A filmmaker’s quest to unmask bomb maker
For Ken Dornstein, tracing suspects in Lockerbie tragedy had personal meaning
BOSTON— Ken Dornstein was 19 and home for the holidays when his family received word his 25-year-old brother, an aspiring writer living abroad, was one of 270 people killed when the New York-bound Boeing 747 he was flying on crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland.
Over the years Dornstein, who went on to become a documentary filmmaker, turned to his sleuthing skills to shake out critical details of one of the worst attacks against American citizens by extremists.
He spent years trying to identify the man he believes made the bomb that took down Pan Am Flight103 on Dec. 21, 1988. “When you lose someone you love, you don’t forget,” Dornstein told The Associated Press.
On Thursday, U.S. and Scottish investigators said they had identified two new Libyan suspects in the bombing and want to interview them in Tripoli.
For Dornstein, 46, it has been a nearly lifelong quest that began the day his brother David died, sending him on a Byzantine chase that included searching files kept by the FBI, the former East German police and ultimately to a jail in Libya.
The first step was coming up with a list of eight to10 names of individuals from the files of the original investigation who seemed to play a role in the bombing but who had never been indicted.
In the summer of 2011, he set off for Libya.
The Somerville, Mass., resident said he quickly found out many of those named in the investigation were dead.
“By my count there were three people left alive who I believe played a role in it and who I was focused on trying to identify and find,” Dornstein said.
Of those, the most intriguing was a mysterious figure who Dornstein said had been travelling with Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the attack, including on the day of the bombing.
Dornstein said he was eventually able to connect a passport number of the suspected explosives expert to a matching passport number linked by East German secret police to the bombing of a disco in Berlin a few years before Lockerbie.
For a long time Dornstein, and investigators, weren’t sure that the individual — a Libyan named Abu Agila Mas’ud — was even real.
Dornstein said he was able to track down Mas’ud to a jail in Libya where he says he was serving a 10-plus year sentence on bomb-making charges for booby-trapping the cars of those opposed to Gadhafi.
“I wish I had come face to face to him,” said Dornstein, who only dealt with Mas’ud indirectly.