Lockerbie: What Really Happened

Lockerbie: What Really Happened? third in the series of TV documentaries by Al Jazeera

MEBO's "Fragment of the Imagination"

"Lockerbie: What Really Happened?" is the title of the third TV documentary by Al Jazeera which investigates the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on 21 December 1988 when 270 people were killed:

Only one man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan citizen, was tried and found guilty of causing the explosion. But he protested his innocence at the time of his trial in Camp Zeist in Holland in May 2000, and continued to do so up until his death in Tripoli in May 2012.

For three years filmmakers working for Al Jazeera have been investigating the prosecution of al-Megrahi.

Two award-winning documentaries, screened on Al Jazeera in 2011 and 2012, demonstrated that the case against him was deeply flawed and argued that a serious miscarriage of justice may have taken place.

In the first episode, "Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber", we followed defence investigator George Thomson as he revealed how forensic evidence presented at al-Megrahi's trial was not only inaccurate but appears to have been deliberately tampered with.

Then in "Lockerbie: Case Closed", we revealed the hitherto secret assessment of the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) - an independent public body in Scotland - which had re-examined the case in detail and had recommended that it be referred back to the courts for possible dismissal.

Crucially, our film also showed how new scientific tests comprehensively undermined the validity of the most significant piece of evidence linking the bombing to al-Megrahi and Libya - a fragment of electronic timer found embedded in the shredded remains of a shirt, supposedly bought by the convicted man in Malta.

The timer, the prosecution had claimed, was identical to ones sold to Libyan intelligence by a Swiss manufacturer. But as our investigation proved, it was not identical - a fact that must have been known to British government scientists all along.

Now, in our third and most disturbing investigation, we answer the question left hanging at the end of our last programme: if al-Megrahi was not guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, then who was?

The third part of this special series can be seen from Tuesday 11 March 2014 at the following times GMT:

Tuesday 20.00; Wednesday 12.00; Thursday 01.00; Friday 06.00; Saturday 20.00; Sunday 12.00; Monday 01.00; Tuesday 06.00.

Al Jazeera invited viewers to submit comments on the documentary for broadcasting by @AJStream on Thursday 13 March 2014 at 19.30. At 18.00 Al Jazeera reported:

Al Jazeera's #Lockerbie investigation is a moving story, so our convo is postponed one week to take recent developments into account.

Review by John Ashton

On 12 March 2014, John Ashton published his review of Al Jazeera's documentary "Lockerbie: What Really Happened?":

Al Jazeera last night premiered its long-awaited documentary "Lockerbie: What Really Happened?" The programme’s broad thrust, with which I agree, is that the bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by the PFLP-GC, with help from Hezbollah. It also suggests that Libya may have had a role, which I don’t rule out.

Before commenting further, I should make a declaration of interest: I was paid consultant and interviewee for the producers’ previous Al Jazeera programme "Lockerbie: Case Closed", (which you can view here) which was broadcast on the day that "Megrahi: You are my Jury" was published, and was also a paid consultant during the development phase of this one, although I was not involved with the production itself. The most significant discoveries I made during the development phase were of no great interest to the producers, so I took them to Channel 4 News, who took a different view and commissioned a special report, which was broadcast on 20 December (you can view it here).

Last night’s programme has generated a lot of media coverage, but contains little that hasn’t already been reported previously. Most of the coverage has led on the allegations made in the film by Abolghasem Mesbahi, the German-based Iranian defector, who alleged that the bombing was carried out in revenge for the US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655. His claims have been reported as if they are new, but they are not: they originally surfaced in the German media in 1996 or 1997. Mesbahi gave his first broadcast interview about Lockerbie to the German channel ZDF in 2008 and Al Jazeera’s interview, which was in fact shot by ZDF, featured in another ZDF documentary last month.

Mesbahi was a former senior official in Iran’s security service, Vevak, and was based in, among other places, Paris and Bonn. In late 1988 he was imprisoned briefly as a suspected US double agent and in 1996 defected. He claimed to have first hand knowledge of the plot that resulted in the 1992 murder, by Iranian agents, of several leading Kurdish separatists in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. His testimony proved crucial in the subsequent trial of some of the Iranians. It was not until some months after his defection that he began to talk about Lockerbie.

Last year I spoke to a leading German journalist who is very familiar with both Mesbahi and the Lockerbie story. While he believes that the evidence that Mesbahi gave in the Mykonos case was credible, he is very sceptical of his claims about Lockerbie.

By Mesbahi’s own admission, all his information about Lockerbie was second-hand. His accounts to the German police (documented in memos disclosed to the Abdelbaset’s lawyers pre-trial) were erratic. Some of his claims were unlikely, others patently nonsense. He claimed that the Iranian government initiated the operation and Iranian foreign minister Velajati held talks with Colonel Gaddafi, during which they’d agreed on a joint operation in which Iran would be responsible for the explosives and Libya for the electronics. There was no reason for Iran to rely on the Libyans to sort out the electronics, when they had plenty of other bomb makers at their disposal. He did not mention the PFLP-GC and instead suggested that the operation was not only commissioned by the Iranian government, but also largely undertaken by Iranian agents.

He said that the technical instructions for the bomb came from the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO). He initially claimed that it was assembled and loaded at Heathrow by Libyan agents who had access to the airport’s ‘secure area’ (by which, presumably, he meant airside), but later claimed that it was assembled there by a ANO members. He also said that the bomb was activated by a chemical detonator, which again seems unlikely. He reported that the Iranians sent explosives to London after which the green light was given to the Libyans to deliver the electronic components. This, a source told him, was done by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah only days before the bombing. However, there is no evidence that they were in London at any point. It is clear that Abdelbaset was in Prague and Switzerland from 9th to 17th December and that he and Lamin were in Malta on the 20th and 21st. I suspect that Abolghasem Mesbahi stitched together a story that would implicate Iran, while accommodating the official 'Libya-did-it narrative'.

Another disappointing aspect of the programme was the prominence it gave to the claims of the Operation Bird reports, about which I have written previously (here and here). Some of the reports’ key allegations are, in my view, unlikely, in particular the claim that the PFLP-GC’s German ringleader, Hafez Dalkamoni, attended a crucial planning meeting in Malta in October 1988. This claim is contradicted by documentary and witness evidence gathered by the BKA, which is far stronger than the evidence that the programme presented to corroborate the claim (essentially, a 1989 Maltese newspaper article).

The film was on more solid ground when it presented US Defense Intelligence Agency reports from 1989 and 1990, which implicated the PFLP-GC and Iran in the attack. Unfortunately, it implied that the reports were secret and stated that they would have been used at Abdelbaset’s second appeal. Neither suggestion was true: the reports had no role in the appeal and are available online having been declassified many years ago.

There were other exaggerated and misleading claims. For example, the commentary stated "this programme has learned" that Tony Gauci had picked out a photo of Mohamed Abu Talb before his partial identification of Abdelbaset. In fact it is well known that, when shown a photo of Abu Talb by the police in October 1989, Gauci said that he resembled the clothes purchaser. The programme also stated that the Toshiba radio-cassette player that housed the Lockerbie bomb was of the same type as the one seized by the BKA during the "Autumn Leaves" raids, but in fact it was substantially different.

On the plus side, the film contained powerful interviews with former CIA investigator Robert Baer, researcher and campaigner Morag Kerr and, surprisingly, the former Times political editor Robin Oakley. Overall, though, it was a wasted opportunity.