While Charles is on the naughty step, I'll just explain why I'm interested in any further primary sources he has regarding the loading of the Heathrow interline luggage and the Frankfurt online transfer.
The Bedford suitcase appeared in the container before the Frankfurt feeder flight landed, among the interline luggage transferring to PA103 from earlier flights landing at Heathrow. If it's accepted that he didn't hallucinate the entire thing, and the judges certainly accepted that, then either it was a suitcase introduced by nefarious means, or it was genuinely one of the interline transfer bags. The judges went for the latter, but for no particularly good reason, as its owner was never identified and no suitcase which appeared to match that sighting was recovered at Lockerbie.
The positioning of the explosion in AVE4041 certainly appears to absolve the Heathrow check-in security, as no Heathrow check-in luggage was in that container. However, it doesn't exclusively implicate the Frankfurt luggage either, because of these interline bags already in the container. Just as the Official Verson later decided the suitcase had arrived at Frankfurt on an interline flight from Malta, it's perfectly possible it could have arrived at Heathrow from one of the direct interline flights, and have been any one of the ten or so such cases said to have been in that container.
There's approximately zip information available about this possibility though. I can't find any primary source that says anything about these passengers or their luggage, and how this possibility was eliminated.
What is available from secondary sources is that there weren't many such passengers - some say about thirteen. That's still a bit odd for only ten suitcases though. Which is why I'd like Charles to expand on his "first-class luggage" claim, but then I don't see 13 passengers generating as
many as ten first-class suitcases.
Then again we know who some of them were. Bernt Carlsson, the UN envoy. The US officials - McKee, Gannon, O'Connor, La Riviere and possibly others. Some or all of them were CIA. Gannon's suitcase (IIRC) was however left behind and found in a Heathrow baggage store after the disaster.
I think, principally, that the Bedford suitcase (the one on the left) was the bomb suitcase. I also think it was placed there directly by one of the terrorists (possibly Abu Elias himself) while Bedford was on his break. I think the right-hand suitcase, which might have been a matching pair to the first, was a place-holder, to try as far as possible to ensure the bomb suitcase stayed on the hull side of the container. (If the forensic conclusions are to be believed this didn't entirely work as planned and the case was moved by the loaders when the Frankfurt luggage was being added, but in the event this didn't matter because all that happened was that Karen Noonan's red Tourister suitcase was slipped under it, and it wasn't moved inboard.)
I'm rather interested in Gannon's lost suitcase though. Was this some sort of a bag-switch operation? Was the tag taken from Gannon's case to be used on the bomb bag? Is there any significance to the fact that this is the suitcase of a CIA operative? Though now I look at the
small wikipedia page on Gannon, I note an implication that his belongings were found at Lockerbie - though this might just have been a carry-on bag.
I'd also like to know more about all the Heathrow interline passengers. We know all passengers who travelled on the Malta-Frankfurt flight were followed up to the point of harrassment, investigating them for terrorist connections, and nothing was found. Surely the Heathrow interline passengers should have been similarly investigated? We don't even know for sure that they all caught the flight, though I think they did. I think they all died, but could one of them have been an unwitting mule?
I questioned whether the ten or so bags we know about in AVE 4041 were all the interline luggage there was, partly because I wanted to know if we could be sure the CIA officers' luggage was among them. I was persuaded that it was, because where else would these cases have gone? If there's any primary-source evidence that these cases were only the first-class interline luggage, and the second-class went in a different container, that would be quite interesting as regards following this up.
There's a great deal of primary-source evidence available in this case, so much that one person can't reasonably assimilate it all. So when someone makes a claim like this, it's useful to enquire where they got it from, as it might be relevant and important. I have a sinking feeling Charles has just got the wrong end of the stick though.
Rolfe.
