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Pan Am Flight 103 (involved in the Lockerbie bombing) was a Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York City that was destroyed by a terrorist bomb on Wednesday, 21 December 1988, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew on board.[1] Large sections of the aircraft crashed into Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 more people on the ground.
Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November 1991. In 1999, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi handed over the two men for trial at Camp Zeist, Netherlands after protracted negotiations and UN sanctions. In 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for the bombing. In August 2009, he was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in May 2012, remaining the only person to be convicted for the attack.
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Gwynne Dyer:
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Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan airline official who was convicted of placing the bomb aboard the plane and sentenced to 27 years in prison by a special international court in 2001, was freed from jail in 2009 and sent home, allegedly dying from cancer and with only three months to live. He eventually did die three years later, but it was a very peculiar thing for the Scottish government to do...
And there was something even more disturbing about the case. As a condition of his release, Megrahi was required to drop an appeal against his conviction that had been granted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007.
The SCCRC listed no fewer than six grounds for serious concern about Megrahi’s conviction, including the fact that the U.S. Justice Department made an undisclosed payment of $3 million to two Maltese citizens whose evidence had linked Megrahi with the suitcase that contained the bomb. If the appeal had gone ahead, Megrahi’s conviction would probably have been quashed.
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Gwynne Dyer goes on to explain, with some testimonial evidence from an Iranian intelligence officer, that Iran was behind the attack (conducted through Palestinian intermediaries) and that the attack was revenge for the US shooting down Iran Air Flight 655. He claims that tacking it on Iran would have gotten in the way of securing Syria's support for the first Iraq War - thus Gaddafi was bribed into taking responsibility.
What really happened? Will we ever know?
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