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ver the years since Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie by a powerful mid-air explosion, killing 270 people, there had been a series of lengthy investigations, tests and court cases. One of the experts involved, Dr. John Wyatt MBE, provides a summary of the explosive tests and their conclusions.
On the evening of 21st December 1988, 31,000 feet above the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, Pan Am Flight 103 (Clipper ‘Maid of the Seas’) on a regular scheduled transatlantic flight bound for New York, was destroyed by a powerful mid-air explosion, killing all 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.
It was the worst such disaster in Britain and one of the worst in the history of civil aviation. Subsequent investigation by the UK Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) established that the explosion was caused by a terrorist bomb made of Semtex and placed in the airliner’s forward cargo hold.
After a lengthy investigation, an indictment for murder was issued against Abdelbaset al- Megrahi, Libyan Intelligence Officer and head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, LAA Station Manager in Luqa Airport, Malta.
After protracted negotiations and UN sanctions, Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, decided to hand over the two men in April 1999. The trial took place in a neutral country as agreed at Camp Zeist in Holland, in late 2000. On 31 January 2001 Megrahi was found guilty and jailed for life, Fhimah walked free.
After unsuccessful appeals, he applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in September 2003 for his conviction to be reviewed. A huge amount of information, a lot of it new, had to be sifted through.
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In June 2007, the SCCRC announced it would refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh after it had found that he (Megrahi) ‘may have suffered a miscarriage of justice’. My explosive tests in 2006 formed part of this new information.
The case against Megrahi centred around a number of key issues; clothing from Malta, fragments of a user manual for a Toshiba radio and tiny fragments of printed circuit board (PCB) from a timing mechanism.
The debris from the explosion was spread over 2,000 square miles onto farm land, forests, built-up areas etc. 10,000 pieces of debris were retrieved, labelled and stored. It was evident from the damage to certain items (from their obvious proximity to an explosion) that the bomb was in a particular Samsonite suitcase.
After further investigation it was discovered that most of the clothes came from a shop in Malta and that the bomb had been built into a Toshiba brand radio/cassette player. This type of bomb had recently been recovered during a terrorist incident in West Germany, so the UK’s forensic scientist from the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) visited the Bundeskriminalamt (BICA) laboratories in Wiesbaden in January 1989.
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Although the fragments from Lockerbie were not exactly the same, they were very similar and found to be from a ‘sister’ Toshiba radio/cassette player. The German discovery started with a raid on known PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General ~Command) people in October 1988.
Several people were arrested and guns, 16 © CITY SECURITY MAGAZINE – SPRING 2021
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Secondly and most importantly a small (10 x 9.2 x 1.6 mm) fragment of a PCB was traced to a MEBO MST–13 timer made by a Swiss Company and sold solely to Libya. This was exhibit number PT 356 and was only found in a shirt in 1990. Answers to a number of questions concerning PT 356 proved difficult to tie down in the appeal investigation. When and where was it recovered and by whom was it found? Was it swabbed for explosives or other traces? Where are the continuity records? Other aspects also ‘muddied the waters’.
The Swiss Company was run by Edwin Bollier. He claims that he was originally shown a fragment of brown 8-ply circuit board which
grenades and explosives including a bomb hidden inside a Toshiba with an altitude switch were recorded. The German police found four bombs, but had reason to believe there had been five. Was the fifth bomb placed on Pan Am 103? These people had been under surveillance for some time including when they travelled to Malta for meetings.
You would have thought that this was a considerable breakthrough, particularly when added to the USS Vincennes mistakenly shooting down Iranian Air Flight 655, in the Gulf. Iran vowed to avenge the 290 people who died and supposedly tasked the PFLP-GC (one Ahmed Jibril). Then suddenly there was an about turn in the investigation and everyone’s attention turned to Libya.
There were supposedly two main reasons for this. Firstly, the Maltese-labelled clothing and the owner of the shop, Paul Gauci, who said he recognised Megrahi from 18 months earlier. However, Gauci changed his story several times and had seen a picture of Megrahi before being interviewed by the Police - he was considered an unreliable witness at the Appeal. It would seem that investigators also ignored the fact that they found clothes from the same shop in the apartment of Abu Talb (member of PFLP-GC).
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