Solving the Mystery of the Lockerbie Bombing

It just seems incredible that someone could trace a dress shirt to a merchant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2012/10/hes_behind_you...

Within months of the attack the famous Sunday Times "Insight" team had a series of scoops that revealed that the bombing on the Pan Am plane was a revenge attack by Iran for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in the Gulf in 1988. The articles laid it all out in enormous detail - how the Iranians had paid a Palestinian terrorist group based in Syria to plant the bomb in a Toshiba cassette player. And that this had been done with the help of the Syrian authorities.

The terrorists were named and "intelligence sources" were quoted with absolute certainty saying that they knew this is what had happened. There was no mention at all of Libya.

But then suddenly in December 1990 there was there was a complete switch.

"Intelligence sources" in America began to tell journalists that they had found evidence that showed that it was Libya who had masterminded the bombing.

Then in June 1991 the British and American governments formally announced that Libya had been behind the bombing. Here is the first TV report, it includes a conservative MP called Teddy Taylor who had been to see Colonel Gaddafi. He raises the question that was going to lie at the heart of this puzzle.

Isn't it a bit odd, he says, that at the very moment in 1990 when Syria became America's ally in the first Gulf War, that America suddenly stopped accusing it of Lockerbie? And at the very same moment America and Britain suddenly find evidence proving it was Libya.

Suddenly the media was deluged with reports that said that the Lockerbie bombing had been carried out by Libya.

And many of the investigative journalists who had previously said that it was definitely Iran also changed their tune as well. Even the journalists who had written the Sunday Times articles saying there was concrete proof it was Iran and Syria now said it was the mad dog of terrorism - Colonel Gaddafi. And what's more their "intelligence sources" were absolutely sure too.

But a few old-school investigative journalists held out against this sudden swerve. The main one was Paul Foot from Private Eye. He wrote a devastating pamphlet that tears part the whole American and British case against Libya.

Foot showed that much of it rested on the evidence of one extremely dubious witness called Mr Giaka who claimed to be high up in Libyan intelligence. In fact he was a mechanic in a garage who serviced the vehicles for Libyan intelligence - and he had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Americans.

Even his CIA handlers were very suspicious of him - and after two years of getting nothing from Mr Giaka they told him they would stop paying him unless he came up with some incriminating evidence for the US Department of Justice. The next day Giaka did just that - describing a samsonite suitcase that was loaded onto a plane in Malta by Libyan intelligence. Something he had forgotten to mention for two years.