Lockerbie verdict challenged

PV Vivekanand

THE world is awaiting anxiously to hear the prosecutors present their version of how two Libyans planned and executed a plan that resulted in a mid-air explosion on a Pan Am flight from London to New York 12 years ago at the hearings of the case beginning on May 3 at a former US Air Force base in the Netherlands by Scottish judges under Scottish law.
Equally interesting will be how the defence goes about picking holes in every point made by the prosecution, if pre-hearing reports and results if extensive research conducted by the US television network CBS as well as newpapers.
The crash, which took place over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of Dec.21-22, 1988, killed 270 people - 259 of them aboard the plane and 11 others on the ground when the Boeing crashed down on them.
But by the time the case gets even before the half way mark, more questions are likely to be raised than answered at the trial, where a Pandora's box is expected to be opened once it gets into the core of the affair.
Most important of all, the prosecution case is believed to be weak and its arguments have already been found lacking in substantiating evidence before the case went to court.
Particularly of importance here is that under Scottish law the charge of murder is tough to prove and Scottish judges are known to be proud of their independence.
The charge sheet against the two — Abdelbasset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi and Al Lameen Khalifa Fhima _ says that Megrahi prepared a suitcase containing a bomb rigged into a Toshiba radio cassette player, and Fhima, who worked for the Libyan Arab Airlines, used planted that suitcase on an Air Malta plane to Frankfurt, Germany.
In Frankfurt the unaccompanied suitcase was loaded on to a Pan Am flight to London. At Heathrow, it was finally transferred to the New York-bound Pan Am 747 which exploded in mid-air half an hour after take-off at a hight of 31,000 feet.
The prosecution is expected to argue that the bombing was in relatiation for a 1985 April US air attack on the Libyan cities of Benghazi and Tripoli, which killed up to five people, including the adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi.
That air raid, which fitted into a pattern of US-Libyan confrontations, was ordered by the then president Ronald Reagan to punish Libya for its alleged role in the bombing of a disco in Berlin frequented by US Marines.
But the alleged Libyan connection to the blast is only one of the many theories that were raised at the very outset of investigations into the crash. These theories varyingly pointed the accusing fingers at Iran, Syria, Libya, the Lebanese drug underworld, and even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Every theory appeared to be as strong as any, and there is a widely-held argument in the Middle East was Libya is the scapegoat in the case and the notorious Israeli secret service, Mossad, helped fabricate the case against Tripoli.
The burden of proving the case against Libya beyond any reasonable doubt rests solely with the prosecution. By definition, that helps the the defence because all it has to do is to pick convincing holes in the prosecution case. And that should be relatively easy, given the abundance of theories and red herrings in the case.
The defence strategy, as one of the lawyers for the Libyan suspects hinted during a pre-trial hearing in court last week, is expected to be based on laying out a well-built case where the accusing fingers point in several directions. The defence will seek to prove that several other parties had as good motives and opportunity (supported by circumstantial evidence) as Libya to carry out the bombing.
The key piece of evidence expected to be presented in court in the Lockerbie case is a tiny piece of a timer that allegedly helped detonate explosives in the suitcase aboard Pan Am Flight 103. The timer was rigged into a Toshiba cassettee player and the fragement was found in part of the wreckage of the airliner in Lockerbie, the prosecution says.
That timer, according to the prosecutor, was manufactured and supplied to Libya by a small electronics company called MEBO based in Zurich, Switzerland.
That is the main pillar of the prosecution argument, but it could be shaken at it foundations in court because the company argues that similar timers were supplied to several parties, including the Stasi secret service of former East Germany.
If serious doubts are cast on the alleged link between the timer and Libya, then that pulls the rug from under the feet of the prosecution, according to European legal experts.
Major Owen Lewis, a former British army explosive expert and now an independent security consultant, said in an interview with the US television network CBS that he could not fathom how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reached the conclusion that the fragment came from the MEBO timers supplied to Libya because of some fundamental differences in the construction of the devices bought by LIbya and those sold by MEBO to others.
The prosecution argument is expected to be weakened further by a challenge to the credibility, a record of misguided conclusions and lack of scientific qualifications of an FBI operative who "established" the alleged link between the timer and Libya.
Edwin Bollier, head of MEBO, told the same CBS programe "60 Minutes" that the fragment could have come from one of two timers he had sold to Stasi. He also reported the theft of blueprints for the timer from his office and affirms that whoever had those blueprints could have manufactured a similar timer.
The Stasi connection opens up another avenue. A Syrian-based group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which was among the first suspects named by US authorities in the case but dropped eventually despite other circumstantial evidence, did have close links with the Stasi and could have obtained the MEBO timer from the East Germans.
Again, that is anticipated as another pillar of the defence argument.
The prosecution is expected to present evidence that clothes found in the wreckage and supposedly came from the suitcase that contained the explosives came from a shop in the Mediterrenean island of Malta and purchased by one of the two Libyan defendants.
Defendant Abdel Basset Al Megrahi, who was the head of security for Libyan Arab
airlines, was known for visiting Malta frequently. The second defendant, Al Lameen
Khalifa Fhima, worked for the Libyan airline at the airport in Malta.
The prosecution contends that the two were Libyan intelligence agents and prepared the bomb that exploded the Pan Am plane, and Megrahi bought the clothes found in the suitcase from Mary's Shop in Malta.
A major hole in that argument is expected to be made with the defence arguing that the shopkeeper could not positively identify the purchaser as Megrahi and the description he provided fitted another man, Mohammed Abu Talb, who was a PFLP-GC member.
A former Libyan intelligence is expected to be produced by the prosecution to testify that he saw al Megrahi and Fhima at the airport on that day of the explosion, and to claim that they put the suitcase containing the bomb aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. From Frankfurt the suitcase was put aboard the ill-fated airliner.
But the ex-agent's testimony could be challenged on grounds that he has a vested interest in lying because is living under a witness protection programme in the US and stands to be rewarded by upto $4 million from the US government.
In strict legal terms, the ex-agent's testimony needs to be corraborated by another witness and that is believed, at this point, to be missing in the prosecution presentation.
Down the line, the prosecution has to prove that the circumstances were also ideal for the accused to put aboard the Air Malta flight the suitcase containing the explosives as unaccompanied baggage.
Air Malta has categorically rejected the possibility of an unaccompanied baggage being aboard the concerned flight to Frankfurt and affirmed that all procedures were strictly followed and the suitcase was not aboard that flight.
A weekly planner is said to contain a phrase allegedly written by Fhima one week before the crash: "Get the taggs from Air Malta." (This has been explained as related to Fhima's routine work, which included getting Libyan Airlines tags printed in Malta and that the reference to Air Malta tag was linked to competitive pricing. There are also other notations in the same weekly planner which refers to an unidentified printer).
The prosecution argues that Fhima used one of these tags to route the suitcase with the bomb from Malta via Frankfurt and London to New York.
But that argument is countered by Air Malta, which points out that if Fhima, with the help of his Libyan Airline security pass, had substituted the suitcase for one belonging to a passenger on the flight, they would have had a claim for a lost bag when the passengers reached
Frankfurt. But no such claim was made, says the airline, adding that every one of the 39 passengers aboard the flight were individually interviewed and they confirmed that there was nothing amiss.
In essence, it has been generally established that there was an unaccounted piece of baggage at Frankfurt that was could have eventually found its way to the Pan Am flight. But there is no concrete evidence that the baggage came from Air Malta - another major dent in the prosecution case.
"If it cannot be stablished that the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 started in Malta, then the evidence is worthless," Robert Black, who heads the law department at Edinburgh University and who devised the plan to have the two suspects tried under Scottish law in the Netherlands, told "60 Minutes."
According to Black, the Scottish authorities could have "allowed themselves to be bounced into the charges against the two named Libyans, who may very well have been Libyan Intelligence agents, known to the intelligence services of Britain and the United States. It became tempting to bring closure to the Lockerbie incident by bringing charges against them."
The weakness of the prosecution case was seen as having prompted the prosecutors to demand postponement of the beginning of the hearings. The court allowed two deferments, but turned down a third prosecution request last week.
The defence is expected to zero in on suspicions that the PFLP was behind the bombings. Defece lawyers will cite the repeated instances where the Syrian-based group's name cropped up during the investigations.
Initial reports citing US intelligence sources said the PFLP-GC could have carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran, which seeking revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian plane with 290 passengers aboard by an American warship, USS Vinceness, in the Gulf at the height of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril, a Syrian colonel, was named as having personally undertaken the alleged "contract" to bomb an American passenger plane in Europe several months before the actual attack. Reports spoke of warnings emanating from Finland and several other European countries, months before the Pan Am explosion, of an impending attack of similar nature.
Figuring high in the reports was a German police raid of a Frankfurt apartment where several men said to have been PFLP-GC members were staying. The raid yielded several weapons, and, most significantly, a Toshiba radio cassette player rigged with a bomb similar to the one that blasted Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
The Palestinians detained during the raid were freed shortly thereafter.
The presence in Malta of the PFLP—GC'S Abu Talb, who is now serving term in Sweden on unrelated charges, at the time of the purchase of the clothes used to wrap the Pan Am bomb and the shopkeeper's description of Abu Talb as the buyer is seen as another strong nail in the prosecution's case.
If there was enough ground to warrant an investigation whether PFLP-GC — and by implication Syria and Iran — were involved in the blast, why did the US move away from that direction?
Explanations provided by Western media include a theory that the US wanted to "neutralise" Iran in the crisis triggered by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and "secure Syrian support" for the US-led coalition against Iraq. It meant excluding the two countries from the investigations.
Other theories raised in connection with the bombing involved a covert CIA operation involving druglords in Lebanon whose help the US wanted in order to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon. This involved allowing drugs to allowed aboard US-bound airplanes without inspection — something the CIA could do with its connections in Europe, says one theory, which is partially supported by the findings of an investigation carried by a private agency hired by Pan Am.
According to the theory, the CIA believed the suspect suitcase contained drugs and allowed its passage through Frankfurt onto the Pan Am flight. Somewhere along the line, somone switched the suitcase with one containing the bomb. It could have been the PFLP-GC or another group with links to the druglords and this group might have been seeking to eliminate the CIA station chief in Beirut, Charles McKee, who was aboard the same flight.
Closely linked to this theory is another which says that CIA agents knew that the suitcase contained explosives and that McKee was the target but they allowed the blast to take place before the CIA station chief was headed for home with a complaint against them that could have led not only to their dismissal from service but prosecution in the US.
"The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee," according to a detailed report carried by the British Guardian newspaper after extensive investigations.
A local farmer from Lockerbie has reported finding a suitcase containing cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields, but the suitcase was taken away and no explanation was given. It was also discovered that the name the farmer saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the passenger list of the crashed plane.