Ustica investigator: no Malta connection in Lockerbie explosion

Rosario Priore, speaking to Italian news agency AGI, claimed secret documents show that Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the bombing but released on pardon by the Scottish government last year, was not responsible for the terrorist attack that killed everyone on board the Pan-Am airliner.

Abdelbaset was stationed in Malta with the Libyan Arab Airlines as an agent of the Libyan secret service, and was convicted of having planted the bomb in a suitcase that left from Malta.

In comments to AGI, Priore – an expert on terrorism who also investigated the Aldo Moro kidnapping by the Red Brigades – insisted on the role played by the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisation Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC) led at the time by Ahmed Jibril.

“This lead emerged through investigations into Palestinian resistance cells involved in attacks on Italian territory… the PFLP had cells everywhere in Europe, especially in West Germany and enjoyed ties with the secret service in Syria and Iran,” Priore said.

The former investigator said similar bomb detonators like those discovered in the Lockerbie bomb were found in a cell located between Hanover and Frankfurt. Priore claims the same ‘baro switch’ used to detonate the bomb 30 minutes after an airliner reaches a certain level of atmospheric pressure, was the same used on the Pan Am flight, which detonated 38 minutes after take-off.

“Almost a perfect coincidence,” Priore observed, who added that the PFLP-GC held close ties with groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and their allies in Syria and Iran.

Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, was freed early on compassionate grounds from the life term he was serving at Greenock prison for the Lockerbie bombing, but he contends he has been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

He was convicted of the 1988 Pan Am flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland, in 2001 by a three-judge Scottish court specially convened in the Netherlands. His case was referred back to the Court of Criminal Appeal by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on 27 June 2007. But he abandoned his appeal against conviction and sentence, when he was freed on compassionate grounds.

The documents include the way in which identification evidence was obtained from a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, the key plank in the conviction of Megrahi. Gauci was instrumental in keeping up his version of events that Megrahi had purchased the clothes, in which the bomb was wrapped, from his shop in Sliema.