Could crazy conspiracy theory really be true?

Published on Monday 27 October 2008 21:22

INSIDE THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

TWENTY years on from the Lockerbie disaster, students at Syracuse University in New York State will hold a ceremony in December to remember the 270 people who died when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up.

It will be a sombre and deeply poignant occasion, as 32 of its students were among the passengers on that ill-fated flight on 21 December, 1988.

Even today, doubts over who was behind the attack remain. Confidence in the safety of the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi has been shaken by not one but two criminal appeals. The second is due to begin next year after a ruling by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that the verdict may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Now it has emerged that Megrahi may not survive that appeal, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Alternative theories surrounding Lockerbie have been given fresh impetus by the revelation that a man thought by many to be responsible may have been a US agent.

The former Labour MP Tam Dalyell and Edinburgh law professor Robert Black have long believed that Abu Nidal and his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command co-ordinated the attack.

Robert Fisk, the foreign correspondent, reported that secret documents from Iraq claim Nidal engaged in "collusion" with US intelligence services around the time of the Gulf war. Mr Dalyell spoke to Fisk over the weekend and is convinced the report is true. If Nidal – once the world's most feared terrorist leader – was working for the Americans in 1991, could the US government have been aware of a plot to commit the Lockerbie atrocity three years earlier?

Conspiracy theorists believe links between Nidal and the US would explain why leading diplomatic figures were hauled off the flight at the last minute (their places were taken by those Syracuse students).

The theory leads to the incredible conclusion that the US government had advance knowledge of the bomb plot, ordered by Iran and carried out by Nidal, who committed suicide in 2002.

But it is a theory Mr Dalyell believes may hold water. He said: "The Iranian interior minister said ten airliners would fall out of the sky, in retaliation at the US downing an Iranian passenger airliner in 1988. Could Lockerbie have been a damage-limitation exercise?"

Mr Dalyell now intends to press the Scottish Government and the Foreign Office to seek answers from the White House.