Al Jazeera to reveal Iran's role in Lockerbie bomb

The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie was carried out by Syrian-based extremists acting on orders of Iran, a documentary by Al Jazeera will state today.

A former Syrian intelligence officer named as a ‘mastermind taking orders from the Ayatollah’ – Abolghassem Mesbahi, who has defected to Germany – said Pan Am flight 103 was downed in 1988 in retaliation for an American navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier, in which 290 people died.

‘Lockerbie: What Really Happened?’ will be shown on Al Jazeera English at 8pm tonight.

He claimed that Ayatollah Khomeini, who was Iran’s supreme leader at the time, ordered the bombing “to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian Airbus”.

His testimony throws into doubt the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer jailed for the bombing.

It also suggests that Libya was not the driving force behind the attack, even though dictator Muammar Gaddafi had given up Megrahi and Ali Fhimah, two Libyan Arab Airlines employees working in Malta, for trial in a court of The Hague, the Netherlands.

The new claims would mean the bomb was placed on board Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow, and not in Malta inside a suitcase, as the prosecution in Megrahi’s trial claimed.

Al Jazeera’s documentary suggests that the bombers belonged to the extremist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing, dropped his appeal when he was granted compassionate release from prison in 2009 because he was suffering from cancer, but protested his innocence until he died in May 2012.

Ever since his conviction in 2001, there have been claims that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and many of the families of the 270 people who died believe the true story has never been told.

Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was a victim, said last night that he was “convinced” that the Iranians recruited the PFLP-GC to carry out the bombing and had no doubt that Megrahi was innocent.

Megrahi’s conviction was based on the theory that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ordered the attack in retaliation for the 1986 American bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi. But the documentary claims that it was in fact an act of revenge for the loss of Iran Air flight 655 in July 1988, which was accidentally shot down by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf.

The documentary also claims the Lockerbie bombing was arranged during secret meetings in Malta, at a St Julian’s flat, attended by members of the Iranian, Syrian and Libyan regimes, leaving open the possibility that Libya did play a part in the attack.

It names Syrian Ahmed Jibril, as the mastermind. He was the head of the PFLP-GC and was allegedly recruited by the Iranians because of his previous experience of bombing aircraft .

Jibril is alleged to have put a Palestinian called Hafez Dalkamoni in charge of the cell, who in turn recruited a Jordanian bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat.

Dalkamoni and Khreesat were arrested by German police months before Lockerbie, and four bombs, one of them almost identical to the Pan Am flight 103 bomb, were recovered. Police were convinced they had made a fifth bomb, which Al Jazeera claims was used to bring down the plane.

The documentary also names a fourth alleged conspirator, Mohammed Abu Talb. It links him to a clothes shop in Malta where clothes found in the bomb suitcase were said to have been bought, and says he may have put the bomb on board the Boeing 747.

The documentary suggests that the investigation switched its focus to Libya after a telephone call between President George HW Bush and Margaret Thatcher, possibly because the US did not want to antagonise Syria.

Gaddafi admitted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in 2003 and agreed to pay £1.7 billion in compensation to the families of the dead. But his son Saif al-Islam has said repeatedly that the admission was a political move to persuade the West to lift sanctions and pave the way for oil deals, some of which were brokered by Tony Blair.

Maltese witness

Lawyers representing Abdelbaset al–Megrahi, who was handed over by Libya in 1999, have always maintained that he was a scapegoat whose conviction suited Britain and the US because it blamed Libya, an international pariah, for Lockerbie and avoided the politically inconvenient truth about who was really to blame. In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission concluded that there were six separate grounds on which Megrahi’s conviction might have constituted a miscarriage of justice.

The most important evidence linking Megrahi to the bombing was the testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who said he had sold clothes to Megrahi that matched those found in the suitcase that contained the bomb.

Gauci picked Megrahi out at an identity parade 10 years later, but it emerged that he had seen a picture of Megrahi in a magazine which suggested he might be the bomber before the ID parade took place.

In addition, Gauci’s witness statement appeared to have been altered to implicate Megrahi, and he was paid $2 million by the US authorities for his evidence, as well as being taken on luxury holidays.

Shortly before he died in 2012, Megrahi said: “If I have a chance to see [Gauci] I am forgiving him. I would tell him that I have never in my life been in his shop, and that he dealt with me very wrongly.”