THE TRUTH AT LAST?
It is 30 years ago today since a New York-bound jet was blown up over Scotland. Now a special investigation reveals it was a Palestinian terror group in the pay of the Iranians that carried out the attack not the Libyans
IRAN paid a Palestinian terrorist group millions of pounds to carry out the Lockerbie bombing, a former senior member admitted to his family. Militant Marwan Khreesat left a dossier of evidence against his former terror boss – including the alleged name of the bombmaker who made the device that exploded above the Scottish town killing 270 people 30 years ago today.
Khreesat’s daughter Saha claimed terror chief Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of PalestineGeneral Command, made millions of pounds from masterminding the bombing on orders from the Iranian regime.
Our investigation adds to the three-decade long dispute over who was really to blame for the worst ever terror attack on British soil.
It will fuel fears that the only man convicted over Lockerbie, Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent, and suspicions Iran ordered the bombing in revenge for the US shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet just a few months earlier.
Dr Jim Swire, who lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the bombing, said: “This is music to our ears and confirms what we have known for a long time and have never been able to say in public.”
Scottish MSP Christine Grahame said: “These various discoveries that you have made builds further on the case that it was, as many of us believe, Iran that was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing and that Megrahi was the fall guy.”
Eighty-year-old Jibril has never been arrested over the bombing and is believed to be in Syria fighting for the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Khreesat was quickly identified as a possible Lockerbie suspect as he had been arrested two months earlier in Frankfurt, along with another PFLPGC member who had plastic explosives hidden in a Toshiba cassette player in his car – a device with strong similarities to the Lockerbie bomb.
Khreesat later admitted his role in the bombing of an Israeli El Al passenger jet from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972, when a device designed to detonate at a set altitude exploded but failed to destroy the plane and the pilot made a successful emergency landing. Jordanian Khreesat died two years ago at the age of 70. But his daughter Saha, 43, insisted her father played no role in the Lockerbie bombing and instead blamed Jibril.
She said: “I think he is responsible, and he has a deal with the Iran government. I do have proof that Ahmed Jibril is responsible for Lockerbie. It might be papers or recordings and it is not in our house now.”
Asked if her father knew the identity of the Lockerbie bomb-maker, she said: “For sure but I don’t know. My dad left something written about this but it’s not in the house. If my dad made the bomb he would have got lots of money but now we don’t have anything. Ahmed Jibril took the first million and then he took the rest of the money and got very rich, but my dad didn’t take anything.”
Asked why Khreesat didn’t reveal this information while he was alive, Saha said: “Maybe he just wanted to protect Jordan.”
Referring to the US-led bombing of Tripoli in 1986, in revenge for the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub, Saha explained her father’s fears: “What happened to Libya will happen to Jordan. Lockerbie is an important topic since it is related to America and no one is supposed to mess with America. My dad was a person who is loyal to his country but unfortunately, the government and the intelligence didn’t respect him.”
Saha claimed that the Jordanian authorities were not interested in the truth about Lockerbie. “When we talk to the government, we tell them that we have specific information and they don’t really care. If I said that information outside, I have young siblings, nephews, and my mother. Maybe something bad will happen to us. How