It was on this date in 1988 that Abdul Majid Giaka, a low level employee of Libyan intelligence (JSO), walked into the United States embassy in Valletta, Malta, and asked to speak to a CIA officer. From that date onwards he was a CIA asset and had many meetings with his American controllers. Although Pan Am 103 was destroyed on 21 December 1988, it was more than two years after that, when Giaka’s monthly US stipend was about to be cancelled, that he came up with information about Lockerbie. Without his “evidence”, it is in the highest degree unlikely that indictments would or could have been brought in either the USA or Scotland against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.
The story of Giaka’s baleful rôle in the Lockerbie case is detailed in chapter 7, The Fantasist, in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury. Other useful accounts can be found here on Caustic Logic’s website The Lockerbie Divide, and on this blog here.
If we hold it as true that Megrahi was innocent, is the following statement true or not?
ReplyDeleteGiaki gave answers that he could only have had if he had been briefed by people with insider knowledge of the investigation.
There are ways of briefing, and then there are other ways. "Did you see them with a suitcase?" "Were they taking it off the carousel?" "Was it a brown hardshell suitcase?"
ReplyDeleteIf an interview isn't video-recorded, or at the very least tape-recorded, there is simply no way to know how leading the questions were that produced these specific answers. My hunch would be, extremely leading.