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.

Sunday Times INSIGHT "The Lockerbie Files" 1990

[On this date in 1990 The Sunday Times published an article of almost 8000 words entitled The Lockerbie Files. It is no longer to be found on the newspaper’s website. What follows is taken from the version posted on 29 October 2012 on the International Skeptics website:]

It was the biggest murder ever committed in Britain. Tomorrow, 21 months after a bomb sent a PanAm jumbo jet plunging into the town of Lockerbie, the public inquiry into the deaths of the 270 victims will open, at last, before John Mowat, sheriff principal of South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway. He will hear dozens of witnesses and scrutinise thousands of pages of evidence over the next three months.

Since the bombing, the Lockerbie investigators have probed the depths of terrorism, challenged powerful foreign interests and extended the frontiers of forensic detection. But most of the fruits of this painstaking police investigation will not be presented at the inquiry.

Lord Fraser, the Lord Advocate, the law officer leading for the crown at the inquiry, has decided not to present evidence that would cover such questions as how the bomb was put on the plane, who did it, and where. Nor will he introduce evidence uncovered by the extensive international criminal investigation evidence of security lapses at foreign airports and allegations of blunders by foreign police, including a bungle over a baggage loading list that may have enabled one of the terrorists to avoid capture by a matter of hours.

The inquiry is not equipped to probe the obstruction, bureaucracy, rivalry and incompetence that may have shielded the killers from justice. Nor is it able to consider the international political pressures behind the fact that today after an investigation costing Pounds 8.5m not one arrest has been made in direct connection with Lockerbie.

After an INSIGHT inquiry ranging over the whole breadth of police investigations in Britain and Germany, The Sunday Times is able to tell the story that the official inquiry will not hear. It is a story full of questions that the investigators still cannot answer. They may never be resolved.

Nobody noticed the undercover police officers as they sat in their unmarked cars in a quiet suburban street in the West German city of Neuss. It was Monday, October 24, 1988. Members of the anti-terrorist unit of the federal police the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) were watching a block of grey council flats at 16 Isarstrasse in the city's Arab quarter. Their targets were terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

This group had been dormant since the early 1970s, when it carried out spectacular attacks on Western airliners. But, alerted by Israeli tip-offs that the group had smuggled weapons into Europe to attack Israeli and American targets, the BKA had begun round-the-clock surveillance of 16 suspects across West Germany. The police called the operation Autumn Leaves.

The Isarstrasse flat belonged to an Arab greengrocer. But the BKA was more interested in his visiting brother-in-law, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni, 43, and a recently arrived companion, Marwan Abdel Khreesat, also 43.

Dalkamoni was a Syrian terrorist identified by the Israelis as leader of the PFLP-GC's European network. He had been captured by the Israelis after losing a leg during a cross-border raid in 1969 and released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange arranged by Ahmed Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC.

Officially, the limping, grey-haired Palestinian was in Germany for medical treatment. But the BKA suspected him of smuggling detonators into the country in his artificial leg.

Khreesat's presence was even more alarming to the BKA. He had arrived on October 13 with his wife and two bronze Samsonite suitcases. Inside one, Dalkamoni admitted later, was a black Toshiba ''bombeat 453'' radio cassette recorder. Remains of a similar model were later found among the debris at Lockerbie.

Balding and paunchy, Khreesat seemed typical of the thousands of Arabs who regularly visit the large Middle Eastern community in West Germany. He was silent for most of his stay, rarely leaving his room except to listen to his hosts' young son practising on a small electric piano in the living room. His wife explained that he liked music and that he owned a television repair shop back in Amman.

But Khreesat was no ordinary TV repairman. He was one of the world's most skilled aviation bombers. Italian secret service files showed he was wanted in connection with the bombing of an Israeli airliner in 1972, when ammonium nitrate concealed in a Philips record player had exploded minutes after take-off from Rome airport.

The BKA wondered, in October 1988, whether Khreesat was now planning an attack against a target in West Germany. As the surveillance team followed Khreesat and Dalkamoni on shopping trips around Neuss and Frankfurt, they began to fear the worst. Why else were the two men buying clocks, batteries, switches and glue?

BKA wiretappers heard Dalkamoni telephone Khreesat from Frankfurt to tell him that an accomplice would deliver ''black boxes with lids'', ''gloves'' and ''paste''. Dalkamoni also promised to bring ''at least seven white pointed aluminium buttons, four of which would be electric''.

On the morning of October 24, as the BKA monitored the flat, Khreesat settled himself at a table in his bedroom with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Dalkamoni arrived with some packages covered in aluminium foil and sealed with black sticky tape. Khreesat opened the back of his Toshiba radio cassette player and set to work.

He worked alone for the rest of the day and the whole of the next; others in the flat were told he was putting together an amplifier. Then Khreesat made a long distance call to Damascus, monitored by the BKA, and said: ''I've made some changes to the medication. It's better and stronger than before.''

Fearing an attack was imminent, the BKA moved in next day. Manfred Klink, its senior anti-terrorism officer, was taking no chances. Armed officers seized Dalkamoni and Khreesat near their green Taunus car. In its boot they found a black Toshiba radio cassette recorder armed with about 300 grammes of Semtex-H high explosive and a barometric trigger designed to close an electric circuit at altitude.

''The detonating mechanism ... is suited to detonate explosives automatically in an aircraft,'' the BKA reported later. ''When the necessary operating height has been reached the fall in pressure connected with it will start the timing mechanism, and when the delay period has elapsed the detonator will be activated''.

The BKA simultaneously raided addresses in Frankfurt and four other cities, seizing 14 more supects and a lethal arsenal that included an anti-tank gun, sub-machine guns, mortars, rifle and hand grenades, TNT and five kilos of plastic explosives.

The Germans also issued an international alert to airline and airport security chiefs about the possibility of other Toshiba radio bombs made by Khreesat. They had reason to congratulate themselves. It seemed a massive plot to bomb an aircraft had been foiled and a terrorist cell taken out.

Events swiftly proved otherwise. For, in an astonishing decision that Scottish detectives would later believe had a direct bearing on the Lockerbie disaster, Khreesat was set free.

After holding him for two weeks on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime, the German police needed a new warrant to keep him in custody. On November 10, Dr Christian Rinne, an investigating judge of the federal high court in Karlsruhe, let Khreesat go.

Rinne said there was insufficient evidence to connect him with the Autumn Leaves gang's arsenal; nor had it been possible ''to discover a target or location for a crime of explosion''. If the BKA suspected Khreesat of involvement in earlier bombings, they did not disclose that to Rinne. ''According to the facts known so far, the accused is certainly suspected of the alleged charge. The strong suspicion of crime necessary for a warrant of arrest is, however, lacking,'' said Rinne.

Dalkamoni and one other suspect had been positively linked with the Frankfurt arsenal and were still under arrest. They would later be charged for bomb attacks aimed at American military trains. But the other suspects seized in the Autumn Leaves round-up were all out of custody. Marwan Khreesat, master bomb-maker, walked out of the courthouse and vanished without trace.

Seven weeks later, a terrorist bomb weighing less than a bag of sugar exploded on flight PA103 as it flew six miles high over Lockerbie. It was 7.03pm on Wednesday December 21, 1988. Many of the passengers were Americans going home for Christmas. All 259 people on board were killed; so were 11 Lockerbie residents.

The following day, from his temporary headquarters in the Lockerbie Academy, John Boyd, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway police, Britain's smallest force, began a vast search and recovery effort. He appointed Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr to head a team of 130 detectives to hunt down the bombers. Orr had no experience of airline bombings; but he quickly focused on three lines of inquiry.

One was that a suicidal terrorist had smuggled a bomb aboard. But tests on the bodies of the victims showed no indication that any of them had recently handled explosives. ''Profiling'' of their backgrounds by Special Branch revealed no terrorist connections.

Another possibility was the ''mule theory'': an innocent passenger had been duped into taking the bomb aboard. This was only ruled out after every single bag belonging to every passenger had been shown not to contain a bomb.

Lastly there was the ''inside man'' theory: an airport worker had managed to smuggle a bomb on to the aircraft in unaccompanied baggage.

It would take months and a tortuous journey through more than 9,250 leads before Orr would discover the answer. [...]

They found that a small magnet had been fused by the heat of the explosion into the metal frame of one damaged suitcase. A tangled piece of scorch-marked clothing in another case yielded a fragment of black-painted loudspeaker grille. A tiny screw melted into a third suitcase was a further pointer. By mid-February 1989, Feraday had identified a crucial piece of evidence pointing to the bomber the tiny piece of circuit board.

''I am completely satisfied that those fragments originate from a Toshiba-brand radio cassette recorder types RT 8016 or RT 8026,'' he wrote to Orr. ''The fragments are shattered in a manner consistent with their intimate involvement in an explosion and I therefore conclude that the bomb was contained in the aforementioned Toshiba-type portable radio cassette player.''

A charred instruction manual written in Arabic and English indicated that the radio had been sold in the Middle East. But there was no prospect of tracing the buyer.

Orr assigned a specialist search team to trawl five square miles of bush and shrubland on the western fringes of Newcastleton forest 23 miles from Lockerbie. It was laborious work. But the team members were fired up by the belief that they might bring the killers to justice.

They eventually found 27 pieces of a suitcase that Rarde was able to establish had contained the bomb. The pieces of scorched or melted brown plastic were all, Rarde concluded, part of a hard-sided brown Samsonite, the kind Khreesat had with him at the bomb flat in Neuss.

Harry Bell, a detective chief inspector, flew to Samsonite's headquarters in Denver, Colorado, where the suitcase was identified as an Antique Copper System Four Samsonite. The model had been manufactured between 1985 and 1988 and sold in the Middle East. But more than 3,500 had been made and there was no way of tracing the buyer. As with the fragments of the Toshiba bomb, the remains of the Samsonite seemed to lead to a dead end.

It was time to look elsewhere for clues. Since the first days after the bombing, Orr had been aware of a possible connection between Lockerbie and the Autumn Leaves operation in West Germany. On his advice, a formal British request went to the BKA for all possible assistance. But as February turned to March, Scottish detectives began to complain of BKA obstructiveness. At first it just seemed like bureacratic red tape. ''There were delays in answering our specific requests,'' said one detective. ''Later it became deliberate prevarication.''

The BKA at first rejected requests to interview detainees connected to the Autumn Leaves gang. When interviews finally did take place, the BKA insisted on asking the questions, and in German. Orr complained privately that the Germans were withholding the full Autumn Leaves files.

It was a delicate situation. A provincial Scottish police force, with little previous experience of terrorism, was challenging the counter-terrorism department of West Germany's equivalent of the FBI; the BKA is probably Europe's most efficient police organisation.

Matters came to a head in late March at a co-ordinating meeting of Scottish and German investigators at the inquiry headquarters in Lockerbie, where Orr outlined the growing evidence of connections between the PFLP-GC in West Germany and the Lockerbie bombing.

Evidence from Autumn Leaves proved conclusively that the group was once more planning to attack aircraft, said Orr. The Toshiba radio bomb, Samsonite suitcase and the use of Semtex were common factors pointing to links between the cell and the Lockerbie bombing. Orr also pointed out that, although Dalkamoni had been in custody when flight PA103 exploded, other members of the gang, including Khreesat, had been free for seven weeks.

Orr argued that it was essential to know the whereabouts of the Autumn Leaves gang after they had been released. ''It is vital to know where the PFLP-GC people arrested and then released were from 2829 October 1988 onwards; the whereabouts of their associates; if all the property capable of being used in bomb-making had in fact been recovered?'' Orr demanded that the BKA release their full files on Autumn Leaves.

''He made it clear,'' notes of the meeting read, ''that while he did not wish to interfere in any way with the investigation of the crimes committed by these people in West Germany, his first priority lay in solving the murder of 270 people in Scotland.''

The following month the long-delayed Autumn Leaves files at last arrived in Lockerbie from the BKA. They held some surprises for Orr. For weeks, he had been puzzled by Judge Rinne's decision to free Khreesat. Now, as he sifted through hundreds of pages of the English translation of Autumn Leaves, his bewilderment turned to horror.

The prima facie case against Khreesat appeared to be overwhelming. Dalkamoni had told the BKA that Khreesat had built bombs not just inside the Toshiba radio that police had seized but also in two tuners and a video screen. He modestly explained: ''Mr Khreesat was the expert. I brought him specially to Germany from Amman.''

Traces of explosives had been found on the table where Khreesat had worked in the Autumn Leaves flat, and Khreesat himself had revealed to police an extensive knowledge of the workings of the PFLP-GC. He had admitted that, about a month previously he had been in Dalkamoni's office in Damascus when he overheard a discussion by four PFLP-GC members about an attack on an American club.

But the really stunning discovery was that on November 5, while still in custody, Khreesat had telephoned Jordan. The call was monitored by an Arab-speaking intelligence officer who reported that Khreesat appeared to be taking orders from an official of the Jordanian intelligence service.

Suddenly the whole investigation took on a different complexion. Was Marwan Khreesat, television repairman and master bomber, also a Jordanian spy? More disturbingly, had a decision been made to let the bomb-maker go free because German intelligence knew he was employed by the Jordanians as an informer on Palestinian terrorism in Europe? Had he even helped the German police to break up Dalkamoni's group?

Perhaps this explained why the case to remand Khreesat had collapsed. Had the evidence against him been ''badly led'' by the police? Did Khreesat's ambiguous role lie behind the apparent reluctance of the BKA to hand over the Autumn Leaves file? It would certainly explain why the BKA was so keen to deny any link between the Autumn Leaves gang and the PanAm bombing.

For the detectives in the Lockerbie schoolhouse, this was a glimpse of a world they knew little about, where the priorities of police work and intelligence diverged, and morality played a subordinate role.

Further shocks lay ahead. In May 1989, police searchers returned from Newcastleton Forest in triumph with the lock to the Samsonite suitcase that had contained the bomb. If the key could be found, it could lead to the Samsonite's owner.

More than 100 luggage keys were scattered among the estimated 10,000 items from the wreckage stored in the investigators' warehouse. Superintendent Angus Roxburgh, the man in charge of the property store, spent the next 48 hours wrestling to fit one key after another into the lock. But none fitted. So Orr asked the BKA about keys he knew had been recovered in the Autumn Leaves raids. Perhaps one would fit: a terrific breakthrough. But the Germans prevaricated. They said no keys had been found, then that they had been house keys, and then that they had been destroyed.

Angrily, the Lockerbie detectives pursued the suitcase connection, and their suspicions about the BKA grew even stronger.

They were intensely interested in the bronze Samsonites which Khreesat had brought to Germany. One of Dalkamoni's relatives had told police that, just minutes before Dalkamoni and Khreesat were arrested, he had seen a bronze Samsonite in the boot of their car. Between this sighting and the arrests, Dalkamoni had parked the car and Khreesat had made a call from a street telephone.

No reference to a Samsonite appeared in German police files. The BKA had reported finding a Toshiba bomb in the boot, but no suitcase What had happened to it?

The Lockerbie police conjectured: ''It is possible that the brown suitcase was delivered to another person while Dalkamoni was 'parking the car', and that the suitcase contained another IED (bomb) and that the suitcase referred to is the brown Samsonite suitcase which contained the IED on PA103.''

In other words, the Scottish detectives suspected that the vanished suitcase was the missing link between Germany and Lockerbie. They surmised that, perhaps unknown to Khreesat himself, one of the bombs he had made had eventually sent 270 people to their deaths.

Such was the atmosphere in the Lockerbie incident control centre (LICC) over this question that Orr ordered an examination of the BKA's scene-of-crime photographs of the car. These showed cigarette packets and other litter in the interior yet a spotlessly clean and empty boot where the Samsonite had been seen. Suspicious, the Scots examined the film, and discovered that the picture of the boot had been taken on a separate roll. The BKA said it had run out of film. The Scots suspected dirty tricks.

What were the Germans up to? As the Lockerbie team chewed over such facts and as it knew about the arrest of Khreesat and Dalkamoni, another suspicion took shape. If Khreesat had been a known informer for the Jordanians, had he actually tipped off German intelligence that he had made his bombs and that it was time to arrest the Autumn Leaves gang before Dalkamoni could distribute them?

That might explain the BKA's apparent efforts to obfuscate what had happened. If it knew about Khreesat's double identity, it would have had to detain him to maintain his cover.

Dalkamoni also had suspicions on these lines. Months later, as he sat in a high security cell in Hessen, he reflected on whether a man he had regarded as a trusted associate in the cause of Palestinian terrorism had all along been working for the West. During a prison visit by his wife in April 1989, he told her that he thought Khreesat had ''played a double game''. [...]

Once again the imperatives of a team of detectives pursuing mass murderers had clashed with those of the intelligence community. The Scottish investigators were under public and political pressure to get at the truth of a dreadful crime; but no intelligence service would willingly unmask its operatives to prying eyes. In their schoolhouse, some of the Scots felt that they were fighting a losing war against encircling secrecy.

Their sense of helplessness grew with the realisation that the tide of international politics was also turning against them. The West was moving towards better relations with Syria, host to the PFLP-GC, and with Iran, whose radical former interior minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was suspected of instigating the Lockerbie bombing in revenge for the American destruction of an Iranian airbus in July 1988.

Orr had been told that he would be unable to produce a shred of evidence against Iranian or Syrian officials in court. But he told his men not to worry about politics.

''He repeatedly told us to keep our heads down and get on with the job,'' said one detective. ''But only a fool could ignore the implications if we got a successful result.''

While gloom spread at Lockerbie, the forensic team at Rarde was trying to resolve another dispute between the two police forces. Had the suitcase packed with the bomb slipped past airport security at Heathrow or at Frankfurt, where a feeder flight to PA103 had originated?

Britons and Germans were blaming each other, and Orr was under pressure from the joint intelligence steering group of the Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates intelligence and security policy, to resolve the disagreement. There was a danger that the festering dispute would compromise co-operation between the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and its German counterparts in the hunt for IRA terrorists on the European mainland.

It was a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Luggage pallet AVE4041, holding the bomb in the Samsonite suitcase, had been loaded at Heathrow; but Special Branch detectives had established that none of the bags in it had originated in London. Most had been transferred off feeder flight PA103A from Frankfurt, apart from seven or eight bags in the bottom layer which had come direct from Cyprus and other airports.

If the scientists could establish the exact location of the bomb suitcase within the pallet, this would indicate the airport where it had been loaded.

Feraday, Rarde's expert, flew to America for a series of secret tests at the US Navy's explosive ordnance disposal technology centre at Indian Head, Maryland. Pointedly, the Germans were not invited.

Moulding varying amounts of Semtex into Toshiba 8016 radios, Feraday built five bombs which were wrapped in clothes and packed into five Samsonite suitcases. Each suitcase was loaded into luggage pallets similar to AVE4041 and the bombs were blown up.

The test report concluded: ''Results clearly indicate that the case containing the IED (the bomb) was not ... in the bottom layer of passenger baggage.'' This meant the bag had come from Frankfurt. It was a rare victory for the Scots.

For the BKA, one embarrassment followed another. Returning in April to a greengrocer's shop owned by Dalkamoni's brother-in-law, which it had already searched during the Autumn Leaves raids the previous October, the BKA found that it had overlooked two home-made bombs in a Sanyo data monitor and an Ultrasound radio tuner. Primed with Semtex, both had barometric pressure switches linked to time delays.

To Orr's men, this discovery was more evidence that the Autumn Leaves gang had been planning attacks against aircraft using bombs made by Khreesat and powerful support for the theory that the Pan Am device had been put aboard PA103A at Frankfurt.

The Germans disagreed, and a battle of scientific memoranda began. The BKA now had three bombs in its possession: one seized with Khreesat and Dalkamoni in October, the other two found in the greengrocer's. It asked its forensic section, ST33, to report if these could survive a flight from Frankfurt to London (flight time 1 hour 18 minutes) without detonation, and then explode, as the Pan Am bomb had done, 38 minutes after take-off from Heathrow.

Unfortunately, one of the bombs blew up while being examined at BKA headquarters, killing a junior technician; and in the resulting panic, another exploded after being rushed outside and blasted with water from a firehose.

Although the BKA was left with only one fully functioning example of Khreesat's bombs, it reported that all three had a time delay of between 30 and 45 minutes, and concluded: ''Presupposing that an explosive device of the same construction was used in the attack, then this must have been taken on board for the first time in London, or at least made acute by insertion of the master switch.''

Bombs built by Khreesat had a maximum time delay of 45 minutes, argued the BKA. Therefore, if he had made the PA103 bomb it must have been loaded at Heathrow. It could not have been loaded at Frankfurt, on a flight of more than an hour, because it would have activated within 45 minutes; so it could not have been made by Khreesat and was not overlooked by the BKA during the arrest of the Autumn Leaves gang. Either way, the BKA had not been responsible.

This logic infuriated senior Lockerbie detectives, who complained that the BKA was ignoring a wealth of circumstantial forensic evidence pointing to Khreesat, Dalkamoni and the rest of the Autumn Leaves gang. [...]

Between the rows there was important progress. By August, after months of painstaking work, Hayes and Feraday had drawn up a detailed list of clothing that had been with the bomb in the suitcase. This gave the police the strongest clue yet to its owner.

The clothing included a white singlet; brown tartan trousers marked ''Yorkie, size 34''; a grey shirt or blouse; a blue and white pin-striped shirt or blouse; a grey herringbone pattern jacket; a coarse herringbone pattern skirt, a cream and brown striped jacket and a blue Babygro romper babysuit. They all showed scorch marks. Fibres from them had been fused into parts of the Samsonite suitcase. The Babygro provided the single most important lead in the whole inquiry. It was labelled ''Malta Trading Company''.

Rarde had also identified a second category of bomb-damaged clothes. None of the clothing showed traces of the radio bomb or the Samsonite suitcase. But the damage was so intense that the clothes must have been inside or at least very close to the bomb suitcase.

These other clothes included: a pair of white jogging trousers or longjohns; a multicoloured headscarf; a purple sweatshirt; a tartan pattern grey jacket a white singlet, a white bra and part of a green slip- on tennis shoe. Most revealing of all was a pair of cream jogging trousers marked "Noonan". The passenger list revealed that Karen Elizabeth Noonan, a 20-year-old American student from Potomac, Maryland, had been on board. Her background revealed she had spent time in Vienna and had befriended an Arab called Bilbassi.

The point did not escape Hayes. "We are therefore able to conclude," he wrote, "that all of the above clothing, much of which could be regarded as lady's clothing, could have originated from within the prime suitcase and, in the case of the first listing above, in all probability did originate from within the prime suitcase,." Had Noonan been a "mule"?

Follow-up inquiries on the Babygro indicated it had been sold at outlets throughout Europe, including Dublin. Noonan had been to Dublin just weeks before the bombing to watch her college team play football.

Hayes's memo caused a stir of excitement at the Lockerbie Academy. During one of his daily phone calls to Douglas Gow, the FBI's supervisory officer in Washington, Orr made it clear that the Noonan lead was the strongest yet, Gow agreed. Noonan fitted the profile of a "mule" perfectly. Could she provide the answer the Scots were looking for?

On the morning of August 16, the telephone rang in John Orr's office. He switched the device on to the orange scrambling machine. Detective Inspector Watson McAteer, deputy liaison officer with the BKA, said the Germans had at last produced the baggage loading list for PA103A, the feeder flight from Frankfurt.

The computerised printout was an itemised list of 111 bags which had been loaded on the afternoon of December 21. Orr had been asking for it since early Janaury. "First the Germans said it didn't exist; then they said they had lost it. Finally they said it had been destroyed," claimed one detective.

This was the goldmine Orr had been waiting for. Casting his eye down the left side of the list, he saw a handwritten cross in the margin beside one entry. It referred to a bag, numbered S0009, which had been entered into the computer at 13.07pm. A separate typewritten worksheet showed that this bag had gone through handling station 206. A third worksheet revealed only one bag had been recorded at station 206 at 13.07pm. It was from Air Malta flight KM180, which had left Valletta at 9.45am that morning, docking at Frankfurt's terminal B at 13.40pm. [...]

Police in Scotland and Germany hope the shifting allegiances and faction fighting within the world of Palestinian terrorism will produce and evidence they need. "It won't be today or tomorrow, but I'm confident that one of these days somebody involved will break their silence," said one Western intelligence official.

But as the fatal accident inquiry opens in Dumfries tomorrow, the Scots and the Germans are still far apart in their theories about what that evidence will be.

The Scots police remain convinced that the Pan Am bomb was one of those made by Marwan Khreesat as he sat at his bedroom table on October 24 and 25, 1988. They suspect the BKA missed this device when it seized the Autumn Leaves gang and that the device was subsequently smuggled out of the country and, somehow, taken to Malta via Cyprus. But this is a theory with several holes.

Principally, how could the bomb have been taken to Malta? There is the Talb link, and there is a report of a member of the Autumn Leaves gang traveling by train to Vienna with a Toshiba radio under his arm after his release from custody. But would terrorists take a homemade bomb with a propensity to go wrong halfway around Europe, rather than move a bomb-maker to the point where the device was needed?

Furthermore, if the bomb was a barometric device made by Khreesat, why did it explode neither on the Malta-Frankfurt flight nor on the Frankfurt-London flight? The fact that it blew up 38 minutes our of Heathrow when, but for a diversion caused by high winds, PA103 would have been over the Irish sea suggests that it was precisely primed to send the plane plunging into deep water, where no evidence would ever be found.

As a result, the Germans treat the argument implicating Khreesat with a mixture of irritation and contempt. They argue that a bomb originating in Malto must have been constructed to a different design by another bomb-maker.

"The Scottish evidence is rather flimsy," said one senior German security official in charge of the case. "If you have a point and you like that point you try to fit everything into that scheme. That's what they are doing." He said evidence pointing away from Khreesat is in the hands of the Scottish police, "they might not like it, but it's there". Yet just what this evidence is he would not say.

Twenty-one months on, while the police bicker, the political steam has started to go out of the Lockerbie issue. Morale amount the investigators has plummeted, and men and resources have been diverted elsewhere. Just 35 of the original team of 130 detectives remain at the Lockerbie Academy; Orr has been promoted to deputy chief constable of the region. In Germany, Klink's Lockerbie team has dropped from 20 to just a handful.

On Thursday, as Sheriff Mowat's fatal accident inquiry enters its fourth day, Hafez Dalkamoni will appear before Frankfurt high court accused of possessing weapons and membership of a terrorist organization. He is expected to plead guilty to possessing one of Khreesat's bombs. But he insists this was meant for a target in Israel. With remission for good behaviour and the time already spent in custody, Dalkamoni can expect to be free within a few years.

Khreesat himself, television repairman and bomb-maker, is believed to be living in Amman, almost certainly under the protection of the Jordanian government. Senior Western intelligence officials refuse to discuss his real allegiances.

"We never confirm or deny the identity of our agents, " said one intelligence official who has supervised the Lockerbie case. "All I can say is that if Khreesat is a penetration agent, I wish we could have many of his sort."

Compromised by such sentiments, the hunt for the truth about the Lockerbie disaster faces an even greater obstacle: the Gulf crisis.

When James Baker, the American secretary of state, visited Syria earlier this month seeking solidarity against Iraq, he indicated that the CIA and West German intelligence had extensive evidence linking the Damascus-based PFLP-GC to the Lockerbie bombing, and he asked President Assad to expel the organization from Syria. Baker said American-Syrian relations could not be normalized until Assad acted.

The Syrians replied that if there was hard evidence to link any person or group in Syria with any terrorist acts, then those responsible would be placed on trail. But pressure to make the Syrian fulfil that promise is increasingly unlikely.

For, in a world suddenly endangered by the Gulf crisis, Syria and Iran have become unexpected partners with the West against Saddam Hussein. When Syrian troops stand shoulder-to-shoulder with British and American soldiers, the 270 victims of Lockerbie take second place in the struggle for justice.