An intelligence report carried out by two experienced private investigators says the real bomber behind the 1988 Lockerbie air disaster was Egyptian terrorist Mohammed Abu Talb, who was known to have travelled to Malta before the attack.
The investigation concludes that the attack was likely directed by Talb and that he planted the bomb on the plane at Heathrow by bribing an official there.
The claim comes from an investigation codenamed ‘Operation Bird’ led by Jessica de Grazia, a former New York chief assistant district attorney, and ex-Metropolitan police officer Philip Corbett for the defence team of the only man ever convicted of the massacre, Libyan national Abdelbaset Al Megrahi.
The evidence is emerging as the world prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of Europe’s worst terrorist attack on Saturday.
The investigation also claims some of the key evidence presented against Mr Megrahi was fabricated.
Talb had been arrested in May 1989 in connection with the Lockerbie bombing.
He came under suspicion after the Swedish secret service established he had been in Malta shortly before the attack, possibly to meet members of a Palestinian terrorist organisation based here.
Mr Megrahi was given a life sentence for the bombing in 2001. He was controversially released eight years later by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds as he had terminal cancer.
He died last year.
The document was submitted to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which in 2008 concluded that Mr Megrahi was likely to have suffered a miscarriage of justice.
The report itself was not given much weight, primarily because it was based on intelligence and anonymous sources close to a Palestinian terrorist organisation, the PFLP-GC.
However, the investigation’s findings tally with the original leads pursued by Scottish and American investigators that led to Malta. Only months after Pan Am 103 was downed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, investigators from the Scottish Police, the FBI and the CIA were in Malta working on the premise that the bomb had been planted by a terrorist cell of the PFLP-GC based in Malta.
The operative theory was that Iran had contracted the PFLP-GC – known to specialise in attacks on passenger planes – in retaliation for the downing of an Iran Air aircraft by the American destroyer USS Vincennes in July 1988, only five months before the Lockerbie tragedy.
Eventually, that theory was discarded and the blame shifted from Iran to Libya. Before that happened, however, investigators were in Malta following Talb’s movements in the months preceding the bombing.
The ‘Operation Bird’ report concludes that Talb, now 59, was the likely bomber and met fellow terror suspects in the run-up to the bombing. Among the places he visited at the time was Malta, where investigators believed he met associates of the PFLP-GC. Journalist Joe Mifsud, who had written extensively about the Lockerbie investigation, had also reported on the matter and established that Talb visited Malta in October 1988.
The ‘Operation Bird’ report claims it was Talb who bought the clothes at Mary’s House in Sliema, which eventually ended up wrapped around the bomb that downed the plane.
In support of this thesis, Swedish newspapers had reported in 1989 that the secret service there had intercepted a phone call in which Talb’s wife warned an unidentified Palestinian to “get rid of the clothes immediately’’.
Swedish investigators had also found a 1988 calendar with the date ‘Dec. 21’ circled when his house was raided.
A year after Lockerbie, Talb was jailed for life in 1989 after carrying out bombings in Copenhagen, Denmark and Amsterdam — killing one person and injuring 20. He was released in 2009 and lives in Sweden.
He has been confronted in the past and always denied involvement in Lockerbie. He also gave evidence against Mr Megrahi during his trial in return for immunity from prosecution.
However, ex-CIA expert Robert Baer later revealed Talb had been paid almost €400,000 some months after the atrocity.
During a recent edition of Times Talk probing the Lockerbie affair, Foreign Affairs Minister George Vella said he was certain that Mr Megrahi was innocent.