Trail of the Octopus said:
On 17 August 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a computer print-out of the baggage-loading list for Pan Am Flight 103A from Frankfurt to London on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. Attached to this were two internal reports, dated 2 February 1989, describing the inquiries that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the airport.
So that's the police report, something I'd wanted to learn more about. August 17 for a date. The information within is about as old as implied by other sources - Printout discovered three weeks after the disaster, so mid-January, and soon given to the BKA. February 2 internal reports "describing the inquiries that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the airport" are a good fit for follow-ups to this revalation. These I'd love to read. It's also indirect verification that
any earlier efforts, fruitful or not, remain under wraps. Did they not look, or not like what they found? This new (to the investigation) development sparked visits to the airport by Scots and the FBI through September and October, pretty much just as their German counterparts did months earlier, and as neither apparently bothered to do before being rung up with the news.
Also provided were two worksheets, one typewritten, the other handwritten, that were said to have been prepared on 21 December by airport workers at key points on the conveyor-belt network.
The handwritten one would have to be the station 206 log, with KM180's coding signed for by Mr. Koca. The "typrewritten" one is new to me, and would be interesting to learn more about. It wouldn't be included unless it had some relevance to item 8849, and maybe not in type unless it was part of the computer system. This COULD actually change my view on things, or not.
In the margin of the computer print-out, a penciled cross drew particular attention to bag number B8849 - that is the 8849th bag to be logged into the computerized system at Terminal B that day.
Very small point, but we've already established here that's wrong. The printout itself shows no particular pattern wrt tray numbers vs. coding time. The numbers are instead, apparently, permanent ID for physical trays scattered at random - this was simply tray no. 8849 that this bag was (allegedly) put in.
More particularly, there were problems with the computer records and worksheets from Frankfurt. For one thing, they did not tally with Pan Am's own baggage records, which although questionable as to their accuracy, were at least compiled in good faith. To this day no one knows exactly how many pieces of luggage there were aboard the doomed flight or consequently whether they have all been recovered or accounted for. Nobody even knows exactly how many suitcases were in the luggage pallet that contained the one with the bomb -- it was 45 or 46 -- or how many of these were brought in by the feeder flight from Frankfurt. (The number was also thought to include not one but four unaccompanied bags.)
There would be a lot of good info coming out of the Pan Am's liability trials, which I'm guessing Coleman drew on for a lot of this. Odd how the whole company
seems to have been scuttled to drag some secrets down with them. But on the bolded, I'm not sure if that's a justified assumption or not. It would be interesting to see it explained. There's a lot with Pan Am I need to learn more about, but they were their own entity back in the day with high-level shadiness, or so I hear.
The BKA estimate that 'about' 135 bags were sent through to the baggage room below the departure gate of Flight 103A, …. There were no records of luggage sent directly to the departure gate, nor of interline luggage taken directly from one aircraft to another, nor of bags belonging to first-class passengers.
This area must be listed as gate (44) in the printout. It's the handwritten records from the actual loading that are missing, leaving people infering that all this was then loaded. Plane-to-plane interlines and even first class baggage was not recorded, or missing? Is that bad policy or more missing records?
Of the 135 bags mentioned by the BKA, 111 had been logged on the Frankfurt computer and about 24 taken directly to the aircraft from three other connecting Pan Am flights. The list compiled by Pan Am at its check-in desks, however, showed not 111 but 117 items of luggage, and the discrepancy has not been convincingly cleared up to this day.
The printout shows 111 bags, Coleman's got another 24
or so coming in outside the system. What does this do for planting possibilities for a bomb or drugs or other secret evils? Pan Am recorded 117 bags as having come through the system, not 111. Is this evidence against the printout's accuracy? My notion of adding one item and otherwise leaving it as accurate as possible doesn't account for this.
Either investigators never came for the crucial evidence before its normal deletion, or it was deleted too early. THAT is why the printout wound up being the only and much-delayed record of the movements of the key bag. I suspect the printout lost NO corroboration in this early deletion. How early? According to this last snippet I'll share, the BKA had eight days to act under normal circumstances. Should have taken one or less.
Quoting John Merritt, The Observer, 17 November 1991:
A major breakthrough in the hunt for the Lockerbie bombers came to light only because of the quick thinking of a conscientious computer operator at Frankfurt airport.
The vital computer evidence,
proving conclusively [
] that the bag from Malta, identified as Item B8849, was on board as the airliner was blasted apart on the last stage of its journey from Heathrow to New York
would have been lost forever [why isn't that the story?] if the woman operator had not kept her own record.
Acting on her own initiative, the woman, an employee of the Frankfurt Airport Company, who for legal reasons cannot be named, was working at the computer system known as KIK on the day of the disaster. She knew records relating to baggage loaded on to flights were kept in the system for only a limited time
[eight days] before being wiped. So when she returned to work the next day she made her own print-out of the information and placed it in her locker before going on holiday.
On her return, weeks later, she was
surprised to learn that no one had shown any interest in the computer records [I would be surprised too, if this actually happened]. She passed the print-out to her baggage section leader who gave it to investigators from the West German Bundeskriminalamt. But it was not until mid-August, eight months after the bombing, that the German authorities turned over this information to Scottish police in charge of the investigation.
The woman employee's role became known only last week when lawyers for families of the American victims took evidence from her in Germany. She had kept her own copy of the print-out and still had it in her locker.
It's slightly interesting that the woman employee's name was still kept secret in 92 or whenever exactly this was written. Francovich had apparently seen it in print, but not heard it pronounced (air-ats or air-atch), before finishing up his movie in '94. She wasn't known of publicly at all, by this, until the time of the indictment.
Still shady. I really like this link to work over for cracks. It seems less well-covered.
