Lockerbie defence case begins

[This is the headline over a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

Lawyers for one of the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing have begun presenting his defence at the Scottish court in the Netherlands.

They attempted to undermine allegations that a shopkeeper sold clothing, which was packed round the bomb that blew up Pam Am Flight 103, to one of the accused.

Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci had told the court that he sold clothes to a man - whom he identified in court as the first accused Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi - at his shop in Sliema on 7 December, 1988.

He alleged that Mr Al Megrahi had also bought an umbrella because it was raining at that time.

Charred fragments of the clothing were recovered from the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 and traced back to Mr Gauci's shop.

The prosecution has alleged that the garments were in the suitcase carrying the bomb which blew the plane apart, killing 270 people.

On day 76 of the trial at Camp Zeist, lawyers for Mr Al Megrahi called retired meteorologist Major Joseph Mifsud who worked in Malta's Luqa airport in 1988.

Mr Mifsud, the 230th person to give evidence at the trial, referred to weather records kept in December 1988.

He told the court that other than some light showers during the morning, there was no rainfall at the airport prior to midnight on 7 December that year.

He said this meant it was unlikely there was any rain in Sliema, 5km away at about the time the clothes were sold.

Defence lawyers also began to concentrate on the activities of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) during October 1988.

They have already indicated that they would produce evidence which would incriminate others, including the PFLP-GC.

FBI agent Edward Marshman read from transcripts of interviews with PFLP-GC member Marwan Kreeshat, who said he had made bombs for the organisation.

Mr Kreeshat was jailed for 18 years in his absence for his part in placing a bomb in a record player on an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972.

He was eventually arrested by the Germans in October 1988, but released in December that year.

Mr Marshman, 42, told the court that Mr Kreeshat was interviewed at the headquarters of the Jordanian Intelligence Services in Jordan by FBI agents in November 1989.

Mr Kreeshat had explained that he was an agent of that intelligence service and was sent to Europe to infiltrate the PFLP-GC.

The court heard that Mr Kreeshat, who has refused to appear as a witness at the trial, was experienced in building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) within radio cassette recorders.

The PFLP-GC had planted them aboard aircraft using women as "unwitting couriers" to whom operatives would propose marriage after establishing a relationship.

They would then send the woman on ahead and give her an IED package to carry on board an aircraft, according to excerpts from transcripts of interviews with Mr Kreeshat read out in court.

The court heard that in October 1988, Mr Kreeshat was summoned to Germany where he met with colleagues and spent time shopping for electrical components and timers and working on building such devices.

He worked on five devices, the fifth of which went missing from his room after one of his colleagues came in while he was taking a shower.

He assumed his colleague took it away and the court also heard that Mr Kreeshat thought that device was a Toshiba radio cassette recorder.

The prosecution has alleged that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 was hidden in a Toshiba SF16 Bombeat radio cassette recorder and programmed to be detonated by an electronic timer.

However, reading from a transcript of the FBI interviews with Mr Kreeshat, Mr Marshman said: "He Kreeshat said he would not use an SF16 to build into an IED as there is not enough space inside.

"He said he would not remove any parts to get more space as then the radio would not work as it's supposed to.

"It is important it works so such a device would not be detected."

A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge

[On 11 January 2016 I blogged on an article entitled A look at Lockerbie: Iran Air Flight 655 that was billed as the first in a projected series. The second article has today been published on the libcom.org website. It is entitled A look at Lockerbie: Intiqam, the man who takes revenge and reads in part:]

In order to determine beyond a reasonable doubt who was responsible for the Lockerbie crime, one must first understand the crucial pieces of evidence that the case hinges on. First of all, forensics experts have identified that the bomb which blew up Pan Am 103 was concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player packed in a brown hard-shell Samsonite suitcase. Another important point was that the bomb was triggered by a barometric timer, meaning that it was specially designed to only be triggered at a high altitude where the change in air pressure could activate the device. And maybe most importantly of all, it has been proven that a tweed jacket, a green umbrella, and a jumper with the brand name Baby Gro were all packed in the suitcase that contained the bomb.1,2,3

The key pieces of evidence are well established, but what about the motive and intent?

I discussed in my last blog post the criminal attack on Iran Air 655, and the Western media's characterization of those responsible as heroes. In response to this the Iranian leadership promised vengeance. "We will not leave the crimes of America unpunished," Tehran radio announced, "We will resist the plots of the Great Satan and avenge the blood of our martyrs from criminal mercenaries."4 As Robert Bauer, former member of the CIA investigation into Lockerbie, put it, "They thought that if we didn't retaliate against the United States we would continue to shoot down their airliners." Abulkasim Misbahi, a high level Iranian defector who in 1988 was reporting directly to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini, would later recall that, "The Iranians decided to retaliate as soon as possible...the target was to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian airbus."5

In order to accomplish this goal the Iranians turned to Ahmed Jibril, a man whose organization was well known for bombing airplanes. Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) was well known for two airplane bombings that took place on the same day in 1970. The first bomb detonated aboard Swiss Air flight 330 bound for Israel. The bomb forced a crash landing in which all 47 of those aboard were killed. The second bomb which exploded later in the day on an Austrian Airlines flight also bound for Israel detonated successfully, but an emergency landing avoided any loss of life. The bombs were notable not only for the tragedy and terror which they inflicted, but also for the fact that they were the first barometric bombs ever used. In addition to the notable use of barometric triggers, the bombs were also both concealed within transistor radios.6

The Iranians turned to Jibril, not only because of his proven abilities as a plane bomber, but also because the PFLP-GC was an organization with close ties to Iran's strong Shia ally, Syria. After being contacted, Jibril put the Iranians in touch with a PFLP-GC member Hafez Dalkamouni who was based in Frankfurt.

Unbeknownst to Jibril and Dalkamouni, the West German police were already suspicious of Dalkamouni and were watching him day and night at his apartment in Frankfurt at 16 Isarstrasse. In October of 1988, the West German police started to notice some highly suspicious activity taking place at the apartment. On October 13th, West German police watched as Marwan Kreeshat arrived at Dalkamouni's apartment. The wife of one of Dalkamouni's accomplices would later testify that Kreeshat was carrying a brown Samsonite suitcase. The next day police listened in as Dalkamouni and Kreeshat called a number in Damascus and Dalkamouni was recorded as saying that soon "everything will be ready." Kreeshat then took the phone and said that he had "made some changes in the medicine," and that it was "better and stronger than before."7 A week later Dalkamouni and Kreeshat went shopping. While shopping they purchased three mechanical alarm clocks, a digital clock, sixteen 1.5-volt batteries and some switches, screws, and glue. A police internal memo made that day noted, "the purchase of the materials under the clear supervision of a PFLP-GC member designated as an explosives expert leads to the conclusion that the participants intend to produce an explosive device which, on the basis of the telephone taps, would be operational within the next few days."8 Fearing an imminent attack, on October 26th West German security services launched Operation Autumn Leaves, intended to round up Dalkamouni and his Frankfurt cell. The police followed Dalkamouni and Kreeshat as they drove in a silver green Ford Taurus and stopped to make a call at a public telephone booth. There the police apprehended them and searched their car, inside they found a Toshiba radio cassette player hidden under a blanket. In Dalkamouni's apartment police found a stopwatch, batteries, a detonator, and both time-delay and barometric fuses. On October 29th, police took a closer look at the Toshiba and discovered 300 grams of Semtex sheet explosive shaped into a cylinder wrapped with aluminum foil with a barometric timer. 9,10 While in custody, Kreeshat revealed that he was actually in the employ of Jordanian intelligence, and that he had made a total of 5 bombs including the one found in the Toshiba cassette player. 11,12 So what of the other 4 bombs?

The fate of three of the four bombs would be revealed in an explosion in April of 1989. At this time West German police had reopened the Dalkamouni case and visited the basement of a grocery store owner who was friends with Dalkamouni at the time of his arrest. In the basement police found two radios that fit the description of the bombs that Marwan Kreeshat had claimed he had made for Dalkamouni. The officers brought the suitcases back to their headquarters and left them lying around for a few days. Eventually a technician was ordered to inspect them 4 days later. Soon after he began inspection they began ticking. He quickly ran the suitcases through an x-ray machine and saw that they looked suspicious. Two explosives experts were called in, and while they were working on opening the suitcases the bomb was triggered killing one and severely injuring the other. German police went in force back to the grocery store basement and uncovered 400 grams of plastic Semtex explosive and a detonator wired to a barometer.13

So that explained four of the five bombs, but what of the fifth?

Flashback to October of 1988, while the West German police were watching Dalkamouni's apartment at 16 Isarstrasse. On October 14th, a man named Martin Imandi visited and parked a car with a Swedish license plate outside Dalkamouni's apartment. Imandi and two others were then seen carrying packages and suitcases in and out of Dalkamouni's apartment. The three men returned to Sweden where they and a fourth person by the name of Mohammed Abu Talb had their headquarters in Stockholm. Abu Talb, whose nom de guerre was Intiqam, roughly translated as "man who takes revenge," was a seasoned fighter. He had served in the Egyptian army, had undergone multiple training programs in the Soviet Union, and had served with the PLO in Lebanon. arrested soon after by the Swedish police.

Soon after returning to Stockholm, the West German police tipped off the Swedish police about the danger the four men posed, but by the time of their arrest, Abu Talb and the rest of the Swedish group had hidden any incriminating evidence and were soon released from police custody for lack of evidence. A Swedish police investigation in 1989 would later uncover a plane ticket in Abu Talb's apartment that showed that after his release in 1988, Abu Talb flew to Malta on November 19th. It was in Malta that he stopped to purchase a jumper, a tweed jacket, and an umbrella at a store called Mary's House.14,15

Unfortunately for Abu Talb his purchases had not gone unnoticed. After the bombing it would be deduced from the unusual brand name of the jumper that it had been purchased at Mary's House. When questioned in April of 1989, the store owner, Tony Gauci, remembered Abu Talb's purchases very clearly as Abu Talb had purchased a tweed jacket that Gauci had been trying to sell for 7 years. Gauci provided to police at the time a perfect description of Abu Talb despite it not being common knowledge that he was a suspect.16 [Emerson, 245] Gauci then repeatedly picked Abu Talb's picture out of a photo lineup (before being coaxed and pressured into picking a man named al-Megrahi as I will discuss more in my next post).17 Abu Talb then returned with the clothes to Sweden on November 26th.

From what can be pieced together the story picks back up in London at Heathrow airport, at 2pm on December 21st, 1988. It was at this time that a baggage handler named John Bedford and two other workers began loading luggage for Pan Am flight 103. The flight was scheduled to take off at 6pm and was destined for New York's JFK airport. Bedford began loading the luggage of transfer passengers upright into a large metallic container. At about a quarter after four as things began to slow he took a tea break. When he came back 30 minutes later his partner, Sulkash Kamboj, informed him that he had put two more suitcases into the container during his absence. Bedford looked into the container and saw two suitcases lying flat, not upright. "In a statement given to the police on 9th January 1989 he was able to describe it--'a brown hard-shell, the kind Samsonite make.'" This statement was made just three weeks after the bombing, at which time there was no indication that a brown Samsonite was the bomb suitcase.18
At 7:02pm, 38 minutes after take off, at an altitude of 31,000 feet, the bomb went off in the Samsonite creating a hole in the plane which caused it to disintegrate. Those on board were sucked out of the plane where they fell to their deaths, some still strapped in their seats. All 259 people aboard were killed, and falling wreckage killed an additional 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland.

• 1. Lockerbie: What Really Happened? Al Jazeera English (AJE), 2014. Web.
• 2. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 3. Kerr, Morag G. Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. Print.
• 4. Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Print.
• 5. AJE.
• 6. Emerson, Steven, and Brian Duffy. The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation. New York, NY: Putnam, 1990. Print.
• 7. Emerson, 130
• 8. Emerson, 130
• 9. Emerson, 168-169
• 10. AJE
• 11. Wines, Michael. "Portrait of Pan Am Suspect: Affable Exile, Fiery Avenger." The New York Times. The New York Times, 1989.
• 12. Emerson
• 13. Emerson, 208
• 14. Wines, NYT
• 15. Emerson, 249
• 16. Emerson, 223
• 17. Kerr, 241-262 18. Kerr, 89-90

Police followed Palestine link, Lockerbie trial told

[This is the headline over a report in The Guardian on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

Scottish police investigating the Lockerbie disaster flew to Rome and Germany within days of the bombing to study similar atrocities involving a Palestinian group, the Lockerbie trial in Holland was told today.

Retired detective chief inspector Gordon Ferrie said that the tragedy was treated as a murder inquiry from the day after it happened. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) quickly became the "focus of attention" because of arrests of some of its members in Germany only two months before Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

They included a man known as Marwan Kreeshat [or Khreesat] a technical expert who had been jailed for 18 years in his absence for his part in placing a bomb in a record player on an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972. He had been arrested by the Germans in October 1988, the court was told, but released in December, before the Lockerbie bombing later the same month.

About ten senior officers from the Lockerbie inquiry spent weeks at the German headquarters of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI, the court heard.

The two Libyans accused of the bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, deny charges of murder and conspiracy to murder, and they have lodged special defences in which they incriminate, among others, members of the PFLP-GC.

Under cross-examination Mr Ferrie confirmed he had been sent to Rome twice to study the El Al incident, in which two British women had been befriended by three men - including Marwan Kreeshat - and persuaded to take a record player on board the plane. They did not know it contained a bomb.

El Al security measures ensured the record player went into the bomb-proof luggage hold, instead of in the passenger cabin. Fortunately, although the device exploded at about 13,000ft and blew a hole in the passenger floor, the plane landed back at Rome safely.

Mr Ferrie brought back to Lockerbie some of the Italian evidence in the case, including part of an altimeter which had been used in the bomb's trigger. Questioned by Richard Keen QC, representing Fhimah, Mr Ferrie confirmed that in Rome he had discovered that Kreeshat had been involved in other incidents "using improvised explosive devices", including the bombing of a plane using a Toshiba radio cassette recorder modified to act as a bomb.

The Lockerbie trial indictment accuses Megrahi and Fhimah of placing an "improvised explosive device" concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette recorder on board an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt labelled for onward connection to New-York bound Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow. (...)

Re-examined by Alan Turnbull QC, prosecuting, Mr Ferrie was asked: "There came a stage when the inquiry led officers in a direction other than the PFLP, weren't there?" Mr Ferrie agreed.

However, when he then asked Mr Ferrie what the eventual result of the police inquiry was, defence lawyers objected that it was hearsay evidence, because Mr Ferrie had later been moved to other work.

Questioned by Mr Keen for Fhimah, Mr McLean insisted that, although FBI and CIA agents from America were swiftly on the scene of the disaster, all evidence found was "religiously and meticulously" logged, including items recovered by the CIA.

Lockerbie - yet again the clues lead to a Palestinian terrorist group

[This is the headline over an article posted on Friday by Swedish journalist Anders Carlgren on his website.  It reads in part:]

Just two months before the Lockerbie bombing, West German police had cracked down on a terrorist cell outside of Düsseldorf, apprehending 17 members of none other than PFLP-GC. The most important find was four Semtex bombs build into Toshiba radios.

But a fifth bomb had gone missing, and it turned out that it had been hidden by the bomb builder of the terrorist cell, Marwan Kreeshat. The legendary European correspondent for ABC News Pierre Salinger later interviewed Kreeshat in prison. In that interview Kreeshat said that he was convinced that it was precisely his bomb that had brought down Pan Am Flight 103. It is also documented that during the fall of 1988, great sums were transferred from Iran to the German terrorist cell, in several batches via a variety of Middle Eastern banks.

But the Palestinian-Iranian trail sudden went cold and non-existent in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. That invasion and the first Gulf war entirely changed the direction of the investigation, documentably at American request. During the preparation for the war, it was important to keep both Syria and Iran calm. The PFLP-GC was now entirely uninteresting and – unexpectedly – the rogue state Libya was pointed to as responsible for the act. The United Nations complied with a request to impose extensive sanctions against Libya.

One of the persons no longer under investigation was the Swedish-Palestinian Mohammed Abu Talb, then a resident of Uppsala. He had entered Sweden on a false passport. Abu Talb probably had ties to the German terrorist cell, as he and three other Swedish-Palestinians repeatedly traveled to places like Frankfurt and Munich. Abu Talb had a background as chief of bodyguard forces in Lebanon and in Syria, and in the Soviet Union he had received training in handling targeting robots.

Today many investigators and relatives of victims are convinced that Abu Talb obtained the fifth Semtex bomb and had it loaded onto the airplane in Frankfurt, where Pan Am 103 had begun its route. It was determined that the bomb-containing suitcase had been loaded without belonging to any passenger.

Three years before the Lockerbie bombing, in 1985, Abu Talb along with three Palestinian co-conspirators were behind the bombing of a synagogue in Copenhagen and similar bombs against airplane companies in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, both of which caused much death and destruction.

In May 1989 the four terrorists were apprehended in Sweden, and December 21st, one year after Lockerbie, Mohammed Abu Talb and Marten Imandi were sentenced to life prison. The two others received significantly milder punishments.

Investigations showed that Abu Talb had been in Malta during the fall of 1988, and that Marten Imandi had stayed in Malta for a longer period. In the Uppsala home of Abu Talb, police also found a calendar with a circle around December 21st. And in a recorded wiretap , the Abu Talb’s wife was heard saying to someone else: ”get rid of the clothes immediately.” A suitcase similar to the one holding the bomb was found at that person’s residence.

Both Abu Talb and Marten Imandi are now free after having had their life sentences converted. Abu Talb was also sentenced to deportation, but is nevertheless still in Sweden, as the government cannot decide which country he is to be deported to – Egypt, Syria or Lebanon. He has repeatedly applied to have his deportation cancelled, most recently last year, but his application was turned down every time. Marten Imandi, however, cannot be deported, as he is a Swedish citizen.

But this Swedish trail to the Lockerbie bombing has never been followed to the end, after the US and Great Britain surprisingly pointed to Libya as the guilty party. After many long and hard negotiations, Moammar Gadaffi agreed to turn over two Libyans to a special Scottish court located at an old military base in the Netherlands. After two rounds of mock trial, one of them, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, was convicted to 27 years of prison. Gadaffi paid 2.7 billion dollars to the relatives of the victims. The sanctions were lifted, and in return, Great Britain obtained profitable oil contracts. Al Megrahi was returned to Libya in 2009, where he died later from prostate cancer.

We know today that the owner of the shop in Malta, Tony Gauci, who sold the clothes found in the bomber’s suitcase, lied when he pointed out Al Megrahi in a confrontation; he had been shown a picture of Al Megrahi in advance. We also know that Tony Gauci received two million dollars from the US for testifying in the two mock trials. There are many other errors and repeatedly changing explanations in his testimony.

Abu Talb was also forced to testify during the trials, but he denied any kind of involvement, and claimed that he had been babysitting in Uppsala at the time. That alibi, however, has never been verified.

A year ago, Scottish newspapers published an 800-page report of the investigation from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which had been classified since 2007. The report pointed out extensive lying, fraud, perjury, bought witnesses and other mistakes during the legal process.

Mohammed Abu Talb and his terrorist associates in Sweden and Germany do not enjoy immunity from the Scottish authorities. Therefore there are good reasons to resume investigation of the Swedish-Palestinian trail.

Extensive lying, fraud, perjury, bought witnesses

[On this date in 2013 Swedish journalist Anders Carlgren published on his website an article headed Lockerbie - Yet Again the Clues Lead to a Palestinian Terrorist Group. It reads in part:]

Just two months before the Lockerbie bombing, West German police had cracked down on a terrorist cell outside of Düsseldorf, apprehending 17 members of none other than PFLP-GC. The most important find was four Semtex bombs build into Toshiba radios.

But a fifth bomb had gone missing, and it turned out that it had been hidden by the bomb builder of the terrorist cell, Marwan Kreeshat. The legendary European correspondent for ABC News Pierre Salinger later interviewed Kreeshat in prison. In that interview Kreeshat said that he was convinced that it was precisely his bomb that had brought down Pan Am Flight 103. It is also documented that during the fall of 1988, great sums were transferred from Iran to the German terrorist cell, in several batches via a variety of Middle Eastern banks.

But the Palestinian-Iranian trail sudden went cold and non-existent in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. That invasion and the first Gulf war entirely changed the direction of the investigation, documentably at American request. During the preparation for the war, it was important to keep both Syria and Iran calm. The PFLP-GC was now entirely uninteresting and – unexpectedly – the rogue state Libya was pointed to as responsible for the act. The United Nations complied with a request to impose extensive sanctions against Libya.

One of the persons no longer under investigation was the Swedish-Palestinian Mohammed Abu Talb, then a resident of Uppsala. He had entered Sweden on a false passport. Abu Talb probably had ties to the German terrorist cell, as he and three other Swedish-Palestinians repeatedly traveled to places like Frankfurt and Munich. Abu Talb had a background as chief of bodyguard forces in Lebanon and in Syria, and in the Soviet Union he had received training in handling targeting robots.

Today many investigators and relatives of victims are convinced that Abu Talb obtained the fifth Semtex bomb and had it loaded onto the airplane in Frankfurt, where Pan Am 103 had begun its route. It was determined that the bomb-containing suitcase had been loaded without belonging to any passenger.

Three years before the Lockerbie bombing, in 1985, Abu Talb along with three Palestinian co-conspirators were behind the bombing of a synagogue in Copenhagen and similar bombs against airplane companies in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, both of which caused much death and destruction.

In May 1989 the four terrorists were apprehended in Sweden, and December 21st, one year after Lockerbie, Mohammed Abu Talb and Marten Imandi were sentenced to life prison. The two others received significantly milder punishments.

Investigations showed that Abu Talb had been in Malta during the fall of 1988, and that Marten Imandi had stayed in Malta for a longer period. In the Uppsala home of Abu Talb, police also found a calendar with a circle around December 21st. And in a recorded wiretap , the Abu Talb’s wife was heard saying to someone else: ”get rid of the clothes immediately.” A suitcase similar to the one holding the bomb was found at that person’s residence.

Both Abu Talb and Marten Imandi are now free after having had their life sentences converted. Abu Talb was also sentenced to deportation, but is nevertheless still in Sweden, as the government cannot decide which country he is to be deported to – Egypt, Syria or Lebanon. He has repeatedly applied to have his deportation cancelled, most recently last year, but his application was turned down every time. Marten Imandi, however, cannot be deported, as he is a Swedish citizen.

But this Swedish trail to the Lockerbie bombing has never been followed to the end, after the US and Great Britain surprisingly pointed to Libya as the guilty party. After many long and hard negotiations, Moammar Gadaffi agreed to turn over two Libyans to a special Scottish court located at an old military base in the Netherlands. After two rounds of mock trial, one of them, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, was convicted to 27 years of prison. Gadaffi paid 2.7 billion dollars to the relatives of the victims. The sanctions were lifted, and in return, Great Britain obtained profitable oil contracts. Al Megrahi was returned to Libya in 2009, where he died later from prostate cancer.

We know today that the owner of the shop in Malta, Tony Gauci, who sold the clothes found in the bomber’s suitcase, lied when he pointed out Al Megrahi in a confrontation; he had been shown a picture of Al Megrahi in advance. We also know that Tony Gauci received two million dollars from the US for testifying in the two mock trials. There are many other errors and repeatedly changing explanations in his testimony.

Abu Talb was also forced to testify during the trials, but he denied any kind of involvement, and claimed that he had been babysitting in Uppsala at the time. That alibi, however, has never been verified.

A year ago, Scottish newspapers published an 800-page report of the investigation from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which had been classified since 2007. The report pointed out extensive lying, fraud, perjury, bought witnesses and other mistakes during the legal process.

Mohammed Abu Talb and his terrorist associates in Sweden and Germany do not enjoy immunity from the Scottish authorities. Therefore there are good reasons to resume investigation of the Swedish-Palestinian trail.

Lockerbie incriminee Ahmed Jibril dies in Damascus

[Ahmed Jibril has died in Damascus at the age of 83. What follows is the report published today on the Middle East Monitor website:]

Ahmed Jibril, leader of Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command passed away in the Syrian capital Damascus yesterday at the age of 83.

Jibril and his family were forced out of Yazour neighbourhood in the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Yafa in 1948.

In 1965, he established the Palestinian Popular Front, which was later merged with other leftist Palestinian factions and became the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In 1969 he defected and formed the PFLP-General Command, which ten years later agreed to a prisoner swap with Israel

In 1979, the PFLP-General Command held a prisoner swap with Israel. Some 76 Palestinian detainees were released in exchange for one m Israeli soldier.

Jibril negotiated a prisoner swap between the PLO factions and Israel in 1985 when 1,150 Palestinian prisoners were released in return for three Israeli soldiers.

In 2002, Israel assassinated his eldest son Jihad in Lebanon.

Jibril was criticised for his support for the Assad regime in Syria, which didn't waiver in spite of the current war.

[None of the reports of Jibril's death that I have seen so far have mentioned his and the PFLP-GC's alleged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. What follows is a report by Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black in The Guardian on 4 May 2000:]

The finger of suspicion after the Lockerbie bombing was first pointed at Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, the very group implicated yesterday, more than 11 years later, by the two Libyan defendants.

In another extraordinary twist, they also implicated Abu Talb, once regarded by the Scottish police as a prime suspect but now a prosecution witness.

For years, western intelligence agencies believed in a simple explanation. The bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing.

It was assumed that the Iranians paid Jibril's Syria-backed group to carry out a revenge attack. The assumption appeared to be backed up by the arrest a few months before the bombing of 17 people in Frankfurt, where the bag containing the bomb is alleged to have been placed on the Pan Am airliner. It was reported later that those arrested in the operation, called Autumn Leaves, included Hafez Dalkamoni, a prominent member of the PFLP-GC with links to Palestinians in Uppsala, Sweden.

They also included Marwan Kreeshat, a Jordanian, found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player in his car similar to the one believed to have contained the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am airliner. British intelligence was later astonished to learn that he had been released for lack of evidence.

Iran appeared to be further implicated in the bombing when a US intelligence report referred to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister who supervised Iranian funding of Middle East terror groups, paying out "10 million in dollars in cash and gold ... to bomb Pan Am flight 103 ... in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus".

The existence of the report, which was given to lawyers representing Pan Am, became known in 1995. This was after the two Libyans were indicted and officials in Washington and London played down its significance, describing it as low-grade information found to be incorrect.

The trail to Talb began when he was linked to a car belonging to to one of those arrested in Frankfurt. Talb was found guilty at Uppsala in December 1989 of planting a bomb at a synagogue in Copenhagen four years earlier.

Swedish police were reported to have found at Talb's Uppsala apartment an air ticket from Malta to Stockholm indicating that he was on the island at the time children's clothes - part of the evidence against the two Libyans - were bought.

British Lockerbie investigators were also alleged to have found clothes bought in Malta during a later raid on Talb's flat. Also found there was a diary with December 21 1988 - the date of the bombing - circled. He was named in the Uppsala court as being suspected in Scotland of murder or as an accessory to murder.

Yesterday, Egyptian-born Talb was described in the Camp Zeist court as a member of the Palestine Popular Struggle Front and witness number 963 for the Scottish prosecution. The PPSF was founded in 1969 with backing from Syria, and split in 1981. One of its two founders, Samir Ghosheh, left in 1981 to join the mainstream PLO and is now a minister in Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority in Gaza.

Experts said last night that the PPSF was defunct and that little had been heard of it for at least two years.

According to Israel's Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, the PFLP-GC, which rejects a political settlement with Israel, has maintained links with Syria, Libya and Iran, serving as a proxy for those states in attacks in the international arena. It was suspected of carrying out the bombing of a French airliner in 1989 over Niger.

Ahmed Jibril declined to comment last night.

Some commentators say that attention over Lockerbie turned to Libya when the west wanted to improve relations with Iran and Syria after the Gulf war against Iraq. Washington and London dismiss this as conspiracy theory.