 |
|
|
25/09/2010
Yusuf Fernandez
September 24, 2010
Al-Manar.com.lb is not responsible
for the content of this article or
for any external internet sites. The
views expressed are the author's
alone.
The case against the Libyan citizen
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi has
served to remind the world that it
should not have illusions about the
workings of the international
justice system. Megrahi was
condemned by a tribunal but that
does not mean he was guilty of the
attack which destroyed the Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland,
on 21 December 1988. His
compassionate release -he suffers
from terminal prostate cancer-
conveniently spared the potential
embarrassment of all those involved
in his injust conviction.
Megrahi, the former head of security
for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), and
another Libyan citizen, Lamin
Khalifa Fhima, the station manager
for LAA at the Malta airport, were
prosecuted at Camp Zeist in the
Netherlands but before Scottish
judges, and under Scottish law. The
two Libyans had been formally
indicted in the United States and
the United Kingdom in 1991. London
and Washington then blamed Libya,
saying that its leader, Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi, wanted revenge for
the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986.
“This was a Libyan government
operation from start to finish,”
declared a State Department
spokesman. Both accused persons
chose not to give evidence in court.
On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was
convicted of murder by a panel of
three Scottish judges and sentenced
to 27 years in prison. Fhimah was
acquitted.
The sentence was not a surprise for
many experts, who denounced the
injustice of this verdict. Robert
Black, a law professor of the
University of Edinburgh, said that
“no reasonable tribunal could have
convicted Megrahi on the evidence
led,” and called his conviction “an
absolute and utter outrage.” Hans
Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at
the trial, stated that “there is not
one single piece of material
evidence linking the two accused to
the crime,” and condemned the
court’s verdict as a “spectacular
miscarriage of justice.” In fact,
the verdict was issued although
there was no evidence to support the
accusation that Megrahi had put a
suitcase with the lethal bomb in an
Air Malta plane in Malta, so it
would eventually be transferred to
Flight 103 in London.
A piece of evidence presented by US
and British Investigators was the
MST-13 timer used in the bomb.
Discovery of a fragment of the timer
helped in the construction of an
circumstantial chain that implicated
him. This was the basis for
Megrahi’s conviction. It was
supposed to have been discovered
months after the crash, in a shirt
found many miles from the wreckage.
According to the investigation, 20
of these timers were sold to Libya
by the Swiss electronics company
MeBo. MeBo owner Edmund Bollier has
consistently claimed that the MST-13
fragment could not have been part of
the batch he sold to Libya on
account of its coloring and the type
of soldering employed. Evidence that
emerged at the trial indicated that
the CIA itself had a version of the
MST-13 before 1988. More
importantly, before the trial
commenced, Bollier said that from
their own research, they had
concluded the bomb had not been
located in the luggage container in
a Samsonite suitcase, as the
prosecution team claimed, but was
jammed against the aircraft wall.
THE “MAGIC SUITCASE”
According to the investigators, the
suitcase was somehow put aboard Air
Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt
without an accompanying passenger
and then the suitcase would been
transferred in Frankfurt to the Pan
Am 103A flight to London without an
accompanying passenger and then
transferred in London to the Pan Am
103 flight bound for New York
without an accompanying passenger.
However, according to the newspaper
The Guardian, Air Malta itself made
an exhaustive study of this matter
and categorically denied that there
was any unaccompanied baggage on
KM180 or that any of the passengers
transferred in Frankfurt to London
flight. And a report sent by the FBI
from Germany to Washington in
October 1989 and quoted by Time also
revealed profound doubts about this
thesis. The report concluded: “There
remains the possibility that no
luggage was transferred from Air
Malta 180 to Pan Am 103.”
In January 1995, more than three
years after the indictment of the
two Libyans, the FBI was still of
the same mind. A confidential Bureau
report stated: "There is no concrete
indication that any piece of luggage
was unloaded from Air Malta 180,
sent through the luggage routing
system at Frankfurt airport, and
then loaded on board Pan Am 103."
The report added that the baggage
records are “misleading” (The
Independent). Moreover, “according
to the international airline rules,
baggage unaccompanied by passengers
should not be allowed onto aircraft
without being searched or x-rayed.
Actual practice is, of course, more
lax, but how could serious
professional terrorists count on
this laxness occurring three times
in a row for the same suitcase?,”
said William Blum, author of
“Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II”.
FALSE WITNESSES
Some tests indicated that the
suitcase in question contained
several items of clothing
manufactured in Malta. According to
Blum, the US and British version of
events led the world to believe that
Megrahi had been identified by the
shopkeeper a particular shop in the
island, Tony Gauci, as the purchaser
of the clothing. However, Megrahi
was never presented to Gauci in
person and the latter had previously
made several erroneous "positive"
identifications, including one of a
CIA asset. Furthermore, after the
world was assured that these items
of clothing were sold only on Malta,
it was learned that at least one of
the items was actually “sold at
dozens of outlets throughout Europe,
and it was impossible to trace the
purchaser,” indicated the Sunday
Times.
Alex Duval Smith, a journalist of
The Observer pointed out in 2007 one
of the witnesses, whose testimony
was crucial to condemn Al Megrahi,
Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, had
apparently confessed that he lied
about the origins of the
above-mentioned timer. Moreover,
CIA spy Abdul Majid Giacka, the
so-called “star witness” at Luqa
airport in Malta, also saw how his
testimony collapsed in court.
On October 30, 1990, NBC News
reported that "Pan Am flights from
Frankfurt, including 103, had been
used a number of times by the DEA as
part of its undercover operation to
fly informants and suitcases of
heroin into Detroit as part of a
sting operation to catch dealers in
Detroit." The TV network reported
that the DEA was looking into the
possibility that a young man who
lived in Michigan and regularly
visited the Middle East may have
unwittingly carried the bomb aboard
Flight 103. His name was Khalid
Jaafar. “Unidentified law
enforcement sources” were cited as
saying that Jaafar had been a DEA
informant and was involved in a
drug-sting operation based out of
Cyprus.
Filmmaker Allan Francovich made a
documentary film about the Lockerbie
case, The Maltese Double Cross,
which presents Jaafar as an
unwitting bomb carrier with ties to
the DEA and the CIA. He claims that
the bombing was a consequence of a
CIA controlled drug running
operation utilized to spy on
Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian
armed political groupings and
factions. Francovich told The
Guardian in 1994 he had learned that
five CIA operatives had been sent to
London and Cyprus to discredit the
film while it was being made, his
office phones were tapped and staff
cars sabotaged.
According to Steve James, who has
written several articles in the
World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)
about this issue, “journalists John
Ashton and Ian Ferguson suggest in
their book “Cover-Up of Convenience”
that responsibility for Lockerbie
may lie primarily with the
intelligence services of several
Western governments, particularly
the United States. They point out
that Charles McKee, a US Army
Special Forces Major, and Matthew
Gannon, the CIA’s Beirut deputy
station chief, were amongst US
officials who allegedly changed
their plans to fly on PA103 at the
last minute. One suggestion by some
media is that these individuals were
the target of a successful
assassination attempt in which
intelligence agencies themselves
played a role.”
The authors suggest that “from as
little as two hours after the crash,
US intelligence officers were at the
southern Scottish site. They were
not looking for explanations as to
the cause of the crash. They did not
cooperate with local rescue
services. Instead, they were
searching for particular pieces of
debris, luggage and particular
corpses. Ashton and Ferguson quote
finds of large quantities of cash,
cannabis and heroin on the flight,
as well as intelligence papers owned
by McKee, whose luggage was removed
and replaced. There were reports of
helicopter-borne armed groups
guarding and then removing a large
box, and an unidentified body.”
Furthermore, a retired Scottish
police officer claimed that the CIA
planted evidence on the crash site
that led to the conviction of
Megrahi. On 28 August 2005, the
daily Scotland on Sunday revealed
that a member of the Association of
Chief Police Officers Scotland (ACPO)
had told the Scottish Criminal Cases
Review Commission that a fragment of
an MST-13 timer circuit board
central to al Megrahi’s conviction
was “planted by CIA agents in order
to implicate Libya for the atrocity.
James claims that those who have
made allegations of possible CIA
involvement include an ex-Mossad
spy, Juval Aviv, hired by Pan Am to
investigate the destruction of its
aircraft, an erratic ex-US spy
Lester Coleman, who at one point
sought political asylum in Sweden,
William Chasey, a Washington DC
lobbyist, and Time journalist Roy
Rowan.
LIBYA... AND NOW LEBANON
All these revelations suggest that
the case against Libya was
fabricated for political reasons
bound up with US policy in the
Middle East. Despite all the
evidence, Megrahi was condemned.
These same facts are now repeating
themselves in Lebanon. Of all the
possible scenarios, the
international probe of the murder of
former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri
has proved to be misguided by
political considerations and has
ignored sound evidence linking
Israel with that crime. As it
happened with the Lockerbie court,
the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
will probably choose to accuse some
Hezbollah members on the basis of
false witnesses and evidences in
order to get a verdict that provides
Israel and the US with the necessary
propaganda tool to weaken the
Lebanese Resistance, stir up
sedition in Lebanon, exert maximum
pressure on the country to accede to
its demands, and thereby strengthen
Israel and the US´s grip on the
entire Middle East region. |
