ABC: Lockerbie verdict could be sent to appeals court. Recent report in the London Review of Books that there was suppressed exculpatory evidence for the Libyan agent convicted in the case, and suppressed evidence pointing in another direction, to a PFLP-GC agent in Syria. "In July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus [killing] ....270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. ...The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing. ...Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC. The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. ..." Lots of other interesting twists and turns, including bizarre things that happened to those US intelligence officials and invetigators who maintained evidence on this theory. And this: "At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again."

Posted by Laura at June 26, 2007 12:56 AM