Lockerbie: The Flight From Justice »

The Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), and the more prominent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), led by Ahmad Jibril, a former officer in the Syrian army, were working together from cells operating out of Germany, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Cyprus and – as became evident during the Lockerbie investigation – also out of Malta.

In a complex web of at least 16 known individuals, their aim was primarily Israeli and American targets. They had a long track record in state-sponsored terrorist activity, including the hijacking and bombing of aircraft. Indeed, it was surveillance of their activities in Germany, two months before the Lockerbie blast, that had led to specific warnings to airlines and government agencies about terrorist threats to airlines and in particular Pan Am, shortly before the disaster.

One named PFLP member, Khaled Jafaar, actually travelled – and perished – on Pan Am 103, boarding in Frankfurt on the feeder flight en route to the US via Heathrow. Others in the German cell, led by Hafez Dalkamoni, were caught red-handed with improvised exploding devices in Toshiba and other music players, with barometric-triggered timers designed to explode in the air (remarkably similar to the Pan Am Toshiba bomb) – and a Pan Am timetable.

Marwan Khreesat, the bombmaker who assembled these devices, had turned informer/double agent and revealed to Jordanian and German police vital information about the German cell and its links to others and to paymasters in Syria – not, it seems, Libya. Between 1985 and 1988, he had made at least nine such bombs, some assembled in Syria, some in Germany. Not all of them were recovered. Khreesat was convicted in his absence of bombing Israeli El Al flights out of Rome and Amsterdam in 1972. He was arrested with Dalkamoni and others, but released – no doubt because he was an informer – and is now believed to be living under protection in Jordan.