103 Days After Flight 103
Massive probe hints at Iran ties to blast

- The rink was empty except for the boys' curling team practice. Their whoops echoed as they furiously broomed a path for a kettle-shaped stone down the ice to the target circle. "Well played," muttered Sandy Smith, the observer.
A curling fan, he has found a lifetime of joy at the rink. But there are moments when he closes his eyes and can envision 161 bodies, bagged and numbered, neatly arrayed on the ice.

When the "Maid of the Seas," a Pan American Airways 747 jetliner, rained in chunks and fragments on this sleepy market town 103 days ago, the rink filled the need for a cool, temporary resting place. "This was the morgue," said Smith with a sweeping hand. A plastic sheet was spread on the ice for safe footing. A team of pathologists took over storerooms for autopsies.

The rink has been washed with disinfectant, stripped and repainted. As in the rest of Lockerbie, most of the physical evidence of the crash is gone.

The 50-foot-deep crater caused by Flight 103, where four houses once stood, is leveled topsoil. Each morning a bunch of daffodils is placed in the center of the former crater, where seven local residents and 10 passengers disappeared Dec. 21. "Vaporized," Police Superintendent Angus Kennedy said.

A granite marker was erected in the town's cemetery last month as a memorial to the victims, and a Lockerbie volunteer group escorts grieving relatives who visit. The impact of New York-bound Pan Am 103 registered 3.4 on the Richter scale - the magnitude of a small earthquake - at the Eskdalemuir Meteorology Station 18 miles from the scene, where 270 men, women and children were killed.

The reverberations may continue for the town and for international relations, following one of the most massive criminal investigations in history, in which high-tech detective work has yielded detailed data about what destroyed the plane. A breakthrough in the investigation - and Scottish police believe they are on the verge of one - could produce yet another crisis between the United States and Iran.

Here is why: Shortly after the American warship Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iran airliner on July 4, 1988, in the Persian Gulf, orders were intercepted from pro-Iranian extremists to agents in Western Europe, urging them to attack American and western targets in revenge for the 290 deaths, U.S. intelligence officials said.

The terrorist attack orders were allegedly sent by the Islamic Jihad, a group that includes members of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards as well as Lebanese Shiite Moslems. The group is believed to be holding 10 U.S. hostages and to be responsible for the 1983 Beirut bombings that destroyed the U.S. Embassy and killed 241 U.S Marines and 58 French soldiers.

On Oct. 27, West German police arrested and later charged under terrorism statutes two key members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a former Syrian military officer.

The group, like the Islamic Jihad, is based in Baalbek, Lebanon, near Syria's border, and the groups often work together, according to American and Israeli intelligence officials. During a sweep coordinated with American and other intelligence agencies, the West Germans arrested in Neuss, near Dusseldorf, were Haj Hafsim Dalkamoni and Fattah Ghondafar. Dalkamoni was described as a paymaster for Jibril's group.

In their car parked near their flat in Neuss, police found a radio-cassette player containing 11 ounces of plastic explosive called Semtex, with a fuse that could be triggered by changes in barometric pressure such as those a plane undergoes as it gains altitude. On Nov. 15, West German officials called the CIA and British intelligence to a top-secret meeting in Wiesbaden.

"The message was that there were a number of these bombs in circulation," a Bonn government official said. It was this chain of circumstantial developments, known mainly to western counterterrorism forces, that made the Islamic Jihad and the PFLP-GC the prime suspects almost immediately after Pan Am 103 exploded.

Partly because Flight 103 was delayed for 30 minutes before takeoff from Heathrow Airport, a dazzling display of high-tech detective work now has an opportunity to build a link with the shadowy world of the terrorists. In the next few weeks, British police believe they will pinpoint the passenger who boarded a Pan Am flight in Frankfurt early Dec. 21 and checked a bag - later transferred to Pan Am Flight 103 in Heathrow - containing a radio-cassette player that held Semtex plastic explosive.

That is the upshot of one of the most massive criminal investigations in history.
A force of 11,000 men and women gathered more than 10,000 fragments from the rolling hillsides, dark forests, streams and lakes of Scotland. More than 80 percent of the plane along with 21 tons of luggage, mail and other cargo have been assembled in a Royal Air Force shed near Lockerbie.

Police computers eventually projected a two-pronged trail of debris stretching 40 miles to the North Sea on the Scottish east coast. In reassembling the wreckage, British aviation disaster investigators determined the bomb had been in the hold, just forward of the left wing.

The luggage container or igloo in that area of the cargo bay was blown to bits and spread over a 30-mile area. British Army explosive laboratories, using spectometry and chromology techniques, determined that the luggage igloo was destroyed by the Semtex. And it was the army lab that found a pattern of tiny pits and craters that was identified as part of a radio-cassette player that had been struck by Semtex explosive.

From another shard with telltale Semtex markings, police have identified a bomb-carrying suitcase, according to one investigator, "in some detail."

Despite optimism among British investigators, there is widespread doubt their investigation will produce a real breakthrough. West German officials have expressed strong doubts about a central British tenet - that the bag containing the bomb originated in Frankfurt. According to one official involved in the Frankfurt airport investigation, the luggage that wound up at Heathrow was subjected to a pressure box screening at Frankfurt.

The device simulates a plane at high altitudes and thus would trigger the bomb if it were like the PFLP-GC bomb recovered near Dusseldorf.

"Why didn't the bomb explode on the Frankfurt-to-London leg of the flight?" said the Frankfurt government official. At Heathrow, the luggage was transferred by hand and sat unattended before being loaded into the 747's igloo, he said.

Many experts on terrorism believe a British breakthrough would only lead to a "cut out" - either a dupe, given a radio-cassette as a gift, or a person without traceable ties to the actual plotters. There are even doubts among American officials who have suspected the carnage in Lockerbie was revenge by pro-Iranian terrorists.

"The arrests in West Germany in October would have disrupted any plan they had," a senior U.S. official said. But if the police in Lockerbie overcome the odds and point the way to Baalbek, it could lead to an American confrontation with Iran, according to a senior U.S. State Department official. "There are factions in the government in Tehran that really control what is done in Baalbek. It would be too much to ignore."

Before his inauguration, President George Bush promised the United States would "punish firmly, decisively those who did this - if you could ever find them." In Lockerbie, the police hope to do just that. "Just be a wee bit more patient," Kennedy said.