Olivier Schmidt / Intelligence - Association for the Right to Information, France - On 21 December 1988, a MST-13 timer-switch manufactured by the Zurich-based company MEBO detonated the cassette bomb which destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people. In mid-August, Ulrich Lumpert, a Swiss engineer and former MEBO employee, walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary confessing that he had lied about the specific MST-13 timer, fragments of which the prosecution claimed had been found at the Lockerbie crash site.

Lumpert's testimony was crucial to implicating Libya in the conspiracy, which is exactly what the intelligence and military establishment in Washington wanted. Gray-suited officials speaking on behalf of various branches of the Reagan administration claimed Lockerbie was "an act of revenge" for the USAF bombing of Triploi two years earlier. And former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was the "scapegoat", sentenced to life by a Scottish court during the 2001 trial at Camp Zeist in Holland. He is currently serving his sentence at Greenock Prison, near Glasgow, in Scotland.

Mr. Lumpert's former boss, Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, supports the allegation. He has admitted that his company, MEBO, had sold a batch of twenty MST-13 timers to Libya in 1986. When FBI and Scot-tish detectives showed him a "fuzzy photograph" of the timer, which they claimed was found on the hillside and used to detonate the bomb in the forward luggage hold of Flight 103 from Heathrow to JFK, he con-firmed that the fragments "looked as though they came from one of our timers".

Ten years after the inci-dent, he travelled to Dumfries, in Scotland, after finally being given permission to actually see the pieces of the badly burned brown circuit board, which matched MEBO's prototype. However, when the MST-13 went into production, the color of the circuit boards was changed to green, and the batch sold to the Liby-ans had green circuit boards, not brown, according to Mr. Bollier.

At the trial in Camp Zeist, the 70-year-old businessman appeared for the defense, and claims the details about the circuit-board were ignored. The pieces which he asked to see again in court "were practically carbonized [and] they had been tampered with" since he had visited Dumfries.

The pieces had been in the possession of FBI forensic laboratories which were later thoroughly discredited. Last June, this and other information resulted in the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruling that there was enough "new" evidence -- not including Lumpert's confession -- to suggest there had been a miscarriage of justice. Later this month, the Scottish Court of Appeal in Edinburgh will hear al-Megrahi's appeal against what is now regarded as a "deeply flawed" verdict.

MEBO went bankrupt after the Lockerbie incident. Threatened with a multi-million lawsuit by Pan Am, the company rapidly lost business, including a major contract to supply the German Kriminalpolizei (CID) and the Bundesgrenzshutz (Federal Border Police) with communications equipment.

COMMENT
It may finally be shown that the Libyan connection was part of a US/UK plot to demonize Kadaffi, which "Intelligence" has always maintained; see chapter 5, "The Trumped-Up Proof of Libyan Terrorism", in Olivier Schmidt, "The 'Intelligence' Files, 2005, Clarity Press.

If this can be shown along with the fact that those responsible for the bombing were closer to the Syrian regime than Triploi, Mr. Bollier will expect to be financial compensated for the international, state-sponsored conspiracy. Unlike the financial compen-sation and apologies Abdulbaset al-Megrahi can expect if his appeal is successful, an unpublicized out-of-court settlement is likely in Mr. Bollier's case. And he'll be satisfied with having cleared his name and that of the company he founded.

This article was first published at Intelligence - Association for the Right to Information, France

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