On December 21st 1988, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York, killing all 259 passengers and crew. Eleven more people died on the ground as the wreckage of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, Maid of the Seas, fell onto the Scottish town of Lockerbie, bringing the death toll to 270.

It was the biggest mass murder in British history and it led to the biggest cover-up of modern times. Much still remains hidden behind the cloak of American "national security" but enough truth has emerged from the fog of government lies and evasion to point a finger at those responsible, as well as exposing unbridled corruption in the highest levels of the governments and intelligence agencies of the United States, Britain and Germany….

THE PLANNING OF THE BOMBING

It is now widely accepted that the sequence of events leading to the Lockerbie disaster began on July 3rd 1988 in the Persian Gulf. While sailing in Iranian territorial waters, the US warship Vincennes somehow mistook a commercial Iranian Airbus that had just taken off from Bandar Abbas airport for an Iranian F14 fighter closing in to attack it. The US warship shot the plane down, killing all 290 civilian passengers on board, most of them pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

The USS Vincennes

The bridge of the USS Vincennes just prior to the missile launch

The US government first tried to excuse this blunder, then lied to Congress about it, lied in its official investigation into the incident, and handed out a Commendation Medal to the ship's air-warfare co-ordinator for his "heroic achievement."

Predictably, the Iranians were incensed. They construed the US government's evasive response to their complaint before the UN Security Council as a cover-up for a deliberate act of aggression, rather than as an attempt to hide its embarrassment. (They were already angry over what they perceived to be America's failure to honour its secret arms-for-hostages deal). Tehran radio declared that the incident would be avenged "in blood-spattered skies."

In retribution for the injury, and to reaffirm the power of Islam, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself is said to have ordered the destruction of not one, but four American airliners - but discreetly. The Iranians could not afford to provoke an open war with America, particularly at a time when they were rebuilding their economy after the long war with Iraq, and were forced to deal with the West for technology and trade.

Khomeini's minister of the interior, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was placed in charge of planning Iran's revenge. At a meeting in Tehran on July 9th 1988, he awarded the contract to Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army officer and head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terrorist organisation based in Damascus. Although Jibril later denied his complicity in the Lockerbie bombing, he was reported to have bragged privately that the fee for the job was $10 million. (Wire transfers of the money were traced to Jibril's secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Spain).

Ahmed Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC terrorist organisation.

The PFLP-GC group was known for the sophistication of its explosive devices: in 1970, the PFLP-GC had blown up a Swissair flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv, killing 47 passengers and crew. Two years later, in August 1972, a PFLP-GC bomb exploded in the cabin of an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv, injuring several passengers. Later, the PFLP-GC's terrorist cell in West Germany succeeded in exploding bombs aboard two American military trains.

Jibril chose Frankfurt as the target airport for several reasons: it was an important site for American flights, connecting with airlines from all over Europe and the Middle East; the PFLP-GC had an established German section, based under cover of the country's sizeable Middle Eastern community; and Jibril knew he could count on the co-operation of local Islamic Fundamentalists among the Turkish baggage-handlers employed at the airport. The latters' skill in evading the airport's security system had already proved very useful in promoting Syria's heroin exports.

After several more meetings with Iranian officials in Beirut and Tehran, Jibril sent a senior lieutenant, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni, to Germany to team up with Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar, who had been stockpiling arms and explosives in a Frankfurt apartment since the beginning of the year.

Dalkamoni moved in with his wife's sister and brother-in-law, who lived in the city of Neuss (less than two hours' drive from Frankfurt), where they ran a green-grocery business. On October 13th 1988, Dalkamoni was joined there by Marwan Abdel Khreesat, the PFLP-GC's leading explosives expert and bomb-maker.

Meanwhile, documents seized by Israeli forces in a raid on a PFLP-GC camp in south Lebanon pointed clearly to a new terrorist offensive in Europe, led by Dalkamoni. A general warning about this was circulated to all European security forces.

Acting on this intelligence, a BKA (Bundes-kriminalamt, German Federal police) surveillance team was watching when Dalkamoni greeted Khreesat on his arrival from Frankfurt airport. The German police were also watching when the two men went shopping for electronic components on October 22nd; when Dalkamoni arrived at the Neuss apartment on October 24th with a number of foil-wrapped packages delivered from Frankfurt by Ghadanfar; when Khreesat remained indoors on October 24th and 25th, assembling four bombs in two Toshiba radio-cassette players, a hi-fi radio tuner and a video monitor; and on October 26th, when Dalkamoni and Khreesat left the apartment for good, carrying their luggage.

At this point, the BKA moved in, arresting both men on the street. Over the next 24 hours, the BKA raided apartments and houses in five other German cities in a carefully co-ordinated operation (code-named Operation Autumn Leaves) and rounded up a total of sixteen terrorist suspects. Two others, one of them Mobdi Goben (another PFLP-GC bomb-maker, more commonly known as "the Professor") were unfortunately out of the country at the time.

When the Neuss apartment was searched, three of Khreesat's bombs were no longer there; nor was a brown Samsonite suitcase he had brought with him from Jordan. The BKA found one of the bombs in Dalkamoni's Ford Taurus car - 312 grams of Semtex-H (plastic explosive) moulded into the case of a black Toshiba radio-cassette recorder fitted with a barometric switch and time delay. This device had been assembled for just one purpose - to destroy an aircraft in flight (a barometric switch is designed, with or without a timer, to detonate at a predetermined altitude).

An urgent warning was accordingly issued to airline security chiefs throughout the world to be on the lookout for Khreesat's three missing bombs and possibly other explosive devices hidden in Toshiba radios.

The BKA had better luck at Ghadanfar's apartment in Frankfurt. They found an anti-tank grenade-launcher, mortars, hand-grenades, sub-machine guns, rifles and another five kilos of Semtex. On the strength of this, and the bomb found in the car, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were held on terrorist charges. However, Khreesat and the other PFLP-GC suspects rounded up in the raids, were mysteriously released (the BKA cited "lack of evidence") and promptly disappeared. The West Germans believe Khreesat fled to Syria.

(It has since been claimed by Western intelligence that Khreesat was a double agent working for the BKA and the CIA. Although this is strongly denied by the West Germans, it is clear that they did have a mole inside the PFLP-GC unit in Germany).

Months later, in April 1989, the BKA found two of the bombs in the basement of the green-grocery business run by Dalkamoni's brother-in-law in Neuss. One of the bombs exploded while it was being disarmed, killing a technician. The other was then deliberately destroyed "for safety reasons", thus denying the Lockerbie investigators possibly vital forensic evidence.

The last of Khreesat's bombs had been smuggled out of the West German apartment by the PFLP-GC terrorist Ramzi Diab. He carried the bomb in a radio-cassette player to Vienna, and then smuggled it into Malta for subsequent handling by Mohammed Abu Talb, a key member of the PFLP-GC's European section. In Malta, Talb purchased an assortment of clothing from a boutique in the resort town of Sliema, which he used to pack around the bomb in the brown Samsonite suitcase.

Still committed to Frankfurt as the best airport from which to attack an American passenger aircraft, Ahmed Jibril turned for logistical support to Libya, the PFLP-GC's principal supplier of Semtex. Dalkamoni and Abu Talb had already conferred at least twice with Qadhafi's agents in Malta, but Jibril had yet to target a particular American airline.

Towards the end of October 1988, around the time of the BKA's raids on the PFLP-GC in Germany, Mossad agents observed Jibril dining at a Lebanese restaurant in Paris with Monzer al-Kassar. Al-Kassar was a drugs and arms dealer, supplying hundreds of tons of weapons to many terrorist groups in the Middle East. Al-Kassar promised Jibril that he would use his connections to get a bomb aboard an as-yet unspecified American passenger flight from Frankfurt.

Although he had been arrested in Denmark, Britain, France and Spain for narcotics and arms offences, Al-Kassar enjoyed the protected status of a CIA "asset". The Agency allowed him full freedom to go about his illegal business with international criminals and terrorists. Al-Kassar and his Syrian associate Rifat Assad (brother of Syria's dictator President Hafez Assad) controlled the Syrian heroin cartel based in Lebanon, which was allowed by the CIA to run a drugs "pipeline" from the Bekaa Valley to the United States via Frankfurt and London.

Knowledge of al-Kassar's "protected" drug smuggling route from Frankfurt into the US was therefore a compelling invitation to Ahmed Jibril to place the bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103.

THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE CONNECTION

In March 1988, the CIA was advised by the BKA of a secret meeting in Vienna between delegations from France and Iran that led to the delivery of weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of French hostages held in Lebanon. Having identified al-Kassar as a key player in the deal, the CIA approached him to see if he could also help arrange the release of American hostages in return for their protection of his drug routes.

Al-Kassar not only agreed to this but helped the CIA send weapons to Iran and also used his arms routes to supply weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua, as part of Lt-Colonel Oliver North's drugs and arms trafficking operation (see Dealing In Death: The CIA and the Drugs Trade), sometimes financing the shipments out of his drug profits. For these services, al-Kassar was designated a CIA "asset", which meant that he and his business activities were virtually immune from interference or prosecution.

Extracts from a congressional report prepared by the House Judiciary Committee's
Sub-committee on Crime and Criminal Justice, showing the US government's
complicity in Syrian and Lebanese drugs trafficking.

The Syrian army's occupation of eastern Lebanon had brought the region's drug trafficking under the supervision of al-Kassar's partner Rifat Assad. The Syrian presence was deeply resented by the Lebanese clans of the Bekaa Valley, who had previously run their family enclaves like independent autonomies.

Until the Syrians moved in, the Jafaar clan had been the Bekaa Valley's biggest heroin suppliers to the United States for almost half a century. With family members settled in and around Detroit as American citizens, which gave them cover to travel regularly back and forth between Lebanon and the United States, the Jafaars saw no reason why they should have to pay Syrian interlopers for "protection" of their drug running network.

US intelligence services played a complicated role in the region. It was standard practice for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to play one target group off against another, in the hope of crippling both. The DEA sought to exploit the friction between the Lebanese and Syrians as a means of slowing down the export of narcotics, whose value had grown to no less than fifty per cent of Lebanon's entire economic activity.

The CIA, on the other hand, had a different agenda. The Agency viewed the Assad/al-Kassar pipeline as both a bargaining chip in seeking the release of American hostages in the Middle East, and an important link in its Middle East intelligence-gathering network. In addition, the narcotics industry was virtually the sole means of economic support for the pro-Western Christian factions in Lebanon, without whom the country would fall into the hands of anti-Western Islamic Fundamentalists.

Narcotics law enforcement in the region tended to proceed, therefore, on the basis of ad hoc agreements between an assortment of agencies with different agendas. Operations were aimed mainly at breaking up drug distribution rings in the United States, rather than at knocking out their suppliers in Lebanon, and the DEA was obliged to confer almost daily with the CIA to see what they were allowed to do.

Virtually all that Michael Hurley, the DEA attaché in Nicosia, was permitted to do by the CIA, apart from compiling intelligence reports, was to organise "controlled deliveries" of heroin to Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles, with a view to having his DEA colleagues in those cities arrest the traffickers who claimed the packages.

The most reliable couriers Hurley could find for this dangerous job were either Lebanese or Lebanese-American informants, who faced long prison sentences for drug offences if they refused to co-operate, or clans like the Jafaars, who hated their Syrian overlords and would do anything to get them off their backs.

THE CIA'S DRUG-SMUGGLING PIPELINE

The CIA and the DEA, in co-operation with the BKA, kept al-Kassar's smuggling operations through Frankfurt airport under close supervision but made no effort to interfere with them. The Agency infiltrated several informers and undercover agents into the pipeline. It appears that the local CIA team running this operation turned it into an internal covert affair operating without any oversight from Washington (similar to Oliver North's arms and drugs smuggling rackets in Nicaragua).

The number of DEA/CIA-"controlled deliveries" of heroin to the United States increased noticeably during the winter of 1988. Members of the Jafaar clan and other DEA couriers would arrive at the Larnaca hotel in Cyprus with suitcases full of high-grade heroin, and be taken by boat to the Christian-controlled port of Jounieh where they would be met by officers of the Cypriot Police Narcotics Squad, who then drove them to the Eurame Trading Company office (a DEA front) in Nicosia. After that, they would be taken by the Cypriot police to the airport and put on flights to Frankfurt.

At Frankfurt airport, an accomplice boarded flights with checked luggage containing innocent items. One of the Turkish baggage-handlers working for Pan Am was tipped to identify the suitcase, and then switch it with an identical piece holding the narcotics. The passenger accomplice then picked up the switched suitcase on arrival in New York, Detroit or other US cities. US Customs at JFK Airport were ordered by the CIA to allow these suitcases to pass uninspected, due to "national security" interests. The drugs couriers would then be met by DEA agents in the baggage-claim area and escorted through Customs, the loads being kept under continuous surveillance until deals were struck and the heroin changed hands. In Britain, HM Customs and Excise also co-operated with the drugs-running operation.

This route and method worked steadily and smoothly for a long time. One of the Jafaar clan, Khalid Nazir Jafaar, was a regular passenger accomplice for the drugs route. Jafaar lived with his father near Detroit but visited his mother and grandfather in the Bekaa Valley several times a year, a family duty which provided him with perfect cover for the job of drugs courier.

The CIA-supervised narcotics pipeline was supposedly motivated by the Agency's desire to catch drug dealers in the United States. More sinisterly, however, the Agency gave its blessing to the smuggling network, in the hope that the massive profits that accrued to the largely Syrian suppliers would help to secure the non-Fundamentalist regime in Syria.

"Seemed like the whole damn family were CIA assets. I know for a fact that Nazzie
[Khalid Nazir Jafaar] ran two or three controlled deliveries of heroin into Detroit."
- SHEILA HERSHOW, chief investigator for the House of Representatives
Sub-committee on Government Activities and Transportation,
on the Jafaar clan, the CIA's bedfellows in its Middle East drugs operations.

Monzer al-Kassar's regular payments from the CIA for his services were deposited to his credit at the Katherein Bank, Vienna (A/c no. 50307495) and at the Swiss Bank Corporation in Geneva (A/c no. 510230C-86).

On December 13th 1988, Jibril met with Khalid Jafaar and Mobdi Goben ("the Professor") in Bonn. Jibril offered Jafaar money to make a private drugs run on Pan Am Flight 103 to raise money "for the cause". The passenger accomplice was now lined up for the bombing plot.

COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER: THE SEQUENCE OF WARNINGS

As early as May 1988 (seven months before the Lockerbie bombing), the DEA's attaché in Nicosia, Michael Hurley, was given a clear warning by US intelligence officer Lester Knox Coleman of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA*) that security had been breached in the DEA/CIA operation which was allowing Lebanese drug traffickers to run heroin into the United States via Nicosia, Frankfurt and London.

(*The Defense Intelligence Agency is even more secretive than the CIA. The director of the CIA is a public figure and much is known about the covert activities of William Colby, Richard Helms, George Bush, William Casey and Robert Gates, but very few even know the name of the DIA director.

The DIA is in fact the largest and most covert intelligence agency in the world, operating entirely without Congressional oversight or restrictions, and whose director reports only to the joint chiefs of staff, who in turn have no legal requirement to inform the Secretary of Defense or even the President of what the organisation is up to - meaning that the DIA is accountable to no-one.

The DIA comprises the combined intelligence arms of the US Army, Navy and Air Force. 57,000 people operate from its headquarters at Arlington Hall, Virginia, and Bolling Airforce Base, Washington DC, on a budget five times bigger than the CIA's). One of the DIA's main roles is to monitor the covert activity of other US government agencies).

Lester Coleman worked for the DIA between 1982 and 1990, as well as having a successful radio and television journalism career that included a two-year spell with the White House press corps. Coleman's DIA job was to spy on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which operated out of a base in Cyprus; he discovered that the DEA was supervising (and the DIA manipulating) drugs and arms trafficking in the Middle East. Coleman found that certain Turkish baggage handlers occasionally switched bags in place of checked-in luggage bound for the US and he told Hurley that this was "a disaster waiting to happen."

Transcript of Lester Coleman's conversation with DEA attache Michael Hurley in which,
seven months before Lockerbie, he warned of "a disaster waiting to happen."

In the summer of 198,8 an eight-man special team of US counter-terrorist agents led by Matthew Gannon, the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut, and Major Charles McKee of the DIA, left for Beirut to reconnoitre and prepare for a possible rescue of US hostages in Beirut.

On 2nd November 1988, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned all airlines about Khreesat's Toshiba radio-cassette bomb which the BKA had recently found in Dalkamoni's car. On 17th November, this was followed up with another bulletin describing the bomb in detail and urging all airlines to be extra vigilant in the lookout for bombs hidden in radio-cassette players. The British Department of Transport issued a warning of its own on November 22nd and had a further detailed description of the bomb.

On December 2nd 1988, an intelligence source to the US State Department's Office of Diplomatic Security issued a warning which read: "Team of Palestinians not assoc with Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) intends to atk US tgts in Europe. Time frame is present. Tgts specified are Pan Am airlines and US mil bases."

(The existence of this warning was kept secret for seven years until it was released in 1995 under a Freedom of Information Act request. The name of the warning's informant was blacked out).

On December 5th 1988, the US Embassy in Helsinki received an anonymous telephone warning that "within the next two weeks" an attempt would be made to place a bomb aboard a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York. The caller had a Middle Eastern accent, and may have been an associate of al-Kassar who did not wish his protected pipeline to be sabotaged, even in the name of Islamic militancy. The State Department subsequently circulated an unclassified warning to all its embassies.

This was a time when many Americans would be going home for Christmas, and the Helsinki warning was taken particularly seriously by the US embassy in Moscow, who posted an "administrative notice to all employees" warning of the threat. Consequently, not a single Moscow embassy worker took Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt on December 21st, which would normally have been a standard and popular route home for Christmas. (This was to be little consolation to the families of those who, unaware of the State Department's warning to its staff, bought standby tickets for the flight vacated by the American diplomats).

On December 8th 1988, Israeli forces raided a PFLP-GC camp in Lebanon, and captured documents relating to a planned attack on an American-flag carrier out of Frankfurt later that month. This information was passed to the governments of the United States and Germany, and thence to the headquarters of the CIA and BKA.

In response, the local CIA team monitoring al-Kassar's smuggling route was said to have suggested that the BKA visibly increase security on all American flights except Pan Am so that the threat, if it was genuine, would be focused on an airport area already under close surveillance.

On December 18th, the BKA was tipped off that there would be a bomb plot against Pan Am Flight 103 in the next two or three days. This again was thought to have come from associates of Nidal and al-Kassar, who wanted to save their protected drug route. They thought that visibly increased security around the airport would put off Jibril's bombing plan. The tip was passed to the CIA unit in Frankfurt. Although anxious not to blow its undercover drugs operation, the CIA passed the warning on to the State Department.

On December 20th, twenty-four hours before Pan Am 103's take-off, an undercover Mossad agent passed on yet another warning, this time relating specifically to Flight 103 the next day, and CIA headquarters sent warnings to various embassies - but not apparently to Pan Am.

A huge entourage of South African government officials, including then foreign minister Pik Botha, were booked on Pan Am 103 but switched flights at the last minute. This appears to indicate that the apartheid regime was also tipped off about the bomb plot, most likely by British intelligence, who had close links with the South African security forces. (Botha changed to the earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike Flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow).

Meanwhile, al-Kassar had learned that the official CIA rescue team in Beirut, led by Matthew Gannon and Charles Mckee, had found out about his relations with the CIA unit in Frankfurt and his protected drugs and arms smuggling route.

Gannon and McKee believed that this rogue operation would jeopardise both their hostage rescue mission and their lives. They advised CIA headquarters of what was going on and, when no action was taken to put a stop to it, they decided to return home to Washington, unannounced. They were outraged and stated their intention of blowing the whistle on the rogue CIA operation in Frankfurt.

Al-Kassar subsequently contacted his CIA handlers and asked for help. There were numerous communications between the Frankfurt CIA unit and its Control (an unknown location in Washington).

During this time, US intelligence had the Iranian Embassy in Beirut under electronic surveillance, and recorded an American named David Lovejoy making a series of phone calls to Hussein Niknam, the Iranian charge d'affaires, about the movements of Gannon and McKee's official CIA team. Lovejoy's last recorded call was on December 20th, when he advised Niknam that the agents had changed their travel plans and would catch Pan Am Flight 103 from London the next day - December 21st. (Gannon and McKee had changed their travel plans in Cyprus, using the DEA's travel agents RA Travel Masters; the DEA may have told them it was safe to fly Pan Am Flight 103 because it was a controlled delivery flight).

Niknam at once phoned the Interior Ministry in Teheran and was monitored passing on Lovejoy's information. This strongly indicates that Flight 103 was targeted by the Iranians because of the American intelligence team they knew would be on board, and furthermore that the CIA may have collaborated in the murder of its own personnel in order to prevent embarrassing revelations about the Agency's illicit drugs activities.

Within 24 to 48 hours before the departure of Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a black Mercedes parked at the airport and the Turkish baggage-handler picked up a suitcase from the car and placed it in the employee locker area in the airport. This was his usual practice with drug shipments.

At 15.21 on December 21st, airport staff began loading passenger baggage aboard the Boeing 727 that was to fly the first leg of Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Heathrow. Khalid Nazir Jafaar boarded the plane after checking in one piece of luggage. After all the checked suitcases had passed through security, the Turkish Pan Am baggage-handler took the bomb suitcase and placed it on the luggage cart, in substitution for Jafaar's.

A BKA surveillance agent reported "suspicious behaviour" in the Pan Am baggage-loading area about an hour before the plane's departure. He noticed that the substituted suitcase, a brown Samsonite, was different in make, shape, material and colour from that used for all previous drug shipments. Like all the BKA agents on the scene, he had been especially alert due to all the bomb tips. He phoned in a report, saying something was very wrong. The BKA passed its agent's information to the local CIA unit, who reported to their Control. Control replied: "Don't worry about it. Don't stop it. Let it go."

No action was taken: the CIA unit issued no instructions to the BKA and the BKA did nothing. (The BKA covertly videotaped the baggage-loading area on that day. The videotape reportedly shows the perpetrator in the act. This tape was held by the BKA, who subsequently claimed to have "lost" it. However, a copy had been made earlier and given to the CIA, who have since refused to release it).

With 128 passengers and an estimated 135 pieces of luggage, Pan Am Flight 103 arrived at Heathrow airport on time. Forty-nine passengers, mostly American civilians, then boarded the plane for the transatlantic leg of the flight. Their bags were stowed on the port side of the forward cargo hold.

A further 210 passengers with baggage now joined the flight, but because of the US State Department's warnings to its embassy staffs, the aircraft was barely more than two-thirds full when it took off at 18.25, twenty-five minutes late.

It was a very young passenger list, with an average age of 27 years. Most were going home for the Christmas holiday. Flight 103 was scheduled to stop at JFK Airport in New York, then continue on to its final destination, Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Had it left Heathrow on time, it would have vanished far out over the Atlantic, leaving little more than speculation as to the cause of the crash.

At 19.03, the bomb exploded in the forward cargo hold on the port side. The explosive decompression, combined with an air speed of 500mph, tore the plane into pieces, which rained down onto the Scottish border town of Lockerbie.

What moments before had been a peaceful little farming hamlet became a panorama of death and destruction. Seismographers at the Earthquake Monitoring Centre in Dumfriesshire, about 14 miles from Lockerbie, reported a 1.9 reading on the Richter scale. The reading was caused when a major portion of the fuselage, containing the engines and fuel tanks, hit the ground in Sherwood Crescent in the south-west end of the town. The impact gouged a deep crater in the earth and sent an exploding fireball three hundred feet in the air. A gas main ruptured as the debris landed, adding fuel to the already roaring fires. The flames engulfed everything: buildings, cars, trees and bushes were an inferno. The fireball was visible more than six miles away.

All 259 passengers and crew of the plane were killed in the crash. A further 11 villagers died as the wreckage plummeted onto the town, bringing the death toll to 270. Bodies, baggage and wreckage were scattered over an area of 845 square miles.

The cockpit section of the plane was found in a farmer's field three miles from Lockerbie. The body of the pilot, Captain Jim MacQuarrie, had been ejected and laid outside the cockpit. The bodies of three more crew members remained inside.

The crumpled nose section of the Pan Am jumbo jet, blown apart by the bomb.

Bodies of people still strapped into their airplane seats were found scattered about the town. Seventy-one bodies were found in one destroyed home alone. The carnage was appalling: bodies were dismembered; feet were missing from some; others had been horribly compressed by the impact of the fall from five miles above. At that altitude, the victims would have experienced two-and-a-half-minutes of free-fall at speeds of nearly 120 mph before impacting the ground.

Among the victims, five members of the CIA intelligence team were identified by a Pan Am investigator's report: Matthew Gannon, Charles McKee, Ronald Lariviere, Daniel O'Connor and William Leyrer. The other three agents were unnamed. Also among the dead was Khalid Nazir Jafaar, the CIA/DEA drugs courier.

A report prepared by the intelligence unit of the Lebanese Forces, concerning intercepted telephone calls to and from the Iranian Embassy in Beirut, was later disclosed by German intelligence. On page 10, the report stated: "Two days after the downing of Pan Am 103, the Iranian Embassy in Beirut receives a phone call from the Interior Minister in Teheran, intercepted, during which the ambassador is told to hand over to the PFLP-GC the remaining funds, size and scope not specified, and is being congratulated for the "successful operation."

The day after the disaster, the DIA's Lester Coleman was interviewed, as an expert on Middle East terrorism, by Tom Brokaw on the NBC network's Nightly News. Although it had yet to be shown that Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb, the media had assumed that a Palestinian terrorist group was responsible. Coleman shared that opinion. He told Brokaw that the Libyans probably had a role in it because they had a large cache of Semtex explosives and about 20,000 pounds of C4 plastic explosive supplied by CIA renegade agent Edmund Wilson. Coleman went on to suggest that the Iranians had probably inspired the attack and commissioned Syrian-backed terrorists to carry it out, but that part of the interview was not aired.

A month after Flight 103 went down, former CIA Director George Bush was inaugurated as President of the United States.

We could have gotten the [Beirut] hostages out any damn time we wanted to, but nobody
was willing to rock the boat with a rescue operation. We knew where they were. We knew who
their guards were. We knew what they had for lunch. We knew where and when they were
going to be moved before their guards did. But the DIA wouldn't risk any action based on
information that might have been traced back to one of our [undercover] agents. If we'd blown
the undercover network because of the hostages, we would have left ourselves blind in the
middle of a mine-field. So there had to be another way. And it was in trying for another way
that the CIA let in people like Monzer al-Kassar…. And set up the whole Lockerbie scenario."
- LESTER COLEMAN

Lester Coleman.

THE INVESTIGATION AND THE COVER-UP

Those involved in the DEA/CIA drugs running pipeline aboard Flight 103 recognised at once that their neglect of the warnings, which went back as far as seven months, had cost 270 lives; that terrorists had slipped through their security and converted a "controlled delivery" of heroin into the controlled delivery of a bomb. The intelligence agencies and the US government began lying about their catastrophic blunders that had let the disaster happen. They lied to the media, to the public and to Congress.

The State Department issued a statement saying: "We never received any credible threat against Flight 103 on 21 December or any other date" (diplomatically hedging its bets with the use of the word "credible".)

The identity of the killers, their motives, the method and approximate details of the weapon employed were known to intelligence agents of several countries from the start, but this knowledge was not shared with the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the Scottish police force who undertook the murder investigation.

Pan Am and its insurers also commissioned their own investigation into the disaster, and the more they discovered about the CIA/DEA involvement with the disaster, the less they felt inclined to accept what was amounting to a $7 billion insurance claim.

The US government feared that Lester Coleman would meet up with Pan Am's insurers and tell them about his warning of the "disaster waiting to happen" months beforehand. If the truth came out, it would blacken the reputation not just of the CIA and DEA but of the United States government itself, inflicting intolerable damage on its policy objectives in the Middle East. The risk was unacceptable: "national security interests" now required that the drugs pipeline never existed.

The collection of forensic evidence at Lockerbie was hampered for two days while CIA agents, some dressed in Pan Am overalls to disguise their identity, combed the countryside for the luggage of the dead US intelligence agents. One witness involved in the search within hours of the crash saw Americans throwing tarpaulins over bodies and suitcases so that they could examine them in private. Other teams of volunteer searchers were warned at gunpoint to keep clear of certain sectors.

After a 48-hour search, assisted by units of the British Army, whatever the CIA agents found was flown out by helicopter. A Lockerbie farmer named Chris Graham recalled a white helicopter landing in his field on Christmas Eve. An American agent from the helicopter asked him not to go up on Torbeck Hill that day; in other words to stay off his own property. There, the CIA found what they had been looking for - the suitcase belonging to CIA agent Charles McKee. It was severely damaged, possibly by a small explosive device of the type fitted in luggage used by intelligence agents to destroy the contents before they fell into the wrong hands. It had probably been set off by the bomb that destroyed the aircraft, or by impact with flying wreckage from the explosion.

The devastation caused by the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 shattered the small farming town of Lockerbie.

As the search continued, documents relating to the American hostages held in Beirut were recovered, along with over $500,000 in cash and traveller's cheques.

On Christmas Day, a small group of Lockerbie police detectives was called together for a briefing by CIA agents, one of whom outlined the day's plan: McKee's suitcase was to be returned to the exact position in the farmer's field from which it had been taken. There was a heavy mist in the air and it was hard for them to make much headway around Torbeck field. The detectives were confused as to what they were supposed to do, until it slowly dawned on them that they were expected to accidentally "find" the empty suitcase and pretend that it had never been removed. They would then be expected to sign statements to the fact.

The Lockerbie detectives did not like this; they had been given no idea why the case was of importance to the CIA and they feared that they might find themselves at some future court hearing, having to lie about their find. Finally, they refused to participate in the charade and called a halt to the operation. McKee's suitcase was eventually relocated on the hill by the CIA and later "found" by two British Transport police officers.

When the CIA's presence at Lockerbie was reported on Radio Forth by presenter David Johnston, he was interviewed at length by police officers, who threatened him with legal sanctions unless he identified his sources. This Johnston refused to do, and that, strangely, was the end of the matter. No further action was taken against Johnston - possibly because this would have drawn more media attention to his story.

Even more oddly, it was reported that 59 bodies which had been found, tagged and certified dead by a police surgeon, Dr David Fieldhouse, on December 22nd, were removed two days later, and all but two of Dr Fieldhouse's labels were thrown away and replaced with others. By then, according to the police count, there were only 58 bodies. One had gone missing.

At least two coach-loads of American officials in plain clothes, who had flown by plane from London, arrived at Carlisle airport the night of the crash and the following day. Another flight arrived in the early afternoon of December 22nd, this time bringing people directly from the United States. Among the Americans' baggage was a single coffin. When they realised that they were being filmed by a cameraman from the local Border TV, they became agitated and demanded that the cameraman stop. The pictures were, however, broadcast that night. No official explanation was given about the coffin.

Also puzzling was the case of a suitcase containing heroin found at the crash site. Farmer Jim Wilson of Thundergarth Mains Farm, near Lockerbie, found a leather suitcase which had burst open in one of his fields, and he summoned the police. The bag had a red-and-white ribbon on it, indicating that a searcher had already found it and marked it for collection, but it had not yet been picked up. A label on the suitcase identified it as belonging to a "Robbi."

Wilson and a police officer emptied the contents of the suitcase into a plastic bag. Buried among a pile of brightly coloured clothes was a money belt full of cellophane packets of a white powder. "Uh oh," Wilson recalled the officer saying. "I know what we got here." There was also a shorthand notebook in the bag. The police officer said that the stuff in the belt was "of substantial value", adding "We know about this one", but he would say no more.

Jim Wilson gave evidence at the fatal accident inquiry. To his surprise, he was not asked about the suitcase or the drugs. The authorities on both sides of the Atlantic continued to insist that no drugs, save a small quantity of cannabis, were found on Flight 103. Further inquiries by some of the victims' relatives discovered that the name-tag observed by Wilson on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the passenger list. And like the missing body, the suitcase subsequently "disappeared".

With the Americans scrambling to cover their tracks, the German authorities were suspicious that the US, aided by the British government, was trying to duck the responsibility for the intelligence operation that had gone so terribly wrong. Worried that they would be left carrying the can for the disaster, Germany refused to co-operate with the Lockerbie inquiry. Although the BKA had collaborated fully with US intelligence in supervising the drugs pipeline, a spokesman for the German Ministry of the Interior stated on December 29th that there were no indications that the Lockerbie bomb had been put aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt (a position the BKA maintained for almost a year).

Contradicting this statement by the Germans, Scottish police officers flew to Frankfurt on December 30th in the hope of interviewing Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar, the PFLP-GC terrorists who were still in custody after the BKA raids back in October.

In the United States, a spokesman for the FBI went one further and named Khalid Nazir Jafaar as the (possibly unwitting) accomplice of the PFLP-GC. Khalid's father, Nadir Jafaar, who owned a garage and other business interests in Detroit, said that his son had been on his way home after visiting Lebanese friends in Frankfurt. He feared that the terrorists might have used his son as a dupe and planted a bomb in his luggage. In any case, he intended to sue Pan Am for $50 million.

On Christmas Eve, the search for forensic evidence uncovered a foot-long piece of aluminium luggage pallet, scorch-marked by the explosion, which showed clear traces of the chemical constituents of Semtex-H plastic explosive. Further tests at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Halstead in Kent, established from fragments of polystyrene and circuit board trapped in the pallet that the explosive device had been housed in a black Toshiba radio-cassette recorder (very similar to the bomb found by the BKA in Dalkamoni's car), which in turn had been packed in a brown Samsonite suitcase.

On 28th March 1989, at a conference in the Lockerbie Incident Control Centre, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr declared that there was strong evidence pointing to Frankfurt as the airport where the bomb was placed aboard Flight 103, and he went on to detail the "evidential connections" between the disaster and the activities of the PFLP-GC in West Germany, demanding that the BKA release their full files on the terrorist group.

The shattered remains of Pan Am Flight 103, meticulously pieced
together by crash investigators at RAF Farnborough, Hampshire.

However, the Germans were not the only ones obstructing the investigation. In mid-March 1989, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Bush decided on the telephone to soft-peddle the investigation. They did not wish to prejudice negotiations aimed at securing the release of Western hostages in Beirut by arousing further animosity among the Syrian and Iranian-backed terrorist groups who were holding them captive.

Another reason was that the change in Middle East politics now required the West to find some counter-balance in the region to the monster it had created in Saddam Hussein of Iraq - and the best available candidate for the job was Hussein's sworn enemy, President Hafez Assad of Syria. Whilst it was known that Assad permitted terrorist groups such as Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC to operate openly from Syria, the joint view of the American and British governments was that Syria was to be courted as an ally against Iraq, and therefore should not be submitted to a criminal investigation.

And their third reason for blocking the inquiry was to shield covert Anglo-American intelligence operations in the Middle East from further embarrassment.

"The truth is, the hostages were cynically exploited by both sides for political and tactical purposes.  OK, so we couldn't afford to compromise the undercover network with a rescue operation, but there was another reason too, why we had to leave them where they were. We needed to keep Hafez Assad, the Syrian president, in place. He's probably the most astute politician in the Middle East and we knew we could do business with him…. Much easier for us to deal with a conniving, self-serving bastard like Assad than try to cope with a religious fanatic. Those were the priorities. The hostages had to stay where they were, and we had to play the game."
- LESTER COLEMAN.

Meanwhile, the Scottish police were getting uncomfortably close to uncovering evidence of the DEA/CIA pipeline and the "controlled" deliveries of Syrian heroin to the United States. After Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr castigated the BKA for dragging their feet in the investigation, the BKA sent him the files on the PFLP-GC cell they had broken up some eight weeks before the disaster. By any reading, the circumstantial evidence against Dalkamoni, Ghadanfar and Khreesat was strong, if not overwhelming.

Meanwhile, Pan Am's investigators had picked up the trail of the Lockerbie heroin and traced it to Syria. As the airline tried to prepare its defence against the liability suits, they were bluntly warned off their investigations by the DEA on grounds of "national security."

The same drugs lead was picked up by Sheila Hershow, chief investigator for the House of Representatives Sub-committee on Government Activities and Transportation. When Hershow showed Lester Coleman a photo of a young man who had died in the Lockerbie crash, Coleman recognised Khalid Nazir Jafaar, the CIA/DEA courier. Coleman had observed Jafaar at a DEA office where he was working in June 1988, six months prior to the Lockerbie bombing.

Coleman's testimony was now a threat to the US government; the DEA had repeatedly denied that Jafaar had any connection with them. Action had to be taken to cover up the scandal.

Three weeks later, on April 6th 1989, Sheila Hershow was fired for being "uncontrollable and dangerous." By the end of the year, public opinion had been conditioned to accept that the mass murder of 270 airline passengers was entirely Pan Am's fault, due to lax airport security and the BKA were acquiescing in a joint cover story with the American, German and British co-sponsors of the drugs pipeline to stall the Lockerbie investigation.

However, the body of evidence that had already been made public, together with a series of leaks, had already let slip the embarrassing consensus that the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC had committed the atrocity on behalf of the Iranians; that the Libyans probably had a hand in the bombing by supplying some of the bomb components; and that the individuals responsible had been identified and warrants could be issued at any time.

Undoing these now inconvenient views was not going to be easy, especially in the light of the fact that various congressional committees, boards of inquiry, lawyers for both sides in the compensation dispute and senior police officers were still treating the case as a murder investigation.

The US and British governments decided that Syria and Iran should be absolved of any responsibility for the bombing, leaving Libya solely to blame. To make their new version of events plausible, a few awkward facts had to be smoothed over. There could be no suggestion, for instance, that Frankfurt was the European hub of a "controlled delivery" pipeline for drugs from the Middle East to the United States. There could be no suggestion that "clean" suitcases, properly checked through, were routinely switched in the baggage-handling area with "dirty" suitcases containing heroin. And Lester Coleman had to be discredited as a witness in the affair.

On May 2nd 1990, Coleman was arrested for making a false statement on a passport application (in fact he routinely travelled under an alias during his work for the DIA, using a birth record provided to him by the US government). Coleman's wife and children were subsequently harassed by FBI agents, death threats were made by phone and Coleman was warned by a DEA agent not to get involved in the Lockerbie case.

In 1991, in fear of his life, Coleman signed a long statement which he thought would assist Pan Am in its legal action, then he and his family fled the country and sought sanctuary in Sweden. Coleman left the US legally, with permission of the US District Court in Chicago. However, the FBI continued harassment of him in Sweden by faking a doctor's appointment before the Chicago court to claim that Coleman had not complied with the terms of his bail-release and was therefore a fugitive who should be extradited back to the United States. After this, Coleman asked for, and received, protection from the Swedish authorities. (The Chicago doctor cited by the FBI in their extradition request later declared that he had never been contacted by the FBI).

Danny Casolaro, an American freelance journalist working on a complex story linking the BCCI bank scandal, the Iran-Contra affair and the Lockerbie cover-up, tracked Lester Coleman down and persuaded him to name his DIA contact, for use in Casolaro's book. Nine days later, Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel bathroom, his briefcase missing. The finding of the police was that he had stabbed himself to death.

THE MALTESE SET-UP

Meanwhile, the US intelligence services proceeded to fabricate "new evidence" to divert attention away from their drugs pipeline and towards the poor security of Pan Am. On August 17th 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a computer print-out of the baggage loading list for Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London on December 21st 1988. In the margin of the computer print-out , a pencilled cross drew particular attention to bag number B8849, indicating that it had arrived in Frankfurt by a scheduled Air Malta flight from Luqa airport and then transferred onto Pan Am Flight 103.

Neither the Air Malta nor the Pan Am passenger lists showed anybody who had booked a through flight from Luqa to New York that day. In other words, bag B8849 had arrived unaccompanied from Malta and had been loaded aboard Flight 103 without being matched with a passenger, plainly showing that Pan Am had been guilty of lax security amounting to wilful misconduct.

This fitted in with the forensic evidence which had already shown that the suitcase containing the bomb had been filled with an assortment of clothing made in Malta, including a baby's blue romper suit. Two of Detective Chief Superintendent Orr's men travelled to Malta and, with the help of the clothing manufacturers, traced the clothes to a boutique in the resort town of Sliema. The proprietor's son, Tony Gauci, remembered selling the items which were later used as packing around the bomb, and he remembered what his customer looked like, clearly enough for an FBI artist to produce a likeness of Abu Talb, a PFLP-GC terrorist who was known to have visited Malta twice, not long before the bombing.

Abu Talb was arrested in Sweden, along with three other Palestinians, for terrorist offences in Scandinavia. One of the terrorists, Mahmoud Said al-Moghrabi, confessed to the charges against him and connected two of the others, Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, with the PFLP-GC cell in West Germany. Just before the BKA raids on the PFLP-GC in October 1988, Imandi's car had been observed parked outside the bombers' apartment in Neuss. In October 1988, Talb had brought back samples of clothing from Malta that he told Moghrabi he intended to import for Sweden's rag trade. When the Swedish police raided Talb's apartment in May 1989, they found a calendar with a pencil ring around the fatal date, December 21st 1988 and some 200 pieces of clothing manufactured in Malta.

Tony Gauci also stated that he thought his customer was a Libyan, or had a Libyan accent. A BKA spokesman subsequently stated: "There are clues that a suitcase from Malta may have played a part in the Lockerbie bombing. There are also clues that someone from Libya - or at least someone with a Libyan accent - may have bought the items."

With this sensational "breakthrough" in the case, the Western governments publicly shifted the responsibility for the Lockerbie disaster from the Iranians and Syrians to Libya, in complete contradiction to the evidence implicating Iranian and Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorists. The official intelligence reports failed to mention that in Malta the generic and vernacular description of all Arab persons is that of "Libyan." It may also be significant that the Libyan embassy was situated just a few hundred yards from Gauci's boutique, leading him to assume that his customer was Libyan. The investigators also confused "passport du Liban" (a Lebanese passport) with a passport of Libya.

There were further problems with the Maltese cover-story.

Air Malta's records clearly showed that no baggage, accompanied or otherwise, had been put aboard Air Malta 180 to connect with Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt on December 21st 1988. Pan Am's counsel, James Shaughnessy of the New York law firm Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, obtained depositions from twenty Air Malta officials, including the airport security commander, the bomb disposal engineer who inspected all the baggage, the general manager of ground operations, the head loader of Flight 180 and three check-in agents, all of whose records showed that no unaccompanied suitcases were put aboard the flight. The staff were prepared to testify under oath that there was no bag that day destined for Pan Am Flight 103.

Furthermore, it was highly unlikely that any well-organised, well-funded, seriously determined terrorist group, capable of building a sophisticated device to blow up an aircraft over the Atlantic, would choose to put it aboard the target flight by sending it, unaccompanied, in a suitcase that had first to be smuggled onto an Air Malta flight (which might have been delayed or diverted) to Frankfurt (in the hope that it would not be misdirected, or that Pan Am would fail to match it with a passenger or search it), and be forwarded, unaccompanied, on a feeder flight to Heathrow (where again it might have been misdirected), still in the hope that no-one would notice or examine the suitcase, before it was finally loaded aboard the third, target, aircraft for the transatlantic leg of the flight?

On the face of it, the Libyans would have stood better chance of success by posting their bomb to the United States as a registered air parcel. Yet this preposterous Malta/Libyan theory was accepted as the official version of events.

Although the "discovery" of an unaccompanied bag from Malta was seized upon as a breakthrough in the investigation, there were in fact thirteen items of unaccompanied luggage on Flight 103. The fourth international conference of police agencies called on 14th September 1989 to consider the new Libyan connection with the bombing, concluded that this cast "doubt on the total reliability of hand-written entries on the computer print-out", which had indicated only one such item.

Facing damage lawsuits totalling $7 billion (and possibly as much again in punitive damages) Pan Am and its insurers subpoenaed the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the State Department, the National Security Agency and the National Security Council in the US District Court for "all documents concerning warnings, tips, alerts and other communications as to plans by any person to place a bomb, make an assault or commit another form of terrorist attack at Frankfurt airport during November or December 1988." The subpoenas were strenuously contested by all of these government agencies, each making it clear that they had no intention of complying.

Pan Am's counsel, James Shaughnessy, then commissioned an internal report summarising (mostly unverifiable) intelligence data, designed to open up lines of inquiry that might lead to the discovery of evidence that would be admissible in court. Known as the Interfor Report, this was carried out by an Israeli-American investigator called Juval Aviv. American and British intelligence both declared Aviv's Interfor Report "rubbish." However, several former and serving DIA, CIA and DEA agents were later to confirm that the report's findings on the CIA's involvement with arms and narcotics trafficking in the Middle East were true.

In January 1990, Juval Aviv interviewed the three Pan Am baggage-handlers who were thought to have been in a position to put the bomb suitcase aboard Flight 103 on the day of the crash. They were: Kilin Caslan Tuzcu, a German national of Turkish origin, who had been in charge of incoming baggage; Roland O'Neill, a German who had taken his American wife's maiden name; and Gregory Grissom. All three voluntarily submitted to polygraph (lie-detector) examinations. Tuzcu was tested three times, O'Neill and Grissom twice.

James Keefe, the polygrapher (who had conducted polygraph examinations for over thirty years for the US Army's Criminal Investigations Division) testified before a Federal grand jury in Washington that Tuzcu was not truthful when he stated that he did not know who switched the suitcase on Flight 103, when he stated he did not switch those suitcases himself, and when he stated that he was not told by Roland O'Neill (who was loadmaster for the flight) to switch the suitcases. O'Neill "wasn't truthful when he stated he did not see the suitcase being switched and when he stated that he did not know what was in the switched suitcase." A second polygrapher brought in to review the findings agreed with this interpretation. Gregory Grissom was later eliminated from Pan Am's enquiries when it was shown he had been out on the tarmac at the time.

Convinced that the Scottish police would wish to interview Tuzcu and O'Neill on the strength of this lead, the airline found a pretext to send them to London so that they could be questioned and, if necessary, detained. Yet none of the British authorities seemed the least bit interested. After hanging around all day, the suspects returned to Frankfurt that night. Intelligence sources suggested later that O'Neill was an undercover BKA agent, which might account for the lack of interest by the British and American investigators.

In response to public pressure for results in the investigation, President George Bush set up a Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, with instructions to report by May 15th 1990. However, with Ann McLaughlin, Reagan's former Secretary of Labor in the chair, and the inclusion of four career politicians (among them a former secretary to the Navy and a retired Air Force General), the Commission dutifully towed the official line dictated by Washington. In its conclusion, the Commission insisted that no warnings specific to Flight 103 and no information bearing on the security of plane flights in general had been received by US intelligence agencies from any source in the months before the bombing. The report also repeated the CIA's assurances that its agents had not gone to Lockerbie after the crash, but stopped short of denying that several of them had been among the victims.

Meanwhile the Lockerbie investigation underwent an extraordinary redirection. The control centre of the inquiry was switched from Scotland to CIA headquarters in Langley. The man put in charge of the Lockerbie investigation was Vincent Cannistraro, who had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council. Cannistraro had been a leading figure in the movement to support the Contras in Nicaragua and had helped mastermind a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of civilian targets in Libya in 1986.

In Sweden, Marten Imandi and Abu Talb, both sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorist activities, steadfastly refused to assist the Scottish police in their inquiries, and although the circumstantial evidence against them remained strong, the lead petered out in yet another dead end.

In June 1990, the Swedish government deported to Syria ten other Palestinians it had arrested on suspicion of terrorism, including two who had been identified as associates of Dalkamoni's West German PFLP-GC cell. These two had arrived in West Germany from Syria and stayed at the Neuss apartment until a few days before it was raided by the BKA. Getting out of the country just in time, they were smuggled by Imandi into Sweden by car, where they had gone to ground near Uppsala.

The Scottish police were naturally keen to interview these men (one of whom was identified as a former Syrian intelligence officer) in the hope of establishing further connections between the Lockerbie bombers and the PFLP-GC, but once again they faced uncooperative intelligence services.

The Scottish police were understandably angry at the fact that the men's whereabouts had been known to Western intelligence services for the past eighteen months. The CIA and MI6 had been tipped off about the men's movements since leaving Syria and the way in which they were smuggled into Sweden a few weeks before the Lockerbie bombing - so why were they arrested only now, just to be sent back to Syria?

The answer lay in the fact that Syria was entering fresh trade negotiations with Britain and America. The following month, Saddam Hussein's forces moved into Kuwait, sparking off the Gulf War. It was vital to Washington that a number of key Arab states were brought on board the side of the Western powers to avoid the war being characterised as anti-Arab or anti-Islamic. Crucial to the creation of the alliance was Syria (headquarters of Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC) and its dictator, President Hafez al-Assad. Instead of supporting a fellow Arab state confronted by Western imperialism, Syria was persuaded by the United States to join the side of the Western forces fighting Iraq. From that moment on, nothing more was heard from official sources in the US or Britain about Syrian complicity in the Lockerbie bombing.

In November 1990, President Bush broke a thirteen year embargo with Syria by meeting President Assad. Bush famously declared: "The Syrians took a bum rap on this", while pointing the finger at Libya, which was now solely to blame for the bombing. A spokesman for the Bush administration stated: "This was a Libyan operation from start to finish." This was in spite of a Congressional report prepared by the House Judiciary Committee's Sub-committee on Crime and Criminal Justice, showing US intelligence's full awareness of Syrian and Lebanese narcotics trafficking.

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd announced that after a four year break, Britain was resuming diplomatic links with Syria. In the House of Commons, Hurd went out of his way to exculpate Syria and Iran from the Lockerbie affair. A few days after Hurd's statement, Britain's Terry Waite and America's Thomas Sutherland, who had been held hostage by pro-Iranian forces, were both released.

Commenting on the release of Waite and Sutherland, a Sunday Times editorial stated: "Our joy at their freedom should be tempered by the shame of the cost: the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bomb must now come to terms with the fact that most of those behind the murder of their loved ones are going to get away with it. The cause of justice is being sacrificed on the altar of diplomatic convenience. We will live to regret it."

Accompanying its pro-Syria stance, Washington claimed to have "conclusive proof" and "new evidence" of Libya's involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. This evidence was a tiny piece of plastic circuit board (no larger than a fingernail) fused into the remains of the Samsonite suitcase found at Lockerbie. Although someone had tried to scratch out the manufacturer's initials, forensic workers were able to make out the letters "MEBO" - Meister et Bollier Ltd, an electronics firm in Zurich, Switzerland.

The CIA declared that Edwin Bollier, Managing Director of MEBO, had confirmed that his firm had made twenty of these timers in a special order for the Libyan military in 1985, and that they had not been sold to any other country. The fragment of circuit board was also said to be identical to those used in timing devices seized with a quantity of explosives from two Libyans at Dakaar airport in February 1988.

Suspicions that this story was a CIA "plant" deepened when it leaked out that the matching of the Lockerbie circuit board fragment with those seized in Dakaar was based on little more than a photographic comparison. Edwin Bollier later disclosed that he had identified the charred remains of the circuit board as one of his firm's solely from a picture produced by detectives. He was never able to see the original because it was being kept as evidence.

The CIA then put out a "two-year-old" intelligence report stating that the Libyans had "taken over responsibility" for the Lockerbie bombing from the PFLP-GC after Jibril's West German cell was broken up by the BKA. The Agency did not explain why they had waited until now to draw this conclusion, when the "proof" had been available for so long.

Nonetheless, Washington issued warrants for two Libyans, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, for the mass murder of 270 people at Lockerbie. This was accompanied by a statement from the Whitehouse insisting that Iran and Syria were not involved.

The two accused Libyans: Abdel Baset Ali Mohamed al-megrahi
and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

When a Newsday reporter asked Bonnie O'Connor of Long Island, New York (her brother had died in the Lockerbie crash) her opinion of the US government's position, she replied: "Does George Bush take us for fools?"

The official sequence of events, according to the American indictment, began with the sale of twenty custom-built Swiss electronic timers to the Libyan Ministry of Justice in 1985. In 1988, the timers were issued to Libyan intelligence agents abroad, many of them working undercover as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), along with detonators and plastic explosives. Fhimah was said to have stored the explosives at Malta's Luqa airport, where he was LAA station manager, and to have built the bomb with al-Megrahi, Libya's chief of airline security, hiding it in a Toshiba radio.

On 7th December 1988, al-Megrahi was alleged to have called at the boutique in Sliema and bought the assortment of clothes that were used to wrap around the radio bomb. On December 17th, al-Megrahi flew to Tripoli for a meeting, followed by Fhimah, and both returned to Malta on December 20th with a suitcase for the bomb. On December 21st, they were said to have placed the suitcase with its Air Malta tags among the luggage being loaded onto international flights from Luqa airport.

The US Justice Department called as a witness Tony Gauci, son of the owner of the Sliema boutique. Ten months after the bombing, when he was first interviewed by the Scottish police, Gauci had given the police a date for the sale (23rd November 1988) and provided an FBI artist with a detailed likeness of Abu Talb, the thirty-five year-old Palestinian PFLP-GC terrorist. After lengthy sessions with CIA personnel, Gauci now changed his mind and fingered the fifty-year-old Libyan Megrahi and also now claimed that the sale was made on December 7th 1988.

Gauci never personally identified Megrahi as the customer in his store; the identification came from a suspect book used by the FBI and Scotland Yard; and neither Megrahi nor Fhimah were provided with a standard police line-up. Five years later, prosecution documents were leaked to the File on Four television programme; they stated that the only direct eyewitness evidence (Gauci's) identifying one of the Libyan agents was "weak and confused."

The US government's surprise second witness was Abdu Maged Jiacha, described as a Libyan intelligence officer who had worked undercover as assistant station manager for LAA at Luqa. In the autumn of 1991, Jiacha defected to the United States and identified Fhimah and al-Megrahi as the bombers. The two were duly charged in the Scottish and US courts. The US authorities declined to reveal that the incentive they gave Jiacha was nothing less than $4 million and resettlement in California under the federal Witness Protection Programme.

Libya's foreign minister, Ibrahim Bechari, responded by saying that Western investigators were welcome in Libya and that both the charged men would be happy to meet investigators to talk about the case. Colonel Qadhafi himself said: "I am angry about the accusations against Libya, but I am satisfied that things are moving according to law. I am satisfied there is a legal way to deal with this."

Even the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) disagreed with the Western line shifting the blame for the bombing away from Palestinian terrorists, and stated that the Libyan contribution to the Lockerbie bombing had been nothing more than that of a low level technical nature. In an 80-page report leaked to the press, the PLO described a number of meetings in the late summer of 1988 between Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian minister of the interior, and Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-GC to plan a revenge attack on an American airliner. According to the PLO's sources, the Toshiba radio-cassette bomb had been built by Khaisar Haddad (also known as Abu Elias), a Lebanese-Christian member of the PFLP-GC, who passed the completed device on to an Iranian contact in Beirut.

Qadhafi challenged the US and Britain to produce evidence against the Libyans. None was forthcoming. The men's' lawyers doubted that they could get a fair trial in either Britain or America, but agreed instead to a trial in a neutral country under a panel of five judges. The US and British governments declared this unacceptable and on April 15th 1992, United Nations Security Council Resolution 748 came into effect, providing for a series of sanctions to be imposed on Libya for its failure to turn over the two "suspects". An air embargo was considered the key to bringing Qadhafi to his knees and the resolution ordered all UN member states to "deny permission for any aircraft to take off from, land in, or fly over their territory if it is destined to land in, or has taken off from, the territory of Libya, unless the particular flight has been approved on grounds of significant humanitarian need by the Committee."

The UN Security Council was later informed by Libya that because of the international aircraft boycott, the massive build-up of road traffic in Libya had led to 10,200 accidents since April 15th; this resulted in the deaths of 1,622 people, and the serious injury and permanent disability of 4,220 others. The sanctions also resulted in a severe economic crisis in the country. $958 million in Libyan assets were frozen in banks around the world; the country subsequently ran out of critical medical supplies, which took a major toll on the civilian population.

In late June 1992, a German Investigating Magistrate named Folkratt completed an exhaustive investigation of all the facts in the Lockerbie case, which exonerated the two Libya agents. Folkratt indicated that he had sent a copy of his investigation to Washington. His report was ignored.

On July 11th 1992, the families of the Flight 103 victims won their suit against Pan Am. After a trial lasting eleven weeks, during which the jury had twice reported themselves deadlocked, they eventually found that Pan Am and two of its subsidiary companies had been guilty of "wilful misconduct" in failing to observe required security procedures at Frankfurt airport, thereby permitting the terrorists to smuggle a bomb aboard. For the defence, Pan Am's trial counsel admitted that as far as security at Frankfurt was concerned "there is no question we made slip-ups and goofs, but they did not cause the tragedy."

Pan Am immediately announced it would appeal, arguing that evidence for the defence had been improperly excluded from the trial by the government, and that the errors in their airport security may not even have been relevant to the planting of the bomb, since this was controlled by the intelligence services who had circumvented Pan Am's security procedures.

At this, the US government went after Pan Am's counsel, James Shaughnessy, with a vindictiveness without parallel in legal history. The Justice Department filed a motion for punitive sanctions against Shaughnessy and his law firm in the amount of $6 million for wasting the government's time, effort and financial resources. In effect, this motion argued that nobody, not even in his own defence in a court of law, was entitled to question the government's conduct or the truth of its assertions. The motion also argued that government files were sacrosanct and were not open to inspection, even in matters as grave as determining who was responsible for the mass murder of 270 people.

If the government's position were to be upheld, Shaughnessy and his law firm faced bankruptcy and worse - disciplinary proceedings, perhaps even disbarment and criminal charges might follow. However, the court eventually agreed with Shaughnessy and the government's motion for punitive sanctions was denied.

On 22nd September 1993, Lester Coleman was indicted on eight counts of perjury during his affidavit in support of Pan Am's suit against the US government. The first count was an accusation of perjury for claiming that he spoke Arabic. (In fact Coleman had grown up in Iran and Libya, and was fluent in Arabic - one reason why he was employed by the DIA.) The other seven counts were simply flat denials of passages from his affidavit describing his work for the DIA, statements that could only be confirmed or disproved by reference to classified security documents that Washington refused to disclose.

The indictment served to secure a warrant for Coleman's arrest and representations were made to the Swedish government for his extradition, even though perjury is not an extraditable offence. When challenged on this point, a Justice Department spokesman claimed that extradition was possible in a case of "aggravated" perjury. Inquiries failed to discover any such offence in the canon of federal law. Nonetheless, the right-wing media controlled by US intelligence effectively portrayed Coleman as an "international con-man and fugitive from the law".

Lester Coleman remains today in Sweden. Though certain the charges against him would never stand up in court, he is far from confident that the United States government would not then invent further charges against him.

"What you have is a mass murder and a horribly cruel injustice system.
They were mostly young kids, young people on that plane. If you can say that
they can just die and we'll forget it, then you start down the road of forgetting
and cover-ups. You can forget and cover-up anything. No, I don't think there
was any excuse for allowing this crime to happen, and being part of a cover-up."
- SUSAN COHEN, who lost her 20 year-old daughter in the Lockerbie crash.

Lester Coleman was not the only dissenter from the official line about Lockerbie to suffer harassment at the hands of the authorities. Juval Aviv, who carried out the inquiry for Pan Am and uncovered much of the CIA's covert links with drugs running, was charged with mail fraud. John Brennan, the President of the insurers for Pan Am, was charged with fraud.

All three investigations involving Coleman, Aviv and Brennan were started by the same assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of New York Court - yet neither Brennan nor Aviv have their businesses located in that district and none of their alleged offences were committed there.

Dr David Fieldhouse, the police surgeon who first tagged the dead bodies found at the Lockerbie crash site (and who counted one more body than the official record) was unjustifiably tarnished by Sergeant David Johnston of the Strathclyde Police, in official sworn evidence to the accident inquiry. Dr Fieldhouse had been accompanied by police officers throughout the two days and nights that it took him to locate the bodies, and he had tagged them all in the presence of police officers. Yet now Johnston claimed that Fieldhouse had examined the bodies on his own and had attached his own identification to them without the knowledge of the police. Johnston's evidence was accepted without criticism, by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the Scottish Lord Advocate and former Tory MP for Aberdeen.

Nearly two years later, in December 1993, Dr Fieldhouse gave an interview for a film about Lockerbie. A few days afterwards, he was summoned to a meeting with two senior West Yorkshire police officers at Wakefield and sacked as police surgeon. He was given no credible explanation.

Pan Am's appeal against the trial finding seemed almost certain to be upheld, with the case going to retrial in the light of the withholding of evidence by the government. Pan Am was now supported by no less an authority than Major Khalil Tunyab, a former chief of intelligence for the PFLP-GC. Tunyab confirmed that Khalid Nazir Jafaar had worked for Muslim fundamentalists in Lebanon and Detroit, who knew he was working in drug running operations for the CIA and DEA.

The US government's case against Libya rested almost entirely on the fragment of circuit board which, Robert Mueller, the assistant US Attorney General, assured was "indisputably from a particular timer that was purchased by Libya. It could not have been bought by anybody else." Yet this always tenuous connection collapsed when Meister and Bollier disclosed that the timers had also been supplied to East Germany (whose Stasi secret police had extensive links with the PFLP-GC) and that two more had probably been stolen from their Zurich premises. Even more damaging was their claim that they had told British and American investigators about this a full year before the indictments against the two Libyans. Meister and Bollier even went on to suggest that "the fragment might have been planted by Western intelligence agencies seeking to frame Libyan leader Colonel Qadhafi's regime."

However, a three-judge Court of Appeals astonished almost everyone who had followed the case with a two-to-one majority decision upholding the original judgement against Pan Am.

When Tam Dalyell MP questioned the new British Prime Minister about the case, John Major replied: "After five years, the inquiry into the bombing has not revealed any evidence that implicates any country besides Libya", and that "the evidence still justifies the warrants issued for the arrest of the two Libyans."

This was an extraordinary statement in light of the existing evidence, and much more was to surface that discredited the standpoint of the American and British governments: In late 1993, Dr Jim Swire, spokesperson for UK Families Flight 103, stated that he now had "good intelligence to believe US intelligence agencies were organising covert drug runs through Frankfurt airport as late as 1990 (i.e. for nearly two years after the Lockerbie bombing).

Dr Swire's 23-year-old daughter Flora had died in the Lockerbie bombing. She had been told she was unlikely to get a seat on Pan Am 103 so close to Christmas, yet the plane suddenly became far from full. "This tells me that the warnings were widely known, that a lot of people acted on them, and only the mugs outside the system climbed on board. So who is it who classifies people as important or unimportant? My daughter was just as important as any diplomat or politician or anyone else you care to name."

On January 30th 1995, a five-page FBI report was leaked, which stated: "There is no concrete indication that any piece of luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180, sent through the luggage routing system at Frankfurt airport, and then loaded on board Pan Am 103." The bomb suitcase could have "come from another flight" or could have been "a rogue bag inserted into the system." The report cast serious doubt on the case against the two accused Libyans and also showed that the FBI had this evidence before the Libyans were indicted by the United States.

Also in 1995 came the disclosure of a hitherto classified NSA intelligence report (written during the Gulf War in 1991) which revealed American knowledge that Iran was strongly implicated in the Lockerbie bombing. The report referred to interior minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi offering $10 million to blow up an American airliner, and stated: "Mohtashemi is closely connected with the Al Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups.... He has recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organisations to carry out terrorist activities and was the one who paid the same amount to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian airbus."

In 1997, a former Iranian intelligence officer, Abolghassen Mesbahi, the co-founder of Savak, Iran's much-feared secret police, gave German investigators and intelligence officials fresh details about the Lockerbie case. Mesbahi confirmed that the late Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the Lockerbie bombing in retaliation for the US destruction of an Iranian airbus. Mesbahi alleged that the components for the Lockerbie bomb were smuggled separately from Frankfurt to London. The bomb was then made in London and put on Flight 103.

Mesbahi had defected to Germany two years previously and was regarded as a credible and very senior intelligence source by the German authorities. (He had presented explosive testimony at a recent Berlin trial which convicted an Iranian and three Lebanese of terrorist murders on German soil). Yet the details of Mesbahi's information on the Lockerbie case were withheld from Scottish investigators by order of the German authorities.

THE ILLEGALITY OF THE WESTERN GOVERNMENTS

"It's absolutely disgusting that the President of the United States and
the Secretary of State are playing politics with the bodies of our dead ones."
- JOHN ROOT, relative of one of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103

Far from combating terrorism, the Lockerbie tragedy has shown that the United States, backed by Britain, has enthusiastically worked alongside, trained, aided and encouraged known terrorists. The US and British governments acted illegally in all of these activities and persistently lied to their own people about their involvement in the affair.

By contrast, the Libyan government acted in accordance both with its own domestic law and with international law by appointing a High Court Judge to carry out an investigation against the two accused Libyan citizens. Although invited to do so, Great Britain refused to permit its police officials to work with the Libyans in their investigation. (Libyan law prohibits the handing over of the men without proper evidence; ironically, this criminal procedure was set up for the Libyans by the British in 1973). Colonel Qadhafi also offered to have the two Libyans tried by Scottish judges at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. This offer was also turned down by the US and UK authorities.

Both Great Britain and Libya are signatories to the Montreal Convention for the suppression of unlawful acts against the safety of civil aviation. Article 7 of the Convention states that unless there is an extradition treaty in force, Libya is "entitled, indeed obliged, to try the offenders under her own domestic law." Since there is no extradition treaty between Britain and Libya, Article 7 of the Montreal Convention applies. Britain has no right to demand that the two Libyans be tried in its country, and violates the Convention by doing so.

In April 1992, Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, prepared a Memorandum of Law on the affair. He concluded: "Libya has fully discharged its obligations.... there is no obligation whatever for Libya to extradite its two nationals to either the United States or the United Kingdom. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have effectively violated most of the provisions of the Montreal Convention.... The United States government has admitted that it will pay no attention whatsoever to its obligations mandating the peaceful resolution of international disputes as required by UN Charter articles 2(3) and 33. The United States government has purposely and illegally made it impossible for there to be a pacific settlement of this dispute."

Qadhafi: conciliatory response to the West's hostility.

Marc Weller, Research Fellow in International Law at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, has written a detailed analysis of the US/Libyan dispute. He stated: "Libya has responded in accordance with international legal requirements.... To secure the UN resolutions, the United States had to expend considerable political capital and goodwill in the Security Council, bullying fellow members to obtain the necessary votes, and enraging many non-members of the Council who observed this spectacle.... The US and UK governments may well have contributed to, or brought about, an abuse of rights by the Security Council."

In 1992, UN correspondent Ian Williams wrote: "One can imagine the reaction of the White House if Nicaragua had tried to extradite Oliver North for his admitted terrorist actions against the Sandinista government. It is not necessary to be an admirer of the Qadhafi regime to suspect that double standards are rapidly becoming the accepted reserve currency of the New World Order."

George Bush's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism concluded with the following: "National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means for defeating terrorism.... We urge a more vigorous US policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions.... These more vigorous policies should include planning and training for pre-emptive or retaliatory military strikes against known terrorist enclaves in nations that harbour them. Where such direct strikes are inappropriate, the Commission recommends a lesser option, including covert operations to prevent, disrupt or respond to terrorist acts."

By such standards, the Iranian revenge strike against the United States for downing a civilian airbus would not only be sanctioned, but legalised.

The United States has itself been responsible for a series of offences against Libya that can only be described as acts of terrorism. In 1986, US airplanes, flying from bases in Britain, launched a strike against civilian targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. The ostensible reason given by Washington was that it had "certain knowledge" of Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque ten days earlier, in which one American died. The German intelligence team investigating the bombing later reported that they had "no knowledge whatsoever of any Libyan complicity." This information was suppressed in the United States and received no media coverage.

Hundreds were killed or injured during the American air strike. A 200-pound bomb made a direct hit on Qadhafi's home. Qadhafi's wife and three children were all victims of the attack. Two of the children were hospitalised in intensive care for many days, suffering from pressure shock. Hanna, Qadhafi's sixteen-month-old adopted daughter, died a few hours after the attack from severe brain damage.

One can only wonder what the outcry and the reaction from Washington would have been if Libyan jets had launched an attack on the Whitehouse and killed members of the President's family?

In fact the response from the Libyan government to the West's hostility and extradition demands has been nothing other than conciliatory. In a personal meeting with William Chasey of the US Department of Justice in 1992, Qadhafi himself made the following extraordinary statement:

"We utterly and without qualification renounce terrorism as an instrument of state policy.... Indeed, we go further and match deeds to our words. We are ready to give evidence of our conviction and commitment in this respect. We have in recent months offered to share information as to known terrorist groups with the anti-terrorist authorities of other nations. We will intensify this exchange of intelligence and take such other measures as are appropriate to support and participate in the international struggle against this intolerable behaviour..... I would like the position of my country to be absolutely clear. We do not oppose, and are prepared to facilitate, the trial of the two Lockerbie accused. We interpose no restriction whatsoever to the judicial determination of these charges anywhere in the civilised world where the accused may receive a fair trial. We have made this official position known to the two accused. We are advised by them that it is their intention, in these circumstances, to present themselves to the authorities of a neutral country for the adjudication of the charges against them, following the accustomed procedures of criminal justice in that country. The arrangements for this are entirely in the hands of the two individuals. My government will play no role in the definition of the terms of their decision, nor in the arrangements their lawyers will make for them, to place themselves at the disposition of the law enforcement authorities of whatever country they shall choose. It is not the place of my government to interfere in these decisions."

Qadhafi also went on to stress his country's wish to co-operate with the West "against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We are not interested in accumulating biological, nuclear or chemical weaponry, or the means to manufacture, store and deliver them. We are, accordingly, prepared to open our facilities, on a reciprocal basis, to full appropriate international inspection, to give the world assurances that our country is not a repository of such weapons."

Upon questioning by Chasey as to whether it was true that in 1986, before the US bombing, Libya had supported many terrorist organisations and subversive groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, Qadhafi's answer was: "Yes, but no longer.... I am not about to account for every activity we supported over the years. I am, however, going to say that was then and this is now. We no longer support international terrorism. We are a different people today than we were yesterday.... By the passage of time, everyone changes, through experience. In the 1970s, we supported liberal movements without knowing which were terrorists and which were not. In the 1980s, we began to differentiate between terrorists and those with legitimate political aspirations."

In May 1992, the Libyan news agency Jana stated that links with terrorist groups were being terminated and that any UN committee was free to visit Libya to ascertain that there were no terrorist camps on Libyan territory. In June, Libyan officials provided information to the British authorities about earlier Libyan support for the IRA - support that was now completely severed. Such developments failed to gain the recognition of either the US or British governments.

Recently, British barrister Michael Mansfield examined all the evidence which was publicly available on the Lockerbie bombing and stated that the government's evidence against the two Libyans was "inconclusive and fatally flawed at the very root.... So far as the Maltese connection is concerned, the clothing, the identification, when it was bought, all of that, I think add up to a situation in which were it to be presented in a court in the United Kingdom, it probably wouldn't even get past the doors."

During his 1992 campaign for the American presidency, Bill Clinton said that, if elected, he would "make sure that all questions regarding Syrian and Iranian involvement in the Pan Am 103 tragedy are addressed and fully answered. The US owes it to the victims' families to see that these charges are thoroughly investigated."

Clinton also sent a letter to Daniel and Susan Cohen of Port Jervis, New York (the Cohen's 19-year-old daughter, Theodora, was one of the victims of the Lockerbie bomb) in which he wrote: "If elected, I will do what is right and necessary to send a message that individuals who engage in, and countries which lend support for, terrorist activities will pay a high price for doing so. "

Once elected, Clinton did nothing to address the questions regarding Iranian and Syrian involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. His much-vaunted concerns for the truth were enthusiastically abandoned when, on March 23rd 1995, the Clinton administration announced a $4 million reward for the arrest of Megrahi and Fhimah, and their names were added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

"I think justice demands that the people who planned and perpetrated the
crime need to be brought to trial. Justice becomes a joke if the
truth is traded off against international political expediency."
- A PARENT OF ONE OF THE VICTIMS OF THE LOCKERBIE BOMBING

"We've heard them all. We can't do anything now because of the hostage crisis.
We can't do anything now because of Desert Storm. There are always bigger fish to fry.
It's amazing how many people have told me, well why are you doing this?
You can't bring her back to life. All right, what does the word justice mean?
All you have to do is commit a murder. Well they're dead. You can't bring them back,
so let's not bother with this. The murderers are too powerful; the murderers are too useful."
- DAVID COHEN on the British government's failure to procure justice for his daughter's death.

CONCLUSION

The Lockerbie bombing was a crime that shocked the world, and both Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan vowed that those responsible would be brought to justice. Those vows turned out to be some of the most barren and hypocritical promises ever uttered by politicians.

The US government has persistently withheld and misrepresented information about its activities to its own people. It lied to the public about the bombing of Cambodia, about Operation Phoenix (the mass assassination programme in Vietnam), about Watergate, BCCI, Irangate and much more. The Lockerbie cover-up is but one more strand in this pattern of wilful abuse of authority.

There is no doubt that if the truth about the Lockerbie bombing were ever established, it would be much too embarrassing to the United States and Britain. Far from confronting terrorists, America and Britain have routinely, and readily, connived with, and encouraged them.

A plethora of Western intelligence agencies were (and still are) involved in highly questionable relationships with known terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. The Lockerbie cover-up points the finger of corruption at the CIA, the DEA, the DIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Justice Department, MI5, MI6, Scotland Yard, the Scottish police, the Home Office and others, right up to the highest levels of the US and British governments, including successive British prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher and John Major to Tony Blair, all of whom have colluded in suppressing the truth.

And in the midst of this scandal, the relatives of the victims of the bombing have been treated as political footballs. The irony is that if the truth of the bombing is ever accepted by the courts, Pan Am's conviction for "wilful misconduct" may be quashed and compensation for the relatives will be delayed even further. As Jim Swire of UK Families Flight 103 put it: "We are now finding ourselves in an increasingly difficult situation where we may be faced with the decision of whether we want the money or the truth."

Many families now suspect that the British and American authorities would be delighted if the Libyan suspects were never released and there is never a trial, because of the awkward revelations that might otherwise be made public.

Libyan government letter sent to several US Senators concerning the Lockerbie affair.
Libya sent similar letters to President Bush and Secretary of State Jim Baker,
but never received a reply.