Abu Talb and PFLP-GC in the frame

[What follows is excerpted from an article on the website of The Guardian dated 27 February 2000:]

Meckenheim, Germany, 14 September 1989 Swedish officials attending an international conference of Lockerbie investigators reported a lead that might implicate the PFLP-GC, the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Commando, a radical Palestinian splinter group that includes some of the most experienced bomb experts in the Middle East. In May 1989, the Swedish police arrested Mohammed Abu Talb, a PFLP-GC agent born in Egypt, for several attacks with explosives in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands. What caught the attention of other investigators was the fact that Abu Talb had visited Malta twice, in October and November 1988. In apartments where the Egyptian had lived, investigators found pieces of clothing that had been bought in Malta and also a calendar on a kitchen table on which the date of 21 December 1988 - the day of the crash - had been circled.

Could the PFLP-GC have been responsible for Lockerbie? And what motive would the terrorist group have had? The investigators believed there might have been an easy answer for the second question: money and revenge. For years the PFLP-GC had received political and military support from the Soviet Union and Syria, but this came to a stop at the end of the 1980s when an Iran Air Airbus with 290 passengers onboard was shot down in the Persian Gulf by the US cruiser Vincennes on 3 July 1988. Ayatollah Khomeini demanded revenge. Might the bomb experts of the PFLP-GC have been working for Iran? According to the CIA, several million US dollars were transferred from Iran to the accounts of the PFLP-GC after the airbus strike. [RB: But see Lockerbie & The Legend of The Iranian Payment.]

But investigators were nevertheless sceptical about this lead. A number of technical details seemed contradictory and one would have thought the shopkeeper in Malta would have recognised Abu Talb's Egyptian accent. In addition, Abu Talb, who was sitting out a life prison sentence in Sweden, denied any involvement in Lockerbie.

[RB: Further details about the Meckenheim meeting can be found here (in German).]

The Palestinian connection

[This is the headline over an article by Martin Asser published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

The Lockerbie trial has resurrected the names of players in Palestinian radical politics that have long since ceased to be relevant in the armed struggle for an independent Palestinian state, a cause which itself has been consigned to the margins.

It was a world veiled in secrecy, where the abundance of splinter groups reflected the fact that internecine rivalry often took the place of liberation as the major occupation of those involved.

Lawyers for the two Libyans on trial for the 1988 airline bombing fingered 11 alleged members of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), a little-known organisation which is now allied to Palestinian self-rule leader Yasser Arafat in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The more prominent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a prime suspect in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie atrocity, also had an unspecified number of its members accused in the trial indictment.

Both groups have denied involvement, with protestations that, when they were involved in the armed struggle, their operations were directed exclusively against Israel.

Before the emergence in the late 1980s and 1990s of Hamas and Hezbollah as the major vehicles of militant (Islamic) resistance against Israel, the PFLP-GC, founded by Ahmad Jibril in 1968, took the lead in anti-Israeli attacks. (...)

Ahmad Jibril was born in the Palestinian city of Jaffa, now in Israel, in 1928, but his family moved to Syria and he became an officer in the Syrian army, reportedly attending the British military academy at Sandhurst.

He set up the small Palestinian Liberation Front in 1959, joining forces in 1967 with fellow radical George Habash to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

His breakaway PFLP-GC was founded after tensions arose between Syria and Mr Habash. Mr Jibril has remained consistently pro-Syrian ever since.

This orientation caused splits with other Palestinian organisations, such as the pro-Iraqi Fatah Revolutionary Council (the Abu Nidal group) in 1978, and the umbrella PLO in the mid-1980s, when Yasser Arafat broke with Damascus over negotiating with Israel for territory.

Mr Jibril's "revolutionary nihilism" - as one rival leader put it - apparently also led him into the arms of similarly inclined states such as Libya and Iran.

Hardly present in Israel and the occupied territories themselves, his group was to be found wherever there were the most hardline opponents of Israel. (...)

West Germany was the main centre for alleged PFLP-GC cells, in association with PPSF cells in Scandinavia.

These are alleged to have been engaged in bomb making and planning attacks on behalf of Iran and Syria, including the Lockerbie bombing. Tehran's motive, with Syrian backing, could have been revenge for the July 1988 shooting down of an Iranian airliner with the loss of all 270 people on board by a US warship in the Gulf.

The possibility of Libyan sponsorship, to avenge the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, was also mooted in the aftermath of Lockerbie. The PFLP-GC had been linked to Col Gaddafi, who reportedly arranged training for Mr Jibril's fighters and even recruited them in his war against Chad in the 1980s.

However, there remain many sceptics who believe Washington's identification of Libya as the sole perpetrator of the Lockerbie bombing has much more to do with politics than evidence.

The first US theories put Syria and Iran firmly in the frame, but that changed after Syria joined the alliance to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, and shortly thereafter Damascus became a key player in the US-sponsored Arab-Israeli peace process.

But it is in the nature of groups like PFLP-GC, and their relationship with the states which support them, that the whole truth may never come out.

[RB: Dr Kevin Bannon’s rather different perspective on the PFLP-GC can be read here and here.]

Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow"

[What follows is an article by Ian Ferguson headed Confidential memo discloses reason police suspected PFLP-GC published in August 2000 on TheLockerbieTrial.com, a website that he and I edited:]

It is not expected that Heathrow Airport will take up much time in the presentation of the Crown case.

Police investigations in this case moved very quickly away from Heathrow and focused on Frankfurt instead.

As early as twelve weeks after it was established that a bomb had brought down Pan Am 103, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr, the senior investigating officer was briefing his colleagues in the FBI and the German BKA and told them on 28 March 1989: "To date 14 pieces of explosive damaged baggage have been recovered and enquiries to date suggest that on the balance of probability the explosive device was likely to be amongst the Frankfurt passengers baggage items. Of all the currently identified explosive damaged baggage, all but one item originated from Frankfurt."

This extract is from a "confidential" report of the Lockerbie Incident Investigation: International Co-ordination Meeting held on 28 March 1989 and obtained by us.

The report is illuminating and describes in detail how John Orr told the meeting of the "evidential connection between the murder of 270 persons at Lockerbie and activities of the PFLP-GC in Germany."

He went on, "There were a number of important factors to be considered including: the history of this organisation (PFLP-GC); the fact that a Toshiba make radio cassette recorder packed with 300 gramms of Semtex Explosive was found in West Germany; at least one hard-shell suitcase, possibly Samsonite, was traced to a member of the PFLP-GC in West Germany in October 1988; previous conduct of this organisation which makes clear that the group is prepared to make repeated attacks on similar targets with identical Modus Operandi."

Despite the very early stages of the investigation it is clear from these extracts that Heathrow had taken second place to Frankfurt and at this stage Malta was nowhere in the picture.

It is interesting though that then Detective Chief Superintendent Orr, now Chief Constable Orr, chose to describe the modus operandi of the PFLP-GC as being "identical" to that which blew up Pan Am 103.

A number of police officers, including some who worked at Heathrow, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us that they felt the investigation at Heathrow was not an in-depth investigation and one even described it as being "cursory".

Whatever the depth of the Heathrow investigation the extracts of the confidential report above show that the investigators were heavily leaning towards the PFLP-GC and Frankfurt airport.

At the time of the bombing, the terminal for Iran Air, the national airline of Iran was situated next to Pan Am's terminal at Heathrow. Iran is alleged to have been one of the financial sponsors of the PFLP-GC in the 80s.

It is also very surprising that the Crown have not called Chief Constable John Orr to testify at Camp Zeist considering that, at the time, he was the senior detective and effectively in charge of the Lockerbie investigation.

Lockerbie-Pan Am 103: Prosecution case evaporates

In the wilds of the Roggeveld Karoo we have been without internet access for the past three days. Here is what I would have posted on Monday, 17 October had it been possible.

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James that was published on the WSWS.org website on this date in 2000:]

After six months, the prosecution case in the trial of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am 103 on December 21 1988 has all but evaporated. The defendants, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, are being tried at a special court in Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, which was designated as Scottish territory for the purpose of the proceedings.

At the time of writing, the trial has again been interrupted after Scottish Lord Advocate Colin Boyd informed the three trial judges that new and unspecified information relating to the defence case had been made available to the prosecution by "a government”, but not that of the USA. The adjournment came on the day before Mohamed Abu Talb, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) was due to give evidence for the prosecution. Talb, who is already serving a life sentence in Sweden for planting bombs, is one of those cited by the defence in their special defence of incrimination. This states that the PFLP-GC was, with others, responsible for the atrocity that killed 270 people. Talb denies any involvement and is now scheduled to give evidence on October 17. He has apparently been offered remission of his present sentence and immunity from further prosecution if he testifies.

A report in the October 15 Scotland on Sunday newspaper suggested that the government in question referred to by Boyd was Syria, and that a "confession" by Talb had been handed over to the prosecution. The Lord Advocate has also arranged an explanatory meeting with angry relatives of those who died in the explosion, who fear the trial may now disintegrate.

The present adjournment is the latest in a series that have preceded the appearance of particularly controversial witnesses or pieces of evidence.

Shortly before the trial commenced, the Swiss manufacturer of the timing device implicated in the explosion announced that from their own research, they concluded the bomb had not been located in the luggage container in a Samsonite suitcase, as the prosecution team claimed, but was jammed against the aircraft wall. Such public announcements from a leading witness threw the prosecution into crisis, triggered a round of legal threats to newspapers such as the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald who had printed the claims made by Edwin Bollier, CEO of MEBO, which made the MST-13 electronic timers alleged to have triggered the explosion.

When he eventually took the stand in June, both prosecution and defence questioning of Bollier revealed the extent of MEBO's relations both with the Libyan government and the former East German security police, the Stasi. He sold prototype timers, and millions of pounds worth of electronic equipment, including exploding mobile pagers and encryption manuals to the Stasi, who are known to have supplied the PFLP-GC with equipment. Bollier supplied Libya with radio antennae, bomb timers, and had observed explosives' trials in the Libyan desert. He rented a Swiss office to one of the accused, who it is likely had some role in the Libyan intelligence service. Bollier also had unspecified relations with other Middle Eastern governments and with the CIA.

Bollier's was followed by a series of witnesses—CIA and ex-Stasi spies, other MEBO staff, airport staff, a clothes shop owner—whose testimony reveals a prosecution case that is characterised by its extreme flimsiness, resting almost exclusively on tenuous circumstantial evidence, for which alternative explanations can easily be found.

The prosecutions most heralded witness was Abdul Majid Giacka, who has been living in the US under a witness protection programme since 1991. Long presented to the family members of the US victims as a crucial eyewitness, Giacka's evidence proved disastrous for the prosecution case.

Giacka, it finally emerged, offered to provide the CIA with information after he joined Libyan intelligence to avoid military service in 1988. Such was the low level of the information that he presented to the CIA that by 1991 his handlers considered halting all payments to their dubious asset, who was costing them $1,000 a month. Despite a period working alongside both the accused at Malta airport, Giacka never mentioned Lockerbie or suitcase bombs to his CIA handlers at the time.

In July 1991 Giacka attended a meeting with the CIA, at which his continued employment on Langley's payroll was to be discussed. The next day, more than two years after the Pan Am bombing, Giacka presented the CIA with an account according to which Fhimah and Megrahi had carried a "Samsonite" suitcase through Maltese customs.

The defence also cited censored CIA cables to illuminate some of Giacka's other extravagant accusations. He claimed at one point that Libyan leader Moammar Qhaddaffi was a freemason, and that he (Giacka) was related to the former Libyan monarch, King Idris. It also became clear from the cables that at the time of the bombing the CIA did not consider Fhimah to be a member of the Libyan intelligence services.

According to Clare Connolly from the Glasgow University's Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit, "The defence cross-examination made it clear that Giaka's actions in providing this information to investigators could have been motivated by a desire for money and a wish to secure his future as a US citizen."

On other occasions, Giaka's reliance on US officials sitting on the prosecution bench was so blatant that UN observers attending the trial told the Sunday Times, "We could not see how Mr Giaka conducted himself, but the defence raised objections repeatedly to the looks that passed between him and the Americans... With other witnesses introduced at the American end of the investigation, through the CIA or the FBI, we have witnessed those types of exchanges."

The prosecution are so short of serious evidence that, despite the numerous delays, the trial is expected to last much less than the full year initially anticipated.

The PFLP-GC were the original suspects, and for two years after the crash most of the investigating authorities operated on the basis that the evidence against the PFLP-GC was overwhelming. The US intelligence services have played a dubious role from before the crash right through to the trial. It is a fact that several US Special Forces members died on Pan Am 103, and that their luggage recovered from the crash site was interfered with.

No trial in legal history has been so bound up with shifts in world politics, a study of which is very revealing. Initial accusations directed against the PFLP-GC regarded the Lockerbie bombing as a reprisal, organised by Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC, for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus on July 3, 1988 by the US. The December 21 1988 bombing came little more than a month after the Palestinian National Council meeting which effectively sanctioned the existence of Israel. On December 13 PLO leader Yassir Arafat expounded on this in his historic speech to the United Nations. The pro-Syrian PFLP-GC opposed the PLO's line, and, along with other Palestinian groups advocating the continuation of a military strategy against Israel, launched a series of raids designed to derail the PLO's developing relations with the US. The PFLP-GC had on numerous occasions been involved in fire-fights in Beirut with the PLO and had been implicated in a series of attacks on aircraft.

The change in focus to Libya was, at the time, widely interpreted as a political response by the US in line with its preparation for the Gulf War, with both Syria and Iran acting as crucial US allies in the attack on Iraq. Subsequently, the US used Lockerbie and other attributed bombings as a justification for imposing sanctions against Libya. The present case only emerged in the context of the Libyan regime's developing international relations, particularly with Europe, and after months of negotiations by Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan.

If the Scotland on Sunday reports are confirmed, it would not be the first time that the Syrian government has dumped its erstwhile allies, in pursuing closer relations with the US. Following Syria's support for the Gulf War, Syria's then leader, Hafez al-Assad, handed over information on planned terrorist attacks, evicted Carlos "the Jackal" from Damascus, and latterly expelled Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, allowing his capture by the CIA and subsequent trial in Turkey.

[RB: Regrettably, the Zeist judges did not agree that the prosecution case had evaporated, but swallowed it hook, line and sinker.]

Lockerbie bombing "commissioned by Iran" - bomb loaded at Heathrow not Malta

[Today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph contains a long article headlined Lockerbie bombing: are these the men who really brought down Pan Am 103? based on the material in Aljazeera’s new documentary.  It reads as follows:]

Evidence gathered for the aborted appeal against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's conviction points finger at Iran and Syrian-based terrorist group

In the 25 years that have passed since Pan Am 103 blew up in the sky over Lockerbie, one of the only facts that has remained uncontested is that a bomb concealed in a Samsonite suitcase exploded at 7.02pm on December 21, 1988, causing the loss of 270 lives.

From the day Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the UK’s smallest police force, began investigating the country’s worst terrorist atrocity, the truth about who was responsible has been hidden by a fog of political agendas, conspiracy theories and unreliable evidence.

The 2001 conviction of the Libyan suspect Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, (and the acquittal of his co-defendant Khalifah Fhimah) only served to raise more questions than were answered.

Quite apart from a number of problems with the prosecution’s case was the question of who else took part in the plot. All sides agreed that Megrahi had not acted alone, even if he was guilty.

Yet some of the investigators who sifted through the wreckage of the Boeing 747 and studied intelligence dating from the months before the attack have never wavered in their belief that it was Iran, not Libya, that ordered it, and that a Syrian-based terrorist group executed it.

Now, following a three-year investigation by a team of documentary-makers working for Al Jazeera television, a new and compelling narrative has emerged, in which previously troublesome evidence suddenly fits together like the parts of a Swiss clock.

It begins in Malta nine months before the bombing and winds its way through Beirut, Frankfurt and London leaving a trail of evidence that pointed to Iran, before a phone call from George H W Bush to Margaret Thatcher allegedly switched the focus of the investigation to Libya.

In March 1988, intelligence officers from Iran, Syria and Libya met in the back room of a baker’s shop owned by Abdul Salaam, the head of the Malta cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

They shared a common cause, and agreed to “join together in a campaign against Israeli and American targets”, according a witness who was at the meeting.

Classified US intelligence cables obtained by Al Jazeera suggest America was aware of the meeting. A Defence Intelligence Agency signal said that “Iran, Libya and Syria have signed a co-operation treaty for future terrorist acts”.

At that stage they did not have a specific target in mind, but three months later, on July 3, 1988, Iran’s hatred of America reached a new high after Iran Air flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes, which was protecting merchant shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war.

During a skirmish with Iranian gunboats the American warship mistook the Airbus A300 on its radar for a fighter jet, and fired two radar-guided missiles which downed the aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children.

Iran’s leaders were convinced the aircraft had been shot down deliberately, and proclaimed that there would be “a real war against America”.

By the time the Iranian, Syrian and Libyan plotters next met in Malta in October 1988, their target was clear: to blow up an American airliner as payback for Flight 655.

A source who was present at the meetings was tracked down by Jessica de Grazia, a former Manhattan District Attorney who was hired by Megrahi’s defence team to explore alternative theories over the bombing. Her findings would have formed the basis of Megrahi’s appeal hearing, which he abandoned after he was released from Greenock prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds in 2009.

She said that among those present were “hard core terrorist combatants” trained in explosives, guns and military matters”.

One of those present was Mohammed Abu Talb, who headed the Swedish cell of PFLP-GC, and would later become one of the prime suspects in the Lockerbie bombing before the focus shifted to Megrahi.

Robert Baer, a CIA agent who investigated the Lockerbie bombing, told Al Jazeera that the PFLP-GC and Iran quickly became the main suspects.

He claims that six days after Flight 655 was downed by the USS Vincennes, at a meeting in Beirut representatives of the Iranian regime turned to Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian officer and head of the PFLP-GC, and tasked him with bringing down five American jets.

Jibril, who enjoyed the protection of the Syrian regime, had masterminded aircraft bombings in the past, and the DIA was aware of his mission.

According to another cable obtained by Megrahi’s defence team: “The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmed Jibril…money was given to Jibril upfront in Damascus for initial expenses – the mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight.”

Jibril placed one of his most trusted deputies, a Palestinian PFLP-GC member called Hafez Dalkamoni, in charge of the terrorist cell, and he travelled to Germany to prepare the attack with Marwan Khreesat, an expert bomb-maker.

While Khreesat busied himself making his devices, Dalkamoni flew to Malta for another meeting in the baker’s shop. Also present was Abu Talb. Their presence in October 1988 was reported by a Maltese newspaper, tipped off that members of the PFLP-GC were in town.

According to the witness spoken to by Miss de Grazia, the meeting was convened to discuss how to get a bomb on board a US passenger jet.

Malta would also become key to the prosecution case against Megrahi, after the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb was found to contain clothes bought in a shop in Malta.

One of the key prosecution witnesses at Megrahi’s trial was Tony Gauchi [sic], owner of Mary’s House boutique, who identified Megrahi as buying clothes from him before the bombing. His evidence was later thrown into doubt after it emerged he had seen a picture of Megrahi in a magazine before he picked him out at an ID parade. He was also paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice.

On his deathbed, Megrahi said: “As God is my witness, I was never in that shop. This is the truth.”

Intriguingly, the papers assembled by Megrahi’s defence team for his aborted appeal show that before Megrahi was ever in the frame, Mr Gauchi identified another of his customers from a list of initial suspects. That man was Abu Talb, who bears a clear resemblance to an artist’s impression of a dark-skinned man with an afro hairstyle which was drawn from Mr Gauchi’s initial recollections.

So was Abu Talb, who Tony Gauchi said had bought clothes in his shop, the man who put the bomb on Pan Am 103?

According to the judges who found Megrahi guilty, the bomb was placed on a flight from Luqa airport in Malta to Frankfurt, and then transferred onto a feeder flight from Frankfurt to Heathrow, where it was finally transferred onto Pan Am 103. But there was another problem for the prosecution: they acknowledged that they had no evidence of Megrahi putting the bomb on board the Air Malta flight at Luqa.

John Bedford, a Heathrow baggage handler, told the Megrahi trial that after he took a tea break on the day of the bombing, he recalled seeing a brown hard-shell case on a cargo trolley that had not been there when he left. He saw the case an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed at Heathrow. There had also been a break-in at Heathrow the night before: security guard Ray Manly told Megrahi's appeal that he found a padlock on a baggage store cut.

Cell leader Dalkamoni and bomb-maker Khreesat had been arrested by the time of the bombing, after German police rounded up terrorist suspects in two cities. But Talb was still at large.

When Talb was arrested until the following year over unrelated terrorist offences police who searched his home found clothing bought in Malta, circuitry and other potential bomb-making materials. For now, his exact role, if any, remains a mystery.

Dalkamoni and Khreesat had been kept under surveillance by German police, who were aware of their terrorist connections, and when the police raided 14 apartments in Frankfurt and Neuss in October 1988 the two men were among 17 suspects who were held.

The police discovered an arsenal of guns, grenades and explosives, and in the back of a Ford Cortina driven by Dalkamoni found a bomb hidden inside a Toshiba radio cassette player.

The bomb was specifically designed to bring down an aircraft, as it had a barometric switch which would set off a timer when the aircraft reached a certain height. Its design had a striking peculiarity: the plastic explosives had been wrapped in silver foil from a Toblerone chocolate bar.

The German police found four bombs in total, but had reason to believe there had been five.

Was the fifth bomb placed on board Pan Am 103? Bomb fragments recovered from the crash site showed that the bomb had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player identical to the one found in Germany.

Even more strikingly, the bomb fragments included tiny pieces of silver foil from a chocolate bar.

A German forensic officer told the Megrahi trial that the timer on the Lockerbie bomb was not switched on until seven minutes into the flight, suggesting a barometric switch had been used to set it off.

Despite so many pointers to Khreesat being the bomb-maker, he has never been charged over Lockerbie because the judges at the Megrahi trial said that there was “no evidence from which we could infer that [PFLP-GC] was involved in this particular act of terrorism”.

The suggestion of a barometric trigger did not fit the prosecution’s version of events, as they said Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, smuggled the bomb on board an Air Malta flight. But if a barometric switch had been used, the bomb would have detonated on take-off from Malta. Instead, the prosecution said the bomb was triggered at 31,000ft by a straightforward timer switch.

The forensic evidence against Megrahi depended on a tiny fragment of the bomb’s timer recovered from the crash site and said to be identical to a batch of 20 timers known to have been purchased by Libya.

But when Megrahi’s defence team obtained the bomb fragment and sent it to a metallurgist to be tested, he showed it was not one of the timers sold to Libya.

On December 5, 1988, a man with an Arab accent called the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, warning that a bomb would be planted on a Pan Am flight in two weeks time. Despite the warning, the bombers managed to smuggle their device on board Pan Am 103.

Another DIA cable obtained by Megrahi’s defence team stated that in early 1989 a cheque from the Iranian Central Bank was written out by an Iranian minister and handed to a middle-man who gave it to Ahmed Jibril. The pay-off was $11 million (£6.5m), according to former CIA agent Robert Baer.

When Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary began its investigation into the bombing, it believed the PFLP-GC was involved. A report written in 1989 by Supt Pat Connor identified 15 members of the organisation he wanted arrested and questioned, and the then Transport Minister Paul Channon invited selected journalists to an off-the-record briefing to set out the case against Iran and the PFLP-GC, adding that arrests were imminent.

But by the middle of 1989 the investigation had suddenly changed tack, reportedly following a phone call between President George H W Bush and Baroness Thatcher in March 1989. The two leaders, it is claimed, were anxious not to antagonize the PFLP-GC’s guardian, Syria - a key strategic power in the Middle East - and decided that Libya, which had taken part in the meetings in Malta, should be the focus of the investigation.

The following year Syria joined forces with the US and Britain to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Mr Baer said the FBI began investigating Libya “in complete disregard to the intelligence” and suggested Libya’s pariah status made it a convenient scapegoat.

Al Jazeera tracked down alleged bomb-maker Khreesat to Amman in Jordan, where he is kept under surveillance by Jordanian intelligence. He refused to discuss the affair on camera but a source close to him later told Al Jazeera that the attack had indeed been commissioned by Iran and that the bomb was put on board at Heathrow.

Abu Talb now lives in Sweden, having been released from prison four years ago following a 20-year sentence for unrelated terrorist acts. His son said he had “nothing to do with Lockerbie”.

For the families of the Lockerbie victims, the wait for the truth goes on.

Lockerbie: What Really Happened? is on Al Jazeera English at 8pm on Tuesday, March 11, Freeview 83, Sky 514.  

[An accompanying article in the same newspaper is headlined Lockerbie bombing: profiles of the men who were implicated before Libya took the blame; another is headlined Lockerbie bombing 'was work of Iran not Libya', says former [Iranian] spy.

A Press Association news agency report published on the Sunday Post website reads as follows:]

The Lockerbie bombing was ordered by Iran in retaliation for a US strike on an Iranian passenger plane, a documentary has claimed.

Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is the only person to be convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed more than 25 years ago. 

Megrahi, who was released from jail by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, died in 2012 protesting his innocence and h is family plan to appeal against his conviction.

But former Iranian intelligence officer Abolghassem Mesbahi has told an Al Jazeera documentary that the bombing was ordered by Tehran and carried out by the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) in retaliation for a US navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier, in which 290 people died.

The US ship apparently mistook the plane for an F-14 fighter jet.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr Mesbahi said: "Iran decided to retaliate as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini.

"The target of the Iranian decision makers was to copy exactly what's happened to the Iranian Airbus. Everything exactly same, minimum 290 people dead. This was the target of the Iranian decision makers."

US Defence Intelligence Agency cables at the time reported that the leader of the PFLP-GC had been paid to plan the bombing, the broadcaster said.

The Crown Office has previously said the alleged involvement of the PFLP-GC was addressed at the original Lockerbie trial.

A successful application from Megrahi's family to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission could start the third appeal into the conviction.

Megrahi lost his first appeal in 2002, one year after he was found guilty of mass murder and jailed for life.

The SCCRC recommended in 2007 that Megrahi should be granted a second appeal against his conviction. He dropped his appeal two days before being released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds.

In December, the Libyan attorney general announced he had appointed two prosecutors to work on the case. For the first time they met Scottish and US investigators who are trying to establish whether there are other individuals in Libya who could be brought to trial for involvement in the attack.

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?

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 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.