Detail PT/35b
Detail MST - 13 board Standard
Detail of Letraset template
Corner of PT/35b compared to a genuine MST-13 board and the original template
The origins of PT/35b remained elusive until, in June 1990, Scotish police allowed the FBI to become involved.
With the help of a CIA agent, the fragment was matched visually to a circuit board from an electronic timer known as an MST-13 made by a Swiss firm called MEBO. Inquiries in Switzerland revealed only 20 of these timers had been produced as a special order for the Libyan armed forces.
This was a major breakthrough in the investigation and the cause of the switch in direction from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Gaddfi’s Libya as the prime suspects. It also provided the perfect answer to a conundrum that had plagued investigators since early 1989. How had one of the PFLP-GC’s devices travelled on three flights before blowing up, when the triggers usually used by that group were altitude-sensitive? The MEBO devices were count-down timers capable of being set to go off days in advance, irrespective of altitude.
The Lockerbie investigators set off to hunt Libyans, and apparently never looked back.
More tests were carried out by forensic scientists at RARDE, overseen by Allen Feraday. His notes dated August 1, 1991 record the same findings as the tests done in Scotland the previous year. The coating on the circuitry was pure tin.
However, there was a complication. Investigators had samples of the MEBO-produced boards for comparison and they were not the same. They had the usual alloy coating
Hawick Moffat
Te careful logging of the recovered debris shows four separate parts of that same shirt recovered from widely separated locations which form an almost perfect straight- line continuation of the “southern debris trail”. Tis all fits perfectly with the known distribution of the falling, wind-swept debris.
seen on mass-manufactured products and therefore different to PT/35b.
The visual match with the MEBO boards was perfect, right down to an oddity in the tracking caused by the Letraset of the template not having been cut quite flush.
The matching of PT/35b to the unique batch of timers supplied to Libya was central to the prosecution of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah in 2000-01. With the timer off the table, proof that Lockerbie was a Libyan operation would have been absent, and the prosecution would have been in all sorts of trouble. The metallurgy discrepancy was put to one side. Mr. Feraday’s original notes were not disclosed to the defence and the mater was covered by having him read out relevant section of his fair-copy report writen some months later. In that, there was no mention of any discrepancy. The report read “... it has been conclusively established that the fragment materials and tracking patern are similar in all respects to the
Jedburgh A68
Northumberland National Park
A7 A74(M) Lockerbie
Two distinct “debris trails” of aircraft parts
Two distinct ‘debris trails’ of aircraft parts
Newcastleton Langholm
Item PI/995 with embedded part PT/35b located
PI /995 with embedded PT/35b
Item PK/339 located
PK 339
Item PK/1973 located
PK 1973 A68
Item PK/1978 located
PK 1978 A696 Bellingham
Most of the lighter luggage contents were found in a continuation of the southerly trail while papers and letters made it as far as the Northumberland coast, and some were lost to the North Sea.
Most of the lighter luggage contents were found in a continuation of the southerly trail while papers and letters made it as far as the Northumberland coast, and some were lost to the North Sea.
February 2016 17
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