Stavros
04-13-2012, 04:56 PM
Pan-Am 103 exploded over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland just after 7pm on Dec 21 1988; all 259 on board were killed, plus an additional eleven on the ground where the main fuselage crashed. It was the worst terrorist atrocity in British history.
A Libyan, Abdelbasit al-Megrahi is the only person to have been found guilty of the bombing. He has always insisted that he is innocent, and has now written down his account of the events, together with John Ashton, who did much of the research for al-Megrahi’s legal team between 2006 and 2009. The result is a book called You Are My Jury.
The case presented against al-Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Fhima at their trial under Scottish law in The Hague in 2000, argued that, acting together, al-Megrahi and Fhima used their connections at Luqa Airport in Malta to place an unaccompanied suitcase on a flight to Frankfurt to join a feeder Pan-Am flight to London Heathrow where the suitcase was placed on Pan-Am 103; that the bomb had been activated by a timer placed in a Toshiba radio-cassette player; and that it had been in a suitcase containing clothes which were traced through the Id and serial numbers on the labels to Mary’s House in Sliema, a town in Malta. It was argued that the bomb was activated by MST-13 timers made by the firm Mebo in Zurich and supplied to the Libyan Intelligence Services (JSO), and that both al-Megrahi and Fhima were former officials of the Libyan State Airline where they had worked as undercover agents for the JSO. The Court presented evidence that all but two of the MST-13 timers delivered to the JSO had been recovered from a raid on a JSO safe house in Senegal in February 1988, and that one of the two missing timers from the batch had been used in an explosion which destroyed flight UTA 772 en route from Congo-Brazzaville to Paris via Ndjamena in 1989 –allegedly a revenge attack by Libya on France for its support for rebels fighting Libya’s attempts to seize part of Chad. The Court heard evidence from Tony Gauci, the son of the owner of Mary’s House, who in 1991 identified al-Megrahi as the man who had bought the clothes from Mary’s House in early December 1988 which were found in the wreckage in Lockerbie- a fragment of the circuit board from a Toshiba radio-cassette player was found embedded in one of the clothes that had been purchased in the shop.
Al-Megrahi protests that he has never been a JSO agent, and that he had left Libyan State Airlines to become a businessman. He admits that he had a false passport which he had obtained through his connections with the government, for whom he made money purchasing goods abroad to break the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya. He claims that he wanted to travel abroad without letting his wife know; she assumed when he was abroad that he was staying with friends. Since the publication of the book he has also claimed he had a mistress in Malta. Al-Megrahi argues that in spite of using a false passport on his trip to Malta in early December 1988, he stayed at the Holiday Inn in Sliema where the staff knew him well under his real name –he says that had he been a JSO agent on a mission he could have travelled incognito to Malta, have stayed in a JSO safe-house and thus there would have been no record of his ever entering Malta at all.
Critics will say –well yes, he would deny it all. The bomb went off at 7pm presumably or possibly because the person who set the timer was outside the UK and forgot or did not realise the UK is one hour behind Europe -7pm in the UK would have been 8pm in Europe –at 8pm UK time Pan-Am 103 would have been flying west of Iceland over the North Atlantic Ocean. Al-Megrahi need not have covered his tracks because none of the team expected any evidence to survive the explosion. As for Libya, the bombing is assumed to be revenge for the US air strikes on Libya in 1986 and the sanctions imposed on the country.
In an extremely detailed examination of the evidence presented at trial, and of the report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which examined the evidence and a 400-page submission from al-Megrahi’s legal team between 2003-2007, John Ashton trashes the evidence and the means by which it was gathered.
He argues the original forensic team were over-worked and incompetent in their handling of thousands of pieces of evidence; he presents sufficient evidence to cast doubt on the claim that the MST-13 timers used to activate the bomb were part of the same batch delivered to the JSO; he casts doubts on the identity of the Toshiba radio-cassette player in which the bomb was placed; and is particularly harsh on the evidence of Tony Gauci whose original statement identified a man buying clothes in Mary’s House who was taller, darker and older than al-Megrahi was in 1988. That Lamin Fhima was found not guilty in a case where it was argued they acted together never made sense, while compelling evidence that the bombing was organised by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command [PFLP-GC] is also presented.
In October 1988, West German intelligence raided a PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt where they found Toshiba radio-cassette players primed to explode, using Mebo MST-13 timers which Mebo had supplied to the Stasi in East Germany. It was well known at the time that East Germany and the Communist bloc countries were safe havens for a variety of left-wing terrorist groups who had the ultimate backing of the USSR. All but one of the timers and all but one of the Toshiba players were recovered in the raid –and one member of the cell evaded arrest and was never captured.
Moreover, during the trial, Marwan Khreesat, a bomb-maker of the PFLP-GC who had been part of the Frankfurt cell declared of the PFLP-GC’s leader Ahmad Jibril and the Frankfurt operation: “It was made very clear to us by Ahmad Jibril that he wanted to blow up an aeroplane. This was the whole purpose of our being there……”.
In addition to this, the CIA knew that days after the [I]USS Vincennes had shot down Iranian Airbus 655 in July1988 (290 dead) the Iranian intelligence services, the Pasadaran met with a man from the PFLP-GC identified as Hafez Dalkamoni -the leader of the cell arrested in the Frankfurt raid. According to Robert Baer in his book See No Evil, the instructions from Iran were clear: “Blow up an American airplane –in the air to kill as many people as possible.”
The US has always insisted that the attack on Iran Air 655 was a tragic accident, even though an aircraft carrier with state-of-the-art radar failed to distinguish the difference between a passenger aircraft that was ascending after take-off from Bandar Abbas airport, and the jet fighter the US assumed was homing in the Vincennes. That Lockerbie was a revenge attack seems to me to the most obvious explanation for the cause of the bombing; that it was carried out by the PFLP-GC on behalf of Iran was widely believed at the time to be the explanation, and it was only later that Libya entered the frame.
The first question then, is –was the destruction of the Iranian Airbus an accident, or was it deliberate? For it to have been deliberate there would have to have been a motive. I have only ever come across one motive for the bombing, provided by the maverick writer on intelligence who died in 2010 –Christopher Story. Story was editor and wrote most of a bulletin called Arab-Asian Affairs. In an issue of Arab-Asian Affairs –I forget the year but in the early 1990s- he claimed that the Iranian airbus was deliberately targeted because amongst its passengers were some of the closest advisers to the Ayatollah Khomeini who at the time were resisting appeals from the Iranian military for an end to the war with Iraq. With those close advisers gone, Khomeini was isolated in the ‘Supreme Council’, and a few weeks after the airbus was destroyed, Iran declared a ceasefire with Iraq. Story never offered any hard evidence for this claim, and caution is required of a man who published a book on the ‘Golitsyn thesis’ claiming that the Sino-Soviet Split of 1960 was an elaborate hoax designed to disguise the Communists long-term plan to take over the world.
The second question is, why Libya? The first answer to this, I think, was driven by the difficulty of attacking Iran directly when it was clear from Lockerbie that Iran was prepared to retaliate against US targets -this is also a reason why the US doesn't want to be involved in a bombing against Iran''s nuclear facilities and is nervous about Israel's intentions.
The second driver was the opportunity Lockerbie gave to intensify the isolation of Libya, which had been a pain in the backside ever since Qadhafi began nationalising the oil industry in 1971. Qadhafi’s form as the paymaster and quartermaster of various terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s, from the IRA to various Palestinian groups, as well as allegations of Libyan involvement in bombings against US targets in Europe (for example the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin) –all of this meant that Libya was ripe for punishment. Qadhafi himself eventually manipulated the Lockerbie atrocity as a means of regaining recognition from the West, in effect buying diplomatic recognition through compensation payments to Lockerbie victims, and business deals (famously with BP), and agreeing to disband a ‘weapons of mass destruction’ programme.
The truth about Lockerbie is as ugly and contorted as these nasty political acts are; behind it are the faces of men with no respect for human life; and their victims, and the families and friends of those victims. Lockerbie did not advance the cause of peace or even war by one step, anymore than the destruction of Iranian Airbus 655, or the whole of the Iran-Iraq war which killed a million and bankrupted two once oil-rich states. The Scottish legal system, once presumed to be more exacting in its demands than the English, has been exposed as incompetent and open to political manipulation, with the Court allowing un-identified Americans, believed to be CIA agents to sit with and advise the prosecution team during the trial. The Judges had no knowledge or expertise in aviation technology and allowed photo-identification procedures which would have been thrown out of any other court, to stand.
Even today as the so-called debate on Iran’s nuclear programme gets heated, nobody knows if Iran will be attacked, and what the consequences might be. A calm mind suggests that there are alternative ways of proceeding, killing people is not one of them.
A Libyan, Abdelbasit al-Megrahi is the only person to have been found guilty of the bombing. He has always insisted that he is innocent, and has now written down his account of the events, together with John Ashton, who did much of the research for al-Megrahi’s legal team between 2006 and 2009. The result is a book called You Are My Jury.
The case presented against al-Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Fhima at their trial under Scottish law in The Hague in 2000, argued that, acting together, al-Megrahi and Fhima used their connections at Luqa Airport in Malta to place an unaccompanied suitcase on a flight to Frankfurt to join a feeder Pan-Am flight to London Heathrow where the suitcase was placed on Pan-Am 103; that the bomb had been activated by a timer placed in a Toshiba radio-cassette player; and that it had been in a suitcase containing clothes which were traced through the Id and serial numbers on the labels to Mary’s House in Sliema, a town in Malta. It was argued that the bomb was activated by MST-13 timers made by the firm Mebo in Zurich and supplied to the Libyan Intelligence Services (JSO), and that both al-Megrahi and Fhima were former officials of the Libyan State Airline where they had worked as undercover agents for the JSO. The Court presented evidence that all but two of the MST-13 timers delivered to the JSO had been recovered from a raid on a JSO safe house in Senegal in February 1988, and that one of the two missing timers from the batch had been used in an explosion which destroyed flight UTA 772 en route from Congo-Brazzaville to Paris via Ndjamena in 1989 –allegedly a revenge attack by Libya on France for its support for rebels fighting Libya’s attempts to seize part of Chad. The Court heard evidence from Tony Gauci, the son of the owner of Mary’s House, who in 1991 identified al-Megrahi as the man who had bought the clothes from Mary’s House in early December 1988 which were found in the wreckage in Lockerbie- a fragment of the circuit board from a Toshiba radio-cassette player was found embedded in one of the clothes that had been purchased in the shop.
Al-Megrahi protests that he has never been a JSO agent, and that he had left Libyan State Airlines to become a businessman. He admits that he had a false passport which he had obtained through his connections with the government, for whom he made money purchasing goods abroad to break the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya. He claims that he wanted to travel abroad without letting his wife know; she assumed when he was abroad that he was staying with friends. Since the publication of the book he has also claimed he had a mistress in Malta. Al-Megrahi argues that in spite of using a false passport on his trip to Malta in early December 1988, he stayed at the Holiday Inn in Sliema where the staff knew him well under his real name –he says that had he been a JSO agent on a mission he could have travelled incognito to Malta, have stayed in a JSO safe-house and thus there would have been no record of his ever entering Malta at all.
Critics will say –well yes, he would deny it all. The bomb went off at 7pm presumably or possibly because the person who set the timer was outside the UK and forgot or did not realise the UK is one hour behind Europe -7pm in the UK would have been 8pm in Europe –at 8pm UK time Pan-Am 103 would have been flying west of Iceland over the North Atlantic Ocean. Al-Megrahi need not have covered his tracks because none of the team expected any evidence to survive the explosion. As for Libya, the bombing is assumed to be revenge for the US air strikes on Libya in 1986 and the sanctions imposed on the country.
In an extremely detailed examination of the evidence presented at trial, and of the report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which examined the evidence and a 400-page submission from al-Megrahi’s legal team between 2003-2007, John Ashton trashes the evidence and the means by which it was gathered.
He argues the original forensic team were over-worked and incompetent in their handling of thousands of pieces of evidence; he presents sufficient evidence to cast doubt on the claim that the MST-13 timers used to activate the bomb were part of the same batch delivered to the JSO; he casts doubts on the identity of the Toshiba radio-cassette player in which the bomb was placed; and is particularly harsh on the evidence of Tony Gauci whose original statement identified a man buying clothes in Mary’s House who was taller, darker and older than al-Megrahi was in 1988. That Lamin Fhima was found not guilty in a case where it was argued they acted together never made sense, while compelling evidence that the bombing was organised by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command [PFLP-GC] is also presented.
In October 1988, West German intelligence raided a PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt where they found Toshiba radio-cassette players primed to explode, using Mebo MST-13 timers which Mebo had supplied to the Stasi in East Germany. It was well known at the time that East Germany and the Communist bloc countries were safe havens for a variety of left-wing terrorist groups who had the ultimate backing of the USSR. All but one of the timers and all but one of the Toshiba players were recovered in the raid –and one member of the cell evaded arrest and was never captured.
Moreover, during the trial, Marwan Khreesat, a bomb-maker of the PFLP-GC who had been part of the Frankfurt cell declared of the PFLP-GC’s leader Ahmad Jibril and the Frankfurt operation: “It was made very clear to us by Ahmad Jibril that he wanted to blow up an aeroplane. This was the whole purpose of our being there……”.
In addition to this, the CIA knew that days after the [I]USS Vincennes had shot down Iranian Airbus 655 in July1988 (290 dead) the Iranian intelligence services, the Pasadaran met with a man from the PFLP-GC identified as Hafez Dalkamoni -the leader of the cell arrested in the Frankfurt raid. According to Robert Baer in his book See No Evil, the instructions from Iran were clear: “Blow up an American airplane –in the air to kill as many people as possible.”
The US has always insisted that the attack on Iran Air 655 was a tragic accident, even though an aircraft carrier with state-of-the-art radar failed to distinguish the difference between a passenger aircraft that was ascending after take-off from Bandar Abbas airport, and the jet fighter the US assumed was homing in the Vincennes. That Lockerbie was a revenge attack seems to me to the most obvious explanation for the cause of the bombing; that it was carried out by the PFLP-GC on behalf of Iran was widely believed at the time to be the explanation, and it was only later that Libya entered the frame.
The first question then, is –was the destruction of the Iranian Airbus an accident, or was it deliberate? For it to have been deliberate there would have to have been a motive. I have only ever come across one motive for the bombing, provided by the maverick writer on intelligence who died in 2010 –Christopher Story. Story was editor and wrote most of a bulletin called Arab-Asian Affairs. In an issue of Arab-Asian Affairs –I forget the year but in the early 1990s- he claimed that the Iranian airbus was deliberately targeted because amongst its passengers were some of the closest advisers to the Ayatollah Khomeini who at the time were resisting appeals from the Iranian military for an end to the war with Iraq. With those close advisers gone, Khomeini was isolated in the ‘Supreme Council’, and a few weeks after the airbus was destroyed, Iran declared a ceasefire with Iraq. Story never offered any hard evidence for this claim, and caution is required of a man who published a book on the ‘Golitsyn thesis’ claiming that the Sino-Soviet Split of 1960 was an elaborate hoax designed to disguise the Communists long-term plan to take over the world.
The second question is, why Libya? The first answer to this, I think, was driven by the difficulty of attacking Iran directly when it was clear from Lockerbie that Iran was prepared to retaliate against US targets -this is also a reason why the US doesn't want to be involved in a bombing against Iran''s nuclear facilities and is nervous about Israel's intentions.
The second driver was the opportunity Lockerbie gave to intensify the isolation of Libya, which had been a pain in the backside ever since Qadhafi began nationalising the oil industry in 1971. Qadhafi’s form as the paymaster and quartermaster of various terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s, from the IRA to various Palestinian groups, as well as allegations of Libyan involvement in bombings against US targets in Europe (for example the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin) –all of this meant that Libya was ripe for punishment. Qadhafi himself eventually manipulated the Lockerbie atrocity as a means of regaining recognition from the West, in effect buying diplomatic recognition through compensation payments to Lockerbie victims, and business deals (famously with BP), and agreeing to disband a ‘weapons of mass destruction’ programme.
The truth about Lockerbie is as ugly and contorted as these nasty political acts are; behind it are the faces of men with no respect for human life; and their victims, and the families and friends of those victims. Lockerbie did not advance the cause of peace or even war by one step, anymore than the destruction of Iranian Airbus 655, or the whole of the Iran-Iraq war which killed a million and bankrupted two once oil-rich states. The Scottish legal system, once presumed to be more exacting in its demands than the English, has been exposed as incompetent and open to political manipulation, with the Court allowing un-identified Americans, believed to be CIA agents to sit with and advise the prosecution team during the trial. The Judges had no knowledge or expertise in aviation technology and allowed photo-identification procedures which would have been thrown out of any other court, to stand.
Even today as the so-called debate on Iran’s nuclear programme gets heated, nobody knows if Iran will be attacked, and what the consequences might be. A calm mind suggests that there are alternative ways of proceeding, killing people is not one of them.