Lockerbie detectives plan to question retired East German Stasi officers

[This is part of the headline over a report published today on the Mail Online website. It reads in part:]

Scottish investigators want to speak to nearly 20 former East German secret police officers over alleged links to the Lockerbie bombing, it has been claimed. 

Seven retired Stasi agents, now in their 70s and 80s, have reportedly been interrogated already, more than 30 years after the crash which killed 270.  

Detectives are said to believe that the Stasi could have helped to supply the timer on the bomb, which brought down Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town in 1988. 

The secret police could also have provided ‘logistical support’ for the attack, German newspaper Bild reported.  

Scottish detectives have reportedly sent dozens of requests to authorities in former East Germany to speak to retired agents.

Seven who live near Frankfurt/Oder are said to have been handed over and questioned already, with investigators from Edinburgh present.  

Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of murdering the 270 crash victims in 2001. 

It has long been suggested that then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ordered the bombing, although he denied it. 

However Libya could have had help from East Berlin, where the Stasi are known to have supported terror groups.  

At the Lockerbie trial in 2000 the court heard that the Swiss businessman whose company supplied the timer had links to the Stasi. 

The Stasi are known to have given assistance to members of the Red Army Faction, a far-left terrorist network active in West Germany in the 1970s. 

Former left-wing terrorists were given shelter in East Germany and given new identities, according to the government of reunified Germany. 

Stasi agents were also linked to a 1986 disco bombing in West Berlin, which was also connected to Libya. 

The Stasi – short for Ministry of State Security – kept watch over the population of socialist East Germany until its collapse in 1990. (...)

Many believe the Lockerbie atrocity was committed in revenge for the downing of an Iran Air passenger flight by a US missile cruiser earlier in 1988.     

Megrahi was released from prison on ‘compassionate grounds’ in 2009 and died in Tripoli in 2012. 

However Megrahi’s family are still pursuing a possible appeal against his conviction. 

[RB: I do not know what connection, if any, this has to the European Investigation Order obtained by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on 13 March 2019.

The suggestion (far-fetched, in my estimation) that the Stasi assisted Libya in carrying out the bombing of Pan Am 103 is of considerable vintage. See, for example, this article in The Baltimore Sun of 27 November 1991: Former E German secret police tied to Libyans, 1988 Lockerbie bombing.]