Page 1 of 2 Libya: A hero's welcome
By Scott Stewart and Fred Burton
On August 24, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill addressed a special
session of the Scottish parliament. The session was called so that MacAskill
could explain why he had decided to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the
former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of terrorism charges in connection
with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and who had been expected to spend the
rest of his life in prison. MacAskill said he granted Megrahi a compassionate
release because Megrahi
suffers from terminal prostate cancer and is expected to live only a few
months.
The August 20 release of Megrahi ignited a firestorm of outrage in both the
United Kingdom and the United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
director Robert Mueller released to the press contents of an
uncharacteristically blunt and critical letter he had written to MacAskill in
which Mueller characterized Megrahi's release as inexplicable and "detrimental
to the cause of justice". Mueller told MacAskill in the letter that the release
"makes a mockery of the rule of law".
The flames of outrage over the release of Megrahi were further fanned when
Megrahi received a hero's welcome on his arrival in Tripoli - video of him
being welcomed and embraced by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was broadcast all
over the world.
For his part, Gaddafi has long lobbied for Megrahi's release, even while taking
steps to end Libya's status as an international pariah. Gaddafi first renounced
terrorism and his nuclear ambitions in 2003, shortly after the United States
invasion of Iraq. In October 2008, he completed the compensation agreement with
the families of the US victims of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 and
of an April 1986 Libyan attack against the La Belle disco in Berlin.
Yet despite the conviction of Megrahi, the 2003 official admission of Libyan
responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in a letter to the United Nations, and
the agreement to pay compensation to the families of the Pan Am victims,
Gaddafi has always maintained in public statements that Megrahi and Libya were
not responsible for the bombing. The official admission of responsibility for
the Pan Am bombing, coupled with the public denials, has resulted in a great
deal of ambiguity and confusion over the authorship of the attack - which, in
all likelihood, is precisely what the denials were intended to do.
The Pan Am 103 investigation
At 7:03 pm on December 21, 1988, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated
in one of Pan Am Flight 103's cargo containers, causing the plane to break
apart and fall from the sky. The 259 passengers and crew members aboard the
flight died, as did 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, the town where the
remnants of the jumbo jet fell.
Immediately following the bombing, there was suspicion that the Iranians or
Syrians had commissioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
General Command (PFLP-GC) to conduct the bombing. This belief was based on the
fact that German authorities had taken down a large PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt
in October 1988 and that one member of the cell had in his possession an IED
concealed inside a Toshiba radio. Frankfurt is the city where Pan Am 103
departed before stopping in London. Indeed, even today, there are still some
people who believe that the PFLP-GC was commissioned by either the Iranian or
the Syrian government to conduct the Pan Am bombing.
The PFLP-GC theory might eventually have become the officially accepted theory
had the bomb on Pan Am 103 detonated (as planned) while the aircraft was over
the North Atlantic Ocean. However, a delay in the plane's departure from London
resulted in the timed device detonating while the aircraft was still over land,
and this allowed authorities to collect a great deal of evidence that had been
scattered across a wide swath of the Scottish countryside. The search effort
was one of the most complex crime-scene investigations ever conducted.
Through months of painstakingly detailed effort, investigators were able to
determine that the aircraft was brought down by an IED containing a main charge
of Semtex, that the IED had been placed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player
(in a macabre coincidence, that particular model of Toshiba, the RT-SF 16, is
called the "BomBeat radio cassette player"), and that the radio had been
located inside a brown Samsonite hard-side suitcase located inside the cargo
container.
Investigators were also able to trace the clothing inside the suitcase
containing the IED to a specific shop, Mary's House, in Sliema, Malta. While
examining one of the pieces of Maltese clothing in May 1989, investigators
found a fragment of a circuit board that did not match anything found in the
Toshiba radio. It is important to remember that in a bombing, the pieces of the
IED do not entirely disappear. They may be shattered and scattered, but they
are not usually completely vaporized. Although some pieces may be damaged
beyond recognition, others are not, and this often allows investigators to
reconstruct the device.
In mid-1990, after an exhaustive effort to identify the circuit-board fragment,
the FBI laboratory in Washington was able to determine that the circuit board
was very similar to one that came from a timer that a special agent with the US
Diplomatic Security Service had recovered from an arms cache while
investigating a Libyan-sponsored coup attempt in Lome, Togo, in 1986.
Further investigation determined that the company that produced the timers, the
Swiss company MEBO, had sold as many as 20 of the devices to the Libyan
government, and that the Libyan government was the company's primary customer.
Interestingly, in 1988, MEBO rented one of its offices in Zurich to a firm
called ABH, which was run by two Libyan intelligence officers: Abdel Basset Ali
al-Megrahi and Badri Hassan.
The MEBO timer, model MST-13, is very different from the ice-cube timer in the
PFLP-GC device found in Frankfurt in October 1988. Additionally, the ice-cube
timer in the PFLP-GC device was used in conjunction with a barometric pressure
switch, and the IED used a different main charge, TNT, instead of the Semtex
used in the Pan Am 103 device.
Perhaps the fact that does the most damage to the PFLP-GC conspiracy theory is
that the principal bombmaker for the PFLP-GC Frankfurt cell (and the man who
made the PFLP-GC Toshiba device), Marwan Khreesat, was actually an infiltrator
sent into the organization by the Jordanian intelligence service. Khreesat not
only assisted in providing the information that allowed the Germans to take
down the cell, but he was under strict orders by his Jordanian handlers to
ensure that every IED he constructed was not capable of detonating. Therefore,
it is extremely unlikely that one of the IEDs he created was used to destroy
Pan Am 103.
One of the Libyans connected to MEBO, Megrahi, is an interesting figure. Not
only was he an officer with Libyan intelligence, the External Security
Organization, or ESO, but he also served as the chief of security for Libyan
Arab Airlines (LAA) and had visited Malta many times. The owner of the Mary's
House clothing shop in Sliema identified Megrahi as the man who purchased the
clothing found in the suitcase, and Maltese immigration records indicated that
Megrahi was in Malta on December 7, 1988, the time that the clothing was
purchased. Megrahi left Malta on December 9, 1988, but returned to the country
using a false identity on December 20, using a passport issued by the ESO in
the name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad. Megrahi left Malta using the Abdusamad
passport on December 21, 1988, the day the suitcase was apparently sent from
Malta aboard Air Malta Flight KM180 to Frankfurt and then transferred to Pan Am
103.
On November 13, 1991, the British government charged Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah
Fhimah, the LAA station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta, with the bombing. One
day later, a federal grand jury in the United States returned an indictment
against the same two men for the crime. In March 1995, the FBI added the two
men to its most wanted list and the Diplomatic Security Service's Rewards for
Justice Program offered a US$4 million reward for their capture. Megrahi and
Fhimah were placed under house arrest in Libya - a comfortable existence that,
more than actually confining them, served to protect them from being kidnapped
and spirited out of Libya to face trial.
After many years of boycotts, embargoes, United Nations resolutions and
diplomatic wrangling - including extensive efforts by South African president
Nelson Mandela and UN secretary general Kofi Annan - a compromise was reached
and all parties agreed to a trial in a neutral country - the Netherlands -
conducted under Scottish law. On April 5, 1999, Megrahi and Fhimah were
transferred to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands to stand trial before a special
panel of Scottish judges.
On January 31, 2001, after a very long trial that involved an incredible amount
of technical and detailed testimony, the judges reached their decision. The
Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah,
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