[This is part of the headline over a long article published in today's edition of the Mail on Sunday. The article, which advances the familiar proposition that responsibility for the Lockerbie atrocity rests with the PFLP-GC acting on behalf of Iran, is condensed from a forthcoming book Lockerbie: The Truth by Douglas Boyd which is due to be published on 11 October 2018. The following are a few paragraphs from the Mail on Sunday article:]
With a loss of 259 lives on board and 11 more on the ground, the destruction of Maid of the Seas, blown up by a terrorist bomb on December 21, 1988, was the worst civil aviation disaster in British history. Yet 30 years later, we still do not officially know who is responsible for mass murder high in the air above a small Scottish market town preparing for Christmas.
There was, of course, a fall guy. Eleven years after the atrocity, a 47-year-old Libyan Arab Airlines security officer called Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted on a tissue of lies which centred on the evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper who claimed to remember him buying clothes similar to those that may have been in the suitcase with the bomb that would rip through the fuselage.
A low-level Libyan CIA ‘asset’ called Abdul Majid Giaka said he recalled seeing al-Megrahi collect a brown Samsonite suitcase from the Arrivals carousel in Malta’s Luqa airport on December 20, 1988. On the following morning, he alleged, the unaccompanied suitcase was loaded on to a flight to Frankfurt, from where it would be transferred to London on a Pan Am ‘feeder flight’ and loaded aboard Flight 103 – before then exploding.
A further 11 years later, al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment at an extraordinary trial held in a disused American air base near Utrecht, Holland.
After years investigating the Lockerbie disaster and its background, I have found that little of the evidence against him can be taken at face value. Instead, a very different story has emerged from the morass of lies, one that should have been apparent from the very start.
It is a story of incompetence, vengeance, political expediency and then a cover-up orchestrated from the very highest levels in London and in Washington – where the real bomber is said to live today, under the cover of an American witness protection scheme.
[RB: The "real bomber" is said by the author to be Basel Bushnaq, alias Abu Elias. This is not by any means a new claim. Indeed Bushnaq was named by Christine Grahame MSP in the Scottish Parliament on 2 September 2009 (Official Report, columns 19051 to 19053). There is lots about him to be found here on The Lockerbie Divide website.]
Excellent work. Thank you for your persistence in this matter.
ReplyDeleteI have now read this book and it was very disappointing. Absolutely nothing new in it, either factual or new analysis or insight. It's a rambling and rather disconnected run through the case presenting the perspective espoused by most people who don't buy the "Megrahi at Luqa airport with an MST-13 timer" explanation, i.e. Jibril, Dalkamoni, Khreesat and Abu Elias.
ReplyDeleteA new exposition of that case as it stands today might reasonably be held to be useful, but not this one. Someone commented, from the Mail article, that the author hadn't read my book. In fact he has, and indeed I get a somewhat awkward name-check. However, how can I put it, he hasn't read it very carefully. The book is absolutely riddled with inaccuracies insofar as the aspects of the case I happen to know about are concerned. (The plane was late. Bogomira Erac saved the entire day's Frankfurt baggage loading records on a floppy disc. And many many more.)
This is quite sad actually. Don't waste your money.