The truth died at Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a long article just published in English on the website of Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The original German language version was published on 14 June:]

Thirty-six years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, US prosecutors are pursuing a new case stemming from the terrorist attack. At the center of the investigation is a colorful entrepreneur from Zurich and his claims of conspiracy.

Edwin Bollier, now nearly 88 years old, sits in his office on Badenerstrasse in Zurich and says: "The book is written. All I have to do is pull it out of the drawer." In his book, Bollier finally wants to tell what he sees as the whole truth about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which more people were killed than in any terrorist attack in Europe since. (...)

Now, at last, US prosecutors are bringing their own case relating to what President Ronald Reagan called the "attack on America." Many years ago, a mid-level intelligence agent from Libya was convicted in Scotland of being involved in the attack. However, some observers never gave up their doubts about this guilty verdict. A figure accused of being an accomplice of the convicted man is currently in custody in the United States, and a new round of legal procedures is underway.

US prosecutors in Zurich

Last year, two prosecutors and a judge traveled to Zurich to question Bollier as a witness. He is confident that the American court will follow his lead when it ultimately makes its ruling. "I have provided all the information necessary to finally expose the conspiracy," he says.

Bollier argues that it was not in fact Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence service that was behind the bombing, but rather a Syrian-Palestinian commando group acting on behalf of Iran.

Bollier says he is waiting for the US court verdict to be issued before publishing his book. However, the court handling the case recently postponed the trial date originally set for May, citing, among other factors, the "complexity" of the case.

Bollier isn’t concerned. He says he is prepared to testify whenever the trial takes place.

No one knows PT/35 (b) as well

The Zurich entrepreneur is also one of the key figures in the US court proceedings. No one is as familiar with the piece of evidence with the file number PT/35 (b) as well as he is. This exhibit is no larger than a fingernail. It is only 1 millimeter thick, and weighs less than 1 gram.

For more than 30 years, the entire Lockerbie case has hinged on this tiny piece of evidence.

It comes from an electronic circuit board, the kind of technology found in every smartphone today. A circuit board is flat, made partially out of conductive metal, and serves as the foundation on which the components necessary for an electronic device are built. The circuit board to which the fragment in question belonged before being torn out by the explosion in the Boeing 747 was part of a timer-based detonator.

Out of the huge, several-ton pile of debris that was recovered in Lockerbie, PT/35 (b) is the only piece that points to Libya. Without this tiny fragment, the Libyan intelligence agent named Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi could not have been charged.

In his office on Badenerstrasse, Bollier is poring over files. He reads them without glasses, even the small print. When he talks about Lockerbie, which he usually does almost without pause for breath, he sometimes mixes up names or dates. Then his wife Mahnaz, a native Persian who came to Switzerland after the fall of the shah, comes to his aid.

It didn't take her long to became part of Team Bollier, and today she knows the Lockerbie case's ins and outs almost as well as her husband.

The film and TV industry has also been subjecting the crash of Pan Am 103 to a thorough reexamination. Several productions have called the Scottish court ruling into question, in some cases openly postulating a miscarriage of justice. The streaming platform Sky is showing an ambitious documentary on the subject, paired with a successful dramatization of the incident as a series starring Colin Firth in the lead role. Its rival Netflix will soon follow with a program produced in collaboration with the BBC.

Too sensitive for Al Jazeera

However, the most controversial production has proved to be a multipart series created by Arab television network Al Jazeera. One episode was withdrawn after broadcast, and the last episode was not broadcast at all. Apparently, it was too controversial for the network’s Qatari owners. The NZZ has viewed all episodes of this series. It reveals previously unknown information that adds weight to suspicions that Iran was behind the attack.

Sooner or later, every documentary filmmaker addressing this subject finds their way to Badenerstrasse 414 in Zurich – that is, to Bollier's office. The BBC has sent its film crews here, as have Sky and Al Jazeera. The multistory concrete building in Zurich's Nova Park gives the feeling of having been drawn from another era. Stepping into the third-floor office with the sign "MEBO LTD," a visitor might well feel that they had been transported back to the 1970s. (...)

Explosives in a cassette recorder

On the evening of Dec 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York, had just reached its cruising altitude of 9,000 meters when a bomb exploded in the cargo hold. A timer-based detonator built into a Toshiba cassette recorder had triggered the explosion. The plane crashed.

All 259 passengers and crew members, most of them US citizens on their way to their Christmas holidays, were killed. An additional 11 people at the crash site in Lockerbie also lost their lives.

The delivery to Libya

A few years previously, in 1985, Bollier's small electronics company Mebo had delivered 20 timer devices to Libya – of the same model that triggered the explosion. This delivery is a matter of record and is undisputed.

The name "Mebo" is drawn from the names of the two company founders, Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier. While Meister has long since withdrawn from public life, Bollier is still fighting on the front lines to defend his company's reputation.

Mebo Ltd. was a simple trading company with a focus on electrical appliances. It even developed a few devices itself. This included a timer with the model number MST-13. An engineer, Mebo’s sole employee, had developed the device in a small workshop. A third-party company manufactured the MST-13 timer according to his plans.

The Libyan army was almost the sole purchaser of these timers. A few additional units were sold to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police agency.

"But we didn't supply detonators to Libya. Just electronic timers," Bollier insists in an interview in his office.

This distinction is important to him – after all, a timer is not in itself a weapon. A timer becomes a weapon only if it is connected to a detonator. Mebo did not do that, Bollier says. Libya thus must have hooked up the detonator itself.

The business owner picks up a timer that is sitting on his desk in his office. The MST-13 is about the size of a fist. It is nothing more than a simple timer, he says. "Similar to an alarm clock or an egg timer, only a bit more robust, fireproof and waterproof."

Mebo had an export license for the delivery of the timer-based switches to Libya and the East German government. The Swiss agency in charge of overseeing such exports did not find that this contract violated the country’s Federal Act on War Materiel.

Because the issue is so important to him, we have agreed with Bollier to use the English word "timer" throughout this article, even in its German-language original – referring both to timers with and without detonators attached.

And what did the Libyan army use the timers from Switzerland for? Bollier insists that the army used them as defensive weapons. The sale came during the desert war against neighboring Chad. The timers were set in military camps where capture was deemed a possibility, he says. If a squad was able to retain its position, it would defuse the explosive. However, if a camp were to be captured by the enemy, the device would go off at some point.

Bollier has never been charged with any crime in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, either as an accomplice or an accessory, even though the Scottish authorities did consider doing so. In Switzerland, the Office of the Attorney General initiated criminal proceedings, but these were discontinued after four years.

Bollier has always appeared in court only as a witness. For more than 30 years, he has been saying the same thing: that the Lockerbie discovery, exhibit PT/35 (b), that tiny fragment of bomb-wrecked timer, differs in various details from the timers that Bollier’s firm delivered to Libya.

For example, he argues that the fragment exhibits characteristics that were introduced only in 1990, more than a year after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this, says Bollier: "Someone must have placed the find at the crash site after the fact, in order to lay a false trail pointing to Libya."

Brown instead of charred

When investigators from Scotland and the US first showed him a photo of the discovery, Bollier recognized it immediately. That was in 1990. "In the photo, the fragment was brown," he recalls. "But after the explosion, it should have been charred."

When he later saw the original of the PT/35 (b) fragment, it was no longer brown – it was charred, he says. From this, Bollier concludes that the alleged find is not only a forgery, but was also tampered with after the fact.

This is clearly an outrageous accusation. But Bollier stands by it. He refers to the alleged forgers and manipulators of the only piece of conclusive evidence from Lockerbie as "Group XXX." By this he means those within Scottish and American government agencies that he says were responsible for this falsification, in cooperation with the Swiss intelligence service, which was then a part of the Federal Office of Police.

However, as someone making such a serious accusation, Bollier has a problem: His credibility is in tatters.

Someone once said that Bollier was the worst witness imaginable, thanks to his dubious past. Anyone who did business during the Cold War with the secret police and intelligence services of Libya and East Germany, with Gaddafi’s «Jamahiriya» state and the Stasi, has inevitably seen their reputation permanently damaged.

Bollier's fight for the truth, as he calls it, is therefore also a fight for his own rehabilitation. Furthermore, if the trail to Libya does indeed turn out to be falsified and manipulated, this would do more than exonerate Bollier morally – he would also be entitled to the equivalent of millions of dollars in financial compensation.

However, Edwin Bollier is not alone in his assertion that exhibit PT/35 (b) was planted at the Lockerbie crash site after the fact. Jim Swire is convinced of this as well.

Bollier’s opposite

When it comes to credibility, Swire is the opposite of Bollier. The English doctor lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. With his clear independence and unimpugned integrity, he soon became a respected spokesman for the families of the British victims.

Bollier and Swire share the same view. But it is no coincidence that Colin Firth is playing the English country doctor rather than the Swiss wheeler-dealer in Sky’s dramatization of the events.

Since the crash of Pan Am 103, Swire has dedicated his life to finding his daughter’s murderers, as he consistently refers to them. At 89 years old, he still hasn't achieved his goal.

Swire once campaigned vigorously to bring Libyan defendant Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and his alleged accomplices to trial in Scotland. When, after much back and forth, that trial finally took place on neutral ground at the former Camp Zeist military base in the Netherlands, Swire did not miss a single one of the 85 days of proceedings.

Nothing would have made him happier than to know at last who had been responsible for his daughter's death. But at the end of the trial, he found himself convinced that al-Megrahi was innocent, and had nothing to do with the bombing.

Befriended the convicted attacker

On the day the verdict was announced, Swire was so distraught that he suffered a breakdown. He was shocked by al-Megrahi's conviction – along with the simultaneous acquittal of his alleged accomplice – and disappointed by the Scottish justice system.

Swire visited al-Megrahi several times in prison, and ultimately became friends with him. When the Libyan was diagnosed with cancer, Swire spoke out strongly in favor of his release. «The sooner he is released, the better,» he was quoted as saying in the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.

When al-Megrahi was dying in 2012, Swire traveled to Tripoli amid the unrest following Gaddafi’s fall. Even on his deathbed, al-Megrahi protested his innocence.

Swire fulfilled his last wish. In his book published in 2021, the key message is that fragment PT/35 (b) cannot have come from any of the 20 timers that Bollier's Mebo had once delivered to Libya – and that al-Megrahi's conviction was therefore a miscarriage of justice.

The FBI on board

The investigation into the bombing was led by the Scottish police. However, the United States' domestic intelligence service, the FBI, was also involved from the beginning – a concession made to the US by the Scottish authorities in view of the large number of victims from America.

The unusual collaboration made the enormous investigation – featuring a debris field alone that stretched over several dozen square kilometers – even more complicated. «We weren't used to not being in the lead,» says the self-assured FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise in one of the many documentaries about Lockerbie.

However, by tapping its global network, the FBI was able to open up various sources that would have remained closed to the Scottish police. "Even the CIA supported us," Marquise once said. Given the rivalry between the two major US intelligence services, this was unusual, he noted.

Yet despite years of investigation and a huge pile of files, the case ultimately led only to the disputed conviction of the single Libyan intelligence agent.

The trail to Iran

Initially, everything pointed in a different direction. Indeed, after just a few months, the Lockerbie case seemed to have been solved, with investigators regarding it as a probable act of retaliation by Iran.

On July 3, 1988, a few months before Lockerbie, a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf – accidentally, according to official statements. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, were killed.

Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly vowed revenge, saying that an American aircraft carrying many passengers would be shot down. There was subsequently much to suggest that the Iranian regime had commissioned a commando group from Syria known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, to carry out the retaliatory action.

The PFLP-GC operated from Syria under the command of Ahmed Jibril. In 1970, his agents had used a parcel bomb to bring down Swissair Flight 330 over Würenlingen, killing all 47 passengers. In that instance, the explosive was built into a radio and triggered by an altimeter.

Thanks to the investigations in the Würenlingen case, hardly anyone in the West was as familiar with the PFLP-GC as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General. Six months after Lockerbie, in late May 1989, three Scottish investigators thus traveled to Bern to exchange information with their Swiss colleagues.

The secret meeting lasted two days, turning up striking parallels. The plastic explosive used in the Lockerbie bombing had been Semtex, which was manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was the same material that had been used in Würenlingen. Even the bomb maker appeared to be the same individual, a Jordanian named Marwan Khreesat.

A few weeks before Lockerbie, in late October 1988, Khreesat had been arrested in Düsseldorf as part of a broad operation dubbed "Autumn Leaves." In total, German police arrested more than a dozen members of the PFLP-GC – dealing a serious blow to the terrorist group.

During the raid, police also seized four electronic devices, all of which had been rigged with explosives. One of these devices was a Toshiba portable radio.

It thus appeared that German police had foiled a planned series of attacks by the PFLP-GC. However, interviews with the detainees revealed that the terrorists had originally prepared five such devices, not just four.

The conclusion seemed obvious: The fifth electrical device must have been the Toshiba cassette recorder that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

When the Scottish delegation bid farewell to their Swiss colleagues on May 25, 1989, the case appeared to be solved. Investigators believed that the Toshiba cassette recorder containing the explosives had been loaded into the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 at Frankfurt Airport on the Pan Am 103 A feeder flight to London Heathrow.

This conclusion was stated in the minutes drawn up by the Swiss Office of the Attorney General following the meeting with their colleagues from Scotland. After a lengthy tug-of-war, the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine published these minutes a few years ago.

But then everything changed.

The shift to Libya

No arrest warrant was issued for Khreesat, the alleged bomb maker, or for any other member of the PFLP-GC initially suspected of involvement.

Instead, the Scottish police and the FBI, who had been focusing their part of the investigation on Iran, issued arrest warrants for two previously unknown Libyans: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and an alleged accomplice, the station manager of the Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

Exactly how these arrest warrants came to be issued remains unclear today. Apparently, they were based on secret information from the CIA and a somewhat shady agent in Malta.

In his office, Bollier rummages through one of the many piles that have accumulated in an adjoining room over the past decades.

He finds the newspaper article he is looking for, and offers a summary: The surprising turnaround in the investigation was the result of the geostrategic climate at the time, which was very different from today's. The United States and the United Kingdom, which at the time were at war with Iraq, did not want to spoil their relationship with Iran’s government as well.

Thus, the article argued, shifting blame for the Lockerbie bombing to Libyan leader Gaddafi and his intelligence agents proved a convenient alternative. After all, their April 1986 attack on a West Berlin discotheque frequented primarily by American soldiers had gone unpunished.

«It's that simple,» Bollier says, tossing the newspaper article back onto the pile.

It is possible that for the U.S. and the U.K., Libya was seen as a more convenient scapegoat than Iran at that point in history. However, like so much else in the Lockerbie case, this theory cannot be proven.

Gaddafi's photo on the side table

This difficulty doesn't impress Bollier. In his office on Badenerstrasse, the presence of long-deposed Libyan despot Gaddafi can still be felt everywhere. A framed photo of the young Gaddafi is placed on the side table next to the sofa, leaning against an iron palm tree.

During Gaddafi's more than 40 years in power, his regime systematically violated human rights. It engaged in countless arbitrary arrests, imprisoning and torturing opposition figures. Many of these individuals disappeared or were executed.

Bollier offers a kind of counterpoint, however. "Gaddafi may have blood on his hands," he says. But from the leader’s own point of view, he had been acting in the interests of the Libyan people, Bollier says. The entrepreneur counts off the gains: roads, housing, infrastructure – "everything in tiptop shape," he says.

It is jarring statements like this that undermine the image of Bollier as a fearless fighter for the truth.

An office for the alleged attacker

Another startling fact reveals just how close Bollier's relationship with Gaddafi's internationally ostracized regime was: Mebo temporarily rented an office at Badenerstrasse 414 to two employees of the Libyan intelligence services – one of whom was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Bollier plays this down. It was purely business, he says. And anyway, al-Megrahi visited Zurich only two or three times a year.

Bollier started doing business with Libya in the mid-1970s. Even before media pioneer Roger Schawinski shook up Switzerland's media landscape by founding his Radio 24 station – which broadcast as a pirate station from Pizzo Groppera in Italy before eventually becoming the country's first commercial radio station – the trained radio engineer Bollier had been operating his own pirate radio station in the North Sea. He had chugged around the international zone in a converted ship, competing in turn with the state broadcasters in England and the Netherlands.

"It was a lucrative business for a while," recalls Bollier – until the authorities shut the pirate station down.

$4.9 million from Gaddafi

That left Bollier sitting on an expensive ship crammed full of electronics that nobody wanted. Only one person showed any interest: Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan ruler paid Bollier $4.9 million for the former pirate radio craft.

Nor did this prove to be the only such deal. Although Bollier says he never met Gaddafi in person, the Libyan state became the Swiss entrepreneur’s most important customer. Contracts with the military and intelligence services soon followed. In the 1980s, Bollier installed Tripoli’s first fax machines, after purchasing them first from a distributor in Zurich. "For this, the Libyans, who had never seen a fax machine before, celebrated me like a hero," he says.

The fax machines were soon followed by the delivery of the MST-13 timers to Libya.

The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the fingernail-sized fragment PT/35 (b), which is supposed to have come from one of these timers from Zurich, are striking. Scottish police found it six months after the crash, in late May 1989, in a wooded area more than 30 kilometers from the crash site. The fragment was stuck inside the collar of a Salomon-brand shirt that had originally been purchased in Malta.

That shirt had wound up in a maroon Samsonite suitcase along with the Toshiba cassette recorder that was rigged with explosives.

No pieces belonging to the timer's significantly larger and more robust housing were ever found. In some official documents, the date of discovery is given not as May 1989, but rather as January 1990 – that is, more than a year after the crash. These dates are important for Bollier's argument.

The Scottish police initially had no idea what to make of their chance discovery. They searched unsuccessfully at 54 companies across 17 countries in hopes of tracking down the origin of the PT/35 (b) fragment.

Help from the FBI and CIA

In early 1990, the Scottish police asked their colleagues at the FBI for help. These investigators then quickly found what they were looking for: The fragment was an exact match with a timer-based detonator that the CIA had seized during a raid in Togo in 1985, they said. Through some convoluted means, a Mebo MST-13 timer had apparently found its way to the rebels in Togo.

However, over the years, investigative journalists have uncovered inconsistencies in this conclusion. One such reporter is Otto Hostettler from the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine. He has published several articles on the discrepancies in the Lockerbie case.

Like Bollier, Hostettler also concludes: "The item labeled PT/35 (b) cannot have come from the shipment to Libya that Edwin Bollier made in 1985." The fragment contains technical components that had not even been developed at that time, the reporter notes.

Moreover, in addition to Jim Swire, the representative of the victims' families, and investigative journalist Hostettler, there are still other unimpeachable figures who agree with Bollier that something is not right about PT/35 (b).

The odd role of Switzerland's intelligence service

The role played by one senior member of the Swiss Federal Office of Police, which was Switzerland's intelligence service at the time, is nothing less than striking. It is a matter of record that on June 22, 1989, six months after Lockerbie, this intelligence service agent appeared at the Badenerstrasse 414 building. On the third floor, rather than visiting the Mebo Ltd offices, he instead ended up in the workshop on the other side of the corridor. There he met with the engineer who had developed the MST-13 timer.

This is publicly known because Bollier later reported the intelligence service agent to the authorities. The entrepreneur accused this figure of stealing a timer from Mebo's inventory and passing it on to the FBI, all without a search warrant. Bollier demanded 6 million Swiss francs in damages from the intelligence service agent.

As part of the criminal proceedings, the Swiss Office of the Attorney General summarized the facts of the case in a written statement. That statement is dated July 30, 2012, and is signed by the head of the office's National Security division

According to this statement, the employee of the Federal Office of Police did indeed receive a timer from the Mebo engineer, "which he passed on to the American authorities."

"The evidence is said to have been subsequently tampered with," says the Office of the Attorney General’s written statement. Followed by: "This assertion by Bollier has not simply been pulled out of thin air."

The Attorney General’s Office explains why Bollier’s assertion could be correct as follows: "In any case, an expert opinion provided by the scientific service of the Canton of Zurich proves that the timer handed over to the Swiss federal police and the timer fragment presented as evidence by the Scottish authorities cannot be identical."

No other authority has adopted Bollier’s thesis that exhibit PT/35 (b) was falsified as clearly as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General, in this written statement.

However, the Zurich cantonal police report referred to in the Attorney General’s statement has never subsequently turned up. This is confirmed by respected Zurich lawyer Marcel Bosonnet, who represented Bollier in this case.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court never addressed the claim for damages – Bollier had submitted it too late.

"In my opinion, there was a lack of will to get at the truth," Bosonnet says. In so doing, Switzerland missed a unique opportunity to resolve the Lockerbie case, he adds.

Al Jazeera reports on secret meetings

This clue prompted the researchers at Al Jazeera's English-language service to work even harder. Their documentary series, which has since been withdrawn, describes how, over the course of 1988, a few months before the Lockerbie crash, several meetings took place involving representatives of the intelligence services of Iran, Syria and Libya, as well as of Hezbollah and the PFLP-GC. The common goal was reportedly a militant campaign financed by Iran against targets in the US and Israel, which was to include shooting down passenger aircraft.

According to Al Jazeera's reporting, these secret meetings took place between March and October 1988 in Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon.

In the documentary, Robert Baer is given considerable time to speak. This author, a former CIA agent, has long argued that Iran, not Libya, was behind the Lockerbie attack. He has been joined by other voices from within American intelligence circles.

Baer told Al Jazeera that he had evidence showing that a few days after the attack on Pan Am 103, in late 1988, $11 million had been transferred from Iran to a bank account in Lausanne. Some of this money was later transferred to the accounts of two leading members of the PFLP-GC, he contends.

Baer is no longer employed by the CIA. Nevertheless, he is bound by the principle that anything he makes public based on knowledge gained during his time in service must be approved in advance by the CIA.

In Al Jazeera’s withdrawn documentary series, he says that he had followed this process in order to divulge his information. He additionally says that there is consensus within CIA and FBI circles that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie crash.

So has Gaddafi's Libya been wrongly blamed, for more than 30 years, for one of Europe's most devastating terrorist attacks?

Despite the numerous proponents of this theory, the question is still not easy to answer. In fact, a new book published in early 2025 argues against this conclusion.

"Top secret" handwritten letters

In this book, the authors present previously unpublished archive material from the Gaddafi-era Libyan intelligence service. Handwritten letters marked "top secret" describe how, in October 1988, a division of the intelligence service in Tripoli carried out experiments with explosives, including detonating a suitcase.

At the time, the head of this division was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had protested his innocence on his deathbed.

Prosecutors in the US are aware of this archive discovery. The postponement of the ongoing trial is likely to be related to efforts to verify documents that were not previously part of the record.

Meanwhile, back in Zurich, Edwin Bollier is keeping his book in his drawer, ready to publish. Mr Lockerbie, as he calls himself in his email address, is at least willing to reveal his title: "The Truth Died at Lockerbie."

Why haven't all the Lockerbie documents been published?

[This is the headline over a letter published today on the website of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

Regarding your recent coverage of the transfer of Lockerbie debris to the US for the Abu Agila Mas'ud trial next year, such activities will no doubt attract greater interest to the trial if that trial does occur in May 2025. 

The debris may remind some people of the horrors of the night of December 21, 1988 in the unsuspecting town, when that preventable disaster occurred in those dark and wind-rent skies high above the borders. Others will never forget.

Might it not have at least been more economical to transfer all UK Government written materials relating to their past handling of the origins of the disaster to the internet, so that the younger generation could form its own opinion about how the UK and US governments have behaved over this terrible tragedy over the past 36 years? Perhaps there would then be a little honest openness.

Your great paper sailed as close to the wind as anyone dared many years ago to try to expose some of the contents of some files concerning the Jordanian based bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat and his bomb-making prowesses, as he worked in Damascus and Neuss for the PFLP-GC terrorist group, even as that group’s funding (by Iran) was renewed: you dared to come under immediate threat of closure, did you not, in attempting to expose truth?

In our group’s 36th year in our search for the truth we believe that only the truth will still suffice for you at The Herald.

We could perhaps press for a complete disclosure of all Lockerbie-related files still held at Kew and elsewhere now that 36 years have passed. 

Which politicians would now have to blush at the audacity with which all that material was kept clear of Freedom of Information requests from the media, the public and from our group? Most are dead or disabled now. Alas that the redoubtable, loveable Scottish MP for Linlithgow, Tam Dalyell, was taken from us so many years ago.

Can significant material about terrorist groups and their links really have remained a genuine reason for secrecy all this time?

Dr Jim Swire, spokesman UK Families – Flight 103, Gloucestershire.

Jim Swire is a force of nature

[What follows is excerpted from a report published yesterday evening on the website of The Sun:]

Retired GP Jim Swire is a force of nature – a man with balls of steel.

His search for justice after his daughter was murdered in the Lockerbie bombing has been so intense that at times he has put his own life in danger.

The 87-year-old campaigner faced down the late “mad dog” Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s guards armed with AK-47s, sneaked a fake bomb on a plane to expose security flaws and fears he could be a target for Iranian assassins.

But 35 years after 270 people were murdered in the attack over Scotland, on the Pan Am passenger jet flying from London to New York, thoughts of his 23-year-old daughter Flora break his indomitable spirit.

When Jim tries to remember the last words he said to medical student Flora before she left to catch the plane, tears flood his eyes and we pause the interview.

We are speaking in the conservatory of his Cotswolds home because he hopes an upcoming TV drama about the terror bombing will create the same public outcry seen when ITV’s Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones highlighted the organisation’s IT scandal.

Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth will play Jim in the Sky series, Lockerbie, which is being filmed now. (...)

Apart from his grief — and bravery — there is also anger at the bungling officials who failed to stop the fateful bomb getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

He tells The Sun: “I am satisfied Colin will do his utmost to portray someone who has been searching diligently for the truth in the name of the murder of his daughter and all those other people.” getting on to the Boeing 747 on December 21, 1988, at Heathrow Airport before it exploded shortly after 7pm. (...)

Jim, a BBC soundman turned GP, believes documents are still being withheld from relatives which could reveal either a cock-up in the investigation or a cover-up.

The worst terror atrocity ever to be visited upon the UK is still shrouded in mystery and controversy.

Only one person has been convicted of carrying out the attack — Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. His country-man Abu Agila Mohammad Masud is awaiting trial.

A call had been made to the US embassy in Finnish capital Helsinki warning that a bomb would be loaded on a Pan Am flight in Frankfurt, Germany, bound for Heathrow then New York.

That information was not passed on to regular travellers.

The threat should have been taken seriously because in October that year terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command were found with bombs in Neuss, Germany, designed to trigger once a plane reached a certain height. (...)

Understandably, Jim cannot hide his rage over this fatal delay. He says of the bomb: “It was in the baggage compartment, almost beneath the feet of my daughter and all of those innocent passengers. It exploded almost 48 hours from the warning having been passed on by the Department of Transport. Have we had an apology? No, we have not.

“Whatever you believe about Libya or all the rest of it, that’s where the explosion occurred, that was the warning they had and that was the way they handled it.

“If that doesn’t make a relative of anyone murdered in that atrocity angry, it bloody well should.” (...)

The late Paul Channon, Transport Secretary at the time, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, denied there had been a security failure but lost his job.

In the wake of Lockerbie, airlines claimed far more stringent inspections of luggage were put in place.

Keen to put that promise to the test, Jim, who had explosives training during a stint of military service, built a replica of the Lockerbie bomb with the Semtex explosive replaced by marzipan.

He managed to get it past Heathrow’s security even though a member of security found the Toshiba tape recorder containing the fake device.

Jim recalls: “The lady who opened up the suitcase said, ‘Sir, have you taken out the batteries?’ and I said, ‘Yes’, and she put it back.

“That poor lady had not been trained in what might and might not be dangerous.”

The Lockerbie crime scene was the largest ever in UK history. (...)

Initially, the finger of suspicion pointed toward Iran, because it had close links to the PFLP-GC and its leaders had sworn revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet in July 1988 by a US warship.

Then the FBI investigation, carried out in unison with Dumfries and Galloway Police, pivoted instead toward Libya.

Detectives concluded that Libyan Arab Airlines security chief Al-Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Khalifah Fhimah were responsible for the atrocity. (...)

[F]ollowing pressure from sanctions, the two Libyan suspects were tried in Holland in 2000. As the trial went on Jim started to doubt they had been responsible for Flora’s murder. When Al-Megrahi was found guilty — although Fhimah was cleared and let go — he collapsed from shock.

Jim says: “My son sitting next to me in the courtroom thought that I had died.”

He now believes the late PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril was the true mastermind of the horror that claimed his daughter’s life.

Jibril died of heart failure in July 2021 in Syrian capital Damascus, and Jim says: “I can’t conceal from you I am delighted he is dead.”

He suspects that Jibril’s ultimate paymasters were Iran’s security services.

Pointing the finger at Tehran’s murderous ayatollahs shows how fearless Jim is. He says: “It has often occurred to me that I might get bombed. The more the truth comes out the more possible it is that I might get killed by Iran for wanting revenge.

“It seems to me the direct line came from Iran.”

But Scottish judges have twice upheld the murder convictions of Al-Megrahi, who died from cancer in 2012.

Next year US prosecutors will bring Masud to trial, accusing him of making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103.

Whatever any court decides, nothing will take away the pain from Jim and his wife Jane.

As Jim puts it: “When someone close to you in your family gets murdered, you get handed a life sentence.

“Jane and I will go to our graves still mourning the loss of Flora.”

The conspiracies are as plausible as the official explanation

[What follows is a review published in yesterday's edition of the London Evening Standard:]

For a disaster that happened 35 years ago, the story of Pan Am Flight 103’s destruction over Lockerbie has a very 21st-Century feel.

This bombing, which caused the deaths of 270 people over a quiet Scottish town, has a confused and controversial epilogue. Moving from the attack itself and the immediate aftermath, this four-part Sky documentary traces the hunt for the bombers and the personal and public struggles of the victims’ families. 

This sense of protracted tragedy is entangled with espionage and geopolitics of the most amoral and conflicted kind, where concepts of national interest supersede individual human lives, so it was inevitable that the bombing has become a focus for conspiracy theories. That the conspiracies are as plausible as the official explanation only makes it murkier. 

At 7.03pm on 21 December 1988, residents of Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway heard the explosion. Those out in the fields would have seen a fireball falling to earth. Those unlucky enough to have been in its path were vaporised by exploding aviation fuel.

The Boeing 747 crashed through the edge of the town spraying debris and the dead over many miles. All 259 on board died that night along with 11 on the ground. Even given the sensitivity of the producers, the cumulative grief is hard to watch and harder to forget.

Viewers have no reference point for a golf course strewn with a hundred corpses or bodies rained on to the roofs of terraced houses. The image of a red suitcase embedded in Scottish mud and the sound of screaming families at JFK airport conveys the unimaginable.

The intimate stories begin with the families and Lockerbie residents, traumatised yet finding an odd comfort in communal loss. Among them is the English doctor Jim Swire, who has spent his life since the crash in pursuit of the truth about those responsible for the death of his 23-year-old daughter Flora.

Swire’s grief evolves into obsession (in 1990 he smuggled a fake bomb on to a flight to New York to prove the inadequacy of Heathrow security) and his testimony, including how his interpretation of events changed over time, provides the moral frame of the film and a necessary touchstone of human dignity and love amid realpolitik at its most cynical. 

The film talks to FBI agents who began their investigation at the end of a decade of state-sponsored terrorism linked to anti-American regimes in the Middle East. The agents are led away from the prime suspects, Iranian proxies the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Council (PFLP-GC), towards Libyans via Malta and Frankfurt.

It had been suggested that Iran used this Palestinian group based in Lebanon (where US and UK hostages had been taken) to exact revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by an American warship a year before, but evidence from the crime scene lead the FBI to two Libyan intelligence agents, including the man eventually convicted of mass murder by Scottish judges in a Netherlands court, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. 

For eight years the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi (“Mad Dog”, as Ronald Reagan called him), refused to hand over the two suspects. Swire went to see him in an extraordinary act of recklessness. “I was pretty crazy because of the freshness of the bereavement and I’d have done anything I could.”

In Tripoli, surrounded by Gaddafi’s female bodyguards with AK47s, he showed the dictator a briefcase full of pictures of his daughter and he asked him to allow the two men to go on trial, before pinning a badge that said “Lockerbie, The Truth Must be Known” on Gaddafi’s lapel.

By the time of the trial in 2000, the consensus about who was guilty had collapsed. The CIA and the FBI operated in suspicion and sometimes outright contempt for each other, a Libyan supergrass was discredited, the shopkeeper who sold clothes in which the bomb was wrapped was paid $2m by the FBI and the Swiss manufacturer of timers allegedly used in the bomb changed his testimony at the trial.

That Gaddafi’s son Saif stated Libya accepted responsibility but didn’t admit to actually doing it does lend credence to the view that they paid $2.86bn in compensation as the price of readmittance to the global oil trade after years of crippling US sanctions. 

What is left behind are two starkly defined camps who believe either justice was served or there was a cover-up – and between them are families in a state of purgatorial uncertainty. Among the politics, the film shows one of the recurring visits to Scotland of the Ciulla family from New York, who come to remember Frank Ciulla and to be reunited with the Lockerbie couple Hugh and Margaret Connell who discovered Frank’s body still strapped to his seat. 

Many of these families, predominantly American, mix their anger with suspicion about the conduct of their own government. Swire says he believes the al-Megrahi trial was a sham and the PFLP-GC were responsible. Rev John Mosey from Birmingham, whose 19-year-old daughter Helga died, says he is 99.9% certain al-Megrahi was innocent. The FBI insist they got their man. An ex-CIA operative says they were wrong all along. 

The moral authority of Swire is so powerful it is almost overwhelming – he is only really challenged once to which he reacts with the anger of a man who has spent more than 30 years fighting for something not yet realised. Lockerbie plays to the idea that government agencies are incapable of telling the truth, something corroding trust in institutions in the US and increasingly in Britain. 

This is a poised and sensitive documentary. It’s moving in so many ways that at times it’s hard to ready yourself for the blows, even when you know they’re coming. What is left are open wounds: grief that does not rest and no sense of an ending.

Lockerbie is available to watch on Sky Documentaries and Now from 25 November

Dismayed by a 35-year-long miscarriage of justice

[What follows is excerpted from a report published yesterday evening on the website of The Telegraph:]

Ever since Flora was killed on Pan Am Flight 103, Dr Jim Swire has been searching for answers – and says the FBI has the wrong man

Flora Swire is everywhere in her parents’ home. There are sketches and photos of her pinned to a board in the kitchen, on the mantelpiece, on the cover of a book; her portrait fills the wall across from their bed. There remains too a lock of her hair – a heartbreaking keepsake taken when the Swires saw her last, almost 35 years ago, after a bomb exploded beneath her feet in the Lockerbie disaster.

It was on 21 December 1988, the eve of her 24th birthday, that Flora, a promising neurology student who had just been accepted to do a PhD at Cambridge, took her seat on a plane bound for New York. She had hoped to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, but would never make it.

Thirty-eight minutes after taking off at Heathrow, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in the sky over the town of Lockerbie in Dumfries and Galloway, with such force on a windy night that the debris landed across an 845-square-mile radius from southwest Scotland to the east coast of England. The fairylights on Christmas trees all over Lockerbie blew their fuses, along with the rest of the grid; smoking orange flames illuminated the town, which quickly filled with the stench of jet fuel. (...)

The investigation has remained open ever since, with one man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan national, the only person ever to be convicted of the atrocity. He was convicted in 2001 and given a life sentence, and died in 2012. But in February this year, the case returned to the courts for the first time in more than two decades.

Another Libyan national, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi (known as Mas’ud) has been accused of making the Lockerbie bomb, and is now awaiting trial (he has pleaded not guilty). The development should offer some shred of hope for the families whose lives irreparably changed that night. Yet Dr Jim Swire, Flora’s father, ‘has no interest’ in the prospect of Mas’ud’s conviction.

‘I know he didn’t make the bomb,’ Jim tells me. ‘I know who made the bomb.’

As such, the official criminal verdict on events to date – upcoming trial included – is, in his view at least, nothing more than ‘twaddle’.

Jim, now 87, had been writing Christmas cards on that December night in 1988 when his wife Jane told him that a plane had just come down over Scotland. He tried calling Heathrow, where Flora had been dropped off by her younger sister, Cathy, a few hours earlier – he spent five hours on hold to Pan Am as news coverage blared, showing body parts hanging from a roof, the 30ft hole a chunk of the 747 had left in a Lockerbie street, and relatives howling in anguish at JFK Airport. When he finally got through, staff confirmed the worst possible news: Flora had been on the flight. (...)

Jim, an old Etonian who went to Cambridge, is still spry in his late 80s – part-raconteur, part activist, wearing a sharp grey suit and trainers. Today, Jim, who became a GP but ultimately left the profession after his daughter’s death, and Jane, 84, take turns bustling between the kitchen and back garden of their home in the Cotswolds town of Chipping Camden with offers of cheese sandwiches and cups of tea. It is a cosy idyll that conceals the sea of names and dates and evidence-tag numbers still etched on their minds.

Some 35 years on, the Swires’ agony remains barely beneath the surface, the memories of their eldest child both a precious gift and cruel reminder of what they have lost. ‘To lose a close family member gives you a life sentence immediately,’ Jim says. ‘Your whole life is altered. And you have to start asking yourself how, how can you go on living, or how can Jane go on living, with a loss so terrible as this?’

Their experiences are documented in Lockerbie, a new four-part documentary that airs on Sky next week. It is a panoptic watch, following the lives of the residents in the town that was, until that day, just a fish ’n’ chip pitstop, 75 miles from Glasgow, before it was completely upturned. The documentary follows the families of UK and US victims, and officials from across the town’s police force, the FBI and the CIA, too. But it also lays bare how devastation led to remarkable acts of humanity, as residents mounted a volunteer effort to wash the clothes and teddies scattered thousands of miles from where they should have ended up, and sent them back to passengers’ loved ones; some of which resulted in relationships with grief-stricken families an ocean away that remain strong. Their lives are, now, forever intertwined.

But underlying the heartfelt stories is a darker thread – for decades on, opinions about who was to blame for the disaster are more divided than ever.

Jim remains dismayed by what he sees as a 35-year-long miscarriage of justice. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, he became the spokesperson for the UK Families Flight 103 group and in the intervening decades, he has met numerous experts and officials, and had independent reviews of evidence undertaken. All of which has convinced him that justice has not been served – and that the wrong man was imprisoned, just as another ‘wrong man’ is now about to be tried.

His theory – that Libya wasn’t responsible for the bombing – runs counter to al-Megrahi’s conviction and Mas’ud’s arrest, and has been dismissed by many. But there are others in his corner, too. ‘Enough honest, reliable and knowledgeable people have discovered the awful truth behind this to know that the truth will now be able to look after itself,’ Jim says. ‘If I die tomorrow, I know the truth will eventually come out.’

Among those people is former CIA investigator John Holt, the long-time handler for the principal US government witness at al-Megrahi’s trial, Libyan agent Abdul Majid Giaka. Holt said at the time that Giaka never provided ‘any evidence pointing to Libya or any indication of knowing anything about that nation’s involvement in the two years after the bombing’ – despite later testifying. But when accused of lying under cross-examination, Giaka replied: ‘I had no interest in telling anybody any lies.’

Others who have been vocal about what they view as Libya’s wrongful implication include solicitor Clare Connelly, director of the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit, an independent project established by the School of Law of the University of Glasgow, and other UK relatives, including John Moseley [sic], whose 19-year-old daughter Helga was killed on Flight 103.

Al-Megrahi’s trial took place 22 years ago at Camp Zeist, a Scottish law court set up in the Netherlands (deemed a neutral territory), where judges heard that he had placed a bomb in a Samsonite suitcase. Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, his co-accused, was acquitted.

There was no smoking gun for the prosecution, but al-Megrahi was found guilty based on a series of links they felt couldn’t otherwise be explained: including that he had an office in Switzerland down the hall from a clockmaker whose device was used to make the bomb; and that clothing fragments found alongside remains of the bomb were traced back to a Maltese shop that its owner, Tony Gauci, said al-Megrahi had visited.

At the same time, there were escalating tensions between the West and Libyan premier Colonel Gaddafi, who was suspected to have ordered the bombing of a nightclub frequented by US personnel in West Berlin in 1986. Judges in al-Megrahi’s trial conceded the case included ‘a number of uncertainties and qualifications’; yet he was sentenced to life. (Libya later paid $2.7 billion to families of Lockerbie bombing victims, though this was considered a political move rather than an admission of guilt.) (...)

Time has only bolstered his defence of ‘poor’ al-Megrahi, having formed personal relationships with both him and Gaddafi before they died. They would exchange Christmas cards, and when al-Megrahi was given compassionate release in 2009 following a diagnosis of prostate cancer – returning to a hero’s welcome on the tarmac at Tripoli airport – Jim travelled to Libya to see him on his deathbed. At the time, Jim recalled al-Megrahi’s words to him: ‘I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.’

He was, in Jim’s eyes, only ever an unwitting pawn in geopolitically motivated ‘deception’ that he says is even now preventing justice for Flora and the other victims from being served. He also took a handful of clandestine trips to Gaddafi’s compound (he did not tell any authorities, and only informed Jane imminently beforehand), in which he would hear that the regime had not been to blame. On leaving their first meeting, Jim pinned a UK Families Flight 103 badge to Gaddafi’s lapel as a show of solidarity for the truth. He believes other UK families are onside, although many have never spoken publicly. But there are certainly others, particularly those in the US, who see this affinity with Gaddafi as a grave error.

For Jim, there are two pieces of evidence that point to al-Megrahi’s wrongful conviction. The 2001 case heard that the explosive had first travelled from Malta to Frankfurt, where Flight 103 began its journey to New York. (The London Heathrow stop was a layover.) But Jim believes the bomb was planted at Heathrow. At al-Megrahi’s appeal in 2002, a baggage handler told lawyers that the baggage build-up area at Terminal 3 had been broken into the night before the bombing.

The other piece of evidence relates to the bomb fragments. According to John Ashton, a researcher on al-Megrahi’s legal team, documents not disclosed during the original trial found differences between the metals of the timers being supplied to the Libyans at the time and those within the fragments police recovered from the Lockerbie site. The circuit-board patterns, however, did align, deemed to be the more important evidence.

Clare Connelly of the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit also questions the veracity of shopkeeper Tony Gauci’s evidence, as there have been claims that he was paid in connection with his participation in the inquiry, which she says would be ‘totally contrary to the interests of justice’. But in November 2013 the Crown Office said: ‘No witness was offered any inducement by the Crown or the Scottish police before and during the trial and there is no evidence that any other law ­enforcement agency offered such an inducement.’

As for who was actually responsible, Jim argues it was Iran, not Libya. He goes on to suggest that it might have been a retaliatory attack for the US shooting down an Iranian passenger plane, thought to have been incorrectly identified as a fighter jet in July 1988, which killed 290 innocent civilians. In his view, with American hostages held in Iran at the time and an upcoming election, the finger had to be pointed elsewhere. ‘What we’re being told is absolute nonsense from beginning to end. It was designed to protect the relationship between Britain and America and to help in getting home American hostages held by Iranian interests back in ’88.’

Jim insists that the bombmaker was not Mas’ud, as the US alleges, but ‘a Jordanian who was a double agent, or even a triple agent’ – feeding intelligence both to his own country and the CIA, while making explosives for a militant group active in Palestine at the time, called the PFLP-GC. Others have theories of their own around Iran’s involvement: Holt has also said ‘there was a concerted effort, for unexplained reasons, to switch the original investigations away from Iran and the PFLP-GC’ – backing Jim’s belief that the focus on Libya was politically motivated.

For the officials who spent years putting together their case, however, Jim’s theory is not credible enough to upend ‘the biggest case the FBI ever had… I don’t believe, in the history of law enforcement, there was a crime quite like Pan Am 103.’ So says Richard Marquise, who led the FBI investigation. ‘I will never attack [Jim], I will never tell him he’s a liar or wrong. I will never say a negative thing, because I cannot feel his pain; I am sure it’s enormous. But I disagree with his assessment of the evidence.’ (...)

For Jim, his ‘obsession’ has been an outlet for the pain of losing Flora. As he puts it: ‘It has provided me with a way of coping with my grief.’

As for Jane, she has had little choice but to accept her husband’s dogged pursuit of answers; something Jim is painfully aware of. ‘[I often think] what is it doing to Jane, that I’m still doing this?’ he admits. (...)

There is another source of anguish for the Swires – a series of missteps without which Flora may never have boarded Flight 103 in the first place.

In late October 1988, West German police found a bomb hidden inside a Toshiba radio cassette player in an apartment in Neuss, believed to have been manufactured to detonate mid-air. The British Department of Transport (DoT) went on to warn airports and airlines of its existence via telex the next month.

Then, on 5 December, an anonymous threat was phoned in to the US embassy in Helsinki, stipulating that within two weeks, someone would carry a bomb on to a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the US. Notices were put up on embassy walls, and US officials were told they could rebook on another flight home for Christmas if they so wished; Interpol informed 147 countries, Britain included – yet the ‘Helsinki warning’ was never made public.

Two days before Lockerbie, a circular featuring images of the explosives authorities feared had been designed to blow up planes was signed by the DoT’s principal aviation security advisor, but never sent out. (...)

Jim would like there to be an examination of the evidence in the International Criminal Court. He sees this as the only possible route to justice now – but each passing year makes it less likely.

‘Our numbers are dropping all the time from people dying off from old age,’ he says of the families’ group, ‘and I’m amazed that I haven’t long ago because the stress all this has been over the last 35 years – why I haven’t died of a heart attack, I don’t know… But I would love it if [the truth] were to come out while we were still around.’

John Dower, director of the new documentary, says that his main hope is that those involved in it will ‘get some resolution, some peace, because that’s what struck us most making this, the ongoing trauma. It’s 35 years later, but that trauma is still there.’

Lockerbie will be on Sky Documentaries and Now from 25 November

Politics has obstructed justice for victims of the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Kim Sengupta published today on the website of The Independent. It reads in part:]

The appearance of Agila Mohammad Masud al Marimi in an American court last month after being held captive in Libya has been portrayed as a vital breakthrough in the long pursuit of justice in the Lockerbie bombing.

It is nothing of the kind. It is, instead, continuation of a course of action which had resulted in a shameful miscarriage of justice; one which brings us no nearer to establishing the truth about the terrible atrocity in which 270 people were killed when their Pan Am flight was blown up just before Christmas in 1988.

The Libyan government – such as it is in the currently fractured country – has ordered an investigation into the abduction of the 71-year-old man from his home in Tripoli by a militia before he turned up in the US. The country’s attorney general did not issue an arrest warrant, and says the handover to American authorities is likely to have been illegal.

The “confession” that he was the Lockerbie bombmaker which Masud – a former Gadaffi regime agent – allegedly made to Libyan officials after he was seized in Libya a decade ago, has long been considered dubious by many with knowledge of the bombing and its subsequent investigation.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the rendition of Masud was the “product of years of cooperation between US and Scottish authorities and the efforts of Libyan authorities over many years.” Officials in Washington have refused to furnish any details of how the transaction took place.

But it is not just possible abuse of procedure which is the main issue in this. The prosecution of Masud is predicated on the narrative that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was responsible for the attack.

But many of those closely involved in the case are convinced that his conviction, by a Scottish court, was fundamentally unjust, should have been overturned and have been campaigning for this over the years.

I saw Megrahi in the winter of 2011 in Tripoli, where he had been sent from his prison in Scotland after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was lying in bed attached to a drip, oxygen mask on his skeletal face, drifting in and out of consciousness. The medicine he needed had been plundered by looters in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of the Gaddafi regime; the doctors treating him had fled.

The vengeful pursuit of Megrahi, the feeling that he had escaped justice by failing to die in a cell, persisted among those who were adamant that he was guilty. He was faking his illness, they claimed right until his death; there were demands that the post-revolutionary Libyan government should arrest and send him back to Scotland or on to the US.

Megrahi died a few months later.

Members of some of the bereaved families in the bombing have long been convinced that his conviction was wrong. Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora was clear: “I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out thinking he had been framed. I am very afraid that we saw steps taken to ensure that a politically desired result was obtained.”

I reported from the specially constituted Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, where Megrahi and his fellow Libyan defendant, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, were tried and the flaws in the prosecution case became apparent very early.

The two men were charged with what amounted to joint enterprise, yet Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was freed. The prosecution evidence was circumstantial and contradictory. Key prosecution witnesses were shaky under cross-examination.

The evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka (codename “Puzzle Piece”) – who turned up in court wearing a drag queen’s costume in an attempt to hide his identity – was widely ridiculed. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed to the defence lawyers by the Crown.

There was scathing criticism from international jurists about the proceedings. Professor Hans Köchler, a UN appointed [observer], described them as an “inconsistent, arbitrary and a spectacular miscarriage of justice”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission subsequently identified six grounds where it believed “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.

Cynical realpolitik had played a key role in the prosecution. Both British and American officials initially claimed that Iran commissioned the attack on the Pan Am flight using the Palestinian guerrilla group PFLP (GC), based in Damascus, in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US.

That changed suddenly, however, after the first Gulf War when Syria joined the US sponsored coalition against Saddam Hussein: the same Western officials now held that Libya was the culprit state.

Colonel Gadaffi’s regime eventually paid out (...) compensation to the families of the victims; but that was seen by those unconvinced by the new theory as one just of the deals which, at the time, brought him back into the international fold.

An appeal to clear Megrahi’s name, backed some of the bereaved families and eminent lawyers, was turned down by the Appeal Court in Edinburgh in 2015 because the law was “not designed to give relatives of victims a right to proceed in an appeal for their own or the public’s interest”.

The US case against Masud is that he had colluded with Megrahi and Fhimah to carry out the bombing. It is claimed that he met the two men in Malta with the bomb which went on to the hold of the Pan Am plane through a connecting flight.

But, as we know, Fhimah was acquitted by the Lockerbie court, where the prosecution had insisted that he and Megrahi were the two bomb plotters in Malta.

Robert Black, KC, an eminent law professor born in Lockerbie who played a key role in organising the Camp Zeist trial, and subsequently became convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice warned back in 2013 that British officials were trying to retrospectively manipulate information implicating Masud and buttressing the case against Megrahi. “It looks like the Crown Office is trying to shore up the Malta connection, which is pretty weak,” he said.

Much of the information implicating Masud as being linked to Megrahi is coming from a former Libyan security official called Musbah Eter, who the FBI has been interviewing.

Eter has had a chequered life. He was convicted of the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin in 1986; an attack which prompted Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya, with some of the warplanes flying from British bases. A German TV investigation subsequently revealed that Eter was a CIA “asset”.

We do not know why it took him more than two decades to come forward with the Lockerbie information, or what influence his relationship with US intelligence played in this.

As well as Masud, the Americans hold that Abdullah al-Senussi – who was both Muammar Gaddafi’s chief of intelligence and his brother-in-law – is involved in the bombing. He is in prison in Libya, and may also end up in the US.

We will see Masud, and probably Senussi as well, end up facing Lockerbie charges at a court, and we may yet see another CIA operative – Eter this time – doing a court turn in a drag queen’s wig. None of this, however, will bring us nearer to knowing the truth about the terrible Lockerbie massacre.

[RB: Further pieces on the Lockerbie case by Kim Sengupta can be accessed here.]

"A wonderful bit of forensic investigation"

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Truth about Lockerbie will never be known … it’s Scotland’s JFK in today's edition of The Herald:]

Cliff Todd was the head of Britain’s Forensic Explosives Laboratory. Now retired, he breaks his silence on the Lockerbie case, talking of the unanswered questions to our Writer at Large, Neil Mackay, who covered the terrorist atrocity and got to know the bomber

Cliff Todd once came so close to death that a mere sneeze in a room full of al-Qaeda explosives would have blown him to smithereens. He’s helped solve some of the world’s most infamous bomb attacks: the 7-7 terror atrocities, the shoe-bomber case, multiple IRA operations like Warrington, the Bali mass murders, the assassination of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and the neo-nazi nail bomb campaign in London. But the one crime he’s never been able to fully resolve is the Lockerbie bombing which killed 270 people when Pan-Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town in December 1988.

Todd was head of investigations with the Ministry of Defence’s Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL). Every bomb incident in Britain fell under his watch – from schoolboy pranks with explosives, to bombings by organised crime gangs or bank robbers, bobby traps set by love rivals, and of course, all high profile terror attacks. Ahead of the release of his memoir – Explosive: Bringing the World’s Deadliest Bombers to Justice – Todd sat down to talk with the Herald on Sunday.

Questions still remain over Lockerbie, he says. Todd believes it’s impossible to say for sure that Libya alone lay behind the atrocity. Todd thinks Lockerbie is destined to become “another JFK”, so steeped in conspiracy theories the full truth will never be known.

Before he retired, Todd was the FEL manager of the Lockerbie case. He immersed himself in the fine detail, poring over every document and piece of evidence in the laboratory’s vaults. “I made it my business to go through everything from beginning to end, for my own satisfaction to know what was done, when it was done, why is was done, and what it meant.”

In 2001, following a sensational trial at a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was jailed for life for the Lockerbie bombing. Libya was accused of masterminding the attack in revenge for American air raids in 1986, in which Colonel Gaddafi reportedly lost his daughter. The air raids were a reprisal for a bomb attack on a Berlin disco which targeted American troops, believed to have been carried out by Libya.

Many – including some relatives of the British victims – never accepted the official version of events surrounding Lockerbie. There’s long standing claims that a Palestinian terror group – the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) – carried out the attack, with the assistance of Iran. Tehran was said to have funded the Pan-Am attack in revenge for America shooting down an Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, in which 290 people died, the summer before the Lockerbie bombing.

Megrahi later died after being controversially freed from jail in Scotland on compassionate grounds as he was suffering from cancer. I corresponded with Megrahi while he was in Greenock Prison and he insisted he was innocent. Todd, though, doesn’t believe Meghrai’s claims that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice – however, he does still think there’s plenty of questions around Lockerbie which remain unanswered.

“Will the truth ever be known?” Todd asks. “That’s a big question.” He says all the forensic evidence points towards Libya being behind the bombing, and he’s “satisfied with the court’s decision. There are some questions, but in essence I’m content that [the bomb] originated from Libya. Now, as to why, and who else might have been involved – I’ve no idea. Did Libya do it as a proxy for Iran? Who knows?”

The forensics point to the bomb being smuggled onto Pan-Am 103, in an international terrorist operation, crucially linked to Malta. The bomb went onboard the plane in Frankfurt, hidden within a Toshiba cassette recorder, placed inside a suitcase which was then stored in a luggage container in the hold of the plane. Pan-Am 103 flew to London before finally exploding over Scotland en route to America. Fragments of trousers, linked to the bomb, were bought in the Maltese town of Sliema in a shop called Mary’s House. Megrahi was identified as the man who bought the trousers. A fragment of timer device, alleged to have been used in the bomb, was said to have been sold by a Swiss company to Libya.

However, claims were made that the Swiss timers didn’t in fact match the bomb fragment. The Herald also uncovered claims that Tony Gauci, the owner of the Maltese shop where Megrahi was said to have bought the crucial pair of trousers, had been paid $2 million by American authorities.

Todd is sure, though, that the timers match and the trousers can indeed by traced to the Maltese shop. On the connection to Megrahi, however, he’s more cautious. “Gauci says he identified Megrahi, well okay, people can argue about that, I can’t have a fixed opinion on that one way or another,” he says. “So on the theory that the bomb went from Malta to Frankfurt to London and on, I’m happy with that. Who instigated that, however, I don’t know.”

Operation Autumn Leaves poses the biggest questions around the Lockerbie case, Todd feels. The operation took place just two months before Lockerbie, and saw German security services bust a PFLP-GC terror cell in Frankfurt. A number of bombs were found, with at least one inside a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder, making it almost identical to the Lockerbie bomb. Some relatives of the British victims believe the similarities are too stark to be easily explained away.

The initial stages of the police inquiry into Lockerbie focused on the PFLP-GC. There’s been speculation that Libyan agents may have been connected to the Palestinian terror cell. Former head of CIA counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro, who worked on Lockerbie, believed the PFLP-GC planned the attack on behalf of Iran. There’s a theory that after the Autumn Leaves arrests, the plot was sub-contracted to Libyan intelligence.

Operation Autumn Leaves, Todd says, “was very much the focus initially. There were similarities there. It was the Malta connection that moved the investigation away from Palestinians towards Libya”.

The forensics, he believes, point clearly to ‘the Malta connection’ but, he feels, questions remain, due to events such as Operation Autumn Leaves, about the wider geopolitical motivations behind the crime and whether Libya may have acted for another organisation or state. “We didn’t say that our evidence pointed directly to Megrahi because it doesn’t, it points directly to Mary’s House selling the material that went into the bomb case. Somebody obviously got those trousers from Mary’s House, who that somebody is, is not for the FEL to say.”

On the timer, Todd adds: “The FEL only ever made conclusions in respect to the fragment belonging to the timer. We never made any conclusions regarding Libya and that’s kind of the overall point. The FEL looks at the evidence and says what the evidence shows, and in Lockerbie we didn’t make any conclusions about ‘this must have been Libya who did it’ … Right from day one is was clearly going to be very political and that will never go away.”

Todd believes “you’d have to be deluded or a liar to think that everything is known that we can know about Lockerbie. I wouldn’t claim that for a second”. So does Todd think the truth will ever be known? “Personally, no. I think it’s a bit like JFK. It’ll never go away, there will always be another angle.”

Does he think Megrahi ‘did it’? “I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. The evidence pointed, it seems to me, to Libya. That’s it.”

At the time of Lockerbie, Todd was a junior investigator. It was his two bosses who worked solely on the investigation. Today, “there would certainly be many more people working on it”, Todd explains. “It was realised very early on that it was likely to become very political, and they were deliberately told to keep it within themselves and so they didn’t use as much help as they otherwise might.”

However, he insists this in no way hampered the investigation’s integrity. “It might have made the investigation a bit longer than it needed to be, but the integrity is beyond question.”

The FEL has been accused of cover-up over Lockerbie. Todd remains furious about such claims. “All that mud was slung and it makes me really angry,” he says. He does, however, empathise with the families of relatives who don’t believe the official version of events and continue their search for truth. Todd feels they remain tragically “trapped in the moment in 1988” when their loved ones died. “My heart goes out to them but that isn’t a place from which you can be entirely objective,” he adds.

Does he think reports of Tony Gauci receiving payments fed conspiracy theories? “Possibly, but as forensic scientists we ignore that and let the police get on with what they do and we do our stuff. Gauci – is he reliable? Nothing to do with us really.”

The FEL’s work on Lockerbie, Todd maintains, “was a wonderful bit of forensic investigation. It was tremendous”. Before he retired, he complied an extensive study on Lockerbie for his staff so they could learn from the investigation. Today, nobody who worked on the bombing is still at the explosives lab. “The expertise cannot be lost,” he says. “Once I left all that expertise would have been gone.”

Forensics teams faced an unimaginably complex task with Lockerbie. A bomb in a cassette recorder, in a suitcase, inside a luggage container, within the hold of a jet exploded over Scotland, scattering debris from coast to coast.

Astonishingly, Todd explains, the components of a bomb “don’t get vaporised”. Rather it shatters into microscopic fragments. Search teams recovered every scrap of debris from the ruined plane. Once all debris was gathered and sorted into batches – bits of wing, under-carriage or fuselage – “you then start looking for specific explosive damage”.

Examining luggage containers seemed “a good place to start” as the theory was that the bomb had been in the airplane’s hold. “Fairly soon, we found bits of a luggage container which showed explosive damage known as micro-cratering.” That meant the luggage container had been peppered with tiny particles of exploding bomb. A timer fragment was also found, and scraps of the tell-tale trousers from Malta – completing the main elements of the forensics case.

Todd is courageous enough to own up to the fact that he’s made forensic mistakes, though. During the investigation into whether Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco de Sa Carneiro had been assassinated by a bomb on a plane, Todd accidentally cross-contaminated evidence with explosive residue. As soon as he realised his mistake, however, he admitted it right away. “Always hold your hands up,” he says. “Never cover anything up. Everyone makes mistakes at some point.”

While he admits that forensic science isn’t perfect because “people are humans and humans make mistakes and so no process can ever be 100% reliable”, he’s clear that no FEL staff would, in his opinion, ever act in a corrupt way by manipulating, planting or covering up evidence.

[RB: Cliff Todd paints a very rosy picture of the work of FEL in the Lockerbie case. As I wrote on 11 August 2021 in an item headed The Forensic Explosives Laboratory and the Lockerbie case  "Anyone familiar with the forensic scientific evidence provided by FEL in the Lockerbie case may be forgiven for regarding today's tribute with a distinct measure of scepticism." A further item headed The same bad science and the same bad scientists sets out the views of Gareth Peirce on the work of the laboratory in a number of high-profile cases, including Lockerbie.]