Nidal's crimes revealed
2002-08-23 09:07
Dubai - Palestinian hired gun Abu Nidal masterminded the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that left 270 people dead, said a former aide to the late militant, whose violent death was reported this week from Baghdad.
"Abu Nidal announced during a restricted meeting of the leaders
of (his) Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC) that the reports
attributing the Lockerbie attack to others was incorrect. We are
behind what happened," former FRC spokesperson Atef Abu Bakr told the Arab daily Al-Hayat, in comments to be published on Friday.
Abu Nidal threatened to kill anyone who leaked the information, Abu Bakr told the daily.
The militant, held responsible for more than 900 deaths, told
his followers that reports implicating Arab intelligence agencies
or Islamic parties in the devastating mid-air explosion of Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland were false.
Until now, the Lockerbie bombing has always been blamed on
Libya, although Abu Nidal was said to have rented his services out to Muammar Gaddafi in the 1980s and 1990s.
With his country reeling from international sanctions, Gaddafi agreed in 1999 to turn over two suspects in the Lockerbie attack to a special Scottish court in the Netherlands. Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is now serving a life sentence in a Glasgow jail, while the other suspect was acquitted.
'Not by his own hand'
Iraqi intelligence chief Taher Jalil Habbush announced on
Wednesday that Abu Nidal had shot and killed himself after being
discovered living illegally in Baghdad and facing interrogation for anti-Iraqi activities.
His followers insisted that the militant, whose real name was
Sabri al-Banna, was killed by Iraqi intelligence agents and not by his own hand.
Abu Bakr, meanwhile, has given a series of exclusive interviews
to the Saudi-owned, London-based Al-Hayat since the first accounts of Abu Nidal's death in Baghdad emerged on Monday.
Abu Bakr, who joined Abu Nidal's group in 1985 and fell out with
the FRC in 1989, has revealed one-by-one to Al-Hayat the infamous
hardliner's alleged exploits.
Abu Nidal ordered the bomb attack on a Gulf Air flight from Abu
Dhabi to Karachi in 1983 that killed all 111 people on board, he
told the paper on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Abu Bakr said his former boss plotted to
assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1989 with the
co-operation of an Arab state, but then aborted the plan.
Abu Nidal was also responsible for the 1986 attack on a West
Berlin disco that killed two US soldiers and a Turkish woman, and
wounded 260 others, provoking US strikes on Libya, Abu Bakr told
the Arab daily on Tuesday in his first revelation to the paper.
- Sapa-AFP
- SAPA