A commentary on the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the Pan Am 103 disaster.
Tuesday 26 August 2014
PFLP-GC press office denies reports of death of Ahmed Jibril
Saturday 17 September 2016
Terrorism, Spies, Palestinians and the FBI
Sunday 3 February 2008
Lockerbie: Chronicle of a Death Foretold
I reproduce below the final section, headed Ockam's Razor:
'Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious. -- St. Thomas Aquinas
'The 14th century English friar and logician William of Ockham is credited to have been the first to suggest the principle according to which the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is usually the right one. Allow me to review the facts.
'Following the Vincennes attack, the Iranian Ambassador at the UN told the world in no ambiguous terms that Iran will seek revenge. In Tehran, Mostashemi, the Iranian Minister of the Interior, promised that the skies will rain blood.
'Mostashemi, and top other Iranian officials, held a series of meetings in Beirut with several members of a well known organization, the PFLP-GC, led by Ahmed Jibril. Iran has colluded with the PFLP-GC before and after the Lockerbie bombing.
'The PFLP-GC was the logical choice for several reasons. The Palestinian group operated in Lebanon under Syrian protection and enjoyed a special relation with Mostashemi who had been the Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon in the 80s.
'The organization had the know-how to manufacture timing devices involving an air-pressure switch for bombs to detonate aboard airplanes. Jibril had operating cells in Europe, including in Germany and Sweden. Last, but not least, Syrian drug Barron al Kasaar, and former associate of Oliver North, could easily bypass the security of Frankfurt airport, thanks to several baggage handlers working for his organization.
'In September, Jibril sent Dalkamoni, his most trusted lieutenant, to Germany in order to organize a cell which, with the collaboration of another PFLP-GC cell from Sweden, had for mission to construct bomb specifically designed to destroy airliners. A few weeks later, Jibril ordered Khreesat, one of his two senior bomb-makers, to join Dalkamoni in Germany.
'In late October, the German authorities arrested most members of both cells. They found four devices built into domestic objects, such as radios and televisions, as well as Pan Am timetables. Several members of the terrorist organization escaped the raid, including Abu Ellias and Abu Talb. A CIA-BKA asset told the FBI that Dalkamoni had passed one bomb to Ellias. Two PFLP-GC members, Goben and Tunayb, have revealed that Ellias planted thebomb in Jafaar's luggage.
'Jafaar met Talb in Sweden and then Jibril in Germany, in mid December. It seems that Jibril convinced Jafaar to carry heroin to the US. A witness described Jafaar as suspiciously agitated as he was waiting to board on Pan Am 103.
'The Germans tested one of these bombs by taking it up in a 747. They established that a bomb detonated by these timers would go off between 32 and 42 minutes after take-off. Flight 103 was in the air for 38 minutes before it blew up, right in the middle of the time frame.
'Last October, former CIA operative Robert Baer told David Horovitz that the bomb that exploded on Pan Am 103 was one of Dalkamoni devices.
'A high ranking Iranian defector testified that Iranian agents planted the bomb parts in Frankfurt, and that the bomb was assembled in London. (See Confession of an Iranian Terror Czar) Jibril and Kasaar were seen having diner alone in a Paris restaurant just weeks before the bombing. The BKA concluded that the bomb started its journey in Frankfurt.
'During the first appeal, in 2002, it was revealed that there had been a break-in at Heathrow the night before the bombing. The Iranian Air facility was immediately adjacent to the baggage assembly area where transit luggage for Flight 103 was loaded.
'The chief baggage handler, John Bedford, testified that, when he returned from a coffee break, he saw two additional suitcases had been loaded into the relevant container for Flight 103.
'The crash investigators established that the explosion occurred precisely where those cases had been placed, above a single layer of baggage that Bedford had already packed into the container.
'The day prior to the bombing, various Intelligence Agencies intercepted communications informing Iranian Officials of the whereabouts of McKee and his rescue team.
'Two day after the bombing, communication intercepts indicate that Tehran ordered their Ambassador in Beirut to pay Jibril Organization for the successful operation. The transfer of the money is recorded and Dalkamoni was in possession of the Paris bank account number when he was arrested.
'Dalkamoni was rewarded for his services to the "Islamic revolutionary struggle against the West." The Iranian citation praises Dalkamoni for achieving the greatest-ever strike against the West.
'Moreover, $500,000 was transferred on April 25, 1989 to the Degussa bank of Frankfurt and deposited on the account of Mohammed Abu Talb. In his agenda, Talb had circled, the date of the Lockerbie bombing. In his apartment, police found clothes bought in Malta. Talb had met with Dalkamoni in Cyprus during October.
'Talb was in Malta on November 23 when clothes surrounding the bomb are believed to have been bought. The owner of the shop had initially identified him. He confessed his participation in the Lockerbie bombing and then retracted his confession without any explanation. His wife was heard telling in a phone conversation to Palestinian friends "to get rid of the clothes."
'Incidentally, Abu Talb likes his friends to call him by his nom de guerre, namely Abu Intekam, Father of Revenge, the very codename given by Mostashemi to the Lockerbie bombing operation.
Thursday 26 November 2020
Who made the bomb? The full truth about Lockerbie is still not being told
[This is the headline over a long report by David Horovitz published today on the website of The Times of Israel. It reads in part:]
Megrahi went to his grave protesting his innocence, and his family continues to fight to clear his name. This week, Scotland’s highest criminal court is hearing his relatives’ latest appeal against his conviction, after an independent review determined that he might have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Among other flaws, the defense is highlighting that the Maltese shopkeeper who identified Megrahi as the man who purchased the incriminating clothing in the suitcase, and whose evidence has always been controversial, was paid for his testimony, a fact that was not disclosed to the defense in the original trial.
I have followed the Lockerbie case since the time of the bombing, when I was working for The Jerusalem Post as its London correspondent, and when I happened to see material in the early stages of the investigation that pointed not to Col. Gaddafi’s Libya, but rather to Iran and the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP-GC — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Earlier in 1988, the US Navy’s guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes had shot down an Iran Air Airbus in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 passengers and crew, in a tragic case of mistaken identity. The US said it had misidentified the civilian airliner as a fighter jet. Iran had promised to avenge the deaths. Ayatollah Khomeini had vowed that the skies would “rain blood.” (...)
Just weeks before the Lockerbie blast, four devices strikingly similar to the one that would soon be utilized to such devastating effect on Flight 103 had been found in the possession of PFLP-GC members arrested in a Frankfurt suburb. That PFLP-GC cell was reported at the time to have been planning to blow up planes heading to the US and Israel. Its bombs, like those the PFLP-GC had used in the past, and like the Lockerbie device, were detonated by a barometric pressure device and timer, activated when a plane reaches a certain altitude. A fifth bomb in the Frankfurt cell’s possession was said to have disappeared; this was presumed to be the device that blew up Flight 103.
The Lockerbie investigators were initially following these leads; then they shifted their focus to Libya. In 2003, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the bombing — though he denied ordering it — and paid compensation to the victims’ families, in accordance with UN demands for the lifting of sanctions on his country.
Almost seven years ago, a colleague of mine at The Times of Israel noticed that a man named Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian national, maintained an Arabic-language Facebook page in which he had taken to posting pictures of the Lockerbie bombing. Khreesat was the PFLP-GC’s bombmaker-in-chief, the alleged maker of those barometric-pressure devices. He was one of those who was arrested by the German authorities in Frankfurt, only to be inexplicably released soon afterward. Now he was promising to reveal the truth about Lockerbie — to “write about Pan Am 103,” including “who was on the flight and the circumstances of the incident.”
In his posts, Khreesat also connected himself to the bombing of an El Al plane from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972, describing that attack as “a challenge to the Israeli intelligence agents who are responsible for searching luggage and everything that goes on a plane.” The 1972 El Al bomb — another barometric-pressure device — had been hidden in a record player that two British women were duped into carrying by two Arab men who were later arrested. Although the bomb exploded, the pilot was able to make an emergency landing. “It was a successful blow against the Israeli enemy,” Khreesat wrote in a March 14, 2014, Facebook post, in which he also described spending time with PFLP-GC chief Ahmed Jibril in Rome as they waited for the attack to unfold.
In several 2013-4 Facebook posts relating to Lockerbie, Khreesat recalled his arrest two months before the bombing. He posted pictures of the destroyed cockpit of the 747 after the explosion, the painstakingly reconstructed parts of the plane wreckage, and a radio-cassette recorder like the one that held the bomb. He also asked a series of unanswered questions about the attack. “Who did the operation?” he mused in a post on the 25th anniversary of the blast. “Israel? Iran? Libya? Who carried the Toshiba explosive device [in which the bomb was hidden]?… Did the explosive device come from Malta airport like the American intelligence agencies say?… When will these riddles be solved.”
This week’s appeal by the Megrahi family was green-lighted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in part because of “nondisclosure” of evidence to the defense team in the original trial. Some of that documentary evidence is widely reported to have been provided by Jordan’s late King Hussein and to not only to implicate the PFLP-GC in the Lockerbie atrocity, but to specify that Marwan Khreesat built the bomb.
On Friday, however, the head of the Scottish judiciary, Lord Carloway, ruled that the documents must still be withheld on the grounds of national security. Accepting a secrecy order signed by British Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb [sic], Carloway explained, “[Rabb’s] clear view is [that the release of the documentation] would cause real harm to the national security of the UK because it would damage counter-terrorism liaison and intelligence gathering between the UK and other states… The documents had been provided in confidence to the government. Their disclosure would reduce the willingness of the state, which produced the documents, to confide information and to co-operate with the UK.”
All manner of conspiracy theories surround the Lockerbie bombing, some of which do not rule out the involvement of Libya and Megrahi, most of which revolve around the fact that nobody has been prosecuted for making the bomb, and many of which focus on the PFLP-GC and Marwan Khreesat.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to raise the question of the Lockerbie bombing with several former Israeli intelligence figures, who were in office at the time of the bombing and well aware of the activities of the PFLP-GC at the time. Two of them insisted without elaboration that “Libya did it” and brushed away further questions. A third, by contrast, told me it was “clear that Jibril prepared the operation.”
Israel was “listening in” on the PFLP-GC during the months prior to Lockerbie, he said, and hearing about preparations for what “we thought was a plan to target an Israeli plane.” There was a “huge alert” in the Israeli security establishment because of indications that the PFLP-GC was about to strike, this source went on. “We told the British and the Americans what we knew, which was that there was an intention to hit an Israeli plane… We didn’t warn about a British or an American plane because we didn’t know that,” he said.
The new appeal hearing is expected to continue until Friday, with a ruling at a later date. “It is submitted in this case that no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned the verdict that it did, namely the conviction of Mr Megrahi,” the defense lawyer Claire Mitchell told the judges on Tuesday. But that argument will be harder to make without those “Jordanian” documents, which the defense has said are central to the appeal. If his relatives fail to have Megrahi’s conviction overturned, their allegation of a miscarriage of justice will linger.
Marwan Khreesat died in 2016.
His Facebook page is still online.
But he never did tell the truth about Lockerbie.