Marwan Khreesat
Marwan Abd Rezak Mufti Khreesat of Jordanian nationality is a terrorist bomb-maker who was active with Ahmed Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) in the early 1970s and again in the mid-late 1980s. Marwan Khreesat's speciality was the altimeter bomb - designed to kill airliners. The IED would be hidden inside electronics such as a radio/cassette player, packed in a suitcase and only detonate after reaching a certain altitude.
By 1988 at the latest, Marwan Khreesat was also working for Jordanian intelligence, General Intelligence Directorate (GID), making him a double agent when he was called back into Ahmed Jibril's fold in the autumn of 1988. To help Iran avenge the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988, a PFLP-GC cell was formed in Neuss/Frankfurt, West Germany, and centered around helping Khreesat build more altimeter bombs. His Jordanian GID bosses instructed him to infiltrate the PFLP-GC cell and not to arm any of his bombs. Instead, four armed bombs were intercepted in the October 1988 operation 'Autumn Leaves' raid by West German police, with a fifth IED disappearing just six weeks before the Lockerbie bombing of 21 December 1988.
Marwan Khreesat was among those arrested in the 'Autumn Leaves' raid but was quickly released and in November 1988 fled back to Jordan where he remained. He was at first a Lockerbie suspect but then he was found to be a CIA informer and gave clues to the FBI in two November 1989 interviews. Suspicion then moved towards Libya and away from the PFLP-GC.[1]
Khreesat on Facebook
On 19 April 2014 The Times of Israel reported that "Marwan Khreesat, tied to PFLP-GC airplane bombings in 1970s, was arrested just before Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up in 1988. Now he’s promising explanations":
- The man investigators initially believed built the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie 25 years ago maintains a Facebook page on which he recently posted pictures of the Lockerbie bombing and promised to write about the circumstances of the attack.[2]
- Marwan Khreesat, who now lives in Jordan, was arrested but bizarrely released by German police two months before the Lockerbie bombing as part of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command cell found in possession of bombs designed to blow up airliners.
- He writes frequent posts condemning Israel, the Palestinian Authority for dealing with Israel, the Assad regime and others. Late last year, he also castigated PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril, for whom he allegedly built several bombs used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s, accusing Jibril of abandoning the Palestinian cause in siding with the Assad regime.
- Last week, Khreesat posted an entry boasting about the PFLP-GC’s bombing of an El Al plane from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972, describing the attack as "a challenge to the Israeli intelligence agents who are responsible for searching luggage and everything that goes on a plane."
- It was subsequently established that the 1972 El Al bomb — designed to explode when the plane reached a certain altitude — had been hidden in a record player which two British women had been duped into carrying by two Arab men who were later arrested. Although the bomb exploded, the pilot was able to make an emergency landing.
- "It was a successful blow against the Israeli enemy," Khreesat wrote in a March 14 Facebook post, in which he also described spending time with Jibril in Rome as they waited for the attack to unfold.
- In several posts relating to Lockerbie in recent weeks, Khreesat recalled his arrest two months before the 21 December 1988 bombing and posted pictures of the destroyed cockpit of the 747 after the explosion, the painstakingly reconstructed parts of the plane wreckage, and a radio-recorder like the one that held the bomb. He also asked a series of unanswered questions about the attack:
- "Who did the operation?" he asked in a post on the 25th anniversary of the blast. "Israel? Iran? Libya? Who carried the Toshiba explosive device [in which the bomb was hidden]? … Did the explosive device come from Malta airport like the American intelligence agencies say?… When will these riddles be solved."
- Last October, Khreesat posted that he intended to "write about Pan Am 103," including "who was on the flight and the circumstances of the incident."
- British and American investigators initially believed that the PFLP-GC had blown up the plane, in which all 259 people on board and 11 more on the ground were killed, and suggested the attack had been ordered by Iran to avenge the mistaken downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf six months earlier in which 290 people were killed.
- Later, however, suspicion switched to Libya, and to a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Megrahi was convicted and jailed in 2001 after a trial in which his fellow alleged Libyan conspirator, Lamin Fhimah, was acquitted. He died in 2012 still insisting on his innocence.
- In 2007, a Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found a series of grounds to justify concerns that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The process by which Megrahi was identified has been widely criticised, and the authenticity of a timer fragment central to the implication of Libya in the plot has been increasingly questioned.
- An Al Jazeera documentary last week (Lockerbie: What Really Happened?) implicated the PFLP-GC in the bombing, and a former Iranian intelligence officer, Abolghasem Mesbahi, who defected to Germany in the 1990s, alleged that Iran had commissioned it, stating that "Iran decided to retaliate (for the downing of its own Flight 655) as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini."
- Khreesat originally agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, the program-makers said, but later refused to do so, and was quoted in the film saying:
- "All of my problems are because of Lockerbie."[3]
