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The Lockerbie case has never been resolved but surely now with tensions with Iran at fever pitch, it could be properly investigated, given Tehran’s role?
After nearly forty years of Britain’s greatest aviation terrorist act and certainly its greatest cover-up, the victims of the Lockerbie tragedy of December 21st 1988 might be forgiven for thinking that it’s high time for an independent investigation so as to establish who is responsible for Pan Am flight 103 exploding over the Scottish town just days before Christmas, killing all 259 on board, as well as 11 on the ground.
But that is very unlikely to happen, given that any clarity in the case will lead to unprecedented billion-dollar legal claims against the U.S. and UK governments who, one can say without a shred of doubt, have successfully covered up the affair – and continue to do so.
The truth, if it were ever to be unearthed, would also be hugely embarrassing for both governments, who might suffer politically through a groundswell of anger from the families.
And so it comes as little surprise that both the U.S. and the UK have a great deal invested in keeping the Lockerbie case an enigma with more questions than answers, feeding the online conspiracy theorists and wannabe journalists with an endless smokescreen of disinformation – much of it building on an even more complicated web of lies, half-truths and elaborate fables.
In recent years, the FBI and CIA have seemed to have acquired new evidence which puts the Libyans in the frame and have made arrests based on that ‘evidence’. Yet it is hard to see how such actions can have any credibility when the trial of the Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was framed for the act of terrorism. Since his death and the trial in the Netherlands which found him guilty, it has become clear that the key piece of evidence which put the spotlight on him as the so-called architect of the bombing – a fragment of a circuit board of a timer used in military explosions made by a Swiss company – was planted by certain individuals who had a strong interest in framing the Libyans. The tiny piece of circuit board, which was believed to be part of a Swiss-made timer and which Scottish police apparently found sixteen months later in April 1990, was emphatically not part of the timers which were sold to the Libyans in 1985.
Those who planted this piece of damning evidence were clumsy and did not check that the timer which the Americans acquired from the Swiss company six months after Lockerbie was for a later, more modern 1990 model – NOT the ones the Libyans had bought. In fact, the Americans had acquired two other timers from Libyan agents in West Africa which were believed to be from the batch sold to Libya in 1985, but chose to use the one Swiss police effectively stole from the company – which was a huge blunder.
If the Scottish court in the Netherlands had done its job properly, it would have noted this, along with many other examples of sloppy interference in the case – such as statements crudely changed later by police officers, unreliable witnesses who had been paid handsomely by the Americans to stick to a certain story, and the whole Malta connection which was farcically fabricated by amateurs. A lot of other critical information was also ignored, it should be stressed.
Yet this theme of ignoring key evidence and putting too much emphasis on material gathered under unorthodox means to continue with the haze designed to keep the truth from ever emerging from the Lockerbie fog seems to have been adopted now by the BBC.
A recent long-form piece by an award-winning journalist appears to swing from two principal ideas – one minute being in the American camp supporting the Libyan theory, before reverting to the proclivity of Iranian guilt the next – merely reflecting the confusion between London and Washington today. While there are cabals of spooks in both capitals who are committed to keeping the oldest lie in post-war history going and fingering Gaddafi for Lockerbie, younger chaps in the security services can’t resist using Lockerbie to point the finger at Iran.
Meghrahi still the fall guy
The simple truth is that new documents which the Libyan security services have magically discovered – which conveniently point to 11-hour timers or Meghrahi’s own signature on a document confirming the storage of 11 kilos of what is believed to be orange-coloured Semtex – cannot be taken seriously and are almost certainly fakes. While it is true that Meghrahi was the perfect patsy, as his work involved dealing with explosives and he was regularly in Malta (as well as renting a small office in the same building as the Swiss company which manufactured the timing device in Zurich), there is not a single shred of evidence which makes him guilty of being the bomb-maker or orchestrating any of the dirty work required to bring down Pan Am 103.
Furthermore, the initial assertion by FBI investigators that it was likely to be the Libyans, as they would have been handed the job to do by the Palestinian group in Germany, is implausible. While it is true that the group had all been arrested before the bombing, it is hard to believe that they had not already set the wheels in motion to have the bomb placed on the flight via a young Lebanese man who believed he was carrying drugs to the States in a Toshiba radio given to him days earlier. Also, the Americans like to point to Meghrahi’s odd behaviour in Malta days before and frame him as the Libyan man who bought the clothes in Mary’s shop – which has since been disproved by numerous respected journalists, as the shop’s owner collected several million dollars in reward from the Americans fingering Meghrahi, even though his statements were altered by FBI agents several times, and his own description of the Libyan bore no resemblance at all to Meghrahi. And why would a Libyan go to such extraordinary lengths to bring all the attention back to Malta, in preference to directing investigators towards the Palestinian group in Germany?
As a secret service agent of the Libyans, Meghrahi was hardly an angel, though, and probably tortured and killed a few enemies of the state in his work. His location and type of work made him the perfect fall guy for those who weren’t going to look too hard for evidence which was unquestionable. There is no smoking gun, simply because, as Jim Swire believes, he simply didn’t do it.
But the malfeasance of investigators, even BBC journalists, never goes in both directions. The weak, circumstantial evidence which was heavily applied to Meghrahi isn’t applied to those who are supposed to be kept out of the frame, such as the Palestinian group itself – whom Swire and the author still believe to this day are guilty of the downing of Pan Am 103.
How hard did the German investigators look at Palestinian bomb-makers?
It is true that there is no smoking gun which puts them in the frame. Yet by the same token, at some point in 1990, it would seem that the German, Swiss and American authorities simply closed their file – despite German police arresting them all in a dawn raid where they discovered Toshiba radio cassette recorders and timing devices – some believe exactly the same type that the Libyans bought, although this is a contentious point. For the league of independent investigators, journalists, or just those of the victims, all the Germans’ evidence about the raid and its findings is still top secret.
Yet this hardly forgives the careless journalism of the BBC in their latest “investigation”, which makes a number of shocking assumptions and blunders that we would not normally associate with a leading media outlet covering such an important case. One critical error in the article stands out and particularly stinks, leading the casual observer to believe that there is something more nefarious in the article beyond poor journalism: the claim that there was no evidence at all pointing the finger at the Syrian/Palestinian group – which is patently untrue on a number of levels.
Palestinians belonging to the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) were arrested in October 1988 in their apartment, where police found explosives, weapons and Toshiba cassette recorders. The operation, called “Autumn Leaves”, would appear at first to have caught the Lockerbie bombers – and yet, according to the BBC, there was nothing remotely suspicious about this group or its activities.
“Dick Marquise, who led the FBI’s Lockerbie task force, says that in the early days of the case he too believed the PFLP-GC were the ‘number one suspect’, but years of investigation found nothing to prove it.” What Marquise perhaps should have said is that they (the FBI) found nothing, but there were others who did.
How can we believe the Americans, though, that those years of investigation were genuine? Six months after Lockerbie, Swiss investigators effectively stole a timer from the Zurich company which they gave to the FBI, who planted it with Libyans in West Africa – which was then used as evidence supporting the Meghrahi/Libyan culpability. And the only person on the planet who finds this suspicious is a 90-year-old doctor whose daughter lost her life on the flight? At this precise moment, everyone involved in the case – even the owner of the Swiss company – all noted how the case changed dramatically, with everything focusing on the Libyan prognosis.
Al Jazeera scoop?
Yet not everyone followed this. Years later, the Qatari-based broadcaster produced a good documentary into Lockerbie – so good that they couldn’t broadcast it, as, presumably, it would have harmed their relations with Washington irreparably. One of the pivotal pieces of old-school journalism they unearthed, which seemed to have escaped the attention of the BBC and its recent piece, is the link between Iran and the Palestinian group, who, along with Hezbollah, regularly met in Cyprus and Malta to discuss how to bring down an American airliner. The Palestinian group specialised in this and had an impressive track record, but it is likely that the Iranians wanted something beyond the group’s normal service: plausible deniability. They met in Malta – a vortex of Libyan spies who based themselves there. How did none of this circumstantial evidence become the basis of a more serious investigation? Did the Germans have an agenda to let the group off the hook, or were they just inept?
This was even weeks before Lockerbie. Even more incendiary evidence was that the documentary had evidence of a transfer of $11 million in the summer of 1988 to the Palestinian group from Iran – shortly after the tragic deaths of all those on an Iranian airliner which a U.S. battleship in the Persian Gulf shot down on July 3rd of that year. And then there’s the location. Whoever chose to plant the Lockerbie bomb chose Malta as the fall guy and Germany as the country where it would be actually put on the plane – the same country where the group operated from and had contacts in the airport handling department who could arrange such a drop. When will this group and their heinous work be really investigated? Can I be the only journalist who finds it very odd that the Lockerbie case against them was dropped very quickly once a fragment of the circuit board was found in the Lockerbie field almost one and a half years later – and that they were never prime suspects due to FBI investigators noting that the type of timer they used, barometric, was not the same type as the Swiss one central to the case?
