Part 107 – OCTOBER 17, 1988
"A person by the name of Darwich was known to Khalid Jaafar." 0 Commission Rogatoire, Sept 18 1989, Lord Fraser to Dr Achim Thiel
Operation Autumn Leaves
On Oct. 17 1988, Martin Khadorah, who lives at 68 Bernadottstrasse – Frankfurt - meets Bilal Dalkamoni in Yugoslavia. Bilal is the brother of Haffez Dalkamoni. Dalkamoni will later admit that Khadorah smuggled explosive and other equipment to commit acts of terror from the Krusevac safe-house. Semtex, recovered at the safe house during an early November raid, was linked to the batch that Dalkamoni had given to Khreesat to fabricate the radio bombs.
Intelligence
Peter Thiel is living in a small village just outside Frankfurt. He used to work at Frankfurt airport. When the BKA raided his home on Oct. 26, they found three messages from Martin Kadorah asking to contact him as soon as possible.
Kadorah, who was arrested in Yugoslavia, never provided the police with a satisfactory explanation for these suspicious phone calls. Nevertheless, both men were released in a matter of hours and never investigated again.
When the BKA raided the house of Martin Kadorah, they found ammunition, gun cleaning equipment and, quite amazingly, an Israeli Ministry of Interior stamp! The BKA also found a notebook belonging to Kadorah.
The notebook contains the name of Hameid Darwich with his address and phone number. As chance would have it, Darwich is an acquaintance of the myserious Khalid Jaafar.
The Goben Memorandum
On April 13 1989, the FBI announced that he had tentatively identified how the bomb got on board of Pan Am 103.
The report suggested that an agent of the Syrian-sponsored Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, had planted the bomb in a piece of luggage carried by Jaafar. The agent was not named but described as an aquaintance of Dalkamoni, who is himself a high ranking member of the organization.
With time, the theory that Jaafar had been the unwitting carrier of the bomb vanished. Yet, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, would testify that this is what actually occurred.
One of them is Major Tunayb who, interestingly enough, was one of the members of the PLFC-GC known to have participated to a key meeting with Tehran officials in the aftermath of the downing of the Iranian airliner.
The other is Mobdi Goben, aka Abu Fuad, who operated the Krusevac safe-house at 17 Dr Vlastimira Godica in the town of Krusevac until October 1988. Born Aug 4, 1943 in Haifa, then Palestine, Mobdi Goben wrote a memorandum in which he described the bombing of Pan Am 103. A few pages of the memorandum have never been recovered to this day.
The Goben memorandum claims that Abu Elias, a relative of Ahmed Jibril and senior member of the PFLP-GC, planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar. In his Memorandum, Goben, nicknamed "the Professor" in his organization, also claims that the Lebanese American passenger was involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation. The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal security screening.
The prosecution asked Syria to hand over information about Goben's allegations. To this day, Syria has refused to collaborate with the investigation.
Not much is known about Abu Elias. Nevertheless, Elias was holder of a Syrian passport. He is known to the FBI who investigated him for a large sum of money he received during the fall of 1998 in the form of traveller checks. Elias will become an American citizen. Sources have claimed that he currently lives in the Washington DC area.
Abu Elias was the CIA's prime suspect but was never caught. According to former CIA operative Robert Baer, Elias supplied the components for the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103.
"Abu Elias was the big centre of the investigation, but he was very elusive," Baer said. Khreesat and Dalkamoni were on their way to meet Abu Elias when they were arrested in Germany. Abu Elias was a close associate of Abu Talb. Both lived in Sweden.
"It is not a bad guess to say that Abu Elias has played a role in the bombing of Pan Am 103," a Western Intelligence Official told investigative journalist David Leppard. Which role he played has never been explained to this day.
