Did he bomb PanAm 103?
He is Britain’s biggest mass killer, the only man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Now, five years after his death, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi’s family has launched a new bid to clear his name. But was he really guilty, or was he framed?
HE has been dead for five years while his crime – Britain’s biggest mass murder – has haunted the nation for almost 30. But doubts over the safety of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi’s conviction for the Lockerbie bombing remain very much alive.
This week his family’s lawyer Aamer Anwar submitted a new application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to review the case and refer it back to the High Court for an appeal. If successful, the most significant trial ever conducted in Scots law will have returned the wrong verdict, an innocent man will have gone to jail for murdering 270 people and the reputation of the nation’s criminal justice system will be shredded before the eyes of the international community. Can such an outcome be credible? Here we examine the two competing Lockerbie narratives. One has Megrahi bang to rights – while the other has the Libyan cynically framed for a crime perpetrated by another country entirely.
WHICH NATION IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LOCKERBIE BOMBING?
IT was Libya. Tensions had been rising between the US and Libya for several years in the disputed waters of the Gulf of Sidra. In 1981, two Libyan fighter aircraft were shot down by US Navy Tomcats and later two Libyan radio ships were sunk. More Libyan vessels were destroyed in March 1986. It allegedly prompted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to order the bombing of Berlin’s La Belle nightclub, which was frequented by US military personnel.
US President Ronald Reagan’s response was air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi – which, the Libyan government claimed, resulted in the death of a baby girl Gaddafi said he had adopted.
The following year the US supplied Libya’s neighbour Chad with satellite intelligence in a humiliating defeat of Gaddafi’s forces at the Battle of Maaten al-Sarra, leaving him simmering with rage. The bombing of Pan Am 103 was his revenge.
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IT was Iran. The country’s supreme leader the Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the bombing in response to the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner in July 1988.
Iran Air Flight 655 was en route from Tehran to Dubai when it was brought down by missiles from the US Navy cruiser Vincennes which had incorrectly identified the aircraft as a fighter jet. All 290 on board were killed in one of the worst aviation disasters in history. The Vincennes crew is said to have made multiple attempts to contact the flight on military and civilian frequencies but received no response.
The US later recognised the incident as a ‘terrible human tragedy’. But it has failed to recognise that it led to another – the murder of 270 people over and in Lockerbie. The Ayatollah gave the order for that bombing to copy what happened to the civilians on board Flight 655.
WHO WERE THE BOMBERS?
NO ONE seriously believes that Megrahi acted alone but he was in the thick of it. He was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and a director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli – both organisations linked to the Jamahirya Security Organization (JSO), the intelligence service of Libya.
And, crucially, he was spotted buying the clothes in Malta which were found to have been wrapped around the Toshiba radio cassette recorder into which the bomb was built.
Accomplices included Gaddafi’s former spy chief and ‘executioner’ Abdullah al-Senussi and Tunisianborn technical expert Abu Agila Masud, a bomb-maker.
Both men have been identified as suspects by the Crown Office and are wanted for questioning. Chillingly, both were also among the welcoming party at the airport in Tripoli where the freed Megrahi arrived to a rapturous reception in 2009.
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THE guilty man is Mohammed Abu Talb, a convicted terrorist now living quietly in Sweden. Egyptian-born Talb was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP – GC) which was heavily funded by Iran and received the Ayatollah’s orders to bomb a US civilian jet. Talb had form. Exactly a year after the Lockerbie bombing he was convicted of involvement of a series of bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam in 1985 and jailed for life – which turned out to be 20 years.
He was the original Lockerbie suspect, was named by both Megrahi and his co-accused Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah as the bomber in special defences of incrimination and considered by many terrorism experts to be the most credible perpetrator.
Talb gave evidence for the prosecution at the trial, saying he played no part in the atrocity.
He had the air of a man who could cheerfully machine gun everybody in the room.
HOW DID THEY GET THE BOMB ON BOARD PAN AM 103?
THE Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb was loaded onto a flight from Malta to Frankfurt in Germany and subsequently transferred to a feeder flight for Pan Am 103.
Computer records at Frankfurt show that Flight KM180 was carrying one unaccompanied bag which was sent to gate B044 to be transferred on to Pan Am 103A, the Heathrow-bound feeder flight. While there is no direct evidence of the bomb being inserted at Luqa airport, it should be remembered Megrahi was head of Libyan Arab Airlines, was frequently in Malta and was seen there around the time of the bombing. His claims to have been at home with his family in Tripoli on the day of the bombing are contradicted by evidence which has him arriving from Tripoli the day before the bombing, carrying a false passport.
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THE case carrying the bomb was loaded onto an aluminium crate at Heathrow Airport and the crate was subsequently loaded onto the 747. A broken padlock was found on a security gate on the night before the bombing, suggesting this was when the culprit infiltrated the system. Baggage handler John Bedford later noticed that a brown Samsonite suitcase had mysteriously appeared in the left-hand corner of a crate while he was on a tea break, but he had dismissed it at the time.
Crucially, he told police he had seen the bag there at least an hour before the feeder flight from Frankfurt arrived. It could not possibly, then, have been unloaded from this plane and so the Malta connection falls. This evidence was simply disregarded when the focus of the investigation switched to Libya from the Middle East.
WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
THREE weeks after the bombing a charred shirt collar with a small fragment of circuit board embedded in it was found near Lockerbie.
This was the smoking gun which proved Megrahi did it. The shirt was traced to a shop called Mary’s House in Malta, run by Tony Gauci, who remembered a Libyan man buying it and other clothes. He said the man looked ‘a lot’ like Megrahi.
The circuit board fragment, part of the timer which detonated the bomb, was made by the Swiss company Mebo which had sold 20 such timers to the Libyans. Mebo was run by Edwin Bollier who has admitted knowing Megrahi and even renting him offices down the hall from his own in Switzerland. Further witness
accounts put Megrahi in Malta on the day of the bombing. Abdul Majid Giaka, a disaffected member of the Libyan intelligence services told investigators Megrahi had flown to Malta on the day before the bombing carrying a brown suitcase, that it had been stored in the cockpit of the plane during that flight and that the Libyan had taken the case, unchecked, through customs.
The following day, shortly after the Air Malta plane began its journey to Frankfurt, Megrahi boarded a Libyan Arab Airlines flight back to Tripoli, said Giaka.
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THE circuit board fragment found near Lockerbie was either planted or doctored to pin the blame on Libya.
It showed no signs of being in an explosion. Furthermore Tony Gauci’s evidence was vague and contradictory and both he and Giaka were bribed by US intelligence to testify against Megrahi.
Compelling evidence points to Talb as the major player behind the bombing. Two days after Pan Am 103 was blown up the Iranian government paid $11million (£8.5million) into a European bank account held by the PFLPGC. Four months later, Iran paid $500,000 into an account held by Talb. This was his fee for the murder of 270 innocents. When he was arrested in Sweden, a calendar in his home showed the date December 21, 1988, which was ringed.
Then there was the raid, two months before the Lockerbie bombing, on a West German terror cell linked to Talb. Among the items seized were bomb making equipment and four bombs built into Toshiba radio cassette recorders – the brand that housed the Semtex which blew up Pan Am 103. A high level intelligence report puts Talb in London on the day of the Lockerbie bombing, not in Sweden looking after a relative as he claimed. Megrahi was framed while investigators back-pedalled on their original suspect simply because the US preferred the narrative that Libya was responsible.
WHICH NARRATIVE SHOULD WE TRUST?
THE official one. So-called evidence pointing to Megrahi’s innocence is a hotch-potch of speculation and conspiracy theories. The case against Megrahi was tested over eight months in open court before three of Scotland’s most senior judges. It was then retested at appeal.
If you don’t believe them, then believe former detective superintendent Stuart Henderson who led the Lockerbie investigation in Scotland and helped identify numerous ‘high level’ Libyan suspects police never had the opportunity to interview.
Believe American investigator Ken Dornstein, brother of Lockerbie victim David, who has spent years sifting through Pan Am 103 evidence in pursuit of Megrahi’s accomplices. What emerged was the most detailed picture of the plot to blow up the aircraft ever presented – along with the identities of those, living and dead, who played a role.
And believe the widow of one of these men, Suad Hassan, who always knew deep inside her late husband Badri was involved in the bombing. From the day it happened, he behaved like a man carrying a terrible secret, she said.
‘May God destroy your house, Muammar Gaddafi,’ she said to Ken Dornstein. ‘You led Libya astray.’
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THE one which best fits the evidence. That is why former GP Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died on Pan Am 103 and who has studied the case ever since, is convinced that Megrahi was fitted up. Many other relatives of British victims feel the same way.
It is why the late MP and Father of the House Tam Dalyell was convinced Libya had nothing to do with it – and why Professor Robert Black, often credited as the architect of the unique, jury-less trial at Camp Zeist in The Netherlands, believes that prosecutors presented a flawed case which should have resulted in an acquittal for Megrahi.
It is why no less a figure than Nelson Mandela was critical of the trial process and Megrahi’s incarceration in Scotland.
And, of course, it is why the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) identified six grounds in 2007 which may point to Megrahi having suffered a miscarriage of justice.
Now, armed with even more evidence suggesting a cover-up, the SCCRC is to re-apply itself to the question of whether Megrahi’s conviction in 2001 was safe.
After making its position clear in 2007, any conclusion other than a resounding ‘no’ would be simply bizarre.