Thursday 28 May 2015

Lockerbie, Iran and USS Vincennes

[On this date in 2008, an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer headed Former Iranian President Blames Tehran for Lockerbie was published by OhmyNews International. The first few paragraphs read as follows:]

In an interview conducted on May 16, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, told me that Tehran, not Libya, had ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier.

On July 3, 1988, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes, also known as "Robocruiser," shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf. The civilian airliner was carrying mostly Muslims on their pilgrimage to Mecca -- 290 died, most Iranians.

According to Bani-Sadr, in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie tragedy, [Ali Akbar] Mohtashami-Pur, the then minister of the interior, acknowledged in an interview that he had contracted Ahmad Jibril, the leader of a Palestinian organization [PFLP-GC], to bomb an American airliner. The interview was scheduled for publication the following day. Hours before distribution, the newspaper was shutdown.

[The remainder of the long and detailed article consists of the fruits of Dr De Braeckeleer’s search for evidence supporting or rebutting Bani-Sadr’s contention. He found quite a lot of the former and not much of the latter. The article merits close attention.]

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