The real Lockerbie bomber is living in Washington DC under US government protection, a new book has sensationally claimed.
The Palestinian terrorist – code-named Abu Elias – allegedly planted the explosives on Pan Am flight 103 under the orders of the Iranian government.
Author Douglas Boyd claims the man is now working at a school in the US capital under the name Basel Bushnaq.
“After years investigating the Lockerbie disaster and its background, I have found that little of the evidence against him can be taken at face value. Instead, a very different story has emerged from the morass of lies, one that should have been apparent from the very start.
It is a story of incompetence, vengeance, political expediency and then a cover-up orchestrated from the very highest levels in London and in Washington – where the real bomber is said to live today, under the cover of an American witness protection scheme.
In the days and months after the crash, thousands of police, military personnel and specialised investigators from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch scoured southern Scotland, finding debris over an area of 1,500 square miles. Investigators from the US Federal Aviation Authority and the FBI took part.
Representatives of the CIA were present for reasons not divulged. Charred material said to have been found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie was sent for analysis to Fort Halstead in Kent, the Ministry of Defence research establishment, where senior scientific officer Thomas Hayes identified bits of black plastic, metal and wire mesh as parts of a Toshiba radio-cassette player.
It had contained a bomb and a small piece of circuit board that Hayes believed to be the remnants of a timer. After three years of the joint British/US investigation, this and other evidence pointed in one clear direction: an obscure terrorist group called the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).
Sleeper cells from the organisation had been arrested in a series of raids in Germany a few weeks before Lockerbie, in which bombs hidden in Toshiba radio-cassette players had been seized alongside a fearsome arsenal of explosives, firearms and ammunition.”
Years later, of course, the world would be persuaded to accept a very different story. But in September 1989, the evidence of Iranian guilt seemed so clear that the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a public statement saying: ‘The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC.’
“Indeed the fate of the passengers and crew of Flight 103 was sealed not in Libya but five months earlier in Tehran after the shooting down of an Iran Air Airbus A300 by the American warship USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988.”
The Vincennes, sailing illegally in Iranian waters, inexplicably mistook the passenger jet for a hostile fighter, despite the fact it was climbing in Iranian airspace and its transponder clearly identified it as a civilian aircraft. All 290 people on board were killed.
According to a former Iranian intelligence officer, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini responded by ordering a ‘qisas’ – a like-for-like punishment under Sharia law – that required the destruction of an American aircraft in revenge.
The Mail / The Sun
