A prominent British parliamentarian urged the Foreign Minister to investigate new claims that Palestinian militant Abu Nidal was responsible for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Atef Abu Bakr, a former spokesman for Abu Nidal's Fatah Revolutionary Council, told the Arab Al-Hayat daily that Abu Nidal had admitted the group was behind the attack on a Pan Am 747 airliner which left 270 dead after it exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
"Abu Nidal told a ... meeting of the Revolutionary Council leadership: I have very important and serious things to say. The reports that attribute Lockerbie to others are lies. We are behind it," Abu Bakr was quoted as saying in the interview published in the Arabic newspaper's Friday edition. "If any one of you lets this (word) out, I will kill him even if he was in his wife's arms,'" Abu Bakr quoting Abu Nidal as saying.
Abu Bakr is a former spokesman for the group and one of Abu Nidal's closest aides between 1985 and 1989, when he split with him over management of the organization.
Bakr's claim follows the reported death earlier this week of Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Until now, the Lockerbie bombing has always been blamed on Libya, although Abu Nidal was said to have rented his services out to Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi in the 1980s and 1990s.
Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is now serving a life sentence in a Glasgow jail.
Britain's Tam Dalyell, a left-wing member of the ruling Labour Party, has long argued that the Libyans were not behind the attack and that it was carried out by Abu Nidal.
The 70-year-old Dalyell commented that the Foreign Office must now investigate the new claims "as a matter of the utmost urgency".
"If these allegations are true they blow everything relating to Lockerbie out of the water, including the trial in Holland," Dalyell said, according to AFP. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
