Early report that Lockerbie investigation pointing to Libya

[Pan Am 103 Clue Leads to Libyans : Terrorism: US and Scottish investigators now believe that the regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the jet bombing that killed 270 is the headline over a lengthy report by Robin Wright and Ronald Ostrow that was published in the Los Angeles Times on this date in 1991. It reads as follows:]

The clue that turned the case was a microchip, a tiny piece of a triggering device to detonate a bomb.

From it, American and Scottish investigators found a new trail that refuted the conclusions of almost two years of arduous legwork by thousands of agents worldwide -- and eventually changed major assumptions about the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over a small Scottish village just four days before Christmas, 1988.

A key breakthrough, which came just as the largest international criminal probe in history neared an impasse, was almost a fluke. A "brilliant young CIA analyst," as one insider described him, decided to try a new hypothesis: Could someone besides the widely suspected culprits -- Palestinian radicals, their Syrian patrons or Iranian militants -- have been involved?

The analyst started with a hunch.

He searched for a "signature" that would match the Pan Am bombing with earlier incidents to prove his suspicions. Culling through CIA files, he came up with the 1984 bombing of a French UTA airliner in Chad. A premature explosion blew up the baggage compartment while the plane was still on the ground and wounded 27 people.

He also found a link with the 1986 attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Togo. Officials in Lome, the Togolese capital, had arrested nine people with two suitcases full of plastic explosives.

But the biggest find was an obscure case in Senegal involving the arrest of two men at Dakar airport in February, 1988. In their possession were 20 pounds of sophisticated Semtex plastic and TNT explosives, weapons and several triggering devices.

The analyst's hunch was right.

In all three cases, the "signature" was distinctly Libyan.

In Senegal, the two men who were arrested -- Mohammed Marzouk, alias Mohammed Naydi, and Mansour Omran Saber -- were both agents of Libyan intelligence. And the triggering devices in their possession matched the microchip fragment from the Pan Am bomb.

The connection has since provided a new set of answers to how and why Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and who masterminded the blast.

Based on the forensic breakthrough and the links with earlier cases, investigators now believe:

* The regime of Moammar Kadafi carried out the bombing. Libyan intelligence, headed by Abdullah Sanussi, orchestrated the plot.

* The primary motive was revenge for the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli in which about 40 people, including Kadafi's adopted daughter, were killed. "The notion that the 1986 bombing of Tripoli deterred Libyan terrorism is greatly flawed," a leading counterterrorism expert concluded.

* The mysterious bag carrying the bomb-laden Toshiba radio-cassette player on the blown-up Pan Am 103 came from Malta. Investigators believe the bomb was probably flown on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, Germany -- although the passenger and cargo log has disappeared. In Germany, the cassette player was loaded on Pan Am 103 as an interline bag, unattached to any passenger.

Vital missing pieces in the puzzle finally fell into place. "We followed a lot of leads that looked promising at the beginning but turned out to be nothing," a counterterrorism specialist said. "All the streets followed down to dead ends."

The breakthroughs mean that, unlike the unsolved cases of half a dozen terrorist spectaculars against US targets in the 1980s, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may go to court.

Assistant Atty Gen Robert S Mueller III, who heads the Justice Department's Criminal Division and has been meeting frequently with the FBI on the investigation, appears poised to take the case to a grand jury, according to US officials.

Should the grand jury return sealed indictments, the biggest obstacle may not be just arresting those involved. US authorities already are working with French police now seeking to apprehend one of the Libyan suspects somewhere in North Africa, the officials said.

The problem instead may be competition over which country will get them for trial. French intelligence now believes yet another terrorist attack -- the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772 over the West African country of Niger -- was also directed by Libyan intelligence.

Although the method differed in each case, the signature was once again the telltale clue. The UTA explosive, part of which did not blow up and was retrieved from the Sahara desert, was one of five "suitcase bombs" that investigators believed Libyan intelligence purchased earlier from the notorious Mideast bomb maker Abu Ibrahim.

The primary motive, French officials suspect, was revenge for French aid that enabled Chad -- where the UTA flight took on most of its passengers -- to rout Libyan troops occupying parts of the neighboring state in 1987. The bomb was probably loaded in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital where the flight originated.

The new evidence on the Pan Am bombing, which began to emerge last summer, contradicts the longstanding belief that it was linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) headed by Ahmed Jibril. The radical PFLP-GC, based in Syria, is outside the PLO umbrella.

The original case was based on the arrest of a cell of 16 operatives in Germany two months before the 1988 Pan Am bombing. The group was found to have five sophisticated bombs, especially designed to blow up aircraft, hidden in electronic equipment.

From his base in Damascus, Jibril was also known to have worked closely with Iran, where he frequently traveled. Investigators believed that Tehran commissioned the PFLP-GC to target an American plane in retaliation for the accidental 1988 US downing of Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf in which 290 people died.

The crucial clues that changed the direction of the probe were the detonators. The Palestinian group's detonators were all Czech-made. They were attached to altimeter devices that were set to go off once a plane reached a certain altitude.

But, as forensic experts discovered, the detonator fragment that was culled from the wreckage of Flight 103, which had been scattered over 845 square miles of Scottish countryside, had important discrepancies.

It was of Swiss manufacture--from the same firm that had made the triggering devices that were found on the Libyan agents in Senegal. And it was attached to an ordinary timer that had been set to go off at a certain hour.

The "fingerprints" -- as forensic experts call the telltale characteristics of sophisticated explosive devices -- of the Pan Am bomb and the PFLP-GC bombs were vastly different. But the fingerprint of the Pan Am bomb was identical to the devices carried by the Libyan agents who were caught in Senegal.

Unfortunately, Senegal freed the Libyan agents, who were never formally charged, in June, 1988. US officials believe their release was part of a package deal in exchange for ending Libyan support for Senegal's opposition forces and for restoring diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been severed eight years earlier.

At the time, the State Department issued a largely unnoticed -- but perhaps tragically prescient -- official comment: "We are extremely disappointed by Senegal's action, which raises questions about that country's commitment to the struggle against international terrorism."

Six months later, all 259 people on board Pan Am 103 and 11 others on the ground died when the New York-bound plane, flying 31,000 feet over Scotland, exploded just 38 minutes after takeoff from London's Heathrow Airport.

Crucial evidence held by Senegalese authorities also subsequently disappeared. US investigators have had to rely on photographs of the Libyan agents' materiel to match up the fingerprints of the two bombs.

US officials are unwilling to say where the two Libyans are today, but there are hints that they may be suspects in the Pan Am case. Investigators do believe, however, that the same top Libyan intelligence officials -- including Sanussi -- masterminded both the operation that was uncovered in Senegal and the Pan Am bombing.

Sanussi has been a constant headache to counterterrorism officials in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, a well-placed US source said. In 1986, he was sentenced in absentia by an Egyptian court to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiring to assassinate a group of prominent Libyan exiles.

Sanussi also reportedly makes regular use of Libyan Arab Airlines, the national carrier, as a cover for intelligence and terrorist activities. He is believed to have recruited baggage-handlers and airport personnel in Europe and Africa to facilitate his operations.

The new case against Libya has effectively absolved Syria, the PFLP-GC's primary sponsor, of involvement in the Pan Am bombing, counterterrorism officials say.

But neither Damascus nor Jibril has been cleared of plotting terrorist activities. US officials also believe the arrests that broke up the radical Palestinian cell operating in Germany probably foiled what could have been an even bigger terrorist spectacular: the bombing of three other planes over a period of only a few days.

Counterterrorism analysts suggest that one of the Palestinian group's targets was an Iberia Airlines flight from Madrid to Israel via Barcelona. Among its scheduled passengers were members of an Israeli sports team.

A former US intelligence official says that PFLP-GC operatives also had surveyed the Pan Am counter at Frankfurt airport, although no evidence indicated specific plans against Flight 103 as one of the three planes.

The biggest outstanding question in the investigation is what role, if any, Iran may have played, several key US sources say.

"Unlike the connection established between Iran and Jibril, we have nothing to prove Iran's link with Libya," one official said. "But some still believe there's a link (that) we haven't found yet."

Another added: "I'll go to my grave believing Iranians had a role in Pan Am 103."

By contrast, before the latest breakthrough, investigators felt they had a strong circumstantial case of Iranian links with the PFLP-GC cell on the Pan Am bombing.

Through electronic intercepts, intelligence services had monitored messages from Iranian officials known for their militancy who expressed concern after arrests of the PFLP-GC cell. They apparently were worried about the implications for an operation they wanted carried out.

Investigators initially thought the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were directly connected. One early scenario suggested that Iran funded two separate cells for the same operation. The second cell was to provide a backup if the first one failed.

But investigators have increasingly moved away from the so-called "Cell A, Cell B" scenario.

So far, investigators have no evidence from intercepts or secret meetings of direct contact between Libya and Iran. Indeed, relations between Tripoli and Tehran have been erratic.

But if the PFLP-GC and Libyan plots were not linked, the implications are even more serious. "You have to be terrified that there were two groups out there in the fall of 1988 plotting to bomb planes," the well-placed official said. "That's even scarier."

[RB: It was just under five months later that it was announced by the prosecution authorities in Scotland and the United States that charges were being brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.]

When truth is inconvenient

[On this date ten years ago a long article by Hugh Miles headlined Inconvenient Truths was published in the London Review of Books.  The following are excerpts:]

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. (...)

Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the [official] who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi. (...)

Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding … which documents … were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USSVincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. (...)

Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.

Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William [Chasey], a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.

At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases). If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:

It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty. 

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.