Gaddafi. Neither was Libya exactly a stranger to arranging terrorist attacks. Some forensic evidence also seemed to link the bombing to Libya. Lord Boyd, the Scottish advocate, noted:
In June 1990, with the assistance ultimately of the CIA and FBI, Alan Feraday of the Explosives Laboratory was able to identify the fragment as identical to circuitry from an MST-13 timer. It was already known to the CIA from an example seized in Togo in 1986 and photographed by them in Senegal in 1988. That took investigators to the firm of MEBO in Zurich. It was discovered that these timers had been manufactured to the order of two Libyans—Ezzadin Hinshin, at the time director of the Central Security Organization of the Libyan External Security Organization, and Said Rashid, then head of the Operations Administration of the ESO.
After ten years of United Nations sanctions Libya eventually handed over al-Megrahi and Fhimahmen in April 1999 to Scottish police at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, a neutral venue.
On 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges acquitted Fhimahmen but convicted al-Megrahi of murder and sentenced him to 27 years in prison. Al-Megrahi professed his innocence. He wasn’t the only one. One observer of the trial, Dr Hans Koechler of the United Nations, called it a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”; as if to outdo Koechler, one professor of law at Edinburgh called al-Megrahi’s conviction the “worst miscarriage of justice in Scotland for 100 years”. Faith in the Camp Zeist judgment was severely shaken again when Libya’s Prime Minister Shukri Ghanen told BBC Radio in 2004 that Libya had only paid US$2.7 billion compensation to the victims’ families to get the sanctions against his country dropped. The money, said Ghanen, was “the price for peace”.
All of which raised the question: were al-Megrahi and Libya framed?
In his book
Behbahani was a former Iranian intelligence officer. His job: co-ordinating Iran’s terrorist attacks on the West. According to him, he contracted out the bombing to Ahmed JibriPs Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). There was a deal of supporting evidence for this claim. The PFLP-GC ran a cell in Germany—where Pan Am 103 began its flight to the US—which built explosive devices hidden in Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorders. The source for this information is the bomb-maker himself, Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian spy infiltrated into the PFLP-GC. According to most forensic evidence, the explosive device placed aboard Pan Am 103 was likewise hidden in a Toshiba Bombeat. So convinced were the Scottish police at one stage that Khreesat was the Lockerbie bomber that they drew up a warrant for his arrest. PFLP-GC watchers also remembered JibriPs 1985 warning: “There will be no safety for any traveller on an Israeli or US airliner.” Pan Am 103 was, by this theory, an eye for an eye: an American warship had mistakenly shot down an Iranian civilian airbus in 1988.
Some journalists and observers account for the Lockerbie investigation switching track from Iran to Libya to a climate change in geopolitics. In the early 1990s the US and UK were enjoying a brief thaw with Syria and Iran, which had respectively supported and acquiesced in George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War. Libya, on the other hand, had sided with Iraq, the enemy. Reputedly, Bush asked the British PM Margaret Thatcher for the Syria/Iran/PFLP-GC line of inquiry to be “toned down”. (Thatcher’s memoirs, interestingly, fail to blame Libya for the Pan Am tragedy.) Being nasty to Libya but nice to the Syrians and Iranians, who effectively controlled the Lebanese capital Beirut, had the added advantage that Western hostages held in the city received their freedom.
Oddly enough, the Beirut hostage crisis had another, more direct, connection to the Lockerbie bombing. On board the doomed flight were at least four US intelligence officers, one of whom was Matthew Gannon, the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut. Sitting directly behind Gannon was Major Charles McKee of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, who is believed to have been in Beirut searching for American hostages held by Hizbollah. According to Pan Am’s own investigation, undertaken by former Mossad officer Juval Aviv, the CIA were couriering drugs in a protected suitcase aboard flight 103 on behalf of a Syrian arms dealer, who had the pull to get US hostages in Beirut released. It is widely reported that the crash area around Lockerbie was searched by scores of CIA officers, who removed cases of heroin and cannabis, together with $500,000. British soldiers found a map detailing the whereabouts of two US hostages.
That the CIA used flight 103 for drug couriering has caused some Lockerbie observers to wonder whether George Bush himself ordered the blowing up of 103 in order to eradicate evidence that the CIA was once again involved in dodgy drug operations. The Iran-Contra Scandal had almost brought down Reagan, and Bush would have been frantic to avoid a repeat performance.
The passenger list of flight 103 makes for fertile reading for conspiracy theory. Among the dead was Bernt Carlsson, the United Nations Commissioner for South West Africa (Namibia). Carlsson was due to fly to New York from Brussels to oversee the agreement by which the apartheid regime of South Africa relinquished control of Namibia as instructed by the UN Security Council; according to a report on 12 March 1990 in the Swedish daily
Carlsson’s death came immediately before the planned Namibia independence signing, and it was impossible for the UN to find a replacement in time, with the result that the territory’s South African administrator-general Louis Pienaar continued to administer South-West Africa in the run-up to the first election in November 1989. Free of Carlsson, the apartheid regime in South Africa foisted the constitution it wanted on Namibia.
It has also been suggested that the Lockerbie bomb was radio detonated, the explosive device being set off by simply coming into range of a certain aircraft navigational beacon (in the case of Flight 103, the Dean Cross beacon, south west of Carlisle, on 123.95MHZ). Only two years before the downing of flight 103, Soviet accident investigators had accused South Africa of using a false navigational radio beacon to lure the Tupolev Tu-134 of Mozambique president Samora Machel to its doom.
With so many allegations still swirling in the wake of the Lockerbie bombing, Dr Jim Swire of the bereaved families campaign group UK Families-Flight 103 (UKF103) has called for “a full review of the entire Lockerbie scenario through an appropriately empowered and independent inquiry”. Before it came to power in the UK in 1997, the Labour Party supported an independent Lockerbie inquiry. When it reached Downing Street the Labour Party decided there was no need to “initiate any further form of review on Lockerbie”.
Strange, that.
John Ashton and Ian Ferguson,
David Johnston,
Madrid Train Bombings
During rush-hour on the morning of 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded more or less simultaneously around the Atocha railway station in Madrid, killing 192 commuters and injuring 1,800 others. Within hours, the conservative government of Jose Marisa Aznar was blaming ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), the terrorist Basque separatist organization, for the attack.
Three days after the train bombs, Spain went to the polls in the general election and voted Aznar’s Popular Party out of office and the Socialists in. Henceforth the investigation into what Spaniards would call “11–M” concentrated not on ETA but on Islamic radicals attached to al-Qaeda. At this, Aznar, together with influential
