Pan Am Flight 103 conspiracy theories
[2] This theory was later reinforced by Abolghasem Mesbahi, former head of Iranian intelligence operations in Europe, who stated after defecting to Germany that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal, a Palestinian guerrilla leader, to carry out the attack on Pan Am 103.
[3] In his 1994 film The Maltese Double Cross, Allan Francovich suggested that rogue CIA agents were implicated in a plot that involved them turning a blind eye to a drug running operation in return for intelligence.
Finally, in December 2013, Patrick Haseldine suggested that the bombing was an assassination by South Africa's apartheid government of United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson.
[4] For many months after the bombing, the prime suspects were the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a Damascus-based rejectionist group led by former Syrian army captain Ahmed Jibril, sponsored by Iran.
[7]Secret intercepts were reported by author, David Yallop, to have recorded the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) in Baalbeck, Lebanon, making contact with the PFLP-GC immediately after the downing of the Iran Air Airbus.
Jibril's right-hand man, Hafez Dalkamoni, set up a PFLP-GC cell which was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany in October 1988, two months before PA 103.
They discussed a planned operation in coded calls to Cyprus and Damascus: oranges and apples stood for 'detonating devices'; medicine and pasta for 'Semtex explosive'; and auntie for 'the bomb carrier'.
Two cell members are known to have escaped arrest, including Abu Elias, a resident of Sweden who, according to Prime Time Live (ABC News November 1989), was an expert in bombs sent to Germany to check on Khreesat's devices because of suspicions raised by Ahmed Jibril.
[9] The link to PA 103 was further strengthened when Khreesat told investigators that, before joining the cell in Germany, he had bought five Toshiba Bombeat cassette radios from a smugglers' village in Syria close to the border with Lebanon, and made practice IEDs out of them in Jibril's training camp 20 km (12 mi) away.
Other supporters of this theory believed that whoever paid for the bombing arranged two parallel operations intended to ensure that at least one would succeed; or, that Jibril's cell in Germany was a red herring designed to attract the attention of the intelligence services, while the real bombers worked quietly elsewhere.
A number of journalists considered the Iranian revenge motive (retaliation for the shooting down of the Iran Air Airbus by USS Vincennes) to have been prematurely dismissed by investigators.
[5] Abolghasem Mesbahi, former head of Iranian intelligence in Europe, eventually defected and "told [German] investigators that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal, a Palestinian guerrilla leader, to carry out the attack on Pan Am 103.
[2]Part of report, which is dated 24 September 1989, cites information acquired at Ft. Meade, MD: The mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight that was to be almost entirely booked by US military personnel on Christmas leave.
The bomb was constructed in LY and then shipped to GE for placement on the aircraft (NFI).In 2013 a former CIA agent told The New York Times's Robert F. Worth that "the best intelligence" supported Iran as the culprit.
[14] This theory suggests that U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents had set up a protected drug route from Europe to the United States—allegedly called Operation Corea—that allowed Syrian drug dealers, led by Monzer al-Kassar (who was involved with Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal) to ship heroin to the U.S. using Pan Am flights, in exchange for intelligence on Palestinian groups holding hostages in Syria.
[citation needed] Time introduced another version of this theory, claiming that the American intelligence officers on PA 103—Matthew Gannon of the CIA and Maj. Charles McKee of the DIA—had found out about the drug operation, and were headed to Washington to raise their concerns about its impact on their hostage rescue plans.
Aviv claimed to be a former Mossad officer[18] who led the Operation Wrath of God team that assassinated members of Black September who were believed to have been responsible for the Munich Massacre in 1972.
According to his theory, the CIA knew in advance that the baggage exchange would take place, but let it happen anyway, because the protected drugs route was a rogue operation, and Gannon and McKee were on their way to Washington to tell their superiors about it.
In 1997, Coleman pleaded guilty to five counts of perjury in a federal court after admitting that he submitted false testimony in civil litigation brought on behalf of the families of passengers killed in the bombing.
[citation needed] This conspiracy theory is based on the premise that key evidence presented at the trial (e.g. timer fragment, parts from a specific radio cassette model, clothing bought in Malta, bomb suitcase originating at Luqa Airport) could have been fabricated by the U.S. and Britain for the "political" purpose of incriminating Libya.
Other incidents that have been attributed to Libya are not so clear cut: At the end of the Lockerbie trial an international observer appointed by the United Nations, Hans Köchler, called the verdict a "spectacular miscarriage of justice".
[information added]In June 1990, with the assistance ultimately of the CIA and FBI, Alan Feraday of the Explosives Laboratory was able to identify the fragment as identical to circuitry from an MST-13 timer.
[citation needed] The lawyers invoked the 1990 Scottish Fatal Accident Inquiry and the evidence it heard that the baggage container AVE 4041, into which the bomb suitcase had been loaded, was left unsupervised at Heathrow for about forty minutes that afternoon.
"[42] According to Atef Abu Bakr, Gaddafi asked Nidal to coordinate with the head of Libyan intelligence, Abdullah al-Senussi, an attack on the U.S. in retaliation for the 1986 bombing of Benghazi and Tripoli.
[43] The theory is rooted in an allegation made by Die Zeit and in the film The Maltese Double Cross that the United States government knew of the bomb and warned staff from its embassies in Helsinki and Moscow, as well as a high-level South African delegation, to avoid the flight.
[1] The allegation prompted a strong statement in November 1994 from the private secretary of Pik Botha, then South African Foreign Minister, stating that "Had he known of the bomb, no force on earth would have stopped him from seeing to it that Flight 103, with its deadly cargo, would not have left the airport.
Haselnut has long claimed that Pan Am 103 was blown up by the apartheid South African government in order to kill an unfortunate Swedish passenger, Bernt Carlsson, the UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Commissioner for Namibia.
As well as aiming various far-fetched accusations over the years at people connected to the Lockerbie investigations and trials, Haseldine has also claimed that he was "nominated" for last year’s Private Eye Paul Foot Award—by which he meant he had in fact submitted his own material for consideration.In The Colonel, the fifth chapter of the 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis, it is proposed that the Reagan administration used Muammar Gaddafi as a pawn in their strategy of creating a simplified, morally unambiguous foreign policy by blaming him for the 1985 Rome and Vienna airport attacks and the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing that killed US soldiers, both of which European security services attributed to Syrian intelligence agencies.
