Terrorism Solving the Lockerbie Case

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

A charred piece of shirt, a shred of green plastic the size of a fingernail, the letters MEBO and a cryptic diary entry. Those were the clues that finally unlocked a three-year-old mystery: Who planted the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas in 1988, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 more on the ground? The answer writ small, according to indictments issued last week in Washington and Scotland, is two Libyan intelligence officials: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. They allegedly fabricated the bomb in Malta, packed it in a suitcase, and sent it on a circuitous route to the final blast.

The chance that either one can be spirited out of Libya and brought to trial in the U.S. seems remote. In any case, the real responsibility lies higher up: government officials on both sides of the Atlantic think the trail of blame leads straight into the office of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But how can he and his regime be punished?

President Bush promised to consult with other world leaders to map out a way. French President Francois Mitterrand hinted that this time Paris might join -- even though France only last month proposed that the European Community lift existing economic sanctions against Libya. An embarrassingly few days later, a French examining magistrate accused four other Libyans, including Gaddafi's brother-in-law Abdallah Senoussi, of bombing a French DC- 10 jet that exploded over Africa nine months after the Lockerbie tragedy (death toll: 171). French intelligence suspects that both bombings were planned at the same meeting in Tripoli.

Reprisals could include a break in airline links between Libya and the outside world or an embargo on purchases of Libyan oil. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater even hinted at military action. But that might give only another spin to a long-running cycle of violence. To avenge the bombing, allegedly by Libya, of a German disco that killed two American soldiers, U.S. warplanes struck Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. Speculation is that Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing in retaliation.

Suspicion in the Pan Am bombing initially fell on the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, supposedly prompted by Syria, Iran or both. Victims' relatives in both the U.S. and Britain last week voiced suspicion that Damascus was in fact involved but that its complicity has been overlooked as a reward for Syrian participation in the gulf war against Iraq and in the Arab-Israeli peace conference that started last month in Madrid. U.S. officials make a persuasive case, however, that Libya is solely responsible.

The first step in the investigation that cracked the case was to reconstruct the plane and its parts from hundreds of thousands of fragments scattered across 845 sq. mi. of Scottish meadows, woods, bogs and lakes. Forensic experts eventually determined after examining fragments, including a tiny piece of tan plastic traceable to a particular model of Toshiba radio, that the bomb consisted of 10 oz. to 14 oz. of plastic explosive concealed inside the radio, which was in turn wrapped in clothing and packed inside a piece of brown Samsonite luggage.

In late 1989, a Scottish investigator going through a bag of burned clothing found a fingernail-size shred of green plastic embedded in a piece of shirt. The fragment was shipped to Washington, where Tom Thurman, an FBI bomb expert, obtained from the CIA a bomb that had been captured unexploded from Libyan- supported terrorists in the African nation of Togo. The bit of plastic from Lockerbie perfectly matched part of the timing device from the Togo explosive. The letters MEBO had been imprinted and scratched out on the Togo bomb but were still decipherable. So the timer evidently had been made by Meister et Bollier, a Zurich firm also known as MEBO AG. Company executives disclosed that the timing device was one of 20 delivered to a Libyan official in 1985 and 1986.

Meanwhile the charred bit of shirt was traced to a small store called Mary's House in Malta; employees who were questioned indicated it had been bought by Abdel Basset. Scouring Malta, investigators also found a diary kept by Fhimah, who had been a station manager there for Libyan Arab Airlines, with a revelatory entry: "Abdel Basset is coming from Zurich . . . Take taggs ((sic)) from Air Malta." The apparent meaning: Fhimah used his access to airport facilities to steal Air Malta baggage tags. The end of the story, as spelled out in the indictments: sometime between 8:15 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, Fhimah and Bassett tagged the bag containing the bomb and placed it on Air Malta Flight KM-190 to Frankfurt. There it was transferred to a Pan Am flight to London, where it was reloaded onto Flight 103 for New York -- passing over Lockerbie.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, Farah Nayeri/Paris and Elaine Shannon/Washington