Lockerbie Witness' Credibility Questioned

Sept. 27 -- He was billed as a star witness in the case against the two Libyans accused of bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, but today a Libyan double agent came under fire from the defense team.

Defense counsel William Taylor said the double agent known by the pseudonym Abdul Majid Giaka had invented stories in a desperate bid to secure his future.

Taylor told the four judges that Giaka was a “shirker” who dreamed up incidents for the benefit of the CIA only when the U.S. intelligence agency threatened to halt payments to him.

Fellow defense counsel Richard Keen said Giaka grossly exaggeratedhis importance within the Libyan secret service to the CIA and made bizarre “tittle-tattle” claims, such as saying Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was involved in a Freemason plot.

“How did you discover that Colonel Gadhafi was a Mason?”Keen asked during the cross-examination barrage and, as Giaka stalled, repeated the question five times.

Said He Saw Explosives

Hidden behind bulletproof glass, testifying with his voice and face scrambled on courtroom television monitors, Abdel Majid Giaka took the stand Tuesday and identified the two defendants — Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah — as his co-workers in Malta’s Luqa airport.

The two men are on trial in a special Scottish court set up in the Netherlands on charges they planted the bomb that caused Pan Am Flight 103 to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. A total of 270 people were killed, including 11 on the ground.

In 1986, two years before the bombing, Giaka told the court that Fhimah — whom he described as his boss — had once shown him a secret cache of explosives kept in a drawer at the airport in Malta.

Giaka described the cache as two boxes containing “a yellowish material” in plastic-wrapped bricks.

He testified that Fhimah told him “he had 10 kilograms [22 pounds] of TNT delivered by Abdel Basset.”