Lockerbie – the cover-up

[This is the headline over an article that was published in the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

The wrong man was jailed for the Lockerbie bombing and the real suspect allowed to escape justice to satisfy political motives, a damning investigation can reveal.

The Scottish Mail on Sunday can today publish remarkable details from a report by two leading investigators which throws major doubt on the conviction of Libyan agent Abdel-baset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi. He is expected to be freed from a Scottish prison this week after serving eight years of a life sentence for the bombing. The report would have formed the basis of Megrahi's appeal against his conviction, a case which will never be heard after he dropped his legal challenge in return for his early release.

The investigation finds that the man almost certain to have conducted the attack was Mohammed Abu Talb, a convicted Palestinian terrorist with the backing, finance, equipment and contacts to have carried out the atrocity. It also places Talb at the scene where parts of the suitcase bomb were bought – and in Britain when it exploded over Lockerbie. But instead of pursuing Talb and his Iranian backers, the report claims the American and British manhunt was ordered to find a link to Libya and its leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

In a damning verdict on the case, the investigators conclude:'We are convinced Mr … Megrahi's conviction was based on flawed evidence … Megrahi's conviction was based on fundamentally flawed evidence. We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a persistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case.This leads us to believe the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing was directed off-course as a result of government interference.'

Talb, serving a life sentence in Sweden for a fatal bombing campaign in the Eighties, was a key witness in the prosecution case against Megrahi in the Scottish courts, for which he received immunity from prosecution. However, the investigation on behalf of Megrahi's defence team by a former UK terror chief and a former US prosecutor who has worked for the British government provides compelling evidence that Talb was the bomber. The report reveals that:

· Talb had clothing from the same Maltese shop as that packed in the suitcase that carried the bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103;

· Talb's alibi that he was in Sweden at the time of the bombing was false, he was in London meeting other terrorists with an unprimed bomb;

· Talb had bribed a corrupt employee at Heathrow to get a suit case through security unchecked;

· Talb was paid $500,000 only four months after the bombing.

Megrahi is expected to fly to Libya after being granted his freedom on compassionate grounds. Officials insist the move followed assurances he has terminal cancer and has only three months to live. However, it is also understood that a condition of Megrahi's release was that he dropped his appeal, because the UK Government and the Scottish justice system were keen to prevent embarrassing details about the case emerging.

At the centre of the alleged cover-up is evidence that Libya, then a pariah state to the US and Britain, was singled out for responsibility to suit political motives, when in fact the bombing was carried out by Talb on the orders and funding of Iran in revenge for the shooting down of its airliner by a US warship.

The Scottish Mail on Sunday has uncovered much of the evidence that would be a source of embarrassment. In recent years, we have revealed that critical evidence was manipulated and even planted, that the key witness was coached by detectives and rewarded for his ever-changing statements and that recent forensic tests conducted on crucial items of evidence shattered the Crown's case.

Now we have obtained documents which outline evidence that the leading player responsible for taking 270 lives in Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, was not Megrahi but Talb. The report carries weight because of the calibre of those who amassed the evidence - Jessica de Grazia, a former senior New York prosecutor who led an investigation for the UK Attorney General's office into the Serious Fraud Office, and Philip Corbett, a former deputy head of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch. Their access to informed sources in Middle East intelligence gives their report particular authority.

Instructed by Megrahi's defence team after his conviction in January 2001, de Grazia and Corbett placed Talb in key locations in Europe with terrorist leaders in the months prior to the Lockerbie bombing. Much of the evidence implicating Talb was known to the Crown and defence prior to the trial of Megrahi. Talb had links to at least two terror groups, in particular the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) and was a strong suspect. The PFLP-GC, funded by Iran and led by the Syrian Ahmed Jibril, was the first suspect in the Lockerbie case. A cell based in Europe in 1988 was led by Jibril's deputy, Hafez Dalkamoni, with Talb one of their most trusted lieutenants.

However, despite the belief that Iran was responsible, the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990 caused a major political shift in the investigation. A secret deal for Allied war-planes to use Iranian airspace to attack Iraq required the US and British governments to stop its pursuit of the Lockerbie bombers and their Iranian connections. Libya was instead chosen as the prime suspect.

When the focus of the investigation switched, the evidence gathered against Talb and the PFLP-GC was effectively discarded by Scottish and US investigators. However, de Grazia and Corbett say evidence almost certainly proved an Iranian-backed plot.

Five months before Lockerbie, the American vessel USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board perished. Iran vowed vengeance and promised that the skies would run with the blood of Americans. Three months later, in October 1988, German secret police raided a flat in Germany where Dalkamoni's cell was making Semtex bombs contained in Toshiba radio-cassettes designed to bring down aircraft, identical to the device used in the Lockerbie attack two months later. Although the Germans seized five devices, the bombmaker Marwan Khreesat told them a sixth had been removed by Dalkamoni.

De Grazia and Corbett's investigation reveals that Dalkamoni and Talb had been friends since 1980 and met, including in Malta, in the weeks before the bombing. De Grazia was also told by intelligence sources that 'because of his abilities, Talb was given Lockerbie to carry out'. The investigation says the missing bomb from Germany was probably taken to Malta for safe-keeping before being packed, unprimed, by Talb before its journey to London.

A Maltese connection had also been a focal point of the prosecution's case during Megrahi's trial. They argued that shopkeeper Tony Gauci identified Megrahi as the buyer of clothes later packed in the bomb case. However, de Grazia and Corbett say that Gauci also identified Talb as the man who 'most resembled' the buyer. Although Gauci's evidence about Megrahi provided key eyewitness evidence to the prosecution's case, it emerged that the store owner had been given paid holidays to Scotland as well as being coached by investigators in his evidence. De Grazia and Corbett say Gauci's evidence against Talb would have been just as strong if it had been pursued. Their report says the most conclusive link between Talb and the clothing bought from Gauci's shop was the discovery of a cardigan in his flat in Sweden. The cardigan was traced to a manufacturer on the Maltese island of Gozo, a firm that supplied Gauci.

The investigation says, based on their evidence, the plan was to launch the attack from Malta but this was dropped because of security at the island's airport. Talb and his colleagues decided Heathrow's security would be easier to crack. It emerged after the bombing there had been a security breach at Heathrow when a lock was forced near Pan Am's airside berths. Corbett describes the probe into the breach as 'inadequate'. Their inquiries uncovered evidence that on an earlier visit to London, Talb bribed an employee to get an unchecked case airside.

Crucially, the report exposes Talb's alibi for December 21. He was not, as he claimed, caring for the children of a relative who was giving birth in a Swedish hospital. They found that on December 19 he sailed from Sweden to Britain, arriving in London on December 21, the day of the bombing. There he met other terrorists, including bomber Abu Elias and Martin Imandi, who are thought to have been in possession of the device left on Flight 103.

After the bombing, De Grazia and Corbett say more evidence emerges linking Talb and his terror cell to the atrocity. They highlight evidence obtained via ex-CIA agent Robert Baer that the Iranian government paid $11 million into a European bank account held by the PFLP-GC two days later. An account held by Talb in Frankfurt was later credited with $500,000. In their conclusions, De Grazia and Corbett recommend forensic scrutiny of the timer fragment that was the only physical evidence in the case that pointed to Libya. That work showed the fragment had never been near an explosion, shattering the case against Megrahi.

The evidence gathered by De Grazia and Corbett would have been the cornerstone of Megrahi's appeal which was expected to have posed a serious challenge to his conviction. However, on Tuesday, as part of the private understanding between the dying Megrahi and the Scottish Executive, his lawyers will drop his appeal. The move will effectively close the chapter on Lockerbie, denying the public the opportunity to hear the full story behind the horror of December 21,1988.

[RB: John Ashton has advised circumspection about accepting the De Grazia and Corbett findings.]

Germans link Heathrow with Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over an article by David Pallister that was published in The Guardian on this date in 1989. It is no longer to be found on the newspaper’s website, but is reproduced on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide:]

West German forensic experts have discovered evidence which suggests that the bomb which brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie last December could have been loaded at Heathrow.

The evidence comes from an examination of three other bombs made by the Palestinian group believed to be responsible for the attack. It casts serious doubt on the theory that the bomb was placed on an earlier connecting flight.

All three devices were identically constructed, with electronic timers set to detonate the Semtex explosive within 43 to 46 minutes of being activated by a barometric pressure trigger at about 3,000 feet. [RB: These timings are not wholly accurate.] The West German police believe they were destined for El Al planes or flights to Tel Aviv.

If the Lockerbie bomb was the same, it would have had to have been placed on board the jumbo at Heathrow, rather than at Frankfurt, Malta or Cyprus - the three possibilities so far publicly canvassed.

The bombs have been connected with the terrorist cell run in West Germany by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The first was found in October 1988 in a radio cassette player in a car driven by Hafez Dalkamoni, who has been identified as a senior member of the PFLP-GC. He is awaiting trial in Frankfurt for a bomb attack on a railway in Lower Saxony in August 1987.

The discovery of the cassette bomb led to warnings from the West Germans to airlines and other western governments in November.

In April this year West German police found three more devices in the basement of a house owned by one of Dalkamoni's relatives in the town of Neuss. One exploded at the Wiesbaden headquarters of the BKA, the federal criminal investigation agency, killing a bomb disposal expert.

The three unexploded devices were all made by the same man. The BKA thinks he was the man arrested with Dalkamoni, Marwan Khreesat, who was mysteriously released without charge two weeks later, along with 12 other Palestinians arrested in October. Khreesat, it has been alleged, was probably an agent working for either Jordanian or West German intelligence, or both.

The forensic experts, working for the BKA, believe the devices were designed to withstand examination by El Al's pressure chambers which are used to screen baggage.

Dr Jim Swire, the spokesman for the UK Families-Flight 103 group, believes the findings could point to the Lockerbie bomb, which was also in a cassette player, being loaded at Heathrow.

The plane took off at 6.25pm and disappeared off the radar screens between 53 and 54 minutes later [RB: Actually 38 minutes later, at 7:03]. It takes between seven and 10 minutes to climb to 3,000 feet, which fits in precisely with the timing system on the other bombs.

Salisbury Incident — Skripal case investigators could learn from the Lockerbie affair

[This is the headline over an article published today on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer's Intel Today website, to which resort should be made for important accompanying references and links. The article reads in part:]

“The men and women at Bletchley had no idea that in the Napoleonic Wars we had broken the French ciphers, any more than those people knew how ciphers had been cracked when we faced the threat from the Armada.

There was absolutely no question of learning from experience. This repeats itself more in intelligence than in any other area because the experience is less well known, and much of it classified. That is why you get major policymakers whose abilities are adequate in other ways who do so badly in matters of intelligence.

There is no profession that know so little about its own history as the intelligence community does.”

Professor Christopher Andrew — Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History

There is no do doubt whatsoever that Intelligence professionals should have a much better knowledge of their history as, now and then, they could use a few hints from past cases. (...)

The comments from Professor Andrew are not without irony. Ten years ago, I wrote to a British scholar who specializes in the history of MI5. I strongly suggested to this professor that it was urgent to save all information regarding the Lockerbie Affair. The reply was direct. “There is no need for that. Nobody, absolutely nobody, cares about this old story.”

Well, never mind that the SCCRC has decided last year to conduct a full review of the Lockerbie case. A new trial is widely expected to quash the infamous Zeist verdict.

Today, although I am certainly not an expert in the Skripals investigation, I would like to tell you about two striking similarities between this case and the Lockerbie affair. (...)

The Smell Test

LOCKERBIE — For many months, a Germany-based terrorist cell was the prime focus of the Lockerbie investigators. Marwan Khreesat — the bomb maker of this organisation — had built five explosive devices. One was hidden inside a Toshiba cassette-recorder similar to the one that allegedly destroyed Pan Am 103.

According to Intelligence reports, Khreesat, Dalkamoni — the leader of the cell in Germany — and Ahmed Jibril — the head of the PFLP-GC — had repeated discussions about various methods to cover the smell of SEMTEX, the explosive used in these five radio-bombs as well as in the attack of Pan Am 103.

These events occurred in October 1988 and Pan Am 103 was downed on December 21 1988. At that time, only one company produced SEMTEX and terrorists like it very much because it was odourless. Chemicals were added after 1991 to give SEMTEX a distinct smell.

One of the first questions addressed to Dalkamoni after his arrest by the German police at the end of October 1988 was if he knew what SEMTEX smells like. He was quite surprised. “Who do you take me for? I am an explosive professional. I know everything about explosives. Of course, SEMTEX is odourless.”

Today, we know that Khreesat was a CIA mole. Why did he made up all these stories about the smell of SEMTEX? Thirty years later, we still do not know.

SALISBURY — According to UK media, Charlie Rowley mentioned that the perfume that killed his girlfriend had an odd ammonia-type smell. Again, Novichok, like all nerve agents, is both tasteless and odourless.

And if you try to spin the story, you quickly run into troubles. Sure, ingredients could have been added. But, we have been told all along that the samples match exactly the Russian ‘secret’ formula.

The Mystery of the Residue Analysis

SALISBURY — According to the official press release:

“On 4 May 2018, tests were carried out in the hotel room where the suspects had stayed. A number of samples were tested at DSTL at Porton Down. Two swabs showed contamination of Novichok at levels below that which would cause concern for public health.

A decision was made to take further samples from the room as a precautionary measure, including in the same areas originally tested, and all results came back negative. We believe the first process of taking swabs removed the contamination, so low were the traces of Novichok in the room.”

So, we must accept that residues of Novichok were present in the hotel room for two months, and then disappeared because of a couple of swabs? How often do they clean a hotel room in East London, where the “suspects” stayed before travelling to Salisbury?

LOCKERBIE — The Lockerbie trial statistics are impressive. The trial amassed 10,232 pages of evidence amounting to more than 3m words. The court was shown 2,488 pieces of evidence and heard 229 prosecution witnesses. The trial cost £60m.

One would therefore safely conclude that the evidence of SEMTEX in the bombing of Pan Am 103 is well established. One would be wrong! None of the important fragments — radio, timer and pieces of clothing surrounding the device — were actually tested for explosive residues.

Only one piece of debris (a beam from the luggage container) — out of 4 million pieces collected — indicated the presence of SEMTEX. When I first saw these data, I immediately understood that something was badly wrong.

The spectrum indicated that all kinds of explosive residues were present in the swabs. This is clearly nonsense as some of these explosives, such as TNT and SEMTEX components, do not mix. Obviously, this was a case of contamination.

Years later, we learned that the laboratory that had conducted these measurements was indeed totally contaminated. One could find explosive residues in the offices, in the library, in the restaurant, anywhere. Over the years, that laboratory has been renamed many times: RARDE, DERA, DSTL. Many names, but it is the same damn place.

It was contamination in the Lockerbie Affair. And I would not rule out contamination in the Salisbury Case. If there is something we learn from history, it is that some people never learn from history.

George H W Bush, Margaret Thatcher and Paul Channon

[On this date in 1989, a significant event in the Lockerbie story took place (and quite possibly two). Here is what Paul Foot wrote some five years later in a review in the London Review of Books:]

The American investigative columnist Jack Anderson has had some scoops in his time but none more significant than his revelation – in January 1990 [RB: 11 January 1990 in The Washington Post] – that in mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George [H W] Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to ‘cool it’ on the subject. On what seems to have been the very same day [RB: 16 March 1989], perhaps a few hours earlier, Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon, was the guest of five prominent political correspondents at a lunch at the Garrick Club. [RB: They were Ian Aitken of The Guardian, Chris Buckland of Today, Robin Oakley of The Times, Julia Langdon of the Daily Mirror and her husband Geoffrey Parkhouse, then of the Glasgow Herald.]  It was agreed that anything said at the lunch was ‘on strict lobby terms’ – that is, for the journalists only, not their readers. Channon then announced that the Dumfries and Galloway Police – the smallest police force in Britain – had concluded a brilliant criminal investigation into the Lockerbie crash. They had found who was responsible and arrests were expected before long. The Minister could not conceal his delight at the speed and efficiency of the PC McPlods from Dumfries, and was unstinting in his praise of the European intelligence.

So sensational was the revelation that at least one of the five journalists broke ranks; and the news that the Lockerbie villains would soon he behind bars in Scotland was divulged to the public. Channon, still playing the lobby game, promptly denied that he was the source of the story. Denounced by the Daily Mirror’s front page as a ‘liar’, he did not sue or complain. A few months later he was quietly sacked. Thatcher, of course, could not blame her loyal minister for his indiscretion, which coincided so unluckily with her instructions from the White House.

Channon had been right, however, about the confidence of the Dumfries and Galloway Police. They did reckon they knew who had done the bombing. Indeed, they had discovered almost at once that a terrorist bombing of an American airliner, probably owned by Pan-Am, had been widely signalled and even expected by the authorities in different European countries. The point was, as German police and intelligence rather shamefacedly admitted, that a gang of suspected terrorists had been rumbled in Germany in the months before the bombing. They were members of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by Ahmed Jibril. The aim of the gang was to bomb an American airliner in revenge for the shooting down by an American warship of an Iranian civil airliner in the Gulf earlier in the year. On 26 October 1988, less than two months before the bombing, two of the suspects – Hafez Dalkamoni and Marwan Abdel Khreesat – were arrested in their car outside a flat at Neuss near Frankfurt. In the car was a bomb, moulded into the workings of a black Toshiba cassette recorder. In the ensuing weeks other raids were carried out on alleged terrorist hideaways in Germany, and 16 suspects arrested. One of them was Mohammad Abu Talb, another member of the PFLP, who was almost instantly released. Even more curious was the equally prompt release of Khreesat, who was suspected of making the bomb found in Dalkamoni’s car.

The finding of the bomb led to a flurry of intelligence activity. It was discovered that the bomb had been specifically made to blow up an aircraft; and that the gang had made at least five bombs, four of which had not been found. At once, a warning went out on the European intelligence network to watch out for bombs masked in radio cassette recorders, especially at airports.

[RB: Further details of these incidents can be found in Paul Foot’s Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice, pages 3 to 5; in this article in the Executive Intelligence Review of February 1990; and in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, pages 52 to 54.]

Far from a final answer

[On the occasion Syracuse University's annual Week of Remembrance for its 35 students who died in the Pan Am 103 tragedy, the website of central New York State's Spectrum News has published a long article on the Lockerbie disaster. The following are excerpts:]

Soon after the bombing, police and military fanned out on foot. They’d eventually scour hundreds of square miles.

It was the largest murder investigation in British history. In the end, it all came down to a piece of evidence so tiny it would fit on a fingertip.

After initially focusing on a possible Iranian connection, more attention was turning to Libya and its leader, Moamar Qaddafi. The pattern of Libyan action and US response had been building throughout the 1980s.

In 1989, investigators in Scotland discovered some clothing fragments. Embedded in them was a tiny piece of what had been a circuit board commanding a timer that set off the explosion aboard Pan Am 103. It was a brand of timer sold to Libya.

Forensics experts traced the clothing to a shop in the island nation of Malta. The owner of the shop identified the man who had purchased the clothes. He turned out to be a low-level operative in Libyan intelligence named Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

A second Libyan charged was Khalifa Fhima, a former official of Libyan airlines at Malta’s Luqa Airport. (...)

It took years and tough United Nations sanctions, but Libya’s government eventually handed over al-Megrahi and Fhima for an unusual trial.

“I wanted to kill them. If I could have gone and sat there with an Uzi, I would have shot them dead on the spot,” said Susan Cohen, the mother of a Flight 103 victim. “No regrets, even if I got shot for it. And you want to know something? I still feel the same way.”

When the final verdict came 12 years after the bombing, the three-judge Scottish panel found al-Megrahi guilty and acquitted Fhima. Al-Megrahi would be handed a life sentence in Scottish prison. (...)

In 2015, the BBC reported that the Scottish government had named two new suspects, both reportedly behind bars in Libya at the time. Abdullah al-Senussi is the former Libyan intelligence chief under Gaddafi. Mohammed Abouajela Masud is a suspected bomb maker. Tracking them has been a challenge. (...)

But not everyone is convinced they’re on the right trail. Over the years, an entirely different theory has emerged about whom, and which country, were responsible.

In July 1988, a US warship came under attack by Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf. In the midst of the confrontation, the crew aboard the USS Vincennes spotted what it believed to be an approaching Iranian fighter jet closing in on their position. The US response was lethal.

It wasn’t long before the Vincennes crew realized they had made a tragic mistake. It was not an Iranian fighter jet, but an Iranian passenger jet — with 290 people onboard.

There was a quick promise of Iranian revenge.

In the months to come, intelligence agencies would report a series of meetings, organized by a leading Iranian government radical named Ali Akbar Mohtashami-Pur. Among those in attendance was Ahmed Jibril, leader of a splinter Palestinian group known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Jibril was a close ally of Syrian President Hafez Assad.

Jibril's deputy was Hafez Dalkamoni, a man being closely watched by German police. Police knew of a plot to bomb aircraft flying out of Frankfurt. When they made their move, Dalkamoni and several others were arrested. Weapons were found, including a bomb hidden in a radio cassette player. There were indications that five bombs were produced. Only four are recovered.

A man with close ties to the PLFP-GC was Mohammed Abu Talb. Talb had visited Frankfurt and was later spotted in Malta, shortly before the Lockerbie bombing. At his home, police later found a calendar with the date — December 21, 1988 — circled.

Did Iran pay the PFLP-GC to exact its revenge? An airliner for airliner? (...)

The man who headed the Scottish side of the case against Libya says it’s possible the Libyan agents, knowing of the Frankfurt arrests, may have used details of that plot to cover their own moves, including housing the bomb in a Toshiba cassette player.

Relatives of those who died in Lockerbie sense that the case against the two Libyans was far from a final answer.

Finger of blame for Lockerbie pointed at American citizen

[This is the headline over an article by Derek Lambie published in the Sunday Express on this date in 2007.  It reads as follows:]

In a sensational twist, Abu Elias, currently living near Washington DC, will be named with others believed to be in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) as part of a terror cell behind the Pan Am disaster.

Lawyers claim the radical Palestinian organisation was hired for $10million to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US five months earlier.

Two weeks ago Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, 55, was given the right to appeal his conviction.  Elias - who has a new identity the Sunday Express cannot divulge - is the nephew of the terror group's leader, Ahmed Jibril, the man believed to be the mastermind of the bombing.

The Sunday Express understands new documents - likely to form the basis for al-Megrahi's appeal - show the American was described as "the primary target" early in the investigation.  They also state he conspired with Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian named by Dumfries and Galloway Police as the initial chief suspect.

Lockerbie relatives last night said they are more convinced than ever that the PFLP-GC are the perpetrators of the atrocity. Dr Jim Swire, who lost daughter Flora in the disaster, said: "My view has always been that Abu Talb was involved but that he was not the actual bomber. This development is encouraging and opens new avenues."

Pan Am Flight 103 was just 38 minutes into its journey from London to New York when it was blown up.  Investigators concluded a Semtex bomb was in a cassette player rigged with a Swiss electronic timing device.  Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2002 following a £75million trial at a Scottish Court, at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, although his co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima was cleared.

But the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has identified six grounds where it believes a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, with its main focus on the evidence from Tony Gauci, who said  al-Megrahi had come into his shop in Malta and bought clothes found at the scene of the disaster.

With the decision, the finger of blame is once again being pointed at the PFLP-GC. Jibril was suspected of organising the bombing on behalf of Iran as revenge on the US for shooting down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf in 1988.

Evidence submitted to the SCCRC named Jibril, now 79, as the mastermind, with his nephew working with Abu Talb, a member of a splinter group and later jailed for life in Sweden for a bomb attack that left one person dead.

The defence case included a US Defence Intelligence Agency cable from September 24, 1989, which states: "The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar (Mohtashemi-Pur), the former Iranian Minister of Interior.

"The operation was contracted to Ahmad Jabril (sic)... for $1million. The remainder was to be paid after successful completion of the mission."

Documents viewed by the Sunday Express allege the plot began when a man named Mobdi Goben supplied material for the bomb to Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the PFLP-GC's European cell. He was then introduced to the alleged bomb maker Marwan Khreesat, by Elias, who has both Syrian and American passports.

Very little is known about Elias, but the defence insists he was paid in travellers' cheques by terror leader Dalkamoni in Cyprus, before he took delivery of the bomb in Frankfurt.  Elias was identified as the key suspect although it was never explored in court, even after documents about his role suddenly emerged during the trial.

The Goben Memorandum, said to have been written by a dying member of the PFLP-GC, was handed to the Lord Advocate detailing the group's activities and a confession about Elias. Elias was concerning the FBI before the bombing and was quizzed about cheques deposited in his bank. In August 1988 he met with agents, who knew he was Jibril's nephew. While the SCCRC said there is dubiety over whether Gauci had correctly identified al-Megrahi, documents show the shopkeeper had no such problems identifying Abu Talb.

Despite the evidence, the investigation took an unexpected twist and the Syrian terror group's suspected role in the disaster was dropped. Meanwhile, it emerged Talb could be brought to trial in Scotland because he does not have lifetime immunity from prosecution as had been believed. During al-Megrahi's trial there was a widespread belief he had been given Crown protection for giving evidence. However, the Crown Office yesterday confirmed he does not have immunity.

Operation Autumn Leaves

[On this date in 1988 the German police arrested seventeen men at Neuss in operation “Autumn Leaves” (Herbstlaub). What follows is excerpted (with citations removed) from the relevant article in Wikipedia:]

For many months after the bombing, the prime suspects were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC), a Damascus-based rejectionist group led by former Syrian army captain Ahmed Jibril, sponsored by Iran. In a February 1986 press conference, Jibril warned: "There will be no safety for any traveler on an Israeli or U.S. airliner" (Cox and Foster 1991, p28).

Secret intercepts were reported by author, David Yallop, to have recorded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) in Baalbeck, Lebanon, making contact with the PFLP-GC immediately after the downing of the Iran Air Airbus. Israeli intelligence (Mossad) allegedly intercepted a telephone call made two days after PA 103 by Mohtashemi-Pur, Interior Minister in Tehran, to the chargé d'affaires at the Iranian embassy in Beirut, instructing the embassy to hand over the funds to Jibril and congratulating them on the success of "Operation Intekam" ('equal and just revenge'). (...)

Jibril's right-hand man, Hafez Dalkamoni, set up a PFLP-GC cell which was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany in October 1988, two months before PA 103. During what Germany's internal security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), called Operation Herbstlaub ('Operation Autumn Leaves'), the BfV kept cell members under strict surveillance. The plotters prepared a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) hidden inside household electronic equipment. They discussed a planned operation in coded calls to Cyprus and Damascus: oranges and apples stood for 'detonating devices'; medicine and pasta for 'Semtex explosive'; and auntie for 'the bomb carrier'. One operative had been recorded as saying: "auntie should get off, but should leave the suitcase on the bus" (Duffy and Emerson 1990). The PFLP-GC cell had an experienced bomb-maker, Jordanian Marwan Khreesat, to assist them. Khreesat made at least one IED inside a single-speaker Toshiba Bombeat 453 radio cassette recorder, similar to the twin-speaker model RT-SF 16 Bombeat that was used to blow up PA 103. However, unlike the Lockerbie bomb with its sophisticated timer, Khreesat's IEDs contained a barometric pressure device that triggers a simple timer with a range of up to 45 minutes before detonation.

Unbeknown to the PFLP-GC cell, its bomb-maker Khreesat was a Jordanian intelligence service (GID) agent and reported on the cell's activities to the GID, who relayed the information to Western intelligence and to the BfV. The Jordanians encouraged Khreesat to make the bombs but instructed him to ensure they were ineffective and would not explode. (A German police technician would however be killed, in April 1989, when trying to disarm one of Khreesat's IEDs). Through Khreesat and the GID, the Germans learned that the cell was surveying a number of targets, including Iberia Flight 888 from Madrid to Tel Aviv via Barcelona, chosen because the bomb-courier could disembark without baggage at Barcelona, leaving the barometric trigger to activate the IED on the next leg of the journey. The date chosen, Khreesat reportedly told his handlers, was October 30, 1988. He also told them that two members of the cell had been to Frankfurt airport to pick up Pan Am timetables.

Acting upon this intelligence, the German secret police moved in to arrest the PFLP-GC cell on October 26, raiding 14 apartments and arresting 17 men, fearing that to keep them under surveillance much longer was to risk losing control of the situation. Two cell members are known to have escaped arrest, including Abu Elias, a resident of Sweden who, according to Prime Time Live (ABC News November 1989), was an expert in bombs sent to Germany to check on Khreesat's devices because of suspicions raised by Ahmed Jibril. Four IEDs were recovered, but Khreesat stated later that a fifth device had been taken away by Dalkamoni before the raid, and was never recovered. The link to PA 103 was further strengthened when Khreesat told investigators that, before joining the cell in Germany, he had bought five Toshiba Bombeat cassette radios from a smugglers' village in Syria close to the border with Lebanon, and made practice IEDs out of them in Jibril's training camp 20 km (12 mi) away. The bombs were inspected by Abu Elias, who declared them to be good work. What became of these devices is not known.

Some journalists such as Private Eye's Paul Foot and a PA 103 relative, Dr Jim Swire, believed that it was too stark a coincidence for a Toshiba cassette radio IED to have downed PA 103 just eight weeks after the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt. Indeed, Scottish police actually wrote up an arrest warrant for Marwan Khreesat in the spring of 1989, but were persuaded by the FBI not to issue it because of his value as an intelligence source. In the following spring, King Hussein of Jordan arranged for Khreesat to be interviewed by FBI agent, Edward Marshman, and the former head of the FBI's forensic lab, Thomas Thurman, to whom he described in detail the bombs he had built. In the 1994 documentary film Maltese Double Cross, the author David Yallop speculated that Libyan agents and agents paid by Iran may have worked on the bombing together; or, that one group handed the job over to a second group upon the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell members. The former CIA head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, who previously worked on the PA 103 investigation, was interviewed in the film and said he believed the PFLP-GC planned the attack at the behest of the Iranian government, then sub-contracted it to Libyan intelligence after October 1988, because the arrests in Germany meant the PFLP-GC was unable to complete the operation. Other supporters of this theory believed that whoever paid for the bombing arranged two parallel operations intended to ensure that at least one would succeed; or, that Jibril's cell in Germany was a red herring designed to attract the attention of the intelligence services, while the real bombers worked quietly elsewhere.