‘The Ghost’ revealed Bomb-maker Abu Agila Masud linked to atrocity through his passport number by US journalist
Nicknamed “The Ghost” by investigators, Abu Agila Masud was for decades an enigma, with even the CIA unsure as to where he was, what role he played or whether he even existed.
All agents had was occasional mentions of a tall, darkskinned Libyan man in his 40s – who cropped up briefly, but repeatedly, in different accounts.
The allegations against him stem partly from his alleged role in the April 1986 bombing of La Belle, a Berlin nightclub used by US soldiers, which later led to retaliatory US air raids on Tripoli. US investigators intercepted communications indicating the attack had been carried out by spies operating out of Libya’s East Berlin embassy. A defecting Stasi official later told the investigators that the maker of the La Belle bomb was a dark-skinned Libyan, and also gave his name.
But the only man ever convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdel Baset alMegrahi, denied ever knowing Masud, and for decades he remained a peripheral figure in inquiries. A link was then established during a longrunning investigation by Ken Dornstein, a US journalist whose brother David was among those killed on the flight.
While Masud had used aliases during his visit to Berlin, Mr Dornstein realised that his passport number – 835004 – matched one given in a declassified CIA cable. The cable described a Libyan technical expert who had travelled with Megrahi to Malta, where the bomb was allegedly prepared
Musbah Eter, a former Gaddafi operative in East Berlin who admitted to the Berlin bombing, later told Mr Dornstein that Masud was still living in Libya. He then identified with “80 per cent” certainty a grainy videograb of him greeting Megrahi on his return to Libya following his release in 2009. However, it was not until 2015, when a group of Gaddafi’s top henchmen appeared in court, that Mr Eter was able to identify Masud conclusively, when he sat in a dock behind Gaddafi’s chief spy, Abdullah Senussi, who has also been linked to the Lockerbie bombing. Masud is currently believed to be in Tripoli’s alHadba prison, where the country’s postrevolutionary government sentenced him in 2015 to 10 years’ imprisonment for bombmaking offences. He has never spoken publicly. Colin Freeman