Why did gaddafi lockerbie

Gaddafi and his regime have been directly tied to international terrorism on many occasions over four decades. Abdullah Senussi, still his trusted enforcer, was convicted in absentia in France in for his role in the bombing of a UTA passenger plane over Niger which killed people.

Senussi is said to have recruited Megrahi when he was head of Libya's external security organisation. That led to a year breach in relations with the UK. The key to their resumption was Gaddafi's surrender of his weapons of mass destruction programme after the US-led invasion of Iraq in , paving the way for a visit by Tony Blair and lucrative trade, investment and energy opportunities for UK business.

There was no way of independently confirming Abdel-Jalil's claim. Libya's former justice minister has told a Swedish newspaper that Colonel Gaddafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil told Expressen he had proof the Libyan leader was behind the bombing of Pan AM flight , which killed people in Following the disclosure the Crown Office said it would "pursue such lines of inquiry that become available". Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was jailed in for the attack.

However, the Libyan was released on compassionate grounds in August by the Scottish government after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Dumfries and Galloway Police are reportedly monitoring events in Libya in the hope of new leads in the case. Expressen quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil as telling their correspondent in Libya: "I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie".

Abdel-Jalil stepped down as justice minister in protest of the violence used during against anti-government demonstrations. Lockerbie claimed the lives of people from 21 different nations, including Americans. Dr Swire lobbied constantly, appealing to the United Nations, exposing the continuing gaps in airport security by smuggling a case of marzipan , which has the same density and appearance as Semtex, onto a transatlantic flight.

It still took nearly 12 years before the trial of two Libyan suspects began on May 3 , at a specially convened tribunal, operating under Scottish law and heard by three Scottish judges without a jury, at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands.

The investigation that put Megrahi and alleged accomplice Lamin Khalifa Fhimah in the frame had involved interviewing 15, people and examining , pieces of evidence. By the time the judges acquitted Fhimah and found Megrahi guilty on 31 January , Dr Swire was convinced that the only man convicted was innocent. You're not letting me tell the truth. I know who did it. I know how it was done. Lord Sutherland, one of the judges coolly informed him: "If you wish to make a point you may do so elsewhere, but I'm afraid you may not do so in this court.

The suspicion was growing that, either by accident or cover-up, Megrahi had become the innocent fall guy who got a life sentence for mass murder. A fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage was identified by prosecutors as being part of a timer made by contractor Thuring and sold by Swiss company Mebo to the Libyan armed forces. But sceptics said independent analysis of the timer fragment showed it had a pure tin coating, whereas Thuring devices were covered in a tin-lead alloy.

Dr Swire came to disbelieve the official story of a bomb going from Malta to Frankfurt to London, thinking instead that the bomb had been smuggled through Heathrow and only ever travelled on one aeroplane: Pan Am The US said it had misidentified the civilian airliner as a fighter jet. Iran had promised to avenge the deaths. Just weeks before the Lockerbie blast, four devices strikingly similar to the one that would soon be utilized to such devastating effect on Flight had been found in the possession of PFLP-GC members arrested in a Frankfurt suburb.

Its bombs, like those the PFLP-GC had used in the past, and like the Lockerbie device, were detonated by a barometric pressure device and timer, activated when a plane reaches a certain altitude.

The Lockerbie investigators were initially following these leads; then they shifted their focus to Libya. Almost seven years ago, a colleague of mine at The Times of Israel noticed that a man named Marwan Khreesat, a Jordanian national, maintained an Arabic-language Facebook page in which he had taken to posting pictures of the Lockerbie bombing.

He was one of those who was arrested by the German authorities in Frankfurt, only to be inexplicably released soon afterward. Although the bomb exploded, the pilot was able to make an emergency landing.

In several Facebook posts relating to Lockerbie, Khreesat recalled his arrest two months before the bombing. He posted pictures of the destroyed cockpit of the after the explosion, the painstakingly reconstructed parts of the plane wreckage, and a radio-cassette recorder like the one that held the bomb.