Early report that Lockerbie investigation pointing to Libya

[Pan Am 103 Clue Leads to Libyans : Terrorism: US and Scottish investigators now believe that the regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the jet bombing that killed 270 is the headline over a lengthy report by Robin Wright and Ronald Ostrow that was published in the Los Angeles Times on this date in 1991. It reads as follows:]

The clue that turned the case was a microchip, a tiny piece of a triggering device to detonate a bomb.

From it, American and Scottish investigators found a new trail that refuted the conclusions of almost two years of arduous legwork by thousands of agents worldwide -- and eventually changed major assumptions about the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over a small Scottish village just four days before Christmas, 1988.

A key breakthrough, which came just as the largest international criminal probe in history neared an impasse, was almost a fluke. A "brilliant young CIA analyst," as one insider described him, decided to try a new hypothesis: Could someone besides the widely suspected culprits -- Palestinian radicals, their Syrian patrons or Iranian militants -- have been involved?

The analyst started with a hunch.

He searched for a "signature" that would match the Pan Am bombing with earlier incidents to prove his suspicions. Culling through CIA files, he came up with the 1984 bombing of a French UTA airliner in Chad. A premature explosion blew up the baggage compartment while the plane was still on the ground and wounded 27 people.

He also found a link with the 1986 attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Togo. Officials in Lome, the Togolese capital, had arrested nine people with two suitcases full of plastic explosives.

But the biggest find was an obscure case in Senegal involving the arrest of two men at Dakar airport in February, 1988. In their possession were 20 pounds of sophisticated Semtex plastic and TNT explosives, weapons and several triggering devices.

The analyst's hunch was right.

In all three cases, the "signature" was distinctly Libyan.

In Senegal, the two men who were arrested -- Mohammed Marzouk, alias Mohammed Naydi, and Mansour Omran Saber -- were both agents of Libyan intelligence. And the triggering devices in their possession matched the microchip fragment from the Pan Am bomb.

The connection has since provided a new set of answers to how and why Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and who masterminded the blast.

Based on the forensic breakthrough and the links with earlier cases, investigators now believe:

* The regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the bombing. Libyan intelligence, headed by Abdullah Sanussi, orchestrated the plot.

* The primary motive was revenge for the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli in which about 40 people, including Kadafi's adopted daughter, were killed. "The notion that the 1986 bombing of Tripoli deterred Libyan terrorism is greatly flawed," a leading counterterrorism expert concluded.

* The mysterious bag carrying the bomb-laden Toshiba radio-cassette player on the blown-up Pan Am 103 came from Malta. Investigators believe the bomb was probably flown on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany -- although the passenger and cargo log has disappeared. In Germany, the cassette player was loaded on Pan Am 103 as an interline bag, unattached to any passenger.

Vital missing pieces in the puzzle finally fell into place. "We followed a lot of leads that looked promising at the beginning but turned out to be nothing," a counterterrorism specialist said. "All the streets followed down to dead ends."

The breakthroughs mean that, unlike the unsolved cases of half a dozen terrorist spectaculars against US targets in the 1980s, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may go to court.

Assistant Atty Gen Robert S Mueller III, who heads the Justice Department's Criminal Division and has been meeting frequently with the FBI on the investigation, appears poised to take the case to a grand jury, according to US officials.

Should the grand jury return sealed indictments, the biggest obstacle may not be just arresting those involved. US authorities already are working with French police now seeking to apprehend one of the Libyan suspects somewhere in North Africa, the officials said.

The problem instead may be competition over which country will get them for trial. French intelligence now believes yet another terrorist attack -- the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772 over the West African country of Niger -- was also directed by Libyan intelligence.

Although the method differed in each case, the signature was once again the telltale clue. The UTA explosive, part of which did not blow up and was retrieved from the Sahara desert, was one of five "suitcase bombs" that investigators believed Libyan intelligence purchased earlier from the notorious Mideast bomb maker Abu Ibrahim.

The primary motive, French officials suspect, was revenge for French aid that enabled Chad -- where the UTA flight took on most of its passengers -- to rout Libyan troops occupying parts of the neighboring state in 1987. The bomb was probably loaded in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital where the flight originated.

The new evidence on the Pan Am bombing, which began to emerge last summer, contradicts the longstanding belief that it was linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril. The radical PFLP-GC, based in Syria, is outside the PLO umbrella.

The original case was based on the arrest of a cell of 16 operatives in Germany two months before the 1988 Pan Am bombing. The group was found to have five sophisticated bombs, especially designed to blow up aircraft, hidden in electronic equipment.

From his base in Damascus, Jibril was also known to have worked closely with Iran, where he frequently traveled. Investigators believed that Tehran commissioned the PFLP-GC to target an American plane in retaliation for the accidental 1988 US downing of Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf in which 290 people died.

The crucial clues that changed the direction of the probe were the detonators. The Palestinian group's detonators were all Czech-made. They were attached to altimeter devices that were set to go off once a plane reached a certain altitude.

But, as forensic experts discovered, the detonator fragment that was culled from the wreckage of Flight 103, which had been scattered over 845 square miles of Scottish countryside, had important discrepancies.

It was of Swiss manufacture--from the same firm that had made the triggering devices that were found on the Libyan agents in Senegal. And it was attached to an ordinary timer that had been set to go off at a certain hour.

The "fingerprints" -- as forensic experts call the telltale characteristics of sophisticated explosive devices -- of the Pan Am bomb and the PFLP-GC bombs were vastly different. But the fingerprint of the Pan Am bomb was identical to the devices carried by the Libyan agents who were caught in Senegal.

Unfortunately, Senegal freed the Libyan agents, who were never formally charged, in June, 1988. US officials believe their release was part of a package deal in exchange for ending Libyan support for Senegal's opposition forces and for restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been severed eight years earlier.

At the time, the State Department issued a largely unnoticed -- but perhaps tragically prescient -- official comment: "We are extremely disappointed by Senegal's action, which raises questions about that country's commitment to the struggle against international terrorism."

Six months later, all 259 people on board Pan Am 103 and 11 others on the ground died when the New York-bound plane, flying 31,000 feet over Scotland, exploded just 38 minutes after takeoff from London's Heathrow Airport.

Crucial evidence held by Senegalese authorities also subsequently disappeared. US investigators have had to rely on photographs of the Libyan agents' materiel to match up the fingerprints of the two bombs.

US officials are unwilling to say where the two Libyans are today, but there are hints that they may be suspects in the Pan Am case. Investigators do believe, however, that the same top Libyan intelligence officials -- including Sanussi -- masterminded both the operation that was uncovered in Senegal and the Pan Am bombing.

Sanussi has been a constant headache to counterterrorism officials in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, a well-placed US source said. In 1986, he was sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian court to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiring to assassinate a group of prominent Libyan exiles.

Sanussi also reportedly makes regular use of Libyan Arab Airlines, the national carrier, as a cover for intelligence and terrorist activities. He is believed to have recruited baggage-handlers and airport personnel in Europe and Africa to facilitate his operations.

The new case against Libya has effectively absolved Syria, the PFLP-GC's primary sponsor, of involvement in the Pan Am bombing, counterterrorism officials say.

But neither Damascus nor Jibril has been cleared of plotting terrorist activities. US officials also believe the arrests that broke up the radical Palestinian cell operating in Germany probably foiled what could have been an even bigger terrorist spectacular: the bombing of three other planes over a period of only a few days.

Counterterrorism analysts suggest that one of the Palestinian group's targets was an Iberia Airlines flight from Madrid to Israel via Barcelona. Among its scheduled passengers were members of an Israeli sports team.

A former US intelligence official says that PFLP-GC operatives also had surveyed the Pan Am counter at Frankfurt airport, although no evidence indicated specific plans against Flight 103 as one of the three planes.

The biggest outstanding question in the investigation is what role, if any, Iran may have played, several key US sources say.

"Unlike the connection established between Iran and Jibril, we have nothing to prove Iran's link with Libya," one official said. "But some still believe there's a link (that) we haven't found yet."

Another added: "I'll go to my grave believing Iranians had a role in Pan Am 103."

By contrast, before the latest breakthrough, investigators felt they had a strong circumstantial case of Iranian links with the PFLP-GC cell on the Pan Am bombing.

Through electronic intercepts, intelligence services had monitored messages from Iranian officials known for their militancy who expressed concern after arrests of the PFLP-GC cell. They apparently were worried about the implications for an operation they wanted carried out.

Investigators initially thought the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were directly connected. One early scenario suggested that Iran funded two separate cells for the same operation. The second cell was to provide a backup if the first one failed.

But investigators have increasingly moved away from the so-called "Cell A, Cell B" scenario.

So far, investigators have no evidence from intercepts or secret meetings of direct contact between Libya and Iran. Indeed, relations between Tripoli and Tehran have been erratic.

But if the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were not linked, the implications are even more serious. "You have to be terrified that there were two groups out there in the fall of 1988 plotting to bomb planes," the well-placed official said. "That's even scarier."

[RB: It was just under five months later that it was announced by the prosecution authorities in Scotland and the United States that charges were being brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.]

Special counsel Robert Mueller and Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a report published late yesterday on the website of The New York Times:]

The Justice Department appointed Robert S Mueller III, a former FBI director, as special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump’s four-month-old presidency.

The decision by the deputy attorney general, Rod J Rosenstein, came after a cascade of damaging developments for Mr. Trump in recent days, including his abrupt dismissal of the FBI director, James B Comey, and the subsequent disclosure that Mr Trump asked Mr Comey to drop the investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael T Flynn. (...)

While Mr Mueller remains answerable to Mr Rosenstein — and by extension, the president — he will have greater autonomy to run an investigation than other federal prosecutors.

As a special counsel, Mr Mueller can choose whether to consult with or inform the Justice Department about his investigation. He is authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” according to Mr Rosenstein’s order naming him to the post, as well as other matters that “may arise directly from the investigation.” (...)

Mr Rosenstein, who until recently was United States attorney in Maryland, took control of the investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself after acknowledging he had failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador to Washington, Sergey I Kislyak, when Mr Sessions was an adviser to the Trump campaign. (...)

Mr Mueller’s appointment was hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country. (...)

Mr. Mueller served both Democratic and Republican presidents. President Barack Obama asked him to stay two years beyond the 10-year term until he appointed Mr Comey in 2013, the only time a modern-day FBI director’s tenure has been extended.

[RB: Mr Mueller has featured regularly on this blog. Perhaps the most egregious of his ill-advised interventions in the Lockerbie case was the remarkable letter sent to Kenny MacAskill after the release of Megrahi in August 2009. The late and much lamented Ian Bell wrote a blistering article in the Sunday Herald about this letter headlined What do US cops know about justice?]

Alex Salmond 'never challenged' in US about decision to release Libyan Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Huffington Post.  It reads as follows:]

On "many trips" to the US in the years after the controversial release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond has never been challenged on the decision, one he said "most people respect even if they don’t agree with it".

The 2009 ruling by the Scottish government to release the terminally-ill al-Megrahi, who was convicted of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, received considerable push back from Washington at the time, with detractors including the former FBI director Robert Mueller and the then-Secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

However, speaking to the HuffPost on Monday, following a lecture for the opening of Glasgow Caledonian University's New York campus, Salmond insisted what his government did "was right and legitimate under Scots law".

"All of the investigations that took place… each and everyone one of them, including the Senate investigation, found nothing to suggest or establish we’d done anything other than follow the precepts of Scots law," he said.

According to the SNP leader, the "difficult decision" in 2009 was taken following the "set down procedures of the Scottish legal system".

Salmond added: "We are currently in a joint investigation with the United States authorities to pursue the leads that we’ve got, and we’ve now got the co-operation of the new Libyan authorities in taking that matter forward.

"But I don’t expect to be challenged on this [in the US], and whether people agree or disagree, there are very few people who don’t accept that we acted as we saw the right in terms of a legal system. That is an important thing for us, that bona fides are not questioned on the matter."

Scraping the bottom of the barrel

[What follows is an excerpt from an article headed Alex Salmond is in the US schmoozing away. But Americans won't forget in a hurry that he freed the Lockerbie bomber by Professor Tom Gallagher, a virulently anti-SNP commentator, published today on The Telegraph website:]

Whether a coincidence or not, at the start of Alex Salmond’s five-day visit to the United States, the Scottish National Party has suddenly launched a peace offensive after a bruising referendum campaign that has raised fears that society will be polarised for years to come. Party sources have told a Scottish newspaper that they intend to concentrate their energies on healing political wounds if Scotland votes Yes.

But to those who recall SNP rhetoric about the party preserving the best of Britishness in a social union, it needs to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. It smacks too much of a serial wife-beater turning round to his family after a traumatic night and saying that from now on life will be totally different.

It remains to be seen if the era of good tidings will last beyond the conclusion of Salmond’s trip which includes a speaking engagement at the IMF in Washington DC. He can turn from being a political bruiser to acting as a charmer in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately for him, plenty of Americans, both influential folk and everyday citizens, have seen both sides of the coin.

It is not only relatives of the 180 US citizens killed when a bomb blew up a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 who were astonished when his government released the man convicted by a Scottish court, in 2001, for the attack on the grounds that he had little time left to live. The release of the Libyan national Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was announced with much fanfare on 20 August 2009. Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s justice minister, read a long statement insisting that the decision was based on "the values, beliefs, and common humanity that defines us as Scots". Hillary Clinton, then the US Secretary of State, twice spoke to MacAskill in the hope that he would reconsider the release of al-Megrahi who, instead of dying within weeks, enjoyed a comfortable life in a Tripoli suburb until 2012. [RB: It requires a really quite special sensibility to describe taking over two years to die of cancer in a war-ravaged and militia-ridden locality as enjoying a comfortable life in a Tripoli suburb.]

On 15 August 2009, Robert Mueller III, director of the FBI for nearly a decade, wrote to MacAskill in terms which had rarely been used between a senior US official and a friendly government:

"I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors. Your decision to release al-Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice… I do so because I am familiar with the facts of the law , having been the assistant Attorney general in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged by your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of “compassion”’. [RB: More details about Robert Mueller’s “foolish and intemperate letter” (as I described it) can be found here. I commented: “In civilised countries decisions regarding liberation of prisoners are not placed in the hands of policemen and prosecutors, nor are they accorded a veto over those decisions. Mr Mueller (and Mr Marquise) would probably wish that this were otherwise. The rest of us can be grateful that it is not.”]

The British lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, the first president of the UN war crimes court [RB: Not so. He sat as an appeal judge in the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, something rather different.], observed that the decision taken was ‘lacking in compassion to every victim of terrorism and made an absurdity of the principle of punishment as a deterrent' ". [RB: Geoffrey Robertson’s idiosyncratic views on the Lockerbie case and Megrahi’s release can be followed here.]

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened hearings on the affair but Salmond refused point-blank to cooperate. [RB: this is tendentious in the extreme. A more accurate account of the episode can be found here and here.]

It is hard to imagine such a scenario being played out if the Pan Am flight had exploded over Irish, Danish or even French territory. It is likely that the authorities of each of these countries would have avoided such a rupture in bilateral relations with an allied country.

The crumbling Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over an article published today on the Consortium News website. It reads as follows:]

A quarter century ago, the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people and later was pinned on a Libyan agent. In 2011, Lockerbie was used to justify a US-backed war to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, but the evidence now suggests the case was a miscarriage of justice, John Ashton writes.

Dec 21, 2013, marked the 25th anniversary of what, until 9/11, was the worst terrorist attack on US civilians. A total of 270 people died when Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the sky over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie; 189 of the dead were Americans.

Officially the crime was partially solved on Jan 31, 2001, when Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the murders by a panel of three senior Scottish judges, sitting at a specially convened Scottish court at Kamp Zeist in The Netherlands. His co-defendant, Lamin Fhimah, was acquitted.

As Megrahi was allegedly a puppet of the Gaddafi regime the Scottish and US prosecutors have vowed to pursue those who were pulling his strings. The ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller said on the 25th anniversary that he expected further charges to be brought. Yet, to most of those who have scrutinized the Megrahi conviction – and Consortiumnews.com is one of the few U.S. media outlets to have done so (see here, here and here) – it is, at best, odd and, at worst, a sham.

One of the UN trial observers, Professor Hans Koechler, noted: “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational,” while eminent Scottish lawyer Ian Hamilton QC has said, “I don’t think there’s a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted.”

More importantly, in 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, a statutory body that reviews alleged miscarriages of justice, referred the conviction back to the appeals court on no fewer than six grounds, one of which was that the trial court’s judgment was unreasonable. Shockingly, four of the other grounds concerned the non-disclosure of important evidence by the prosecution. Sadly, Megrahi succumbed to pressure to abandon the appeal, shortly before his release from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

More Promising Leads

Another reason to doubt the official line that the bombing was a solely Libyan operation is that there is ample circumstantial evidence that it was commissioned by Iran (possibly in retaliation for the U.S. military shoot-down of an Iranian airliner on July 3, 1988, killing 290 people) and carried out by a radical Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Two months before the Pan Am 103 attack, on Oct 26, 1988, the group was caught red-handed by the German federal police with a barometric bomb designed to explode at altitude. The police also uncovered a huge terrorist arsenal, which the group had amassed in an apartment in Frankfurt, the city from which PA103’s feeder flight, PA103A, would originate. Like the Lockerbie bomb, the barometric bomb had been built into a Toshiba radio cassette player. Although it was a single-speaker model – the Lockerbie device had twin speakers – by a rather sick twist, both models were from Toshiba’s BomBeat range.

The man who made the German bomb, Marwan Khreesat, turned out to be a mole for both the Jordanian and German intelligence services. He told the police that he had made five bombs, only four of which were recovered. He and another PFLP-GC member, Mobdi Goben, who led the group’s Yugoslavian cell, confirmed that the organization had other bomb makers and that the Oct 26 raids did not snare all of its German operatives.

Significantly, both men independently named a member with the nomme de guerre Abu Elias as the operation’s linchpin. His true identity remains unknown. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents stated as fact that Iran and the PFLP-GC were behind the bombing. Another, written months after the investigation had shifted decisively to Libya, said that Iranian interior minister had paid $10 million for the hit.

The increasingly rickety “Libya-did-it” line appeared to receive a much-needed boost 2½ years ago with the fall of the Gaddafi regime. At the start of the revolution, in early 2011, the opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who had been Gaddafi’s justice minister, told the Swedish newspaper Expressen that he had proof that his old boss was responsible for Lockerbie. Other senior government defectors implicated the old regime in the bombing.

So, when Scotland’s prosecution service, the Crown Office, announced that it would be seeking the cooperation of the new Libyan government to gather evidence against Megrahi’s alleged co-conspirators, Lockerbie watchers were braced for some rapid developments.

Getting Nowhere

Unfortunately for the Crown Office and police, in the intervening 2½ years, they appear to have got precisely nowhere. Last December, Libya’s new UK ambassador, Mahmud Nacua, said that his government would be happy to open all of its Lockerbie files to the police, but added that this would only happen when the government had fully established security and stability – a process he believed would take at least a year. A year on, there’s no hint that the files are about to be opened.

It was not until February 2013 that the police, prosecutors and the FBI got to visit Tripoli to speak to the new government. Embarrassingly, no sooner had they left than the new deputy justice minister, Hameda al-Magery, told the Daily Telegraph that the case was closed.

The Crown Office swiftly issued a press release, which described the discussions with the Libyans as “positive” and added “it is hoped there will be further progress as a result.” That hope seems increasingly forlorn. Only last month did the Libyan government appoint prosecutors to work on the case with Scottish and US investigators.

The development was hailed as a “significant step” by Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland. That is one interpretation, but, when viewed as a whole, the events since Gaddafi’s fall suggest that the Libyans might be trying to put off the day when they have to admit to the Scots and FBI that the cupboard is bare: they have no evidence of the Gaddafi regime’s involvement.

Since Gaddafi’s fall, the only document about the case to surface publicly from his regime’s files is a letter from Megrahi to his relative, Gaddafi’s security chief Abdullah Sennousi, in which, according to the Wall Street Journal, he protested his innocence and blamed his plight on “the immoral British and American investigators” who “knew there was foul play and irregularities in the investigation.”

What, then, of Mustafa Abdel Jalil’s proof? When asked about it on BBC Newsnight, the best he could offer was the fact that Gaddafi’s government had paid Megrahi’s legal bills. A year later Jalil insisted in another newspaper interview that Expressen had misquoted him, adding: “All I said then is what I say right now, which is that the regime was involved in this case, evident by insisting [Megrahi] returns [to Libya] and that they spent a lot of money on him while he was in jail.”

It was preposterous to claim that the old regime’s funding of Megrahi’s legal defense, and its efforts to secure his return to Libya, was evidence of its guilt.

Exonerating Evidence

While the police investigation in Libya has stalled, the police and Crown Office are studiously ignoring new evidence that destroys the case against Megrahi and Libya. It concerns the most important physical evidence of the entire case, a tiny fragment of circuit board, known by its police reference number of PT/35b, which was allegedly part of the bomb’s timer.

According to the prosecution case, the fragment matched boards in timers designed and built for the Libyan intelligence service by a Swiss firm called Mebo. During preparations for Megrahi’s aborted second appeal, his legal team (with whom I worked as a researcher) discovered that the fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers’ boards, because it bore a crucial metallurgical difference.

When combined with a wealth of existing anomalies concerning the fragment’s provenance, the discovery strongly suggested that it was a fake that was planted in order to implicate Libya. According to the published memoir of the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, his opposite number in the Swiss police also suspected the fragment was a plant.  The thought even occurred to Marquise and the Scottish police’s senior investigating officer, Stuart Henderson.

Why, then, have the Scottish police and Crown Office failed to approach the witnesses who can attest to the mismatch between the fragment and the Libyan timers – witnesses who include the man who made the boards used in the those timers, and two independent scientists? The obvious answer is that they want to avoid evidence that shows the official case to be built on sand.

John Ashton, who worked as a defense investigator on the Pan Am 103 case, is the author of Scotland’s Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters.

The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103: Case closed?

[This is the headline over an article by William Blum published yesterday on the Foreign Policy Journal website.  It reads as follows:]

When the 25th anniversary of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 occurred on December 21, I was fully expecting the usual repetitions of the false accusation against Libya and Moammar Gaddafi as being responsible for the act, which took the lives of 270 people over and in Lockerbie, Scotland. But much to my surprise, mingled with such, there were a rash of comments skeptical of the official British-US version, made by various people in Scotland and elsewhere, including by the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Libya.

In a joint statement the three governments said they were determined to unearth the truth behind the attack. “We want all those responsible for this brutal act of terrorism brought to justice, and to understand why it was committed”, they declared.[1]

Remarkable. In 1991, the United States indicted a Libyan named Adelbaset al-Megrahi. He was eventually found guilty of being the sole perpetrator of the crime, kept in prison for many years, and finally released in 2009 when he had terminal cancer, allegedly for humanitarian reasons, although an acute smell of oil could be detected. And now they speak of bringing to justice “those responsible for this brutal act of terrorism”.

The 1988 crime was actually organized by Iran in retaliation for the American shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of 290 people. It was carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a 1968 breakaway from a component of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with some help from Syria. And this version was very widely accepted in the Western world, in government and media circles—until the US buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed. Then, suddenly, we were told that it was Libya behind the crime.

If the US and UK now wish to return to Iran, and perhaps Syria, as the culprits, they will have a lot of explaining to do about their previous lie. But these two governments always have a lot of explaining to do. They’re good at it. And the great bulk of their indoctrinated citizens, with little resistance, will accept the new/old party line, and their mainstream media will effortlessly switch back to the old/new official version, since Iran and Syria are at the top of the current list of Bad Guys. (The PFLP-GC has been quiescent for some time and may scarcely exist.)

If you’re confused by all this, I suggest that you start by reading my detailed article on the history of this case, written in 2001 but still very informative and relevant. You may be rather surprised.

The UK, US, and Libyan governments have now announced that they will co-operate to reveal “the full facts” of the Lockerbie bombing. And Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI, said he believes more people will be charged. This could be very interesting.

Note

1. Reuters news agency, December 22, 2013