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Israel still believes Palestinian group planned Lockerbie

TEL AVIV [MENL] -- Israeli officials do not dismiss the assertion by the attorneys of two Libyan security agents that a Palestinian terrorist group masterminded the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The officials said the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command remains the most likely suspects in the bombing, in a move ordered by Iran. A Scottish court based in the Netherlands is prosecuting two Libyans for the crime.

But Israeli officials said the assessment remains that the Palestinian group headed by Syrian intelligence officer Ahmed Jibril was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. Regarded as a leading Israeli researcher in Islamic terrorism, Paz said German and other Western authorities did not follow up on initial evidence that the PFLP-GC was involved.

"I believe it was Jibril's group," Paz told the Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "Many in the Israeli secret service think this way." Paz, academic director of the Herzliya-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, is now a visiting scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Several weeks after the 1988 bombing, German police found five bombs similar to the one that exploded on the Pan Am airliner during the arrest of a PFLP-GC leader in Frankfurt. German authorities determined that one of the bombs was either given by or taken from the organization leader.

Paz said Israeli officials did not press the issue with their U.S. counterparts.

Israeli officials, however, said that since the Lockerbie bombing, Libyan ruler Moammar Khaddafy has lowered his profile and began to reduce aid to terrorists. U.S. officials now say Tripoli has taken significant steps to end support for terrorists.