Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction


Dalkamoni enters W. Germany again



Download 0.96 Mb.
Page24/31
Date19.10.2016
Size0.96 Mb.
#4434
1   ...   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   ...   31

Dalkamoni enters W. Germany again Having left Krusevac on 5 October, Dalkamoni was tracked entering West Germany on a Syrian passport, it was believed to take command of the cell, and drove to Neuss. Shortly afterwards, his brother-in-law Abassi’s younger brother Ahmed arrived from Sweden apparently to serve as his interpreter and the two men were observed almost constantly in each other’s company. Dalkamoni travelled to Berlin on 7 October and to Frankfurt on the ninth. On or around 13 October three Arab looking men arrived at 16 Isarstrasse in a Swedish registered white Volvo, dropped off various packages and took away others. (Sweden was the base of Mohammed Abu Talb, already mentioned as a key suspect for the bombing).

Arrival of Marwan Khreesat Then, on 13 October, the PFLP-GC’s master bomb-maker from the early 1970s and specialist in designing bombs to be planted on aircraft, Merwad Abd Rezak Mufti Khreesat, otherwise known as Marwan Khreesat, flew into Frankfurt from the Jordianian capital, Amman, accompanied by his wife and arrived at 16 Isarstrasse. In the trenchant words of Ashton and Ferguson (p.47) “his sudden reunion with the man chosen by Ahmed Jibril to help negotiate a revenge attack with the Iranians was a chilling sign that the attack was imminent.”

Khreesat subsequently revealed as a Jordanian undercover agent In fact Khreesat had at some stage been enlisted as a deep cover agent for Jordan’s intelligence service, the Mukabaret. (Whether his role was primarily to gather intelligence or to go further and act as an agent provocateur will probably never be known and in any event is a fine distinction.) Ahmed Jibril had long posed a threat to King Hussein, having launched several terrorist attacks on the Hashemite kingdom, including assassination attempts on the King himself and the Mukabaret had a keen interest in infiltrating the PFLP-GC. It appears that in January 1989 Jordanian intelligence confirmed to their W. German counterparts that Khreesat had been acting undercover on their behalf (see Emerson and Duffy, p.177). They would never give the Dumfries and Galloway investigators permission to interview Khreesat but the Americans had more of an entreé. In early February 1989 the Jordanians officially confirmed to U.S. intelligence that Khreesat was their undercover agent and moreover asserted that they had already passed this on to the BND (the W. German foreign intelligence service), a fact which, according to Emerson and Duffy (p.177), the Germans had failed to reveal to the Lockerbie investigators, to the considerable chagrin of the FBI. Having regard to the very close relationship between Jordan and the United States it is difficult to believe that US intelligence was unaware of Khreesat’s role in the Mukabaret before he was sent to Germany, indeed that he was not in effect an asset by proxy of the CIA.

Khreesat statement to the CIA Following the Jordanian disclosure to the United States the Mukabaret furnished the CIA with a statement from Khreesat in response to a list of interrogatories (Emerson and Duffy, pp.167-177; see further below VII, 3 (b)).

The FD302 report on Khreesat’s November 1989 FBI interview In November 1989 Khreesat was actually interviewed at Mukabaret headquarters in Amman by FBI agents Edward Marshman and William Chornyak and the account he gave them of his activities, recorded in an FBI pro forma “FD302,” report was generally not inconsistent with the BKA Autumn Leaves records. Years later, in June 2000, in the run up to the trial at Zeist, defence solicitors Alastair Duff and Eddie MacKechnie were permitted to interview him in depth, though his disclosures to them were never placed in evidence at the trial. The defence sought to call Khreesat as a witness at Camp Zeist but Jordan refused to sanction his attendance and under the relaxed rules of procedure agreed for the conduct of the trial much of the FD302 interview record was instead read to the court by Marshman.

(c) The “Autumn Leaves” October 1988 timeline

The BKA appear to have maintained a fairly comprehensive log of their observations of presumed PFLP-GC activities, which in combination with the FD302 report of Khreesat’s FBI interview, provides a graphic picture of preparations for the planting of a bomb or bombs on commercial airliners. Some of the more interesting episodes follow.



Sources The familiar course of the Autumn Leaves operation has been summarised in diverse narratives (see eg Emerson and Duffy, above; Katz, above; Ashton and Ferguson, above; Ashton, above; and in the blog The Lockerbie Divide, “Just a Passing Magic Touch, and the Rest Unseen: Khreesat, Abu Elias, and the Fifth Device,” April 15 2010, http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/2010/04/ just-passing-magic-touch-and-rest.html); Ashton, Megrahi, passim. It should be pointed out that as between Emerson and Duffy on the one hand and Ashton and Ferguson on the other, there is some inconsistency in their accounts as regards the dates of various episodes.

15 and 16 October 1988 On these two days Dalkamoni visited a number of locations to the south of Neuss, making contact with various individuals suspected of involvement in the group’s activities. They included 68 Bernardottstrasse in Frankfurt, where on 15 or 16 October he called on a Mahmoud Khadorah, a Palestinian who had changed his name to “Martin” on becoming a German citizen and had earlier been suspected of involvement in terrorism. He also collected a Syrian-born German citizen named Yasim Kam-Nakche with possible terrorist connections and together they visited an address in Hockeneim, where his Ford Taunus was loaded up with plastic bags and storage boxes. The BKA log shows that one of the plastic bags contained a “brown unidentifiable substance.” Dalkamoni took care to place the bag away from the others “on the car’s hat rack.”

17 October In the evening Dalkamoni visited a prison inmate in Cologne (Emerson and Duffy, p.128).

18 October: purchases On 18 October, according to Khreesat’s FBI narrative, he and Dalkamoni bought two Ultrasound stereo radios and a Sanyo computer monitor at a second-hand shop. These would later be seized by the BKA in a raid on Hashem Abassi’s greengrocery in April 1989 (see later VII, 2, (e)).

18 or 19 October: call to Cyprus The BKA log describes Dalkamoni making a telephone call from 16 Isarstrasse to King’s Take-Away restaurant in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus and speaking to a man named Dijani (According to Ashton and Ferguson the date was 18 October and Dijani’s first name was Habib: p.48; Emerson and Duffy give the date as 19 October and the first name as Amer: p.128). Dijani said he had applied for a German visa valid from the 20th and was waiting for Dalkamoni to summon him, although inquiries actually showed it was valid for the 24th (Emerson and Duffy, p.129). Dijani later admitted to the BKA that he had passed on messages on Dalkamoni’s behalf, including from Abu Nidal: Ashton and Ferguson, p.48).

18 or 19 October: call to Damascus Dalkamoni then telephoned someone in Damascus whom he called “Abed” (18th: Emerson and Duffy, p.129; 19th: Ashton and Ferguson, p.48): He told him that everything would be ready in a couple of days. Dalkamoni then handed over to someone he called “Safi” who the BKA deduced was Khreesat and who said that he had “made some changes to the medicine” and that it was now “better and stronger.” Dalkamoni came back on the phone and said “things are under way.”

18 or 19 October: the big-eared man After the telephone calls Dalkamoni left the flat and purchased electronic devices in Dusseldorf. In the evening (Emerson and Duffy give the time as 8.10 pm: p.129; Ashton and Ferguson give it as 6.10 pm: p.48) he talked to a man in Giessen railway station restaurant.The man was described in the BKA log as in his early thirties, 170 cm tall, slim build, bearded and described as having “remarkably big ears.” Dalkamoni subsequently told the BKA that this man (whose identity was later established: see below) supplied him with a Toshiba radio cassette player. After the meeting the stranger drove away in a car registered to a man known to have various terrorist connections.

20 October On 20 October the BKA log records Dalkamoni visiting Frankfurt and telephoning Khreesat in Neuss to tell him that he was about to take delivery of “three black tins with lids,” “gloves” and “paste” from someone subsequently inferred to be Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar, a senior PFLP-GC figure whose Frankfurt base was a flat above a shop at 28 Sandweg. Ghadanfar was responsible for setting up arrangements to fund the group’s European operations from Syria (Ashton and Ferguson, p.49).

22 October: Dalkamoni and Khreesat travel to Frankfurt On 22 October, the log records, Dalkamoni and Khreesat drove to Frankfurt. Khreesat told the FBI that they had taken his wife to the airport from where she had returned to Jordan. While at the airport Dalkamoni had said that many people were flying to the United States and that some airlines flew there twice a day. He also mentioned something about Pan Am, but Khreesat was unable to recall what it was. The BKA log records them visiting two electrical shops, although it is not recorded what if any purchases they might have made. On the way back to Neuss, Khreesat informed the FBI, Dalkamoni left him, Khreesat, at the zoo. Picking him up an hour later he told Khreesat that a man whom Khreesat named only as Abu Elias and who Dalkamoni had previously told him would be coming to Germany, had just arrived (FD302, p.2). Khreesat conjectured that Dalkamoni had met up with Abu Elias after dropping him off. It is interesting to compare this account with the BKA log, which does not mention Khreesat being dropped off at the zoo but states that at 2 pm Dalkamoni met up with “the same stranger that he met on 18 October,” presumably positively identified as such when he was arrested a few days later. He was a Palestinian who went by the name of Ramzi Diab although his real name was Salah Kwekas. We shall return to discuss his identity and possible role later. After the meeting Dalkamoni visited Ghadanfar’s flat at 28 Sandweg.

22 October: they bring back the “fifth device” from Frankfurt On the return of Dalkamoni and Khreesat to 16 Isarstrasse in Neuss a number of boxes were carried in containing various items of equipment. These, Khreesat told the FBI, included a cassette radio player which he was to convert into a bomb. He referred to it as the “fifth device” to distinguish it from four others the police subsequently seized.

23 October: Khreesat’s strange story about a bomb built by someone else According to the FBI record (FD302, p.22) it was on the 23 October that Dalkamoni came into the workroom with a radio-cassette player, almost certainly a two-speaker model, and asked him to solder together two wires. Khreesat could not see that this had any purpose and he later told Duff and MacKecknie (Ashton, p.222) that he got the impression that the curious request to solder the wires was a test of his loyalty to discover if he would ask any questions. He was uncertain of the make because it was lying face down. He recalled that it had some peculiar modifications, some involving cardboard, and he told Dalkamoni of his doubts about its quality. The barometric pressure trigger was clearly visible beneath the cassette relay and its conversion into a bomb would have been fairly obvious, he said. Dalkamoni then took him out to his car and in the boot he saw a partly concealed cassette-radio player which he thought was probably a Toshiba twin-speaker model. He could also see wire and Semtex in the boot.

23 October: international calls reporting progress On 23 October Dalkamoni received an intercepted call from someone called Abu Hassan Jomah in Damascus. According to Emerson and Duffy (p.130) Jomah explained that “the things are almost ready”; according to Ashton and Ferguson (p.49) it was Dalkamoni who stated that “things were nearly ready” and that he would be in Damascus by Friday, five days later. It was also that day (ie the 23rd), as Khreesat stated in a call to Amman on 24 October monitored by the BKA, that he had started work on bomb-making at 16 Isarstrasse. That statement is not necessarily inconsistent with what Dalkomoni had said over the telephone the previous day to Abu Hassan, and with what Khreesat himself, as “Safi,” had said during the telephone call to “Abed” in Damascus on 18 or 19 October, namely that the mixture was now “better and stronger.” During that same call, it will be recalled, Dalkamoni had told Abed that everything would “be ready in a couple of days.” If these declarations were to be believed Khreesat had already been working for some days before 22 October and did not leave it until the 23rd before starting work.

24 October: shopping for equipment On 24 October, accompanied by Ahmed Abassi, Dalkamoni and Khreesat were tailed shopping in Neuss. At the Huma-Markt store they bought three mechanical clocks and a digital clock and at the Kaufhalle shopping centre switches, glue, screws and sixteen thin AAA type 1.5 volt batteries. As already mentioned, the BKA log states that later in the day Khreesat telephoned Amman to report that he had started work the day before, adding that he only needed another two or three days before he could return home on the Friday.

24 October: the “fifth device” supposedly goes missing from under Khreesat’s nose Khreesat described to the FBI how on 24 October he was assembling bombs in the workroom at 16 Isarstrasse shortly after lunch time when he decided to take a shower. While he was in the shower Dalkamoni knocked on the door to say he was leaving for Frankfurt. After his shower Khreesat saw that the fifth device had disappeared from the workroom, which only he and Dalkamoni ever used. Khreesat did not say whether Dalkamoni did go to Frankfurt on that date but it is noteworthy that the 22 October appears to have been the last day before their arrests on 26 October (see below) that Dalkamoni visited Frankfurt. It may be that Khreesat was confused as to the date on which the fifth device is supposed to have been removed by Dalkamoni from the workshop, or was otherwise obfuscating. This is further discussed below.

24 or 25 October: Khreesat’s claim that he called his Jordanian control about the missing bomb Although he stated to the FBI that he did not at the time pay a lot of attention to the removal of the fifth device (“as he was thinking about the upcoming meeting with Abu Elias”) he claimed that he subsequently telephoned his case officer in Amman to report his assumption that it had been handed over to Abu Elias. The call would either have been on the same day that Dalkamoni removed the fifth device, that is the 24th, or next day. As to the content of the call, the FD302 records at (pp.23-24) that

“he had prepared a device and given it to Abu Elias. Khreesat advised that he had assumed that the fifth device went to Abu Elias, as related above.”



On the face of it the contrast between the two sentences is curious. Either he himself gave it to Abu Elias or he assumed someone else (presumably Dalkamoni) had done. Perhaps the second sentence is no more than the product of the FBI interviewers clarifying an ambiguity in the first sentence but the real reason may be that he wished to cover up the extent of his own involvement in the hand-over. We shall return to this. It is curious that the BKA do not appear to have monitored any call in which the hand-over of a device is mentioned but there may in fact be a good explanation for this and we shall return to it, together with a discussion as to the possible date the fifth device went missing, if it ever did.

24 or 25 October: Khreesat and Dalkamoni pick up airline schedules for Düsseldorf airport Khreesat told the FBI investigators that after making the call to his controller in Amman he and Dalkamoni visited Düsseldorf airport where they picked up several airline schedules (including some for Pan American). Over ten years later Khreesat told solicitors Duff and MacKechnie that the day before the arrests Jibril had called Dalkamoni from Damascus and given orders for the targeting of a flight out of Frankfurt. They had therefore visited Pan Am offices in Frankfurt to obtain information about flight schedules. It may be that he was mistaken about the dates or after ten years had forgotten where the inquiries had been made.

(d) The Autumn Leaves arrests: 26 October

The BKA’s terrible dilemma With the accumulating evidence the BKA could have been in no doubt that a spectacular outrage was in the offing. An internal memorandum noted that “the purchase of the materials under the clear supervision of a PFLP-GC member designated as an explosives expert leads to the conclusion that the participants intend to produce an explosive device which, on the basis of the telephone taps, would be operational within the next few days” (quoted by Emerson and Duffy, p.130). However, the target could only be conjectured and the BKA were facing a terrible dilemma. If they continued to keep watch without making preventive arrests the gang might be able to strike at their secret target without the police being able to pre-empt it. On the other hand, if they moved too soon, gang members of whom the police as yet had no knowledge, might finish the job. The conlusion of the internal memorandum was that the course of events was “becoming increasingly . . . uncontrollable.” Although there is nothing about it in the internal memorandum it is not inconceivable that the alarm which Khreesat claimed to have sounded in his call to Amman was the cue for police action, taken in a frantic effort to recover the missing bomb. Senior officials of the BAK, the BND and the BfV convened late on 25 October and the decision was made to bring the surveillance to an end and break up the gang next day. On 26 October, the BKA swooped, raided twelve apartments and five business premises across W. Germany and out of the total of 34 people who had been kept under surveillance on suspicion of being connected with the PFLP-GC took into custody all 16 of those for whom they had actually obtained arrest warrants. Khreesat and Dalkamoni were followed in Dalkamoni’s green Ford Taunus as they drove into the centre of Neuss. They parked and while Khreesat used a telephone box to make a call Dalkamoni waited outside. They were arrested once Khreesat had completed the call.

Seizure of a Toshiba radio-cassette player disguised bomb in Dalkamoni’s car Hidden under a blanket in the car police discovered a Toshiba RT-F453D BomBeat single-speaker radio-cassette player. When it was duly examined found packed inside were 300 grams of Semtex, a detonator and an altitude-sensitive barometric trigger which clearly showed it was designed to destroy an aircraft in flight.

Chocolate bar wrapping The Semtex in the Toshiba bomb found in the Taunus was wrapped in paper bearing the Tobler chocolate insignia. Curiously, shreds of such paper were found in the vicinity of the remains of the Pan Am 103 bomb.

Khreesat asserts that the Toshiba in the car was not the bomb removed from the workshop However, Khreesat professed to be sure that the Toshiba which Dalkamoni had supposedly spirited away while he was in the shower was not the one found by the BKA in Dalkamoni’s car on 26 October (FD302 statement).

Assertion by Khreesat about the timing of the arrests If Khreesat is to be believed he told the BKA “that they should have waited one more day to make the arrests, as Dalkamoni was on the way to meet Abu Elias when they were arrested” (an anticipated meeting variously referred to in FD302, at pp.2, 7, 22 and 23).

Physical evidence seized in the immediate aftermath of the arrests When the police searched 16 Isarstrasse they found another F-453D with holes already drilled and various items of bomb-making equipment, including a detonator, time-delay fuses and barometric fuses, a stop watch, batteries, radio components, soldering irons and Syrian passports. They also found airline luggage tags and timetables. At 28 Sandweg in Frankfurt police found an arsenal of firearms: a bazooka, five Hungarian-made automatic rifles, a grenade launcher and thirty hand grenades, twenty fully loaded clips of amuunition, nearly six kilograms of commercial grade TNT and fourteen sticks of dynamite. Significantly they also found five kilograms of Semtex explosive.

Evidence subsequently seized The following April – after Lockerbie – the BKA raided Hashem Abassi’s greengrocer’s shop and seized three further completed bombs, two fitted into the Ultrasound radio tuners and one in the Sanyo monitor. This is further considered later (see VII, 3 (a)).

Statements obtained by the BKA about Khreesat and a Samsonite suitcase It will be recalled that by early March the Lockerbie investigators had established that the primary suitcase was “Antique Copper” Samsonite hardshell model and there was therefore some potential significance in a statement made to the BKA by Dalkamoni’s brother-in-law, Hashem Abassi, after the raid on his grocery shop the following (ie April 1989). Questioned about Marwen Khreesat’s stay the previous October he said “I think I can remember that on his visit Khreesat had a rigid dark-coloured Samsonite suitcase” (statement D4129, 24 April, 1989). While he might conceivably have remembered a hardshell suitcase, that he should have remembered the make seems rather difficult to accept and the suggestion is that the police interviewer prompted him. In any event, when shown photographs of two brown Samsonites he stated that he had never seen either before, nor could he remember if Dalkamoni had such a suitcase. Both Abbasi and his brother Ahmed said that they could recall having seen a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase in the boot of Dalkamoni’s Ford Taunus shortly before the arrests on 26 October but, again, that they should have remembered the make unprompted seems very doubtful.

Swift release of most of the arrested terrorist suspects Two of the sixteen men arrested were assumed to have been caught up innocently in the police operation and were released the same day. The remaining fourteen were produced in court next day (27 October) and eleven, including Ramzi Diab (or Kwekes), were promptly released by the judge for what he deemed was lack of evidence, even though the circumstances clearly implicated them in terrorist activities and a number aggravated their position with explanations which were simply ludicrous (see in particular Emerson and Duffy, p.134, for Diab’s account to the BKA). Within seventy-two hours six of them had vanished. Of the three whose continued detention was authorised, Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were eventually given lengthy sentences for bombing German railway trains. Martin Kadhora, who it will be recalled had been visited by Dalkamoni in Frankfurt on 15 or 16 October was not initially seized in the round-up but was soon extradited to W. Germany from Yugoslavia and held for several days until he too was released. The Germans always accepted that Abassi was Dalkamoni’s innocent dupe.

Khreesat’s probable collusive judicial discharge and return to Jordan Marwen Khreesat remained in custody for questioning and admitted that he was familiar with explosives. He eventually provided the names of senior personalities in the PFLP-GC and said that he had overheard Jibril talking about a planned attack on an American club in Germany. He also stated that on the day of their arrest Dalkamoni had assured him that in four or five days he “would be told everything on target” but apart from that he was adamant that he knew nothing about Dalkamoni’s objectives.” On 5 November he was allowed to make a telephone call to an official in Jordanian intelligence. Four days later a German prosecutor asked the court to delay proceedings against him but the request was denied. Instead, the judge explained away Khreesat’s association with the other suspects as being “limited [to] the level of friendship” and discharged him for “lack [of] the required urgent suspicion to justify further . . . custody.” Whether this was a collusive release or merely reflected a degree of naivèté is unclear but Khreesat was flown straight home to Jordan, proving, if proof were needed, that he was, as he claimed, an agent of the Mukabaret, and a likely proxy asset therefore of the CIA.


Download 0.96 Mb.

Share with your friends:
1   ...   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   ...   31



The database is protected by copyright ©ininet.org 2024
send message
    Main page
united states
current view
last word
great advantage
assumption that it
technical know-how