Reopening the Lockerbie Case is a Blood-Soaked Gamble

The Justice Department wants to close the books on a decades-old mass murder mystery which left 270 dead amid many unanswered questions

Something remarkable happened yesterday in the annals of counterterrorism. One of the deadliest terrorist attacks in history saw a new chapter open with the appearance in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, of the accused “third man” behind the infamous Lockerbie bombing. The Justice Department hopes that this will be the final chapter too, in a case which has witnessed numerous twists, turns, and controversies over more than three decades.

Next week marks the thirty-fourth anniversary of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on the night of December 21, 1988, a catastrophe which killed all 243 passengers and 16 crew who were embarked on Clipper Maid of the Seas. After the doomed jetliner exploded while flying 31,000 feet over Scotland’s Southern Uplands, pieces of the Boeing 747 fell in flames on the town of Lockerbie, killing 11 more innocents. One hundred and ninety of the dead were Americans, including 35 Syracuse University students who were returning home for Christmas after a semester abroad in Europe.

It didn’t take long for British investigators to determine that a bomb concealed in luggage brought down the plane, but that was the last major point of agreement in the investigation. The cause of the catastrophe was undoubtedly a bomb, specifically less than a pound of plastic explosive, Semtex from Czechoslovakia, packed in a Samsonite suitcase stowed in the plane’s forward left luggage container. The improvised explosive device was hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette player and was detonated by a barometric sensor designed to detect altitude. But whose?

Initial investigations soon pointed a finger at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, a radical Arab terrorist group which perpetrated a string of airline bombings, including several that closely resembled the IED which took down Pan Am 103. In Western intelligence circles, the PFLP-GC was considered an appendage of Syria’s intelligence service, indeed its boss, Ahmed Jibril, was a former Syrian army officer, so the working assumption became that the Lockerbie disaster was perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists taking orders from Damascus but commissioned by Tehran.

Multiple Western intelligence agencies picked up chatter in the fall of 1988 that revolutionary Iran wanted payback for the U.S. Navy’s downing of Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf on July 3 of that year, a terrible accident which claimed the lives all 290 passengers and crew on the doomed Airbus A300 (254 of the victims were Iranian). Tehran had the means, motive, and opportunity to avenge that crime – was Lockerbie the outcome? The eerie symmetry of those two tragedies could not be denied. The fact that Syrian and Iranian intelligence regularly collaborated on operations against the West, sometimes via Palestinian proxies, added fuel to the speculative fire that Pan Am 103 was Tehran’s doing through familiar cut-outs.