Blame Iran, not Libya, for Pan Am Flight 103 bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Arthur F Bethea published today on the website of the Massachusetts newspaper South Coast Today. It reads as follows:]

In a late June press conference, President Obama said that Col Gadhafi, "prior to Osama bin Laden, was responsible for more American deaths than just about anybody on the planet."

Ignoring George Bush's needless invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of more than 4,400 US soldiers, Obama linked Gadhafi and bin Laden to deceive less-informed viewers into thinking that the two are one and the same. They aren't. In 1998, Libya issued the first official Interpol arrest warrant against bin Laden, and Gadhafi condemned 9/11. An enemy of bin Laden, Gadhafi opposes radical Islamic fundamentalism.

Obama was also alluding to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that murdered 189 Americans. This indirect smearing is reminiscent of Bush, who implied falsely (but never directly asserted) that Saddam sponsored 9/11. If Obama wants to accuse Gadhafi of Lockerbie, he should man up and state the charge directly.

Many people assume that Gadhafi is guilty of the Lockerbie bombing because a Libyan intelligence officer (Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi) was eventually convicted. What few Americans know is that the trial's fairness has been convincingly disputed. Key witnesses appear to have been paid for their testimony, evidence may have been fabricated, one crucial witness has admitted to perjury, and the witness who identified Megrahi has had his reliability attacked by the prosecutor who brought the original charges.

A former professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, Robert Black, said, "No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted" Megrahi. The conviction was "an absolute disgrace and outrage." Megrahi is "an innocent man."

Some readers will protest, "But Gadhafi paid damages; he must be guilty." Yes, Libya paid more than $2.5 billion in reparations, but, according to one source, sanctions had cost the country $30 billion. Saif al-Islam, Gadhafi's son and former heir apparent, explained, "We wrote a letter to the Security Council saying we are responsible for the acts of our employees," but this "doesn't mean that we did it in fact." "What can you do?" he asked. "Without writing that letter we would not be able to get rid of sanctions."

Compelling evidence implicates Iran in the Lockerbie bombing. Thinking it was about to be attacked by a fighter jet, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airbus in July 1988, killing 290 people, most of them Iranians. Iran's religious dictator, the Ayatollah Khomeini, promised that the skies would rain with American blood. Iran offered a huge reward for revenge; a Palestinian terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, apparently accepted the offer; and 5½ months after the Vincennes disaster, 189 Americans were murdered.

A senior CIA officer in 1988, Robert Baer, worked the case from the start and concluded that Iran sponsored the bombing. According to Baer, now retired from the CIA, financial records indicate that Iran transferred $11 million to the Swiss bank account of the PFLP-GC two days after the bombing. Obviously, if Iran did transfer $11 million to a Palestinian terrorist group two days after the atrocity, this is overwhelming evidence of Iranian involvement. England's Sunday Herald said it saw the "CIA paperwork that supports" Baer's claims.

In 2009, Baer told England's Sunday Mail that the CIA had "hard evidence" of Iranian involvement "almost from the moment the plane exploded."

Another American intelligence organization also linked the bombing to Iran. A September 1989 memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency states: "The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran's former interior minister."

There are many good reasons to oppose Obama's Libyan adventure but no good ones [to support it], including false revenge for Lockerbie.

Is Libya being framed?

[This is part of the headline over an article by Gary C Gambill that was published on this date in 2000 in the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's Sunday Herald reported last week that the US government placed a gag order on a former CIA agent to prevent him from testifying in the trial of two Libyans accused of carrying out the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people.

Dr. Richard Fuisz, a wealthy businessman and pharmaceutical researcher who was a major CIA operative in Damascus during the 1980s, told a congressional staffer in 1994 that the perpetrators of the bombing were based in Syria. "If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack . . . I can tell you their home addresses . . . you won't find [them] anywhere in Libya. You will only find [them] in Damascus," Fuisz told congressional aide Susan Lindauer, who has submitted a sworn affidavit describing this conversation to the Scottish court that is trying the two suspects.

One month after their meeting, a Washington DC court issued a ruling that prohibits Fuisz from discussing the Lockerbie bombing on national security grounds. When a reporter called Fuisz last month with questions about Lindauer's affidavit, he replied: "That is not an issue I can confirm or deny. I am not allowed to speak about these issues. In fact, I can't even explain to you why I can't speak about these issues." The report quoted a senior UN official who has seen the affidavit as saying that "in the interests of natural justice, Dr. Fuisz should be released from any order which prevents him telling what he knows of the PanAm bombing."1

The investigation into the bombing by Scottish police and the FBI initially focused exclusively on evidence linking the blast to the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a radical Palestinian group closely allied with Syrian President Hafez Assad and other senior officials. However, the investigation suddenly changed courses after Syria joined the US-led coalition against Iraq in 1991 and Iran stayed neutral. In November of that year, US investigators issued indictments against two alleged Libyan intelligence agents and President George Bush declared that Syria had taken a "bum rap" on Lockerbie.

Fuisz is not the first to run afoul of the U.S. government for speaking about Syrian and Iranian complicity in the Lockerbie bombing. Juval Aviv, the president of Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am to conduct an inquiry into the bombing, was indicted for mail fraud after Interfor announced its conclusion that the PFLP-GC had been responsible.2 A former agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Coleman, was charged by the FBI with "falsely procuring a passport" while he was researching a book entitled Trail of the Octopus which fingered the PFLP-GC (Coleman left the country and published the book in Britain).3 William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar claims about PFLP-GC involvement, said in 1995 that the US Justice Department had frozen his bank accounts and federal agents scoured through his garbage cans.4

The Case Against Libya

The prosecution's claim is that two Libyan intelligence agents, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, planted Semtex plastic explosives inside a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder in an unaccompanied suitcase on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred onto Pan Am flight 103, bound for New York via London's Heathrow airport.

The first important chain of evidence links the bomb-laden suitcase on Flight 103 to Air Malta Flight KM180. Fragments of the Toshiba radio-cassette recorder were found inside a brown Samsonite suitcase, the only piece of luggage on the Flight 103 that was not checked by a passenger. The suitcase had entered the baggage system at Frankfurt at the same time and location as the Air Malta flight was unloading. According to prosecutors, a tattered shirt with a Maltese label containing fragments of the timing device was found by a Scottish man walking his dog 18 months after the explosion (fabric samples from the shirt were said to indicate that it was inside the brown suitcase).

However, Air Malta's computer records show no indication that a brown Samsonite suitcase was on board Flight KT180, and the notion that an old man walking his dog would stumble across a key piece of evidence a year and a half after the explosion is a bit far-fetched. Moreover, according to a forensic report which the defense will present during the trial, a bomb in a suitcase stored in the aluminum luggage containers could not have created the dinner plate-sized hole in the fuselage that brought down the plane--the bomb would have had to be directly next to the plane's fuselage. If this true, then the prosecution's entire explanation of how the bomb arrived on the aircraft in Malta falls apart.

A second chain of evidence links the two Libyan suspects to Malta. Detectives traced the charred remains of clothing tattered shirt to a clothing shop in Sliema, Malta, whose owner, Tony Gauci, said that he recalled selling the clothes to a tall Arab male, about 50 years old, in the fall of 1988. Investigators say he later identified the man who bought the clothes as Megrahi. However, Megrahi was only 36 at the time, and Gauci greatly overestimated his height. Moreover, a member of the PFLP-GC, Muhammed Abu Talb, was originally identified as the man who bought the clothes during the early stages of the investigation.5

A third primary piece of evidence said to implicate Libya are two fragments of an electronic circuit board from the the timing device that detonated the explosives on board the airliner. Investigators traced the fragments to a Swiss company which manufactures electronic timers, Mebo Telecommunications. The head of Mebo Communications, Edwin Bollier, told investigators that the fragments came from an MST-13 timer he had sold to the Libyan government. However, Bollier recently said he had made the identification solely from looking at photographs of the fragments. When he was shown one of the actual fragments in September 1999, he concluded that "the fragment does not come from one of the timers we sold to Libya." Bollier says that it appears to come from one of the three prototypes built by his company--two of which were sold to the Institute of Technical Research in East Germany (a front for the Stasi intelligence service), while the third was stolen. He intends to testify to this at the trial, as will Owen Lewis, a British forensic expert.6

A fourth important piece of evidence is the testimony of a former Libyan intelligence officer who will identify the two suspects as members of Libya's intelligence service. While details of what he told investigators are scarce, sources close to the defense have said that it is highly questionable.

A number of irregularities in the investigation also detract from the plausibility of the prosecution's claims. The American FBI agent who was instrumental in pushing the Libya hypothesis, J. Thomas Thurman, was later suspended for manipulating evidence to favor the prosecution in subsequent cases.7

The Case Against Syria/Iran

The primary hypothesis guiding the investigation for the first year was that the bombing was perpetrated by the Syria-based PFLP-GC, presumably acting on behalf of Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had vowed to retaliate for the US Navy's July 1988 downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, saying that the skies would "rain blood" and offering a $10 million reward to anyone who "obtained justice" for Iran. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Teheran's envoy in Damascus in 1988, was believed to have recruited the financially-strapped group for the task.

Two months before the disaster, German police arrested 15 terrorist suspects, all connected to the PFLP-GC, and confiscated three explosive devices consisting of Semtex hidden inside Toshiba cassette recorders--nearly identical to the one used in the Lockerbie bombing (the only major difference being that they had barometric triggers, rather than electronic timers of the type that investigators claim detonated the explosives on board Pan Am flight 103). Moreover, US officials reportedly had received advance warnings that a flight to New York would be targeted around the time of the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, Stephen Green, a senior Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) administrator, John McCarthy, the U.S. Ambassador to Beirut, and several other US officials were originally scheduled to fly on the ill-fated airliner on December 21, but rescheduled at the last minute.

It's possible that the PFLP smuggled the bomb on board Pan Am flight 103 from Malta. Abu Talb was sighted in Malta just weeks before the bombing. When he was later arrested in Sweden, police found the date of the Lockerbie explosion (December 21) circled on his calender.8

This and most other evidence linking the Lockerbie bombing to the PFLP-GC is largely circumstantial and difficult to substantiate, if only because the results of the FBI's early investigation into its involvement were not made public. The question is: Given the weaknesses in the case against Libya, why was the investigation into PFLP-GC involvement suspended and should it be reactivated if the two Libyan defendants are acquitted?

------

 1 The Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), 28 May 2000.

 2 The Guardian (London) July 29, 1995.

 3 Ibid.

 4 IPS Newsire, 3 May 1995.

 5 The Daily Telegraph (London), 22 December 1998.

 6 The Independent (London), 14 December 1998.

 7 The Daily Telegraph (London), 22 December 1998.

 8 AP Newswire, 29 April 2000.

$2m witness payment, bogus forensic evidence and Pentagon memo blaming Iran: How Lockerbie bomber appeal threatened Scottish justice

[This is the headline over a long and highly detailed article in the Mail on Sunday. The following are excerpts:]

In a submission to the Court of Appeal running to thousands of words, Megrahi’s lawyers list 20 grounds of appeal which include:

* Details of a catalogue of deliberately undisclosed evidence at the original trial.
* Allegations of ‘tampering’ with evidence.
* A summary of how American intelligence agencies were convinced that Iran, not Libya, was involved but that their reports were not open to the 2001 trial.

[Note by RB: I strongly suspect that what is being referred to is the submission made on Mr Megrahi's behalf in 2003 to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, not the Grounds of Appeal lodged with the Criminal Appeal Court once the SCCRC had referred the case back.]

The closely guarded submission was obtained by Ian Ferguson, an investigative journalist and co-author of the book Cover-up of Convenience - The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie.

But the evidence will never be tested in open court after the dying Libyan abandoned it last week to spend his final days with his family.

Mr Ferguson, who has had 100 hours of unprecedented access to the 57-year-old former Libyan intelligence agent during his eight years in jail, claimed last night: ‘From the start there was a determination to try to prevent this appeal being heard.

'It opened but never got off the ground, with stall after stall as each month Megrahi weakened with the cancer that was killing him.

‘There was rejoicing in the Crown Office in Edinburgh when he was released and the appeal abandoned.

'There may well be political manoeuvres behind his release but at the heart was a decision to save the face of the Scottish judiciary - in particular the Crown Prosecution, who would have been shown to have been involved in an abuse of process by non-disclosure of witness statements.’

It took the use of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to unlock the full intelligence documents which are now highlighted in the appeal submission.

They show memos from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which suggested the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people in 1988, was in response to the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by the American warship USS Vincennes five months earlier.

In a memo dated September 24, 1989, and reproduced in the appeal submission, the DIA states: ‘The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister.

‘The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad [Jibril], Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command [PFLP-GC] leader, for a sum of $1million [£600,000.

‘$100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Sy [Syria], Muhammed Hussan [Akhari] for initial expenses.

'The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.’ (...)

The memos and reports, denied in full to the original trial, were available to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which, two years ago, cast doubt on the safety of Megrahi’s conviction based on six separate counts of the legal argument.

Their view opened the way for a second appeal. That report has never been made public.

Mr Ferguson said: ‘Megrahi was made the scapegoat for whatever reason and from that point everything went in reverse to try to make the crime fit.’

Central to Megrahi’s conviction was the evidence of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who claimed that Megrahi had bought clothes allegedly found in the suitcase bomb.

Lawyers were due to claim that Gauci was paid a $2million reward for his evidence, which followed more than 20 police interviews, and that many of the often wildly conflicting statements taken on each occasion were withheld from the defence.

Mr Ferguson says that, although too late for the submission, lawyers were planning to spring a witness called David Wright, an English builder who was on holiday in Malta and who is said to have information about the clothes shop.

He would have produced evidence as to the date and buyer of the clothes, seriously undermining Gauci’s reliability and credibility.

It is now believed that Gauci has moved to Australia.

Other new evidence listed in the grounds for appeal would have called in new witnesses to prove that the fragment of circuit board from a timing device found near the crash and pointing to Libyan involvement simply could not have survived such an explosion.

Subsequent analysis carried out by an independent forensic scientist found no trace of explosive on the tiny piece. (...)

Also due to be called was a witness who would allegedly discredit the accepted account that the suitcase in which the bomb was placed had somehow travelled unchecked and unaccompanied from Malta to Frankfurt and on to the Pan Am flight.

Questions would have been asked as to how a fragment of cloth - believed to be from the clothing wrapped around the bomb - subsequently came to be packed with material linking it direct to the bomb.

Mr Ferguson added: ‘Had this appeal gone ahead and witnesses recalled and cross-examined, I believe it would be shown that some had most definitely perjured themselves or deliberately misled the court.

‘It is no wonder that some people were hoping Megrahi would die before certain witnesses were called.

'The release on compassionate grounds is a blessed release for them, as much as it was for him.’

Mr Ferguson, who now lives in France but continues to pursue ‘leads’ in the case, first met Megrahi in 2002 and says he was a constant visitor over the years as they went over every aspect of the evidence against him.

‘From the start I was struck by his total, unchanging, quiet protestation of his innocence.

'He readily admitted that his job was sanction-busting for the Libyan government but never anything more sinister.

‘He frequently said he knew his government were involved in many things but always looked me straight in the eye and said: "I am not a killer".

Despite seeing the by then frail and faltering Megrahi only four weeks ago as he waited to hear if he could be sent home, Mr Ferguson insists he did not press him on any political dealings which may have been going on behind the scenes.

He added: ‘Politics may have got him into prison but I believed it was only evidence that could get him out.

'I never believed, though, that he would give up the appeal after so many years of fighting for it. That was all we focused on in our meetings - his refusal to give up.

'At the end, though, I agreed with his decision because, otherwise, he would not have been able to get what he most wanted - to live out his last days with his family.’

Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal cancer in September last year.

Mr Ferguson, who saw him two months later, said: ‘He already looked very different. His complexion was drawn and he’d lost a lot of weight.

'He cried as he told me how he had been called into the prison governor’s office and learnt his cancer was inoperable and ultimately untreatable.

‘He called his wife and they were both crying for 15 minutes. He wasn’t embarrassed to cry in front of me.

'I’d had cancer myself in 2002, so I knew what he was going through.

'I contacted a psychologist specialising in this disease who I hoped would help him deal with it.’

Since Megrahi’s diagnosis, Mr Ferguson has seen him four times.

He added: ‘Our visits were shortened because he couldn’t sit down for too long before being in pain.

'Because he is so religious he wasn’t scared of death but he was desperate to have his name cleared before he died.

‘I felt he was being blackmailed but he never admitted it.

'The Crown wouldn’t agree to transfer him unless he gave up his appeal and the longer they stalled the more fragile he became physically. In the end he just couldn’t continue.’

He first met Megrahi and his lawyer in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison - and quickly became convinced that he was innocent.

He said: ‘The first thing I asked him was if he had had anything to do with the bombing.

'He insisted he hadn’t and was convinced from the start his conviction would be overturned. He seemed smart and intelligent without being arrogant and very angry.

'The evidence was purely circumstantial and came at a time when the West wanted to implicate Libya at a time when it was politically inconvenient to accuse the real culprits.’

Over the months the pair reached a tacit understanding: ‘It was never spoken outright but Megrahi knew I would never jeopardise his trust by writing about our meetings.’

The Sunday newspapers

Most of the Scottish and UK Sunday newspapers have lengthy articles, commentaries and features on the past week's developments in the saga of the fate of Abdelbaset Megrahi. They consider the implications of his decision to abandon his appeal for the man himself, for the relatives of those killed at Lockerbie, for the nations most closely involved and for the Scottish criminal justice system. With one exception, all of them assume that Mr Megrahi will be repatriated later this week. The exception is Scotland on Sunday which has a report by Political Editor Eddie Barnes headed "Lockerbie bomber faces death in jail" which reads in part:

'The Lockerbie bomber's health has deteriorated to the point that he may die before any decision is made about his release from jail, Scotland on Sunday has discovered.

'Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is believed to be no longer receiving treatment for his prostate cancer but having pain relief offered to those in the final stages of the disease.

'Government sources confirmed yesterday that justice secretary Kenny MacAskill will not reveal his decision on whether or not to release the convicted terrorist this week, and may even take until the end of the month before showing his hand. (...)

'It had been widely expected that MacAskill would make his decision this week.

'But Scotland on Sunday has been told that a decision this week "can be ruled out", as MacAskill is awaiting more submissions from the prison governor at Greenock and the Scottish Parole Board.'

A further article entitled "The end game: The fate of Lockerbie bomber" in the same newspaper can be read here The first of these articles should be contrasted with one appearing in the Sunday Mail which can be read here. The Mail on Sunday has an article to the effect that the consultants treating Mr Megrahi have reported that he has no longer than three months to live.

The Sunday Herald's coverage consists of a four-page spread headed "Lockerbie: after the conspiracies ... the cover up?" This is divided into sections entitled "MacAskill in the eye of the storm"; "The legal system has nothing to be ashamed of ... unlike Holyrood" by Scottish Tory legal spokesman Paul McBride QC; "I will never rest until I know who killed my daughter ... and why" on the reactions of relatives such as Dr Jim Swire; "An inquiry is the only hope of getting a new criminal probe" on the case for setting up an inquiry now that the appeal is being abandoned; and "A potent mix of politics and oil" on the politics that may lie behind abandonment of the appeal and repatriation.

The same newspaper has another article headlined "Holyrood set to back calls for Lockerbie public inquiry". It reads in part:

'The Scottish government is likely to back a comprehensive public inquiry into the Lockerbie disaster after all legal proceedings are resolved. First minister Alex Salmond's administration is said to be "very relaxed" about either a United Nations probe or a joint inquiry between Holyrood and Westminster into the terrorist atrocity.

'It is understood a stand-alone Scottish investigation has been downplayed as an option due to the limited powers the SNP government would have to compel witnesses. (...)

'The families of the 270 victims fear that dropping the appeal will end the possibility of finding out the truth behind the worst terrorist act on British soil.

'However, it is understood the Scottish government has accepted a public inquiry into the disaster should take place once Megrahi is home and his appeal has been dropped.

'Officials have explored the possibility of Salmond's administration launching its own inquiry, but the idea has been deemed a non-starter.

'This is because the terms of the Scotland Act, which sets out the powers of the devolved parliament, would hinder an inquiry's ability to demand documents and compel witnesses to give evidence. It is understood Salmond's government would prefer a joint cross-border inquiry with Westminster, which would have far greater powers.

'Another option would be for the United Nations to launch an investigation that would command international co-operation.

'However, Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University law school said the UK government would never consent to a cross-border investigation, adding that a stand-alone Scottish inquiry would be valuable.

'"It would look at the Scottish criminal justice system and all its aspects: investigation, prosecution and adjudication. All of them are within the powers of the Scottish government and Scottish parliament.

'"It wouldn't satisfy the relatives, whose primary concern is to know what happened, but to me and the people of Scotland, knowing how the criminal justice system works seems a very important goal and one which can be achieved within Scotland."'

The Sunday Times publishes an article headed "US blamed Iran for Lockerbie bomb". It reads in part:

'American intelligence documents blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.

'Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer expected to be freed this week, had instructed his lawyers to produce US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cables implicating the so-called “rogue state”.

'The memo suggests Iran was behind the attack on Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people in 1988, in response to the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, an American warship, five months earlier.

'One document the defence team had planned to produce was a memo from the DIA dated September 24, 1989. It states: “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister.

'“The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad [Jibril], Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader, for a sum of $1m (£600,700).

'“$100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Sy [Syria], Muhammad Hussan [Akhari] for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”

'The document is included in an unpublished report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, a public body which considers miscarriage of justice claims, and which in 2007 cast doubt on the safety of Megrahi’s conviction.

'The report also cites a DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled “Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation” which named Iran as the likely state sponsor of the bombing.

'The briefing stated that the PFLP-GC was “fast becoming an Iranian proxy” and that the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 airbus may have been the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation.

'The DIA briefing discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was “no current credible intelligence” implicating her. It stated: “Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya [in 1986], Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks.”

'Robert Baer, a retired senior CIA agent who claims Iran was behind the attack, has alleged that the Americans were wary of pursuing the country in case it disrupted oil supplies and damaged the economy.'

Some pertinent questions for the Scottish Government

[What follows is the text of a letter sent and emailed to the First Minister, Alex Salmond, on 19 November by barrister and author David Wolchover:]

The destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie

You may have been made aware of some of my writings on Lockerbie, earlier correspondence with the Government of Scotland on the topic, and of the fact that last week I posted on my website a new and much expanded revision of my treatise, Culprits of Lockerbie (http://www.davidwolchover.co.uk/docs/Culprits%20of%20Lockerbie.doc).

Re-launch of the treatise was reported in an article by Lucy Adams in The Herald on 13 November, 2013 (“Iranian president accused of insight into Lockerbie attack” – for some reason, as Robert Black QC points out in his Lockerbie blog, the newspaper has not posted the article on line, despite its prominence in the paper edition).

As you are doubtless aware the treatise was considered newsworthy because I included the results of my recent researches and analysis inferentially demonstrating the high probability that the Scots-educated President Hassan Rouhani of Iran was complicit in procuring the atrocity with the then Interior Minister Hojatoislam Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. This was also the theme of a recent feature I contributed to the widely read weekly newspaper Jewish News (“The grim Lockerbie shadow over Iran’s new president,” 31.1013, http://jewishnews.co.uk/ the-grim-lockerbie-shadow-over-irans-new-president/).

I am not writing with any hope of eliciting comment from you on this admittedly thorny topic. Were that to be the case I should not be surprised if the result were any different from Lucy Adams’s attempt to obtain a comment from President Rouhani’s office: ie no response. Rather I am writing for a very specific reason.

Lucy asked the Crown Office to comment and in her piece she reported their spokesman’s response:

“The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and Police Scotland are actively working with US law enforcement in pursuit of lines of inquiry to bring to justice the others involved in the Lockerbie bombing. This is a live investigation and in order to preserve the integrity of the investigation it would not be appropriate to offer further comment.”

The thrust of the response was predictable enough but, unless and until Scotland attains independence, I believe that, as a UK taxpayer, I am entitled to ask of you, as Head of the Government of Scotland, the following questions:

• How many officers of the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary or any other Scottish police force or department are there currently assigned to work on the case and how many are actually working on it?

• Of what rank and speciality are they?

• Whether the officers are working on it full-time or in addition to other duties?

• What budget has been set aside for the investigation?

• What has been the expenditure on foreign travel in connection with their inquiries, or telephone calls over the last 12 months?

• Has there been any material progress in uncovering substantive new evidence?

• If there has been no recent relevant evidence uncovered, why are there officers still assigned to, and more importantly working on, the case?

• What is the current Crown Office budget vis a vis Lockerbie inquiries?

If there has been no progress despite significant expenditure I believe I am entitled to know why British tax payer’s money is being devoted to an investigation which is going nowhere.

That might be a matter of relevance in the current constitutional debate.

A substantive reply to the above questions would be appreciated.

For the convenience of your staff I am enclosing/attaching a copy of The Herald article.

A new chapter in Lockerbie bombing horror story

[This is part of the headline over a long report just published on the Arab News website. It reads in part:]

For some, the arrest last week of a Libyan man charged with having made the bomb that downed the jumbo jet over Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988, offers the prospect of long overdue justice for the 270 victims of the disaster and their families.

For others, though, confidence in the judicial system and the joint US-Scottish investigation that has led to the latest arrest was shaken long ago by uncertainties that continue to hang over the trial and conviction in May 2000 of another Libyan, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, who in 2001 was found guilty of carrying out the bombing. (...)

Last week, 71-year-old Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, an alleged former intelligence officer for the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, appeared in a US court accused of being the bombmaker.

It is a stunning development in a case which, for many relatives of the dead, has never been satisfactorily settled. Masud’s anticipated trial represents an unexpected opportunity for the many remaining doubts surrounding the Lockerbie disaster to be resolved once and for all.

Key among them is the suspicion, which has persisted for three decades, that the Libyans were falsely accused of a crime that was actually perpetrated by the Iranian regime.

Iran certainly had a motive. On July 3, 1988, five months before the bombing, Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 carrying Iranian pilgrims bound for Makkah, had been shot down accidentally over the Strait of Hormuz by a US guided-missile cruiser, the Vincennes.

All 290 people on board were killed, including 66 children and 16 members of one family, who had been traveling to Dubai for a wedding.

In 1991, a subsequently declassified secret report from within the US Defense Intelligence Agency made it clear that from the outset Iran was the number-one suspect.

Ayatollah Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister, was “closely connected to the Al-Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups,” it read.

He had “recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and ... paid the same amount to bomb Pam Am flight 103, in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus.”

The evidence implicating Iran piled up. It emerged that two months before the bombing, German police had raided a cell of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and seized a bomb hidden in a Toshiba cassette player, just like the one that would be used to blow up Pan Am flight 103.

Yet in November 1991 it was two Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who were charged with the murders. The case against them was circumstantial at best.

After years of negotiations with Qaddafi’s government, the two men were eventually handed over to be tried in a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands. Their trial began in May 2000, and on Jan 31, 2001, Al-Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted.

The crown’s case was that an unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb had been carried on an Air Malta flight from Luqa Airport in Malta to Frankfurt. There, it was transferred to a Pan Am aircraft to London, where it was loaded onto flight 103.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in clothing, was the Toshiba cassette player containing the bomb.

A small part of a printed circuit board, believed to be from the bomb timer, was found in the wreckage, along with a fragment of a piece of clothing. This was traced to a store in Malta where the owner, Tony Gauci, told police he remembered selling it to a Libyan man.

Gauci, who died in 2016, was the prosecution’s main witness, but from the outset there were serious doubts about his evidence. He was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before he finally identified Al-Megrahi — and only then after seeing the wanted man’s photograph in a newspaper article naming him as a suspect.

In their judgment, even the three Scottish judges conceded that “on the matter of identification of the … accused, there are undoubtedly problems.”

Worse, in 2007 Scottish newspaper The Herald claimed that the CIA had offered Gauci $2 million to give evidence in the case.

Another part of the prosecution’s case was that the fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage, believed to have been part of the timer that triggered the bomb, matched a batch of timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss company in 1985.

However, the company insisted the timer on the aircraft had not been supplied to Libya, and in 2007 its CEO claimed that he had been offered $4 million by the FBI to say that it had.

Many have denounced the trial as a sham, suggesting that Qaddafi agreed to surrender Al-Megrahi and Fhimah, accept responsibility for the attack and pay compensation to the families of the victims, only because the US promised that the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya would be eased.

After Al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction was rejected in March 2002, one of the independent UN observers assigned to the case as a condition of Libya’s cooperation condemned what he called the “spectacular miscarriage of justice.”

Professor Hans Köchler said that he was “not convinced at all that the sequence of events that led to this explosion of the plane over Scotland was as described by the court. Everything that is presented is only circumstantial evidence.”

It remains to be seen what evidence will be presented in the upcoming trial of Masud.

Reports say that he was released only last year from prison in Libya, having been jailed for a decade for his part in the government of Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.

Last week, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah said that his government had handed Masud over to the Americans.

“An arrest warrant was issued against him from Interpol,” he said on Dec 16. “It has become imperative for us to cooperate in this file for the sake of Libya’s interest and stability.”

As Dbeibah put it, Libya “had to wipe the mark of terrorism from the Libyan people’s forehead.”

From the very beginning, one of the strongest advocates for the innocence of Al-Megrahi was Jim Swire, a British doctor whose daughter Flora died in the bombing on the eve of her 24th birthday. Now 86, Swire has spent the past three decades campaigning tirelessly to expose what he believes was a miscarriage of justice.

Al-Megrahi, suffering from prostate cancer, was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. Shortly before his death in Libya in 2012, he was visited in his sick bed by Swire, who in an interview last year recalled Al-Megrahi’s last words to him: “I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.”

Last week, Swire called for the trial of Masud not to be held in the US or Scotland.

“There are so many loose ends that hang from this dreadful case, largely emanating from America, that I think we should … seek a court that is free of being beholden to any nation directly involved in the atrocity itself,” he said.

“What we’ve always been after amongst the British relatives is the truth, and not a fabrication that might seem to be replacing the truth.”

A gaping hole

[On this date in 2007 I posted an item on this blog which reads in part:]

I have often on this blog had occasion to bemoan the apparent blindness of the mainstream media and commentators in the United States to the shakiness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi, to the weakness of the evidence on which it was based and to the fact that it has now been referred back to the High Court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission because there may have been a miscarriage of justice. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I draw attention to an article on the Congressional Quarterly website, CQ Politics by their National Security Editor, Jeff Stein. In this article, he outlines the problems with the official US/UK version of events and explores the most compelling of the alternative scenarios, with quotes from US security and intelligence operatives who doubt the official version. A welcome transatlantic breath of fresh air.

[Mr Stein’s article no longer appears on the CQ Politics (now Roll Call) website. However, it is to be found at other locations, including Ed’s Blog City. It reads as follows:]

Libya is close to getting off the hook for millions of dollars in payments to relatives of the 189 Americans who died in the bombing of Pan American Flight 103, amid a stiff new challenge to the 2001 verdict and rapidly warming relations between the erstwhile terrorist state and Washington.

It was 19 years ago this weekend that the airliner, bound from London to New York with 259 passengers, 189 of them Americans, exploded in the night skies over Scotland, killing all aboard as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, the village where the fiery chunks of steel and other debris came crashing down.

A memorial service was planned for Friday at Arlington National Cemetery to mark the anniversary.

Back in 1988, Iran was immediately suspected of authoring the mass murder, in retaliation for the accidental downing of one of its own airliners by a US Navy warship in the Persian Gulf a few months earlier.

US intelligence agencies, in overdrive to find the culprits, quickly compiled evidence that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, had carried out the plot on behalf of Iran and Syria. (The PFLP-GC was formed to opposed PLO leader Yassir Arafat’s movement toward detente with Israel.)

Nevertheless, on Jan 31, 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges found Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, officially the head of security for Libyan Airlines, guilty of carrying out the plot and sentenced him to life in jail. A Libyan co-defendant was set free.

Libya always denied any guilt in the crime, but agreed to compensate relatives of the dead to open the door for normal relations with the United States. It also agreed to compensate victims of the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle discotheque in West Berlin, a gathering place for US soldiers. Libya also denied complicity in that attack, which killed three and wounded scores more, but likewise agreed on compensation payments.

Megrahi, now serving a life sentence in Scotland, could be freed soon, British authorities hinted on Thursday, as part of a broad normalization of relations with Libya.

Only a day earlier, the Bush administration managed to stave off a congressional effort, led by Sen. Frank R Lautenberg , D-NJ, to deny it funds to build an embassy in Tripoli until Libya completed payments to the relatives of those who died on Pan Am 103.

While Lautenberg lost that battle, he and his allies in the House did manage to prohibit the administration from giving Libya any US aid until the payments are completed.

‘A Gaping Hole’

The ranks of critics of the 2001 verdict have steadily grown through the years.

Among them is Hans Koehler, the eminent Austrian jurist who was appointed by the United Nations to ensure the trial was conducted fairly.

“It is highly likely that the sentenced Libyan national is not guilty as charged and that one or more countries other than Libya, through their intelligence services and/or financial and logistical support for a terrorist group, may have responsibility for the crime,” Koehler said in a formal statement this year.

Likewise, Robert Black, the senior University of Edinburgh legal scholar who devised the trial of the Lockerbie defendants in the Netherlands under Scottish law, noted that the prosecution never produced any direct evidence tying the defendants to the bomb that brought the plane down.

It was entirely “circumstantial,” he said, based on a single computer print-out of a baggage manifest, which was contradicted by other evidence. “A gaping hole in the prosecution’s case,” he called it.

But more sinister factors were at work in the investigation, Black and other authoritative sources close to the case told me.

Black told me that he suspected Libya was framed to avoid a case that would hold Iran and Syria responsible.

The first Bush administration needed Syria to stay in the broad Middle East coalition that it was readying to oust Iraq’s troops from Kuwait.

“I have been told by persons involved in the Lockerbie investigation at a very high level, that a public announcement of PFLP-GC responsibility for the bombing was imminent in early 1991,”

Black told me, confirming earlier UK press reports. “Then suddenly, and to the mystification and annoyance of many on the investigation team, the focus of the investigation changed to Libya.”

Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was based in Paris at the time and tracking Iranian terrorist operations, agrees.

Baer told me the Scottish commission reviewing evidence in the case was able to confirm that Iran and Syria paid the PFLP-GC to carry out the bombing.

Indeed, Vincent Cannistraro, who headed the CIA’s investigation of the crash, was quoted several times in 1989 blaming Iran, and right after the 1991 verdict he said it “was outrageous to pin the whole thing on Libya.” (Oddly, last week he told me the evidence “always pointed to the Libyans.”)

But Baer says, “Everybody” in US intelligence knew about “Iran’s intention to bomb an American airliner” in response to the downing of one of its own only months earlier.”

“We knew that,” Baer added. “We had that solid.”

The Defense Intelligence Agency also thought the Iranians paid the PFLP-GC to do it.

Patrick Lang, chief of the DIA’s Middle East section at the time, told me he “signed off” on the DIA’s conclusion that “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorized and financed by Ali-Akbar (Mohtashemi-Pur), the former Iranian minister of Interior.”

“The operation was contracted to Ahmad Jabril” [the head of the PFLP-GC] . . . for $1 million,” said the Sept 24, 1989, memo, first reported last week in a London tabloid. “The remainder was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”

Lang said on Friday, “I still agree with that. We felt quite sure that this was a PFLP thing.”

“The CIA wouldn’t listen to that,” Lang added, because it couldn’t find proof of Iranian or Syrian complicity and was under immense pressure to solve the case.

Just last week, a Scottish newspaper, citing “sources close to the investigation,” recently cited specific transactions that the SCCRC allegedly had uncovered, including amounts and dates.

“This doesn’t exonerate Libya,” Baer cautioned. “Iran and Syria and Libya could have been working together.”

Plenty of Theories

Conspiracy theories have grown like barnacles on the much-questioned verdict, including far-fetched allegations of Israeli and even South African involvement in the crime.

On the Internet, some bloggers see the hand of the White House in the growing evidence of Iranian complicity in the Pan Am bombing, suggesting that the administration is further laying the groundwork for an attack on Iran.

The available evidence, however, suggests that the administration is primarily interested in getting Western companies’ access to Libya’s oil fields.

A particularly persistent rumor is that key witnesses were paid off by American intelligence to finger the Libyans.

Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, has claimed variously that he was offered “bribes” by the FBI and CIA to finger Libya.

Bollier’s company did in fact supply the circuit boards to Libya, he admitted, but also East Germany, where the PFLP-GC had an office.

Since Bollier had ongoing business with the Qaddafi regime, his veracity has often been questioned.

In response to my query, a CIA spokesman ridiculed Bollier’s accusations that it offered or paid him anything.

“It may disappoint the conspiracy buffs, but the CIA doesn’t belong in your story,” he said, insisting on anonymity.

An FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed, however, that the bureau met with Bollier in Washington in 1991, but denied he was offered anything to implicate Libya.

In a formal statement, FBI spokesman Richard Kolko emphatically rejected any suggestions of a payoff.

“Any accusations that any witness was paid to lie are complete fabrications and these ridiculous statements should be immediately discounted as the untruths they are,” Kolko said. “That is not the way the FBI operates.”

Likewise, allegations have persisted that Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper on Malta who testified, in spite of contrary evidence, that he sold Megrahi clothing that ended up in the suitcase bomb, was paid to finger the Libyans.

But Gauci was paid approximately $2 million from the State Department’s USA Rewards program, an authoritative source told me, along with another, still unidentified witness.

Together, they were paid somewhere between $3 million and $4 million for information leading to the conviction of Megrahi, the source said.

The State Department acknowledged to me that rewards were paid.

“A reward was paid out in the Lockerbie-Pan Am 103 case,” a spokesperson there said on condition of anonymity, “but due to operational and security concerns we are not disclosing details regarding specific amounts, sources, or types of assistance the sources provided.”

Freeing Megrahi

All this — and much more questionable evidence related to the electronic timers and witnesses — may soon be moot.

A British Ministry of Justice spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Foreign Minister Jack Straw had been in contact with Scotland’s justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, about a deal that would send Megrahi back to Libya.

Such a move could well make irrelevant a Scottish appeals court’s expected judgment that a “miscarriage of justice” occurred in the case.

Reopening the investigation to present evidence of an Iranian/Syrian connection to the Pan Am bombing would be extremely difficult if not impossible, in the view of all observers.

The commercial pressure against such a move would be extreme. Western oil companies are eager to develop Libya’s reserves.

How this will affect Libya’s stalled payments to relatives of the Lockerbie and LaBelle discotheque victims is unknown, but if past patterns hold true, they cannot be optimistic.

In July 2006, a lawyer for the LaBelle families was about to finalize a deal with Libya when the State Department announced its intention to take Libya off the terrorist list.

The deal evaporated, said attorney Thomas Fay.

“They had made an offer and we accepted and at their request had every client execute release of claims forms” he told me by e-mail late Friday.

“In short, we were not close to a deal, we had made the deal,” Fay said. “They just refused to pay when they came off the terrorist list.”