Pan Am 103: Unaccompanied bag from Malta: Evidence?

[Caustic Logic]

Just when you all thought maybe the Pan Am 103 crap had gone away. ...

Collectively, the evidence used to convict Abdelbaset Al Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am 103 indicates a Libyan-made bomb, placed by a Libyan intel operative, into a specially packed bag in Malta onto an Air Malta flight, tagged to be transferred unaccompanied onto Pan Am 103 to blow up right around the Scottish coastline. Mostly this is based on circumstantial clues – the clothing, app. near the bomb, labeled as from Malta, and later the timer fragment, which was found to so boldly point to Libya. Eventually some testimony was bought/mangled to support the middle link of a loose bag from Malta traceable to Libyan super-spook al Megrahi.

But this wasn’t (AFAIK) pursued until after they had some evidence for the bag itself. In between the Maltese clothing and Libyan timer app. near the bomb, and the fields of southern Scotland, there might have been, and probably should have been, nothing but speculation. As we’re told, Frankfurt airport routinely destroyed its luggage records after a short period of, as I recall, one week. Even in the case of Pan Am 103, which had been loaded with passengers and luggage partially at that airport and was all over the news well within 24 hours for having blow the heck up.

Not that it mattered; apparently, no attempt was even made to even look at such records in the first months after the incident. Details are hazy but puzzling. However, by luck and fate an anomalous copy did surface, fairly early in the (looong) investigation, and it showed just the bag that the other points could lean against to strengthen the case that emerged. Briefly, the source for this is Mrs. Bogomira Erac, a computer programmer and baggage handler/tracker employed at Frankfurt Airport and on duty on Dec 21 1988 as part of PA 103’s load passed through. Normally the computer files were wiped and paper records destroyed, she says, but on a whim she personally kept a copy of the records pertaining to Flight 103, sat on it a few months, then reported it to her supervisor.

It then made its way to the Lockerbie investigation in August 1989, where it changed the picture. “That was a key part of the investigation, which allowed us to link a bag from Malta to Frankfurt, through London and then obviously on to Lockerbie,” FBI SCOTBOM chief Richard Marquise has said. (see video, below). These coded numbers on paper, produced by a programmer after some programming and politicking time had elapsed, with no backing records, merged with the Maltese clothing scraps to point to Malta and beyond – ominously - to Libya.

I’m not sure yet what to make of what this evidence really means and would like to hash it out some. For starters, in another thread, Rolfe pointed out that the coverage this issue was given in BBC’s 2008 Conspiracy Files episode was badly slanted. I agree, and have a detailed critique, but the OP is long enough. Suffice to say, they give Erac and Marquise the floor, and include no counter-claims or questions, of which there are plenty, and seem to present as unchallenged fact that “the bag had traveled unaccompanied.”
Link to watch - starts about 5:00 in

While another program, Channel 4’s Dispatches from December 1998, indicates a perfectly opposite slant. “The indictment stands or falls on the fact that the suitcase began it lethal journey at Malta,” the narrator says near the beginning. “For us too it seems the logical place to start.” The video has a great section on all these baggage issues, starting about 1/3 through. I don’t think it actually mentions Erac’s records at all, and gives Marquise no time, and includes almost strictly counter-arguments, including by Prof. Robert Black, a key party in stablishing the trial to begin with.
Link to watch

As we start from these videos, and expand to other sources, related issues that will and should connect in will include; Air Malta’s counter-claims, evidence, the lawsuit and Denis Phipps; the suspects’ own influence at Luqa airport, “taggs,” etc.; evidence handling/planting thoughts and theories; the technical aspects of Erac’s records, timeline analysis re: trays and bins and what was really where when, the alleged lack of any other traces of this data; the reported security breach at Heathrow, general observations.

 

[Ambrosia]

You can download the Dispatches program from the MEBO website by following this link which makes it easier to view rather than watching it streamed.

It's in Apple Quicktime format (mp4) and is about 40MB in size.

There is no evidence that any unaccompanied bags were loaded at Malta.

None, zero, zip. In fact there is reason to believe that no such bags were loaded at Malta given that Air Malta sued Granada TV for libel over a documentary that showed the bag being loaded at Malta, Granada settled out of court in 1993.

The Frankfurt baggage printout shows a bag being transferred from the Malta flight to the Frankfurt Pan Am flight. Thats all it shows. A baggage handler could well have added the bag at Frankfurt airport to the place the Air Malta bags were unloaded to.

On top of that all we know of here is an unaccompanied bag. This bag could have been a luminous orange rucksack, a canvas duffelbag, a carpetbag, there is no description of it anywhere by baggage handlers, nothing at all to suggest that it was "the" brown Samsonite suitcase that is believed to have held the bomb. To assume that this one unaccompanied bag was both loaded at Malta AND was the primary suitcase is a hell of a leap. One that's not backed with any evidence.

 

[Rolfe]

The Frankfurt baggage printout shows a bag being transferred from the Malta flight to the Frankfurt Pan Am flight. Thats all it shows. A baggage handler could well have added the bag at Frankfurt airport to the place the Air Malta bags were unloaded to.

What Ambrosia said, but more than that. It appears there was no positive evidence the item of luggage in question came from KA180 or was even tagged as coming from KA180. Paul Foot goes into some detail about this. The point was that the bag in question had been coded by the coding station that had been dealing with the KA180 baggage.

The argument is quite compicated, involving the time the coding of the Malta bags finished, and an illegible work-sheet where a time could have been either 10 past or 16 minutes past the hour. The bottom line was that the mystery bag could have come from a number of different places, and Foot mentions Damascus and Warsaw in this context.

As I understand it, the decision that the bag was unaccompanied rested on the fact that no passenger from KA180 transferred to PA103A. Therefore if a bag did that, it was unaccompanied. However, I'm not sure the possibility that it was an accompanied bag from somewhere else that had just taken a slightly circuitous route through the airport was definitely discounted.

The luggage system at Frankfurt seems to have been a bit chaotic, geared entirely to sorting the bags to their correct destination without any attention being paid to where they came from or whose they were. I have also read that there was quite a few unaccompanied bags on PA103.

Mrs. Erac's story is very peculiar. She says on the BBC programme that she was about to destroy the printout, but then kept it "in memory of the people that had died on that flight". Other places she's credited with having realised it might have evidental value, and keeping it for that reason on her own initiative. However, nobody seems to have even tried to retain or acquire these reconrds in an official capacity, and she went on holiday and didn't volunteer the information until much later.

It certainly doesn't seem to have surfaced until after the charred clothes recovered from the crash had already been identified as being of Maltese origin. Thanks in no small part to the babygro having a label saying "Made in Malta" still legible. My impression is that they went through the printout not to see what was there, but to torture the information to try to substantiate the assertion that a bag had travelled through from Malta unaccompanied. And that the timing of the coding of the KA180 bags in relation to the "mystery item" allowed them to do that.

I have no idea why the fact that the clothes were bought in Malta a month earlier (or even two weeks earlier) should lead to the assumption that the bomb was loaded at Malta. Almost the reverse - for terrorists who were globetrotting a fair bit anyway, purchasing the clothes near to the airport they intended to load the bomb seems pretty silly.

To summarise what we do know.

1. The baggage security at Luqa was surprisingly good. Bags were counted three times and tallied to the number of passengers on the plane. 55 people travelled on that flight, and 55 bags were triple-counted on to it.

2. None of these 55 passengers was booked to transfer to PA103A.

3. All the bags were claimed at the other end - nobody reported any missing luggage. So the possibility that a genuine bag was taken off the flight to substitute the bomb suitcase seems to fall.

4. The manager in charge of the system was very confident in court that nothing could have got past, and only said, "well, you can never be 100% sure about anything" when pressed hard about it.

5. The case against Megrahi, who was in Luqa airport that morning, was based on his having an accomplice with an air-side pass, namely Fhimah, to get the bomb suitcase onto the plane. However, all the evidence against Fhimah was thrown out, it was never shown that he was even at the airport that morning, and no other possible accomplice was ever named.

We really have no clue how Megrahi could possibly have got the suitcase on board at Malta, unaided. In fact we don't really see how it could have been done by anyone, aided or unaided. And we know of no suggestion of anyone else being present at Malta that morning who might have been shipping a bomb.

And yet the judges decided that somehow, the suitcase "must" have gone on there, somehow. Based, apparently, on the ambiguous record of the Frankfurt baggage system.

To me, it looks like "we've decided Megrahi did it, and since he was at Luqa airport that morning, he must have managed to get the thing on board somehow even if it seems on the face of it to be impossible."

So if we assume that the bag didn't in fact come from Malta but was either smuggled on at Frankfurt (possibly using the same coding station that dealt with the KA180), or might have been interlined from somewhere else, where does that get us?

Should Mrs. Erac's role be looked at with more suspicion? Why did nobody get an instruction to Frankfurt within a day or to of the crash that all baggage records for that flight (or even that day) should be kept? Records were apparently destroyed after a week, which would seem long enough for someone a bit higher up the food chain than Mrs. Erac to decide that lot ought to be kept.

It's another very peculiar circumstance, but is there any more to it than incompetence, and then over-narrow analysis of the contents of the printout to try to prove a pre-determined conclusion?

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

You can download the Dispatches program from the MEBO website by following this link which makes it easier to view rather than watching it streamed.

Unfortunately that didn't work for me an my Mac. Just got a frozen computer for ten minutes till it finished loading a page of gibberish.

There is no evidence that any unaccompanied bags were loaded at Malta.

None, zero, zip. In fact there is reason to believe that no such bags were loaded at Malta given that Air Malta sued Granada TV for libel over a documentary that showed the bag being loaded at Malta, Granada settled out of court in 1993.

That's true from what I've read. However, to someone though who believed the official version and the printout (as interpreted), such a bag had to be loaded there, or materialized before frankfurt. The arguments about a small airport being less permeable make sense but aren't totally convincing IMO. And I'd like to see a primary news source from the time, but it seems clear Granada was sued for stating this fact as fact, and settled, which is a sign, but not the clearest. There are different reasons to settle out of court - just look at Libya's admission of 'responsibility' but not guilt, settled out of court as it were to end sanctions.

I'll come back to the details of the printout and/or other records in a bit.

 

[Caustic Logic]

What Ambrosia said, but more than that. It appears there was no positive evidence the item of luggage in question came from KA180 or was even tagged as coming from KA180. Paul Foot goes into some detail about this. The point was that the bag in question had been coded by the coding station that had been dealing with the KA180 baggage.

The argument is quite compicated, involving the time the coding of the Malta bags finished, and an illegible work-sheet where a time could have been either 10 past or 16 minutes past the hour. The bottom line was that the mystery bag could have come from a number of different places, and Foot mentions Damascus and Warsaw in this context.

I was reading, I think defense protests and questioning from the trial where these were the main questions. Glad you're just enough ahead of me... Damascus we know. Warsaw... like the Pact? I still have not bought his big article, could but will wait til after payday. It's actually that tight ATM.

As I understand it, the decision that the bag was unaccompanied rested on the fact that no passenger from KA180 transferred to PA103A. Therefore if a bag did that, it was unaccompanied. However, I'm not sure the possibility that it was an accompanied bag from somewhere else that had just taken a slightly circuitous route through the airport was definitely discounted.

Exactly. People are kept better track of I should think, and none boarded from that flight. So if a bag shows up as having done so, it's either alone or some mix-up, or perhaps a purposeful mix-up.

The luggage system at Frankfurt seems to have been a bit chaotic, geared entirely to sorting the bags to their correct destination without any attention being paid to where they came from or whose they were. I have also read that there was quite a few unaccompanied bags on PA103.

Huh! But if so, they didn't all have Maltese clothes...

Mrs. Erac's story is very peculiar. She says on the BBC programme that she was about to destroy the printout, but then kept it "in memory of the people that had died on that flight". Other places she's credited with having realised it might have evidental value, and keeping it for that reason on her own initiative. However, nobody seems to have even tried to retain or acquire these reconrds in an official capacity, and she went on holiday and didn't volunteer the information until much later.

It certainly doesn't seem to have surfaced until after the charred clothes recovered from the crash had already been identified as being of Maltese origin. Thanks in no small part to the babygro having a label saying "Made in Malta" still legible. My impression is that they went through the printout not to see what was there, but to torture the information to try to substantiate the assertion that a bag had travelled through from Malta unaccompanied. And that the timing of the coding of the KA180 bags in relation to the "mystery item" allowed them to do that.

Yes. Maybe. Te lack of interest in records is troubling. Did investigators actually look at their records once and found totally different info, but when this paperwork surfaced, suddenly the other data never existed and this only a luck copy? That would be a cover-up that would require a few collaborators to keep quiet, plus some others to do the torture. It seems entirely possible. It could well be simpler/more honest than that, or a bit more complex, but not too much...

I have no idea why the fact that the clothes were bought in Malta a month earlier (or even two weeks earlier) should lead to the assumption that the bomb was loaded at Malta. Almost the reverse - for terrorists who were globetrotting a fair bit anyway, purchasing the clothes near to the airport they intended to load the bomb seems pretty silly.

As does using your precise timer to blow it up where all these silly clues could be found and traced back. If Libya did this, they were trying to implicate themselves, and should we be playing into the schemes of terrorists like that?

To summarise what we do know.

1. The baggage security at Luqa was surprisingly good. Bags were counted three times and tallied to the number of passengers on the plane. 55 people travelled on that flight, and 55 bags were triple-counted on to it.

39 people, 59 bags, IIRC.

2. None of these 55 passengers was booked to transfer to PA103A.

3. All the bags were claimed at the other end - nobody reported any missing luggage. So the possibility that a genuine bag was taken off the flight to substitute the bomb suitcase seems to fall.

4. The manager in charge of the system was very confident in court that nothing could have got past, and only said, "well, you can never be 100% sure about anything" when pressed hard about it.

I do find these arguments perhaps specious, re: Phipps and the "small neighborhood airport" notion. Are small towns less crime prone? Depends. The suspects are alleged to have had ins at this airport. But anyway, 100% argument or no, it's a claim and makes sense.

So if we assume that the bag didn't in fact come from Malta ... Should Mrs. Erac's role be looked at with more suspicion? ... It's another very peculiar circumstance, but is there any more to it than incompetence, and then over-narrow analysis of the contents of the printout to try to prove a pre-determined conclusion?

These are about the questions I'd like to answer. Suspicion must be engaged now, along with suspicion of our suspicions, coz we are investigoogling.

 

[Caustic Logic]

So here is a secondary source refection of theprimary paperwork, from the Court's Verdict, 2001:
link

[30] Mrs Bogomira Erac, a computer programmer employed at the airport, was on duty on 21 December 1988. She heard of the loss of PA103 during the evening of that day and realised that PA103A had departed during her period on duty. She was interested in the amount of baggage on the Frankfurt flight, and on the following morning she decided to take a printout of the information as to baggage held on the computer in case it should contain any useful information. She did not at once identify any such information, but retained the printout, which later was given to investigators. The printout is production 1060, and includes the following entry:
-
Container no.
Flight no.
Counter no.
Time leave store
Time at gate
B8849
F1042
S0009+Z1307
TO
HS33+Z1517
B044+Z1523

The document itself contains no column headings, and those set out above are derived from the evidence showing how the printout is to be interpreted, by reference to the codes in operation at the time. The document therefore bears to record that an item coded at station 206 at 1307 was transferred and delivered to the appropriate gate to be loaded on board PA103A.

[31] The documentary evidence as a whole therefore clearly gives rise to the inference that an item which came in on KM180 was transferred to and left on PA103A.

(info reorganized by me)
Container no. B8849
Flight no. F1042
Counter no. S0009+Z1307
Time leave store HS33+Z1517
Time at gate B044+Z1523

What does that mean? This is the route of the set bag? I don't know the codes here except that Z is prob Zulu time, which is a few hours behind local Frankfurt time.

Same page also has (as point 29) supplementary evidence from Joachim Koscha, who was one of the managers of the baggage system at Frankfurt. This I haven't looked at yet. But there's what Erac's paperwork shows.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Okay, well it's supposed to indicate, as the court put it, that "an item coded at station 206 at 1307 was transferred and delivered to the appropriate gate to be loaded on board PA103A." Being a feeder flight for the fatal flight (physically different planes, but same/connected flight numbers) this must be what she calls F1042. F might mean feeder, or something in German, and I guess it's been decided elsewhere 1042 does in fact mean PA103A, a Boeing 727 with 89 passengers, 47 of whom transferred in London to the fatal flight. "Counter no." is attached to 1307, so apparently refers to when the item was coded. "HS33" is a store number? A store is? "BO44" is a gate, where the item arrived at Z1523, I guess, and the gate F1042 was loading from at the same time.

Anyone who knows any of the little answers above, feel free. Otherwise, I'll guess I have that part of the accepted evidence down and move on to point 29:

The evidence of Joachim Koscha, who was one of the managers of the baggage system at Frankfurt in 1988, taken with production 1068, shows that flight KM180 reached its parking position at 1248 on 21 December 1988. Since it was not a PanAm flight it was unloaded by employees of the airport authority. According to the record, it was unloading between 1248 and 1300. Andreas Schreiner was in charge of monitoring the arrival of baggage at V3 on 21 December 1988. He made the following record on a document called the interline writer's sheet (production 1092):
-
<snip - makes no sense to me and too long>
That bears to record one wagon of baggage from KM180, in position at 1248, arriving at V3 at 1301. Mr Schreiner's evidence was that coding would generally begin three to five minutes after the arrival of the baggage at V3. Mr Schreiner also said that luggage was always delivered from one flight only. Mr Schreiner and Mr Koscha further identified production 1061 as a work sheet completed by a coder to record baggage with which he dealt. The name of the coder in question was Koca, who was not called as a witness. The relevant part of production 1061 is as follows:
-
Intestell 206
Flug Nr. KM180
Kodierzeit
Beginn 1304
Ende 1310
Cont. Nr. --
Wag. 1
Kodierer Name Koca

That record bears to show that one wagon of baggage from KM180 was coded at station 206 in V3 between 1304 and 1310. It was suggested that the figure for the completion of coding might be 1316, but Mr Schreiner preferred the reading 1310, which is more consistent with what can be seen on the document. There is also documentary evidence (production 1062) that the aircraft used for PA103A arrived from Vienna (as flight PA124) and was placed at position 44, from which it left for London at 1653.

I'm not sure why container no. is blank or how significant that is. As per the highlighted part, the accepted coding time is six minutes, and would be twelve if we take the 0 as a 6. I'm not sure which makes more sense. By 1310/16 then, this item was coded, but no earlier than 1304. Erac's records show a bag being checked at 1307, so that's a fit for when KM180's bags were being coded. Give or take clock discrepancies on one end or the other. Her records show this was at container no. B8849, Koscha's doesn't say where. That's a maybe fit so far. It was kept at a store, HS33 for two hours until moved at 1517 to gate B044 and loaded for the 1653 departure. Six hours then, this item was in the system at FA.

Also, it seems odd that Koscha and Koca are such similar names. One was called as a witness, the other not. It's probably nothing.

But anyway, records are apparently there and indicate a possible connection, but there seem to be some conclusions leapt to, and there are strong counter-points to consider...

 

[Rolfe]

Here's an interesting passage from The Trail of the Octopus.

Apart from the inherent improbability that trained intelligence agents would simply add an armed suitcase bomb tagged for New York-JFK to a pile of international luggage waiting to be loaded in Luqa and then trust to luck that, unescorted, the bomb would get through the baggage-handling and security arrangements of two other major airports and be loaded aboard the target aircraft before the timer triggered an explosion, there remained the problem with the provenance and reliability of the Frankfurt baggage-list that was said to have identified the suitcase in the first place.

Apart from the inherent improbability that the Lockerbie investigators never thought to ask for it, that it was left to a clerk to print out a copy on her own initiative before the computer wiped the record, only to return weeks later from holiday to find that still no one ad asked for it, and that the BKA, after being given the list, sat on it for months before passing it along to the Scottish police, there remained the problem of the FBI teletype which left open the possibility that no such bag from Malta was ever loaded on Flight 103.

According to this five-page document, sent from the US Embassy in Bonn to the FBI director on 23 October 1989, 'From the information available from the Frankfurt airport records, there is no concrete indication that any piece of baggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180, sent through the luggage routing system at Frankfurt airport and then loaded on board Pan Am 103.'

The baggage computer entry 'does not indicate the origin of the bag which was sent for loading on board Pan Am 103. Nor does it indicate that the bag was actually loaded on Pan Am 103. It indicates only that a bag of unknown origin was sent from Coding Station 206 at 1:07 p.m. to a position from which it was supposed to be loaded on Pan Am 103.'

The handwritten record kept at Coding Station 206 was no more explicit. According to the teletype, 'the handwritten duty sheet indicates only that the luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180. There is no indication how much baggage was unloaded or where the luggage was sent.' On the agent's reading of the evidence, 'there remains the possibility that no luggage was transferred from Air Malta 180 to Pan Am 103 and that a piece of luggage was simply introduced at Coding Station 206.'

The teletype also disclosed that, on a guided tour of the baggage area in September 1989, Detective Inspector Watson McAteer and FBI Special Agent Lawrence G. Whitaker had actually seen this happen. They had 'observed an individual approach Coding Station 206 with a single piece of luggage, place the luggage in a luggage container, encode a destination into the computer and leave without making any notation on a duty sheet'. From this they concluded that a rogue suitcase could have been 'sent to Pan Am 103 either before or after the unloading of Air Malta 180'.

Although one government-inspired commentator tried later to dismiss the FBI teletype as 'an early memo ... that sketched one possible scenario, as of October 1989', and which subsequent everlts had rendered 'irrelevant' and 'pointless', it was less easy to reject the categorical denials by Air Malta, the airport staff at Luqa, the Maltese police and the Maltese government that any unaccompanied bag had been sent to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, or, indeed, that any Maltese connection with the Lockerbie bombing had been established at all, other than that the clothing in the suitcase bomb had apparently originated on the island.

The plot thickens.

Rolfe.

 

[Ambrosia]

you can make a plausible case for the bag to be introduced at Frankfurt. You can equaly make a plausible case for the bag being introduced at Heathrow.

The Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands has heard witnesses questioning baggage handling procedures at Heathrow Airport.

...

The special court at Camp Zeist was told on Thursday that baggage was sometimes left unattended because of workload and during refurbishment.

One witness, a former Pan Am employee, admitted that anyone wearing a uniform and a pass could have been in the area and would not necessarily have been challenged.

[link]

There is no case at all for a Malta ingestion, I am still stunned that the Zeist trial judges took this view.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I'm trying to do the devil's advocate thing here, folks, but it's gettin' hard. Cain't I gets a little help? Judges and police and FBIs believed this stuff and passed out indictments and convictions over it, and no one at this forum can stand up for it and explain what we're missing here?

To clarify from above, 39 passengers 55 bags. All accounted for unless Air Malta are liars.

Apart from the inherent improbability that trained intelligence agents would simply add an armed suitcase bomb tagged for New York-JFK to a pile of international luggage waiting to be loaded in Luqa and then trust to luck that, unescorted, the bomb would get through the baggage-handling and security arrangements of two other major airports and be loaded aboard the target aircraft before the timer triggered an explosion,

IMO apart from that we need consider nothing else, but it's good that we're more rigorous than that. Great excerpt, I'd missed it only searching for Erac by name.

There is no case at all for a Malta ingestion, I am still stunned that the Zeist trial judges took this view.

Here's another one, on what they did and didn't accept.
from point 28:

There was evidence from two witnesses, Roland O'Neill, the load master for PA103A, and Monika Diegmuller, a check-in supervisor, that there was a reconciliation of interline passengers and baggage, but there was overwhelming evidence to the contrary and their evidence on this point is not acceptable. The evidence that there was no reconciliation came from Herbert Leuniger, PanAm's director at Frankfurt, and Wolf Krommes, a duty station manager with PanAm.

They may have had good grounds here, there may be politics. But two people said there was a check and no bags came on unaccompanied.

 

[Rolfe]

There is no case at all for a Malta ingestion, I am still stunned that the Zeist trial judges took this view.

Me too. It's jaw-dropping. If you read the judgement, there are some aspects where they present what seems to me to be a rather slanted take on the evidence, making it look better than it really is for the prosecution.

The Malta ingestion theory is not one of them. It's perfectly clear from the actual Court judgement that there's no case at all for a Malta ingestion. They actually say that "this is a major difficulty for the prosecution". And then they go on to declare that it must have been introduced at Malta after all.

It seems they have decided that the contents of Mrs. Erac's printout prove conclusively that a bag must have been introduced at Malta. I simply cannot see how the evidence on that printout, taken together with the ancillary evidence of the worksheets and so on, can possibly bear that interpretation. They may suggest that it might have been introduced there, but by no stretch of the imagination do they constitute conclusive proof. The bag could have been routed through that coding station from another flight. Or it could have been slipped into the system right there by a terrorist working under cover. If it was routed from another flight, there's no real reason to suppose it had anything to do with the bomb - it could have been a completely innocent piece of luggage.

None of these possibilities was given serious consideration. Instead, the judges ruled that it was the bomb, and that it must have come on KM180, despite the complete absence of any evidence of shenenigans associated with KM180, and in fact the great difficulty of seeing how any shenanigans could have been pulled at that end.

Frankly, it seems to me that their logic actually went, well, we know Megrahi did it, and we know Megrahi was at Luqa airport that morning, so it must have gone on at Malta. (Even if the alleged accomplice was nowhere near the place, no other potential accomplice was identified, we all agree it couldn't be done without an accomplice, and in fact all the evidence from the Malta end indicates it wasn't done.)

you can make a plausible case for the bag to be introduced at Frankfurt. You can equaly make a plausible case for the bag being introduced at Heathrow.

[link]

Hmmm, I don't entirely agree. I think there's a paradox here. Most of the prominent CTs have the bomb being introduced at Frankfurt, usually by way of infiltration of the existing drug-smuggling system, and substituting the bomb bag for a case of drugs, knowing that the identified drugs shipments were being given the nod through security.

However, there are quite a lot of things wrong with this scenario, starting with the apparent fact that the drugs were actually on the plane, and found in a field. Also, while it's clear the Frankfurt baggage system could have been infiltrated, we have no evidence (apart from that stray luggage tray mentioned above, which could have been perfectly legit) of anything untoward happening at Frankfurt.

In contrast the evidence for something having been introduced at Heathrow is much stronger, unless Mr. Bedford is a fantasist of the first water, and Mr. Manly hallucinated the sawn-off padlock.

This has a bearing on the nature of the device used. If the standard-issue Jibril ordnance was the culprit, it would have had to have been introduced at Heathrow. If it was introduced at Frankfurt, something more sophisticated would have been needed, to prevent detonation on the first leg of the flight. A timer of the MST-13 type would therefore make sense.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Paul Foot's account of the Frankfurt baggage evidence and the Erac printout is probably the clearest of any available. This is the relevant extract from the Private Eye report. (I hope this extract encourages people to shell out for the whole thing; it really is very well written and presented indeed.)

For if the bomb suitcase did not go on the flight from Malta, then that was the end of the prosecution case. The connection of the bomb to Malta was an absolutely necessary condition for the entire prosecution.

There was however some evidence that an unaccompanied bag from the flight from Malta was loaded at Frankfurt onto Pan Am 103A to Heathrow. This evidence was seized on by the prosecution, and became the lynch-pin of their case.

It depended on two pieces of paper. The first was a worksheet of the operator who coded the baggage from the Malta flight into the computerised baggage system at Frankfurt. This man’s name was Koca. He was crucial to the prosecution case, and was listed as a prosecution witness, but was not called to give evidence. No explanation for Koca’s mysterious absence from the witness box was offered by the prosecution.

Koca’s worksheet showed that he started coding the bags from the Malta flight at 13.04 on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. The time he finished coding the bags was, and still is, a mystery. Mr Koca’s handwriting was so vague that the finishing time could have been 13.10 or 13.16. The difference between the two turned out to be crucial since the entire supposition that a bag from Malta went on the flight to Heathrow depended on the coincidence in time between Mr Koca’s worksheet and a print-out from the computerised records at Frankfurt airport.

This was printed out on the day after the Lockerbie bombing by Bogomir Erac, who was in charge of the software for the baggage system at Frankfurt. She recovered the print-out in case it revealed anything interesting about the luggage loaded on to flight 103A to Heathrow, which linked to the separate and doomed flight 103.

Mr Campbell for the prosecution explained: “The printout shows that at 13.07 on 21 December 1988, tray number 8849 was coded in at a coding station with reference number S0009. The interpretation document shows that reference number S0009 means coding station 206. Each tray holds one piece of luggage. From that it may therefore be concluded that a bag from KM 180 (the Maltese flight) was transferred as an interline bag from KM 180 through the computerised baggage system to Pan Am 103A. As all the passengers recovered their luggage and none were booked for onward travel to the United States, it may be concluded that the bag was an unaccompanied bag.”

Note that the assumption the mystery bag 8849 was unaccompanied was based on the assumption that it had come in on KA180 - and as all bags from KA180 were picked up by their owners, and nobody on that flight reported any missing luggage, then it must have been unaccompanied. However, if it actually came from a different flight, it could easily have been normal accompanied luggage.

Perhaps naturally, Mr Campbell did not emphasise that his conclusion, so vital to his case, depended entirely on the coincidence in timing between the bags from Malta being coded at station 206 in between 13.04 and 13.10 or 13.16 and a bag for Pan Am 103A being coded at the same station at 13.07. This was the coincidence in timing that convinced not only the prosecution in 2000, but the Dumfries and Galloway police, the CIA and the Sunday Times eleven years earlier so soon after the bombing.

There were clothes in the bomb suitcase that had been bought in Malta – and here, apparently, was proof on a computer at Frankfurt that an unaccompanied bag from a flight from Malta had been transferred at Frankfurt on to a feeder flight to the plane that ended up in pieces round Lockerbie.

There were however huge holes in the coincidence that depended upon such split-second timing. Mr Taylor for Megrahi emphasised the point that no one could say what kind of bag had gone on 103A at Frankfurt, or even whether it was a bag at all. It could have been a wine crate or a set of golf clubs. Nothing in the computer system described the bag on tray number 8849.

The only proof that it had come from Malta was the time it was encoded – 13.07. The whole proposition, said Taylor, depended “on your Lordships accepting a degree of accuracy in relation to documentation, time recording and work practices, none of which are warranted”. The whole theory depended on the exact and coincidental accuracy of the computer clock at Frankfurt airport and the watches of the coders from which they took the times they entered on their worksheets. The picture was made all the more confusing by the absence of Mr Koca – the witness who was directly involved.

Mr Taylor spent much of 12 January 2001, the second day of his four-day submissions, showing in the most meticulous detail how the timings on the coders’ worksheets could go wrong, or how the computer clock could slip out of line with the coders’ watches. Staff at Frankfurt airport in December 1988 were under great pressure to shift luggage fast, and the coders were far more interested in the destination of luggage than in where it had come from. Even the slightest discrepancy in time, he argued, could ruin the coincidence on which the prosecution relied, and could jeopardise the possibility that a bag from the Maltese flight went on to 103A.

Methodically, Mr Taylor examined both possible end-times for the coding of bags from the Maltese flight. If the endtime was 13.10, he said, and the coder’s watch or clock was “fast by one or more minute, then the encoding for KM 180 will have concluded by the time the entry was made”. If, on the other hand, the end-time was 13.16 this left a gaping hole in time when other bags may have been encoded through the same station that did not come from Malta at all.

Indeed, another flight, from Damascus, had arrived at Frankfurt at almost the same time as the Malta flight. Most of the bags from Damascus had gone to coding stations 202 and 207. And one-and-a-half wagons of luggage from that flight could not be accounted for. “It seems a not unreasonable inference,” concluded Mr Taylor, “that some of this baggage, even if only half a wagon, was encoded at station 206 between 13.04 and 13.16.” In other words, if the coding of bags from Malta was finished at 13.10, it took only a tiny discrepancy in clocks and watches to ensure that all the bags had been coded by the time the suspect bag went through the system. If it did not end until 13.16 there was every likelihood that other bags from other flights were being coded, any one of which could have ended up on flight 103A. To back up this reasoning, Mr Taylor referred again and again to the voluminous evidence of baggage handlers and supervisors at Frankfurt airport to the effect that mistakes, especially small mistakes in timings of the type that would have destroyed the prosecution case, were commonplace.

The mention of Damascus is interesting here, because Damascus runs all through The Trail of the Octopus. It's the centre for the sanctioned drug-running operation it is claimed was infiltrated by the bombers to get the bomb on board without security inspection (known drug-running suitcases being ignored by prior arrangement).

It still seems unlikely to me that any terrorist would launch an unaccompanied bag so far up the line, to take its chances on three flights and three sets of security inspections. However, if such a scenario is being considered, the possibility that some other incoming flight to Frankfurt (or even to Heathrow) was involved also needs to be considered. I don't think it ever was. First it was, look at Frankfurt because the PFLP-GC is based there, then it was, look at Malta because of these clothes. But by that criterion it could have come in from anywhere, and nobody seems to have looked.

Even if such an interline bag from Malta had got through the coding station at Frankfurt, it would have been x-rayed by staff who were on special alert for explosive devices packed in electronic equipment. The man running the x-ray machine was Kurt Maier. He was ill, so his evidence was given to the court through his statements. These confirmed, as did his colleagues that a) he was a careful operator and b) that on 21 December 1988 he had been warned to look out for electronic devices such as Toshiba cassette recorders.

His equipment could identify recorders and any explosive packed into them. He x-rayed all the interline baggage which was loaded on Pan Am103A, but did not see anything remarkable enough to make him stop the machine and call his supervisor. So even if a bag that apparently never left Malta arrived in Frankfurt and was coded into a station for Pan Am 103A to London, it would still have had to pass the vigilant eye of an x-ray specialist at Frankfurt who had recently been instructed of the dangers of explosives packed in Toshiba cassette recorders.

The Court judgement holds that Maier was untrained and wouldn't have known what to look for. It's not clear that the actual evidence bears this out. Foot seems to imply that he would have pulled anything that appeared to be a radio-cassette recorder out to be hand-searched, if he'd seen such a thing. He wouldn't have needed to know what Semtex looked like on an x-ray to do that.

If the thing went on at Frankfurt (or went through Frankfurt), the theories that involve inside help to circumvent security (whether the help thought the bag was heroin or know it was more than that) seem to have more inherent plausibility.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Something else I don't get about all this. This account has Mr. Taylor, Megrahi's advocate, doing a very good job on that evidence. And yet there has been enormous (and apparently entirely justified) criticism of the defence on many other points, where they either ignored Megrahi's instructions, failed to lead evidence that would have been favourable to him, or ignored lines of argument that would have undermined the prosecution's case. Here's the latest installment, published only a couple of days ago.

Very strange.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

If you read the judgement, there are some aspects where they present what seems to me to be a rather slanted take on the evidence, making it look better than it really is for the prosecution.

The Malta ingestion theory is not one of them. It's perfectly clear from the actual Court judgement that there's no case at all for a Malta ingestion. They actually say that "this is a major difficulty for the prosecution". And then they go on to declare that it must have been introduced at Malta after all.

Decoded: "be aware we are bailing you people out here."

It seems they have decided that the contents of Mrs. Erac's printout prove conclusively that a bag must have been introduced at Malta. I simply cannot see how the evidence on that printout, taken together with the ancillary evidence of the worksheets and so on, can possibly bear that interpretation. They may suggest that it might have been introduced there, but by no stretch of the imagination do they constitute conclusive proof.

I can say, if I felt the other evidence was fairly tight and i genuinely expected this bag made such a journey, I'd presume the link from KM180 to PA103A. It's doesn't seem an outlandish possibility that that cart wound up at just the right station at the right time. But with questions over the timer fragment's handling and alleged logic of deployment, given the ambiguities in Gauci's testimony, the known fabrications of Giaka (which wound up essentially true anyway to the judges), and the logic again of trying to sneak the bomb in this way, and indeed, the jaw just drops that they found this leap self-evident.

The bag could have been routed through that coding station from another flight. Or it could have been slipped into the system right there by a terrorist working under cover. If it was routed from another flight, there's no real reason to suppose it had anything to do with the bomb - it could have been a completely innocent piece of luggage.

None of these possibilities was given serious consideration. Instead, the judges ruled that it was the bomb, and that it must have come on KM180, despite the complete absence of any evidence of shenenigans associated with KM180, and in fact the great difficulty of seeing how any shenanigans could have been pulled at that end.

I disagree with emphasizing could, until I know way more than I ever will. But otherwise agreed. Also I'm agreed Heathrow has a stronger case, and Frankfurt may have been fingered to distract from that. Ex, didn't Juval Aviv make the case it was the PFLPG folks who did it, which is consistent with their bombs loaded at Heathrow, but then insists it was loaded in Frankfurt? Maybe I have that wrong.

Anyway, it seems the "grave damage to the Scottish justice system" so feared if this case ever unraveled, was done long ago. It's just not widely known yet. Better to get it out in the open and work through it than to keep it wept under the rug.

 

[Rolfe]

Uh, on the subject of Jibril getting the bomb on at Frankfurt, see my post in the timer thread.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

By 1310/16 then, this item was coded, but no earlier than 1304. Erac's records show a bag being checked at 1307, so that's a fit for when KM180's bags were being coded. Give or take clock discrepancies on one end or the other. Her records show this was at container no. B8849 station 206, Koscha's Koca's doesn't say where. That's a maybe fit so far. It was kept at a store, HS33 for two hours until moved at 1517 to gate B044 and loaded for the 1653 departure.

corrections. And again, that's just what the paperwork was read as showing.

Paul Foot's account of the Frankfurt baggage evidence and the Erac printout is probably the clearest of any available. This is the relevant extract from the Private Eye report. (I hope this extract encourages people to shell out for the whole thing; it really is very well written and presented indeed.)

You could get better about dropping teasers rather than whole chapter-things. It's great stuff, now I finally get to understand the red tarpaulin story, and see what Dr Fieldhouse looks like, etc. Realy helps get a handle on the thing. To nitpick, it is sort of a collection of articles more than a connected book, but then that makes it easier to research, going bit-by-bit, as we're doing here.

And so sticking to this bit, and Foot's contribution, well, there it is. Dunn about the Maier story, if it's true or not, but does argue against frankfurt ingestion, bag from Malta or no. The rest, good.

Something else I don't get about all this. This account has Mr. Taylor, Megrahi's advocate, doing a very good job on that evidence. And yet there has been enormous (and apparently entirely justified) criticism of the defence on many other points, where they either ignored Megrahi's instructions, failed to lead evidence that would have been favourable to him, or ignored lines of argument that would have undermined the prosecution's case. Here's the latest installment, published only a couple of days ago.

Great! I was waiting for that stuff, got it now, will read later. http://www.megrahimystory.net/
Indeed, Taylor goes into great detail as I've already seen and Foot confirms. It's a pretty good spot to build reasonable doubt on top of. But we've seen the stubborn power of conviction where they were inclined to downplay doubts and make the possible connection definite. Doing so after these elaborate efforts to remind them what they were ignoring, man... nothing could convince these guys. They even held onto Giaka's evidence after being forced to officially rule it out.

 

[Rolfe]

I've been re-reading the OP here, and I think CL brought up a number of issues we haven't really touched on yet. (Time to get back to the actual evidence, away from suggestions that the entire suitcase and its contents were fabricated!)

Is there really any evidence to support the suggestion that the bomb went on at Luqa?

Is there any significance to Fhimah's diary entry about luggage "tags" or "taggs"?

What about Megrahi being in Luqa airport that day on a "coded" passport and not giving any explanation?

What about the story of the way round the security at Luqa (by going through the ladies' toilets?) and could Megrahi have done that without an accomplice?

Why was the Air Malta checkin girl not asked at the trial whether she'd seen Fhimah at the airport that day?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I've been re-reading the OP here, and I think CL brought up a number of issues we haven't really touched on yet. (Time to get back to the actual evidence, away from suggestions that the entire suitcase and its contents were fabricated!)

Is there really any evidence to support the suggestion that the bomb went on at Luqa?

Is there any significance to Fhimah's diary entry about luggage "tags" or "taggs"?

That was the point I was about to come back to. As an enticement to anyone who might step in and try debunking, there is this curious evidence against the second accused, Fhimah. He was found not guilty, but there is the danging diary entries:

[84] We deal first with the second accused. The principal piece of evidence against him comes from two entries in his 1988 diary. This was recovered in April 1991 from the offices of Medtours, a company which had been set up by the second accused and Mr Vassallo. At the back of the diary there were two pages of numbered notes. The fourteenth item on one page is translated as “Take/collect tags from the airport (Abdulbaset/Abdussalam)”. The word ‘tags’ was written in English, the remainder in Arabic. On the diary page for 15 December there was an entry, preceded by an asterisk, “Take taggs from Air Malta”, and at the end of that entry in a different coloured ink “OK”. Again the word ‘taggs’ (sic) was in English. The Crown maintained that the inference to be drawn from these entries was that the second accused had obtained Air Malta interline tags for the first accused, and that as an airline employee he must have known that the only purpose for which they would be required was to enable an unaccompanied bag to be placed on an aircraft.

http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/library/lockerbie/docs/lockerbiejudgement.pdf

Why else would this guy be writing about picking up tags? If you think this is a strong point, speak on up and support it. For a sneak peak at the rebuttal you'll get, check Dispatches, about 1/3 through. In short - he worked in the airline/travel business and had different business with luggage tags. Discount the other possibilities and get us all to where the Crown was when they decided "the inference to be drawn" that "as an airline employee he must have known that the only purpose for which they would be required was to enable an unaccompanied bag to be placed on an aircraft." Worth a try, eh?

Adam.

 

[Rolfe]

I hadn't seen the Dispatches programme before. My God, who hasn't made a documentary about this?

It's far more informative about Thurman, Bollier and the fragment though.

Rolfe.

 

[leonAzul]

Unfortunately that didn't work for me an my Mac. Just got a frozen computer for ten minutes till it finished loading a page of gibberish.

You need to option-click on the link to force it to download instead of displaying in a browser window -- ouch! Right-click or control-click will give you a contextual menu with a choice to "download" or "save linked file", depending on the browser.

HTH.