21 Dec 1988 - Lockerbie, The Maltese Double Cross?

[karlos]

By Mark Trevelyan

LONDON (Reuters) - Lawyers for a Libyan man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing demanded access on Thursday to evidence from an unnamed foreign state which they believe could undermine the case against him.

Maggie Scott, representing former Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, made the request at the first court hearing in the case since an independent commission decided in June that he should be granted a new appeal.

She said one of the documents the defense is seeking is related to the type of timer used in the bomb, which blew up a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people including 189 Americans.

Media reports had suggested the missing document, which has never been shown to the defense, was supplied to the prosecution by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its disclosure could help clear Megrahi, serving a life sentence in a Scottish jail.

But prosecuting counsel Ronnie Clancy said the document had not come from the United States or its agencies, although he did not disclose the country involved.

He said it had been handed to Scotland's Crown Office, the public prosecuting authority, on the basis that it should remain confidential, and the Crown had always tried to respect this. He asked to be given six weeks to respond to the defense request.

Jim Swire, a Briton whose daughter Flora died at Lockerbie, told Reuters after attending the hearing in Edinburgh: "I'm horrified to hear of these refusals to divulge information."

Megrahi was convicted of the bombing in 2001, but the review commission said in June it believed he may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.

A successful appeal would throw the case wide open after nearly two decades. It is unclear how Libya would respond.

The North African state has paid more than $2 billion to victims' families on the basis that its agent Megrahi was guilty, a move that has helped its international rehabilitation after long being regarded by the West as a pariah state.

The original trial was told the bomb was triggered by a digital timer called an MST-13, manufactured by a Swiss firm. The court accepted evidence from one of the firm's partners that he had supplied 20 sample MST-13s to Libya in 1985 and 1986.

Some victims' relatives and observers of the case have questioned the evidence relating to the timer, which came from minute fragments discovered among the airliner's wreckage.

Swire has long believed the timer was not an MST-13 but a pressure-triggered device of a kind used by the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), which fell under strong international suspicion in the immediate aftermath of Lockerbie.

He said the source of the missing document might be Israel, Jordan or Germany. West Germany authorities had investigated the PFLP-GC, and the feeder flight for the doomed plane had taken off from Frankfurt.

[karlos]

The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.
The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air. Britain and the US blamed Libya, saying that its leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.
He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi's appeal.

The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside.

Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. 'Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.'

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.'

Back in Switzerland, Bollier's company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.'

[zennon]

Well * me, what are the odds of finding this page after hearing what I have today? I know what happened over Lockerbie and it's going to blow your * mind. Three words: CIA, drugs, assassination.

Many of you would have an idea of what really happened that day, and the link between the CIA and drugs but I'll lay it out here clear and simple.

Why was Pam Am 103 shot down? And why did Libya take the rap for it? According to MP for Lockerbie Tam Danyell is was a "business deal"; and he's spot on. In a tit-for-tat deal Libya claimed responsibility and had three UN sanctions against it removed.

The air embargo against Libya was crippling the economy and at the time there was a huge shortage of polio vaccinations. Anyone who traded with Libya would have had their assets frozen. Libya has the 6th largest reserve of "good" oil reserves, the king which meant it was very cheap to extract and process but lack of investment was crippling it's economy. After they took the rap and had the sanctions removes huge investment flooded in.

A company called "Interforce", which consists of ex-intelligence officers from the CIA, Mossad etc. released a report of their findings, and it'll blow you away:

It concluded that Eight CIA officers were on board that day who were involved in directing drug traffic involving one "Ghazer" (wrong spelling) who was a DEA officer. the DEA and the CIA had been using Pan Am flights for years to courier hard drugs, heroin, and narcotics which were distributed by the CIA across the US in Detroit, St. Louis, LA and New York.

The plane was blown up because the agents were coming back to the US to blow the cover on that operation, pissed off because they were told it would be escalated.

In Jan 1990 the Toronto Star had an article saying that Eight CIA operatives were on the flight led by Major General Charles Dennis Mckee.

A secret FBI field report revealed there was no suitcase originating in Malta where the accused Libyans allegedly travelled through. Instead it was a CIA front company (think Visor Consultants).

Chairman of Pam Am Thomas Planket was quoted as saying something along the lines of "I thought I was running a airline, not a drug running courier service". This was put forward by Congressman Thomas Trafficante.

Funds from the drug running service came to about $5 billion annually and was integrated with US banking system processed through Morgan Stanley.

[utopiated]

The following is an article sent to me by Dr Jim Swire who's daughter was killed in the Lockerbie crash.



The story of this man's presence in the Lockerbie briefing unit broke during the Zeist trial. Prof. Grant, whose unit it was, was appalled, and the unit did not seem to recover from the revelation.

This is belated confirmation of what we then thought and seems to be but one tiny piece in the jigsaw of protection/concealement devised to prevent full exposure of the behaviour of US and UK personnel involved in creating diversions to conceal the truth over Lockerbie.

Jim S.



Former spy in line for top Scottish Tory job

[utopiated]

More articles about a possible film of the Pan Am 103 narco-terror episode.

For those who don't know the long and complex story of the Lockerbie "crash" - Aviv is a former Israeli agent who now runs an intel investigation service in the US. His conclusions on the whole Lockerbie affair was a damning indictment of the US investigation....

Once you get a grip of what went on you can see how his version could easily become a film - and I don't mean that on a non-reality level - in fact his version of events is far closer to the truth as we'll ever get. That's my opinion after 5 years personal research inot the event and it's aftermath.

[PaulStott]

This is interesting, as it is rare to see ex (?) spooks named so blatantly.

I would have like to know more about the military career of Shadow Home Secretary David Davis (he is often referred to as ex-SAS reserve) and if anyone can read Serbian, the papers in the former Yugoslavia have long since been convinced that Paddy Ashdown is MI6.

[utopiated]

[PaulStott]

Ashdown has already proved himself in such a role - when in post in as the UN high Representative for Bosnia, he was sarcastically known as the "Viceroy of Bosnia", to his critics.

I can't recall the name of the Serb politician who replaced Milosevic as President, but I do know that the first foreign politician he met was Ashdown, who at the time was the ex-leader of the 3rd largest party in British politics. Why?

Oh - on Ashdown's MI6 connections, Lobster magazine has debated them in the past.

[utopiated]

[utopiated]

Here's another instalment on the Lockerbie plane crash that I've been posting on this forum for ages.

The first section [in BOLD] is a commentary by Dr. Jim Swire. You need to read this before going on the the bottom article.

I advise anyone interested to get a copy of Coleman's book. The US intel crowd went to great lengths to harrass him into not publishing and disclosing what he knew from his time in the DIA.

DG
==

Quote:

This is an interesting article claiming to 'rubbish' what was basically the story behind 'the Maltese Double Cross' film and Les Coleman's book.[Trail of the Octopus] It fails to provide any more convincing evidence than Zeist did concerning Malta and Libya. I know no independent and reliable evidence to support any of the stuff about the drugs run being used by the terrorists. On the contrary there is excellent evidence that one suitcase filled with 'a white powder in sachets' was found at the crash site by a local apparently entirely reliable source, who had no reason to lie and who could not conceivably be a member of the 'smoke and mirrors brigade'. This suitcase was removed from the field where it was found and never appeared in the list of objects found on the site. The finder and the existence of this suitcase were not mentioned at Zeist.[Afficionados will recall that McKee's suitcase had also been removed from the crash site but then returned for the police to find, so the complete removal of a second one may come as no great surprise, and should alert the enquiring mind as to the understandable lack of police control in the first few days, in the face of a powerful and immediate American presence. It even appears from the evidence of Dr David Fieldhouse that there is doubt as to the number of BODIES found on site] This shows that drugs were being carried on this flight (no surprise there), and their existence being concealed from the criminal investigation. But it also suggests that the 'drug route' was NOT used to plant the bomb, else the suitcase would not have fallen more or less intact. It does appear that the evidence now available from Frankfurt airport is other than that used at Zeist, but that unlike the allegations here, far from confirming it, destroys the 'evidence' that a bomb suitcase was transferred from an Air Malta flight to Pan Am 103A. [Afficionados will recall that Grenada TV were sued by Air Malta for claiming that the bomb was carried on their aircraft, and that Grenada rapidly settled out of court.] William of Occam, I still think, using his calm and powerful philosophy of simplicity, would favour the device having been inserted at Heathrow, following the break-in there and put into the container where the head baggage handler (Bedford) saw the case containing it, the following evening, put there perhaps by IranAir staff who were to hand and had opportunity aplenty. The material evidence from Zeist about timer and pressure switch performance, and the 38 minutes flight time (ignoring the famous fragment PT35B of course) still strongly favours a Syrian built IED, which could not possibly have come via the Frankfurt flight (PA103A) that night, because of the chronology at Heathrow. * * | Sunday, May 11, 2008 From AJR, September 1992 PanAm Scam How two self-styled intelligence agents took the news media for a ride. By Steven Emerson Steven Emerson is a Washington, D.C. based reporter who writes frequently on U.S. intelligence and the Middle East. His most recent books are "Terrorist" and "The Fall of Pan Am 103." Michael Schafer is a 39-year-old American who owns a floor cleaning company in Atlanta. In late April, he received a phone call notifying him that his photo was in the current issue of Time magazine. Schafer found a copy and began leafing through the cover story, "The Untold Story of Pan Am 103." Near the bottom of page 31 was a passport-size photo. It was his picture. But the caption identified the person as "David Lovejoy, a reported double agent for the U.S. and Iran." "I just couldn't believe what I was looking at," says Schafer. "There it was in front of millions and millions of people – Time magazine accusing me of being a terrorist!" Time obviously screwed up. Publications, even ones as reputable as Time, make mistakes. But in this case, misidentifying Schafer was only one indication that something was amiss. More troubling was the article's reliance on self-described "intelligence operatives" who had already convinced a number of news organizations, including ABC, NBC and Barron's, as well as the now-defunct Pan American World Airways, that they knew the true story behind the December 1988 bombing. Time not only ignored evidence that contradicted key elements of its story, but it also discounted information that disputed the credibility of its two main sources. The fact that both sources had a financial interest in the story should have made the magazine even more skeptical: They were paid consultants for Pan Am attorneys fighting a multimillion - dollar negligence claim by the victims' families, who alleged the airline's careless baggage handling allowed the tragedy to happen. If Time's sources were correct in their contention that U.S. undercover agents could have prevented the bombing, Pan Am probably would not be found liable. The Time story and similar ones preceding it have been dismissed as baseless by U.S. and British officials who investigated the bombing. Nevertheless, Time editors insist their story is accurate. "We stand by this story as a good faith effort to explain the bombing," says John Stacks, Time's chief of correspondents. "This piece went through the same vetting procedure as all other articles." The "Untold" Story Time's April 27 cover story, written by veteran correspondent Roy Rowan, described a conspiracy involving U.S. agents of the CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who allegedly collaborated, wittingly and unwittingly, in a Byzantine plot in which terrorists and drug traffickers bombed Pan Am 103 on December 22, 1988. It killed all 259 passengers and crew members as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, where the plane crashed. The story, according to Rowan, goes like this: • In the late 1980s the CIA operated a "freewheeling" unit in the Middle East, known as COREA, that trafficked in "drugs and arms in order to gain access to terrorist groups." The CIA and the DEA also was secretly cooperating with a Syrian drug trafficker and arms dealer named Monzer al-Kassar. In return for his help in obtaining the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, COREA allowed al-Kassar to ship drugs to the United States on U.S. airlines. Meanwhile, the DEA was using al-Kassar's drug-smuggling ring in a sting operation designed to flush out drug dealers in Detroit, Los Angeles and Houston – cities with large Arab populations. • At about the same time, Syrian terrorist Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, was contracted by the Iranian government to avenge the downing of an Iranian Airbus by the U.S.S. Vincennes in July 1988. Jibril solicited and received al-Kassar's pledge to help by using his "CIA-assisted drug and arms business" to plant a bomb on an American plane. Al-Kassar was "reluctant" to get involved because he didn't want to disrupt his profitable smuggling operation, but he went along with the plan. • Jibril had an additional motive for the bombing: He wanted to eliminate a U.S. "intelligence team" that was working on a plan to rescue American hostages in Beirut. U.S. military intelligence official Charles "Tiny" McKee, who had been stationed in Beirut to collect information on the whereabouts of American hostages, learned of the CIA's secret COREA unit. McKee had complained to the CIA about COREA's ties to al-Kassar, but the agency had failed to respond. Furious at the agency's silence, McKee and four other U.S. intelligence operatives "decided to fly back to Virginia unannounced and expose the COREA unit's secret deal with al-Kassar." • Tehran found out about McKee's plans from an American double agent named David Lovejoy, "a one-time State Department security officer." Armed with this information, Jibril's group was able to target McKee and the other officials who had flown from Cyprus to London, where they changed planes, boarding Pan Am 103. To do this, the terrorists – with al-Kassar's assistance – switched a suitcase containing a bomb for a suitcase containing drugs and loaded it onto Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt. The plane picked up the McKee team and others in London. • Al-Kassar wasn't involved in selecting the target or the date of the bombing. But after an Israeli agent warned German and U.S. intelligence agents about a terrorist attack on a U.S. airliner leaving Frankfurt "on or about December 18," al-Kassar – "playing both sides of the fence" – told COREA that Pan Am 103 was Jibril's "most likely target." The CIA could have foiled the plot, but, as one purported source charged, the agency "knew about it and screwed up." The Mistold Story In 1990 the independent President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism examined the same allegations – initially raised in 1989 – and found "no foundation for speculation in press accounts that U.S. government officials had participated tacitly or otherwise in any supposed operation at Frankurt Airport having anything to do with the sabotage of Flight 103." More recently, officials at the Justice Department, FBI and DEA have called the Time story – and the stories by ABC, NBC and others that preceded it – fabrications. And the findings of the U.S.-British Pan Am 103 investigation – the most comprehensive counterterrorist probe in history – completely contradict the Time cover story. The bombing inquiry included hundreds of investigators who spent three years on the case, conducting more than 14,000 interviews in 53 countries. Initially the investigators concluded that Syria and Iran were responsible. But in the summer of 1990 the investigation took a dramatic turn, and in November 1991 the U.S. Justice Department obtained the indictments of two Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, on charges they conspired to bomb the plane. According to the indictments and other government and airline records, a remnant from a microchip in the bomb's timer identified in mid-1990 showed that the timer was one of many acquired by Libyan intelligence operatives and that the suitcase containing the bomb was loaded onto an Air Malta flight and transferred twice : at Frankfurt Airport onto a Boeing 727 with the Pan Am 103 flight number, and again onto a Boeing 747, also called Pan Am 103, at London's Heathrow Airport. According to U.S. officials, the evidence was further buttressed by a Libyan government agent who defected to the United States last year. The indictments generated some controversy, leading several critics to charge that the U.S. government might be engaged in a cover-up. Some victims' families alleged that the indictments of the Libyans – and the fact that no Syrians were named – were a reward for Syria's involvement in the Desert Storm campaign and an attempt to persuade Syria to help win the release of American hostages. President Bush rushed to claim that the indictments exonerated Syria. "Syria took a bum rap on this," he told reporters. Time exploited this controversy to advance a radically different explanation for the bombing, one that was being promoted by, among others, an ex-Israeli named Juval Aviv. In fact, Time's investigation appears to be drawn largely from a report assembled by Aviv, now a U.S. citizen. Aviv is president of Interfor, a New York-based international security firm hired by Pan Am's attorneys in June 1989 to build a case to defend the airline from negligence charges. Less than three months after Pan Am hired Aviv, he "solved" the mystery of who carried out the bombing. Claiming to have collected information from his own sources – none of whom he would identify – Aviv assembled a 26-page report and later made it available to the press. Two-and-a-half-years later he would give a longer version to Time. A line-by-line reading of Rowan's article and the updated Aviv report shows that Rowan repeated many of its most controversial allegations. When carefully scrutinized, Aviv's report turns out to be a mixture of unsubstantiated declarations, previously reported arcane facts, and widely known information (such as the fact that passenger Khalid Jaffar initially was considered a suspect in carrying the bomb aboard the plane in Frankfurt) – all woven together in a tapestry of demonstrably false and largely uncorroborated theory. Aviv even asserts that German intelligence agents gave the CIA a videotape of the bomb being put aboard the plane. He claimed to have seen the video and promised reporters he would obtain a copy – a promise he has never kept. Equally problematic is Aviv's background, which is decidedly different than what he told Pan Am and the press. Aviv says he worked for the Mossad, Israel's secret service. He also has claimed that he was personally responsible for tracking down and killing the Palestinian terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Rowan acknowledges that "Israeli and U.S. intelligence sources deny Aviv was ever associated with Mossad," but does not challenge further Aviv's background and repeats Aviv's claim that he was a Mossad agent. Staff members of the the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism checked Aviv's background and concluded that he had "fabricated" his credentials. The commission also had received a May 1990 report from Yigal Carmon, Israel's top counterterrorism official, which states that Aviv "never worked for the intelligence community of the State of Israel" and that the only connection he had to security work was a job he held as a "junior security officer" for the Israeli airline El Al. He was fired in April 1974 after less than 18 months work for being "unreliable and dishonest." Aviv, the report further notes, "has been involved during the years (after being dismissed from El-Al) in various acts of fraud and impersonation." Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's Pan Am 103 investigation, says Aviv was never in Israeli intelligence and that "none of his allegations have any basis in fact. He's a fabricator and a scam artist." Aviv refused to be interviewed for this article. The Observer Weighs In Because his report lacked substantiation, Aviv might have been ignored by the media except for one development: Once Pan Am received his report in October 1989, its lawyers issued subpoenas to the CIA, DEA, FBI and other government agencies. The detailed descriptions in the subpoenas reiterated Aviv's claims. To some journalists, the fact that Pan Am had issued subpoenas seemed to legitimize the charges. Within weeks, the combination of the subpoenas and the "leak" of Aviv's report resulted in a spate of headlines in Britain and the United States. In response, the U.S. Senate and House intelligence committees asked for briefings from the CIA, FBI and Pentagon about Aviv's charges. In a series of classified briefings in November and December 1989, CIA and FBI officials told the committees there was no substance to the allegations. The first journalists to report critically on the Aviv report were John Merritt and Simon de Bruxelles of the London-based Observer. In November 1989, Merritt began to scrutinize the few allegations that were subject to independent verification. Merritt and de Bruxelles went over the report with painstaking detail. For example, Aviv had alleged that terrorist-drug trafficker al-Kassar had rented a car from a Paris car rental agency on November 25, 1988, and driven it to Frankfurt and back. But Merritt obtained the rental agency's records and found that no car rented at that time logged enough miles to cover such a trip. The Observer reporters also found that COREA – which Aviv (and later ABC, NBC and Time) claimed was a CIA unit or operation – was in fact the "designated code word for communications [among an official] group of police, customs, and intelligence services cooperating in Europe" on terrorism and violence. The group, TREVI, has an office in Brussels. Despite Merritt's findings, Aviv's misrepresentation of COREA as a renegade intelligence unit would be repeated by the media for the next two-and-a-half years. Merritt also found that Aviv's report contained passages about European law enforcement surveillance of al-Kassar that were similar to those in an obscure 1984 German nonfiction book ("Der Pate Der Terroriste" by Manfred Mohrstein) that has never been translated into English. "Aviv had pieced together known events and facts together in a wild conspiracy," Merritt says. "He's never been in the Mossad." The Retold Story The Aviv conspiracy story died down until late October 1990, when a slightly newer version was broadcast as the lead news item on NBC and ABC evening and morning news shows. Instead of blaming the CIA for allowing the tragedy to happen, the two networks shifted the spotlight to the DEA. NBC's Brian Ross reported that terrorists may have infiltrated a DEA undercover drug sting in which a 20-year-old passenger with dual Lebanese-U.S. citizenship, Khalid Jaffar, had been working as an informant and courier for U.S. agents. NBC reported that terrorists had secretly switched a suitcase containing a bomb for Jaffar's suitcase, which contained heroin. NBC said the name of the DEA Beirut-Cyprus-Frankfurt-Detroit drug operation was "Courier." ABC's Pierre Salinger reported the same allegation, but said the DEA drug operation was called "Corea" and was discontinued two months before the bombing. Salinger also suggested the DEA was involved in a cover-up. Despite competitive pressures, CBS refused to air the story. Ira Silverman, Ross' producer at NBC, says the network's story was triggered by the fact that DEA was "calling in their own people – sources and subsources – to determine for themselves whether DEA operations were connected to the bombing." He says that he and Ross were concerned that DEA may have lost control of some of its informants, who may have been providing terrorists information about DEA sting operations. Salinger says he stands by his story. "The fact that there was a drug operation in Frankfurt and in Cyprus was verified and the fact that the drug operation was called off a month before the Pan Am 103 bombing also has been verified," he says. However, Salinger acknowledges, "There is no proof of the connection between the drug operation and the bombing." Besieged by inquiries from the press and Congress – which announced it would hold hearings – the DEA accelerated its investigation. Within a week the agency reviewed every file from the previous five years and sent inquiries to its agents overseas. The evidence collected by the DEA – and independently confirmed by the FBI – showed that the allegations reported by NBC and ABC were baseless. The DEA produced a 350-page classified report in November 1990, released information to reporters, and then sent agency officials to testify in open congressional hearings in mid-December. According to the agency, there was no DEA operation or unit named "Corea," "Courier" or anything similar to that name. Passenger Jaffar had never been used as an informant or subsource, and no DEA office or agent ever had any contact with him. According to FBI and Scotland Yard forensic analyses, Jaffar's two pieces of luggage showed no signs of explosives or drugs – a conclusion publicly confirmed by Scotland's Fatal Accident Inquiry Board. (If one of Jaffar's bags had been "switched" after checking in, then that bag would have remained in Frankfurt. But both of his bags were accounted for.) Finally, there had been no "controlled deliveries" of drugs or sting operations through Cyprus or Frankfurt since 1987. There had been three controlled deliveries through Frankfurt between 1983 and 1987, but none involved Pan Am planes. Still, some journalists were not convinced. In its December 17, 1990 issue, Barron's published a lengthy article reporting virtually everything in the Aviv report. The conspiracy theory would not die. A New Source The reports by NBC and ABC were also based on information from a new player in the conspiracy story: Lester Coleman. Coleman, who said he was a top operative for both the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an arm of the Pentagon, and the DEA in the Middle East, had been hired by Pan Am in mid-1990 to assist in the Pan Am 103 investigation. To journalists and Pan Am attorneys, Coleman was a dream come true. He said he was willing to talk about everything he knew – including a purported DEA sting operation that he believed led to the bombing of Pan Am 103. Coleman alleged that passenger Jaffar was one of his "informants" who served as a U.S. courier from Lebanon via the Frankfurt Airport as part of a DEA-sanctioned sting operation. Conspiracy supporters claimed that Coleman's allegations independently corroborated Aviv's story. But, in fact, Coleman had teamed up with Aviv earlier in 1990 after reading about Aviv's investigation. An internal November 1990 DEA memo reported that Aviv told a DEA agent that Coleman had contacted him several months before and that "Coleman was approaching different people offering to sell information about the Pan Am 103 bombing." Journalists who were in regular contact with Coleman also confirmed that he collaborated with Aviv. By the time NBC and ABC interviewed Coleman, he had worked out his story with Aviv. Coleman also was a principal source for Time's cover story a year-and-a-half later. Rowan reported Coleman's allegations as facts, repeating his description of himself as a top DIA agent working undercover for the DEA in Cyprus and intimately involved in covert "controlled drug operations" for the U.S. government. Calling Coleman Pan Am's "key witness," Rowan wrote that Coleman "spotted a newspaper picture of one of the Pan Am victims" and recognized him as one of his "drug-running informants" from Lebanon – Khalid Jaffar. Coleman, said Rowan, then contacted Pan Am. Rowan quoted a source who suggested that Coleman was arrested in May 1990 in the United States on "trumped-up charges" in order to keep him quiet. Coleman, Rowan wrote, is now "hiding in fear of his life in a small town in Europe." In fact, Coleman fled the United States rather than stand trial after his arrest for passport fraud. The charge of passport fraud is a minor indication that Coleman may not be completely honest. DEA documents, court records and interviews with journalists and government officials show him to be someone who operated at the periphery of U.S. government agencies but repeatedly exaggerated his work and involvement in anti-terrorist and anti-drug operations. Rather than serving as an agent, DEA files state that Coleman was a freelance journalist in the Middle East who also worked as a U.S. informant. Coleman is married to a Lebanese woman, and therefore has an identity card that allowed him to move freely in and out of Lebanon. An internal DEA memo states the agency hired Coleman on January 31, 1986 as a "confidential informant" in Cyprus for a 10-month period and again between February 1987 and June 1988. He was hired, according to the memo, after he "offered to video record the opium/cannabis production in Lebanon." But in June 1988, Coleman was "deactivated" by the DEA for "unsatisfactory behavior," which included selling DEA information illegally to Soldier of Fortune magazine and "obtaining goods and services" on Cyprus under "false pretenses." Coleman's file at DEA states that he had been "caught up in a quagmire of fabrications with DEA, the Cyprus Police Force and his] subsources and other associates in Cyprus." To bolster Coleman's credibility, Rowan reported that Micheal Hurley, DEA's country attaché in Cyprus, "admitted in a Justice Department affidavit that he had paid Coleman $74,000 for information." But Rowan omitted nearly everything else in Hurley's detailed nine-page affidavit. Hurley stated flatly that there was no substance to Coleman's assertions and that Coleman had misrepresented his activities, bounced checks to subsources, and had been banned from Cyprus for failing to pay his bills. Furthermore, Rowan didn't contact Hurley. Had he done so, Hurley says he would have provided him with a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone call between Coleman and a friend in which Coleman admitted that he never met Pan Am 103 passenger Jaffar – whom Coleman had identified as "one of his drug-running informants" to Time, NBC and ABC. Besides U.S. government agencies, several journalists also have discovered Coleman has credibility problems. For example, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Ron Martz and Lloyd M. Burchette Jr. went to Cyprus in 1988 to do research for a story on drug trafficking and terrorism. They hired Coleman as a consultant. "Les promised to provide us access to all sorts of people and it's clear that he had greatly exaggerated his contacts," Martz says. "We soon found out what the Cypriot police already knew: He was a wannabe, scurrying around on the fringes... He was a great fabricator; he had a great ability to spin a yarn. I'm embarrassed to say that he even convinced me." Burchette, now a screenwriter, recalls that Coleman continuously ran up hotel and telephone bills without delivering on any of his promises. "We were suckered," he says. "Coleman was a first-rate liar." Following his arrest for passport fraud in May 1990, Coleman unsuccessfully tried to get DEA officials to quash the case against him. Embittered both by his termination from DEA and by the agency's refusal to protect him, Coleman apparently sought revenge, in particular against DEA agent Hurley, who had fired him. Revenge – in the form of the phony Pan Am story – would prove to be financially rewarding as well. In a telephone conversation with Burchette in November 1990, Coleman said that he had provided information to ABC and NBC and that Pan Am was paying him for his information. "Coleman was snickering that he had pulled the wool over the networks' eyes," Burchette recalls. "He even admitted to me that he didn't know who Khalid Jaffar was." Coleman had just told ABC and NBC – and they reported – that Jaffar was a drug courier for the DEA. The two networks were the first of many media outlets to be misled by Coleman over the next year. For example, in the Sunday (London) Times on July 22, 1991, Coleman's assertions – ranging from his claims about being an intelligence agent to his allegations about a drug sting aboard Pan Am 103 – were again reported uncritically. The payoff for Coleman, who along with Aviv was working for Pan Am, has been significant. The two men have been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Pan Am's attorneys, according to officials close to the case. Pan Am's law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, would not comment. Having conned journalists about their inside knowledge of the bombing of Pan Am 103, Aviv and Coleman began plugging into other conspiracies fanned by various American reporters. INSLAW, a small company that alleges the Justice Department stole computer software from it, retained Aviv as an investigator. Prominent television shows such as "Nightline" and "60 Minutes" also have used Aviv as a consultant. Meanwhile, Coleman provided INSLAW with an affidavit claiming he has evidence linking the DEA, the Iran-contra scandal, the BCCI scandal and the INSLAW affair. Like Aviv, Coleman refused to be interviewed for this article. More Problems Aside from its acceptance of Aviv and Coleman's allegations, Rowan's story had a number of other half-truths, misstatements and omissions. Among them: • Rowan reported that in January 1990, Aviv, a Pan Am attorney and a "polygraph specialist" administered lie detector tests to two Frankfurt Airport Pan Am baggage handlers suspected of allowing the bomb on board. Rowan reported that both men had flunked their tests and that the polygraph specialist said one was "not truthful" when he denied that he switched suitcases. Rowan neglected to point out that all of the court rulings in the Pan Am 103 case, in addition to FBI and Scotland Yard investigators, have dismissed as totally baseless allegations that the baggage handlers had anything to do with the bombing. • Rowan also reported that the terrorists got the bomb aboard Pan Am 103 because they knew in advance which flight the targeted intelligence agents would be taking. In fact, at least three of the agents made their travel arrangements within 48 hours of the flight. Moreover, the agents flew from Cyprus to London. Rowan never explained how or why terrorists would place a bomb on a plane in Frankfurt in order to target agents travelling on a different route. Moreover, Rowan failed to report that the first leg of Pan Am 103's flight from Frankfurt to London was on a Boeing 727. In London, 49 out of the 125 passengers transferred to a Boeing 747 – also called Pan Am 103 – bound for New York. It was the second plane that blew up over Lockerbie. U.S. and British investigators concluded that the fact that McKee and four other U.S. intelligence agents were aboard Pan Am 103 was a tragic coincidence. • Time did not reveal a potential conflict of interest. Aviv, a key source for Time's Pan Am story, had been working on a project with Rowan for Time's sister company, Warner Books. The publishing company had paid "seed money" to Rowan and Aviv to explore the possibility of the two collaborating on a book about Aviv's life, according to Rowan and Nancy Neiman, a Warner Books executive vice president. Rowan says he could not substantiate enough of Aviv's biography to warrant the project, so he returned the unused portion of the money he had received. Aviv, however, did not return his unused portion, according to sources at Time. Neiman would not comment. Time Chief of Correspondents Stacks said the Warner deal was completely separate from Time. "Time did not pay Aviv anything," he said. "This wasn't checkbook journalism." The Lawsuit The civil lawsuit pitting the victims' families against Pan Am's insurers was scheduled to begin last spring. The Aviv-Coleman conspiracy theory – essentially Pan Am's defense – would be put to the test. The stakes were enormous: If the jury found that the airline's security program had been negligent, Pan Am's insurers would be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. Pan Am itself had gone bankrupt in January 1991 and went out of business last December. The Time cover story appeared a week before the opening of the trial on April 27. Much of Rowan's story was taken from court records and exhibits filed by Pan Am's attorneys before the trial, which included material supporting the Aviv-Coleman allegations. But Pan Am's attorneys never introduced their "key witness" Coleman, Aviv, or the allegation that terrorists infiltrating a CIA-DEA drug sting. According to sources familiar with the defense strategy, Pan Am's attorneys began having doubts about Aviv and Coleman two years ago. Even so, they went along with the conspiracy story because it was their only hope of winning the case. But when the defense attorneys apparently realized that their prize witnesses and their story would be torn to shreds under cross examination, they withdrew the witnesses. Even so, the Aviv-Coleman story showed up on the cover of Time just one week before the trial. Rowan's story was not the first time allegations similar to those outlined in the Aviv report surfaced just before judicial proceedings on the bombing. As David Leppard, author of "On the Trail of Terror," a book on the bombing, pointed out in an article he wrote for the Washington Post in late April, Time's "untold story of Pan Am 103" "appeared twice before under similar circumstances... In autumn 1989, in the midst of evidence-taking in Frankfurt that proved highly critical of Pan Am, the story surfaced in the British and U.S. media. A year later, on the eve of the 1990 inquiry in Scotland, an identical item was reported on NBC-TV." Two days after the Time story appeared, attorneys for the victims' families, in a letter to the court, charged that Pan Am's attorneys were trying to sow confusion in an effort to influence the 550-member jury pool. In the letter, lead attorney Lee Kreindler stated that "false information..appears to have been given to Time by the defendants." Nevertheless, the strategy didn't work. On July 11, a jury found Pan Am liable for "willful misconduct" in its sloppy baggage handling that allowed the bomb on Pan Am 103. False Accusation Time's Rowan stands by his story. He says he independently confirmed the substance of his article and cites the fact that other "stories had also reported these things." He says Aviv and Coleman correctly identified COREA as a secret CIA unit dealing with drugs and weapons. "I buy the notion that COREA was a rogue unit," he says. "I have talked to another intelligence agent. But I can't tell you his name." As for the other allegations in his article, Rowan says, "I only used from Aviv what I could corroborate from another source. There were a lot of things in his report that I could not substantiate and I did not report them. In the case of Coleman, I used things for which I had documentation either from him or from other sources. A lot of people in the government would like to discredit Coleman. I haven't found anything that he told me that was proven wrong. "We made one mistake in identifying [Schafer as] Lovejoy," he acknowledges, "but that wasn't Coleman's error." Michael Schafer and his attorney complained to Time about the false accusation. Time acknowledged in a one-paragraph "correction" four weeks after the Pan Am story was published that the photo was actually that of Schafer and stated it "regrets that Schafer's photograph was used in error." Time said that the photo was "identified in court documents as being of David Lovejoy, a reported double agent for the U.S. and Iran." But how did the photo get into the court records? Former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Burchette believes the picture was given to Pan Am by Coleman, who had worked with Schafer when the latter was a cameraman for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Lebanon in 1985. Burchette recalls that one day in May 1988 in Cyprus, Coleman showed him a letter of identification stating that Michael Schafer "is a representative of CBN News assigned to the Beirut bureau." It included a photo of Schafer – the same photo Time said was "David Lovejoy" – and was signed by Coleman, who was a CBN senior correspondent at the time. A copy of this letter of identification shows that the photo of Schafer and that of "Lovejoy" are exactly the same. "Coleman never thought the picture would ever end up in Time," says Burchette. "He just thought that Pan Am would buy it and that would be it." l

[utopiated]

Follow up point from discussion with Jim Swire

[utopiated]

More info and google video :

http://intergritynews.wetpaint.com/page/The+Strange+Disappearance+of+L ester+K.+Coleman+a.k.a+Lex+Coleman+Reporter,+Talk+Show+Host?t=anon

[utopiated]

And now and update claiming film producer Spielberg has been warned off doing a film with Aviv - the ex-intelligence advisor who's line on Lockerbie seems to be closer to the real events.

Note how it is claimed Emmerson was sacked from media establishments in the US for being a placed agent. This back's up the claim we've made above that his article was part of a wider disinformation campaign in years past but re-dug up recently - what is going on?

I think Project Mockingbird in action - that's what. Alphabet agencies placed in media outlets ready to sway issues. Just as Annie Machon claims that in the UK SIS regularly "brief" the editorial staff of UK papers as to which stories to run with. Project Mockingbird was, to my knowledge, primarily created for the UFO cover-up issue.

Comments from Dr. Jim Swire - reprinted [with persmission] before the confirmation email from Coleman. Of course 'Trail of the Octopus' is true. Knock me down with a feather!

DG.
==

[utopiated]

Spielberg is doing a version of the Pan Am 103 film based on the new [ish] book by ex-mossad agent Aviv.

The story he puts out has been the one I've waffled endlessly on this forum and others for years.

It's also the exact opposite that David Shayler and Annie M. have stuck to since leaving mi-phive.

IE: Libya did not do it.

The truth always outs... even if it's in a film by a Hollywood producer.

One part is innaccurate - there is mention of "drugs for hostages" in this article when this is just another ploy like the Poppy Bush Iran Contra excuse - that was personal gain not for arms or hostages and I doubt this/was is either.

DG


--

From 'OhMyNews' 29th April 08
Spielberg to Direct Lockerbie Bombing Movie

[TonyGosling]

US and British relatives split over release of Lockerbie bomber
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/aug/13/families-oppose-lockerbie-bom ber-release
Simple - and here is why -
Not shown in America
Because of the likelihood of legal action, The Maltese Double Cross - Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in America. It can however be viewed here on the internet, by scrolling down to Allan Francovich - The Maltese Double Cross.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7160854996287567609

[paul wright]

Did anyone see the great Jim Swires interview on BBC 24 today
This father of victim has done his research and knows the Libyan connection is false
The Heathrow break-in prior to this flight?

[Frank Freedom]

More information on the Speilberg film on Lockerbie:

May 2008

[TonyGosling]

These two death dealing psychopaths want him to die in jail, Medieval style, to stop substantive allegations coming out about the CIA bombing their own Pan Am flight 103.
Imagine the Libyan TV and AlJazeera documentary.
Erk!!

Barack Obama: Lockerbie bomber should die in Scottish jail
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/2009/08/19/barack-obama-lockerbie-bo mber-should-die-in-scottish-jail-86908-21607941/

Clinton Says Release of Lockerbie Bomber Would be "Absolutely Wrong"
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/08/clinton-says-release-o f-lockerbie-bomber-would-be-absolutely-wrong.html

[steve44]

Just watched The Maltese Double Cross and it is indeed mind blowing... would urge anyone who hasn't seen it to watch it... does anyone know if this has been shown on MS tv?

[steve44]

Does anyone know where to get this on DVD?... Maltese Double Cross that is

[sheerluck]

steve44,

the Maltese DoubleCross is available as a 270mb wmv file on the pirate bay and other BT sites. It's a fast download right now. Check out also how, where and when Allan Francovich(the film maker) died. You could'nt make it up!!

[xmasdale]

Well the guy's been released back to Libya, gratis the Scottish government.

That means the SNP government in Scotland can show that it at least will not toady to US pressure in the way that the UK government does (eg over the extradition of Gary McKinnon and invading Afghanistan and Iraq). This will tend to increase the SNP's popularity among the Scottish population in the run up to the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence from the UK but within the EU.

[Eckyboy]

I have a horrible feeling that the Intelligence services will carry out a terrorist operation in Scotland after the decision to release Mr al-Megrahi. The Americans hate anyone who defies them and I have no doubt they will look to punish the Scottish stance. They will carry out attacks and then probably claim that terrorists see Scotland as an easy target now. God I hope I am wrong.

Also I agree with you Paul Wright. Dr Jim Swire comes across as very knowledgable and informed with what has happened and depite his terrible loss he shows that he is still able to be fair and just without letting his emotions get the better of him. A terrific example for anyone.

[kbo234]

The Americans did not want the Megrahi appeal to go ahead. They do not want their dirty laundry washed in public.

Although Obama, Clinton, Milliband et al expressed their hypocritical 'disgust' at the situation you can be sure the people they represent are very pleased with this outcome......

.......our leaders can pontificate pompously from the 'moral high ground'(not), never have to face very embarrassing disclosures and generate some more public contempt for arabs/Muslims while reminding everyone who the 'terrorists' are.

Watch "The Maltese Double Cross" on Google Video and get some idea of the perfidy, double dealing, international criminality and knowing sacrifice of innocent human life that our US/UK people were involved in......never mind the Iranians who were determined to extract revenge for the US shooting down of one of their airbuses.

This one was a definite LIHOP.....but of a very complex kind.

[Eckyboy]

I don't doubt it kbo234. You are probably spot on with the whole false outrage (or are they really oblivious to what is going on?) statements but I still think that the people behind the scenes with the help of MI6 (or Murderers Incorporated as I like to call them) could use Scotland for their next false flag ops.

Is there anyway to get a dvd copy of The Maltese Double Cross Kbo234 I would prefer that to viewing it online.

[xmasdale]

[kbo234]

Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the plane crash and was the 'leader of the victims' relatives, is adamant that Megrahi is innocent. He is surely correct.



Lockerbie: Megrahi's release means truth of who was behind bombing may never be known

Aug 21 2009 By Charlie Gall

THE bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 is likely to remain an unsolved mystery, it was claimed last night.

As Megrahi went home to Libya to die, the controversy over what really happened over Lockerbie almost 21 years ago showed no signs of fading away.

And while some people demanded answers and claimed there were cover-ups, a legal expert close to the case said he feared relatives mourning the 270 dead would never know the truth.

Professor Peter Duff spent three-and-a-half years reviewing the case as a member of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. They referred Megrahi's challenge against his conviction back to the Appeal Court.

But he admitted: "I think it highly unlikely that the truth is out there and would have emerged as a result of the appeal.

"I don't know if it's out there any more."

Law lecturer Duff, from Aberdeen, backed the decision to release Megrahi, saying: "Regardless of whether he committed the crime or not, we want to show we are more civilised than the people who commit such crimes.

"One way of doing that is to exercise compassion."

The professor was wary of discussing new evidence an appeal had been expected to throw up.

But he said: "I am happy to say, from a purely personal point of view, that it's disappointing his appeal has not gone ahead.

"I would have been very interested to see how it came out.

"From a lawyer's point of view, I would have been very interested to see how the legal issues played out, not the facts.

"For a lot of people, there would have been interest to see what facts would come out."

Duff does not rule out a public inquiry but is sceptical about what more it could uncover about Scotland's biggest mass murder.

He said: "An official or a public inquiry might satisfy some people but I don't think there is a lot more that can be discovered.

"There's a supposition that a whole load of material would have come out at the appeal which would have painted the whole picture. That's not the case at all.

"There aren't any answers in there. We might see an independent inquiry but I don't think it will get anywhere.

"It won't be the fault of the independent inquiry but I don't think it will."

Libyan intelligence agent Megrahi was first identified as a suspect three years after the Lockerbie atrocity, along with his countryman Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

It took another nine years of diplomatic manoeuvres and the painstaking collection of evidence before the two men finally went on trial at the specially created Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

In January 2001, Megrahi was found guilty of mass murder and jailed for life with a minimum term of 20 years.

Fhimah was found not guilty and freed to return to Libya.

But there has long been disquiet among the families of some of the victims over parts of the evidence brought forward at the trial and the witnesses who were called.

They also claim that bizarre occurrences such as a break-in at Heathrow airport on the morning of the bombing were covered up to allow the charges against the Libyans to proceed.

Briton Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora, 24, was killed in the tragedy, is adamant that Megrahi was an innocent man, insisting: "As time goes by it will become clear he had nothing to do with it."

Dr Swire said: "We should be looking for a full-blown, empowered enquiry into why Westminster and Whitehall concealed that evidence so the trial could proceed on the unlikely hypothesis that Megrahi put the device on board at Malta then had it transferred at Frankfurt and again at Heathrow.

"It never did seem to hold water, it doesn't hold water to inspection now.

Protect "And I think it's about time our own government got around to admitting what they knew beforehand and why they didn't protect our loved ones.

"I feel despondent that the West, and in particular Scotland, didn't have the guts to allow this man's second appeal to continue because I am convinced, if they had done so, he would have overturned the verdict against him.

"It is a blow to those of us who seek the truth but it's not an ending. It's time we knew who killed our loved ones."

Jean Berkley, 78, of Northumberland, lost her son Alistair, 29.

She represents UK families who lost relatives in the attack and want a full independent inquiry into the atrocity.

She said: "Our big disappointment about the circumstances of this is that he had unnecessarily dropped his appeal, because he didn't need to drop the appeal in order to have compassionate release.

"The Scottish Criminal Cases Review said there were grounds for the appeal and we cannot now hear the evidence that made them come to that decision.

"We know very little really and we are not in a position really to make a judgment about whether Megrahi was involved or not.

"We are left with a mystery here." In August 2003, Britain introduced a UN resolution to lift sanctions against Libya after Tripoli accepted the blame for the Lockerbie bombing and agreed to compensate the victims' families.

But Libyan prime minister Dr Shukri Ghanem said just a month later that the payment did not represent an admission of Libya's guilt.

And a variety of other possible bombers have been identified in the years since the disaster.

Iran was initially the prime suspect and had the most obvious motive for bombing a US airliner in December 1988.

Five months earlier, an Iranian civilian aircraft was shot down by the US warship the USS Vincennes and Ayatollah Khomeini called for revenge.

The theory is that Iran paid the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) to carry out the attack on its behalf.

But the group has denied any involvement in Lockerbie and one of the main named suspects, Mohammed Abu Talb, gave evidence at Megrahi's trial, offering an alibi.

There were also hazy claims that Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who died in 2002 and who had lived in Libya in the late 1980s, had boasted of carrying out the attacks.

Last night, the verdict was mixed on Kenny MacAskill's decision to release Megrahi, which will be debated by the Scottish parliament on Monday.

Tam Dalyell, the former Labour MP, said: "He has reached the right decision on compassionate grounds.

"I do not accept his endorsement of the guilt of Mr Megrahi, whom I continue to believe had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime of Lockerbie."

But Scots Labour leader Iain Gray said: "If I was First Minister, Megrahi would not be going back to Libya. The decision to release him is wrong. He was convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity in our history."

Tory leader David Cameron said: "This man was convicted of murdering 270 people, he showed no compassion, they weren't allowed to go home and die with their relatives in their own bed and I think this is a very bad decision."

But Martin Cadman, 84, from Norfolk, who lost his son Bill, said: "I'm very pleased he has been released on compassionate grounds because I don't think he was the right person to be there anyway.

"It is just righting a wrong. The trial was a farce. "

Countdown to release

TIMELINE

December 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York explodes over Lockerbie, killing 259 people on board and 11 in the town.

November 14, 1991: US and Scottish authorities indict Libyan intelligence officials Megrahi and Fhimah in the bombing. January 21, 1992: UN Security Council demand Libya hand over the pair but a Libyan judge later that year rejects extradition demands. December 11, 1996: Megrahi insists he is innocent and says he is willing to stand trial in a neutral country.

May 3, 2000: Trial on charges of conspiracy and murder opens at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands under Scottish law.

January 31, 2001: Megrahi found guilty and jailed for life. Fhimah acquitted. January 23, 2002: Megrahi appeal begins but judges later uphold the conviction. August 15, 2003: Libya officially accepts responsibility for Lockerbie and agrees to pay restitution to relatives of the victims. September 2003: UN Security Council approve the lifting of UN sanctions against Libya.

March 2004: Then Prime Minister Tony Blair meets Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi in a tent outside Tripoli and offers the "hand of friendship". February 24 2005: Megrahi is moved to Greenock prison. October 2008: Megrahi is diagnosed with prostate cancer.

April 28 2009: Megrahi begins his second appeal. The court hears his health has deteriorated. April 29 2009: Prisoner transfer agreement between Britain and Libya comes into force, allowing Megrahi to apply to serve the rest of his sentence in a Libyan jail - if he drops his second appeal.

August 14 2009: Megrahi applies to drop his second appeal.

August 20 2009: Kenny MacAskill announces Megrahi is free.

[kbo234]

One small(ish) detail from 'The Maltese double Cross' of which I had been unaware was the fact that Pik Botha and a bunch of his South African security personnel....and a number (not all) of CIA staff were booked on to Pan Am 103 but these people were taken off the passenger lists and switched to other flights.

Familiar stuff????

This is why Dr Jim Swire said that his government " obviously valued some lives more than others" and that it was a great scandal that his daughter had not been saved liked the others.

If, as is alleged, that there were CIA agents determined to blow the whistle on CIA involvement in the global drugs trade......then that would provide a very strong motive for more highly placed CIA puppeteers to conspire in having them 'done away with'.

'Collateral damage', as we have seen in so many other cases, is of absolutely no concern to these people.

In fact it serves a positive purpose in empowering their satanic narratives.

[TonyGosling]

More on the big false flag of the month
Interesting 2007 Lockerbie article which suggests a cover-up.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

CIA Involvement: Police chief: Lockerbie evidence was faked
CIA planted tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people
by Marcello Mega
Global Research, August 25, 2009
The Scotsman - 2006-08-28
This report was published by The Scotsman exactly three years ago. "the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people."
A former Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.
The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.
The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.......
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14908