Iran 'ordered PanAm bomb'

LIBYA did not order the Lockerbie bombing, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA officer who investigated the terrorist attack.

In a BBC interview to be broadcast tomorrow night, Mr Cannistraro will claim that the bomb that destroyed PanAm flight 103 in December 1988, killing 270 people, was ordered by Iran.

When Britain and the US issued warrants in November 1991 for the arrest of two Libyans accused of the bombing, officials insisted that Libya had acted alone. But Mr Cannistraro claims that, although Libyan agents may have placed the bomb on board the PanAm jumbo, it was Iran that ordered the attack after the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus in the Gulf in July 1988 killing 290 people. He says Iranian officials commissioned the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, to build the bomb.

His allegations come in the wake of new evidence which casts doubt on Libyan involvement. Edwin Bollier, a Swiss businessman, who told Scottish police that fragments of the bomb recovered by police scientists were part of a timer device made exclusively for Libya, has said that identical timers were also available in the former East Germany. He has told the BBC that he changed his story after his chief engineer, Ulrich Lumpert, 'reminded' him of a visit to Berlin in 1985 when he delivered identical timers to the East German authorities.

Mr Bollier's evidence was central to the charges against two Libyans.