FBI document shows Lockerbie case flaws

[This is the headline over a report that appeared on the website of The Independent on this date in 1995 and in the print edition of the newspaper the following day. It reads as follows:]

The case against two alleged Libyan bombers is ‘crumbling to dust’ John Arlidge reports

A secret FBI document has demolished a key part of the case against the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing. The internal US Government document was leaked to The Independent on the eve of a House of Commons debate on claims that Iran, not Libya, ordered the terrorist attack.

The five-page official briefing paper, marked "Director FBI/Priority", reveals that vital prosecution evidence that the airline bomb began its fatal journey in Malta is flawed. Its release, which follows the disclosure last week that American intelligence sources blamed Iran, not Libya, for the terrorist attack, will increase the pressure on investigating authorities to re-open the case against Tehran.

In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP, will call on the Government to establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate Iranian links with the atrocity. He will also urge Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, to approve a trial of the Libyan suspects in an international court.

The FBI paper challenges prosecution evidence that the bomb, which destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988 and killed 270 people, was loaded on to the aircraft in Frankfurt after arriving in Germany on a flight from Malta.

During the Lockerbie investigation, detectives from Britain, the United States and Germany examined computer records at Frankfurt airport which, they said, revealed that an unaccompanied suitcase, thought to have contained the bomb, arrived on 21 December on Air Malta Flight KM 180 before being transferred on to Flight 103. The evidence led Britain and the US to charge two Libyan Arab Airlines employees who worked in Malta, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, with putting the suitcase on Flight KM 180.

The Frankfurt airport baggage records are vital to the prosecution case because they provide the only direct link between Malta and Germany and, therefore, between the suspects and the unaccompanied bag.

But the FBI briefing paper discloses that there is no documentary evidence that the suitcase was on Flight KM 180. The only link with the Maltese flight was that some transfer baggage from KM 180 had been unloaded at the luggage processing point where the suitcase was first sighted. It says: "There is no concrete indication that any piece of luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180, sent through the luggage routing system at Frankfurt airport, and then loaded on board Pan Am 103."

The document says the baggage records are "misleading" and that the bomb suitcase could have come from another flight or was simply a "rogue bag inserted into the system".

Last week, BBC Radio's File on Four and The Independent revealed that vital prosecution eye-witness evidence from a Maltese shop-owner, which links one of the Libyan suspects to the bomb bag, was unreliable.

Lawyers for the pair said yesterday that the latest revelations, coupled with the American intelligence leak, called into question the prosecution case. One solicitor said: "The eye-witness statements in Malta and the documentary evidence from Frankfurt are absolutely crucial to the case against the two accused. We know that the eye-witness evidence is flawed. We now also know that the same is true of the documentary evidence. This case is crumbling to dust - raising fundamental questions as to why it was brought in the first place."

Fhimah, 38, and Al-Megrahi, 42, who deny the charges against them, have refused to surrender for trial in the UK or the US, but have offered to go to court in the Netherlands. The Government has rejected the offer.

Lockerbie: A Sour Pill for Libya

[This is the headline over an article by Ashur Shamis originally published on the BBC News website on this date in 2002 and reproduced on the libya-watanona.com website. It reads as follows:]

The official Libyan media is paying only cursory attention to the Lockerbie appeal currently being heard at camp Zeist.

At best reports on the appeal come fourth on the news bulletins.

Considering how outspoken he has been in the past about Lockerbie, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's current silence is startling.

This could be because the regime is not confident of a favourable outcome in the appeal against the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

Libya is hoping to draw the whole Lockerbie affair to a close. Tripoli is reported to have offered to pay billions of dollars in compensation to the families of the victims of the bombing, in return for closure on the issue.

United States and British officials, reported to be negotiating a settlement with representatives of the Libyan regime, are said to be pressing Libya for a settlement before the appeal is concluded.

Whichever way the appeal goes, Libya stands to lose financially and politically, or both.

'Ordinary Libyans powerless'

Like the government, most Libyans just want to see the Lockerbie affair concluded.

Libyans are well accustomed to the whimsical changes of direction of their leader, and to being powerless in the face of this whimsy.

Most Libyans are more likely to complain about the hardship of the dry season and traffic chaos in the cities.

Colonel Gaddafi's supporters still insist he is the arch-enemy of American imperialism and international Zionism.

However, most Libyans sympathise with al-Megrahi and his family, seeing them as hapless victims of a regime, which, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, adopted terrorism as a state policy.

The bombing of the Pan Am and French UTA flights, and the bombing of a Berlin discotheque - all acts in which the Gaddafi regime is at least implicated - are widely seen as elements of the Libyan leader's past coming back to haunt him.

But Libyans do worry about the billions of dollars their country will have to pay out in compensation.

Eventually, it is they who will end up suffering lower currency exchanged rates, reduced government salaries, higher prices and taxes, and run-down public services.

'Premature claims of victory'

Back in 1998, when Mr Gaddafi declared that he was ready to hand over the two Libyans suspected of the Lockerbie bombing for trial in the Netherlands, he sounded triumphant.

It took the Libyan leader eight years to reach this point - a period during which Libya came under an international air embargo and punitive US economic sanctions.

The country's economy was set back 10 years, its infrastructure deteriorated, and it became more and more isolated internationally.

When he finally did hand over the suspects in 1999, Colonel Gaddafi claimed credit domestically for defying the US by not handing over al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah for eight years, and he claimed credit internationally for allowing a trial to proceed by handing them over.

Deal struck?

Reports persist that a deal was struck with Colonel Gaddafi, though Western officials deny this.

It is said that he handed over the two Lockerbie suspects on condition that no other Libyan officials, including himself, would be dragged into the investigation or the trial.

At the time, the Libyan media hailed the outcome a victory and praised the virtues of the Scottish judiciary.

However, not only did the Lockerbie trial deliver an unexpected verdict in January 2001, but it also dragged out the conclusion of the affair.

One of the defendants was acquitted while al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence operative in Malta, was convicted of committing the atrocity and sentenced to life imprisonment.

'Ambiguous verdict'

This verdict gave everyone some cause for celebration. The families of the victims and the US and UK governments saw some form of justice being done.

However, the three Scottish judges freely admitted to "uncertainties and qualifications" in the evidence brought before them.

But, having considered the evidence as a whole, they decided it formed a convincing pattern, leaving them with no "reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused".

This ambiguity in the judgement allowed Libya to argue that al-Megrahi was a "political hostage" and a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The air travel embargo was lifted, but Libya continues to languish under damaging American trade sanctions.

The victory claimed by Colonel Gaddafi in 1999 is now looking very hollow indeed.

Lockerbie and the claims of Magnus Linklater

[On 6 January 2016 an article by Magnus Linklater headlined We can be confident that the Scottish prosecutors got the right man appeared in the Scottish Review. On 23 January John Ashton responded to that article on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website. In The Cafe section of today’s issue of the Scottish Review John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr reply as follows to the Linklater article:]

Magnus Linklater’s article on the Lockerbie case 'We can be confident that the Scottish prosecutors got the right man’ (6 January) makes a number of inaccurate claims, including the suggestion that, when writing the biography of the alleged bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, I deliberately suppressed evidence that was unfavourable to Mr Megrahi.

This was that on the morning of the bombing, and on a couple of occasions prior, he shared a flight with Libyan Abouagela Masud, who was alleged by a Libyan witness to be the bomb-maker responsible for the La Belle night club bombing in Berlin in 1986. This particular flight was from Malta, which the prosecution alleged was the launchpad for the bomb.

The book examined the evidence used to convict Mr Megrahi. Like the Scottish Police and prosecutors, I was unaware of Mr Masud’s alleged connection to La Belle until told of it by filmmaker Ken Dornstein well over three years after completing that book. Mr Linklater could easily have checked this with me before defaming me, but chose not to. How, I wonder, could I have suppressed something of which I had no knowledge? My book did not dodge the fact that Mr Megrahi was connected to some unsavoury characters within the Gaddafi regime, including the alleged mastermind of La Belle and Said Rashid, yet Mr Linklater fails to mention this, preferring instead to accuse me of burying inconvenient truths.

As anyone who has followed the Megrahi case knows, it is the Crown that suppressed important evidence – lots of it – all of which was helpful to Mr Megrahi. On this scandal Mr Linklater has consistently remained mute.

He also suggests that my claim that Megrahi suffered a miscarriage of justice is based on speculation, rather than hard evidence. Had he read my book properly, he would see that all of its key claims are founded on hard evidence, the bulk of which was from the Crown’s own files. The same goes for Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, which he breezily dismisses, without naming it, as having 'no concrete evidence’ to back it up.

He implies that I believe Mr Megrahi was the victim of a giant conspiracy in which judges and lawyers knowingly participated in a miscarriage of justice. As I have repeatedly made clear, including to Mr Linklater, I hold no such belief. If there was a conspiracy to frame Mr Megrahi – a big if, but by no means impossible – I don’t believe it would have involved the knowing participation of the Scottish criminal justice system.

Mr Linklater tells us: 'I like the famous Sherlock Holmes quote: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth"', yet applies it selectively. Hard evidence that has emerged since Mr Megrahi was convicted demonstrates the impossibility of the main planks of the prosecution case: that Mr Megrahi bought the clothes for the bomb suitcase from a Maltese shop a fortnight before the attack; that the fragment of bomb timer found at Lockerbie matched timers supplied to Libya by Swiss firm Mebo; and that the bomb began its journey In Malta. In contrast, the only evidence to support the conviction in 15 years is that concerning Abouagela Masud.

Two years ago I wrote an open letter to Mr Linklater, which posed a number of questions. He promised to reply, but never did. Maybe he would like to in the Scottish Review – he has had plenty of time to think of answers.

John Ashton

I’m getting more than slightly tired of Magnus Linklater’s repeated attacks on me and my Lockerbie book (Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, Matador 2013). He uses his entrée as a journalist to disparage and dismiss my work over multiple platforms, without at any point addressing the substance of what I have written. His latest sally is perhaps the weakest to date: '...suggestions that Heathrow Airport was where the bomb was loaded again have no concrete evidence to back them; an entire book has been written on the Heathrow connection, but nothing has emerged to give it the kind of validity which would stand up in court'. (In a supreme discourtesy he doesn’t even cite my book by name to allow readers to access it and judge for themselves.)

My book is stuffed to the eyeballs with concrete evidence that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow. I have repeatedly begged proponents of Megrahi’s guilt to explain to me in what way I am mistaken or what inferences I have missed that might admit of any plausible scenario whatsoever whereby the bomb suitcase might have flown in on the feeder flight. Nobody has answered me. I have specifically begged Mr Linklater in person to address this point, but he has ignored me in favour of yet another sally in the press denouncing 'conspiracy theorists'.

He repeatedly states that no evidence has emerged that would stand up in court. I am quite certain that the analysis I present would stand up in court, as would other evidence being highlighted by other interested parties. The problem is that it has not come before any court. Attempts to bring it to court have been mounted and indeed are ongoing, but so far these have been thwarted by procedural obstacles.

It is not enough simply to hand-wave away a detailed, evidence-based and non-conspiratorial dissection of the Lockerbie evidence with vague platitudes about 'nothing has emerged to give it ... validity'. What does he expect to emerge, from where and from whom, before he will do me the courtesy of actually addressing the substance of my thesis? One might imagine that it would be of some interest to a journalist who repeatedly invokes the name of the respected Sunday Times Insight series, but apparently not.

If, as I contend, detailed and logical analysis of the evidence gathered at Lockerbie (with no allegations of fabrication, substitution, evidence-planting, corruption, conspiracy or deliberate malpractice) demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, not Malta, this flips the entire 'was Megrahi guilty?' conundrum on its head. Rather than placing him at the scene of the crime, it provides him with a rock-solid alibi.

Ken Dornstein’s work, which impresses Mr Linklater so profoundly, relies absolutely and fundamentally on the unexamined assumption that the Lockerbie bomb was introduced at Malta. If it wasn’t, then he might as well produce eye-witness evidence that Elvis was checking in for a flight at Luqa airport that morning for all the relevance it would have. It doesn’t matter if Megrahi knew, or travelled with, or was related to any number of rank bad guys implicated in unrelated atrocities – if the scene of the crime that day was a thousand miles away, he didn’t do it. Worse still, the entire multi-million-pound Lockerbie investigation was up a gum tree from its earliest weeks, and due to its failure to investigate the real scene of the crime we simply have no idea who carried out the atrocity.

I challenge Mr Linklater to put up or shut up. To explain in detail where he thinks the mistakes or omissions are in my analysis that invalidate my conclusion that the bomb suitcase was already in the container an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed, or to refrain from disparaging my work and myself in print.

Morag Kerr

Treats for testimony

[On this date in 2002 the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday published a long report on the “treats” provided to the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci in connection with his evidence at the Lockerbie trial. That report is no longer available online, but the story was immediately followed up by other news media. What follows is the text of the article that appeared in The Guardian:]

An investigation has been demanded following a claim that a witness in the Lockerbie trial enjoyed police hospitality in Scotland.

Evidence given by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopowner, helped to convict the Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. It is alleged that Mr Gauci was brought to Scotland five or six times, taken salmon fishing and hill walking, and put up in an expensive hotel.

He is also said to have been taken to Lockerbie, to see where the wreckage of the bombed Pan Am airliner landed in 1988, before last year's trial got under way.

Yesterday the Labour MP Tam Dalyell said he would raise the issue as a matter of urgency with the prime minister and foreign secretary.

The claim comes days after the start of al-Megrahi's appeal. Last January the Libyan former intelligence officer was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the bombing, which killed 259 on flight 103 and 11 on the ground.

Last week his legal team said a rebuttal of Mr Gauci's evidence would form a plank of its case.

Mr Gauci was the sole witness to link al-Megrahi directly to the bombing of Pan Am 103. He told the trial that al-Megrahi "resembled a lot" a man who bought clothes from Mr Gauci's shop that were later discovered to have been packed around the bomb.

Yesterday the Scottish Mail on Sunday reported that an undercover investigator had travelled to Malta and secretly taped conversations with Mr Gauci, owner of Mary's House clothes shop in Sliema.

Mr Gauci claimed that police had flown him to Scotland on five or six occasions, and taken him to Lockerbie to be shown the damage. He also claimed that the hospitality of the Scottish police had been extended to four others in his family.

He talked in the tape of being taken into the mountains, visiting Aviemore ski resort, fly-fishing for salmon, and bird-watching. On at least one occasion he stayed at the Hilton in Glasgow.

Dumfries and Galloway police and Strathclyde police refused to discuss the claim yesterday, saying only they could not comment on issues concerning witness protection.

Mr Dalyell said that the reports, if true, would have profound implications for al-Megrahi's appeal. "If Gauci was brought to Scotland before the trial at Zeist, why were the defence and the judges not told? If Gauci came after the trial, what is the purpose of the ongoing relationship?"

Robert Black, professor of law at Edinburgh University, said that Mr Gauci's trips needed to be investigated during al-Megrahi's appeal, adding that he knew of no other Scottish murder trial witness being taken on fishing trips by police.

Megrahi judgment 'full of mistakes'

[This is the headline over a report published in The Herald on this date in 2002. It reads as follows:]

The 82-page judgment that convicted Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi of the Lockerbie bombing is riddled with errors both great and small, the Libyan's counsel claimed yesterday.

William Taylor, QC, told five appeal judges at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands: ''Some of these errors are by themselves gross enough to entitle this court to hold that a miscarriage of justice has occurred.''

Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield, and MacLean jailed Megrahi for life last January after concluding that the evidence against him fitted together to form a ''real and convincing pattern'', but yesterday Mr Taylor used words such as ''flimsy'' and ''unbalanced'' to attack the judges' reasoning.

He accepted that one simple error might not have the effect of causing the appeal court to accept that a miscarriage of justice had taken place, but the combination of a series of errors could persuade the judges there had been a wrongful conviction.

He concentrated his attack yesterday on the way the trial judges dealt with the evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper whose testimony was instrumental in convicting Megrahi.

The judges decided Megrahi was the man who bought clothes from Mr Gauci's shop in Sliema on December 7, 1988, two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing, and Mr Taylor argued that the date of purchase was crucial to his client's conviction.

He has already told the appeal judges that unless the sale of the clothes - later packed in the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb - could be pinpointed to December 7 the purchaser could not have been Megrahi.

One of the factors used by the trial judges to pick December 7 as the purchase date was Mr Gauci's evidence about whether Christmas decorations were up in Sliema at the time the clothes were bought from his shop.

Asked about Christmas decorations at the trial, Mr Gauci replied: ''I wouldn't know exactly, but I haven't really noticed these things, but I remember, yes there were Christmas lights. They were on already. I'm sure. I can't say exactly.''

Mr Taylor told the appeal court: ''Gauci gave conflicting evidence in the trial about whether or not Christmas decorations were up or in the process of being up. In a statement to the police he had said that no Christmas decorations were up at the time of the sale.

''There are therefore three self-contradictory positions adopted by Gauci on the matter and the court has ignored the difficulty that Gauci told police in September 1989 that there were no decorations up at the time of the sale.

''It is surprising that the court felt able to reach any conclusion at all on the issue of being able to fix the date of purchase by reference to Christmas decorations.

''The court has preferred one version of Gauci's evidence over others in relation to whether decorations were being put up and has ignored an important contradiction in his evidence in order to reach a conclusion.

''The court attempted to reach a conclusion in the face of contradictory evidence which the court failed to explain away. This was a material misdirection adverse to Megrahi.

''It was at the forefront of the defence submissions that Gauci's reliability was undermined by inconsistencies in his evidence. It is Megrahi's contention that the court misdirected itself as to the date on which the purchase (of the clothes) took place.''

Mr Taylor also attacked the court's finding that Mr Gauci's ''qualified identification'' of Megrahi as the clothes buyer was reliable ''so far as it went''.

He pointed out that descriptions of the buyer given by Mr Gauci to the police less than a year after Lockerbie were ''radically different'' in terms of height, age, and skin colour from his later identification in court and at an identification parade at Camp Zeist in 1999 of Megrahi as resembling the purchaser.

He attacked Mr Gauci's identification of Megrahi as ''inherently suspect and flawed''.   

The hearing continues.

A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge

[On 11 January 2016 I blogged on an article entitled A look at Lockerbie: Iran Air Flight 655 that was billed as the first in a projected series. The second article has today been published on the libcom.org website. It is entitled A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge and reads in part:]

In order to determine beyond a reasonable doubt who was responsible for the Lockerbie crime, one must first understand the crucial pieces of evidence that the case hinges on. First of all, forensics experts have identified that the bomb which blew up Pan Am 103 was concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player packed in a brown hard-shell Samsonite suitcase. Another important point was that the bomb was triggered by a barometric timer, meaning that it was specially designed to only be triggered at a high altitude where the change in air pressure could activate the device. And maybe most importantly of all, it has been proven that a tweed jacket, a green umbrella, and a jumper with the brand name Baby Gro were all packed in the suitcase that contained the bomb.1,2,3

The key pieces of evidence are well established, but what about the motive and intent?

I discussed in my last blog post the criminal attack on Iran Air 655, and the Western media's characterization of those responsible as heroes. In response to this the Iranian leadership promised vengeance. "We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished," Tehran radio announced, "We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries."4 As Robert Bauer, former member of the CIA investigation into Lockerbie, put it, "They thought that if we didn't retaliate against the United States we would continue to shoot down their airliners." Abulkasim Misbahi, a high level Iranian defector who in 1988 was reporting directly to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, would later recall that, "The Iranians decided to retaliate as soon as possible...the target was to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian airbus."5

In order to accomplish this goal the Iranians turned to Ahmed Jibril, a man whose organization was well known for bombing airplanes. Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) was well known for two airplane bombings that took place on the same day in 1970. The first bomb detonated aboard Swiss Air flight 330 bound for Israel. The bomb forced a crash landing in which all 47 of those aboard were killed. The second bomb which exploded later in the day on an Austrian Airlines flight also bound for Israel detonated successfully, but an emergency landing avoided any loss of life. The bombs were notable not only for the tragedy and terror which they inflicted, but also for the fact that they were the first barometric bombs ever used. In addition to the notable use of barometric triggers, the bombs were also both concealed within transistor radios.6

The Iranians turned to Jibril, not only because of his proven abilities as a plane bomber, but also because the PFLP-GC was an organization with close ties to Iran's strong Shia ally, Syria. After being contacted, Jibril put the Iranians in touch with a PFLP-GC member Hafez Dalkamouni who was based in Frankfurt.

Unbeknownst to Jibril and Dalkamouni, the West German police were already suspicious of Dalkamouni and were watching him day and night at his apartment in Frankfurt at 16 Isarstrasse. In October of 1988, the West German police started to notice some highly suspicious activity taking place at the apartment. On October 13th, West German police watched as Marwan Kreeshat arrived at Dalkamouni's apartment. The wife of one of Dalkamouni's accomplices would later testify that Kreeshat was carrying a brown Samsonite suitcase. The next day police listened in as Dalkamouni and Kreeshat called a number in Damascus and Dalkamouni was recorded as saying that soon "everything will be ready." Kreeshat then took the phone and said that he had "made some changes in the medicine," and that it was "better and stronger than before."7 A week later Dalkamouni and Kreeshat went shopping. While shopping they purchased three mechanical alarm clocks, a digital clock, sixteen 1.5-volt batteries and some switches, screws, and glue. A police internal memo made that day noted, "the purchase of the materials under the clear supervision of a PFLP-GC member designated as an explosives expert leads to the conclusion that the participants intend to produce an explosive device which, on the basis of the telephone taps, would be operational within the next few days."8 Fearing an imminent attack, on October 26th West German security services launched Operation Autumn Leaves, intended to round up Dalkamouni and his Frankfurt cell. The police followed Dalkamouni and Kreeshat as they drove in a silver green Ford Taurus and stopped to make a call at a public telephone booth. There the police apprehended them and searched their car, inside they found a Toshiba radio cassette player hidden under a blanket. In Dalkamouni's apartment police found a stopwatch, batteries, a detonator, and both time-delay and barometric fuses. On October 29th, police took a closer look at the Toshiba and discovered 300 grams of Semtex sheet explosive shaped into a cylinder wrapped with aluminum foil with a barometric timer. 9,10 While in custody, Kreeshat revealed that he was actually in the employ of Jordanian intelligence, and that he had made a total of 5 bombs including the one found in the Toshiba cassette player. 11,12 So what of the other 4 bombs?

The fate of three of the four bombs would be revealed in an explosion in April of 1989. At this time West German police had reopened the Dalkamouni case and visited the basement of a grocery store owner who was friends with Dalkamouni at the time of his arrest. In the basement police found two radios that fit the description of the bombs that Marwan Kreeshat had claimed he had made for Dalkamouni. The officers brought the suitcases back to their headquarters and left them lying around for a few days. Eventually a technician was ordered to inspect them 4 days later. Soon after he began inspection they began ticking. He quickly ran the suitcases through an x-ray machine and saw that they looked suspicious. Two explosives experts were called in, and while they were working on opening the suitcases the bomb was triggered killing one and severely injuring the other. German police went in force back to the grocery store basement and uncovered 400 grams of plastic Semtex explosive and a detonator wired to a barometer.13

So that explained four of the five bombs, but what of the fifth?

Flashback to October of 1988, while the West German police were watching Dalkamouni's apartment at 16 Isarstrasse. On October 14th, a man named Martin Imandi visited and parked a car with a Swedish license plate outside Dalkamouni's apartment. Imandi and two others were then seen carrying packages and suitcases in and out of Dalkamouni's apartment. The three men returned to Sweden where they and a fourth person by the name of Mohammed Abu Talb had their headquarters in Stockholm. Abu Talb, whose nom de guerre was Intiqam, roughly translated as "man who takes revenge," was a seasoned fighter. He had served in the Egyptian army, had undergone multiple training programs in the Soviet Union, and had served with the PLO in Lebanon. arrested soon after by the Swedish police.

Soon after returning to Stockholm, the West German police tipped off the Swedish police about the danger the four men posed, but by the time of their arrest, Abu Talb and the rest of the Swedish group had hidden any incriminating evidence and were soon released from police custody for lack of evidence. A Swedish police investigation in 1989 would later uncover a plane ticket in Abu Talb's apartment that showed that after his release in 1988, Abu Talb flew to Malta on November 19th. It was in Malta that he stopped to purchase a jumper, a tweed jacket, and an umbrella at a store called Mary's House.14,15

Unfortunately for Abu Talb his purchases had not gone unnoticed. After the bombing it would be deduced from the unusual brand name of the jumper that it had been purchased at Mary's House. When questioned in April of 1989, the store owner, Tony Gauci, remembered Abu Talb's purchases very clearly as Abu Talb had purchased a tweed jacket that Gauci had been trying to sell for 7 years. Gauci provided to police at the time a perfect description of Abu Talb despite it not being common knowledge that he was a suspect.16 [Emerson, 245] Gauci then repeatedly picked Abu Talb's picture out of a photo lineup (before being coaxed and pressured into picking a man named al-Megrahi as I will discuss more in my next post).17 Abu Talb then returned with the clothes to Sweden on November 26th.

From what can be pieced together the story picks back up in London at Heathrow airport, at 2pm on December 21st, 1988. It was at this time that a baggage handler named John Bedford and two other workers began loading luggage for Pan Am flight 103. The flight was scheduled to take off at 6pm and was destined for New York's JFK airport. Bedford began loading the luggage of transfer passengers upright into a large metallic container. At about a quarter after four as things began to slow he took a tea break. When he came back 30 minutes later his partner, Sulkash Kamboj, informed him that he had put two more suitcases into the container during his absence. Bedford looked into the container and saw two suitcases lying flat, not upright. "In a statement given to the police on 9th January 1989 he was able to describe it--'a brown hard-shell, the kind Samsonite make.'" This statement was made just three weeks after the bombing, at which time there was no indication that a brown Samsonite was the bomb suitcase.18
At 7:02pm, 38 minutes after take off, at an altitude of 31,000 feet, the bomb went off in the Samsonite creating a hole in the plane which caused it to disintegrate. Those on board were sucked out of the plane where they fell to their deaths, some still strapped in their seats. All 259 people aboard were killed, and falling wreckage killed an additional 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

• 1. Lockerbie: What Really Happened? Al Jazeera English (AJE), 2014. Web.
• 2. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 3. Kerr, Morag G. Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. Print.
• 4. Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Print.
• 5. AJE.
• 6. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 7. Emerson, 130
• 8. Emerson, 130
• 9. Emerson, 168-169
• 10. AJE
• 11. Wines, Michael. "Portrait of Pan Am Suspect: Affable Exile, Fiery Avenger." The New York Times. The New York Times, 1989.
• 12. Emerson
• 13. Emerson, 208
• 14. Wines, NYT
• 15. Emerson, 249
• 16. Emerson, 223
• 17. Kerr, 241-262 18. Kerr, 89-90