A new chapter in Lockerbie bombing horror story

[This is part of the headline over a long report just published on the Arab News website. It reads in part:]

For some, the arrest last week of a Libyan man charged with having made the bomb that downed the jumbo jet over Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988, offers the prospect of long overdue justice for the 270 victims of the disaster and their families.

For others, though, confidence in the judicial system and the joint US-Scottish investigation that has led to the latest arrest was shaken long ago by uncertainties that continue to hang over the trial and conviction in May 2000 of another Libyan, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, who in 2001 was found guilty of carrying out the bombing. (...)

Last week, 71-year-old Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, an alleged former intelligence officer for the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, appeared in a US court accused of being the bombmaker.

It is a stunning development in a case which, for many relatives of the dead, has never been satisfactorily settled. Masud’s anticipated trial represents an unexpected opportunity for the many remaining doubts surrounding the Lockerbie disaster to be resolved once and for all.

Key among them is the suspicion, which has persisted for three decades, that the Libyans were falsely accused of a crime that was actually perpetrated by the Iranian regime.

Iran certainly had a motive. On July 3, 1988, five months before the bombing, Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 carrying Iranian pilgrims bound for Makkah, had been shot down accidentally over the Strait of Hormuz by a US guided-missile cruiser, the Vincennes.

All 290 people on board were killed, including 66 children and 16 members of one family, who had been traveling to Dubai for a wedding.

In 1991, a subsequently declassified secret report from within the US Defense Intelligence Agency made it clear that from the outset Iran was the number-one suspect.

Ayatollah Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister, was “closely connected to the Al-Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups,” it read.

He had “recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and ... paid the same amount to bomb Pam Am flight 103, in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus.”

The evidence implicating Iran piled up. It emerged that two months before the bombing, German police had raided a cell of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and seized a bomb hidden in a Toshiba cassette player, just like the one that would be used to blow up Pan Am flight 103.

Yet in November 1991 it was two Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who were charged with the murders. The case against them was circumstantial at best.

After years of negotiations with Qaddafi’s government, the two men were eventually handed over to be tried in a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands. Their trial began in May 2000, and on Jan 31, 2001, Al-Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted.

The crown’s case was that an unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb had been carried on an Air Malta flight from Luqa Airport in Malta to Frankfurt. There, it was transferred to a Pan Am aircraft to London, where it was loaded onto flight 103.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in clothing, was the Toshiba cassette player containing the bomb.

A small part of a printed circuit board, believed to be from the bomb timer, was found in the wreckage, along with a fragment of a piece of clothing. This was traced to a store in Malta where the owner, Tony Gauci, told police he remembered selling it to a Libyan man.

Gauci, who died in 2016, was the prosecution’s main witness, but from the outset there were serious doubts about his evidence. He was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before he finally identified Al-Megrahi — and only then after seeing the wanted man’s photograph in a newspaper article naming him as a suspect.

In their judgment, even the three Scottish judges conceded that “on the matter of identification of the … accused, there are undoubtedly problems.”

Worse, in 2007 Scottish newspaper The Herald claimed that the CIA had offered Gauci $2 million to give evidence in the case.

Another part of the prosecution’s case was that the fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage, believed to have been part of the timer that triggered the bomb, matched a batch of timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss company in 1985.

However, the company insisted the timer on the aircraft had not been supplied to Libya, and in 2007 its CEO claimed that he had been offered $4 million by the FBI to say that it had.

Many have denounced the trial as a sham, suggesting that Qaddafi agreed to surrender Al-Megrahi and Fhimah, accept responsibility for the attack and pay compensation to the families of the victims, only because the US promised that the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya would be eased.

After Al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction was rejected in March 2002, one of the independent UN observers assigned to the case as a condition of Libya’s cooperation condemned what he called the “spectacular miscarriage of justice.”

Professor Hans Köchler said that he was “not convinced at all that the sequence of events that led to this explosion of the plane over Scotland was as described by the court. Everything that is presented is only circumstantial evidence.”

It remains to be seen what evidence will be presented in the upcoming trial of Masud.

Reports say that he was released only last year from prison in Libya, having been jailed for a decade for his part in the government of Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.

Last week, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah said that his government had handed Masud over to the Americans.

“An arrest warrant was issued against him from Interpol,” he said on Dec 16. “It has become imperative for us to cooperate in this file for the sake of Libya’s interest and stability.”

As Dbeibah put it, Libya “had to wipe the mark of terrorism from the Libyan people’s forehead.”

From the very beginning, one of the strongest advocates for the innocence of Al-Megrahi was Jim Swire, a British doctor whose daughter Flora died in the bombing on the eve of her 24th birthday. Now 86, Swire has spent the past three decades campaigning tirelessly to expose what he believes was a miscarriage of justice.

Al-Megrahi, suffering from prostate cancer, was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. Shortly before his death in Libya in 2012, he was visited in his sick bed by Swire, who in an interview last year recalled Al-Megrahi’s last words to him: “I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.”

Last week, Swire called for the trial of Masud not to be held in the US or Scotland.

“There are so many loose ends that hang from this dreadful case, largely emanating from America, that I think we should … seek a court that is free of being beholden to any nation directly involved in the atrocity itself,” he said.

“What we’ve always been after amongst the British relatives is the truth, and not a fabrication that might seem to be replacing the truth.”

French and Israeli media attribute Lockerbie to Palestinian group

Israeli media have recently been publishing articles that suggest that the Lockerbie bombing was perpetrated not by Libya but by a Palestinian group on behalf of Iran. This view is expressed, for example, in an article headlined Did French Caribbean serve as Palestinian terrorists arms route? published in today's edition of The Jerusalem Post; and in an article titled L’aveu de Bonnet prouve la connivence de l’Etat avec le terrorisme palestinien published on 11 August on the website of Le CAPE de Jerusalem. 

These articles stem from the admission, in a recent report in Le Parisien, by Yves Bonnet (Director of the French intelligence agency DST from November 1982 to August 1985) that the DST made a secret deal with the Abu Nidal Organisation that its members could travel to and live in France provided that they did not carry out attacks on French soil. An English language account can be found in Kim Willsher's report Ex-French spy chief admits 1980s pact with Palestinian terrorists in The Guardian of 9 August.

Yves Bonnet's public expression of the view that the bombing of Pan Am 103 was carried out by a Palestinian group and not by Libya is not new and instances can be found on this blog here.

Lockerbie bombing: story of a fake conviction

[This is the headline over an article published today on the Top Conspiracies website. It reads in part:]

Pan Am Flight 103 was a scheduled flight from Frankfurt to Detroit. In December 1988 the plane was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers.The explosion took place over Scotland after taking off from London, and thus Europe had jurisdiction over the explosion. In 1999 Two Lybian nationals were handed over by General Gadaffi (the then leader/dictator of Lybia) for trial in a Scottish court in the Netherlands. The bomb was said to have been made out of Semtex plastic. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was jailed for life in connection with the bombing, released by the Scottish government in 2009 on compassionate grounds due to a diagnosis of prostate cancer. There was a significant lack of protest in the wake of his release, suggesting that many of the family of the victims do not believe him to be behind the bombing. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi died in 2012.

Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the other Libyan handed over for the case, was found not guilty. Gadaffi accepted responsibility for the bombings in 2003. The CIA and the FBI worked with intelligence officers in Europe when processing the case. Over 15,000 people were questioned in over 30 countries. The explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 is also known as the Lockerbie bombing.

It is almost certain that the Libyan convicted had little to do with the Lockerbie bombing and that the real players are unknown. Just about only thing that remains uncontested is that a bomb went off in a suitcase and killed 243 passengers and 16 crew members. In a Report on and evaluation of the Lockerbie trial conducted by the Special Scottish Court in the Netherlandat Kamp Van Zeist, Dr Hans Köchler, University Professor, International Observer of the International Progress Organization stated that:

“ It was a consistent pattern during the whole trial that – as an apparent result of political interests and considerations – efforts were undertaken to withhold substantial information from the Court. “

The Opinion of the Court is exclusively based on circumstantial evidence and on a series of highly problematic inferences. As to the undersigned knowledge, there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime.

On the basis of the above observations and evaluation, the undersigned has – to his great dismay – reached the conclusion that the trial, seen in its entirety, was not fair and was not conducted in an objective manner. Indeed, there are many more questions and doubts at the end of the trial than there were at its beginning”

Conspiracy Theory #1 – Revenge

One theory contends that it was an act of revenge stemming from Iran. Over 290 passengers were killed when US forces shot down an Iran Airbus over the Strait of Hormuz, including over 66 children. This was less than 6 months before Pan Am Flight 103. Investigative reporter Paul Foot believes that this is the most likely scenario and that Libya was actually framed by the British and Americans, with political factors coming into play: Libya openly backed Saddam Hussein and Iran were needed during the first Gulf War. A number of journalists have drawn attention to the fact that Margaret Thatcher dismissed the idea in her memoirs that the Lockerbie bombing an act of Iranian revenge.

Conspiracy Theory #2 – CIA drug smuggling cover up

Not the first and most definitely not the last link between the U.S Central Intelligence Agency and illegal substances. This theory is backed up through Lester Coleman, a former member of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. Allegedly there was a route of drug smuggling between the US and Europe through Syrian drug dealers, who were allowed keep the ring going in return for CIA intelligence. The agency managed to ensure that the suitcases were not checked so the regime could continue; however, the scheme backfired when a bomb was put into the suitcase instead of the narcotics. In the 1994 film The Maltese Double Cross, it was suggested that the CIA agents were to blame for turning a blind eye to the drug smuggling ring between Europe and the US in return for information.

Conspiracy Theory #3 – Abu Nidal on behalf of Gadaffi

Abu Nidal was an internationally renowned terrorist around the time of the Lockerbie bombing. US bombings in 1986 killed large numbers of Libyan civilians and Gadaffi’s response was to engage the services of Abu Nidal. Nidal moved his organization to Libya in 1987. It is also contended that Abu Nidal warned US intelligence that a flight on route to Detroit would be blown up. Abu Nidal allegedly confessed to the bombing on his deathbed. The former head of Iranian intelligence was reported to have told German intelligence that Iran asked Libya/Gaddafi and Abu Nidal for help in bombing the American airline. Part of that report states:

The mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight 103 that was to be almost entirely booked by US military personnel on Christmas leave. The flight was supposed to be a direct flight from Frankfurt, GE, to New York, not Pan Am Flight 103 which was routed through London, UK. The suitcase containing the bomb was labeled with the name of one of the US passengers on the plane and was inadvertently placed on the wrong plane possibly by airport ground crew members in Frankfurt. The terrorist who last handled the bomb was not a passenger on the flight.

Conspiracy Theory #4 – PFLP-GC & Pan Am Flight 103

In the aftermath of the bombing, the prime suspects in the Lockerbie bombing were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command. These were a warlike revolutionary group led by a former Syrian military officer. Mohammed Abu Talb was the head of the Swedish cell of the PFLP-GC and was one of a number of suspects before the focus shifted to Al Megrahi. PFLP-GC had a bomb maker at their disposal who was meant to be investigated by Scottish police until the FBI persuaded them to call off the warrant for the purposes of intelligence information. Khreesat was a Jordanian intelligence officer unknown to the PFLP-GC and relayed intelligence back to HQ, which relayed it to Western Intelligence. Allegedly, Khreesat relayed information that there would be a bomb planted on a Pan Am flight in October 1988, around 6 months before the actual crash. German intelligence raided the PFLP-GC acting on this information but did not progress further with regard to the bombing. (...)

Conclusion to the Pan Am Flight 103 Explosion

It is certain at this stage that the official story of a lone Libyan civilian conducting the bombing is false. He did not bring down Pan Am Flight 103 alone. However, no-one is any the wiser to what actually happened. There are simply too many conflicting theories, too many intelligence agencies, too many countries involved and too many variables to construct a credible theory as to what went on. Even the theories listed above tend to blend and mix together with different variants. It is possible that the PFLP-GC, Gadaffi and Abu Nidal all had a role in some fashion, but separating what happened exactly and who is responsible is just impossible. One theory is that Iran asked Libya/Gadaffi and Abu Nidal to bomb Pan Am 103 in revenge, a mixing of two theories. It gets more complex the more that it is investigated with all the difference information from the intelligence agencies and reports from investigative journalists.

Abu Nidal and Pan Am 103

[What follows is the text of an article published on the website of Al-Ahram Weekly on this date in 2002:]

Abu Nidal is reported to have said that his organisation was behind the Lockerbie bombing. The news emerged after a series of interviews with Atef Abu Bakr, a one-time aide to the terrorist mastermind, published by the Arabic-language Al-Hayat newspaper last week. Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad last week. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

Abu Bakr is a former spokesman for the group and was one of Abu Nidal's closest aides between 1985 and 1989. He subsequently split with him over management of the organisation. "Abu Nidal said during an inner-circle meeting of the leadership of the Revolutionary Council, 'I will tell you something very important and serious, the reports which link the Lockerbie act to others are false reports. We are behind what happened,"' Abu Bakr was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Abu Nidal's organisation has been blamed for many terrorist attacks in the 70s and 80s, in which hundreds were killed or wounded.

Abu Nidal set up his organisation's headquarters in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in 1987. He was put under house arrest when the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, came under pressure to crack down on militants after the Lockerbie bombing.

Abu Bakr's statements are shocking because, if true, they jeopardise the verdict given by a Scottish court, in the Netherlands, which sentenced Libyan Abdel-Basset Al-Megrahi to life in prison in 2000. Another Libyan suspect, Lamine Khalifa [Fhimah], was acquitted. In March this year, a Scottish appeals court upheld the murder conviction of Al- Megrahi.

Commenting on the new revelations, Tam Dalyell, the longest serving member of Britain's parliament, called on the government to investigate Abu Bakr's allegations "as a matter of the utmost urgency". He said that "if these allegations are true they blow everything relating to Lockerbie out of the water, including the trial in Holland."

If Abu Bakr's statements prove to be true, they would also demonstrate the unfairness of sanctions imposed on Libya, in 1992, for its failure to hand over its two suspects. The United Nations, supported by the US and Britain, imposed sanctions on air travel and arms sales to Libya in 1992. The sanctions were suspended, but not lifted, in 1999, when Gaddafi handed over Al-Megrahi and Khalifa.

Abu Bakr's accounts were surprising but not new. After the bombing took place on 21 December 1988, the US State Department said that an unidentified person had telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, on 5 December, saying there would be a bombing attempt within two weeks against a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States. The caller claimed to belong to the Abu Nidal group, the State Department said at the time.

Also in 1995, Youssef Shaaban, a Palestinian member of Abu Nidal's group confessed responsibility for the bombing before judicial authorities in Lebanon, where he stood trial for the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat in Beirut.

However, Shaaban's words were not taken seriously. The investigating magistrates did not document his confession. The US and Britain reacted by saying that they had clear evidence against the Libyan suspects. Even the Libyan suspects' defence team never made use of Shaaban's statements or the State Department's Helsinki evidence.

British MP, Dalyell, has long argued that the Libyans were not behind the attack and that it was carried out by Abu Nidal.

Accordingly, relatives of the Lockerbie victims have renewed their calls on Friday for an independent inquiry into the attack.

Indeed, many of the relatives and legal observers who attended the trial, echoed their dissatisfaction with its outcome. They claim that many questions remain unanswered.

Jim Swire, a spokesman for the families of British victims, said the reports bolstered calls for an independent inquiry into the bombing, lapses in airport security and why Britain had not acted on warnings that an attack might occur.

Swire added that Palestinian militant Abu Nidal's possible involvement was "one more of the many questions which we feel absolutely demand an independent inquiry into Lockerbie". Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, has long demanded an independent inquiry into Lockerbie to uncover how much British intelligence services knew about the attacks.

"We certainly have part, or all, of at least eight intelligence warnings, all of which were received in good time, some of them incredibly detailed. I think we have a right to know why these didn't lead to any form of special protection for our loved ones," he said.

The same view was echoed by Hans Koechler, one of five UN observers who followed the trial as part of the deal with Libya. He believes that Abu Bakr's comments underline the urgency of calls he has made for an independent public inquiry into the entire Lockerbie case.

"The fact that Libya had hired a defence team that grossly neglected its professional duties and chose not to use most of the legal means available to Al-Megrahi's defence requires an explanation," Koechler said in a statement released in Vienna this week.

Koechler also criticised the legal proceedings and documented his remarks. He argued in his report that in the aftermath of the original verdict, the trial did not proceed fairly and was not conducted in an objective manner.

Ibrahim Legwell, former head of the Libyan consortium of jurists, acknowledged the poor performance of the defence team. However, he urged them not to ignore the new evidence. "Al- Megrahi's defence team should investigate claims [by any member of Abu Nidal's group]. If they find new evidence they should demand that the Scottish crown refer the case to the Scottish case review commission."

However, Al-Megrahi's lawyer, Eddie MacKechnie, has a different view. He said he was applying to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge Al-Megrahi's life sentence.

According to him, the allegations about Abu Nidal's involvement offered little new evidence for his client's legal battle.

"I'm not aware of there being any usable evidence arising from this second-hand confession, although I do know that Abu Nidal was thought to have links to the Lockerbie bombing right from the very beginning," MacKechnie said.

Abu Nidal and Lockerbie

[On this date in 2008 a long article entitled Lockerbie: The Man Who Was Not There by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer was published on the OhmyNews International website. It contains lots of interesting material, including extensive quotes from Richard Marquise, the FBI’s chief Lockerbie investigator. The following is just one short excerpt from the article:]

Atef Abu Bakr is a former spokesman for the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO) and one of Nidal's closest aides between 1985 and 1989. In a series of interviews published in the Arabic Al Hayat newspaper Bakr said that Abu Nidal told him that his organization was behind the explosion on Pan Am flight 103*.

"Abu Nidal told a meeting of the Revolutionary Council leadership: I have very important and serious things to say. The reports that attribute Lockerbie to others are lies. We are behind it."

"If any one of you lets this out, I will kill him even if he was in his wife's arms,"' Abu Nidal added, according to Bakr.

Having become persona non grata in Syria, Abu Nidal started his move from Syria to Libya in the summer of 1986. His operations, and those he falsely claimed, were bringing discomfort to Damascus. His move to Libya was completed by March 1987.

Settling in Tripoli, Abu Nidal and Libya's leader, Muammar al-Gaddafi, allegedly became close friends sharing, according to some observers, "a dangerous combination of an inferiority complex mixed with the belief that they were men of great destiny."

In the aftermath of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, Gaddafi, seeking to distance himself from Nidal, expelled him in 1999**.

* "Abu Nidal Behind Lockerbie, Says Aide."

** Abu Nidal Organization

MI6 warned of Syrian-sponsored attack on American target

[What follows is a brief extract from an article by Cal McCrystal about David Yallop that was published in The Independent on this date in 1993:]

Stranger still was a meeting with Abu Nidal in a suburb of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. At 10am, the bald, bloated terrorist was drunk and talkative, acknowledging an Iraqi role in the 1982 attempted murder of Slomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London, and suggesting that a Syrian-sponsored attack on an American target was imminent.

Returning to London, Yallop warned MI6 of the threat. 'To my astonishment the MI6 agent was far more interested in Nidal's drinking habits.' Less than two weeks later Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York was blown up over Lockerbie.

Relations between US and Libya improving

[What follows is a snippet from the Libya News and Views website from this date in 1999:]

After years of condemning Libya as a rogue state, the Clinton administration has recently taken steps toward better relations with the government of leader Mu'ammar al-Qadhafy, citing evidence of growing moderation on the part of a leader long demonized as a patron of international terror. Since Qadhafy agreed in April to the extradition of two men suspected of blowing up a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the administration has permitted four US oil companies to visit Libya on reconnaissance missions and last month, publicly welcomed the expulsion from Libya of the infamous Abu Nidal terrorist group. Although unilateral US sanctions still bar most trade between American companies and Libya, the administration approved last spring the de facto lifting of international UN sanctions against the oil-rich North African country and -- according to a senior official -- is considering whether to lift a passport restriction that bars US citizens from traveling to Libya without a special State Department exemption. [Washington Post]

[RB: I wish a happy Christmas to all readers of this blog.]

“Abu Nidal confesses to Lockerbie attack”

[This is the translated headline over a report in German published on this date in 2002 on the Austrian News website. My English translation of the piece (assisted by Google Translate) reads as follows:]

Convicted Libyan was innocent according to Weltspiegel

Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al Megrahi, who was sentenced to life imprisonment because of the Lockerbie attack, is innocent according to the terrorist group Abu Nidal. This was reported on Saturday by ARD Weltspiegel, citing the Palestinian Khalid Awad, according to a leader of the terror group.

According to him, the bomb which destroyed the American Pan-Am plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 was planted by the Abu Nidal group and the terrorist group led by Ahmed Jibril.

The Libyan secret agent Megrahi and a colleague, who was also arrested but later acquitted, were in no way the persons responsible for the terrorist attack, reports Weltspiegel according to Awad. The two terrorist groups each received five million dollars (about five million euros) from Libyan authorities after the attack. [RB: It is normally claimed that the money was paid by Iran, not Libya. Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer contends that these payment claims are erroneous.]

In December 1988, 259 passengers and crew and eleven people on the ground were killed. Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2001. In March [2002] of this year a Scottish Court of Appeal confirmed the verdict. In September, lawyers for Megrahi filed a petition with the European Court of Human Rights to review the judgment against their client. [RB: The history of the application to the ECtHR can be read here.]

Deception over Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a long article by Maidhc Ó'Cathail published on this date in 2009 on the Canadian Global Research website. It reads in part:]

The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.

While the news reports dutifully recorded the protestations of outrage by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and others at what appeared to be an unseemly hero’s welcome for a convicted terrorist, they neglected to mention that Libyans were celebrating the release of a countryman whom they believe had been wrongfully imprisoned for eight years. Also omitted from the reports was any indication that informed observers of Megrahi’s case in Britain and elsewhere are likewise convinced of his innocence.

Robert Black, the University of Edinburgh law professor who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, says that “no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led,” and calls his 2001 conviction “an absolute and utter outrage.” Prof Black likens the Scottish trial judges to the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at the trial, states that “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime,” and condemns the court’s verdict as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” And Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 killed on December 21, 1988, dismisses the prosecution’s case against Megrahi and fellow Libyan Lamin Khalifa F’hima as “a cock and bull story.”

According to that “cock and bull story,” Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), conspired with Lamin Khalifa F’hima, the station manager for LAA in Malta (who was acquitted), to put a suitcase bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the lethal suitcase had to be transferred to another flight bound for London Heathrow. Then in Heathrow Airport, it would have to be transferred for a second time onto the ill-fated Flight 103 destined for New York.

But for that rather implausible scenario to be true, the Libyans would have to have had an inordinate faith in the reliability of baggage handlers in two of Europe’s busiest airports at one of the busiest times of the year. Less optimistic would-be bombers would surely have slipped the bomb-laden suitcase on board in London. Fueling suspicions that this is indeed what happened, investigating police were told by a security guard at Heathrow that the Pan Am baggage storage area had been broken into on the night of the bombing.

The reported break-in at Heathrow was part of 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence that Megrahi’s defense could present at an appeal, which in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after a three-year investigation, recommended he be granted.

But before that appeal could be heard, the compassionate release of Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, conveniently spared the potential embarrassment of all those involved in his dubious conviction. More significantly, it also averted awkward questions being raised, in the likely event of the Libyan being acquitted, about who actually planted the bomb, and why.

Many of those who doubt Libya’s  responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, tend to suspect other Muslim countries of involvement. The most popular theory is that Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Gibril to avenge the “accidental” shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 288 civilians on board.

Others believe that Abu Nidal, the founder of the infamous Black September terrorist group, may have been involved. If they’re right, it raises disturbing questions about who was ultimately responsible for the Lockerbie atrocity. In his fine biography of Nidal, A Gun for Hire, British journalist Patrick Seale confirms long-held suspicions that many in the Middle East have had about the “Palestinian terrorist” who did more than anyone to discredit the Palestinian cause. “Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent,” Seale asserts. “Practically every job he did benefited Israel.” (...)

Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans, veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled “What if they are innocent?” analyses whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, “Even if Megrahi and F’hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel’s possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US.” Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.

Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas’s book on Mossad, Gideon’s Spies, to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned “empty and undamaged.”

Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, informed him that “within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.”

It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the US government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, “mission accomplished.”

Aide says Nidal confessed to Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over a report published in The Guardian on this date in 2002. It reads as follows:]

The Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal admitted to a meeting of his most trusted colleagues that he was behind the 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing and the culprits were not Libyans, it is claimed today in a leading Arabic newspaper.

In an interview with the London daily, Al-Hayat, a former colleague, Atef Abu Bakr, says Nidal made the confession to the inner circle of his revolutionary council some time before his death earlier this week.

Bakr, once a politburo member of Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council, told the paper that Nidal had said: "I will tell you something very important and serious. The reports which link the Lockerbie act to others are false reports. We are behind what happened."

According to Bakr, Nidal threatened anyone who leaked what he said with death, "even if he is in the arms of his wife".

Last night a spokesman for Al Hayat confirmed that the interview with Bakr was conducted some time before Nidal's death.

The Lockerbie disaster happened when a New York-bound Pan Am plane blew up over the town in Scotland, in December 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew, and 11 local residents. A Scottish court sitting in Holland convicted a former Libyan agent, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, over the bombing and in January 2001 gave him a life sentence.

The group led by Nidal, once one of the world's most wanted men, has been blamed for a series of horrific attacks in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Iraqi authorities have claimed that Nidal, found dead in his Baghdad apartment, committed suicide. Members of the Fatah-Revolutionary Council, better known as the Abu Nidal organisation, said he committed suicide as he was suffering from cancer.

Nidal set up his headquarters in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in 1987. He was put under house arrest when Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, came under pressure to crack down on militants after the Lockerbie bombing.

Bakr and another dissident split from Nidal's group in late 1989, almost a year after the bombing. After the attack, Bakr was quoted as extending condolences to victims on behalf of Nidal's group.

Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, has long maintained that Nidal was to blame, and not Libyans. Last night he said: "If true, this is a hugely important development. If he has said that no one else had anything to do with it, where does that leave Mr al-Megrahi? I believe the Libyans had nothing to do with it. This is one hell of a thing."

He said that the Foreign Office must now investigate Bakr's claims "as a matter of the utmost urgency".

He added: "If these allegations are true they blow everything relating to Lockerbie out of the water, including the trial in Holland."

[RB: Further information about Abu Nidal’s alleged involvement in Lockerbie can be found here.]