Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
(e) The “Toshiba” alert goes out The international alert
Download 0.96 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Delayed action in the UK
- Jordan informs the US about Khreesat’s role
- April 1989: the three barometric bombs mentioned by Khreesat are seized
- Dalkamoni further questioned
- Components of the 1985 bombs handed to Khreesat in Germany and their re-use
- Khreesat’s claim that the fifth device was a bronze single speaker F453D
- Khreesat contradicts himself on his non-use of twin-speaker radio cassette players
- Self-contradictions involved in Khreesat’s claim that he did not build the fifth device
- Improbability of Khreesat’s story that he was asked to solder two wires in a poorly made bomb
- Assessing Khreesat’s claim that his bombs were non-lethal
- Did Khreesat build the fifth device
- Was the fifth device the fatal bomb
- 4. The story of Abu Elias and the missing bomb: fact or fiction (a)
(e) The “Toshiba” alert goes out The international alert While the Autumn Leaves arrests had obviously dealt a serious blow to PFLP-GC operations in Germany the BKA were under no illusions that the German cell and its European associates had been decisively knocked out. It was clear that other cell members and bombs designed to destroy aircraft in flight might well have escaped the net and accordingly a comprehensive international warning giving details of Khreesat’s Toshiba radio cassette player bomb was issued through Interpol on 9 November 1988 and duly passed on to airlines and airport authorities across the world. This puts in doubt the convenient contention later relied upon that with the dissolution of the PFLP-GC cell the Iranians were forced to look for assistance elsewhere – to Libya (a country hardly strapped for cash). Delayed action in the UK The United Kingdom Department of Transport had known about the Toshiba bomb warning since November but it was not until 19 December that a dossier containing a fully detailed description of the bomb together with photographs was forwarded to airlines. Disastrously for the fate of Pan Am 103, the material was dispatched by ordinary post, which meant that with the usual backlog in the run-up to Christmas many airlines – including Pan American’s UK offices – only received their packs after Lockerbie. (f) Three missing Khreesat bombs January 1989: Jordan informs W. German intelligence that three completed Khreesat bombs had been left at 16 Isarstrasse and consequent search of Abassi’s shop basement It has already been mentioned that at some stage in January 1989 the Jordanian authorities officially informed the W. German government that Khreesat had been sent to Germany as an undercover agent on their behalf. They also passed on the fact that whilst in Germany he had made five barometric bombs and that these included three completed bombs which had been in 16 Isarstrasse at the time of the Autumn Leaves arrests. As the only completed bomb seized by the BKA was the device found in Dalkamoni’s Ford Taunus BKA specialists from Meckenheim therefore returned to 16 Isarstrasse on 31 January. By that time Hashem Abassi and his wife Somaia and baby had moved to Ratingen, leaving, Abassi said, some of their belongings stored in the basement of his greengrocer’s shop at 14 Neumarkt in Neuss. The BKA searched that address and six other locations they thought Abassi or someone else might have hidden Khreesat’s bomb but found nothing more. Jordan informs the US about Khreesat’s role It has already been mentioned that early in February 1989, the Jordanians officially informed US intelligence that Khreesat was their undercover agent. In response to interrogatories prepared by the CIA the Mukabaret furnished them with a statement by Khreesat repeating that he had made five barometric bombs in Neuss and that three were probably still at 16 Isarstrasse. Also as mentioned earlier, the Jordanians revealed that they had already informed W. German intelligence about Khreesat and his assertion that he had left three completed bombs at 16 Isarstrasse. When challenged about this by American officials the BKA admitted that the BND had been maintaining secret dealings with certain elements in Jordan’s intelligence service and received regular reports on Khreesat. The FBI duly insisted that the BKA return to the address and to the Greengrocer’s shop basement and search again, but the BKA refused on the grounds that they had already done so on 31 January, with no result. (For a fascinating discussion on the possible reasons for the Germans’ reticence see Emerson and Duffy, pp.178-181). April 1989: the three barometric bombs mentioned by Khreesat are seized Although the Lockerbie investigators and in particular the CIA were puzzled by the apparent lack of W. German co-operation in the first few months of 1989 an attempt in April by the FBI’s anti-terrorism chief Oliver “Buck” Revell to solicit a greater spirit of helpfulness with regard to Khreesat’s account of his three missing completed barometric bombs met with some success (see, generally, Emerson and Duffy, pp.205-219). On 13 April the BKA returned to to Hashem Abassi’s greengrocer’s shop at 14 Neumarkt and were shown by Abassi to the basement where he had stored things from his vacated flat, including items left behind by Dalkamoni and Khreeshat after their arrest. Khreesat had told the Jordanians that two of the five bombs he had been made in Germany were housed in stereo radio tuners and in the basement the BKA officers found two such such tuners. These were taken to the BKA offices in Meckenheim but not immediately examined (which may be why the episode was not mentioned to the FBI’s anti-terrorism chief Buck Revell when he met BKA officials the next day). However, on 17 April one of them was examined and found to be housing a bomb. At great risk it was transported to BKA HQ in Wiesbaden where two BKA bomb experts began to dismantle it but while doing so it exploded, killing one of the technicians, Hans Jürgen Sonntag, and maiming and blinding the other, Thomas Ettinger. The BKA immediately returned to the grocery store and found in the basement the Sanyo video monitor which Khreesat had told the Jordanians he had used to build one of his bombs. Both the Sanyo monitor and the other tuner were both found laden with Semtex and both contained a barometric triggered detonator. All three bombs which had been missed on 26 October were therefore identical in design to the Toshiba radio cassette recorder bomb which had been discovered on the back seat of Dalkamoni’s Ford. Repercussions The Federal Prosecutor’s spokesman now conceded the “theoretical possibility” that Pan Am 103 had been destroyed by one of Khreesat’s bombs. Although he insisted it was still only a matter of speculation it was the death of the Hans Sonntag and the maiming of his colleague which apparently caused a sea-change in the whole approach of the W. German authorities to the Lockerbie inquiry. Since he could easily have disposed of the three bombs it was accepted that Hashem Abassi must have been an innocent dupe of his brother-in-law. Dalkamoni further questioned Dalkamoni was then further questioned. Hitherto he had refused to say anything to the police but now, on being told he would be charged with Hans Sonntag’s murder he told the BKA that Khreesat and Ramzi Diab had each brought with them a Toshiba bomb and that he enlisted Khreesat because he himself lacked expertise in bomb-making. He said the bombs were to be smuggled back to the Middle East for use against Israel and were made in Germany because the PFLP-GC had no one in its organisation with bomb-making expertise. The explanation hardly tallied with the fact that Khreesat, with his long history of making bombs for the PFLP-GC had plainly been enlisted by Jibril and that he could easily have travelled to Jibril’s base in Syria. In any event it was difficult to see what purpose barometric bombs would serve in Israel (a topic considered above at V, 4). 3. The “fifth device”: the effort to distance Marwan Khreesat from the fatal bomb and ruminations on its provenance and history (a) A tally of bombs The five Toshiba bombs from 1985 The story of the Toshiba bomb which Khreesat told the FBI must have been handed over to Abu Elias has been the subject of much conjecture and debate. Khreesat informed the FBI men that in 1985 he had gone to Syria to improvise five altimeter bombs of the kind he had been making since 1970. These particular five were housed in Toshiba F-453D Bombeat models. Going into considerable detail on the later history of the five devices Khreesat said they were for demonstration only and in different states of completion before being disassembled. Two had been ready to arm, one had no barometric pressure device or associated timer (see below) and the remaining two, for some reason which he did not specify, needed only “two wires to be connected” (FD302, p.5). Components of the 1985 bombs handed to Khreesat in Germany and their re-use Khreesat stated that following his arrival in Germany the four barometric pressure triggers (together with their associated delay timers) which had been removed from the 1985 demonstration Toshiba bombs were delivered back to him for incorporation into a new batch of bombs. Three were fitted respectively into the two Ultrasound radios and the Sanyo monitor bought second-hand on 18 October and seized by the BKA in April 1989. The fourth, he stated, was installed (or re-installed) in the ex-1985 F-453D which the BKA found in Dalkamoni’s car on the day of the round-up. The F-453D found at 16 Isarstrasse with holes already drilled was presumably one of the five 1985 models. That left the so-called fifth device. There was of course also the amateurishly constructed bomb in the stereo model radio cassette player of unknown make two wires of which he claimed Dalkamoni had asked him to solder together. In addition, the Toshiba stereo radio-cassette player he had seen in the car boot on the same day as the strange request could have been a bomb. Two other Toshiba bombs It has already been mentioned that Dalkamoni told the BKA that Khreesat and Ramzi Diab had each brought along with them a bomb housed in a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder. Khreesat’s, he said, had come from PFLP-GC headquarters in Damascus and contained two clocks and two barometric pressure switches. Ramzi Diab had handed him a similarly equipped Toshiba device when they met in Frankfurt on October 18 (see Ashton and Ferguson, p.51-52; cf Emerson and Duffy, p.209, stating that Dalkamoni told the BKA that Khreesat and Diab had brought the devices discovered in the grocery shop basement on 13 April, 1989). Khreesat did not directly refer to these in his FBI interview. If they were additional to the five devices Khreesat claimed to have built (one of which had gone missing) it may be suggested that one of them could have been the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103. (b) Khreesat distinguishes his devices from the Lockerbie bomb Some effort seems to have been made by Khreesat, possibly with the assistance of his FBI interrogators, towards dissociating himself from the fatal bomb. Khreesat’s claim that the fifth device was a bronze single speaker F453D The FD302 interview record has Khreesat telling the FBI agents that the Toshiba radio cassette player housing the fifth device, which had been delivered to 16 Isarstrasse on 22 October, was not in a “new box”; he did not know where it had come from but he thought Abu Elias might have handed it to Dalkomoni while he, Khreesat, was at the zoo (FD302, p.21). From a catalogue shown him by the FBI agents he purported to identify it as a single-speaker Toshiba RT-F453D, but bronze in colour. By the time of the FBI interview RARDE were claiming to have established from some circuit board remnants, some bits of black plastic and the remains of a user’s guide that the bomb had been housed in a Toshiba SF16 stereo radio-cassette player. One might be forgiven for wondering if Khreesat was hedging his bets here. If the fifth device was housed in a bronze Toshiba it could not have been the fatal bomb (he and his collusive FBI interrogators might have imagined). On the other hand (they might possibly have supposed) if, in spite of the black fragments, doubts remained, it could always be argued that use of a bronze Toshiba could never be proved because the absence of bronze fragments could either be explained away by their having been fused with the remains of the bronze Samsonite suitcase which carried the fatal bomb or because the fatal Toshiba had not been bronze. Khreesat contradicts himself on his non-use of twin-speaker radio cassette players Could the identification of the Toshiba as an SF16 have been the reason why, according to the agents, Khreesat maintained he had never used a stereo model and could not therefore be responsible for building the device which brought down Maid of the Seas? Could he have been intending to imply that with two speakers there was insufficient room for the bomb components (a issue touched on earlier)? Yet when the BKA raided 16 Isarstrasse they noted 12 unmodified stereo radio cassette players which they left there. Why had so many stereo models been obtained if Khreesat was not going to use them? Perhaps they had been purchased without consulting Khreesat and had then been discarded as unsuitable. However, there is directly contradictory evidence of what Khreesat told the agents. When he was interviewed by Defence solicitors Duff and MacKechnie in June 2000 he admitted using both mono and stereo models, an assertion he also incidentally appears to have made in his statement forwarded by the Jordanians to the CIA in the first half of 1989. (Ashton and Ferguson, p.191, give the month as June but Emerson and Duffy, p. 176-177, suggest that Khreesat’s statement passed on by the Mukabaret in response to CIA interrogatories was forwarded on to them somewhat earlier in the year). In any event it was months before the FBI gained access to him (Ashton and Ferguson, p.265, citing Zeist trial transcript, 6 June, 2000). Self-contradictions involved in Khreesat’s claim that he did not build the fifth device Khreesat did not merely rely on the mono-stereo and colour points in distancing himself from the Pan Am 103 bomb. It rather seems as if he was anxious to cover his back against the possibility that the missing bomb – the fifth device – might nonetheless be implicated as the fatal bomb, even though he maintained the BomBeat was a single-speaker bronze model whereas the fatal bomb was supposed to have been a twin-speaker model. In telling the FBI that he did not know what type of device was used to destroy Pan Am 103 he– “advised that he does not think he built the device responsible for Pan Am 103, as he only built the four devices in Germany which are described herein” (FD302, p.37). These were the bombs in the two Ultrasound radios, the Sanyo monitor and the RT-F453D found hidden in Dalkamoni’s car. The fifth device, he professed to claim, he did not build. It was the one, he said, which had been brought back from Frankfurt on 22 October. The latter could not have been the amateurishly fashioned bomb he was shown on 23 October, with its “strange modifications . . . some involving cardboard” and the visible barometric pressure trigger. Although that device had supposedly been built by someone else and he was merely being asked by Dalkamoni to solder two wires together, it could not have been the bomb delivered on 22 October and brought back from Frankfurt for the simple reason that, according to his own account, the machine brought back from Frankfurt on 22 October – called by him the fifth device – was a Toshiba F453D mono BomBeat. As already mentioned he made it clear (a) that he was uncertain of the make of the poorly constructed device he was shown on 23 October because it was face down and (b) he was certain it it had twin speakers. In fact, his claim that he only built four devices in Germany was substantially undermined by a basic self-contradiction going to the very heart of the question as to whether he built the fatal bomb. On the one hand, as we have seen, to the FBI he said he only built four bombs (the two Ultrasound radios, the Sanyo monitor and the F453D found hidden in Dalkamoni’s car: FD302, p.37). On the other hand, he also told them that the Toshiba radio cassette player was brought back from Frankfurt on 22 October for him to convert into a bomb. Did he not then actually carry out the job? In fact, there is an even starker self-contradiction of his “only four bombs” claim. As we have already seen he also told the FBI that when he called his Jordianian controller to report the removal by Dalkamoni of the fifth device from the workshop he stated that “he had prepared a device and given it to Abu Elias” which is to say “that he had assumed that the fifth device went to Abu Elias” (FD302 pp.23-24). Typical of lying, he got his story in a twist. Improbability of Khreesat’s story that he was asked to solder two wires in a poorly made bomb We can be tolerably certain that there was no sixth, amateurishly made, machine because the story is inherently so improbable. The story of the two wires which needed to be soldered seems to hark back to two of the 1985 devices, which “needed two wires to be connected.” However, why would someone else – Abu Elias perhaps – have gone to all the trouble of making a poor effort to assemble a Toshiba disguised bomb when the expert Khreesat had been brought to Germany explicitly for the purpose of building bombs and was on hand to construct them properly? Why would Khreesat be requested simply to solder two wires together to complete the job? Why, to quote The Lockerbie Divide blogger (“Just a Passing Magic Touch,” above), would they have needed Khreesat’s “token touch”? The gang were hardly dependent on his expertise for such an elementary task. How would asking him to solder two wires together – “no questions asked” – amount to any sort of test of his “loyalty”? What in sum might be made of his strange story of the amateurish bomb? Was it perhaps a pure invention designed to provide some sort of smokescreen as to the number of bombs, by expanding the number the cell had available which were not his and thus distancing himself from the fatal bomb? If that was his purpose, as a stratagem it was fated to get him nowhere because the coup de grâce was administered to his credibility by the basic self-contradiction (exposed in the last paragraph) in his own account to the FBI as to the number of bombs he built. Assessing Khreesat’s claim that his bombs were non-lethal One conceivable answer to this odd puzzle is that it may tie in with the desire on Khreesat’s part – and that of the FBI men – to demonstrate that his government controllers would hardly have sanctioned him to construct a lethal bomb where there was any danger that it might slip out of his hands, as he claimed had happened with the fifth device. If that bomb happened to be the one which destroyed Pan Am 103 there would have been the strongest of motives for both Khreesat and his controllers to show that he had been authorised to build lethal bombs only under the most pressing conditions of necessity. Thus, it could be argued that he would have had little choice but to build a lethal bomb in order to maintain his cover because a relevant gang member had possessed the technical knowledge to rumble the incorporation of a feature rendering the bombs inoperable. That indeed is exactly what he suggested to the FBI agents. Having stated that he had previously been ordered by his Jordanian control to disable any bombs he improvised he went on to assert that this had proved to be impossible “as Abu Elias would probably know it.” By coming up with the story of the amateurishly constructed bomb and the two wires and the implication that it had been built by Abu Elias, Khreesat perhaps cunningly hoped he could float the idea that Abu Elias had just about sufficient knowledge to detect a built-in spoiler. At the same time, by making out that Abu Elias’s handiwork was amateurish he preserved the raison d’être of his assignment by the PFLP-GC – that he was the bomb-making expert while Abu Elias was the specialist in planting them. It may have seemed to be him to be the perfect compromise. But in the nature of mendacity the story was liable to unravel. It was assuredly a leaky vessel. If Khreesat had been brought in because of his bomb-making expertise whereas Abu Elias was an airport security expert and not a bomb-maker why might Khreesat ever have supposed he could not hoodwink him? The excuse seems untenable. Might it not follow then that he, or his controllers – probably both – had been reckless in the extreme, that they knew it, and that they felt numbed by embarrassment and shame at the realisation that it was Khreesat’s bomb which probably destroyed Pan Am 103. He could hardly claim that his bombs were not at least potentially lethal, as is attested to by the fact that a BKA bomb disposal expert was killed attempting to test one of the three bombs seized at Abassi’s shop in 1989. A decade later Khreesat may have forgotten what he was supposed to have told the FBI or he may have forgotten about the death of the bomb disposal man. Perhaps he believed that the old story would never be resurrected. He told defence solicitors Duff and MacKechnie that he had carefully designed bombs that would not explode. On the other hand, merely because the bomb which killed the expert had a detonator which worked does not mean that the circuitry involved in the link between the barometric trigger and the capacitator time-delay components could not have been altered so as to disable its operation. If Khreesat built the fifth device and it was the fifth device which destroyed Pan Am 103, it clearly had not been disabled. Did Khreesat build the fifth device? Khreesat’s claim to have built only four bombs in Germany was tainted by self-contradiction of a plainly self-serving nature. His story that he was asked by Dalkamoni to solder together two wires in a bomb ineptly put together by someone else is as implausible as was his suggestion that Abu Elias had enough technical know-how to spot the fact that it had been disabled. Indeed, the very heart of Khreesat’s suggestion that Abu Elias was the amateurish maker of the fifth device is capsized by the inherent inconsistency that a man who can only build a poor excuse for a bomb will possess that degree of specialist knowledge. It is clear from the accumulation of contrived improbabilities and inconsistencies in Khreesat’s story that he was desperate to distance himself and his controllers from responsibility for what he and they doubtless believed could well have been the fatal bomb. Can it be inferred from this that he did in fact build the missing fifth device (whether it was a stereo or mono Toshiba)? It seems likely though it is by no means certain. Was the fifth device the fatal bomb? Whilst it is likely that Khreesat was the maker of the fifth device and highly likely that it was lethal this is very far from pointing irresistibly to the inference that it was the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103. On the other hand, as the enlisted bomb-making expert he probably did build the fatal bomb, whether it was the fifth device or another Toshiba radio cassette player bomb of similar if not identical pattern, and whether he did so in Germany or elswhere. How far his FBI interrogators and his Mukbaret/CIA controllers were sensitive to the probability that he was the man who built the Lockerbie bomb can only be conjectured. 4. The story of Abu Elias and the missing bomb: fact or fiction? (a) Uncertainties about when the missing device could have been passed on If Khreesat was telling the FBI the truth the fifth device was never seized in the Autumn Leaves raids and Abu Elias escaped the net and was never arrested. However, doubts about his account of the hand-over of the fifth device are self-evident. Khreesat said that the episode in which Dalkamoni knocked on the shower door and said he was going to Frankfurt and the fifth device was then found to have gone missing from the workshop, took place on 24 October. However, as already noted, there is no BKA record of Dalkamoni going to Frankfurt after the 22 October. It may be that Khreesat merely got the timeline wrong. It is far from impossible that Dalkamoni delivered it to Abu Elias in Frankfurt on 22 October and that the unconverted Toshiba – which became the fifth device – was supplied to Khreesat to work on earlier than the date he gave, the 22nd (when he said it was brought back from Frankfurt). It is noteworthy that Dalkamoni told the BKA that Ramzi Diab had supplied him with a Toshiba radio cassette player when they met on 18 October. Could that have become the fifth device which Khreesat completed by 22 October (and not the 24th)? It may be that Khreesat did not tell the FBI the full story. Both the BKA log and Khreesat’s own FD302 account show that on the 22nd they had both driven to Frankfurt. Perhaps what really happened is that Dalkamoni knocked on the bathroom door to tell Khreesat to be ready to leave with him at some point but that he did not necessarily leave immediately and Khreesat went back to do a little further work, found the fifth device missing and that they then left for Frankfurt where the fifth device was handed over to Abu Elias. So what Khreesat represented as an unspoken removal was in reality no mystery at all but it can be seen that he may have felt the need to maintain the illusion of being kept in the dark in order to distance himself and his masters from the handover. Against the background of this conjecture the peculiar phrasing of his statement about the transfer as recorded in the FD302 report becomes readily explicable. It will be recalled that the record reads as follows: “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.” He starts by saying that he gave the device to Abu Elias and then, realising he has made a slip of the tongue quickly corrects himself in the next breath. The distinct possibility is that he was not only privy to the handover but party to it. The 22nd does seem the more likely date on which the fifth device was handed over to Abu Elias – if it ever was – for the simple reason that it is the last date given in the BKA log for Dalkamoni’s visit to Frankfurt before the arrests. In his FBI interview Khreesat stated that Dalkamoni had dropped him off at the zoo in Frankfurt and that when he picked him up later he said that Abu Elias had arrived in Germany. Whether he was in truth dropped off at the zoo is unverifiable but it is not mentioned in the BKA surveillance log and the almost absurd coyness with which Khreesat purports to conjecture that Dalkamoni may have met up with Abu Elias – as if Dalkamoni would have indulged in nods and winks – only serves the more to suggest that it was used as a most convenient further ploy by which Khreesat could, with the co-operation of the FBI agents, cunningly distance himself from the handover and any tacit admission to having dealt directly with Abu Elias.
Directory: docs docs -> Application for acem docs -> Observational Assessment of Teaching Practices Teaching Assessment Initiative Proposal Submitted to The Teachers for a New Era project docs -> Traditional British values docs -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization docs -> Borzoi Club of America Register of Merit Program I. What is a Register Of Merit docs -> Protecting the rights of the child in the context of migration docs -> United Nations E/C. 12/Esp/5 docs -> 9th May 1950 the schuman declaration docs -> Getting To Outcomes® in Services for Homeless Veterans 10 Steps for Achieving Accountability Download 0.96 Mb. Share with your friends:
|