You called?
Yeah, but...when a terrorist attack like that occurs six months after threats of revenge and it comes out that Libyan officials probably didn't do it, you have to give a lot of credence to the conspiracy theory.
This.
The theory that Lockerbie was revenge for IR655 isn't a hill I would absolutely martyr myself on, but it's by far the most likely explanation for the atrocity. It was the main theory of the investigators for almost two years after the crash and there was a fair bit of evidence to support it.
IR655 happened in July 1988, PA103 happened in December of that year. In September/October a bunch of Palestinian/Syrian terrorists with experience in blowing aircraft out of the sky reformed their cell after about 20 years of little activity. The bomb-maker,
Marwan Khreesat (yes this is actually him) had been working in Jordan as a television repairman. There's a great deal of scuttlebut to the effect that the Iranian government commissioned the group to bring down one or more US airliners as revenge for IR655, including evidence (disputed, as all this stuff is) of the group receiving a bank transfer of $10 million from Iran.
In October the cell was busted by the German cops and 17 of the group (including Khreesat) taken into custody. Most were released within 48 hours and Khreesat himself was released not long afterwards after making one phone call to Jordan. In spite of the ringleaders being arrested in a car with an IED built into a radio-cassette player in the boot, and a bunch of other evidence, a judge said there was insufficient evidence to hold the men. Funny that.
Some commentators declare that the arrests stopped whatever plan these guys were hatching dead in its tracks, however there were a bunch more IEDs built into various items of consumer electronics in their safe house, and these weren't discovered until the following April, after Lockerbie happened. The bomb that brought down
Maid of the Seas was extremely similar to the bombs Khreesat had been building. The terrorists who were arrested were only held for a very short time.
So, we have certain knowledge of a terrorist gang active in the autumn of 1988 and with links to Iran, making bombs designed to bring down airliners in flight, and in particular building them into things like radio-cassette players. The bombs were designed to blow up about 40 minutes after the aircraft took off, by means of a barometer built into the mechanism. The bomb that brought down PA103 was built into a radio-cassette player and the plane blew apart exactly 38 minutes after its wheels left the tarmac.
Except, in the end the investigators decided these were not the people responsible for Lockerbie. Instead they went after a completely different culprit, Libya, and people with no history of bombing aircraft, or expertise in the area. (The Palestinian gang had been blowing up aircraft bound for Israel by more or less the same method back in 1970.)
If we leave aside geopolitical considerations that may have made Libya a far more acceptable culprit than Iran, politically, at that time, what seems to have happened is this.
The bomb that brought down PA103 was loaded into an unattended baggage container sitting in a shed at Heathrow airport, at about 4.30 pm on the day of the disaster. The evidence for this is quite clear. However the investigators walked straight past this evidence as if it wasn't there and insisted that the suitcase containing the bomb had actually been transferred from a connecting flight from Frankfurt. (The connecting flight arrived more than an hour
after the bomb suitcase was seen in the container by a baggage handler.) This is all a bit convoluted but can be understood by anyone prepared to wade through
this.
So the investigators concentrated on Frankfurt, and from there their attention turned to Malta airport. They became absolutely convinced that the bomb had begun its journey there at about 9 am, loaded on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt as illegitmate unaccompanied luggage, and then transferred through the automated baggage transfer system to the PA103 feeder flight. Their conviction never wavered, even when painstaking and prolonged investigation on Malta (where there was another cell of the same Palestinian terrorist group) failed to find any connection between the suspects and the Air Malta flight - or indeed any evidence of an unaccompanied suitcase on the flight in question.
Well, it seems to me that if you're looking for the right people in the wrong place you might have trouble getting the evidence you need to bring them to book. By the autumn of 1990 the gung-ho rhetoric of imminent arrests for Lockerbie (that would be arrests of the Palestinian gang), so prevalent in 1989, had given way to frustrated silence. Then in late 1990, after a re-think caused by the identification of a puzzling piece of evidence, the investigators decided that their problem had been that they were looking for the wrong people. They needed to look for Libyans.
That's another long and complicated story, but in the end they managed to cobble a case together against two Libyan airline staff, one of whom (Abdelbaset al-Megrahi) had been at the airport in Malta at the salient time, catching a flight back to Tripoli after a business trip to Malta.
The likelihood is that nobody expected this case to come to trial. The whole point was to get sanctions imposed on Libya and cripple its economy. This was however too successful, in that Libya was suffering so badly that the two accused agreed to surrender themselves for trial. That was where the spectacularly threadbare nature of the case against them was revealed, however it seems that the judges (OK, two of the three, Coulsdon was for acquittal but was persuaded to fall in line with a compromise split verdict) couldn't face the prospect of no convictions coming out of a multi-million pound investigation, eight years of sanctions against Libya, the entire world having been told that these guys did it no question, and a multi-million pound three-ring circus of a trial. So they convicted Megrahi in
a judgement which is the most outrageous example of circular reasoning it has ever been my misfortune to read.
This conviction is finally starting to unravel despite the best efforts of the Scottish Crown Office to prop it up. So what then? Whether we'll get a new investigation of the actual crime, that is the loading of a suitcase containing a bomb into the baggage container at Heathrow in the late afternoon, I really don't know. It's been nearly 30 years. But at this point in my opinion the smart money is on the Palestinian gang who were the original suspects.
They were cooking up a plan to do to an aircraft almost exactly what happened to PA103. PA103 happened. If it wasn't the Palestinians, then we have one gang we know about who were making a plan to do this, but that plan didn't come to fruition, but some other gang we know nothing about just happened to succeed in doing that very thing a short time later. I mean, go figure.
The strength of the evidence linking the Palestinian gang (the leader was one Ahmed Jibril and his main henchman was Hafez Dalkamoni, while I think the bomb may actually have been planted by someone going by the pseudonym of Abu Elias) with the Iranian government has not been tested in court and some of the most damning assertions have been questioned by various commentators. However it was pretty much accepted fact in 1989.
So yes, I think this interpretation of the Lockerbie disaster is the most likely one, unless something very unexpected is uncovered in a new investigation.
