Defense Attacks Credibility of Lockerbie Witness

A defense attorney in the Lockerbie trial sought to discredit the prosecution’s key witness Wednesday, claiming his testimony was riddled with “carefully crafted lies.”

“I did not lie . . . I did not lie,” the Libyan witness, who became a CIA spy four months before the Dec. 21, l988, airplane bombing, said in response to relentless questioning by Bill Taylor.

Taylor’s client, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, is accused with co-defendant Lamen Khalifa Fhimah of sending the suitcase bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

Taylor claimed the prosecution’s key witness, identified by the pseudonym Abdul Majid Abdul Razkaz Abdul-Salam Giaka, fabricated evidence about the bombing at the time of the investigation to please his American employers.

“We see the same sequence repeated,” Taylor said. “The Americans saying, ‘We’re not going to pay you money.’ You demanding money. The Americans saying, ‘You’ve not come up with anything.’ Then you come up with something.”

On Tuesday, Giaka claimed that shortly before the bombing, he saw the defendants carry a brown Samsonite suitcase--similar to the one that contained the Lockerbie bomb--through Malta’s Luqa Airport, where he was assigned as a Libyan Arab Airlines employee. Giaka also testified that Fhimah stored a TNT cache at the airport until weeks before the Lockerbie disaster.