Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Lester Coleman. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Lester Coleman. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday 4 August 2017

Immunity ruled out in Lockerbie row

[This is the headline over a report published in The Herald on this date in 1995. It reads as follows:]

The Lord Advocate yesterday effectively rejected the possibility of a disgraced former American intelligence agent being granted diplomatic immunity to allow him to give evidence on the Lockerbie bombing.

Mr Lester Coleman, a former US intelligence agent, has said he is willing to come to Scotland to give evidence on the outrage provided he was offered immunity from extradition to the United States.

However, Scotland's senior law officer said yesterday that neither the Crown Office nor the Scottish Office had any role or authority in relation to the extradition of Mr Coleman to the US, where warrants have been issued for his arrest. That was a matter for the Home Office and the English courts.

The comments by the Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, made in a reply to Mr Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for Linlithgow, came on the same day that former Scottish Office Minister Allan Stewart called for the former American intelligence agent to be granted immunity from extradition to allow him to give evidence on the PanAm bombing to a Scottish court.

Mr Stewart, Conservative MP for Eastwood, speaking on Radio Scotland's Newsdrive programme yesterday, said: ''I think unquestionably he (Lester Coleman) should be granted immunity from extradition.

''There are very many questions about the Lockerbie tragedy. He says he has got very substantial evidence to offer. I cannot see why we in Britain have anything at all to lose by giving Lester Coleman the opportunity to put forward that evidence.''

He added: ''The Crown Prosecution Service appears to have decided who is guilty. I cannot understand why they seem to have this single-track approach and to be ruling out any other.''

Asked if he believed that the Lockerbie investigation was being hampered by a cover-up, Mr Stewart said: ''I think it is extremely odd ... that other possible avenues of exploration to get at the truth about Lockerbie simply appear not to be being explored. That cannot be right.''

Mr Stewart's plea came just a few days after Mr Dalyell urged the Lord Advocate to give diplomatic immunity to Mr Coleman to uncover the part he claimed the US played in the Lockerbie tragedy.

Mr Dalyell said Mr Coleman was willing to speak to Scottish police about an alleged security loophole set up by the US which resulted in a bomb being placed on PanAm flight 103 at Frankfurt airport.

Mr Coleman's theory of a link with a drugs run from Lebanon through Cyprus and Germany was the conclusion of a book about him by Mr Donald Goddard, called The Trail of the Octopus. The book is now the subject of a libel action by another US agent.

Mr Coleman believes the bomb got on to the jet because US intelligence agents in Beirut in 1988 agreed with Lebanese terrorists to facilitate a route for drugs from Lebanon to the US in exchange for information about Western hostages.

Luggage containing drugs was protected by US intelligence, with normal security restrictions on baggage at airports removed. However, he alleges, the terrorists exploited the loophole by exchanging a bag of drugs with a bag containing a bomb at Frankfurt airport.

Mr Coleman was based in Beirut at the time and often travelled to Cyprus, where he had dealings with the American Drug Enforcement Agency.

Shortly after the book was published in 1993, Mr Coleman was indicted on charges of perjury and travelling on a false passport. He fled the US and is now in hiding.

The Lord Advocate, in his written reply to Mr Dalyell, the contents of which were published yesterday, explained that the Crown's position was based on evidence, and that careful consideration was given to any information received and appropriate investigations carried out.

In reply to Mr Dalyell's request that Mr Coleman be allowed to enter the UK with the promise of immunity from extradition to talk with the police, the Lord Advocate, says: ''Neither the Crown Office nor Scottish Office has any role or authority in relation to extradition to the United States.

''The procedures for extradition as between the United Kingdom and the United States are the responsibility of the Home Office and the English Courts.''

Mr Dalyell said he found it ''extraordinarily odd'' that responsibility for extradition in Scotland was a matter for the Home Office and the English courts.

The MP said: ''Two Scottish lawyers have told me that they thought extradition and immunity from extradition north of the Border would be the responsibility of the Crown Office or the Scottish Office.

''The Lord Advocate's statement has certainly raised eyebrows in Scottish legal circles.''

Tuesday 16 February 2016

US 'maltreating' spy who blew whistle on Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in the Electronic Telegraph, issue 632, on this date in 1997. It reads as follows:]

Lockerbie campaigners in Britain and America are voicing concern over the US authorities' treatment of a renegade American spy who claims there has been a massive international cover-up over the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

Lester Coleman, a former agent with the US Defence Intelligence Agency, provoked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic by claiming that the tragedy in which 270 people died was caused by an American drug "sting" operation in Lebanon that went badly wrong. He was serving in the Middle East at the time.

Mr Coleman and his family were forced to go into hiding in Europe after US intelligence chiefs ordered his arrest on charges of perjury. His supporters claim that the charges were brought because he had contradicted the official American view that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

But, after living in exile for six years and in failing health, Mr Coleman returned to the US at the end of last year intending to clear his name. He was arrested at Atlanta airport and has been held since at New York's Manhattan Detention Centre, which houses murderers, rapists and drug-dealers.

Numerous bail applications have been rejected, even though he has been diagnosed as suffering from cancer and the charges he faces are relatively petty ones.

Vivian Shevitz, his defence lawyer, last week wrote to the judge responsible for the case, condemning as "an outrage" the medical treatment Mr Coleman has received since being remanded in custody. Miss Shevitz claims that Mr Coleman, now in his sixties, has been denied proper medical care since being returned to jail a few days after undergoing surgery.

"The way the authorities are treating Coleman is a total overreaction," she said. "There is no justification for treating him like this. It suggests the authorities are afraid of something, and want to keep him quiet."

Dr Jim Swire, the spokesman for British relatives of the Lockerbie victims, said he was disturbed at how the US authorities were handling the case. "The gross maltreatment of Coleman by the American authorities appears to fit a pattern of the victimisation of people who challenge the official version that Libya was solely to blame for Lockerbie," he said.

Certainly, the manner in which various American intelligence agencies have reacted to Mr Coleman's claims over Lockerbie suggest they deserve a more thorough investigation than they have so far received.

When I interviewed Mr Coleman for The Sunday Telegraph in 1993 at a secret location in Portugal, he was escorted by an armed Scandinavian bodyguard who had been lent by a friendly European government that supported his claims.

In essence, Mr Coleman's story, as related in his book, Trail of the Octopus, is relatively straightforward. During the late 1980s, Mr Coleman was working for the Defence Intelligence Agency, based in Cyprus, then a major intelligence-gathering post for the Middle East. Part of his task was to spy on the activities of a second American organisation, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Mr Coleman claims that the DEA was operating a number of Beirut-based "sting" operations, by which agents allowed "controlled" deliveries of drugs from Lebanon to America through Frankfurt airport, in the hope of arresting US-based drug gangs. But Mr Coleman says the operation was infiltrated by Iranian-financed terrorists, who had been ordered to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus in July 1988: instead of placing a suitcase of heroin on the flight, they checked in a suitcase full of explosives.

Mr Coleman initially made these allegations in an affidavit to Pan Am during the airline's own investigation into the tragedy.

But it was only after he reiterated them in his book, which was published three years later, that the US intelligence establishment responded by accusing him of perjury.

Wednesday 26 August 2015

Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman

[What follows is excerpted from an obituary written by Tam Dalyell that was published in The Independent on this date in 2003:]

Donald Goddard, writer and antiques dealer: born London 7 February 1928; married 1953 Pamela Goss (three sons, marriage dissolved), 1970 Natalie Donay (died 1991), 1996 Carol Dulling; died Wivelsfield, East Sussex 3 August 2003.

A Londoner by birth and a New Yorker by adoption, who spent the second part of his life in rural Sussex, Donald Goddard's formative experience was as an editor at The New York Times between 1962 and 1970, when he developed an intense interest in the then unfashionable subject of the New York underworld. (...)

Goddard's last book, which brought me into close contact with him over the last 10 years of his life, was Trail of the Octopus: from Beirut to Lockerbie - Inside the Defence Intelligence Agency (1993). This was the story of Lester Knox Coleman, the first American citizen since the Vietnam war to seek political asylum in another country. Hounded by the FBI, the drug enforcement administration and Middle East heroin traffickers, Coleman seemed to Goddard to be a victim of one of the biggest international cover-ups in modern times.

In the spring of 1988, Coleman was on a mission for the world's most secretive and well-funded espionage organisations - the Defence Intelligence Agency. Coleman had been ordered to spy on the DEA (the Drug Enforcement Administration) in Cyprus which, along with the CIA, was running a series of "controlled deliveries" of Lebanese heroin through the airports of Frankfurt and London en route to America. Coleman discovered that the security of this "sting" operation had been breached and warned the American Embassy that a disaster was waiting to happen. He was ignored. Seven months later, Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie. Among the dead was a DEA courier.

Since then, Washington has claimed that the blame for the bombing rests with Libyan terrorists and negligent Pan Am officials. With Pan Am and their insurers fighting this version all the way, it was never likely that Coleman's experience in Cyprus would go unnoticed. In 1991, American state security apparatus - what Goddard called the "Octopus" - made its move. His book is a gripping investigation into the causes of the Lockerbie disaster and the subsequent manipulation of the evidence.

Although Trail of the Octopus was not considered relevant in the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, where Abdel-Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment in February 2001, despite the many unanswered questions surrounding the bombing, it would be highly relevant to the public inquiry on Lockerbie that the relatives of those killed want, and that the British and American governments don't want. Goddard was a supreme seeker after truth. If history ever reveals the truth about Lockerbie, I'll wager that Goddard will be one of the unsung heroes in reaching it.

Saturday 30 July 2016

US agent knows Lockerbie secret

[This is the headline over a report published in The Independent on this date in 1995. It reads as follows:]
Scotland's top law officer, the Lord Advocate, is to be asked to give diplomatic immunity to a disgraced American intelligence agent to uncover the part he claims the US played in the Lockerbie disaster.
The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, says the former agent, Lester Coleman, is willing to speak to Scottish police about an alleged security loophole set up by the US which resulted in a bomb being placed on Pan Am Flight 103 at Frankfurt airport.
The bomb exploded above Lockerbie after leaving London en route for the US on 21 December, 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. Mr Coleman's theory of a connection between a drugs run from the Lebanon through Cyprus and Germany was the conclusion of a book about him by Donald Goddard, The Trail of the Octopus. The book is the subject of a libel action by another US agent.
Mr Coleman believes the bomb was able to be planted on the Pan Am flight because of an arrangement between US intelligence agents based in Beirut in 1988 and Lebanese terrorists. In exchange for information about Western hostages, the Americans agreed to facilitate a route for drugs from the Lebanon into the US.
Luggage containing drugs was protected by US intelligence with normal security restrictions on baggage at airports removed, allowing the bomb to be planted in a bag at Frankfurt.
Mr Coleman was indicted on charges of perjury and travelling on a false passport in 1993. He fled the US and is in hiding.
Mr Dalyell said he had written to the Lord Advocate asking him to bring Mr Coleman to the UK "on the promise of immunity from extradition to the US to talk to the police". He would not say where Mr Coleman was, adding: "The difficulty is that he is certainly threatened by US agents.

Wednesday 13 April 2016

US hounds accusers over claims of Lockerbie crash cover-up

[This is the headline over an article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that was published in issue 688 of the Electronic Telegraph on this date in 1997. As reproduced on the website DCDave.com it reads as follows:]

The US Justice Department appears to be waging a campaign of persecution against those who have challenged the official explanation of the Lockerbie disaster.

The FBI has used its immense power to sift through the background of whistle-blowers, investigators, and their employers, searching for vulnerabilities that could be exploited in a criminal prosecution.

The chief targets have been those who allege that the bombing of Pan Am 103, which took 270 lives on Dec 22, 1988, was an Iranian-Syrian plot that exploited a security breach in a bungled CIA operation. The US government says this is a conspiracy theory cooked up by the US Aviation Insurance Group (USAIG), the underwriters for Pan Am, to try to avoid liability for up to $500 million in damages for families of the victims. Both the US and British authorities insist that the bombing was the work of Libyan terrorists.

Insurance disputes of this kind are typically adjudicated in civil court. But the Justice Department began an extremely aggressive criminal investigation of Pan Am's lawyers and insurers. The investigation, begun in 1992, was unable to muster evidence of a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Lockerbie case. But after broadening the scope of its inquiry the FBI managed to sustain a case of fraud against the former chairman of USAIG, John Brennan. This involved insurance claims over a 1987 crash of a USAir commuter plane. Brennan was convicted in July 1996. He is expected to be sentenced later this month. USAIG has accused the government of engaging in a malicious vendetta.

The Justice Department was less successful in its efforts to destroy Juval Aviv, an expert on terrorism employed by Pan Am's insurers to investigate the bombing. He was acquitted on federal charges of fraud last December after an ordeal lasting more than four years. Aviv, head of a New York security firm, Interfor, was indicted in 1995 for supposedly defrauding a client, General Electric, in a minor security contract involving a fee of $20,683.

But General Electric had never issued a complaint. FBI agents nevertheless visited Aviv's clients demanding files. They were the same agents, Chris Murray and David Edward, who had conducted the Lockerbie investigation. "The whole thing was obviously trumped up in revenge for his role in the Pan Am 103 disaster case," said a juror afterwards.

Aviv has now filed a claim alleging malicious prosecution, violation of constitutional rights, and the launch of a campaign to discredit him "in retaliation for his report to Pan Am".

It was Aviv's report in 1989 that first sketched the outlines of a cover-up. He claimed that a rogue CIA unit had allowed a Syrian drug ring to smuggle heroin on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt to New York. He said this was to gain help in the release of US hostages in Lebanon. But the operation was penetrated by Iranian-backed terrorists who exploited the Pan Am channel to plant a bomb on flight 103.

"Aviv stirred up a lot of trouble, playing on the emotions of the families," said Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA. "He goes around saying that he used to be a member of Mossad, but the office of the Israeli prime minister has written a letter denying it. The man's a fraud."

But documents introduced at his trial paint a more complex picture. An internal FBI memo, marked secret, confirmed his "past association with the Mossad". Other documents corroborated his claim to have served as a security consultant to the FBI, Secret Service and other US agencies. Aviv believes that he was indicted in 1995 to destroy his credibility just as claims of a Lockerbie cover-up were gathering momentum. A film that supported his theories, The Maltese Double Cross, was about to be shown in Britain for the first time. It was never broadcast, but families of the victims had a private screening.

The US embassy in London, joined by the Crown Office, went on the offensive, calling him a "fabricator ... recently arrested in the US for defrauding an American company".

The same treatment was meted out to another source for the film, Lester Coleman, who had worked for the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The embassy said he was "a fugitive from justice, wanted in the US for perjury related to the Lockerbie case and for passport fraud".

Coleman was indicted in 1993, four days before the British launch of his book, Trail of the Octopus - still unpublished in the US - confirming that the American government was indeed running "controlled" heroin deliveries from Lebanon on Pan Am flights out of Frankfurt.

He returned to the US from exile in Sweden last year to clear his name and now awaits trial in New York. The US government's actions clearly indicate that something is amiss in the Lockerbie case. Fabricators are usually ignored, so perhaps it is time to pay closer attention to the charges of Juval Aviv, Lester Coleman, and apostles of the "Syrian Connection".

Wednesday 6 May 2015

At the start of the trial

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James which was published on this date in 2000:]

On May 3, the trial began of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.

Abdelbaset Ali Muhammad Al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah are charged with planting a Semtex-packed cassette recorder on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane killing its 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents.

For years it was assumed that no legal proceedings into the Lockerbie tragedy would ever be held, as Libya would be unlikely to give up the accused individuals. That the case has come to court is the outcome of a significant shift in political and economic relations internationally. The European Union (EU) has led efforts to normalise relations with Libya in order to gain access to the country's considerable oil resources.

The accession of Blair's Labour government to office in 1997 provided a means for Britain—concerned that French and Italian oil companies were reaping the benefits of the USA-UK embargo on Libya—to develop its interests in the country. After protracted negotiations with South Africa's Nelson Mandela and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi agreed to hand over Al-Megrahi and Fhimah last year—provided they would not be tried on US or British soil. They have been held in the Netherlands ever since.

Once the suspects were handed over, the EU lifted its sanctions against Libya, and a considerable trade in oil, natural gas, and machinery has opened up, from which the US remains largely excluded. A steady stream of EU ministers have also visited the Libyan capital Tripoli. Only the awkward business of Flight 103 remained to be resolved for business as usual to be resumed.

For the purposes of the trial, Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, was designated as Scottish territory. The proceedings, expected to last many months, are being held in accordance with Scottish law and will involve hearing thousands of witnesses. It is the first time that a British court has sat outside British territory. This arrangement was agreed after protracted negotiations between the Libyan, British, US and Dutch governments, and also involved Scottish legal officials and the families and friends of those killed in the crash. Four Scottish judges, sitting without a jury, are hearing the case. The prosecutor is Scotland's Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

The trial began with the indictment against the two men being read out. They are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder, and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. The two pleaded not guilty and the clerk to the court read out a list of Arabic names of people he said the defence would allege were the real Lockerbie bombers. This included members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) — the two groups originally suspected of the bombing.

The Pan Am jumbo Maid of the Seas blew up on December 21, 1988, shortly after taking off from London's Heathrow airport. The plane disintegrated in mid-air, shedding debris over a wide area. The bulk of the wreckage impacted on and around the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, also killing 11 local residents.

Early investigations into the atrocity by Dumfries and Galloway police pointed to the bomb having been a reprisal for the US navy's shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in the Persian Gulf six months earlier. On July 3, 1988 the US warship the Vincennes was operating within Iranian waters, providing military support for Iraq in the ongoing Iran/Iraq war. During a one-sided battle against a small number of lightly armed Iranian gunboats, the Vincennes fired two missiles at the Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilians onboard were killed.

This act of mass murder by the US has never resulted in any court case. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were militarily decorated. Attempts by relatives of the victims to bring legal action against the American government were rejected by the US Supreme Court in 1993. Despite the fact that the vast majority of victims were Iranian, the US paid $2.9 million in compensation only to non-Iranian victims of the shooting.

The Iranian government promised revenge attacks at the time and it is alleged that it reached an agreement with the PFLP[-GC] to this end, which was led by ex-Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril and had links with the Syrian government.

Discussion between Dumfries and Galloway police and the West German police revealed that members of the PFLP had already been arrested in West Germany in possession of a bomb similar to the one blown up over Lockerbie. It was also discovered that four other bombs, disguised in cassette players, had been made but were unaccounted for. The suspicion grew that the PFLP had planted the bomb on Flight 103, or arranged for it to be planted, and that it was intended to blow up over Atlantic.

The suitcase containing the explosive device had been loaded at the Frankfurt airport. The bomb's timing mechanism was pressure activated and set to explode four hours after it first reached 8,000 feet. [RB: I have no idea where the author picked up this egregious error.] But Flight 103 was delayed at Heathrow before embarking on its transatlantic journey. As a result, the plane blew up over Lockerbie.

Several warnings were forwarded to American embassies and intelligence staff that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York would be attacked in December 1988. US intelligence staff based in Moscow and elsewhere scheduled to fly on Pan Am flights over that period cancelled their seats due to the warning. Many students took advantage of the cheap flights this made available. Flight 103 was only two-thirds full a mere four days before Christmas.

Crash investigators subsequently found more evidence indicating a possible link between the explosion and the PFLP. Clothing found in the case that had contained the bomb was identified as having been bought in Malta. A PFLP associate, Abu Talb, recently returned from Malta was later identified in the shop where the clothes were bought. By 1990, Dumfries and Galloway police announced they were on the brink of arrests. Talb is one of the individuals named by the Libyans' defence team.

Allegations have been made that what happened subsequently points to an attempt by the US government to divert police investigations away from Iran and Syria. According to the British journalist Paul Foot, in March 1989 US President George Bush rang the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask her to "cool it" on the Lockerbie case. Foot, in a 1994 review of the book Trail of the Octopus by Donald Goddard and ex-US intelligence agent Lester Coleman, noted that Paul Channon, the British Transport Minister, had briefed journalists that arrests were imminent just hours before Bush's call. Channon was sacked shortly after and no arrests were made. A US commission of inquiry into Lockerbie did not mention the PFLP.

In 1990, a timer fragment was belatedly recovered from the wreckage by US investigators. They identified this as coming from a batch of timers sold by the Swiss makers MEBO to Libya. MEBO subsequently insisted that the timer in question was part of a batch, which had never been electrically connected, sold to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Goddard and Coleman's book outlined a scenario in which the US government was not only politically responsible for the Lockerbie bomb, vis-à-vis the Vincennes incident and their long-standing domination of the region, but were practically responsible for it having been placed on Flight 103.

According to Coleman, America's Defence Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency were all active around the region looking for information on Middle Eastern factions, drug trafficking, and spying on each other. Coleman suggests that the CIA, on the assumption that it contained heroin, identified the bag with the bomb as being safe for transit. Goddard and Coleman suggest that PFLP members, who switched some drugs for the bomb, had infiltrated the drug-running operation.

Coleman and others, including an investigator Juval Aviv employed by the now defunct Pan Am, have subsequently been vilified, framed for petty misdemeanours, and/or generally harassed by the US state.

Coleman's allegations were repeated in a 1994 British TV programme, The Maltese Double Cross, produced by Channel 4. In 1997, the Libyan government showed the Channel 4 film at a hearing it had won before the UN International Court of Justice to protest against the sanctions imposed by the US in 1992. The impact of sanctions on Libya between 1992 and 1995 had been drastic, causing many deaths through lack of medical supplies and costing the country $6 billion in lost agricultural exports alone.

It is alleged that blame for the bombing was pinned on Libya in order to turn attention away from the Iranian regime, which the US was now developing as its ally in the Middle East as a counterweight to Iraq. By the late 1980s, longstanding US plans for a major escalation of their military involvement in the Persian Gulf, the world's leading oil-producing area, were coming to fruition. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 gave the US the pretext it required. The US and NATO were able to assemble a broad coalition of support for the intervention—from the Soviet Union, Europe and most of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East.

Libya opposed the bombardment of Iraq and was defined by the US as a "pariah" state. The US had bombed Tripoli in 1986, killing Libyan leader Gadhaffi's daughter, and had severed diplomatic relations with the country, accusing it of sponsoring international terrorism.

Monday 8 June 2015

Is Libya being framed?

[This is part of the headline over an article by Gary C Gambill that was published on this date in 2000 in the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's Sunday Herald reported last week that the US government placed a gag order on a former CIA agent to prevent him from testifying in the trial of two Libyans accused of carrying out the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people.

Dr. Richard Fuisz, a wealthy businessman and pharmaceutical researcher who was a major CIA operative in Damascus during the 1980s, told a congressional staffer in 1994 that the perpetrators of the bombing were based in Syria. "If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack . . . I can tell you their home addresses . . . you won't find [them] anywhere in Libya. You will only find [them] in Damascus," Fuisz told congressional aide Susan Lindauer, who has submitted a sworn affidavit describing this conversation to the Scottish court that is trying the two suspects.

One month after their meeting, a Washington DC court issued a ruling that prohibits Fuisz from discussing the Lockerbie bombing on national security grounds. When a reporter called Fuisz last month with questions about Lindauer's affidavit, he replied: "That is not an issue I can confirm or deny. I am not allowed to speak about these issues. In fact, I can't even explain to you why I can't speak about these issues." The report quoted a senior UN official who has seen the affidavit as saying that "in the interests of natural justice, Dr. Fuisz should be released from any order which prevents him telling what he knows of the PanAm bombing."1

The investigation into the bombing by Scottish police and the FBI initially focused exclusively on evidence linking the blast to the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), a radical Palestinian group closely allied with Syrian President Hafez Assad and other senior officials. However, the investigation suddenly changed courses after Syria joined the US-led coalition against Iraq in 1991 and Iran stayed neutral. In November of that year, US investigators issued indictments against two alleged Libyan intelligence agents and President George Bush declared that Syria had taken a "bum rap" on Lockerbie.

Fuisz is not the first to run afoul of the U.S. government for speaking about Syrian and Iranian complicity in the Lockerbie bombing. Juval Aviv, the president of Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am to conduct an inquiry into the bombing, was indicted for mail fraud after Interfor announced its conclusion that the PFLP-GC had been responsible.2 A former agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Coleman, was charged by the FBI with "falsely procuring a passport" while he was researching a book entitled Trail of the Octopus which fingered the PFLP-GC (Coleman left the country and published the book in Britain).3 William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar claims about PFLP-GC involvement, said in 1995 that the US Justice Department had frozen his bank accounts and federal agents scoured through his garbage cans.4

The Case Against Libya

The prosecution's claim is that two Libyan intelligence agents, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, planted Semtex plastic explosives inside a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder in an unaccompanied suitcase on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred onto Pan Am flight 103, bound for New York via London's Heathrow airport.

The first important chain of evidence links the bomb-laden suitcase on Flight 103 to Air Malta Flight KM180. Fragments of the Toshiba radio-cassette recorder were found inside a brown Samsonite suitcase, the only piece of luggage on the Flight 103 that was not checked by a passenger. The suitcase had entered the baggage system at Frankfurt at the same time and location as the Air Malta flight was unloading. According to prosecutors, a tattered shirt with a Maltese label containing fragments of the timing device was found by a Scottish man walking his dog 18 months after the explosion (fabric samples from the shirt were said to indicate that it was inside the brown suitcase).

However, Air Malta's computer records show no indication that a brown Samsonite suitcase was on board Flight KT180, and the notion that an old man walking his dog would stumble across a key piece of evidence a year and a half after the explosion is a bit far-fetched. Moreover, according to a forensic report which the defense will present during the trial, a bomb in a suitcase stored in the aluminum luggage containers could not have created the dinner plate-sized hole in the fuselage that brought down the plane--the bomb would have had to be directly next to the plane's fuselage. If this true, then the prosecution's entire explanation of how the bomb arrived on the aircraft in Malta falls apart.

A second chain of evidence links the two Libyan suspects to Malta. Detectives traced the charred remains of clothing tattered shirt to a clothing shop in Sliema, Malta, whose owner, Tony Gauci, said that he recalled selling the clothes to a tall Arab male, about 50 years old, in the fall of 1988. Investigators say he later identified the man who bought the clothes as Megrahi. However, Megrahi was only 36 at the time, and Gauci greatly overestimated his height. Moreover, a member of the PFLP-GC, Muhammed Abu Talb, was originally identified as the man who bought the clothes during the early stages of the investigation.5

A third primary piece of evidence said to implicate Libya are two fragments of an electronic circuit board from the the timing device that detonated the explosives on board the airliner. Investigators traced the fragments to a Swiss company which manufactures electronic timers, Mebo Telecommunications. The head of Mebo Communications, Edwin Bollier, told investigators that the fragments came from an MST-13 timer he had sold to the Libyan government. However, Bollier recently said he had made the identification solely from looking at photographs of the fragments. When he was shown one of the actual fragments in September 1999, he concluded that "the fragment does not come from one of the timers we sold to Libya." Bollier says that it appears to come from one of the three prototypes built by his company--two of which were sold to the Institute of Technical Research in East Germany (a front for the Stasi intelligence service), while the third was stolen. He intends to testify to this at the trial, as will Owen Lewis, a British forensic expert.6

A fourth important piece of evidence is the testimony of a former Libyan intelligence officer who will identify the two suspects as members of Libya's intelligence service. While details of what he told investigators are scarce, sources close to the defense have said that it is highly questionable.

A number of irregularities in the investigation also detract from the plausibility of the prosecution's claims. The American FBI agent who was instrumental in pushing the Libya hypothesis, J. Thomas Thurman, was later suspended for manipulating evidence to favor the prosecution in subsequent cases.7

The Case Against Syria/Iran

The primary hypothesis guiding the investigation for the first year was that the bombing was perpetrated by the Syria-based PFLP-GC, presumably acting on behalf of Iran. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had vowed to retaliate for the US Navy's July 1988 downing of an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf, saying that the skies would "rain blood" and offering a $10 million reward to anyone who "obtained justice" for Iran. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Teheran's envoy in Damascus in 1988, was believed to have recruited the financially-strapped group for the task.

Two months before the disaster, German police arrested 15 terrorist suspects, all connected to the PFLP-GC, and confiscated three explosive devices consisting of Semtex hidden inside Toshiba cassette recorders--nearly identical to the one used in the Lockerbie bombing (the only major difference being that they had barometric triggers, rather than electronic timers of the type that investigators claim detonated the explosives on board Pan Am flight 103). Moreover, US officials reportedly had received advance warnings that a flight to New York would be targeted around the time of the Lockerbie bombing. In fact, Stephen Green, a senior Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) administrator, John McCarthy, the U.S. Ambassador to Beirut, and several other US officials were originally scheduled to fly on the ill-fated airliner on December 21, but rescheduled at the last minute.

It's possible that the PFLP smuggled the bomb on board Pan Am flight 103 from Malta. Abu Talb was sighted in Malta just weeks before the bombing. When he was later arrested in Sweden, police found the date of the Lockerbie explosion (December 21) circled on his calender.8

This and most other evidence linking the Lockerbie bombing to the PFLP-GC is largely circumstantial and difficult to substantiate, if only because the results of the FBI's early investigation into its involvement were not made public. The question is: Given the weaknesses in the case against Libya, why was the investigation into PFLP-GC involvement suspended and should it be reactivated if the two Libyan defendants are acquitted?
------
 1 The Sunday Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), 28 May 2000.
 2 The Guardian (London) July 29, 1995.
 3 Ibid.
 4 IPS Newsire, 3 May 1995.
 5 The Daily Telegraph (London), 22 December 1998.
 6 The Independent (London), 14 December 1998.
 7 The Daily Telegraph (London), 22 December 1998.
 8 AP Newswire, 29 April 2000.