank’s body still strapped to his seat. 

Many of these families, predominantly American, mix their anger with suspicion about the conduct of their own government. Swire says he believes the al-Megrahi trial was a sham and the PFLP-GC were responsible. Rev John Mosey from Birmingham, whose 19-year-old daughter Helga died, says he is 99.9% certain al-Megrahi was innocent. The FBI insist they got their man. An ex-CIA operative says they were wrong all along. 

The moral authority of Swire is so powerful it is almost overwhelming – he is only really challenged once to which he reacts with the anger of a man who has spent more than 30 years fighting for something not yet realised. Lockerbie plays to the idea that government agencies are incapable of telling the truth, something corroding trust in institutions in the US and increasingly in Britain. 

This is a poised and sensitive documentary. It’s moving in so many ways that at times it’s hard to ready yourself for the blows, even when you know they’re coming. What is left are open wounds: grief that does not rest and no sense of an ending.

Lockerbie is available to watch on Sky Documentaries and Now from 25 November