Scottish police probe Cyprus link to Lockerbie bombing

By Martin Hellicar

SCOTTISH police believe there could a Cyprus link to the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing.

A team of Scottish officers arrived on the island on Saturday to probe the activities of a Libyan businessman as part of inquiries into the Lockerbie disaster.

The Scots, who are being helped by Cyprus police, are trying to uncover the relationship the unnamed man had with the two Libyans who are due to stand trial in Holland next year for the bombing.

The two suspects stand accused of blowing up PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie in southern Scotland in December 1988, killing 259 people on board and another 11 on the ground.

Cyprus police have already secured a court injunction lifting secrecy laws on a bank account the Libyan businessman had at a branch of a foreign bank in Nicosia, Reuters quoted local security sources as saying.

The man is no longer on the island and authorities could not immediately say what sort of business he was involved in.

“All I can say is that he used various names while he was in Cyprus,” a security source stated.

Police were also hoping to get records of telephone calls the Libyan made when he visited Cyprus “years ago”, the source said.

The Cyprus Mail learnt yesterday that the businessman used to own an offshore company in Cyprus in 1992.

The Scottish investigators had asked local authorities to keep a media blackout on their presence.

They are due to leave the island today, a police source said yesterday.

The trial of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima is due to start next February in Holland. The two are to be tried there under Scottish law as part of a complex deal agreed with Libya.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.