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Lockerbie Defense Lawyer Brands Top Witnesses As Liars
CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (News Agencies) - Two key witnesses at the Lockerbie bombing trial were branded "liars" Wednesday by a defense lawyer who challenged the credibility of their testimony.
William Taylor took aim at Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka and Swiss businessman Erwin Bollier on day four of closing arguments at the mass-murder trial of two Libyans accused of downing Pan American Flight 103.
All 259 people on the Boeing 747, plus 11 others on the ground, were killed when the London-New York flight blew up in mid-air over Lockerbie, southwest Scotland on December 21, 1988.
Taylor called Majid, who now lives in the United States under an assumed identity, a "cunning" figure who concocted tales to convince his CIA handlers that he was a "valuable asset."
"He was utilizing deception for his own personal ends... In short, he is a man who tells lies for a living," Taylor told the special three-judge Scottish court hearing the case in Holland.
Taylor likewise dismissed Bollier, a supplier of timing devices, as "a liar and a fantasist" obsessed by the prospect of up to $4 million in U.S. reward money.
"He embarked on this journey with invention, dishonesty and greed on his mind.... He is a witness who was highly motivated by money," the burly Edinburgh advocate said.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 48, and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, 44, have both denied charges that they put together the suitcase bomb in Malta, then put it on a flight to Frankfurt, tagged for transfer in London onto Pan Am Flight 103.
Taylor and Fhimah's lawyer Richard Keen have suggested that the real culprits were a Palestinian group whom investigators have testified were the initial suspects.
Majid, a former Libyan secret agent turned paid CIA informer in Malta, testified behind a screen last September that he had seen plastic explosives in a desk drawer belonging to Fhimah on the Mediterranean island.
He also claimed that he saw Megrahi and Fhimah at Malta's Luqa airport on the eve of the Lockerbie attack with a Samsonite suitcase like the one in which forensic experts say the bomb was hidden.
Majid did not, however, testify that he actually saw the bomb with his own eyes. Nor did he state that either of the accused had told him of any plan to blow up Pan Am Flight 103.
Bollier's Swiss company Mebo AG is alleged to have been the source of the MST-13 timer used in the bomb, and he testified in June that he supplied timers to Libya for military purposes.
Libya was at war with neighboring Chad at the time.
But Taylor reminded the court Wednesday it was not until October 1993 that Bollier told investigators that Mebo had also sold MST-13 timers to communist East Germany's Stasi secret police.
The implication is that the Stasi might have in turn given an MST-13 timer to German-based members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).
Taylor also mocked Bollier's claim that a "mystery man" had told him in Zurich nine days after the Lockerbie bombing to write to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - using a Spanish typewriter - and incriminate Libyan leader Moamer Ghaddhafi.
"It was a story that Bollier plainly felt was capable of belief," Taylor said.
Taylor, for Megrahi, was to wind up his final arguments Thursday, when Keen, for Fhimah, will take his turn. The judges will then retire to consider their verdict.
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