Pan Am 103: Unaccompanied bag from Malta: Evidence?

[Caustic Logic]

Okay, so it seems I was confused and numbers are permanently set for each physical container.

I just have trouble with the idea of two quite separate fabrications and plants in this story (one pre Cannistrato and one post?), and also with the idea that the printout is planted but the timer fragment isn't!

Well it's not like there's a cosmic watcher saying "alright, buddy, you want a cover-up? You're only allowed one planted piece of evidence, because two, c'mon, that's just crazy." If there are signs, then maybe they mean what they point to. So far we have all this data narrowed to one woman's privately held copy, and reportedly the verifying paperwork was disappeared as well. That totally makes the printout suspect. Of just what I can't say for sure, but we know what made it important later.

I'm working on a transcript of the MDC section with Phipps and Jones, and will look again at the printout more widely. So I'll be back.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh sure, don't let me stop you. I can think of a motive for fabricating the printout early on. There was a reason for not going after Jibril. This again is another thread. By March we know there was a Bush/Thatcher agreement to soft-pedal the PFLP-GC connection.

Jibril's group was based at Frankfurt. So maybe we want to direct the search for the starting point of the bomb away from Frankfurt? Well, where? Malta was the source of the clothes in the suitcase, and it's a handy entrance to Europe from a fair chunk of the Middle East. Malta is a natural choice. So let's trail the possibility that something came through from Malta.

(I wonder how soon it was realised that the Malta security was so tight? Might have been little reason to question Luqa before the printout was discovered and checked - up till then it was just one of many airports two hops from PA103.)

So this could have been done early, while Jibril was still Scotland's Most Wanted, simply to get the hounds away from Frankfurt, where the presence of the bomb in a luggage container mostly filled from PA103A had directed the enquiry in the very early stages.

Then later, once the Bush-or-high-level-strategic-chief decision was made that pinning the blame on Libya would kill quite a few birds with one stone, and there had been some very peripheral mention of Libya already (Gauci always said the mystery shopper was a Libyan, and one of Jibril's bomb experts was originally wrongly identified as Libyan), so hey, who knows maybe that can be arranged, let's appoint our Libyan dirty tricks expert to head the case and see what he can find, off you go Vincent, and you know where we want this to go....

Maybe an earlier, successful fabrication encouraged the idea that maybe a second one would work just as well....

OK, Agatha Christie might think it was overkill, but it isn't intrinsically impossible.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

1:23 in the video, Michael Jones, Pan Am security, went to Frankfurt Airport Jan 23 1989 and found loading files for 103A missing from the daily file. That does seem like a promising lead.

OK, got it.

Michael Jones, Pan Am security, London

I went to Frankfurt airport on 23rd of January 1989, to look for documents in relation to the preparation of Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London, and particularly the cargo and baggage loading plan, who was responsible for loading the plane and what their duties were, but these documents were missing from the daily file.

Denis Phipps, former head of security, British Airways

The records at Frankfurt they were by no means complete. One was not able to get hold of the detailed records. Particularly what concerned me was, there was no record of who unloaded that flight KM180 when it arrived at Frankfurt. We don't know who the loaders were. There was no record of the number of bags that were actually unloaded from that flight. There were no records that I could find.

Michael Jones

If the original documents had been taken by the authorities, and by that I mean the police, then it would be normal practice for a copy to be retained in the Pan Am file.

Narrator

In 1993 Air Malta won its libel suit against Granada television. Granada, in a docu-drama, had claimed the bomb had been placed in an unaccompanied bag on an Air Malta flight.

Denis Phipps

At Malta, the records of the handling of that flight, KM180, were made available for me to see. There was no evidence of any unaccompanied bags. All of the bags that were carried as passenger baggage on that flight had been checked in by a passenger who actually travelled on the flight.

Narrator

When in October 1989 the FBI visited Frankfurt airport, the agent sent back this telex to Washington. "No evidence of any bag transfer from an Air Malta flight." The only evidence showing a transfer bag, a computer printout used to prepare this German police report. An airport employee, Mrs. Erac, claimed to have stored in her locker a copy printed off the destroyed original computer tape.

Denis Phipps

The computer printout does not say where the bag came from. They tried to tie that bag to KM180 from the worksheet which was maintained, and as we found, the worksheet is completely unreliable, and in any case, even if you accept that the worksheet was approximately right, we have nobody that can account for, or was in charge of, or can tell us who or how those bags came from the actual aircraft KM180 to that coding station. And for more than one kilometre, while they were in there waiting, those bags were under nobody's control or supervision, they were not counted, we don't know how many should be there, and it would have been possible to put another bag in there along any of that route or at any time.

Michael Jones

I've never seen any documentation whatsoever produced by Pan Am or anybody else to show there was any interline baggage from the Air Malta flight on the 21st of December 1988.

It seems we also have to explain the disappearance of so much of the original records and information. This doesn't entirely sound like, sorry officer, you're just too late, if we'd know you wanted this stuff - but it was all thrown out a week ago.

Phipps doesn't seem to be saying that, he seems to be saying that flight in particular was missing, and didn't seem to have been given to the police because where were the copies.

Did you have a date for Bogomira coming forward with the printout, and also for the Frankfurt police finally handing it over to the investigation? If so, source?

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Great on the transcript. I'll come back to that in a bit.

This film is pretty amazing in what information he had at the time. It was made in Nov. 1994, wasn't it? So why does i have the $4 million reward poster for the FBI program ushered in in mid-95? Can't re-locate it now, but It's different - no Megrahi or Fhimah pics, but the same case and the headline "we'll give you $4 million reasons to fight terrorism" with app. small print beneath it.

I dunno about LeWinter; from here I though 'old ex-CIA guy that's spent years repeating disposable CIA CT claims as if he knows all about them, gettin' a little slow at it now.' Others then said long-time hoaxster, so I'm like - meh. On Cannistrano his gist does make sense - it seems he was Reagan's 'make ◊◊◊◊ up about Gaddafi' guy, and here he's in charge of the investigation that wound up, parallel to the criminal one, doing just that. His Giaka teasers are classic. The set-up between that and the total teardown in court is jaw-dropping.

On when he was put in charge, there's little around. Dr. Swire's site HAD a dedicated page on him with details, sourced at Wikipedia, no longer there. It almost feels like a dead spot around these Qs, like Feraday's getting wikipedia to pull his profile. Or maybe not. But he was reportedly the CTC "Chief of Operations and Analysis" from 88-91, so would it make more sense for him to head the investigation up-front, or only after the normal guy was swapped out? We only have LeWinter's statements that he wasn't in charge at first. We can agree on guessing it was in no later than the end of 89 anyway, right?

 

[Caustic Logic]

I'm doing some "analysis" on the printout data. FWIW, this post only deals with more of my fumbling for patterns there, If boring to you, skip it.

Here's a question to lure an expert on statistics, combinatorics, odds, etc. to step in. I'm still finding the bunching of the two late arrivals (at gate 41 if not the plane) is statistically unlikely, though possible. Since there are 111 slots, by pure chance the odds that the other late arrival should happen to have the closest container no. as the one from station 206 is about 1 in 110, if I'm not wrong. That the other late loader should have the next closest number is itself 1 in 109. Right? So that both happened would be 1 in 110x109 or 1 in 11,990.

But what this bunching could mean is beyond me so far. Probably nothing. I wasn't trying to find some debunk code, as I don't usually believe in those. But this was odd and stood out.

I'm also finding little patterns at work. Ex: "time leave store" to "time at gate" is almost all six minute intervals. A few slowed items (up to 20 min so far) and late items (1600 and after) move faster - from 3 down to even one minute (at gate 41, 1631) Container numbers run up to 12244 only, so it's a partial 5-digit system, stopping well short of 99999, unless some huge random sector is just not represented. I figure about 13,000 distinct tray ID numbers?

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

I'm doing some "analysis" on the printout data. FWIW, this post only deals with more of my fumbling for patterns there, If boring to you, skip it.

Here's a question to lure an expert on statistics, combinatorics, odds, etc. to step in. I'm still finding the bunching of the two late arrivals (at gate 41 if not the plane) is statistically unlikely, though possible. Since there are 111 slots, by pure chance the odds that the other late arrival should happen to have the closest container no. as the one from station 206 is about 1 in 110, if I'm not wrong. That the other late loader should have the next closest number is itself 1 in 109. Right? So that both happened would be 1 in 110x109 or 1 in 11,990.

But what this bunching could mean is beyond me so far. Probably nothing. I wasn't trying to find some debunk code, as I don't usually believe in those. But this was odd and stood out.

I'm also finding little patterns at work. Ex: "time leave store" to "time at gate" is almost all six minute intervals. A few slowed items (up to 20 min so far) and late items (1600 and after) move faster - from 3 down to even one minute (at gate 41, 1631) Container numbers run up to 12244 only, so it's a partial 5-digit system, stopping well short of 99999, unless some huge random sector is just not represented. I figure about 13,000 distinct tray ID numbers?

I don't intend this to be snarky, but I can't figure out a way of saying this without it possibly sounding that way.

That post reminds me of the bible code, or the comedian's (Eddie Izzard?) joke 'A funny thing happened on the way here tonight, I saw a car with the registration FN05 QVC, what are the odds of that?'

You can't do statistical analysis like that on a single data point (one loading list). If you had several hundred, you could maybe identify something unique about PanAm103A's, otherwise you are looking for patterns in a big list of numbers, which you will find. Lots of them, but they mean nothing.

 

[Caustic Logic]

Michael Jones, Pan Am security, London

I went to Frankfurt airport on 23rd of January 1989, to look for documents in relation to the preparation of Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London, and particularly the cargo and baggage loading plan, who was responsible for loading the plane and what their duties were, but these documents were missing from the daily file.
...
If the original documents had been taken by the authorities, and by that I mean the police, then it would be normal practice for a copy to be retained in the Pan Am file.

Isn't this just what my theory said? I don't trust this guy or anyone, exactly. But he's saying that the records are gone, as they must be. He seems to be implying the CIA. Someone else at Pan Am maybe. And they were working with Aviv at the time (94). Heroin suitcases, implications, ulterior motives. But he's painting a dead spot in daily paper records re: the loading of the fateful flight with a certain finality. By 1/23 makes sense - he's not a primary investigator, and only might be looking for curiosity, so no rush. By a month later anyway this was gone. I already knew the Court didn't mention these logs in the positive, but didn't see if they note the absence.

ETA: word searched the verdict, and Pan Am appears exactly once, in naming the crime. So no, they just completely glossed over this.

ETA: OOps, PaAm nospace has several hits.

Now on Bogomira's printout - this would not and did not show the loading. It seems the hard paperwork applied in tarmac-and-wheels areas: planes, wagons, and coding stations these fed into. What the system tracked was (pardon my perhaps stupid characterization as I'm picking it up) the computerized system of roller conveyors, switching stations, bar-code-scanners, and such in a large underground system: connecting coding stations, stores, and apparently up to gates.

I wonder if the luggage stores had people in them keeping paper logs? No mention of store "HS33" logs where people wrote down tray no.s as they came in and out. That sounds insane. Just letting the computers running it keep track sounds smarter, but again, aren't records important? Backup tapes seems the smartest way. How hard would it be to buy a few and keep them for, say a week? Not too hard, that's what they did. Investigators should have been there well within that week. They probably were. It was probably as blank as Pan Am's daily file. Which is why they write a police report later on the printout - it was probably the first they saw and not for sluggishness on their own part.

Frankfurt's records were incomplete all right, in some very poignant ways.

Denis Phipps, former head of security, British Airways

The records at Frankfurt they were by no means complete. One was not able to get hold of the detailed records. Particularly what concerned me was, there was no record of who unloaded that flight KM180 when it arrived at Frankfurt. We don't know who the loaders were. There was no record of the number of bags that were actually unloaded from that flight. There were no records that I could find.

Speaking in '94 after having recently looked at/for primary documents. The Airportt authority was responsiible for unloading and should have records, like the one for coding station 206. The Cort had the records presented and for 180's unloading was production 1068 “the evidence of Joachim Koscha,” which established KM180’s arrival and unloading time, 12:48-13:00. They provided no direct citation of record. No numbers, no papers AFAICT. Hmmm. Was someone afraid these would be found the verify Air Malta's claims that the same number claimed was unloaded? Or is it a coincidence these records also weren't kept?

Denis Phipps

At Malta, the records of the handling of that flight, KM180, were made available for me to see. There was no evidence of any unaccompanied bags. All of the bags that were carried as passenger baggage on that flight had been checked in by a passenger who actually travelled on the flight.

So - we have proof a wagon of unknown number of bags from KM180 arriving at station 206. We're to believe the number of bags is one higher than Air Malta admits to. Sorry, no verifying record, take our word for it. The number admitted all claimed, a remaining item from 206 at the right time is then recorded being routed to the gate 103A loaded from. No investigators anywhere bothered getting a verifying record of this even tho the data was officially available for a week. But then we should have a record at the gate of items arriving and going in containers and onto the plane, that should show item 8849 among them. Sorry no records available to verify this.

Someone hands SCOTBOM a sheaf of paper in August 89 and Marquise says: “her printout was the only record." Damning indictment of a blanked system? Nahhh "This was as much a key to the solution of the case as Tony Gauci or the Mebo chip.” Or Giaka, don't forget Giaka. Lots of prime moments in this mammoth exemplary investigation.

August 89 is from Conspiracy Files, part 3, 4:45, as the month the inv. first learned of the printout. I saw that verified somewhere else, I forget where. No details tho.

When in October 1989 the FBI visited Frankfurt airport, the agent sent back this telex to Washington. "No evidence of any bag transfer from an Air Malta flight."

That is interesting. I wonder what the source was for this conclusion?

Denis Phipps

The computer printout does not say where the bag came from. They tried to tie that bag to KM180 from the worksheet which was maintained, and as we found, the worksheet is completely unreliable,

I think I disagree here. All it showed was station 206 dealt with KM180's baggage, some amount of it, at the same time the printout showed 8849 coded there. Is the airplane origin listed unreliable, or did they get their station number wrong? Or is he just referring to how it's not reliable to assume ONLY KM180 stuff was going on, or the 1310/1316 debate? Nitpicking, IMO. This one paper is fine.

 

[Rolfe]

I don't intend this to be snarky, but I can't figure out a way of saying this without it possibly sounding that way.

That post reminds me of the bible code, or the comedian's (Eddie Izzard?) joke 'A funny thing happened on the way here tonight, I saw a car with the registration FN05 QVC, what are the odds of that?'

You can't do statistical analysis like that on a single data point (one loading list). If you had several hundred, you could maybe identify something unique about PanAm103A's, otherwise you are looking for patterns in a big list of numbers, which you will find. Lots of them, but they mean nothing.

Fair comment, but he's not actually claiming anything here. Sometimes you actually have to look that closely at the data to convince yourself thre's nothing to find.

Personally, I think there are three possibilities here.

1. The printout is entirely genuine, with the history as described, but the "mystery tray" has been misinterpreted - it was a perfectly innocent piece of luggage either from another flight (as suggested by Paul Foot), or misdirected to PA103A and later corrected (as apparently suggested by Edwin Bollier).

Here is what Paul Foot said, taken from evidence and arguments presented at the trial.

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.”

2. The printout is entirely genuine, with the history as described, but what it reveals is in fact the introduction of the bomb suitcase at Frankfurt itself, possibly at coding station 206. This is the possibility explained in The Trail of the Octopus. This is a closer examination of the October 1989 FBI teletype (shown in The Maltese Double Cross), which seems to be a report by FBI investigators who went to Frankfurt to try to clarify whether or not there was indeed a bag from Malta on PA103A.

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'.

3. The entire printout is a fabrication, designed to be consistent with the surviving paper records and show a bag that appeared to come from KM180 going on to PA103A.

The fourth possibility, that the data were covertly retained (in spite of the investigators finding nothing on 23rd January) and subsequently doctored to add the mystery tray before persuading/threatening/bribing Mrs. Erac to "find" the printout in her locker, seems very far-fetched compared to these three scenarios.

The problem, I suppose, is that neither of my first two suggestions satisfies the feeling of incredulity over the entire "no we lost all the relevant information relating to this huge terrorist incident" followed by "oh, fancy that, here it is after all" story.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I think I disagree here (referring to the worksheets being unreliable). All it showed was station 206 dealt with KM180's baggage, some amount of it, at the same time the printout showed 8849 coded there. Is the airplane origin listed unreliable, or did they get their station number wrong? Or is he just referring to how it's not reliable to assume ONLY KM180 stuff was going on, or the 1310/1316 debate? Nitpicking, IMO. This one paper is fine.

Paul Foot's account doesn't think much of the accuracy of these worksheets in general.

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. [....]

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.”

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. [....]

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.

I think Paul Foot is suggesting that the worksheets were only approximate, and simply could not support the weight of inference being put on this one. I've read elsewhere of other stray bags being noted in that printout coming in from uncertain origins (reference?). Part of his thesis seems to be that the end-time may be 13.16 because actually half a wagon or so from a completely different flight showed up at station 206 at the same time as the KM180 luggage and got coded along with it, and one of these bags happened to be tagged for PA103A.

Oh yes, and note yet another important witness somehow not being called. Maybe he would have been so vague about what he was coding and where it came from, it would have destroyed the entire house of cards.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

I don't intend this to be snarky, but I can't figure out a way of saying this without it possibly sounding that way.

That post reminds me of the bible code, or the comedian's (Eddie Izzard?) joke 'A funny thing happened on the way here tonight, I saw a car with the registration FN05 QVC, what are the odds of that?'

I had that same thought, and glad you said it so succinctly since I had so much else to say. Can't cover ALL bases without busting a fuse. I think the odds are about as I say, pure statistics only. And it's only when arranged by container no. - other arrangements would reveal other oddities. I also emphasize that I can't see a reason behind or a clear clue in this, at least not one applicable to the 3-D world and that isn't pretty weird. It COULD be a clue to the reasoning behind and info set-up thing, but if so it's a pretty stupid one. But stupid is a type of real. So I dunno. Can't say. I'm ready to move on.

You can't do statistical analysis like that on a single data point (one loading list). If you had several hundred, you could maybe identify something unique about PanAm103A's, otherwise you are looking for patterns in a big list of numbers, which you will find. Lots of them, but they mean nothing.

This is a set spread, and presuming random sampling due to uncontrolled shuffling of trays, certain statistical probabilities apply. Pure chance would only yield this result about once in 12,000 tries, I think. That's all.

2. The printout is entirely genuine, with the history as described, but what it reveals is in fact the introduction of the bomb suitcase at Frankfurt itself, possibly at coding station 206. This is the possibility explained in The Trail of the Octopus. This is a closer examination of the October 1989 FBI teletype (shown in The Maltese Double Cross), which seems to be a report by FBI investigators who went to Frankfurt to try to clarify whether or not there was indeed a bag from Malta on PA103A.

Entirely possible. Any person doing this would have to know they were framing Libya. Unless it's a bizarre coincidence they used Maltese clothes and picked just the station and time where KM180's bags were processed. Not my leasing thought just yet, but interesting...

 

[Guybrush Threepwood]

This is a set spread, and presuming random sampling due to uncontrolled shuffling of trays, certain statistical probabilities apply. Pure chance would only yield this result about once in 12,000 tries, I think. That's all.

That's true, but the point is it is equally true for every possible ordering of the list, if you only have one list it is a 1 in 12000 shot that you got that one, whichever one it is.

 

[Rolfe]

Any person doing this would have to know they were framing Libya. Unless it's a bizarre coincidence they used Maltese clothes and picked just the station and time where KM180's bags were processed. Not my leasing thought just yet, but interesting...

No. This was way too early for framing Libya. I don't think they started framing Libya until early in 1990, at the earliest.

If this is fabricated, it would be about drawing attention away from an introduction of the bag at Frankfurt (where Jibril's gang was based) to a completely different airport. If so, I would speculate that they picked KM180 precisely because of the clothes, to make the whole scenario seem to hang together.

At this point, we have evidence that Jibril's involvement was to be down-played, but no evidence of an alternative Libya hypothesis being promoted.

(I still favour the view that the printout isn't fabricated, though.)

Rolfe.

 

[Klimax]

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/51...7EC77F5F8D1CE052F2A02EF72904139F71A9C9BC19C35

Very quickly:URL is to a cache server/proxy which refuses my connection,could you please find different location or original loaction?

Anyway is there any place with raw(UNALTERED) images of evidece and data?
Rolfe is right,if I don't see it I just cook from water.(Don't know how this turn of pharse is international)

Anyway I may be answer rest of post,but I am now trying to do too many things in 24hour long day already without this. (Unfortunately I suspect that we all are sort of speculating and any results will be dependent upon poster)

 

[Rolfe]

Try this page. The image is smaller, but you'll get it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1145884.stm

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

No. This was way too early for framing Libya. I don't think they started framing Libya until early in 1990, at the earliest.

If this is fabricated, it would be about drawing attention away from an introduction of the bag at Frankfurt (where Jibril's gang was based) to a completely different airport. If so, I would speculate that they picked KM180 precisely because of the clothes, to make the whole scenario seem to hang together.

At this point, we have evidence that Jibril's involvement was to be down-played, but no evidence of an alternative Libya hypothesis being promoted.

(I still favour the view that the printout isn't fabricated, though.)

Rolfe.

On the timing, there was no final and complete decision even now to blame Libya. Officially, yes, but the old line(s) of inquiry still resides in many peoples' minds. Likewise, before the shift there may have been the future case in some minds but not others. There seems to be a period of interweave in 1989, fading into 1990 with no movement allowed on the one track that fades as the action on the other solidifies. I believe the notio to bame Libya was there to some degree from the beginning. The Naltese clothes and the bag transfer ARE both early signs pointing vaguely to Libya, but not necc. part of that plan.

It does minimize attention on Frankfurt, by showing all we need to know is this slender thread running back to the Med so all they did was unwittingly pass the evil along. The printout shows all you need - from KM180 to 206, to store HS33, to gate 44, to 103A, and gone - no closer examination needed.

I could well accept that the printout is genuine, just delayed, even though I find that 206 connection just as suspicious as SCOTBOM found it useful. But either way, I think at the least this genuine copy was held at bay on purpose, along with the blanked system (within a few days of the crash I'd guess) and disappeared loading papers. Maybe they (CIA?) just wanted to make sure all was kosher before letting anyone else see what wen onto PA103A. Except the loading papers didn't resurface AFAIK. If it wasn't okay, they'd fix it, and if it was okay and didn't show any heroin suitcases, Jibril-conneting flights, or what have you, they'd release it as is, with a sigh of relief that no complex faking was necc. , to reveal what it does - a bag from station 206.

You're icon's getting spookier all the time, BTW. More mysterious and noir, which seems to fit the terrain here.

 

[Rolfe]

There's a thread in Community doing Hallowe'en transformations on people's avatars. I have been peculiarly blessed.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

But either way, I think at the least this genuine copy was held at bay on purpose, along with the blanked system (within a few days of the crash I'd guess) and disappeared loading papers. Maybe they (CIA?) just wanted to make sure all was kosher before letting anyone else see what wen onto PA103A. Except the loading papers didn't resurface AFAIK. If it wasn't okay, they'd fix it, and if it was okay and didn't show any heroin suitcases, Jibril-conneting flights, or what have you, they'd release it as is, with a sigh of relief that no complex faking was necc. , to reveal what it does - a bag from station 206.

If that was really done at that stage of the enquiry (that is, within the first four weeks), it almost inevitably implies some degree of LIHOP going on.

This whole thing really does have the air of a security services sting (or similar) getting completely f-ed up and going horribly and tragically wrong. How much of it is Khreesat, believed to be a Jordanian spy (thus aligned with the CIA) and so released from custody, but actually making live bombs which kill a German policeman - and 270 people at Lockerbie? How much of it is Jafaar and the drug smuggling, which may have been DEA sanctioned? How much of it was related to the CIA officers on the plane, maybe?

I don't necessarily mean LIHOP as in "we know it's going to happen and we're OK with that", but somewhere between "we've a pretty good idea something is going to happen and we can't stop it because it would expose our sources and operatives" and "PA103 is the target but we're not going to cancel the flight."

I suspect this examination of the evidence is leading that way in the end, but if the baggage records at Frankfurt were really spirited away in advance of the legitimate investigators, I can't see an innocent explanation for that.

Rolfe.

 

[Caustic Logic]

If that was really done at that stage of the enquiry (that is, within the first four weeks), it almost inevitably implies some degree of LIHOP going on.

Not necessarily. There are more routine non-explosive secrets that would normally move in an out of records unnoticed, but when police are likely to come looking, and you really don't want that info seen, you'd make sure it disappeared and laid low in some "locker" until things cleared up and blew over.

This whole thing really does have the air of a security services sting (or similar) getting completely f-ed up and going horribly and tragically wrong. How much of it is Khreesat, believed to be a Jordanian spy (thus aligned with the CIA) and so released from custody, but actually making live bombs which kill a German policeman - and 270 people at Lockerbie? How much of it is Jafaar and the drug smuggling, which may have been DEA sanctioned? How much of it was related to the CIA officers on the plane, maybe?

I get the same vibe, but I haven't given much close thought/study to what positively DID happen there, as opposed to what didn't. So many variable, so many real leads and misdirecting hoaxes tangled together, such grave accusations and tinfoil that starts growing if you try and figure it out...

I don't necessarily mean LIHOP as in "we know it's going to happen and we're OK with that", but somewhere between "we've a pretty good idea something is going to happen and we can't stop it because it would expose our sources and operatives" and "PA103 is the target but we're not going to cancel the flight."

I suspect this examination of the evidence is leading that way in the end, but if the baggage records at Frankfurt were really spirited away in advance of the legitimate investigators, I can't see an innocent explanation for that.

Rolfe.

Innocent being a relative word, totally agreed. This is some shade of shady. Thanks for the tips here!

 

[Caustic Logic]

So I put all this stuff together in a big blog post:
http://12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/2009/10/frankfurt-airport-records.html
It's still a little rough, I'm sure, and I haven't got all my sources and links lined up yet but I just needed to get it up.

Along the way I double-checked the Court's opinion and found suspiciously little on any info from PanAm e: Frankfurt. Referring to the court's "production number" evidence system, I called this section "production null"

This is the designation – none – given to PanAm’s loading records for flight 103A. Holding to previous patterns, we’re back to tarmac and wheels space, and there should be records kept at gates 44 and 41 regarding the luggage items received and loaded onto the planes at each gate. There should be a verification that item 8849 was among them, and that it was then loaded to the plane.

Obviously the Airport authority couldn’t offer this to the court, as it wasn’t their job to load a PanAm plane or to log what they don’t do. There’s no mention in the Court’s opinion of what PanAm provided to the case; they went bankrupt in late 1991, so it’s natural they didn’t send anyone to the 2000 trial. But judging by Marquise, they also added nothing to the 1989-91 investigation, at least regarding the crucial Frankfurt link. The court adds nothing to that, only citing "evidence [...] that no baggage was left at the gate" in reasoning that "it can be inferred that all items sent there were loaded." Again, a non-admission admission that they don't really have the evidence they should.

Positive confirmation of this lack of records can be found in The Maltese Double-Cross. According to Michael Jones, a Pan Am’s security chief with the London office [emph mine]:
I went to Frankfurt airport on 23rd of January 1989, to look for documents in relation to the preparation of Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London, and particularly the cargo and baggage loading plan, who was responsible for loading the plane and what their duties were, but these documents were missing from the daily file. … If the original documents had been taken by the authorities, and by that I mean the police, then it would be normal practice for a copy to be retained in the Pan Am file.

We have a date – one month after the disaster, and the crucial files for this plane are reportedly gone. No one I know of has reported seeing them since. The computer tracking system was also gone to nearly all eyes as of January and on through August before it resurfaced to lead the case in a new direction. It would appear that investigators before that clue had no data on what went onto that plane that fed into the other plane. This in itself is a little-known but major scandal, quite likely its own crime scene that could not be traced back to foreign terrorists. Therefore, it’s to remain little-known.

 

[Rolfe]

Do you really think the first reaction of airport authorities and managers, faced with a completely unexpected air disaster to a plane which hadn't even taken off from their airport, would be to conceal a heap of baggage loading records, just in case?

I think it's quite hard to postulate even in the situation where some spooks and law enforcement people are more than half-expecting an incident and hope to cover it up if it happens. It's surely kind of hard to swan into a major airport and make the people there co-operate with your cover-up without being exposed by someone.

That's the trouble with this affair, it's just crawling with weird anomalies, but they aren't necessarily easy to explain either innocently or as some sort of cover-up. You expect some anomalies in any incident like this, that in the end simply have to be written off as "stuff happens", but the sheer number fouling up this case is extremely peculiar.

Rolfe.