Serious New Lockerbie Questions Involve CIA

The bomb that blew up a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, murdering 270 people, was planted by Libyan agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, according to the results of a remarkable trial that concluded in 2001. (al-Megrahi's motion for a re-trial was denied in 2002.) The case against al-Megrahi hinged on a circuit board found months after the crash, miles away from the crash site. Case closed.

After the bombers were found guilty -- by their own admission -- the Bush administration gradually moved to lift longstanding sanctions against Libya.

But now, according to the Scotsman, a former Scottish police chief has charged that the CIA planted the circuit board, the wrong man was convicted, and that the Popular Front for the Liberatin of Palestine, an Iranian-backed group based in Syria, was behind the blast.

The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi.

At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters.

The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.

Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.

The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.

The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.

Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.

A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.

"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made."

It turns out there's been much speculation throughout the years from reputable sources that the wrong people had been charged, arrested and convicted in the Lockerbie case. More on that here, here and here.

Add to this the fact that the FBI's Thurman has been "discredited" by the agency as an explosives expert, as this report makes clear, and that al-Megrahi is again asking for a re-trial, and we have the makings of a case that could change the fortunes of a Libyan agent but, more important, turn international relations on its head and further damage the credibility of an already reeling CIA and U.S. government.