171 days later: the curious case of PT35 (b), the incredible shrinking man, the bomb-making double agent, the wheeler-dealing star witness and other strange tales that most of us probably missed
Teasing out some threads of Pan Am 103's destruction over Lockerbie - still Britain's worst terrorist atrocity
Context: ongoing events in the Middle East and the (much delayed) upcoming trial of Abu Agila Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi. Known usually as Masud, he's accused of building the Pan Am 103 bomb and setting the timer. He was kidnapped by an armed militia group in Libya in November 2022, sold to the US and controversially transported to America using 'extraordinary rendition' .
Why any of this matters: 270 people died violently and 37 years later, many questions remain about how it happened.
Objective here: it occurred to me that the Lockerbie bombing might mean little to anyone under about the age of 50, even though the story continues to unfold (and arguably unravel) all the time. So this is designed to boil down a complex back story to some essential threads, so that the latest upcoming trial makes better sense. Doing this has at least helped me to discern the wood from the trees on a confusing topic.
This piece (part 1 of an intended occasional series) is largely based around a massive corpus of reporting, which is diligently captured here every time something relevant is published anywhere in the world.
That blog is maintained by Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. You may already know that he designed the trial of those eventually accused and the one who was convicted of the Lockerbie atrocity. Black is perhaps the leading figure among many reputable names who continue to suggest that a miscarriage of justice occurred.
What this piece isn't: the 'truth' about Lockerbie or any new information. It's a primer, designed to break the case down to identify the salient disputes that continue to this day over the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who died in 2012, still protesting his innocence. Using this, you can then jump down some very specific rabbit holes while understanding the context. This not a rehash of the Wikipedia page, which I didn't consult since finding it confusing last time I looked.
As conspiracy theories go, this one has a cast of unusually credible witnesses as well as the inevitable smattering of shady characters with an obvious axe to grind.
The Masud trial is currently delayed until April 2026 but I hope that this breakdown is useful for those who wish to follow it.
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The timeline for Britain's worst peacetime mass murder could begin at many points, but 1986 is perhaps the best discrete contender. That year saw the bombing of the LaBelle Discotheque in Berlin, a foiled plot to blow up an airliner over Tel Aviv and U.S. air strikes launched against targets in Libya. And also the accidental shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner.
There are many previous contenders too, because conflict between the West and the Middle East creates a more or less solid through-line from just about any point you choose to just about any terrorist event organised from that region.
The title above and the point where I choose to begin the timeline nod toward the most popular version of events and the suspicions they raised.
Timeline
It was July 3 1988. Iran Air Flight 655 took off on a scheduled service from Bandar Abbas Airport with 290 people on board, heading for Dubai.
Iraq had been trying to invade Iran and it was going badly. The US were now involved in an unofficial supporting role, attacking various Iranian installations.
Among America's naval forces in the region was a 4-year-old 'state of the art' cruiser called the Vincennes.
Following an altercation with a few Iranian gunboats the Vincennes misidentified Flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz and shot it down, killing everyone onboard.1
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spoke of the skies over the Persian Gulf being painted with the blood of innocents and said that divine retribution must follow.
Iranian Interior Minister Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur predicted a “rain of blood” as America's punishment.
Between July and October 1988 Mohtashemi-Pur held a series of meetings with Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Jibril, in Syria.
The purpose of these meetings was believed to be to discuss Iran hiring Jibril's group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) to bomb a US airliner.
Jibril then organised a cell in Germany, headed by 'right-hand man' Hafez Dalkamoni, a Syrian-born Palestinian. He in turn recruited a Jordanian 'master bomb-maker' (and senior intelligence officer) called Marwan Abdel Khreesat.
Alerted to this by Israeli and western intelligence services, the German domestic intelligence service (BfV) launched operation Autumn Leaves (Operation Herbstlaub) to surveil the cell in Frankfurt and Neuss, near Düsseldorf.
On October 26 1988 they found a bomb moulded into a Toshiba radio-cassette player in the car of Dalkamoni and Khreesat.
Further investigations suggested that 5 bombs of this type existed. Only 4 were ever recovered (one of which killed a German technician the following year). There was a bomb missing.
On November 8 1988 German authorities alerted US, UK and international airlines and airports to their investigation and included a photograph of the Toshiba 'Bombeat' radio cassette player they found.
The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) issued a security bulletin about the Toshiba bomb on November 18 1988, disclosing details of how plastic explosive was concealed in a foil wrapper inside the machine, connected to a barometric sensor designed to detonate the bomb at a predetermined altitude.
Less than 3 weeks later, on December 5 1988, an anonymous telephone call was received at the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland.
The caller warned that a Pan American flight would be bombed during the next fortnight. The flight would be from Frankfurt, West Germany, to the United States and the bomb would be concealed in a radio-cassette player.2
2 days after this, on December 7, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin (FAA security bulletin ACS 88-22) to airlines, airports and other U.S. diplomatic posts in Europe and the Middle East, advising them of the Helsinki warning. The bulletin was not shared to the general public.
On December 19 an aviation security circular/alert to British airlines and airports was signed off by the UK's Department of Transport (DoT), describing a 'new type of terrorist bomb', hidden in a radio cassette player. Distribution was held back because they didn't have enough colour copies of the Toshiba radio cassette photograph.
2 days later, just after midnight December 20/21 1988, the duty officer for Heathrow Airport Terminal 3 noted in his logbook "Door at T3 2a lock broken off." This door led from a public area to the baggage loading bays. Another baggage handler subsequently reported seeing two suitcases already loaded into an otherwise empty container designated 'AVE 4041PA', which was destined for a transatlantic flight later that day.
Around 09:15 CET that day, Air Malta Flight KM180 took off from Luqa Airport, Malta. It landed at Frankfurt Airport at around 12:50 CET.
[In the prosecution case for the Lockerbie trial the presence of an unaccompanied suitcase, containing a bomb concealed among clothes bought from a shop in Sliema, about 6 miles away, is essential. The entire prosecution argument rests on the contents of this case.
Luqa Airport authorities, Maltese police and the Maltese police commissioner all subsequently denied the presence of any unaccompanied baggage on that flight, saying that all 55 bags checked onto the flight were picked up by passengers in Frankfurt.
One of the Scottish trial judges ultimately dissented that it had been proven that an unaccompanied bag was on Flight KM180. In October 1989 an internal FBI memo described as 'misleading' a computer printout from the baggage handling system at Frankfurt Airport suggesting that there was an unaccompanied bag on Flight KM180 which was then transferred, unaccompanied, to another flight. A German investigating magistrate eventually determined that there was no evidence that this unaccompanied bag existed.
Finally, on this point, Air Malta eventually successfully sued Granada Television (a British regional broadcaster) for repeating the unaccompanied suitcase claim on air. Granada settled and paid damages before the case came to court.
The 'Malta link' is also crucial in the upcoming prosecution of Abu Agila Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi (Masud)]
Early afternoon of December 21 1988, Pan Am flight 103A took off from Frankfurt Airport.
This was a Boeing 727 running a 'feeder' flight connecting with Pan Am flight 103, scheduled to depart London Heathrow for the US that evening.
Pan Am 103 was a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet called Clipper Maid of the Seas. She received the PA103A passengers and luggage from Frankfurt ready for the transatlantic flight, along with passengers and luggage loaded at Heathrow. This included baggage container AVE 4041PA, in the forward cargo hold.
She was scheduled to land first in New York, completing her journey in Detroit the next day.
[Famously, South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha and his delegation, about to sign a peace treaty between South Africa, Angola and Cuba and grant independence to Namibia, were booked onto this flight but changed at the last minute]
At 18:04 (GMT) Clipper Maid of the Seas pushed back from the gate at Heathrow Terminal 3 and took off at 18:25.
After 33 minutes the crew confirmed to Air Traffic Control in Prestwick, Scotland, that they were levelling at 31,000 feet.
4 minutes later a bomb detonated in the forward cargo hold, over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
It blew a small hole in the fuselage, the plane disintegrated and fell across a debris field of 845 square miles.
All 259 people onboard, plus 11 residents of Lockerbie, were killed.
[A declassified CIA account of its role in the subsequent investigation said that PA103 should have blown up over the Atlantic, based on its usual flightpath. But there was an exceptionally strong west-east jet stream that night, so the Jumbo first headed north rather than south west. This report was declassified 4 years ago and can be found here.]
Almost immediately following the bombing, MI6 is reported to have 'flashed' their French counterparts, the DGSE, that Libya was suspected as the culprit. This advisory has been mentioned often, but never declassified or leaked. At this point no evidence of foul play had yet been found.
The investigation began amid media speculation that it was an Iranian-sponsored revenge attack for Flight 655. It was jointly led by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the FBI.
On December 23 the PFLP-GC received $11 million in a Swiss bank account, according to CIA Case Officer, Robert Baer, giving evidence to a later Scottish legal hearing in connection with Lockerbie.
[Baer has often spoken of the distinction between raw intelligence and hard evidence that can be introduced into legal proceedings. This widely discussed payment is a case in point. Intelligence services often prefer not to reveal how they know things for fear of compromising sources and methods.
In this instance, the receipt of $11 million into a PFLP-GC account two days after the bombing has been subject of much discussion and assumption as to the source and reason, but it was never officially acknowledged as relevant by Lockerbie investigators.
The money was transferred to another PFLP-GC account at the Banque Nationale de Paris (ending up in the Hungarian development bank). The Paris account details were reportedly found on Hafez Dalkamoni when he had been arrested in Germany during the Autumn Leaves operation that surfaced the Toshiba bomb.
It's important to note that this is all disputed]
On January 13 1989 a piece of fabric was found, in a patch of woodland. It was the charred section of a polyester shirt collar. This was bagged, labelled and sent to the Royal Armament Research & Development Establishment (RARDE), the scientific HQ for the Lockerbie investigations.
There are conflicting accounts of who found this and where, which is unfortunate because the entire case revolves around it. In the trial transcript is is described as found by Lothian and Borders Police detectives DC Thomas Gilchrist and DC Thomas McColm, during a search on farmland in Newcastleton, about 30 miles east of Lockerbie.
But the declassified CIA document mentioned above says it was found by a local dog walker almost a year later.
However it turned up, this find came to be the linchpin for shifting attention away from Iran and the PFLP-GC and toward Libya instead. What that charred piece of polyester was found to contain would also be the key piece of evidence used to demonstrate Libya's culpability.
It contained a fingernail-sized circuit board fragment that came to be known as PT35 (b).
[It seems surprising that this CIA report was signed off for public release containing an error of this nature, given the controversy surrounding the nature, handling and chain of custody for this particular piece of evidence. The paper may well be just a CIA hagiography on its role in the Lockerbie investigation, written as it is in an obviously informal way, but it seems odd that such an error could reach the public domain in a document that contains plenty of redactions. Unless, as some have speculated, this was intentional.
For further comments on this CIA document read this report on the Intel Today blog]
On March 16 1989 Britain's Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon confidentially briefed journalists that the Lockerbie perpetrators had been identified and that arrests were to follow.
On the same day President H.W. Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a phone call in which they agreed to "low key" the Iran angle, maintain jointly that findings to date had been inconclusive and to tighten up on leaks to journalists from officials involved in the investigation.3
On May 12 1989 a forensic scientist, Dr Thomas Hayes, examined the charred cloth found on January 13 (or whenever) and recovered 'shreds of Toshiba cassette-player plastic' and a half-inch fragment of green printed circuit board which would come to be labelled PT/35 (b) in the evidence list.4
[Dr Hayes is one of 2 British forensic investigators in the Lockerbie enquiry whose credibility was later called into question, having been implicated in previous miscarriages of justice and also for questionable practices in the handling of PT/35 (b)]. Hayes’s reputation was so comprehensively undermined that when his role in the false conviction of an Irish family (the 'Maquire Seven') was exposed, he became a chiropodist.]
On July 10 1989 the first public mention of suspected Libyan involvement appeared in the New Yorker magazine, suggesting that this line was now being briefed by intelligence officials in the US.
On September 15 1989 detectives were asked by forensic analyst Alan Feraday to identify the kind of device to which PT/35 (b) belonged. A lot would hang on this fragment of evidence.
[Feraday's credibility was also later questioned on grounds of a gap between his technical qualifications and status as an expert, along with inexplicable changes in his notes on PT/35 (b) and his implication in previous miscarriages of justice. It later turned out that he had no scientific qualifications.
Later it also emerged that their FBI forensics 'explosives examiner' counterpart, Thomas Thurman, held only a degree in Political Science. He was eventually dismissed from his forensics post after an enquiry found that he fabricated or overstated unjustified scientific conclusions relating to other investigations.
It's worth noting that all of the questions arising from the way PT/35 (b) was handled eventually led to a criminal investigation for alleged fabrication, manipulation and misrepresentation of evidence, perjury and failure to disclose exculpatory evidence by police, forensic scientists and government officials. No charges resulted but the conclusions have never been published.]
September 24 1989 (9 months after the bombing) a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) memorandum (surfaced long after) noted:
"The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, the former Iranian Minister of Interior. The operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril for $1 million. The remainder was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”
[Note the discrepancy between emerging public mentions of suspected Libyan involvement and continued private references to a PFLP-GC contract bombing on behalf of Iran. Also note that the existence of this document has never been confirmed, although sources reporting on it were reputable]
It was October 29 1989 when Malta was suddenly mentioned as salient to the case. A police leak to the Sunday Times newspaper described a suitcase travelling unaccompanied from Malta to Frankfurt, containing clothes bought from a local shop, to be loaded onto the later 'feeder flight' to Heathrow. This suitcase was said to contain the PA 103 bomb.
The newspaper continued to maintain that western intelligence believed that Jibril's PFLP-GC were behind the plot, which had been commissioned by Iran. In an ongoing series of articles the Sunday Times also introduced some new names; a Palestinian called Abu Talb and a Libyan explosives expert known as 'The Professor'. Talb was said to have organised another PFLP-GC cell in Malta and organised for a bomb to be placed on a flight to Frankfurt.
The suspects were now reported to be Dalkamoni, Khreesat, Talb and 'The Professor'. Talb was already in a Swedish prison on unrelated terror charges.
Talb was said to have been identified by a shopkeeper as the purchaser of clothes, in Sliema, Malta, which had been in the suitcase with the Lockerbie bomb. The shopkeeper later changed his mind about this. This information was also reportedly given during a closed court session in Sweden, preparing for Talb's extradition to face Lockerbie charges. In a further article, the Sunday Times revealed that 'The Professor' was in fact a Palestinian called Mobdi Goben.
On November 30 1989 the US ABC-TV ‘Prime Time Live “Flight 103” programme was the first to specifically mention suspected involvement of Libyan intelligence.
April 19 1990 saw British Foreign Minister William Waldegrave tell Parliament of 'Libyan involvement'.
On June 15 1990, at FBI HQ in Washington DC, Scottish Det Chief Insp William Williamson, Alan Feraday and Thomas Thurman decided that PT/35 (b) closely matched the circuit board of an MST-13 timer device. The MST-13 was designed, built and supplied by a Swiss company, called Mebo, primarily to Libyan intelligence (and also to the East German Stasi).
[Mebo co-founder Edwin Bollier, one of the most controversial characters in the story, told the subsequent trial that the PT/35 (b) fragment of circuit board was similar to that found in a Mebo MST-13 but appeared to have been fabricated. At one point his company lawyer attempted to bring a criminal complaint against the UK Crown on this basis. Later another Mebo employee signed an affidavit confessing to having lied about the authenticity of PT/35 (b) at the trial and that he'd stolen a prototype MST-13 from his employer and handed it to a Lockerbie investigator in 1989. The implication here is that this may be how the Libya connection was established with ‘hard forensics’ that could be introduced into the evidence chain; a device supplied almost exclusively to Libya and found at Lockerbie]
On August 2 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Among the international coalition that was assembled to oppose the annexation of Kuwait were the two countries publicly touted as most closely connected with the bombing of Pan Am 103; Syria (home to the PFLP-GC) and Iran.
This seems to be the event around which many commentators coalesce in their suspicions of geopolitical interests shaping the public narrative on the Lockerbie bombing.
All the while, relatives had been pressing for a public enquiry, but British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resisted. All they got was a Fatal Accident Inquiry (the Scottish equivalent of an inquest), beginning on October 1 1990.
Nonetheless, rather than simply identifying exactly how everyone had died this inquiry spawned one of the strangest oddities of the whole saga; the reputational smearing of a police surgeon who volunteered his services on the night of the bombing. Accompanied by police officers he tagged bodies on the ground. Later he noticed that one less body than he had tagged was in the official record and raised his concerns. He eventually received an apology for calling his professionalism and motives into question. This is an entire story of its own, recounted by the British investigative journalist Paul Foot for Private Eye magazine and others. A flavour of some of these strands is offered by Foot in this article reviewing this book.
13 November 1991: US and British investigators indicted Libyans Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah on 270 counts of murder and other charges. Warrants for their arrest were announced the following day.
The men were said to be Libyan intelligence agents.
Following much wheeler-dealing with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, around the lifting of sanctions in return for producing the two suspects, on April 5 1999 the men were flown to the Hague and charged.
The trial began on May 3 2000, in a special Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.
One of the most (among many) noteworthy moments in the trial was the exposure of America’s star witness as a fantasist and liar who appeared to be inventing his story, implicating Megrahi, just to please his CIA handlers.
On January 31 2001 Megrahi was found guilty of murder and Fhimah not guilty.
The trial was described by a UN observer, Dr. Hans Köchler ...
"A spectacular miscarriage of justice"
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Here the timeline for this digest ends.
The story continued, through reviews, appeals, the release of Megrahi on compassionate grounds owing to terminal prostate cancer and so on. But all of this sets the scene for the upcoming trial of Abu Agila Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi.
That was supposed to have begun in May, this year, but is proving complicated for both prosecution and defence.
And, of course, the hares are still running because enough seemingly good faith people continue to believe that Libya was framed for political reasons and that the case against Megrahi was implausible.
It didn't help that the only person who could link Megrahi to the shirt in which PT35 (b) was lodged changed his mind over time about the height, build and age of his customer until his memory matched the suspect - and was then paid $2 million by the US. Worse, that this reward money was not revealed until after the trial.
Nor does it help that Megrahi's name only came into the frame via a Libyan CIA asset they had previously given up on, due to a history of wildly dishonest claims and unreliable tips. For example, he said he was related to royalty and had worked as a senior official in Libyan intelligence when he had really been a garage mechanic servicing their cars.
It doesn’t instil confidence in the legal process that the prosecution fiercely resisted defence access to CIA cables revealing that his handlers apparently blackmailed him into naming the accused. In a remarkable sequence of interviews it turned out that they had grown so tired of their dishonest and useless informant - Abdul Majid Giaka - that they told him his monthly payments would be cut off unless he could link Libyan intelligence with Lockerbie. This was a connection that he had never suggested in months of contact since the bombing. Until, suddenly, he did. Naming Megrahi and Lamin Fhima, who he knew through his work.
"The very fact that the prosecution should rely on a man who had been so remorselessly bribed to invent a story was a measure of the depths to which the Crown lawyers were prepared to sink" - investigative journalist Paul Foot in Private Eye magazine
It seems off that the Germans had interrogated a high-ranking Iranian secret service operative who had defected, been granted asylum and described in detail how - and by whom - the bomb had been smuggled onto Pan Am Flight 103. But that this was never mentioned at trial.
Almost everything about this case seems off.
Everything above is only a fraction of a convoluted story that seems to stand today only by virtue of exhausting most people who try to follow the ins and outs.
Prof. Robert Black wrote in 2007:
"It is surely time for all involved in the Scottish criminal justice system to put away childish things. We are all of us, judges included, surely too old to believe any longer in fairytales. Fairytales can be convenient and comforting and can bolster our self esteem. But, as in the case of the belief that the Crown can uniformly be relied upon always to act selflessly in the public interest, they can be dangerous and, if acted upon, work terrible injustice."
Like any good conspiracy this one refuses to be accounted for by just one incentive for the alleged shadowy operators. In the case of Lockerbie they range from covering up a CIA or DEA drug-running operation into Lebanon at one end, all the way down to there possibly being no bomb of the type described and that the whole show was put on to hide another cause of the catastrophe. Before you laugh, that's the suggestion of a man who in 2015 won a prize for discoveries in nuclear physics and continues to blog about Lockerbie. Plus, of course, the usual gamut of strategic incentives for diverting attention from Iran and Syria to Libya.
But it's fascinating stuff and will return to the headlines in due course when Masud's trial begins. Which is why I spent several days trawling through all of this, in an attempt to set the scene adequately.
Only last week it was revealed that DNA traces have now been retrieved from the original suitcase and some of its contents. Prosecutors are hoping to link them to Masud and Megrahi.
And in true Lockerbie fashion, the author of this book (which I read long ago) points out below the piece that a photograph of PT35 (b) resting on someone's naked fingertip for a photograph during the original investigation doesn't bode well for trusting DNA evidence at this point.
The more you learn, the harder it is not to entertain conspiratorial notions. When I learned of the speed at which the original trial judges had arrived at their guilty verdict I thought … well, it would have been a shame if anything happened to them or their loved ones in the event of an acquittal.
But in the end this is about justice for those people who were lost; 270 in Lockerbie and 290 over the Strait of Hormuz, 37 years ago.
As for the innocent lives lost on Flight 655, perhaps the last word should go to George H. W. Bush, who said in August 1988:
“I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”
Recommended further reading for Lockerbie beginners
Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice (PDF - Private Eye - UK - clear distillation of the case in one place)
The full transcript of Giaka's cross-examination is astonishing
A round-up of doubts that Megrahi was justly convicted, assembled by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, as revealed in the media
An academic paper discussing the eyewitness identification of Megrahi by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci (PDF)
Questions already whirling around next year’s trial of Masud
Or …
Two years later Captain Will C. Rogers III was awarded the Legion of Merit decoration "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer ... from April 1987 to May 1989." America expressed deep regret and, 8 years later, gave $131.8 million in compensation to the Iranian government, $61.8 million intended for the families of the victims. This was on a grace or goodwill basis, with no admission of legal liability. There was no apology.
Finnish authorities are reported to have been sceptical, as similar warnings had been received previously and they believed that it was a caller who often made unsubstantiated claims about bomb threats.
This call was revealed on January 10 1990 in a Washington Post story, followed up by other media accounts. Some have the president calling Thatcher to tell her to "cool it" on the Iran angle, but the original story has her calling him. This seems to have been the first moment when behind-the-scenes political management of the Lockerbie bombing emerged into the public domain. Channon was subsequently sacked from the Cabinet.
There is a blog that was maintained between April 2025 and June 2017 dedicated to minutiae around PT/35(b) at https://pt35b.wordpress.com/. The person behind it is Dr Ludwig De Braeckeleer, a Belgian nuclear physicist. His conclusion is that PT/35(b) was a 'forgery' planted to implicate Libya.
Interesting. I am certainly old enough to remember the disaster vividly. I watched the BBC's recent dramatisation of the terrible event, its aftermath and the investigation. It was presented as a coherent story with expert forensics investigators from the UK and the US cooperating to solve the puzzle step by step. Key witnesses like Bollier were introduced and then their role in unravelling the mystery became clearer with each episode. I knew that some of the facts are disputed, some of the links tenuous, but as you say even the Wiki page is confusing. As a TV programme it was interesting and moving and clearly it sought to give due respect to and remembrance of the victims, the affected familes, the locals and the investigators. It probably also had to tell one story. So I will be following this series with interest.