Fifteen years after the tragedy, new light has fallen on the real reasons behind the mid-air explosion that downed Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland. Two hundred and seventy people lost their lives: 259 on board the Boeing 747 and 11 on the ground.
In August this year Libyan President Colonel Moammar Gadaffi offered to pay $2,7-billion (about R18-billion) in compensation to families of the victims of what has been generally accepted as an act of terrorism by a Libyan agent. Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed all-Megrahi — convicted in 2000 of planting the bomb on the aircraft — was a Libyan government employee. A second accused Libyan, Al Amin Khalifa Fhima, was acquitted.
The compensation payment offered by Gadaffi has yet to paid. Now it seems likely there will be even further delays in compensation for the December 1988 disaster. This delay will come about as a result of findings made by renowned South African forensic scientist, Dr Dayzo ‘Wingnut” Glutzow, a man already famous for his entertaining personal findings on the causes of the SAA Helderberg accident of 1987, and the crash in 1988 of the Russian-built and crewed Tupolev, which killed the then Mozambique president, Samora Machel.
According to Glutzow, both of those accidents were direct results of covert activities by evil apartheid-era agents. In the Helderberg accident, Glutzow held that the fire that led to the immolation in flight of the Jumbo Jet was caused by the carriage of critically unstable red mercury-flavoured military chewing gum being carried in defiance of international arms sanctions.
In the Tupolev accident Glutzow agreed that secret apartheid police had planted a ‘decoy” navigational radio beacon in the tribal headpiece of a member of the Swazi royal family in order to mislead the aircraft into the mountainous territory where it crashed.
In a statement released this week, Glutzow claims that his private investigations have revealed that Pan-Am Flight 103 was carrying a quantity of highly volatile plastic explosive material, disguised as a set of garden furniture and intended for use in the United States by a group of South African apartheid-era government secret agents who wanted to use the material in a plot to discredit the Nigerian government. The furniture was to be donated to the United Nations buildings, with patent clues to suggest that the donation was being made by Nigerian UN representatives.
‘In those wicked days there was nothing the racist National Party South African apartheid-era government would stop at in order to defame and disgrace black African governments,” said Glutzow through a half-kilo mouthful of Easter egg. ‘This one had Pik Botha written all over it,” he added with a grim smile.
In his statement Glutzow said that the accepted theory that Flight 103 was brought down by a small bomb hidden in a portable radio ‘is palpably false”. A far bigger explosion was necessary to ‘cripple and bring down an aircraft of the size of a Boeing 747”.
Glutzow went on to explain his additional theory about a decoy navigational beacon again being used to mislead the pilots of an aircraft. In this case a decoy Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) was planted by South African agents working out of the South African embassy in London. This one was attached to the antlers of a wild Scottish roe deer stag. Its purpose was essentially humanitarian as the NDB was intended to lead Flight 103 into a rural area, at which stage the explosion was to be triggered by means of a radio signal from the ground. ‘Evil as they were,” said Glutzow, ‘the South African government did not want to cause unnecessary casualties on the ground by exploding the device while the aircraft was over populated areas.
‘Flight 103’s crew had, for a critical three-and-a-half minutes, been confused by the false beacon,” said the Glutzow statement. ‘It seems they had been worried that the NDB readings did not agree with other sophisticated navigational information at their disposal. Modern airliners of this size always carry secondary navigational equipment like sextants, detailed road maps and back-up compasses and telephones. They don’t just blindly fly from radio beacon to radio beacon.
‘All the navigators on board Flight 103 would have asked the pilot to slow down or, if necessary, stop the giant aircraft, while they recalculated their position and made a few necessary phone calls,” said Glutzow. ‘It was this slowing down that put them over the village of Lockerbie instead of over the vast watery expanse of Loch Levin, where it was intended the aircraft would disintegrate with wreckage falling into deep water. The South African government apartheid-era agent on the ground would not have known the exact position of the aircraft when he detonated the bomb by remote control.”
Glutzow’s new theories have given rise to much controversy. Most of this relates to the fact that payment of the $2,7-billion (Zim$678 500 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000,43) compensation to the Lockerbie victims’ families has now been put on hold. Gadaffi has issued a statement expressing both his and his nations deep gratitude to Glutzow for ‘at last revealing the awful colonialist wickedness behind Lockerbie”. The colonel said he will be sending Glutzow a crate of chocolate-flavoured goat biltong by way of a reward.
According to Gadaffi, the reason Libya had offered compensation was not because he ever believed citizens of Libya would be responsible for such a dreadful deed as bringing down an aircraft full of innocent people. The Libyan leader said that the compensation was offered more in way of sympathy and a helping hand to those who had lost family and relatives. ‘Someone had to step forward and make amends for what I always knew was the work of the racist colonial imperialists of apartheid-era South Africa. Not content with enslaving their own people, the apartheid-mongers wanted to spread their evil.
‘I also had to make an effort to reveal the Libyan government under my regime as the caring and internationally responsible nation it is,” said Gadaffi, chewing on a photograph of Ariel Sharon.
In 1999, in another display of the uncontrollable Gadaffi humanitarianism, Libya agreed to pay more the $31-million (R206-million) to France as reparations to the victims of a similar airline attack conducted by Libyan agents. A UTA plane was brought down over Niger in 1989, killing 171 people.