The claim, if it can be corroborated, would mark the final step in the long and tangled story of the downing of Pan Am flight 103, in which 270 people died in the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
“I have proof that Qadh-dhafi gave the order about Lock-erbie,” Mustafa Abdel-Jalil told the Swedish tabloid Expressen, but he did not describe the proof.
Libya accepted responsibility for the atrocity, for which intelligence agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted. It also paid billions of dollars in compensation. But it has never admitted carrying the bombing out—let alone that it was on Qadhdhafi’s direct orders.
Abdel-Jalil resigned from the govermnment last week in protest against the brutal clampdown on anti-government protests. He is now the declared head of a temporary Libyan government being organized in the eastern part of the country.
The Lockerbie affair continues to generate heated controversy, most recently when Megrahi was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die in about three months. He is still alive in Tripoli.
Libya’s involvement is still questioned by those who argue that the US plane was downed not by Libyan intelligence but by a Palestinian faction acting in concert with Iran, probably in retaliation for the shooting down a few months earlier of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes.
There was no way of independently confirming Abdel-Jalil’s claim. Expressen spokeswoman Alexandra Forslund said its reporter in Libya, Kassem Hamade, taped the interview, which was conducted in Arabic and translated to Swedish.
Most of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing were Americans, and al-Megrahi’s release was criticised by members of the US Congress and the victims’ families.
Bob Monetti, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son Richard was killed in the bombing, said he was glad to hear a former Libyan official say what had been clear to him all along. He said officials and the media, especially in the UK, had been in denial over who was to blame.
“If you went to the trial, there was no question about who did it and why, and who ordered it,” Monetti said.