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| Middle East |
| Abu Nidal buddy sez they did the Lockerbie bombing... |
| 2002-08-22 |
| An estranged comrade of Abu Nidal said in remarks released Thursday the Palestinian guerrilla who died of an apparent suicide in Baghdad had earlier admitted his group was behind the 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing. Atef Abu Bakr, once a politburo member of Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council, made the charge in comments to the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat due to be published on Friday. "Abu Nidal said during an inner-circle meeting of the leadership of the Revolutionary Council, 'I will tell you something very important and serious, the reports which link the Lockerbie act to others are false reports. We are behind what happened,"' Abu Bakr was quoted by the newspaper as saying. If anyone leaked what he had said, "I will kill him even if he is in the arms of his wife." "In the arms of his wife"? Arabs do that? Oh. I guess they do. That's how we get little exploders... The New York-bound Pan Am plane blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 259 mostly American passengers and crew, and 11 residents of Lockerbie. Following the attack, Abu Bakr was quoted as extending condolences to victims on behalf of Abu Nidal's group, which at the time some media speculated could be to blame. A special Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted former Libyan agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in the bombing and sentenced him in January 2001 to life in prison. Abu Nidal set up his headquarters in the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1987. He was put under house arrest when Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi came under pressure to crack down on militants after the Lockerbie bombing. Could be a true story, though these groups have a record of forming long lines to grab the credit for whatever atrocity's just been committed. Guess as long as the "technical experts" were right there, Muammar just went ahead and made use of them. Must have cheesed them when he turned around and dumped them when the heat came on... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |