A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge

[On 11 January 2016 I blogged on an article entitled A look at Lockerbie: Iran Air Flight 655 that was billed as the first in a projected series. The second article has today been published on the libcom.org website. It is entitled A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge and reads in part:]

In order to determine beyond a reasonable doubt who was responsible for the Lockerbie crime, one must first understand the crucial pieces of evidence that the case hinges on. First of all, forensics experts have identified that the bomb which blew up Pan Am 103 was concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player packed in a brown hard-shell Samsonite suitcase. Another important point was that the bomb was triggered by a barometric timer, meaning that it was specially designed to only be triggered at a high altitude where the change in air pressure could activate the device. And maybe most importantly of all, it has been proven that a tweed jacket, a green umbrella, and a jumper with the brand name Baby Gro were all packed in the suitcase that contained the bomb.1,2,3

The key pieces of evidence are well established, but what about the motive and intent?

I discussed in my last blog post the criminal attack on Iran Air 655, and the Western media's characterization of those responsible as heroes. In response to this the Iranian leadership promised vengeance. "We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished," Tehran radio announced, "We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries."4 As Robert Bauer, former member of the CIA investigation into Lockerbie, put it, "They thought that if we didn't retaliate against the United States we would continue to shoot down their airliners." Abulkasim Misbahi, a high level Iranian defector who in 1988 was reporting directly to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, would later recall that, "The Iranians decided to retaliate as soon as possible...the target was to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian airbus."5

In order to accomplish this goal the Iranians turned to Ahmed Jibril, a man whose organization was well known for bombing airplanes. Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) was well known for two airplane bombings that took place on the same day in 1970. The first bomb detonated aboard Swiss Air flight 330 bound for Israel. The bomb forced a crash landing in which all 47 of those aboard were killed. The second bomb which exploded later in the day on an Austrian Airlines flight also bound for Israel detonated successfully, but an emergency landing avoided any loss of life. The bombs were notable not only for the tragedy and terror which they inflicted, but also for the fact that they were the first barometric bombs ever used. In addition to the notable use of barometric triggers, the bombs were also both concealed within transistor radios.6

The Iranians turned to Jibril, not only because of his proven abilities as a plane bomber, but also because the PFLP-GC was an organization with close ties to Iran's strong Shia ally, Syria. After being contacted, Jibril put the Iranians in touch with a PFLP-GC member Hafez Dalkamouni who was based in Frankfurt.

Unbeknownst to Jibril and Dalkamouni, the West German police were already suspicious of Dalkamouni and were watching him day and night at his apartment in Frankfurt at 16 Isarstrasse. In October of 1988, the West German police started to notice some highly suspicious activity taking place at the apartment. On October 13th, West German police watched as Marwan Kreeshat arrived at Dalkamouni's apartment. The wife of one of Dalkamouni's accomplices would later testify that Kreeshat was carrying a brown Samsonite suitcase. The next day police listened in as Dalkamouni and Kreeshat called a number in Damascus and Dalkamouni was recorded as saying that soon "everything will be ready." Kreeshat then took the phone and said that he had "made some changes in the medicine," and that it was "better and stronger than before."7 A week later Dalkamouni and Kreeshat went shopping. While shopping they purchased three mechanical alarm clocks, a digital clock, sixteen 1.5-volt batteries and some switches, screws, and glue. A police internal memo made that day noted, "the purchase of the materials under the clear supervision of a PFLP-GC member designated as an explosives expert leads to the conclusion that the participants intend to produce an explosive device which, on the basis of the telephone taps, would be operational within the next few days."8 Fearing an imminent attack, on October 26th West German security services launched Operation Autumn Leaves, intended to round up Dalkamouni and his Frankfurt cell. The police followed Dalkamouni and Kreeshat as they drove in a silver green Ford Taurus and stopped to make a call at a public telephone booth. There the police apprehended them and searched their car, inside they found a Toshiba radio cassette player hidden under a blanket. In Dalkamouni's apartment police found a stopwatch, batteries, a detonator, and both time-delay and barometric fuses. On October 29th, police took a closer look at the Toshiba and discovered 300 grams of Semtex sheet explosive shaped into a cylinder wrapped with aluminum foil with a barometric timer. 9,10 While in custody, Kreeshat revealed that he was actually in the employ of Jordanian intelligence, and that he had made a total of 5 bombs including the one found in the Toshiba cassette player. 11,12 So what of the other 4 bombs?

The fate of three of the four bombs would be revealed in an explosion in April of 1989. At this time West German police had reopened the Dalkamouni case and visited the basement of a grocery store owner who was friends with Dalkamouni at the time of his arrest. In the basement police found two radios that fit the description of the bombs that Marwan Kreeshat had claimed he had made for Dalkamouni. The officers brought the suitcases back to their headquarters and left them lying around for a few days. Eventually a technician was ordered to inspect them 4 days later. Soon after he began inspection they began ticking. He quickly ran the suitcases through an x-ray machine and saw that they looked suspicious. Two explosives experts were called in, and while they were working on opening the suitcases the bomb was triggered killing one and severely injuring the other. German police went in force back to the grocery store basement and uncovered 400 grams of plastic Semtex explosive and a detonator wired to a barometer.13

So that explained four of the five bombs, but what of the fifth?

Flashback to October of 1988, while the West German police were watching Dalkamouni's apartment at 16 Isarstrasse. On October 14th, a man named Martin Imandi visited and parked a car with a Swedish license plate outside Dalkamouni's apartment. Imandi and two others were then seen carrying packages and suitcases in and out of Dalkamouni's apartment. The three men returned to Sweden where they and a fourth person by the name of Mohammed Abu Talb had their headquarters in Stockholm. Abu Talb, whose nom de guerre was Intiqam, roughly translated as "man who takes revenge," was a seasoned fighter. He had served in the Egyptian army, had undergone multiple training programs in the Soviet Union, and had served with the PLO in Lebanon. arrested soon after by the Swedish police.

Soon after returning to Stockholm, the West German police tipped off the Swedish police about the danger the four men posed, but by the time of their arrest, Abu Talb and the rest of the Swedish group had hidden any incriminating evidence and were soon released from police custody for lack of evidence. A Swedish police investigation in 1989 would later uncover a plane ticket in Abu Talb's apartment that showed that after his release in 1988, Abu Talb flew to Malta on November 19th. It was in Malta that he stopped to purchase a jumper, a tweed jacket, and an umbrella at a store called Mary's House.14,15

Unfortunately for Abu Talb his purchases had not gone unnoticed. After the bombing it would be deduced from the unusual brand name of the jumper that it had been purchased at Mary's House. When questioned in April of 1989, the store owner, Tony Gauci, remembered Abu Talb's purchases very clearly as Abu Talb had purchased a tweed jacket that Gauci had been trying to sell for 7 years. Gauci provided to police at the time a perfect description of Abu Talb despite it not being common knowledge that he was a suspect.16 [Emerson, 245] Gauci then repeatedly picked Abu Talb's picture out of a photo lineup (before being coaxed and pressured into picking a man named al-Megrahi as I will discuss more in my next post).17 Abu Talb then returned with the clothes to Sweden on November 26th.

From what can be pieced together the story picks back up in London at Heathrow airport, at 2pm on December 21st, 1988. It was at this time that a baggage handler named John Bedford and two other workers began loading luggage for Pan Am flight 103. The flight was scheduled to take off at 6pm and was destined for New York's JFK airport. Bedford began loading the luggage of transfer passengers upright into a large metallic container. At about a quarter after four as things began to slow he took a tea break. When he came back 30 minutes later his partner, Sulkash Kamboj, informed him that he had put two more suitcases into the container during his absence. Bedford looked into the container and saw two suitcases lying flat, not upright. "In a statement given to the police on 9th January 1989 he was able to describe it--'a brown hard-shell, the kind Samsonite make.'" This statement was made just three weeks after the bombing, at which time there was no indication that a brown Samsonite was the bomb suitcase.18
At 7:02pm, 38 minutes after take off, at an altitude of 31,000 feet, the bomb went off in the Samsonite creating a hole in the plane which caused it to disintegrate. Those on board were sucked out of the plane where they fell to their deaths, some still strapped in their seats. All 259 people aboard were killed, and falling wreckage killed an additional 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

• 1. Lockerbie: What Really Happened? Al Jazeera English (AJE), 2014. Web.
• 2. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 3. Kerr, Morag G. Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. Print.
• 4. Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Print.
• 5. AJE.
• 6. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 7. Emerson, 130
• 8. Emerson, 130
• 9. Emerson, 168-169
• 10. AJE
• 11. Wines, Michael. "Portrait of Pan Am Suspect: Affable Exile, Fiery Avenger." The New York Times. The New York Times, 1989.
• 12. Emerson
• 13. Emerson, 208
• 14. Wines, NYT
• 15. Emerson, 249
• 16. Emerson, 223
• 17. Kerr, 241-262 18. Kerr, 89-90

A fresh look at the bombing of Pan Am 103

This is the headline over an article by Trina Y Vargo that was published yesterday on Huffington Post. It reads as follows:]

Photos of the debris of a Russian airliner scattered across the Sinai reminded many of another plane that also came apart at 31,000 feet, more than a quarter of a century ago.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in midair, killing 259 people on board and 11 residents in the town of Lockerbie, Scotland below. Several victims were Massachusetts' residents. Many questions about that bombing remain unanswered, but new clues suggest this cold case should get a fresh look.

In 2001 a Libyan, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was convicted in a special court in the Netherlands for planning the bombing. After serving only 8 years in a Scottish prison (about 11 days per victim), the Scots released him on "compassionate grounds" in August 2009. It was reported that he was about to die from prostate cancer. He didn't die until nearly 3 years later and I was not alone in believing that his release had more to do with oil than compassion. Within days, he was meeting with Muammar Qadaffi, who, according to The Guardian, "heaped praise on Scotland, his 'friend Gordon Brown', the Queen and Prince Andrew, saying all of them had contributed" to the release of al-Megrahi.

Among the 189 Americans on Pan Am 103 was a 25 year-old named David Dornstein. Ken Dornstein was 21 years old when his brother was killed. In an excellent three-part series on PBS's Frontline, Ken, a documentary-maker who has been investigating the bombing, makes a compelling case that bomb-maker Abu Agila Mas'ud should be added to the list of suspects.

It was reported last month that the Scots and the US Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch have asked the Libyans for help in tracking down two suspects, presumably because of what Dornstein uncovered. While the suspects have not been named, the Libyans shouldn't have to look far to find Mas'ud or Qadaffi's former intelligence officer, Abdullah al-Senussi, as both are currently serving time in Libya after being convicted in the same trial. (The upheaval in Libya in the years that followed the 2011 killing of Qadaffi meant that his loyalists had to flea or try to hide and survive in a chaotic Libya where there is no love lost for the former regime.)

Dornstein's investigative work is impressive. One thing it should hopefully do is put to rest any suggestion that al-Megrahi was innocent. One of the most compelling things Dornstein presents is Libyan television footage of al-Megrahi's return to Libya, which shows some of the worst characters in the Qadaffi regime greeting him like a brother. If al-Megrahi was innocent, why was he warmly embracing al-Senussi and Al-Masud (who are identified in the video for the first time by Dornstein)?

This new information will also hopefully lead to a fresh look for evidence that may reach beyond Libya. At the time of the bombing, I was a foreign policy adviser to Senator Edward M Kennedy. In addition to supporting the bringing to trial of al-Megrahi and another Libyan who was ultimately acquitted, we encouraged the Clinton Administration to continue to investigate the many questions regarding possible Syrian and Iranian involvement in the bombing, questions that date back to the Reagan Administration.

The most widely held theory is that Iran, seeking revenge for the July 1988 downing of an Iranian Airbus by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf, sponsored Ahmed Jibril, the Syrian-based leader of the PFLP-GC to carry out the bombing. Jibril's plans were disrupted in the fall of 1988, when German agents raided his terrorist cells in Germany in an operation known as "Autumn Leaves." It was believed that Jibril then handed off the plans to Qadaffi who was all too happy to carry out the bombing because he hated President Ronald Reagan who had bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the 1986 Libyan bombing of a discotheque in Berlin which killed 2 American soldiers and injured 79 others.

Several investigators at the time told us that only the two Libyans could be tried because they were the only two for whom prosecutors could make a case. With so much upheaval in the region, opportunities may now exist to obtain more leads and answers. The Obama Administration should make it a priority to quickly interview al-Senussi and Al-Masud. They might unlock answers to Qadaffi's personal involvement and perhaps answer questions about Iran and Syria. The US should also investigate other fresh evidence Dornstein has uncovered. And what of the Syria and Iran? Where is Ahmed Jibril? A 2012 New York Times reference to the Bashar al-Assad supporter suggests that he is either still in Syria, or perhaps Iran. And why did Scotland really let al-Megrahi go?

There are many questions that deserve a new look. The FBI might want to hire Ken Dornstein to give them a hand.

The Senegal timer

[What follows is the text of a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

A Libyan secret service agent alleged by the prosecution to have gathered explosives and detonators used to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 has been questioned at the Lockerbie trial.

Mansour Omran Ammar Saber is named as one of the "others" in the indictment against the two Libyans accused of carrying out the bombing in December 1988.

The Crown says Mr Saber and other Libyan agents provided the explosives, detonator and timer.

Alan Turnbull, for the prosecution, referred in particular to one incident in February 1988, when Saber was arrested at Dakar airport in Senegal.

He was said to have been beaten unconscious and held in custody for four months after explosives and timers were discovered, allegedly in his baggage.

The witness denied all knowledge of the explosives.

The prosecution says the timer was made by Swiss firm Mebo on the orders of the head of the Libyan Secret Service in 1985.

Mr Turnbull showed the court photographs of explosives, timers, wires and a gun, believed to have been confiscated from him on his arrival at Dakar Airport.

He questioned Mr Saber on how the timer had ended up at Dakar Airport at the same time as him.

"It's none of my business and I don't know anything about it," he replied.

Later, the focus moved to the so-called Autumn Leaves investigation by the BKA German police unit which resulted in the arrest of several Palestinians and the discovery of weapons, ammunition and explosives at a Frankfurt flat in October 1988.

Three members of the BKA unit appeared and defence lawyers sought to show that Palestinian groups were active and gathering weapons and explosives in Germany shortly before the Pan Am 103 explosion.

The defence has suggested the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) were involved in the attack on the Pan Am plane.

The prosecution continues its case on Friday and is expected to conclude on Monday or Tuesday.

Presiding Judge Lord Sutherland granted the defence a one-week adjournment for lawyers to consider their position and prepare arrangements for the appearance of defence witnesses.

The trial, at the Scottish Court in the Netherlands, is now in its 70th day.

[The report on the proceedings of 16 November 2000 from Glasgow University’s Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit can be accessed here. The story of the Senegal timer can be followed here, on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website.]

"The coverage of the film is more notable for what it omits than what it reveals"

[What follows is the text of an article by John Ashton headlined The Lockerbie Case published in today’s edition of the Scottish Review:]

Lockerbie is back in the news. On 15 October the Crown Office announced that the lord advocate and the US attorney general have agreed that two Libyan men should be treated as suspects. They have been named as Abu Agila Masud, an alleged bomb-maker whose identity was until now a mystery, and Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi’s former security chief. Both men are currently in prison in Libya.

The announcement was prompted by the recent broadcast by the American PBS channel’s 'Frontline' series of a three-part documentary, My Brother’s Bomber, made by Ken Dornstein, who lost his brother David in the attack. Trailed by a long feature in The New Yorker, it suggests that the Libyan man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was guilty and that he acted with Masud.

The film has provided the much-derided Crown case against Megrahi with the only significant boost it has had since he was convicted almost 15 years ago. That case, accepted by the three Scottish law lords who tried him, went as follows. Two weeks before the bombing, on 7 December 1988, he bought a selection of clothes from a shop in Malta called Mary’s House. On 21 December 1988, while travelling on a false passport he placed an unaccompanied brown Samsonite suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt.

The suitcase contained the clothes and a bomb, and was labelled for New York on PA103. At Frankfurt it transferred to Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to London Heathrow, and at Heathrow to PA103. The bomb was allegedly built in to a Toshiba BomBeat brand RT-SF16 radio cassette player. A large percentage of the global total of this model had been imported by the Libyan General Electrical Company, which was run by Megrahi’s friend and relative Said Rashid, who was a senior figure in Libyan intelligence service, the JSO. More importantly, it was said to have been detonated by a timing device known as an MST-13, which had been designed and built to order for the JSO by a small Swiss company called Mebo, whose Zurich offices were shared by a Libyan company called ABH, in which Megrahi was a partner.

Before I go further, I should declare an interest. I worked for three years as a researcher for Megrahi, helping his lawyers prepare for his appeal against conviction, and following his return to Libya, at his request, I wrote his biography Megrahi: You are my Jury. I was also a paid consultant during the early stages of the film’s production in which capacity I was interviewed on camera (although the interview doesn’t appear in the film) and provided Ken with numerous documents. Although he and I hold very different views about the case, I like and respect him.

He has a profound need for clear answers about who killed his brother. He always believed that Megrahi was guilty and that he had acted on behalf of the Libyan state. He used the opportunity opened by the Libyan revolution to pursue the other alleged state players.

He accepts that the evidence suggesting Megrahi was the clothes purchaser was flawed. Not only was he very much younger, smaller and lighter-skinned than the man described by the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, but the evidence also suggested that the purchase date was not, as the crown alleged, 7 December 1988, but two weeks earlier, when Megrahi was not in Malta. Ken considers that these weaknesses in the Crown case are relatively insignificant when set again the other evidence that he has unearthed, the most important of which concerns Abu Agila Masud.

We have always known that on the morning of the bombing Masud was on the same flight as Megrahi from Malta to Tripoli and that they had been on other flights together in the previous weeks. Megrahi denied knowing him, as did the Libyans interviewed by Lockerbie investigators prior to Megrahi’s trial. The film reveals that, according to a German court judgment, Masud was the technical mastermind behind the 1986 bombing of La Belle nightclub in Berlin. That attack prompted US air strikes on Libya, which in turn, according to the official Lockerbie narrative, prompted Libya to bomb Pan Am 103. Furthermore, the film suggests, Masud was in the car that greeted Megrahi at the airport on his return to Libya in 2009. Then, earlier this year, a Libyan court convicted him of making booby-trapped car bombs during the 2011 revolution.

The film also focuses on another alleged plotter, Said Rashid, who greeted Megrahi on the steps of the aircraft on his arrival home. Ken got access to Rashid’s abandoned house, where he found diaries in which he had described Malta as a launch pad for terrorism against the west. Malta, of course, was where the Libyans allegedly launched the Lockerbie bomb.

Megrahi was always open about his close relationship with Rashid and other notorious senior security figures, including the newly named suspect Abdallah Senussi, who, like Rashid, was a relation. Megrahi: You are my Jury made clear that both Rashid and Senussi were allegedly involved in terrorism – in Rashid’s case the La Belle bombing.

The evidence that Ken has assembled is substantial and I do not dismiss it out of hand, but, for reasons set out below, I believe the conclusions he has built upon it are unsustainable.

His film has prompted an avalanche of media coverage, almost all of it uncritical. The Crown Office’s chief media cheerleader, Times columnist Magnus Linklater, has even declared that '[it] is time to extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long'. 

Anything that places Lockerbie back in the spotlight is to be welcomed. Unfortunately, however, the coverage of the film is more notable for what it omits than what it reveals.

The first significant omission is a consideration of the evidence from Libya and of Megrahi’s behaviour. At the start of the Libyan revolution four years ago, the former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil claimed to have proof that Colonel Gaddafi ordered the bombing. Since then nothing has emerged publicly from the country’s security archives to implicate the Gaddafi regime and Megrahi in the bombing. Jalil later claimed he had been misquoted and the best he could offer by the way of evidence was the fact that the regime had paid Megrahi’s legal bills. Said Rashid’s papers implicated Rashid in terrorism, but there was nothing new and substantial to demonstrate that he had a role in Lockerbie.

The only genuine document to emerge from the ruins of the old regime that speaks directly to the suspects’ private views on the case is a letter by Megrahi to Senussi, reported on by The Wall Street Journal, in which he protested his innocence. (The WSJ speculated that he might have expected the prison staff to check his mail, but that didn’t happen, as he was free to hand over correspondence to the Libyan consulate staff who frequently visited him.)

Megrahi continued to plead his innocence following his return to Libya in 2009. By then there was nothing for him to lose in admitting his guilt, yet he wouldn’t and he spent much of his remaining time cooperating with me in writing his biography – hardly the actions of a guilty man. The Gaddafi regime also had nothing to lose. In 2004 it made a formal admission of responsibility and paid compensation for the bombing, but only because it was obliged to do so in order to free itself of crippling UN sanctions, which had been imposed under US and UK sponsored Security Council resolutions passed in the early 90s. It never made an unambiguous admission of guilt.

Megrahi didn't act like a terrorist when he was in Malta. Although he travelled on a coded passport under a false name, he went to visit his co-accused Lamin Fhimah’s Maltese business partner, whom he had never met before, and introduced himself under his real name. He then stayed the night at the Holiday Inn, rather than at one of the island’s Libyan-owned hotels, despite having stayed there for two nights only a fortnight earlier under his own name. He kept the passport for 11 years until he went to The Netherlands to stand trial and handed it over to the prosecution; again, not what one would expect of a terrorist.

Megrahi told a number of lies, not least, it seems, about his relationship with Masud, but lies do not prove guilt. Truth telling is a luxury of liberal democracies. In countries like Gaddafi’s Libya it can be fatal.

A second omission is the strong evidence that points away from Megrahi and Libya. Unlike the Libyans, the original suspects in the bombing, the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), had a track record of bombing aircraft. Moreover, they made bombs into Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players, the same brand – although a different model – that was used to destroy Pan Am 103. According to their bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat, who was arrested in Germany with other members of the group two months before Lockerbie in an operation code-named Autumn Leaves, his fellow arrestee Hafez Dalkamoni had come to Germany to coordinate an attack on a western airline and had shown a particular interest in Pan Am. 

The German cell also had a link to Malta through the Swedish-based terrorist Mohamed Abu Talb, some of whose associates had visited Dalkamoni and Khreesat’s German apartment two weeks before the Autumn Leaves raids, and who himself visited Malta around the same time. 

There have been suggestions that the PFLP-GC and the Libyans somehow joined forces and that the Libyans were responsible for the plot’s final execution. This would make sense if the Autumn Leaves arrests had halted the PFLP-GC’s operation. However, other evidence suggests that it continued. Khreesat told the German police that other members of the group had evaded arrest, including one called Abu Elias, who, Khreesat gleaned, was to have an important role in the planned attack. Another PFLP-GC member called Mobdi Goben, who led the group's Yugoslavian cell and was visited by members of the German cell shortly before their arrest, later claimed that the bombing had been coordinated by Abu Elias. 

Further evidence that the PFLP-GC’s plot remained active after the Autumn Leaves raids came in a warning circulated by the US State Department's bureau of diplomatic security three weeks before Lockerbie (and a few days before the better known and allegedly hoax Helsinki warning). It stated that a group of radical Palestinians in Europe was planning to target Pan Am, adding 'Timeframe is present'. 

A number of declassified US intelligence documents have stated as fact that the bombing was commissioned from the PFLP-GC by Iran in revenge for the accidental shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 by US battlecruiser the USS Vincennes six months earlier. Former CIA agent Robert Baer revealed specific details of the Iranian/PFLP-GC attack, which he said came from a number of reliable sources. Another, Richard Fuisz, revealed in a court deposition that he was told by numerous senior Syrian officials who were close to PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril that the group was behind the bombing. 

None of this rules out Libyan involvement in the attack: Libya backed the PFLP-GC and may well have provided logistical and material support to the bombers. This scenario was one that neither the Lockerbie prosecutors nor the Libyans themselves would wish explored. 

A third omission is the evidence suggesting that the La Belle bombing was not a straightforward act of Libyan terrorism. Three of the four people convicted of the bombing worked at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin: Palestinian Yassar Chraidi, Lebanese-born German Ali Chanaa and Libyan Musbah Eter. Eter confessed to his role in the bombing in 1996 and became the key prosecution witness (Chanaa also confessed but his evidence was not relied upon by the prosecution). Also central to the case were files from the former East Germany security service, the Stasi, which documented information provided by its network of informers within Berlin’s Arab community.

The files appeared to corroborate Eter’s claim that Masud was a bomb technician and indicated that he was in Berlin around the time of the bombing. The Libyan witnesses in the Lockerbie case all denied knowledge of Masud. Also important to the case were intercepts of incriminatory messages supposedly sent between the Libyan government and the East Berlin People’s Bureau. Said Rashid was identified as the main voice behind the instructions from Tripoli. Ostensibly, all this was convincing evidence of Masud’s and Libya’s guilt. But other evidence suggests the bombing had some very murky undercurrents.

The Stasi files suggested that the staff of the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau were far from being a close band of Gaddafi loyalists. Most startlingly, they showed that Musbah Eter had a long-standing relationship with the CIA. A 1998 investigation by the German TV channel ZDF alleged that, at the time of his confession in 1996, he was running a CIA front company in Malta.

Some of the Stasi’s Arab informants also had a relationship with the CIA. So too did a number of non-Libyans, whom the Stasi files implicated in the wider La Belle plot, but who escaped justice. One key informant, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, and his brother Mohamed, both of whom were both close to Chraidi, ran a freelance Palestinian terrorist cell that was mistrusted by other Palestinians. The Stasi learned that the CIA knew that Mahmoud and another cell member, Khaled Shatta, were involved in the bombing. In the months prior to the attack the cell lived in East Berlin and met the defendants almost daily. Hours before the attack they travelled to West Berlin. Their movements were monitored by both the Stasi and the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, who concluded that they were working for Western intelligence. A declassified KGB document indicated that Jaber was suspected of being an agent provocateur, who was being used by the CIA to concoct a case against Libya. The KGB reported that, two days before the bombing, he told his CIA contacts that it would cost $30,000, rather than the previously quoted amount, $80,000. Another member of the group admitted to ZDF that he was a Mossad asset.

All this is important in the light of the widely reported and well documented fact that throughout the Reagan presidency the CIA ran a massive covert campaign against Libya. In the run up to the La Belle attack, the US navy conducted aggressive exercises off the coast of Libya, which were clearly designed to provoke a Libyan military response, although none came. The bombing gave the White House hawks the excuse they craved to strike. 

When the US released the incriminatory intercepts to the German authorities a decade after the attack they appeared to be genuine. However, according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky the Americans were duped by a Mossad, who broadcast phony messages from Tripoli. Neither the La Belle prosecutor Detlev Mehlis nor the FBI bothered to interview Ostrovsky about his claims. 

To be clear, I do not claim that Libya, Said Rashid and Abouagela Masud were not involved in La Belle – I would not be surprised if they were – I merely caution against taking a black and white view of the case.

The fourth major omission in the recent media coverage is the evidence that demonstrates that the Lockerbie bomb did not originate in Malta. To remind you, Megrahi's conviction rested on the belief that he had managed to smuggle a bomb contained in an unaccompanied suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt and that this case had been transferred to Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to Heathrow, where it was transferred to PA103. The claim relied upon two documents from Frankfurt airport, which, according to the Crown, demonstrated that an unaccounted-for suitcase had been transferred from KM180 to PA103A.

However, that claim in turn relied upon a number of shaky inferences about the documents and the surrounding events at Frankfurt (which are documented in Megrahi: You are my Jury and, more exhaustively, in Dr Morag Kerr's book, Adequately Explained by Stupidity?).

Megrahi's conviction depended upon two still more unlikely assumptions. The first was that he had struck very lucky. Forensic evidence suggested that the bomb's position within luggage container AVE4041 was such that it was as close as it could be to the skin of the aircraft and that had it been any further away it would not have penetrated the skin and caused the plane to disintegrate. 

The second was that he had managed to circumvent Air Malta's baggage loading procedures. Unlike Pan Am's these were unusually strict; they required the head loader to physically count all the bags to make sure the total tallied with the number checked in. To ensure that he had done so, he was not told this number, but instead had to report the total to the flight's ramp dispatcher, who would check it against the checked-in total. KM180's records showed that the numbers had matched. The police investigation established that all these bags had made it onto the flight and been collected by their owners, which ruled out the possibility that Megrahi or an accomplice had managed to swap the bomb suitcase for a check-in bag prior to the head loader's count.

The only witness from any of the three airports investigated by the police who could recall seeing a brown Samsonite case of the type that contained the bomb was a Pan Am loader at Heathrow called John Bedford. On the day of the bombing he was based in the so-called interline shed, which processed bags transferred from other flights, but not those from PA103A from Frankfurt, which allegedly carried the suitcase from Malta.

When interviewed by the police he remembered clearly that it was lying flat in the luggage container AVE4041 in the approximate position that the explosion later took place. He said he noticed it when he returned from his tea break at around 16.45 and that a colleague, Sulkash Kamboj, had told him that he had placed it there. (Kamboj subsequently had no recollection of doing so and there is no suggestion that he was part of the bomb plot.) 

Crucially, Bedford went off duty before PA103A arrived from Frankfurt, so the suitcase he saw could not have originated from that flight and could therefore not have been a rogue suitcase from the Air Malta flight KM180. Equally crucially, he and the two other loaders who saw AVE4041 were sure that, by the time it was taken to PA103A to be topped up with baggage from Frankfurt, the base of the container was covered by a single layer of baggage, which consisted of at least five cases standing vertically along the back and two lying flat at the front.

These details were important because two police memos uncovered during preparations for Megrahi's second appeal showed that only six legitimate interline bags would have been loaded into AVE4041, none of which matched that described by Bedford. Clearly then, the Bedford suitcase was rogue and, to the best of his recollection, it matched the one that contained the bomb.

Further evidence that the bomb was planted at Heathrow has been unearthed and compiled in an exhaustive investigation by researcher Dr Morag Kerr in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?. Taken together, the Heathrow evidence is far more convincing evidence of the bomb's origin than the fact that Megrahi and Abouagela Masud left Malta together on the morning of the bombing.

The final important omission is the evidence that destroys the Crown’s central claim that the Lockerbie bomb contained an MST-13 timer from a batch supplied by the Swiss company Mebo to Libya. The claim relied upon a fragment of circuit board known as PT/35(b), which was found within the Lockerbie debris.

According to the Crown, it matched the boards used in the Libyan batch, which had been made for Mebo by another Swiss company, Thüring. However, there was a crucial difference, which was not revealed to the trial court: PT/35(b)’s copper circuitry was plated with pure tin, whereas the boards in the timers supplied to Libya were plated with a tin-lead alloy. In 2008 Thüring’s production director confirmed to Megrahi’s lawyers that the company had only every used tin-lead alloy plating. It meant that the fragment could not have been from one of the MST-13s supplied to Libya. 

As well as omitting such vital evidence, the media coverage surrounding 'My Brother’s Bomber' has swerved an urgent question: given that Abu Agila Masud apparently linked the La Belle attack and Lockerbie, why did the Lockerbie investigators never make anything of the fact? It's clear from the statements of Scottish police officers that Masud was a prime suspect from 1991 onwards. In 1997 he was named in the indictment against the La Belle accused. Had the Lockerbie prosecutors known of the link, they should have used it to bolster the weak circumstantial case that they had assembled against Megrahi and his co-accused, Lamin Fhimah. The fact that they did not looks like a major cock up, which the announcement of the pursuit of the two new suspects has effectively concealed. The Crown Office claims that there is now a 'proper basis' in Scots law to treat the two men as suspects, implying that there wasn’t previously. In fact, such a basis has existed since 1991.

The initiative has already descended into farce. The Crown Office has discussed getting access to the suspects with the internationally recognised government in Tobruk, which is powerless to help, because they are being held by the rival government in Tripoli. That government is willing to allow the Crown Office to interview the suspects, but has heard nothing from them. As leading Libya observer Jason Pack has observed, given the very delicate political situation in the country, which the UN is attempting to resolve by brokering the formation of a national unity government, the Crown Office’s announcement seems 'particularly ill-timed and naïve'.

I can believe that the police and FBI failed to be sufficiently curious about La Belle, but find it hard to believe that the CIA missed the Masud link with Lockerbie. In the official narrative, the two bombings were umbilically linked. The CIA of all people should therefore have been alert to the possibility that there were common players between the two attacks. They could not have been unaware that Masud had been implicated in La Belle if the man who implicated him, Musbah Eter, was one of their own.

Why, then, was it not until 19 years after Eter named Masud, and 18 years after he was named in the La Belle indictment, that the Lockerbie connection was made? And why did it fall to one of the Lockerbie victims' relatives to make the connection? Clearly the Libyans kept silent about Masud because they knew that the La Belle connection, whether genuine or not, would damage Megrahi and Fhimah's prospects at trial, but why the apparent silence from the CIA?

We are unlikely to get answers to these and the many other questions that cloud Lockerbie. We should applaud Ken Dornstein for adding some pieces to the jigsaw. He has seen a picture that he finds convincing, but when I look at the other pieces, I am equally sure he is wrong and that, if we ever get to see the complete picture, the part he has illuminated may prove to be peripheral.

We must nevertheless hope that Masud and Senussi are handed over to the Scottish authorities, unlikely as that prospect may currently seem. The case urgently needs reopening and a trial of the two men may be the best way of achieving it. Should there be one, the prosecution would have to re-run most of the discredited case that convicted Megrahi, and the defence would be armed with vital exculpatory evidence that the Crown previously withheld. The result, I predict, would be a deepening rather than an answering of Lockerbie’s mysteries.