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News Article: U.S. Links Lockerbie Blast to African Bomb Finds

<FONT SIZE=-1>By Will Hardie</FONT>
CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (Reuters) - U.S. weapons experts and
CIA officers told the Lockerbie murder trial on Thursday that
bomb components found in Africa were similar to those used to
destroy Pan Am flight 103.
The prosecution aims to pin the 1988 attack on Abdel Basset
al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima -- who it says were Libyan
secret agents -- by proving Libyan agents elsewhere used the
same kind of bomb.
The explosion killed all 259 passengers and 11 people on the
ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988.
The prosecution says the defendants posed as Libyan Arab
Airlines employees to put a bomb in an unaccompanied case in
Malta, which was later loaded onto the doomed jet in London.
For the first time in the trial, two protected witnesses
were hidden by a curtain from journalists and victims' families
at the special Scottish court in the Netherlands.
CIA officers Kenneth Stiener and Warren Clemens, their
voices electronically disguised, said they had examined a
briefcase seized at Dakar airport in February 1986. It contained
Semtex and TNT explosives, detonators, fuses, a pistol with
silencer and an electronic timer.
Senegal said at the time it suspected the two men arrested
with the weapons were Libyan agents.
Two officers from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and
Tobacco, Richard Sherrow and Edward Owen, described examining a
captured arms cache in Lome, Togo, which included two electronic
timers. These were the size of a large matchbox.
They did not say where the cache came from.
LINK TO LOCKERBIE FIREBALL
Photographs of the Lome and the Dakar timers showed circuit
boards coded 'MST-13', a type made by Swiss firm MEBO AG and
linked by prosecutors to a tiny blast-damaged fragment found in
wreckage near Lockerbie.
        Scottish Chief Inspector William Williamson told the three
judges presiding over the jury-less trial that police had traced
the shard to MEBO's Zurich office.
He showed a photograph of the Lockerbie scrap, a rough
square with one curved edge, marked with a large '1' and the
remains of two copper tracks, next to a complete 'MST-13' board,
part of which it seemed to match closely.
The indictment charges Megrahi and Fahimah with obtaining
from MEBO 20 electronic timers capable of triggering bombs.
The defense suggested U.S. authorities may have interfered
in the British investigation, building on conspiracy theories
that key evidence might have been tampered with or introduced.
"Were you aware ... that the CIA tried to deter or delay
the Scottish inquiry team from making the visit (to
Switzerland)?," defense counsel Richard Keen asked Williamson.
He quoted an unidentified report that said the CIA had
interviewed Swiss officials the day before Williamson.
"I have no knowledge of this information," Williamson
said.
The defense is expected to blame Palestinian extremists
operating in Frankfurt for the bomb attack.