Call for answers on US spy claims

Lockerbie campaigners say dead terrorist linked to bombing may have been in pay of Americans

By Joe Quinn

Published:

Lockerbie campaigners have urged the UK and Scottish governments to press Washington over claims that a now-dead terrorist leader was a US spy.

Former Labour MP Tam Dalyell and Edinburgh law professor Robert Black said yesterday the claims should also be investigated by prosecution authorities in Scotland.

The claims that Abu Nidal was working for the US would explain some of the mysteries surrounding the Lockerbie outrage, they said.

Nidal died in 2002 in Baghdad and Mr Dalyell has long argued that he could have had a co-ordinating role in the Lockerbie bombing.

Former Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi is serving life with a minimum of 27 years for bombing Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988, with the loss of 270 lives.

But campaigners have argued that he is innocent and that Nidal’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command was behind the bombing.

Their call came after a London-based newspaper said Iraqi secret police who interrogated Nidal in 2002 believed he had been colluding with US and Kuwaiti intelligence services.

Intelligence reports, said to have been drawn up for Saddam Hussein’s security services, said Kuwaitis had asked Nidal to find out if al Qaida was present in Iraq.

The reports referred to Nidal’s “collusion with both the American and Kuwaiti intelligence apparatuses in co-ordination with Egyptian intelligence”.

Mr Dalyell and Prof Black – who, with Lockerbie relative Dr Jim Swire, persuaded the Libyan government to hand over Megrahi for trial – said they were “deeply and personally concerned” about the Libyan, who is suffering from cancer.

“For some years we have contended that neither Mr Megrahi nor his country had anything to do with the crime which was Lockerbie,” they said.

The campaigners have argued that the most likely explanation was that Lockerbie was a revenge attack for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner by the warship USS Vincennes in 1988.

“We have suggested that the action might have been co-ordinated by Abu Nidal,” Mr Dalyell and Prof Black said in a statement yesterday.

“We have thought it possible that elements in Washington may have ‘acquiesced’ in ‘allowing’ one airliner, tit for tat, to be destroyed.

“But it never occurred to us that Abu Nidal could have the sustained relationship with elements in Washington, described in detail by (journalist) Robert Fisk.

“We call on the Foreign Office, parliament, the Crown Office and the Scottish Parliament to seek a comment from Washington

A US link with Abu Nidal would answer several “unexplained mysteries” such as why a notice went up at the US Embassy in Moscow warning diplomats not to travel on Pan Am flights and why senior South African figures were “hauled off” the plane before its final flight.

If the US public had known of a link with Abu Nidal, and had known that the US government knew enough to pull VIPs of the plane and let home-going students take their place, there would have been “fury” at a time of transition between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush sen, they said.