W. Germany Denies Bomb Was Put on Flight 103 in Frankfurt

West Germany on Saturday denied a British newspaper report that the bomb that blew up the Pan Am jumbo jet over Scotland on Dec. 21 was smuggled aboard in Frankfurt, possibly by a Lebanese passenger duped into carrying it.

Instead, authorities in Bonn said that initial results of the international probe indicate that the bomb was placed aboard Flight 103 in London, but provided no details.

“The evidence we have so far is contradictory” to the newspaper report, Interior Ministry spokesman Michael-Andreas Butz said.

Saturday’s front-page Times of London story about where the bomb was placed also elicited denials from British and U.S. officials, with one senior U.S. law enforcement official in Washington saying the report was “just not accurate.”

John Orr, a police detective in charge of the investigation of the terrorist downing of the airliner, declined to comment on the paper’s story or on the reports in the British press that the bomb may unwittingly have been carried aboard by a Lebanese student.

“It would be dangerous and premature to say anything about any person or evidence at this stage,” Orr told reporters in Lockerbie, where the Pan American World Airways jetliner went down.

The student, identified as Khalid Jaafar, 21, was booked from Frankfurt to Detroit by way of London and New York, the reports said.

The London Daily Telegraph said some members of Khalid Jaafar’s family suspected he may have been used to plant the bomb and had provided details of his background and movements to the FBI.

In Washington, the FBI also refused comment, although Jaafar’s father, Nazir Jaafar, of Dearborn, Mich., said on Saturday that agents had already questioned him.

The Jaafars’ family attorney Stanley Chesley said: “There is nothing in that story that has any accuracy whatever. He is not a suspect in the eyes of the FBI.”

Chesley said Jaafar’s parents are both naturalized American citizens.

Flight 103 originated in Frankfurt on a Pan Am Boeing 727 bound for London. One West German daily, the Frankfurter Rundschau, said investigators had established that all 49 passengers--all but three of them Americans--aboard that 727 later boarded the connecting flight--the 747 that crashed, killing all 259 passengers and crew and perhaps another 11 on the ground.

West German newspapers also reported that police are following up “strong clues” that indicate the bomb attack may have been planned in Frankfurt, where two months ago police discovered an arms cache of the hard-line Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Among the material in the cache was 12 pounds of Czech-made plastic explosive known as Semtex, which is suspected in the Pan Am bombing. The cache also contained a highly sophisticated double-trigger detonator. The Times of London on Friday said investigators were working on the theory that such a device may have detonated the Pan Am bomb.