|
THE MALTESE DOUBLE CROSS -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
|
Lamin Fhima then steals Air Malta luggage tags after duly noting the English word in his diary.
[Lamin Khalifah Fhima, Libyan suspect] First of all, at the time of the Lockerbie accident, I wasn't working at Malta airport, contrary to what has been said. As for the tags, they are found on luggage all over any airport, which makes them accessible to anyone, let alone me. It's so easy. The tags are even available in the offices of the Libyan Arab Airlines. So why didn't they say the tags were stolen from the LA office in Libya.
[Narrator] And then arranges for an unaccompanied bag full of the medley of Maltese clothes and the bomb to be put unaccompanied on an Air Malta flight, a bag going through three airport security systems, traveling through a European winter with unpredictable flight delays, the explosion capable of occurring anywhere on Pan Am 103, in the air or the land or the sea, even in the airport. Our play began as a tragedy. Has it now become a comedy with two stooges, not three?
[Denis Phipp, former head of security, British Airways] If a device had been infiltrated into the system at Malta, it would have been necessary for that device to have been carried in an aircraft on the sector from Malta to Frankfurt, to have gone through a handling process being carried on an aircraft for the sector from Frankfurt to Heathrow and then timed to detonate during the final sector, Heathrow to New York presumably whilst the aircraft was over the ocean to avoid discovery of forensic evidence. One has to say, "Are terrorists idiots? Don't terrorists plan to have a reasonable degree of success of doing it?" We looked at something else, and it's a matter of public record, of the bombmaking activities in the group that had been active in Germany in Neuss at the time. There is all the publicity, the documentation of that.
So we had to consider do you think it likely that a terrorist group that has managed to manufacture a very sophisticated device in Germany, are they going to move it somewhere else and then send it on its way back to Germany.
[Michael Jones, Pan Am security, London] I went to Frankfurt airport on the 23rd of January, 1989 to look for the documents in relation to the preparation of Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London, in particular the cargo and baggage loading claim, who was responsible for loading the plane and what their duties were. But these documents were missing from the daily [inaudible].
[Denis Phipp, former head of security, British Airways] The records at Frankfurt, they were by no means complete. One was not able to get hold of the detailed records. Particularly that concerned me was there was no record as to who unloaded that flight KM 180, when it arrived at Frankfurt. We don't know who the loaders were. There was no record of the number of the bags that were actually unloaded from that flight. There were no records that I could find.
[Michael Jones, Pan Am security, London] If the original documents had been taken by the authorities, and by that I mean the police, then it would be normal practice for a copy to be retained in the Pan Am file.
[Narrator] In 1993, Air Malta wins its libel suit against Granada television.
Granada, in a docudrama, had claimed the bomb had been placed in an unaccompanied bag on an Air Malta flight.
[Denis Phipp, former head of security, British Airways] But Malta, the records of the handling of that flight KM 180 were made available for me to see. There was no evidence of any unaccompanied bags. All of the bags that were carried as passenger baggage on that flight had been checked in by a passenger who actually traveled on the flight.
[Narrator] When in October, 1989, the FBI visited Frankfurt airport, the agent sent back this telex to Washington:
No evidence of any bag transferred from an Air Malta flight.
The only evidence showing a transferred bag, a computer printout used to prepare this German police report.
An airport employee, Mrs. Arak, claims to have stored in her locker a copy printed off the destroyed original computer tape.
[Denis Phipp, former head of security, British Airways] The computer printout does not say where the bag came from. They tried to tie that bag to KM 180 from the worksheet which was maintained. And as we found, the worksheet is completely unreliable and in any case, even if you accept that the worksheet was approximately right, we have nobody that can account for, or was in charge of, or can tell us who or how those bags came from the actual aircraft, KM 180 to that coding station. And for more than one kilometer while they were in there waiting, those bags were under nobody's control or supervision. They were not counted. We don't know how many should be there. And it would have been possible to put another bag in there along any of that route or at any time.
[Michael Jones, Pan Am security, London] I have never seen any documentation whatsoever produced by Pan Am or anybody else that show there was any interline baggage from an Air Malta flight on the 21st of December, 1988.
[Vincent Cannistraro, CIA head of Lockerbie Investigation] What I can tell you is that both Fahima and Megrahi are members of the Libyan Intelligence Service. They were undercover as employees of Libyan Arab Airways, but they are in actuality members of the Libyan Intelligence Service.
|
