Kadafi May Report Pan Am Suspects Missing

Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi intends to announce the disappearance and possible kidnaping of two suspected terrorists indicted in the bombing of Pan American World Airways Flight 103 to eliminate pressure from the West to turn them over for trial, sources said Monday.

Arab intelligence operatives in the Middle East have claimed that the two actually were executed by Kadafi to prevent their testimony on the Pan Am bombing and other acts of terrorism, according to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counterterrorist operations.

U.S. government officials said Monday night that they have no independent information that the suspects have disappeared, other than that provided by Cannistraro.

The two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, 39, and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 35, have been indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury on 193 felony counts in connection with the explosion aboard the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, four days before Christmas in 1988. The bombing and subsequent crash killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

Both the United States and Britain have demanded the extradition of the two men, and the United Nations has threatened sanctions if Kadafi refuses. But Libya has declined to cooperate, saying that it will retain custody of the men while conducting its own investigation.

Cannistraro noted that word of the apparent disappearance of the two Libyan terrorists follows by a month the reported disappearance of another Libyan terrorist, Bernard Yanga, a suspect in the bombing of a French UTA jet over the Sahara desert in 1989.

Yanga was being held in a jail in Brazzaville in the Congo, where he was reported missing on Jan. 26.

In the Pan Am 103 indictment, the U.S. government strongly suggested that the Libyans were carrying out state-sanctioned terrorism that may have been ordered by Kadafi.

Calling Kadafi “an old hand at deception,” Cannistraro said that the Libyan leader cannot afford to turn over the suspects because they might cooperate with U.S. authorities and implicate him and other high-ranking Libyans.