‘Palestinian group carried out Lockerbie bombing’

Gaddafi may have commissioned attack that killed 270 people 25 years ago, ex-Israeli security official tells Times of Israel, but Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC carried it out

Twenty-five years after Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, with the loss of all 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground, a former senior member of the Israeli security establishment said he was certain the bombing was carried out by Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The Israeli source, who spoke to The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity, said Israel was “listening in” during the months prior to the December 21, 1988 bombing on preparations for what “we thought was a plan to target an Israeli plane” and that it was “clear that Jibril prepared the operation.”

The comments came ahead of Saturday’s 25th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on British territory, and the worst terror attack on American civilians with the exception of 9/11. The anniversary is prompting another slew of conspiracy theories as to who was responsible.

Among the claims that have come to the fore in various newspaper reports, TV documentaries and new books in the last few days are allegations that the bomber was Palestinian terrorist Mohammed Abu Talb, who carried out a series of bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam in 1985; that the CIA subverted the investigation; and that a fair-minded examination of the evidence demonstrates that the bomb, rather than beginning its fateful journey in Malta, was smuggled onto Flight 103 via a baggage container at Heathrow Airport.

The Israeli source did not dispute that Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, which in 2003 accepted responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to victims’ families, had commissioned the attack. And he said that while an Iranian role made sense, Israel had found no proof of Iranian involvement. (Iran, a prime orchestrator of international terrorism, had pledged to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, with the loss of all 290 people on board.)

Several Israeli prime ministers and former heads of the Mossad intelligence service have told this reporter over the years that it is their belief that the Libyans instigated the bombing.

The source, who was a senior figure in the Israeli military intelligence hierarchy at the time of the Lockerbie blast, said there was a “huge alert” in the Israeli security establishment in the months before the bombing, because of indications that the PFLP-GC was about to strike. “We told the British and the Americans what we knew, which was that there was an intention to hit an Israeli plane,” he said. “We didn’t warn about a British or an American plane because we didn’t know that,” he said.

The only man ever convicted for the bombing was a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was found to have placed a suitcase containing the bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, from where it was transferred to a flight to London’s Heathrow, before detonating on Flight 103 a little more than half an hour after the Pan Am plane took off for New York. Megrahi, who was jailed in 2001 after a trial in which his fellow alleged Libyan conspirator, Lamin Fhima, was acquitted,went to his death in 2012 insisting on his innocence.

Times of Israel