Pan Am 103 destroyed by "detonation of high explosive"

[On this date in 1988 Mick Charles, the AAIB inspector in charge of the Pan Am 103 investigation, announced that the aircraft had been destroyed by the detonation of high explosive. What follows is excerpted from a statement made in the House of Commons on 10 January 1989 by the Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon:]

On 28 December, the inspector in charge of the accident investigation at Lockerbie announced that the aircraft had been destroyed by the detonation of high explosive. A team from my air accident investigation branch, assisted by people from the local emergency services and armed forces, has been working to find out where in the aircraft the bomb was placed. The chief inspector of air accidents is today issuing a bulletin that narrows the area to that of the No. 1 cargo and baggage hold just forward of the wing. It is too early to say yet where the article containing the explosive orginated.

It may help the House if I explain how the investigation is organised. Because the incident happened in his area, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway is in charge of the police investigation under the supervision of the procurator fiscal. The chief investigating officer is a chief superintendent of the Strathclyde police, and he is being given extensive assistance by other police forces in this country, including the metropolitan police, and by the FBI both in Lockerbie and in the United States. The investigators here have close links with the German police who are investigating the incident in Frankfurt, and other authorities in Europe and elsewhere who may be able to help to trace the movements of the passengers and their contacts immediately beforehand. (...)

It is essential that we discover who put the bomb on the aircraft and how it got there. We must await the progress of the investigation. The signs of the use of a high performance plastic explosive—which was very probably, but not certainly, Semtex—point to a well-organised and well-supplied terrorist group. If that proves to be the case, I am sure that the House will join the Government and the Governments of most nations to condemn not only the despicable murderers themselves but any country which has supplied them, trained them, housed them or encouraged them.

There has been much speculation about the origin of the article in which the explosive was placed on the aircraft. I hope that the extensive, painstaking and detailed work on the wreckage, which is still being recovered, will eventually establish which consignment contained the bomb. It cannot help those seeking to discover the facts to speculate, and I am not prepared to do so. 697The fact that a bomb was on board an aircraft flying from Heathrow obviously raises questions about aviation security in this country. Security at our airports is acknowledged to be among the best in the world. Yet an aircraft with all its passengers and crew has been lost, and there have been grievous casualties on the ground. Immediate steps, in consultation with the Federal Aviation Authority and with the United States airlines, have been taken to increase security for those airlines' scheduled operations at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Prestwick.

Those measures were promulgated as soon as the accident investigator's announcement that the aircraft was destroyed by an explosive device was made on 28 December; the came into effect the next day. They require additional hold and cabin baggage checks, including checks of all baggage transferred from other aircraft, and more stringent requirements for protecting aircraft while they are on the ground. I am grateful for the co-operation we have had from the United States authorities and airlines and the airports.

[RB: In 1997 the AAIB’s Chief Inspector of Air Accidents, K P R Smart CBE, published an informative article on the Lockerbie investigation. It can be read here. The 1990 AAIB report into the destruction of Pan Am 103 can be read here.]

A town laid to waste

[This is the headline over a report published in The Scotsman on this date in 1988. It reads in part:]

The peaceful Borders town of Lockerbie was left with smoking ruins and grieving families last night after a flaming Boeing 747, laden with more than 270 people, scattered death and destruction before crashing alongside the A74.

There were no survivors among the 273 adults and three children on board the Pan American flight front London to New York. An unknown number of people were killed on the ground. in their homes and in their vehicles, in the Dresden-like maelstrom of burning homes and cars.

The jet destroyed or damaged at least a dozen houses and narrowly missed a petrol a station before crashing beside the A74 on the edge of the market town, ten miles cast Of Dumfries, in what was Britain's worst air disaster.

Eye-witnesses spoke of a gigantic explosion and a huge fireball as the jumbo crashed, soon after 7 pm. One described how the stricken plane "rained liquid fire" as it roared earthwards. An RAF spokesman said: "The plane demolished two rows of houses. There are no survivors from these houses. There will be a lot of digging needed tomorrow."

The ill-fated flight, thought to have been full of Americans returning home for Christmas - including some US servicemen - left Heathrow 25 minutes late, at 6:25 pm. It disappeared from radar screens 54 minutes later.

Trouble appears to have struck the 747 somewhere over Langholm approximately 13 miles to the cast where residents found lumps Of aircraft metal and suitcases.

The crippled aircraft struggled west at low level, apparently clipping a hill about three miles east of Lockerbie.

More wreckage fell on houses on the northern edge of the town before the plane finally crashed near Sherwood Crescent.

The end came in a blinding ball of flame that lit up the night sky, as the aircraft just missed a petrol station.

A huge blazing 40-foot deep crater was torn in the ground and earth and rubble covered the A74.

At a 1am Press conference, Chief Constable John Boyd of Dumfries and Galloway Police said that he feared for casualties in Lockerbie.

He said: "Wreckage is spread over a very wide area about ten miles in radius and parts of wreckage have fallen on two residential areas of the town, causing considerable damage and setting fire to a number of houses. There is severe damage to houses at Sherwood Crescent and I am fearful about casualties at that site."

He added: "It would appear that wreckage has fallen at six different locations both within Lockerbie and some miles outside the town. There are bodies at each of these locations."

District nurse Sheila Macdonald was with her two children in a car delivering presents to a friend's house on a hillside overlooking the town when she saw the plane come down.

She said: "There was a horrible droning noise and then this V-shaped object came sweeping down ... it was obviously the wings and the front part of the plane. It was accompanied by showers of what looked like sparks. Another part of the plane came afterwards and it just seemed to plough into the town. There was a sheet of flame and everything shook I knew then it was some terrible catastrophe."

A former police inspector, Mr Archie Smith, lived only yards from the residential crescent which was devastated in the impact and he said: "Four or five houses are just simply gone. The flames spread quickly and suddenly my house was on fire and it just went out of control and has now been destroyed."

He added: "I had more than thirty years in the police force and never saw anything so appalling or with so much horror as this."

Lockerbie resembled a war zone last night with debris strewn all over the streets. The town centre was lined with ambulances and police cars as the search for bodies went on. Seriously injured people were being taken to Dumfries Royal Infirmary while the town hall was being used as a temporary mortuary.

The building was also the centre for anxious people seeking relatives from the area devastated as the 747 crashed. A list of evacuees was pinned on the front wall of the town hall.

The quiet Dumfriesshire town was strewn with debris as the stricken aircraft lurched across the sky to its final impact on Lockerbie's southern outskirts beside the A74.

Phones in the area were knocked out by the explosion. Ambulances came from as far away as Edinburgh, Livingston land Glasgow. Helicopters quartered the sky in a search for any survivors and Territorial Army volunteers plus Royal Air Force staff from Carlisle were also helping to try to wrest some order out of the widespread confusion.

In a grim pointer to the high death toll, a spokesman at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, Mr Les Callaghan, said it had received only a, 'very, very small number of casualties," nearly two hours after the crash.

A fleet of 12 helicopters from as far away as Hampshire, two RAF mountain rescue teams and a coastguard team from nearby Kirkcudbright joined Scotland's biggest emergency rescue operation.

A special landing zone was organised by officers at Lockerbie police station, which was set up as the disaster headquarters.

Early reports said 12 people had been taken to the hospital - they were thought to be residents of Lockerbie, which has a population of about 3,000.

One eye-witness, Mr Jack Glasgow of Mount Florida, Glasgow, said: "We tried to get near the plane but it was completely on fire. There were no bodies about. I don't think there would be any chance of anyone getting out of it. It went up in a fireball."

Mr Glasgow said the aircraft hit the road, carried on for about three quarters of a mile and then exploded.

A Dunfermline businessman, Mr Edward Killeen, was a few hundred yards away from the scene. He was driving to his home in Gowanbrae Drive Dunfermline, from Bolton and from the scene last night said: "It was quite unbelievable.

"I saw a tremendous burst of flame and explosion. The traffic immediately ground to a halt and even from the distance I could see the sky lit up.

"Very shortly afterwards, the emergency services arrived but found obvious difficulty approaching the scene because of the congestion."

Mr Colin Gourlay, of Hightae, two miles south-west of Lockerbie, said: "We heard a roar, and the roar got louder and everything started to shake. I thought it was maybe a earthquake or a meteor and the atmosphere was burning up. Everything outside was a huge orange glow. My wife was frozen to the ground with fear."

Mr Mike Carnahan, who lives two miles south of Lockerbie, said: "I was driving past the filling station when the aircraft crashed. There was a terrible explosion.

"The sky was actually raining fire. It was just like liquid. We have actually found an aluminium rivet embedded in the metal of my car."

One resident near to the impact scene, Mr Raymond Lees (71), said 'We heard this rumbling, a terrible noise as though it was a vehicle in trouble.

"Then we looked out the window and we could see this debris falling. It just went past the window. There was a massive explosion as though it was fuel that went up. We could see the houses and roofs on fire within yards of us.

"It must have missed this place by a few inches.

"We walked to the A74 and had a look and could see a terrific burning. There were cars and houses on fire. It was complete mayhem."

A school teacher who declined to be named helping control crowds outside the town, hall said of the crash: "There was a sort of rumble. We thought it was an earthquake and ran outside just as the sky lit up."

All roads to Lockerbie were reported blocked with telephone lines down.

Fire services said the A74 the main road between Scotland and the English border had been cut and several cars appeared to have been set alight.

For the first time Dumfries and Galloway Regional Council activated its emergency back-up service to help to provide rescue co-ordination. A spokesman said that there never had been a disaster on such a scale in the area.

A Boeing team will be travelling to Scotland along with representatives of the US National Transportation Safety Board, a Boeing spokesman said in Seattle, Washington, last night.

Mr John Wheeler, Boeing's public relations manager, said: "We will probably he sending a team of two to three experts. They will join the NTSB team."

The Jumbo, a 747-121 class named Clipper Maid Of The Seas, had reached an altitude of 31,000 feet before it ran into trouble, an aviation official said. (...)

Among the dead passengers were at least 36 students from Syracuse University in New York State. They had been studying in London since September, and were returning for Christmas.

A Department of Transport air investigation branch team will be going to the scene of the crash today to carry out an investigation.

The Transport Secretary, Mr Paul Channon, will make a full Commons statement on the tragedy at 11 am today.

[Paul Channon’s statement in the House of Commons and the ensuing debate can be read here.]

Lockerbie: Unanswered questions

[The current (December 2015) issue of the excellent iScot magazine contains an article entitled “Lockerbie: Unanswered questions”, the first in a series by Dr Morag Kerr. It reads in part:]

Most people in Scotland probably know that, some quarter of a century ago, a Jumbo Jet with the name Maid of the Seas painted on her nose-cone fell out of the sky on to the Dumfriesshire town of Lockerbie.  Many people still harbour grave doubts about the safety of the conviction, twelve years later, of the so-called “Lockerbie bomber” Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.  Few retain a detailed recollection of the circumstances, but “Wasn’t the key witness paid millions to implicate him?” is a common refrain.  

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi died in May 2012, but the doubts linger.  Efforts to secure a third appeal against his conviction received a setback last month when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission refused to proceed unless his family, virtually incommunicado inside war-torn Libya, provided them with a specific document which doesn’t actually exist under Sharia law.  Quite separately, however, a major police investigation is underway into formal allegations of wrongdoing against individuals involved in both the original investigation and the later court proceedings.  A third strand is public petition PE1370 calling for an independent inquiry into the Lockerbie affair, laid before the Scottish parliament in October 2010.  Only two months ago the disaster was once again in the headlines as the Lord Advocate revealed that he was on the trail of two of Megrahi’s alleged accomplices – but was that story quite what it seemed?  This month, with further revelations likely in the near future, we look back on the chain of events that began in 1988. (...)

A terrorist attack was immediately suspected, and senior police insisted the crash site be treated as a crime scene.  Detectives reviewing the case in 2015 have remarked that even today it’s unlikely the evidence-gathering could be handled any better, and it’s hard to argue with that.  Meticulous records of where every item was recovered yielded a detailed picture of how the plane broke up and what caused it.

What caused it turned out to be a small improvised explosive device disguised as a radio-cassette recorder, packed into a suitcase with some items of clothing. The baggage container carrying the exploding suitcase was identified as one containing only transfer luggage – luggage belonging to passengers connecting from other flights.  The bomb hadn’t been checked in at Heathrow.  The relief of the British investigators when they discovered this seems to have been immense.

After that, things got murkier.  While most of the luggage in that container was transferred from a single flight (a feeder from Frankfurt also designated PA103), a few items from other flights were also present.  The Frankfurt luggage was security-screened in Germany and shunted directly across the tarmac, but the other cases had been collected in Terminal 3 and were supposed to have been screened there.

When the fragments of the container were reassembled the explosion proved to have been about ten inches from the floor.  The Heathrow interline cases had been loaded first and covered the bottom, and everything from the second layer upwards was from the feeder flight.  The forensic scientists believed the bomb suitcase had been on the second layer, and so attention focussed on Frankfurt.

The German police joined the inquiry, and they had news for the Scottish investigators.  Two months before Lockerbie they had busted a terrorist gang in Düsseldorf, making bombs obviously designed to destroy aircraft in flight.  The gang was a cell of a hard-line Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, or PFLP-GC.  Unfortunately the suspects had been released by the German authorities, and it was feared they had regrouped and completed their mission.

A picture began to emerge.  On 3rd July 1988 an Iranair passenger flight carrying pilgrims travelling to Mecca had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by an American cruiser.  The aftermath of the disaster was appallingly mishandled by the US authorities and Ayatollah Khomeini vowed revenge.  Money appeared to have changed hands, and the suspicion was that Iran had employed proven sabotage experts to do its dirty work.

There was a catch to all this, which the Germans tried to point out to the British investigators.  The type of device the PFLP-GC was known to be making, launched from Frankfurt, would have exploded somewhere over Belgium.  These devices were triggered by the drop in internal pressure that occurs shortly after take-off, and would detonate about half an hour after that.  An IED like that, exploding over Lockerbie, must have been loaded at Heathrow.  The forensics team discounted this and remained wedded to their belief that the bomb had flown in from Germany.

By March 1989 Paul Channon, the UK Transport Secretary, was talking about imminent arrests.  However, no arrests were forthcoming.  The case receded from public consciousness until the autumn, when it emerged that a new lead had been uncovered.  Investigators were now certain the bomb had arrived in Frankfurt on a third aircraft, flight KM180 from Malta. (...)

The investigators secured one big breakthrough.  Scraps of burnt clothing believed to have been packed with the bomb were traced to a Maltese manufacturer, and from there to a small retailer in the Maltese town of Sliema, only three miles from the airport – and the shopkeeper Tony Gauci remembered selling some of the items to a customer in late 1988.  He described the man and his purchases, even remembering the bill and the amount of change given. Detectives set out to try to identify this mystery shopper.

However, as 1989 became 1990, the case went cold again.  The clothes purchaser was elusive, and nobody could figure out how Air Malta’s security precautions might have been breached.  Once again the story faded from the news until in the autumn of 1990 another change of tack hit the headlines.  Iran and the PFLP-GC were no longer suspected.  Iran had taken a “bum rap”, according to US President George Bush Snr.  The new suspect was Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime, and the motive was retaliation for the US bombing of the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi back in 1986.

Events moved quickly after that.  By January 1991 the police had a suspect, a Libyan national named Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and on 13th February Tony Gauci picked Megrahi’s passport photo out of a photo-identity parade.  Some time later it was discovered that Megrahi had been at Malta airport on the morning of 21st December 1988, travelling under an assumed name.  Case closed, or so it seemed.  In November 1991 simultaneous indictments were issued in Scotland and the USA against Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Fhimah for the murder of 270 people at Lockerbie.

Megrahi and Fhimah, however, were in Libya, protesting their innocence. Gaddafi offered to try the pair in Libya, if he was provided with the relevant evidence.  This was correct procedure under the Montreal Convention, but unsurprisingly the offer was rejected.  Stalemate.  Britain and the USA approached the UN complaining that Gaddafi was sheltering terrorists from justice, and as a result punitive sanctions were imposed which heavily impacted the Libyan economy.  In the years that followed the damage multiplied, and eventually the two accused agreed to surrender themselves for trial to secure an end to the blockade.

It was agreed that the trial would be held in a neutral venue.  A disused US air base in the Netherlands, Camp van Zeist, was decreed to be Scottish territory for the duration and converted into a court facility.  The trial began on 3rd May 2000, and on 31st January 2001 the verdict was announced.  Megrahi was found guilty, but Fhimah was not guilty.

The controversy began immediately.  How could one conspirator be guilty but not the other?  It was Fhimah who was alleged to have put the bomb on the plane, so how had Megrahi managed it without Fhimah’s assistance?  The defence had destroyed the prosecution’s star witness, a Libyan CIA informer called Abdul Majid Giaka, and without his testimony was there really enough evidence to convict beyond reasonable doubt?  In late January the Foreign Office had been briefing in the expectation of a double acquittal.  Many people, including UN-appointed observer to the trial Dr. Hans Köchler, believed there was an enormous amount of entirely reasonable doubt.

An appeal was heard at Camp Zeist in early 2002.  The defence had new evidence.  A Heathrow security guard revealed details of a security breach airside in Terminal 3, the night before the disaster.  A door padlock had been broken, apparently from the landward side, not far from the shed where the ill-fated container was parked the following afternoon.  The appeal judges heard his evidence, but dismissed it on the grounds that the trial court recognised that Heathrow security was poor, and knowing there had been an actual breach wouldn’t have altered their conclusions.  Megrahi was sent to Barlinnie to begin a life sentence for mass murder.

In 2003 he applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for leave to mount a second appeal.  In its 2007 report the Commission identified six grounds on which a miscarriage of justice might have occurred.  These centred round the disputed fingering of Megrahi as the man who bought the infamous Maltese clothes, and without the eye-witness identification the case was expected to collapse.

Megrahi’s second appeal came to court in spring 2009, by which time he had received what turned out to be a death sentence – a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer.  The following August his application for compassionate release was granted by Kenny MacAskill, three days after Megrahi had formally abandoned his hard-fought-for appeal.

The appeal could have continued despite the release of the applicant.  Was Megrahi pressurised into withdrawing it?  His advocate Maggie Scott said that he was.  Kenny MacAskill has consistently denied it.  Professor Robert Black has a more nuanced take on the matter, suggesting that Megrahi was poorly informed about the options available to him and open to pressure from Libyan officials anxious to get him back home.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, the appeal was swiftly forgotten in the universal stampede to condemn the Scottish government for releasing a mass murderer.  Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Jack Straw, David Cameron, Jack McConnell, Barack Obama, Robert Menendez and others, who before Megrahi’s release had breathed not a hint of opposition (because of course they were all heartily glad to see Megrahi back in Libya and the obstacle to trade and oil deals with Gaddafi removed), turned on Kenny MacAskill and Alex Salmond and monstered them.

Others were dismayed for a different reason.  The abandoning of the appeal torpedoed the chance to have the case reviewed again in court and the doubts and uncertainties examined.  Was it possible, or likely, that Megrahi had bought these clothes?  Did the bomb really start its journey on Malta, as the investigators believed?  And what was all that about a fragment of printed circuit board, widely alleged to be a fabricated plant?

Subsequent articles in this series will examine these contentious issues.  How much reasonable doubt surrounds Megrahi's guilt?  Was the evidence tampered with?  Might we, indeed, suggest that his innocence can be proved beyond reasonable doubt?

Flight from the truth

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson that was published in The Guardian on this date in 2001.  It reads in part:]

There are two versions of the Lockerbie story. One - told at the trial - is neat, clearcut and, ultimately, reassuring. The other, which we believe is the true story, is far less comfortable. In the official version it was bad guys against good: Muammar Gadafy and his recently convicted henchman Abdel Baset al-Megrahi versus the heroic international investigation led by the tiny Dumfries and Galloway police force. It ends with the triumph of justice over terror. In the alternative version the heroics of the cops are obscured by dirty politics. It ends with a dreadful miscarriage of justice.

The conviction of Megrahi (his co-accused, Al-Amin Khalifah Fhimah, was acquitted) supposedly proved the official version and drew a line under the Lockerbie saga. But the case will not go away: Megrahi is planning an appeal and the relatives of the British passengers are determined to hold the Labour government to their promise, made in opposition, of an independent inquiry. If the relatives get their way, a huge can of worms will be opened for, (...) almost from the night the plane went down, vital evidence was suppressed.

In the official version, of course, nothing of the kind happened. It posits that on December 21 1988 Megrahi placed a bomb in a suitcase, which was loaded, unaccompanied, on to a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to Pan Am flight 103. It exploded over Lockerbie just after 7pm that night, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. The bomb was built into a Toshiba radio-cassette player and fitted with a distinctive timing device supplied to the Libyan intelligence service by a Swiss company, Mebo. The firm's Zurich offices were shared in 1988 with the Libyan company ABH, with which Megrahi was closely involved. He was also alleged to have bought the clothes in the bomb suitcase from the Mary's House shop in Malta on December 7 1988.

During the eight-month trial the prosecution could offer no direct evidence of the bomb being loaded in Malta, and their star witnesses, Abdul Majid Giaka - a former colleague of the two accused - was exposed as a money-motivated fantasist. The court heard that Mebo sold identical timers to the East German Stasi (which armed Middle East terrorist groups), and the evidence of the Mary's House shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, suggested that the man who bought the clothes was considerably older and taller than Megrahi, and that the purchase occurred two weeks earlier, when, it is believed, Megrahi had an alibi. The fact that the judges refused to be swayed by the clouds of doubt hanging over the prosecution case left many observers staggered.

In the alternative version, the real culprits lay not in Libya, but in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. It begins in July 1988, when a US warship accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people. The CIA later revealed that, within days, Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) to avenge the incident. The group had close ties to the Lebanese Islamic radicals Hizbullah and in the early 1970s specialised in bombing airliners. Its favoured method was to plant carefully disguised bombs on innocent dupes.

The group's leader, Ahmed Jibril, dispatched his right-hand man, Hafez Dalkamoni, and a bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, to West Germany, where Khreesat manufactured at least five barometric bombs designed to blow up aircraft, two - possibly more - of which were built into Toshiba radio-cassette players. Six weeks before Lockerbie, police raided the PFLP-GC gang and found one of the Toshiba bombs. In the official version this put an end to the revenge mission, but there is every reason to doubt this. The PFLP-GC may not have relied solely on Khreesat to make bombs and, in any case, at least four of his devices were unaccounted for. Three were recovered four months after Lockerbie, but the second Toshiba was never found.

Five weeks after the raid, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned of the continuing threat of an Iranian reprisal and noted that Middle Eastern terrorist groups active in Germany had the infrastructure to conduct bombings. At around the same time, the US state department circulated a specific warning that radical Palestinians were planning to attack a Pan Am target in Europe.

Three months after the bombing, the transport minister Paul Channon told lobby journalists that the culprits had been identified and charges were imminent. Everyone knew he meant the PFLP-GC. The months passed and nothing happened. A White House leak later revealed that Margaret Thatcher and George Bush had agreed to downplay the investigation for fear of endangering hostages in Lebanon - almost all held by Syrian and Iranian proxy groups. Following the Gulf war, in which Syria became a crucial western ally, the PFLP-GC and their Syrian and Iranian sponsors were officially exonerated, and the blame was shifted to Libya.

The alternative version becomes murkier still when it comes to how Jibril's men got the bomb on to flight 103. Two PFLP-GC insiders and many western intelligence sources claim it was planted in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese-American mule in a heroin trafficking operation. The whistle-blowing spooks say elements within the CIA were allowing Middle Eastern dealers to ship drugs to America in return for help in locating and releasing US hostages. In allowing the suitcases containing heroin to bypass security procedures, the CIA handed the dealers' terrorist associates a failsafe means of getting the bomb on the plane.

Among the Lockerbie victims was a party of US intelligence specialists, led by Major Charles McKee of the DIA, returning from an aborted hostage-rescue mission in Lebanon. A variety of sources have claimed that McKee, who was fiercely anti-drugs, got wind of the CIA's deals and was returning to Washington to blow the whistle. A few months after Lockerbie, reports emerged from Lebanon that McKee's travel plans had been leaked to the bombers. The implication was that Flight 103 was targeted, in part, because he was on board.

As with the official version, there is no proof of this scenario, but there is a chain of circumstantial evidence. Much of it comes from the army of police officers and volunteers who scoured the vast crash site in the weeks after the bombing. And much of it was either not revealed at the recent trial or, worse, covered up.

One such item was a T-shirt found in Kielder forest, Northumberland, by David Clark, who was later told by police that it was potentially important evidence because it bore the insignia of Hizbullah. The T-shirt has never been officially acknowledged or explained. At least four large quantities of US dollars were also found. No one knows who was carrying the cash, but it has been speculated that McKee's team would have had large amounts to pay Lebanese informants. When the Labour MP Tam Dalyell asked about the cash finds in 1995, the Scottish Office minister, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, replied that nothing other than "what might ordinarily be regarded as personal money" was found.

Also denied was the existence of two large quantities of what appeared to be heroin: one found on Lockerbie golf course and the other in a suitcase discovered by a farmer a couple of miles to the east. The Rev John Mosey, whose 19-year-old daughter Helga died in the bombing, learned about the latter find and assumed the farmer would be questioned at the Lockerbie fatal accident inquiry held in October 1990. But the farmer did not appear, and police witnesses denied that any drugs were found. Mosey raised the issue with a senior police officer, who told him that the farmer would be interviewed. To the best of Mosey's knowledge, this never happened. In 1992 Dalyell wrote to the Scottish lord advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, about the drugs. In his reply, Lord Fraser stated that none had been found, save for a small quantity of cannabis.

Who engineered the cover-up? Almost certainly not anyone in Britain. Police officers and volunteer searchers have spoken of American agents removing items from the crash site. A proper inquiry into these issues could reveal a picture that governments on both sides of the Atlantic dare not face, but without it the echoes of the Lockerbie bomb will be ringing for a long time to come.

At the start of the trial

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James which was published on this date in 2000:]

On May 3, the trial began of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.

Abdelbaset Ali Muhammad Al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah are charged with planting a Semtex-packed cassette recorder on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane killing its 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents.

For years it was assumed that no legal proceedings into the Lockerbie tragedy would ever be held, as Libya would be unlikely to give up the accused individuals. That the case has come to court is the outcome of a significant shift in political and economic relations internationally. The European Union (EU) has led efforts to normalise relations with Libya in order to gain access to the country's considerable oil resources.

The accession of Blair's Labour government to office in 1997 provided a means for Britain—concerned that French and Italian oil companies were reaping the benefits of the USA-UK embargo on Libya—to develop its interests in the country. After protracted negotiations with South Africa's Nelson Mandela and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi agreed to hand over Al-Megrahi and Fhimah last year—provided they would not be tried on US or British soil. They have been held in the Netherlands ever since.

Once the suspects were handed over, the EU lifted its sanctions against Libya, and a considerable trade in oil, natural gas, and machinery has opened up, from which the US remains largely excluded. A steady stream of EU ministers have also visited the Libyan capital Tripoli. Only the awkward business of Flight 103 remained to be resolved for business as usual to be resumed.

For the purposes of the trial, Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, was designated as Scottish territory. The proceedings, expected to last many months, are being held in accordance with Scottish law and will involve hearing thousands of witnesses. It is the first time that a British court has sat outside British territory. This arrangement was agreed after protracted negotiations between the Libyan, British, US and Dutch governments, and also involved Scottish legal officials and the families and friends of those killed in the crash. Four Scottish judges, sitting without a jury, are hearing the case. The prosecutor is Scotland's Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

The trial began with the indictment against the two men being read out. They are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder, and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. The two pleaded not guilty and the clerk to the court read out a list of Arabic names of people he said the defence would allege were the real Lockerbie bombers. This included members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) — the two groups originally suspected of the bombing.

The Pan Am jumbo Maid of the Seas blew up on December 21, 1988, shortly after taking off from London's Heathrow airport. The plane disintegrated in mid-air, shedding debris over a wide area. The bulk of the wreckage impacted on and around the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, also killing 11 local residents.

Early investigations into the atrocity by Dumfries and Galloway police pointed to the bomb having been a reprisal for the US navy's shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in the Persian Gulf six months earlier. On July 3, 1988 the US warship the Vincennes was operating within Iranian waters, providing military support for Iraq in the ongoing Iran/Iraq war. During a one-sided battle against a small number of lightly armed Iranian gunboats, the Vincennes fired two missiles at the Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilians onboard were killed.

This act of mass murder by the US has never resulted in any court case. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were militarily decorated. Attempts by relatives of the victims to bring legal action against the American government were rejected by the US Supreme Court in 1993. Despite the fact that the vast majority of victims were Iranian, the US paid $2.9 million in compensation only to non-Iranian victims of the shooting.

The Iranian government promised revenge attacks at the time and it is alleged that it reached an agreement with the PFLP[-GC] to this end, which was led by ex-Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril and had links with the Syrian government.

Discussion between Dumfries and Galloway police and the West German police revealed that members of the PFLP had already been arrested in West Germany in possession of a bomb similar to the one blown up over Lockerbie. It was also discovered that four other bombs, disguised in cassette players, had been made but were unaccounted for. The suspicion grew that the PFLP had planted the bomb on Flight 103, or arranged for it to be planted, and that it was intended to blow up over Atlantic.

The suitcase containing the explosive device had been loaded at the Frankfurt airport. The bomb's timing mechanism was pressure activated and set to explode four hours after it first reached 8,000 feet. [RB: I have no idea where the author picked up this egregious error.] But Flight 103 was delayed at Heathrow before embarking on its transatlantic journey. As a result, the plane blew up over Lockerbie.

Several warnings were forwarded to American embassies and intelligence staff that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York would be attacked in December 1988. US intelligence staff based in Moscow and elsewhere scheduled to fly on Pan Am flights over that period cancelled their seats due to the warning. Many students took advantage of the cheap flights this made available. Flight 103 was only two-thirds full a mere four days before Christmas.

Crash investigators subsequently found more evidence indicating a possible link between the explosion and the PFLP. Clothing found in the case that had contained the bomb was identified as having been bought in Malta. A PFLP associate, Abu Talb, recently returned from Malta was later identified in the shop where the clothes were bought. By 1990, Dumfries and Galloway police announced they were on the brink of arrests. Talb is one of the individuals named by the Libyans' defence team.

Allegations have been made that what happened subsequently points to an attempt by the US government to divert police investigations away from Iran and Syria. According to the British journalist Paul Foot, in March 1989 US President George Bush rang the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask her to "cool it" on the Lockerbie case. Foot, in a 1994 review of the book Trail of the Octopus by Donald Goddard and ex-US intelligence agent Lester Coleman, noted that Paul Channon, the British Transport Minister, had briefed journalists that arrests were imminent just hours before Bush's call. Channon was sacked shortly after and no arrests were made. A US commission of inquiry into Lockerbie did not mention the PFLP.

In 1990, a timer fragment was belatedly recovered from the wreckage by US investigators. They identified this as coming from a batch of timers sold by the Swiss makers MEBO to Libya. MEBO subsequently insisted that the timer in question was part of a batch, which had never been electrically connected, sold to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Goddard and Coleman's book outlined a scenario in which the US government was not only politically responsible for the Lockerbie bomb, vis-à-vis the Vincennes incident and their long-standing domination of the region, but were practically responsible for it having been placed on Flight 103.

According to Coleman, America's Defence Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency were all active around the region looking for information on Middle Eastern factions, drug trafficking, and spying on each other. Coleman suggests that the CIA, on the assumption that it contained heroin, identified the bag with the bomb as being safe for transit. Goddard and Coleman suggest that PFLP members, who switched some drugs for the bomb, had infiltrated the drug-running operation.

Coleman and others, including an investigator Juval Aviv employed by the now defunct Pan Am, have subsequently been vilified, framed for petty misdemeanours, and/or generally harassed by the US state.

Coleman's allegations were repeated in a 1994 British TV programme, The Maltese Double Cross, produced by Channel 4. In 1997, the Libyan government showed the Channel 4 film at a hearing it had won before the UN International Court of Justice to protest against the sanctions imposed by the US in 1992. The impact of sanctions on Libya between 1992 and 1995 had been drastic, causing many deaths through lack of medical supplies and costing the country $6 billion in lost agricultural exports alone.

It is alleged that blame for the bombing was pinned on Libya in order to turn attention away from the Iranian regime, which the US was now developing as its ally in the Middle East as a counterweight to Iraq. By the late 1980s, longstanding US plans for a major escalation of their military involvement in the Persian Gulf, the world's leading oil-producing area, were coming to fruition. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 gave the US the pretext it required. The US and NATO were able to assemble a broad coalition of support for the intervention—from the Soviet Union, Europe and most of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East.

Libya opposed the bombardment of Iraq and was defined by the US as a "pariah" state. The US had bombed Tripoli in 1986, killing Libyan leader Gadhaffi's daughter, and had severed diplomatic relations with the country, accusing it of sponsoring international terrorism.