A week after the crash, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) announced that it had found traces of high explosives, indicating that Flight 103 had been brought down by a bomb. After examining the wreckage of the aircraft at a hangar in Longtown, Cumbria, the air accident investigators began the mammoth task of partially reconstructing the fuselage. They found that at the left side of the forward cargo hold, directly under the aircraft’s navigation and communications system, there was a small area less than 3 ft
2
(0.26 m
2
) that had been completely shattered. The metal there was sooted and pitted, and the skin of the fuselage had petalled out in a starburst, a clear sign of an explosion.
The cargo hold had carried baggage containers made of aluminium or fibreglass and filled with suitcases. Most of these baggage containers showed damage consistent with falling from 31,000 ft (9,400 m). However, two of them showed other damage likely to have been caused by a bomb. These were the aluminium container AVE 4041 PA and the fibreglass container AVN 7511 PA. They were found at the southern end of the wreckage trail, indicating that they had fallen from the plane early on in the break-up.
From the loading plan, investigators saw that AVE 4041 PA had been situated slightly above the starburst-patterned hole in the fuselage and inboard of it, with AVN 7511 PA right next to it. The containers were then reconstruction on wooden frames. Around 85 per cent of AVE 4041 PA had been recovered. It showed blacking, pitting and other damage consistent with a blast. A buckled section of the skin was found to contain the remnants of a Toshiba radio-cassette player.
Although the floor of the container was damaged, it showed no blackening or pitting. From the distribution of sooting and pitting elsewhere, investigators deduced that the suitcase containing the bomb had been near the floor, but had been on top of another case. From the damage to AVN 7511 PA, it was possible to calculate that the explosion had occurred some 13 in. (330 mm) from the floor of AVE 4041 PA, 8 in. (200 mm) from the left side of the container and about 25 in. (640 mm) from the skin of the fuselage. It was also concluded that the blast damage to the forward face of container AVN 7511 PA was not caused by a second bomb, but occurred as a direct result of hot gases and blast fragments escaping from the aft face of container AVE 4041 PA. No other containers exhibited blast damage and there was no evidence to suggest that more than one bomb had exploded on Flight 103.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration began a series of tests detonating plastic explosives placed into a Toshiba radio-cassette player inside a suitcase packed with clothes that was, itself, in a baggage container. These confirmed the AAIB’s theory about the positioning of the bomb. The FBI and a forensic team from Britain’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency analysed the carbon deposits left on the two containers and concluded that the bomb contained between 12 and 16 oz (340 and 450 g) of plastic explosive. Analysis of traces from the metal strips of AVE 4041 PA found pentaerythritol tetranitrate and cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, components of Semtex-H, a high-performance plastic explosive manufactured in the Czech Republic. It was later revealed that a large consignment of Semtex had recently been supplied to the Libyan government by a company called Omnipol.
During the fingertip searches around Lockerbie, fifty-six fragments of a suitcase were found that showed extensive, close-range blast damage. With the help of luggage manufacturers, it was determined that the fragments had been part of a brown, hard-shell, Samsonite suitcase of the 26 in. (660 mm) Silhouette 4000 range. The damage indicated that the bomb had gone off inside it. A further twenty-four items of luggage were found to have been within a very close range of the suitcase when it exploded.
Clothing was found containing more fragments from the Toshiba radio-cassette player. These included a white Abanderadobrand T-shirt, striped pyjamas, a herringbone jacket and brown herringbone trousers. Fragments of the owner’s manual of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 BomBeat radio-cassette player were also found in two different Slalom brand shirts, a Babygro and a pair of tartan checked trousers, along with fragments thought to come from an RT-SF 16 itself. During October 1988, 20,000 black Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio-cassettes were shipped to Libya. In fact, of the total worldwide sales of that model, 76 per cent were sold to General Electric Company of Libya whose chairman was Said Rashid. He was also head of the Operations Administration of Libya’s External Security Organization.
A singed page from the instruction manual for the Toshiba radio-cassette player had been found in a field 60 miles (100 km) from Lockerbie by Gwendoline Horton the day after the crash. However, at the trial, Mrs Horton could not positively identify the official exhibit, as the page she had found had been intact, while the exhibit was in pieces. The police said the paper was damaged during a battery of forensic tests.
Material from the white T-shirt and the tartan trousers, and fragments of a black umbrella, carried blue and white fibres matching those from the Babygro. The Babygro itself came from Primark. Two fragments of the label were found. Together they read: “Made in Malta”. The trousers also carried a label. It identified them as Yorkie-brand, size thirty-four. The Yorkie Clothing company manufactures in Ireland and Malta.
In August 1989, British police officers visited Malta in an attempt to trace the source of these items. After a visit to Yorkie Clothing, they went to a shop called Mary’s House, run by the Gauci family in Sliema. Tony Gauci recalled a particular sale about a fortnight before Christmas 1988, although he could not remember the exact date. His recollection was that the Christmas lights were just being put up. It was midweek, possibly a Wednesday. At about 6.30 in the evening, a man who Gauci recognized as a Libyan came into the shop. Their conversation took place in a mixture of Arabic, English and Maltese. Many Libyans visit his shop, and Gauci said he could tell the difference between a Libyan and a Tunisian or an Egyptian.
The customer bought an assortment of clothing, though the nature of what he was buying did not seem to be of any importance. Among the items that Gauci remembered him buying were two pairs of Yorkie trousers, two pairs of striped pyjamas of the same brand as the fragment found, a tweed jacket, a blue Babygro, two Slalom shirts with collar size sixteen, two cardigans, one brown and one blue, and an umbrella. The order number seen on the fragment of one of the pairs of Yorkie trousers was 1705, and the delivery note for this order showed that it was delivered to Gauci’s store on 18 November 1988.
The police then obtained, either from Gauci or from the manufacturers, samples of all of these items, so that forensic scientists could compare them with the fragments. They matched.
Towards the end of 1989, the
Sunday Times
reported that the police were closing in on the Lockerbie suspects, saying categorically that the bombing had been carried out by the German PFLP-GC cell led by Dalkamoni under orders from Ahmed Jibril with a bomb made by Khreesat. It was also revealed that a member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was awaiting trial for other terrorist offences in Sweden, had visited Malta. Gauci identified Abu Talb as the man who had brought the clothes from him in Mary’s House. However, in court, he identified the defendant Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who later went on trial for the Lockerbie bombing along with his one-time business partner, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.
It was thought that the bomb had been on a flight in Malta. It was then flown to Frankfurt were it joined the luggage of Flight 103 being carried to London. In that case, a simple barometric trigger could not have been used to initiate the explosion, otherwise it would have gone off in the first leg of the flight. There must have been another device that overrode it.
The mystery was solved by a tiny fragment of debris found in January 1989 by two policemen on the outer reaches of the search area. It was initially labelled as “cloth (charred)” and later “debris”. On 12 May 1989, Thomas Hayes, a forensic scientist at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, got round to examining it. The material came from the neckband of a Slalom-brand shirt. In it there were fragments of the Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its owner’s manual. But he also testified that he found a fragment of a green circuit board no bigger than a fingernail.
But there is a mystery surrounding this piece of circuit board. Hayes did not make a drawing of the fragment and where it was positioned when he found it, though this was his usual practice. Nor was a photograph taken, which was standard procedure. A month later he was assigning to other evidence lower identification numbers than the PT/35(b) he gave to the circuit-board fragment. The details of the fragment appeared on page fifty-one of his notes. But the pages originally numbered fifty-one to fifty-five were renumbered fifty-two to fifty-six. He offered no explanation of the repagination.
He had not tested the circuit board for explosive residue, claiming that it was too small, though he admitted that smaller samples had been tested in other cases. His expertise would soon come into question. He had been involved in a case against the Maguire Seven, who were convicted in 1976 for supplying explosives used by the Irish Republican Army in a number of pub bombings on the forensic evidence that they had handled nitroglycerine. The convictions were eventually quashed in 1991, but not before one of the convicted, Giuseppe Conlon, had died in prison.
On 15 September 1989, Hayes’s colleague Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid picture of the fragment to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, with a note saying: “Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time” – even though the fragment had been found back in May. He continued: “I feel this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed on the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.” If it was so important, why wasn’t it looked at four months earlier?
Feraday had also been involved in three early cases where convictions secured on his forensic evidence were overturned. He had no relevant academic qualifications other than a higher national certificate in physics and electronics that was thirty years old. He has subsequently been banned from appearing as an expert witness.
Thomas Thurman of the FBI forensics laboratory identified the fragment as coming from a timer similar to the one seized from a Libyan intelligence agent, Mohammad al-Marzouk, who had been arrested in Dakar airport ten months before Flight 103. He was also carrying 9.5 lbs (4.3 kg) of Semtex, several packets of TNT and ten detonators. The timer was an MST-13 made by a Swiss company called Mebo. Thurman said on TV: “I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.”
In 1997, the US Inspector General Michael Bromwich issued a damning report on Thurman’s investigations of terrorist cases after Dr Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who had worked alongside Thurman for five years, filed a complaint. He was barred from the FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. It appears that he, too, had no scientific qualifications and according to a former colleague he had been “circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence”. Inspector General Bromwich found that in a number of cases, other than Lockerbie, Thurman rewrote lab reports, making them more favourable to the prosecution. He was not present at the trial of al-Megrahi. Nor did he appear in court in Paris in 1999 when six Libyans were convicted in absentia for the bombing of UTA Flight 772, which he also investigated. Again, among thousands of pieces of debris, a fragment of a circuit board was found. Again, Thurman identified the manufacturer as Mebo.
Mebo was short for Meister & Bollier, an electronics firm in Zürich. According to co-owner Edwin Bollier, he had sold the MST-13 timers exclusively to Libya at the request of Ezzadin Hinshin, the director of the Central Security Organization of the Libyan External Security Organisation (ESO), and Said Rashid, head of the Operations Administration of the ESO. When Bollier delivered the first batch, he said he met Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who he thought was a major in the Libyan Army and a relative of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader. After that meeting, Bollier said that al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah had set up a travel business together in the Mebo offices in Zürich. Fhimah later went on to become the station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta for Libyan Arab Airlines, where al-Megrahi was head of security.
When al-Megrahi and Fhimah came to court, Bollier was described by al-Megrahi’s barrister as an “illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match”. Even before the case came to trial it was discovered that the timer had been sold elsewhere. Some were delivered to the East German secret police, the Stasi, who supplied terrorist groups. The judge said that Bollier’s testimony was “inconsistent” and “self-contradictory”.
As part of the investigation, the police were tracing every piece of luggage found at the crime scene through the baggage-handling system. Records from Frankfurt showed that an unaccompanied bag had been routed from Air Malta Flight KM 180 out of Luqa Airport to Frankfurt, where it had been loaded on to Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London. A properly marked Air Malta baggage tag would have routed the suitcase through the so-called interline system from Malta to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to London, and London to New York.
Detectives discovered that the baggage for Air Malta Flight KM 180 was processed at the same time as the bags for Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 147 to Tripoli. They later discovered that al-Megrahi had been a passenger on this flight, having arrived in Malta two days earlier on a false passport. As he did not take the stand during his trial, his explanation for his presence in Malta was never heard.