Word: libyans
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...seemed too good to be true and, sure enough, it was. As the United Nations Security Council prepared early last week to vote on sanctions against Libya, that country's ambassador announced that his government would hand over to the Arab League two Libyan intelligence agents suspected of bombing Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. The understanding was that the two would be passed on for trial in either the U.S. or Britain. But when an Arab League delegation called in Tripoli, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi pronounced his ambassador "incorrect" and sent...
...chicanery, though, appeared to win him only a brief delay. Without ! waiting for the World Court's ruling, the Security Council is expected this week to adopt sanctions directing U.N. members to break all airline links with Libya, stop all sales of arms to that country and expel most Libyan diplomats. Such penalties, and Gaddafi's desperate efforts to escape them, signal that the civilized world's terrorist counteroffensive has made much more progress than is often generally recognized...
Reprisals could include a break in airline links between Libya and the outside world or an embargo on purchases of Libyan oil. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater even hinted at military action. But that might give only another spin to a long-running cycle of violence. To avenge the bombing, allegedly by Libya, of a German disco that killed two American soldiers, U.S. warplanes struck Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. Speculation is that Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing in retaliation...
...Scottish investigator going through a bag of burned clothing found a fingernail-size shred of green plastic embedded in a piece of shirt. The fragment was shipped to Washington, where Tom Thurman, an FBI bomb expert, obtained from the CIA a bomb that had been captured unexploded from Libyan- supported terrorists in the African nation of Togo. The bit of plastic from Lockerbie perfectly matched part of the timing device from the Togo explosive. The letters MEBO had been imprinted and scratched out on the Togo bomb but were still decipherable. So the timer evidently had been made by Meister...
Meanwhile the charred bit of shirt was traced to a small store called Mary's House in Malta; employees who were questioned indicated it had been bought by Abdel Basset. Scouring Malta, investigators also found a diary kept by Fhimah, who had been a station manager there for Libyan Arab Airlines, with a revelatory entry: "Abdel Basset is coming from Zurich . . . Take taggs ((sic)) from Air Malta." The apparent meaning: Fhimah used his access to airport facilities to steal Air Malta baggage tags. The end of the story, as spelled out in the indictments: sometime between...