WASHINGTON -- More than seven years after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, experts still disagree about who is responsible for the bombing, and no one has been convicted of the crime, which claimed 270 lives.
Like the Trans World Airlines Boeing 747 that exploded Wednesday night off the southern coast of Long Island, the Pan Am Boeing 747 was less than an hour into its flight when it exploded in midair on December 21, 1988.
Within hours of the Pan Am crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, investigators strongly suspected that a bomb was responsible. The clues included the plane's sudden break-up at 31,000 feet, an Iranian group's claim of responsibility and the revelation that the U.S. government had been warned that a Pan Am flight on the Frankfurt-New York route would be bombed.
That warning came in the form of an anonymous telephone call on Dec. 5, 1988, to the U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, warning that a Pan Am flight on that route would be sabotaged within two weeks.
While the State Department had warned its employees of the threat, the warning was not circulated outside the government.
Later, careful combing of the wreckage and sophisticated forensics convinced investigators that the bomb had been made of Semtex, a plastic explosive, hidden inside a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder, placed inside a hard, brown suitcase and triggered by a barometric device set to go off at a certain altitude.
After a three-year investigation that touched 52 countries and 14,000 witnesses, officials in the United States and Scotland issued warrants for the arrest of two Libyan intelligence officers in November 1991.
The United States has offered a $4 million reward for information in the case and has imposed a trade ban with Libya and frozen all Libyan assets in America. The United Nations has also imposed sanctions on Libya intended to force Col. Moammar Gadhafi to surrender the men, who remain free.
But Jerrold M. Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University, said Thursday that among terrorism experts, "there are a number of us who do not see this as being solely Libyan, despite the focus in that direction."
Post said several factors, including the sophisticated nature of the explosives used in the bombing, lead him to believe that there may have been a multinational effort behind the act.
Post said Iran may have helped to pay for the operation, "perhaps seeking revenge" for the July 1988 shoot-down of an Iranian passenger plane by the USS Vincennes, which mistook the plane for a jet fighter.
It's also likely that the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command may have played a role in actually carrying out the attack, Post said.
Other experts and some victims' relatives take the case further, arguing that Libya is just a convenient target in a complicated part of the world. They say the United States and Britain knew Iran and Syria were behind the bombing, but chose to blame Libya in order to protect their strategic interests in the region.
Marina De Larrakotexea, whose sister, Maria Nieves, died on the flight, has criticized U.S. leaders for ignoring what she says are Iranian, Syrian and Palestinian connections to the bombing. The United States failed to pursue those connections, she says, because it was more interested in building a coalition against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and, later, in encouraging the Arab-Israeli peace process.
"To me and my family, this is nothing but a cover-up of the murder of my sister and hundreds of others," De Larrakotexea said at Arlington National Cemetery at the November 1995 dedication of a monument to the 259 people on board the plane and 11 others killed on the ground.
But terrorism expert Yonah Alexander, who also teaches at George Washington University in Washington, disagrees.
"There are many theories: the Syrians, the Iranians, the Palestinians, and clearly each one has a motivation," said Alexander. But he sits firmly in one camp: "It's very clear that those who executed this operation were the Libyans."
Alexander said evidence recovered at the scene and the subsequent global investigation show that "it's beyond any doubt that this was a Libyan operation. ... You talk about a smoking gun."
To get their smoking gun, Scottish investigators, British defense officials and FBI agents searched an area of 845 square miles around Lockerbie for about six months, collecting 16,000 bits of evidence.
By the spring of 1989 British forensics experts had used the recovered pieces to rebuild the plane's tail section, as well as the front passenger and baggage areas and a metal cargo container where the bomb had been placed.
That reassembly led them to conclude that the bomb had been placed in a luggage container that was filled with bags from Frankfurt, where the flight originated on its way to London and New York.
Investigators then traced a bit of a circuit board on what they said was the bomb's timing device to a Swiss company, whose owner said such equipment had been supplied to Libya.
Fragments of clothing from the crash site were traced to a clothing store in Malta. The shop's owner said he had sold clothes to a Libyan man, who investigators later found working in Malta for Libyan Arab Airlines.
That man and another, who also worked for the airlines, were indicted after a third Libyan, who defected to the United States, said he had seen one of the men place a suitcase on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to Pan Am Flight 103.
Copyright 1996....NANDO NET
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