The revelation that Germany's top spook, Bernd Schmidbauer, gave Iran's top
spook, Ali Fallahian, a guided tour of the German Intelligence Service's
Weisbaden HQ, should come as no surprise to those who have followed the course
of the 'investigation' into the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
More than eight years after the event, the perpetrators of the bombing
remain at large, principally because of a trail of confusion, disinformation,
and obfuscation, laid by the British, American and German governments and their
agents.
Lockerbie-watchers will recall that the current favourite theory as to what
happened runs something like this: A radio-cassette bomb was allegedly placed on
a connecting flight from Frankfurt airport by a group of Iranian-backed
terrorists who were protected by the CIA. Weisbaden was also home to the CIA's
freewheeling COREA group which specialised in arms and drugs trafficking
allegedly in order to obtain access to terrorist groups.
It may be that someone from the American Embassy in Beirut was preparing to
blow the whistle on this covert operation and was taking documents back to
Washington which implicated highly-placed people as principals.
Yet further enlightenment has come to us from someone who says he witnessed
events the night of the crash. The person, whom we shall call Mr X, says he was
contacted by the Ministry of Defence on the night of the disaster and told to go
immediately to Lockerbie. He says he was also given clearances from the US
Defense Intelligence Agency and what was then the West German Secret Service.
Access
He and a colleague were allowed unhindered access to the crash site. They
spent most of the night and the following day examining wreckage, bodies, and
talking to witnesses.
In his subsequent reports, sent to London, Germany and America, Mr X
outlined the possibility of a dual explosion on the plane, some minutes apart
and concluded that the pilot had been attempting to land at nearby Prestwick
airport or was going to attempt a crash landing on flat land some miles to the
west of Lockerbie.
He said the first explosion would have occurred over Northumberland within
the luggage hold, explaining the widespread distribution of luggage as the hold
depressurised and luggage was sucked out. He pointed out that the plane would
have automatically dropped to between 18 and 20 thousand feet leaving it enough
height to cruise in and also reducing the pressure differential on the cabin
skin.
He added: 'The pilot could not have been aware of the possibility of another
explosion, caused by an additional device or by generation equipment'. And he
concluded that 'in any event this, when taken into consideration with the
direction of impact... the direction of flight... the position of the cockpit,
and the position of the engines, would certainly point to a general consensus
that the aircraft had managed to reduce its height, the passengers were strapped
in to the emergency landing positions, and the engines were obviously
controllable and functional up to the immediate seconds prior to the impact. It
was possible that the second device severed the cockpit resulting in the loss of
the aircraft and the now legendary loss of life both on the plane and on the
ground.'
If the above scenario is true, the pilot would have radioed immediately the
nearest airport or ground control station and request an emergency landing. The
plane's automatic beacon would also have sent a signal to a number of stations
in the area, at that height particularly. This would also have been recorded in
the black boxes on the aircraft.
The pilot would have obtained emergency clearance for Prestwick immediately
and there would have been total evacuation of the airspace.
The radar traces and records of voice communications between flight 103 and
the ground have never been released. Nor has any 'black box' data been released.
More importantly, Mr X says he was also given clearance to recover a silver
document case from the plane. What he did with said document case he will not
say. Nor will he say what it contained. Perhaps Messrs Schmidbauer and Fallahian
could help us out with that one?