Allegations have persisted that Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who testified, in spite of contrary evidence, that he had sold Abdel Basset al-Megrahi clothing that ended up in the suitcase bomb, was paid to finger the Libyans, Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor wrote in the latest issue of Cqpolitics.com.
Mr Stein claimed that Gauci was paid approximately $2 million from the State Department’s USA Rewards programme, an authoritative source told him, along with another, still unidentified witness.
Together, they were paid somewhere between $3 million and $4 million for information leading to the conviction of Megrahi, the source said.
The State Department acknowledged to him that rewards were paid.
“A reward was paid out in the Lockerbie-Pan Am 103 case,” a spokesperson there said on condition of anonymity, “but due to operational and security concerns we are not disclosing details regarding specific amounts, sources, or types of assistance the sources provided.”
It was 19 years ago this weekend that the airliner, bound from London to New York with 259 passengers, 189 of them Americans, exploded in the night skies over Scotland, killing all aboard as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, the village where the fiery chunks of steel and other debris came crashing down.
Back in 1988, Iran was immediately suspected of authoring the mass murder, in retaliation for the accidental downing of one of its own airliners by a US Navy warship in the Persian Gulf a few months earlier.
US intelligence agencies, in overdrive to find the culprits, quickly compiled evidence that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, had carried out the plot on behalf of Iran and Syria, Mr Stein said. (The PFLP-GC was formed to oppose PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s movement toward detente with Israel.)
He quotes Robert Black, the senior University of Edinburgh legal scholar who devised the trial of the Lockerbie defendants in The Netherlands under Scottish law, as saying that that he suspected Libya was framed to avoid a case that would hold Iran and Syria responsible.
The first Bush administration needed Syria to stay in the broad Middle East coalition that it was readying to oust Iraq’s troops from Kuwait.
Ironically, Megrahi, now serving a life sentence in Scotland, could be freed soon, British authorities hinted on Thursday, as part of a broad normalisation of relations with Libya.
Only a day earlier, the Bush administration managed to stave off a congressional effort, led by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., to deny it funds to build an embassy in Tripoli until Libya completed payments to the relatives of those who died on Pan Am 103.
While Lautenberg lost that battle, he and his allies in the House did manage to prohibit the administration from giving Libya any US aid until the payments are completed.