An easy target required as some kind of scapegoat

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Kill 290 innocents: Get an award for bravery posted today on Peter Biddulph and Dr Jim Swire’s Lockerbie Truth blog:]

How do you kill 290 innocent people: men, women, including 66 children?

And how do you get a medal for bravery in action against America's imagined enemies?

July 1988.  This is how you do it.  See the maps, the paranoia, the stupidity. America called it an unfortunate mistake. Yet they gave the captain a medal for bravery in action against an enemy.

This was the reason for the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 290 innocent people.  At least, that's what CIA classified reports said for almost two years.

After that, America needed Syrian and Iranian support in the 1991 Gulf war. So an easy target was required as some kind of scapegoat. Those CIA reports were quietly shelved, and in November 1991, out of the blue, came evidence against Libya. (...)

The waiting game of Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article that appeared in the Melbourne newspaper The Age on this date in 1999. The following are excerpts:]

The Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands will be neither brisk nor easy for lawyers or the accused, writes Sonia Harford.

The accused wear their own clothes and receive visitors. Part of the bustle in and out of the camp gates is catering staff who provide meals in strict accordance with the Libyans' Muslim requirements. A prayer room has also been provided with a compass indicating the direction of Mecca.

Up the road in Soesterberg proper, the Dutch locals are characteristically phlegmatic. They notice and quite enjoy the barrage of media passing through, but become more enthusiastic when remarking on how the presence of the Scots will boost local business.

The Americans abandoned Camp Zeist four years ago, and with them went many guilders spent in the town on food and other supplies. "The Americans bought lots of fruit," said Toft the Groenteman (vegetableman) from his fruit and , vegetable shop in Rademakerstraat. "When they were here, everyone from the petrol station to McDonald's benefited."

Bartender Rob Westra, having an off-duty beer at the Het Wapen van Soesterberg bar, had a different form of self-interest. "You have to be careful with the drinking now, because the whole village is full of police."

About 100 Scottish prison service staff and police are assigned to guard the camp at any given time, housed in dormitories inside the gates. When the trial begins, the converted buildings will also house legal teams and witnesses.

Anyone expecting an air of menace at the prison compound will be disarmed by the site's tranquility. Local residents walk or cycle past, just metres from the camp gates. And, nearby, visitors continue to arrive at the aviation museum, a popular collection of old planes and jets dotted around the flat ground.

Depending on their cell's location, it's not impossible that the two Libyan suspects could hear the chatter and laughter of children playing outside the prison grounds.

The detention of the two men comes after a decade of US and British legal and diplomatic manoeuvering to force Libya to hand over the suspects for trial before a Scottish court.

In 1991, Britain and the US said investigations into the crash had unearthed evidence that pointed towards Tripoli. But Libya's President, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, refused to surrender the prime suspects, claiming they would not receive a fair trial outside Libya, frustrating the US and British authorities and the hopes of the victims' families.

The Netherlands is regarded as having sound experience, having hosted the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Gaddafi continued to delay, and, in February, the US laid down a deadline, demanding the suspects surrender within a month. By March, Gaddafi finally agreed. The two men would be handed over.

The men are described as airline officials for Libyan Arab Airlines, but are believed to be intelligence agents. Both have denied the charges. It has been alleged that a more senior agent, perhaps even Gaddafi, was behind the bombing, but he has denied any involvement.

The surrender has long been sought by the British, and the week's Government statements had a subtle air of triumph. "There can be no question of prejudging the outcome, but the very fact that the trial will now take place represents real and significant progress," said the Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar.

Immediately after the suspects' arrival at the renamed HM Prison Zeist, the UN suspended its sanctions against Libya, leading this week to speculation that European oil companies, sensing an oil boom, will soon renew investment links with the country. However, Washington is expected to continue sanctions it imposed independently in the '80s when terrorist incidents forced Americans to leave Libya.

A Scottish Office spokeswoman said the level of international cooperation at Camp Zeist was unprecedented. "Never before has there been a Scottish trial taking place on foreign ground," she said. It was also likely to be the longest and most expensive Scottish trial ever.

In the week that Scotland began an historic election campaign for its own Parliament, the legal procedures begun at Camp Zeist also came under scrutiny. The Lockerbie bombing trial will be heard by a panel of three Scottish judges no jury, as it is believed to be almost impossible to find Scottish residents not prejudiced by reporting of the Lockerbie bombing. Most observers believe the trial could be a long process for the legal teams and the victims' families, and could last up to a year.

Scottish law requires that those charged with murder must be tried within 110 days, but it is widely believed in the Lockerbje case that the defence , lawyers will ask for an extension to examine investigations going back over 10 years.

If convicted, the men will serve their sentences at the high-security Barlinnie Jail in Glasgow, monitored by UN observers. The trial is not expected to begin for several months. For now, the prisoners are on remand.

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, 46, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 42, were this week handed over to Dutch authorities and charged with mutder and conspiracy in connection with the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Their arrest marks the culmination of years of intense international efforts to bring the men" to trial.

The two are accused of planting a bomb, concealed in a cassette recorder, that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York on 21 December, 1988, killing 270 people on board the plane and on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

On Monday, the two Libyan suspects left Tripoli seven years after they were indicted by Britain and the US. The next day they made their first appearance before a Scottish sheriff, Graham Cox QC, in a makeshift courtroom in the Netherlands. Officials read out the warrants for their arrest in English and Arabic and, in a brief hearing, the suspects made no plea.

As the Libyans settle in, their arrival focuses world attention on Soesterberg, a quiet Dutch town outside the city of Utrecht. Under an extraordinary, UN-brokered diplomatic deal, the Netherlands has ceded a small patch of its territory to Scotland for the term of the trial to satisfy Libya's demands that the charges be heard in a neutral country.

In a matter of months, Camp Zeist, a former US air base, has been refitted to provide a secure prison and courtroom under Scottish jurisdiction. As a result, Scottish prison staff and Dutch police share guard duties at the camp's front gate, beyond which lie 40 hectares deemed to be Scottish soil.

In the past week, residents of Soesterberg have become accustomed to a large media pack descending on their community, and police and military vehicles making regular convoys through their homely streets. Camp Zeist is reached at the end of a long, straight road lined with quaint brown cottages. Over a freeway bridge, on a grassed heath, the former base is a surprisingly pleasant place ("not when it rains" mutters a Scottish guard), ringed by forest and trees blossoming in the European spring.

The two-metre front gates, covered in plastic, appear hastily erected at what is regarded as a temporary facility, which is surrounded by a long perimeter fence. The front gates swing open regularly as armed police, and catering staff enter the camp.  

In 1992 the United Nations tried to force Libya's hand by imposing sanctions, banning air travel to and from Libya, and prohibiting trade in equipment used in the nation's vital oil industry. Intense international pressure followed, including the tireless efforts of one victim's father, Jim Swire, who represented the other families, and whose patient, lined face became a moving symbol of their struggle for justice.

Last year, after South Africa's President Nelson Mandela had helped mediate, Britain made some headway in bringing the suspects to trial. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook suggested the Netherlands as an impartial third party.

A classic mix of incompetence ... and deviousness

[What follows is the text of an article about Iran Air flight 655 that appeared on The Trusty Servant website on this date in 2014 (maps and graphics omitted):]

It was an Airbus A300 on a flight from Tehran to Dubai shot down by USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988 using guided missiles. All 290 people on board (16 crew, 274 passengers, including 66 children) were killed.

It was a classic mix of incompetence leading to the accident, and deviousness in trying, and eventually failing, to cover up what actually happened.

At first sight the shooting was hard to believe. The flight had a stop-over at Bandar Abbas. It took off normally from there at UTC 06:47, 27 minutes late. It flew normally down the commercial air corridor Amber 59, a 20-mile wide direct route to Dubai airport. It followed the normal flight plan of climbing steadily, aiming to reach 14,000 ft, then cruise briefly, then descend to Dubai. Its transponder was broadcasting the regular civilian code (“Mode III”, easily distinguishable from the military “Mode II”). When it reached 10 miles from the Vincennes still climbing, it was shot down on the basis that it must be an Iranian F-14 descending on its final attack run.

The Vincennes was at lat 26.513056N, long 56.015833W, 10.8 miles from the nearest point of the Iranian coast (the little island of Hengam, just south of Qeshm), inside Iranian territorial waters, and was in the process of attacking small Iranian gunboats which it had lured out with a decoy “Liberian ship” the Stoval. It was neither a ship, nor Liberian, but essentially just a transmitter to fool the Iranians into coming into range of the Vincennes’ helicopters and various other US ships that were in the area.

Indeed it turned out that the US had been engaged in a secret naval war in the Gulf for some while, a war for which it did not wish to seek authorisation under the War Powers Act.

The Vincennes had all the latest kit, known as Aegis.

This was a complex computer system linked into umpteen radars, intelligence feeds and other systems, designed to allow the ship to engage up to a hundred air or surface threats simultaneously.

It performed flawlessly.

The snag was apparently that the crew did not believe the information it was giving them. They expected the plane to be a hostile Iranian plane rushing to defend the gunboats, so that is what they managed to see.

There was also a classic time-zone mix-up. The ships clocks were on UTC + 4hrs, whereas Bandar Abbas was on UTC +3.5 hrs. So although the crew knew all about the IA655, they knew it could not be the plane on the radar, because the timing was wrong.

But part of the problem was that the Vincennes had too much information. All kinds of people were intercepting, real-time, the communications between IA655 and the Bandar Abbas control tower: GCHQ and NSA (with listening stations in Oman, including Goat Island), an AWACS plane (a Grumman E2-Hawkeye) above the Gulf.

All this information may not have been much help to the captain of the Vincennes faced with only a few minutes to make a decision as the plane closed on his position at about 6.5 miles/minute. Having said that, I am not inclined to be particularly sympathetic. There was precisely one scheduled flight out of Bandar Abbas that morning, IR 655, due to depart at 09:50 local time = 06:20 UTC. It was flying direct to Dubai, which would take it directly over the Vincennes. Clearly, avoiding downing that flight was a priority.

But the information was certainly a problem afterwards. Aegis provided a flawless audit trail. It showed that the crew had imagined things when they thought the flight was descending. It did nothing but ascend. There followed a lengthy period of giving out a mixture of flat untruths and heavily redacted truths, but the truth did emerge several years later.

Full details, and amusingly commented original documents etc, are available on Charles Harwood’s site.

Rewriting history

I have detected a recent trend among American political commentators to describe President Ronald Reagan’s bombing raid on Tripoli and Benghazi as retaliation for the attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. The most recent example is this sentence from an article headlined Is President Trump’s strike on Syria constitutional? by Amber Phillips yesterday in The Bulletin:

“President Ronald Reagan didn’t seek congressional approval when he bombed Libya in retaliation for a bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.”

The bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi took place on 15 April 1986. Pan Am 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.

The same article by Amber Phillips appears on the website of The Washington Post. But there the article has now been updated to correct the faux pas.

Lockerbie trial damned by UN report

[This is the headline over an article by William Paul that appeared in Scotland on Sunday on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

A United Nations observer at the Lockerbie trial has branded the verdicts in the case unfair, irrational and politically motivated, saying they should be overturned on appeal.

In a scathing denunciation of the proceedings and the quality of Scottish justice, Professor Hans Koechler, a world-renowned expert in international law, claims there was no basis in evidence for the guilty verdict against one of the accused.

Koechler, personally appointed by UN secretary general Kofi Annan to oversee the trial at Camp Zeist in Holland, said it was tainted by the air of international power politics and was neither fair nor balanced.

The guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational, his report states.

The outcome of the trial may well have been determined by political considerations and may have been the result of a more or less openly -exercised influence... from outside the judicial framework.

Koechler acknowledges that his condemnation of the trial may have a profound impact on the professional reputation and integrity of the three Scottish judges—Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and Maclean—but insists that the verdicts were unfair and adds that he hopes any appeal will correct the deficiencies of the trial. His report has been buried by both the UN and the Scottish authorities for the past two months.

Koechler, president of the Vienna-based International Progress Organisation and professor of philosophy of law at Innsbruck University, reiterated his concerns at a conference in Cairo yesterday. He said: In my opinion, there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict.

He was given privileged access to lawyers and the accused and sat through all sessions of the court. He submitted his analysis within days of Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi being found guilty, and his co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, not guilty of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the mass murder of 270 people.

The publication of his report now will come as a monumental embarrassment to both the Scottish legal establishment and to the UN, which had hoped the end of the trial would signal an improvement in relations between the west and Libya.

After the trial Annan said that justice had taken its course and the authority and legitimacy of the legal process must be respected.

Yesterday, a UN spokesman insisted Koechler’s report was nothing more than a personal opinion and that, as an observer of the trial, he was required only to watch, not to report on its fairness.

Lord Sutherland, the senior trial judge whose verdict was condemned by Koechler, said: It would be inadvisable for me to make any comment. Let the Appeal Court decide whether the verdict was irrational.

A spokesman for the Crown Office said the report appeared to be based on a misunderstanding of the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system in Scotland and other English-speaking countries.

It involves a contest between prosecution and defence rather than an inquiry carried out by judges.

He does not appear to have understood it is for prosecution and defence lawyers to investigate the case and decide what evidence to present to the court. The suggestion that the verdict was politically motivated again proceeds on a complete misunderstanding of facts and the independence of the judiciary.

However, the Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga,19, was killed at Lockerbie, said Koechler’s report touched on many of the issues he had raised with the Lord Advocate during the trial without receiving satisfactory answers. It expresses more eloquently than I managed to do all of the major concerns that many of the relatives had identified, he said.

An A to Z of Lockerbie “conspiracies”

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.