Pan Am Flight 103

Pan Am Flight 103 Cockpit section

On 21 December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747-21, was on a scheduled transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport when there was an explosion on board. The aircraft broke up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. Eleven people in Lockerbie were killed by large sections of the plane which fell in and around the town, bringing total fatalities to 270.

Thirteen years later, on 31 January 2001, Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted of involvement in the bombing and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland. His co-defendant, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was unanimously acquitted. In June 2007, Megrahi was granted leave to appeal his conviction, on the basis of evidence that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred. This appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal was abandoned in August 2009, two days before the Scottish Government released him on compassionate grounds to return to Libya. The stated grounds for release were that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and was likely to die within three months.

The Trial

Personalities central to the investigation and prosecution case

1. Vincent Cannistraro - CIA task force officer in the brutal 1980s Iran-Contra campaign. Deployed a training manual of invasion and killing of Nicaraguan citizens and officials. Wrote "the anatomy of a lie" to cover up US government involvement in Nicaragua. In 1986 was commissioned by the US President to "Destabilize Libya and destroy the Gaddafi regime". Secretly worked to arm the Afghanistan Mujahadeen and Osama Bin Laden. His chief Admiral Poindexter chaired a top-level meeting - to which Cannistraro had access - to discuss the manufacture of evidence to destabilize the government of Yemen. Head of the CIA Lockerbie team, but did not attend the trial to give evidence.
2. Dr Thomas Hayes - Over the 1970s and early 1980s progressed to Head of Department at the British Royal Armaments Research Establishment at Fort Halstead, in the United Kingdom. His testimony was central to the Lockerbie verdict. Yet he and two colleagues conspired to with-hold evidence from the 1974 alleged IRA Maguire Seven trial which would have indicated innocence. The Maguires were freed on appeal after fifteen years in jail. This matter was exposed in the Lockerbie trial, but the judges trusted his word implicitly.

Two key elements in the al-Megrahi conviction

1. The identification of Al-Megrahi: In an extraordinary development in 2005, Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci was exposed as an unreliable witness by the man who in 1991 indicted Megrahi, former Scottish Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's words, Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic." And yet the judges trusted Gauci's contradictory and confused evidence, and ignored the fact that Gauci was on a promise of a multi-million dollar reward if Al-Megrahi was convicted. It is now documented and proven that Gauci was paid at least $2 million for his evidence, and his brother Paul $1 million.
2. The alleged bomb timer fragment: Was it planted to frame Libya for the crime? The fragment's label had been altered by unknown persons. And its finding and examination by Dr Thomas Hayes proved highly suspicious. A series of scientific tests in 2009 have proved that its survival two centimetres from the centre of a high explosive fireball was impossible.

Evidence withheld or not available at the time of the trial

• Former CIA agent, Robert Baer, CIA Middle Eastern specialist, worked on the early stages of the investigation. He has repeatedly claimed that, in 1989, there was "Grade A intelligence" held by America to prove that Iran requested and paid for the Lockerbie bombing. If Baer is correct, then the bomb timer fragment which pointed to Libya must have been planted.
• Lord Peter Fraser, Scotland's Chief Law Officer during the investigation and indictments, claimed in 1991 that witnesses would "prove the case beyond reasonable doubt." In 2005 he admitted to journalists that his chief witness Gauci was highly unreliable. Then in 2008, when questioned by a Times journalist, Fraser indicated suspicions that key evidence might have been planted with the knowledge of the CIA.
• Shukri Ghanem, Libyan Prime Minister 2003 - 2006, has said, on at least two occasions in radio and television interviews, that Libya was not responsible and it paid the $2.7 billion compensation with great reluctance and only "to buy peace and move forward."

See Also

• How Megrahi and Libya were framed for Lockerbie - .doc file on WikiSpooks
• Bomber, Bomber, Bomber - .doc file on WikiSpooks
• Flight From the Truth - The Guardian 27 June 2001
• Jim Swire's Web Site
• Professor Robert Black's Blog