The Daily Star
Monday March 16 2020
By Michael Glackin
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine, the old adage goes. Well the first part is definitely true.
Last week Scotland’s judicial system ruled that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man ever found guilty of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988, in which 270 were killed, may have been the victim of a “grievous miscarriage of justice.”
The Scottish criminal cases review commission announced Wednesday that it will refer Megrahi’s conviction, for the largest mass murder in British history, back to the appeal court. An earlier appeal against the conviction in 2002 was unsuccessful.
The New York-bound Pan Am flight blew up as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie after taking off from London. So when Megrahi eventually came to trial, a dozen years after the event, he was tried by a specially convened Scottish Court that sat in The Netherlands. Megrahi was sentenced to 27 years by three Scottish judges who found him responsible for putting a suitcase containing a bomb aboard a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. From there the suitcase went on to London and was transferred to the New York flight that exploded less than 40 minutes after takeoff.
The main evidence against Megrahi was that he was positively identified by a witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci. Gauci claimed he had sold clothes to Megrahi which were later found scattered over the crash site and had been in the suitcase containing the explosive device.
Last week the commission said “no reasonable trial court could have accepted that Mr. Megrahi was identified as the purchaser” of the clothes.
It’s the latest twist in the long running saga of Megrahi and the bombing of Pan Am 103. Last year five former members of the Stasi, the now defunct intelligence service in communist East Germany, were questioned over the bombing. The former spooks, now in their 70s and 80s, were interviewed as witnesses, not suspects.
A few years earlier, in 2017, Scottish prosecutors announced they interviewed two Libyans they had identified as “new suspects” in the bombing. The “new suspects” were far from new. Both had been of interest to the original investigation in 1991. One was Abdullah al-Senussi, Libya’s intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi. He had already been convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after being found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime though his family are pressing for his release.
The other “new suspect”, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, who I believe is also still in prison in Tripoli completing a 10-year sentence for bomb-making, was almost indicted alongside Megrahi in 1991 for the Pan Am bombing. Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The disco attack led to U.S. airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.
The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for the U.S. airstrikes against Libya.
Gadhafi admitted responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. Former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”
It’s worth remembering that after the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair took the lead in persuading Gadhafi, to give up on Libya’s nuclear program, the first step in his international rehabilitation. In 2003, Libya paid $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of those killed - around $10 million per victim. In 2004 international sanctions imposed on Libya were eased and a raft of Western oil companies signed multi-million dollar contracts to explore and develop oil and natural gas in the country.
You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to see that Libyan compensation payments and the continued incarceration of Megrahi were a small price for Gadhafi to pay to repair his reputation and open the floodgates of Western investment.
The case against Megrahi always stank, and his early release from jail in 2009 added to the smell.
The key witness against him, Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and placed in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” returned to Malta and died there in 2016 aged 75.
But if Megrahi wasn’t responsible, who was?
Lest we forget, in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has been busy in recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in 2014, but popped up on Hezbollah’s Mayadeen TV in 2017 to say he wanted the help of Iranian troops to invade Israel, and, as I recall, oust King Adbullah in Jordan.
The judges at Megrahi’s trial rejected the argument that Jibril was involved.
But much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a U.S. warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.
Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the U.S. and the U.K. until November 1991.
But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front PPSF). When German police raided the Frankfurt apartment in the weeks before the bombing, they also arrested members of the PPSF. It emerged that Talib had been in Malta two months before the bombing. He was cleared of involvement during Megrahi’s trial, despite the fact he had circled the date of the bombing in a calendar found at his apartment. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks a few weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.
The final part of the jigsaw is the Libyan angle. The PFLP-GC was subcontracted dirty deeds for Iran and Syria, but also Libya when it was at the top of the West’s list of terrorist states. Libya’s intelligence service worked closely with a range of terrorist groups. It is possible, even likely, that Megrahi had contact with the PFLP-GC, but not credible that he masterminded and executed the entire Pan Am bombing.
Indeed, given that the authorities were so keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one U.K. government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time.
The full truth about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 may never be known. But what we do know now indicates that the guilty remain unpunished.
The wheels of justice do turn slowly, but they have still yet to grind sufficiently finely to bring justice to the 270 people who were murdered over the skies of Scotland in 1988.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in The Daily Star on Monday, March 16, 2020.
