Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction

Three days after al-Megrahi’s release (August 20, 2009) the UK Sunday Express revealed that the paper’s Scottish counterpart had tracked down the man suspected of being Abu Elias to his home in Virginia near Dulles airport, Washington DC, pointing out the irony that it was only a few miles from the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington National Cemetery (Ben Borland, “‘I’ll reveal true identity of bomber,’” August 23, 2009 http://www.express.co.uk/ posts/view/122299/-I-ll-reveal-true-identity-of-bomber% 20 UK%20NEWS). The article went on to state that the man, whom the paper continued not to name, was employed by the US government as a schools engineer, had his own Facebook page and that when confronted by the newspaper’s representatives denied being Abu Elias or having any involvement with the atrocity, claiming mistaken identity or malice. The article further revealed that Scottish National MSP Christine Grahame, a campaigner for al-Megrahi’s release, was believed to be considering naming the man in the Scottish Parliament chamber. On 2 September, 2009, during the debate on al-Megrahi’s compassionate release, she did precisely that, naming him as one Basel Bushnaq (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ sp/?gid=2009-09-02.1 9051.0). Subsequently Ms Grahame revealed on More4 TV News that the name was mentioned in SCCRC papers (“Was Megrahi really the Lockerbie bomber?” 2 September 2009, http://www.channel4.com/ news/article.jsp?id= 3329 697&time=181158). Mr Bushnaq is a “suburban activist” for Middle East peace and his Virginia address and telephone number are given quite openly on Google (21051 Thoreau Court, Sterling, Virginia, telephone number, 001-571-926-9231). He apparently describes himself as a Bosnian from the Mostar Lakisic clan, a self-portrayal reported on The Lockerbie Divide (http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/2010/10/basel-to-basil-kubaissi-link.html, 7 October, 2010). The same posting reveals that his wife Raghad shared her maiden name (Kubaissi) with that of a prominent Black September, later PFLP, organiser who was assassinated by the Israelis in 1973 in retaliation for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

If Basel Bushnaq is indeed Abu Elias it would clearly be a matter of the gravest concern if the US authorities know it and are giving shelter to the man who was and remains the prime suspect for planting the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103. As it happens it ought not to be too difficult to establish this but the likelihood is that the Virginian Bushnaq is not in fact Abu Elias. In Israel Versus Jibril Samuel Katz noted that in late 1983 Israeli commandos infiltrated Beirut and “kidnapped Marwad Bushnaq, better known by his nom de guerre of Abu A’Ali, a senior PFLP-GC officer and, most important, Ahmed Jibril’s nephew” (p.105, citing “Enough is Enough,” Time Magazine, August 14, 1989, p.20, and the Israeli daily evening newspaper Ma’ariv, May 21, 1985, p.15). It was predicted that this would induce Jibril to order the swift release of three Israeli servicemen held captive by the PFLP-GC in Damascus but he remained unmoved and it was only when Israel eventually agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian prisoners (including 400 men convicted of terrorist offences but only 271 PFLP-GC prisoners) that Jibril agreed to the release of the three Israelis. The exchange took place on May 21, 1985 and of the total number released 390 were to be flown to Geneva from Ben-Gurion International Airport. Marwad Bushnaq – Abu A’Ali – had frequently made himself available to the Israeli media and now, the consummate showman and the last man to board, he bounded up the steps to the door of the plane where he turned and gave a “V” for victory sign (Eiran Shenker and Baruch Ron, reporting in the Israel Defence Force weekly newpaper Bamachane, May 30, 1985, p.6). It may be noted that the name Abu A’Ali is almost a homophone of Abu Elias. The two names certainly sound suspiciously similar. It seems most unlikely that if Bushnaq were indeed the nephew’s real surname he would have sought shelter in America using the same surname but disguising it with a new forename. It may be conjectured whether it was the similarity which led to Duff and MacKechnie asking Basel Bushnaq if his father was a senior member of the PFLP-GC (see Ashton, Megrahi, p.250). It ought to be easy enough to settle the matter by comparing his appearance with that of the man the Israelis took prisoner. The Israelis surely have their former prisoner’s photograph in their files and would no doubt be willing to make it available for comparison. Alternatively, there must surely be archived press photographs of Abu A’Ali giving his v-sign at Ben Gurion and these could be compared with any which the Scottish Sunday Express may have taken of Basel Bushnaq. At any rate the Sunday Express reporters or Duff and MacKecknie could make the comparison with the man they interviewed.

In the first year or so after Lockerbie the general thrust of supposition on the part of Western intelligence, the police investigators and the media was that with the full backing of Ahmed Jibril the PFLP-GC European cell under the command of Hafez Dalkamoni (in conjunction with its Swedish based affiliate, the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, under the command of Mohamed Abu Talb) was actively engaged in plotting the bombing of a fully laden American passenger jet. It was assumed that after the cell was broken up the objective was completed by PFLP-GC operatives who escaped the Autumn Leaves dragnet and the end result was the destruction of Pan Am 103: that the BKA interdiction could have prevented a small rump associated with the group (principally Abu Elias) from proceeding to consummate the atrocity was regarded as plainly untenable; execution of the atrocity would hardly have needed an army of terrorists. After the focus of official suspicion, led by the United States, shifted on to Libya, through all the years of the struggle of the Scottish police, the FBI and the CIA to make the charge against al-Megrahi stick, and into the swan-song years of a stubborn and increasingly forlorn refusal on the part of the British, Scottish and US governments to let go of the myth of Libyan responsibility, the main stream of opposition to the official line has generally kept faith with the original, familiar assumption. However, there is one agency which seemed, at one time at any rate, to have subscribed to a rather different take on events and that, while having no doubt of Jibril’s role as the general in command, believed that while the deed had been perpetrated under his direction it was not carried out by a rump of his European acolytes but by an entirely different team. It is proposed to examine that notion in order to contrast it with a scenario ventured later.

In his book Israel Versus Jibril Samuel M. Katz noted that although Israeli intelligence had been responsible for alerting the Federal German authorities to the existence of a PFLP-GC terrorist cell they were sceptical as to its true nature (p.204). Dalkamoni, they believed, was too close to Jibril and was too important a figure within the PFLP-GC to be risked commanding a terrorist action in the field. If captured he knew too much about the group, its funding, its personnel and its programmes, to avoid compromising its entire organisation. In short, in the view of the Israelis, there was “something very suspicious about Dalkamoni’s capture, about the immediate release of the eleven cell members, and about Khreesat’s hasty return to Jordan” (ibid).

In fact, suggested Katz, it was the considered view of Israeli intelligence sources passed on to him (pp.212-217) that Jibril merely employed the West German cell and the Abu Talb group as “throwaways” whom he “discarded” in order to “deflect attention” from his objective, obtaining the Iranian bounty money. Apparently quoting an Israeli intelligence source Katz attributed to Jibril a belief that he would never be able to “destroy an American airliner with an organisation infiltrated by foreign intelligence agents” (source interviewed by Katz in Jerusalem on June 4, 1991). According to Katz (presumably paraphrasing his Israeli source) Jibril had become aware of the PFLP-GC’s poor security and in fact believed that Dalkamoni, his chief lieutenant no less, was a Syrian agent. Many of the PFLP-GC old guard had openly resented the move closer to the Islamist Iranian regime and its distancing from the group’s long time patron, the Assad regime in Syria. Dalkamoni was in fact believed to have been vocal in opposing any attack on non-Israeli targets and in warning of the risks to the organisation in contracting to avenge the shooting down of the Iranian Airbus.

(c) The question of Jibril’s shift to Islamic fundamentalism and Jibril’s suspicion of Dalkamoni’s disloyalty

A parallel analysis was that Jibril, undergoing an ostensible metamorphosis from Ba’ath party loyalist to fundamentalist Muslim (no doubt in the interests of guaranteeing and if not maximising the vengeance bounty) had decided to purge the PFLP-GC of its secularist, pro-Syrian elements, of whom Dalkamoni was probably the most influential. Instead he would henceforward rely on a close-knit and trusted cadre who supported the shift to Iran. Against that background, Katz conjectured, liquidating Dalkamoni, a possible traitor, would have been considered a waste of resources. Preserved, he could be employed as an unwitting, expendable asset in the provision of a smokescreen for the plot to earn millions of dollars by furthering Iran’s thirst for vengeance. If Jibril did indeed suspect Dalkamoni to be an informant of western intelligence he would be counting on his lieutenant tipping off the authorities in West Germany that a German cell operation was ostensibly afoot.

Presumably relying on his Israeli intelligence source Katz asserts that Jibril also suspected Khreesat of double-dealing (Jibril Versus Israel, p.214). This was apparently predicated on an assumption that Khreesat had not “been used properly” by the PFLP-GC since the 1970s, when he had furnished bombs which had been planted on Israeli airliners and that of other flag carriers. That he should now once again be recruited by his old patron after years of apparent inactivity is supposedly an indication that Jibril knew he was an agent for Jordan and that he intended using him to conceal alternative arrangements. But had Khreesat in fact been inactive in the years since 1979? As already mentioned, he himself told the FBI that he had been engaged in building Toshiba F-453D Bombeat devices for the PFLP-GC in 1985.

In furthering their plans to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991 it was clearly essential for the United States to enlist general regional support, or at least to defuse potential local opposition. The US was also anxious to secure the release of American hostages held in the Lebanon. Both these objectives required the nurturing of friendly relations with Syria and an improvement of relations with Iran. Perhaps inevitably, this meant that any moves to condemn a terrorist group enjoying the patronage, protection and support of the Assad regime had necessarily to be jettisoned. According to Katz, Israeli intelligence nonetheless had little doubt that the destruction of Pan Am 103 was “masterminded, logistically handled, and even possibly carried out by Jibril and the PFLP-GC” (Israel Versus Jibril, p.221, citing Emanuel Rosen, Ma’ariv Shabbat, November 22, 1991, p.7).

However, Israeli intelligence conjectured (according to Katz), the PFLP-GC operation did not involve their West German cell. In a detailed investigation aired on ABC-TV’s news programme Prime Time Live for November 30, 1989 (cited by Katz, at pp.222-223) it was contended (apparently on the basis of disclosures by Israeli intelligence sources) that Jibril had recruited three Palestinian terrorists who had originally been arrested in Kenya on January 18, 1976, for attempting unsuccessfully to shoot down an El Al Boeing 747 with a handheld surface-to-air missile as the aircraft was making its final descent into Nairobi airport. The three terrorists were secretly handed over to the Israelis in whose custody they remained until released in the large-scale prisoner exchange on May 21, 1985, when they were flown from Israel, via Geneva, to Libya and finally to Syria. There was supposedly no suspicion that the men had been turned while in Israel’s custody and it seems to have been supposed that they were kept “under wraps,” answerable only to Jibril and under orders never to declare their allegiance to him.

As Katz reports it the story then goes that in December 1988 they were sent to Libya with a Toshiba Bombeat F-453D bomb probably made by one of the technicians who had joined the PFLP-GC from the Abu Ibrahim Arab Organisation of May 15, a pro-Iraqi faction known for its bomb-making capabilities, when that organisation broke up in 1985 or 1986. The bomb was then handed over to two Libyan intelligence agents who were responsible for planting it on board Pan Am 103. Katz relates that this had been agreed between Jibril and Gaddafi in September 1988, during a conference attended by international terrorist organisations in Tripoli.

It is interesting to compare Katz’s 1993 account of the conference date with the 1991 disclosure by David Leppard (On the Trail of Terror) citing “CIA sources” that Jibril met Gadaffi in Tripoli in November 1988, when the job was handed over to the Libyans. In September, of course, Gaddafi might well still have been seeking to avenge the 1986 American bombing of his country and contemplating terrorist acts against the United States. However, as Katz noted (see supra, at p.79, citing Katz p.189) Gaddafi saw Yassir Arafat’s December 1988 renunciation of terror as an opportunity to gain international respectability by supporting Arafat’s diplomatic initiative. This would not necessarily rule out an uninterrupted dedication to pursuing revenge against the United States for the 1986 bombing in spite of his public stance but suggests that in the new situation he might have felt it would be prudent to avoid association with terrorist acts.

Katz’s supposition – doubtless inspired by his Israeli intelligence source – that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built by the former Abu Ibrahim men and supplied by Jibril’s secret couriers to Libyan agents who planted it on the aircraft was explicitly predicated on the propositions (a) that the evidence of the recovery of PT35b (the alleged fragment of a PCB of an MST-13 electronic timer) was genuine and (b) that if genuine it had come from a timer of a kind which had been supplied to the Libyan military and no other end-user. According to this supposition the bomb was not the usual PFLP-GC barometric triggered type but one detonated by an MST-13 timer. However, it is not at all clear why the PFLP-GC technicians would have included in its design a timer supplied by Libya merely because Libya was enlisted to supply agents who would plant the bomb.

In any event, the supposition falls to the ground for two basic reasons. First, a long delay timer would only have been needed if the bomb was ingested into the system at Malta for passage through two legs of the journey to Heathrow and the manifest absurdity of that proposition has been made abundantly clear. In any event why would Jibril have used such a convoluted, inconvenient and above all risk-laden plan requiring Libyan assistance when he would almost certainly have had at his disposal docking and loading facilities available for IranAir’s use at Heathrow. It was, after all, almost certainly for Iran’s benefit that Pan Am was targeted. (See further at VII, 7, (b), below.)

The second reason why the Katz/Israeli intelligence supposition fails is that on basic, unassailable scientific grounds we now know that PT-35b could not have come from a timer supplied to Libya.

That Gaddafi may have been wary of supporting terrorist ventures at year’s end 1988 hardly precludes his willingness to resume limited activity in the following year. Katz suggested that plans were discussed at the September 1988 Tripoli conference to take revenge against France for its overt military support of Chad in the conflict with Libya (Jibril Versus Israel, p.223, citing Youssef M. Ibrahim, “Libya Denies Link to Airline Blasts,” The New York Times, June 28, 1991, p.A13). Presumably the Libyans felt uninhibited by the ceasefire in October 1987. On September 19, 1989, a DC10 owned by the French owned carrier UTA was operating Flight 772 from Brazzaville to Paris when, not long after take-off following a brief stop at the Chad city of N’Djamena, it was brought down by an on-board bomb over Niger’s Tenere Desert with the loss of all 171 passengers and crew. Investigations by French experts suggested that the device was barometric pressure-controlled, entirely consistent with the time to detonation after take-off and only too typical of PFLP-GC manufacture. Moreover it was housed in a BomBeat radio cassette player.

Although the French subsequently indicted four Libyans, including Abdullah Senoussi, deputy commander of Libya’s External Security Agency, it has been conjectured (see Katz, Jibril, pp.234-235) that the bombing was actually carried out by the PFLP-GC in order to deter France from activating its naval forces deployed off the Lebanese coast to protect the Christian Lebanese renegade military leader Michele Aoun from attack by Syrian forces. Further or in the alternative, it was suggested, they were acting at the behest of the Iranians, who wanted revenge against France for allegedly reneging on a deal to pay a ransom in exchange for the 1987 release of French hostages held by Hezbollah in Beirut. (The second of these suppositions first entered the public domain four days before the destruction of the UTA plane when the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shirra reported that Iranian-backed Islamic militants were planning to attach French interests in Africa for having reneged on the hostage ransom deal: see Ashton, Megrahi: You Are My Jury, p.164.) Both conjectures fit with Jibril’s reported move away from Syria and into the Iranian camp.

(g) Current view of Israeli intelligence

Katz did not indicate whether his informant was conveying the majority opinion inside the Israeli intelligence community but it seems unlikely that Mossad’s analysts swallowed the unaccompanied bag story. Whatever Katz’s informants may at one time have believed to be the prevailing wisdom within that organisation there can be little doubt that the consensus view nowadays is that whether or not the Frankfurt cell had been exploited by Jibril as an expendable smokescreen Libya had nothing to do with the atrocity. Israeli intelligence probably now has little doubt that however the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 reached Heathrow it did not get there by way of Pan Am 103A and was a classic Khreesat PFLP-GC barometric device. That belief is probably shared by many in British, American and German intelligence.

If Abu Elias, the PFLP-GC’s airport security expert was indeed handed at least one missing Toshiba barometric bomb and was either Jibril’s nephew or otherwise a close relative whom we shall assume was the man known to the Israelis as Marwad Bushnaq, can this help to determine if it was he who planted the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103. There are eleven points we need to examine.