On December 21st, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded mid-air over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 270 aboard the 747 were lost, and 11 residents of Lockerbie itself were killed when a wing section of the aircraft, traveling at some 500 miles per hour, hit 13 Sherwood Crescent and exploded.

The man convicted of the bombing was a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who was also the head of security for Libya Arab Airlines. He was sentenced to life in prison in Scotland for his role in the bombing on the 31st of January, 2001. Megrahi appealed the decision, which was refused on March 20th of 2002. He has, since his arrest, continually professed his innocence.

Having read that, most, including myself at one time, would view Megrahi’s assertion of innocence as little more than laughable. After all, not only was the bombing investigated thoroughly by British authorities, but by the FBI as well. The conclusion reached, of course, was that the government of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi was exacting revenge for the bombing of Tripoli in 1986. It should also not be overlooked that four of the passengers aboard Flight 103 were US intelligence officers…

- Matthew Gannon - CIA Deputy Station Chief, Beirut, Lebanon
- Major Chuck McKee – DIA, Beirut, Lebanon
- Ronald Lariviere – CIA Security Officer, U.S. Embassy, Beirut, Lebanon
- Daniel O’Connor – CIA Security Officer, U.S. Embassy, Nicosia, Cyprus

The deaths of these four men lend credence to theories that the plane was targeted specifically to kill, at the very least, Gannon and McKee.

All of that said, an unexpected turn of events has occurred with regards to the Lockerbie bombing that may very well now result in Megrahi’s freedom.

According to yesterday’s Guardian…

“The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.

Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21 December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial ‘timer’ - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime.”

If you can believe it, Lumpert simply walked into a Zurich police station and requested to swear an affidavit. Now, that in itself might sound suspect, but Lumpert’s sudden desire to confess may have been prompted by the fact that the Edwin Bollier, who has spent two decades trying to clear the name of Mebo, his now bankrupt company that supposedly manufactured the timing switch used in the bombing, and who has admitted that his company did sell switches to the Libyan military, stumbled across something that casts serious doubts on the legitimacy of the case against Megrahi…

“Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. ‘Two years before Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.’

However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and asked to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and travelled to Dumfries to see the evidence.

‘I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.’

Back in Switzerland, Bollier’s company was in effect bankrupt, having faced a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.

In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. ‘I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them in Dumfries.’

Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.”