Mohamed Abu Talb - the Swedish Lockerbie connection ?
Number 963 on the Crown witness list!
In June 1985 I was then attending the last grade in primary school and was looking ahead to enter high school - and looking even more forward to the end of all those exams and the long summer holiday. Just finishing one of my last exams, we were all suddenly shaken by the sound of a very big explosion and hundreds of windows breaking. Following came the sounds of police and ambulance sirens. We went straight out of the school yard to see what happened. A few hundred meters from our school the whole area was crowded with police and people.
A large bomb had blown up the corner between Imperial Cinema and Vesterport Train Station - the target had been the North Western Airlines office on that corner. I still remember the smell of smoke and all the broken glass. And I remember the strange figure sitting on the pavement like a mannequin while attended by firts-aid rescue workers. He was a guy just passing by that corner at the same time a bomb went off - we had never experienced a bomb in Copenhagen before and terrorism was until that event unknown in our small country. The man later died in the hospital.
During the next few weeks another bomb went off at the jewish synagogue and another bomb was found in a bag in the canals. A few years later police in Denmark and Sweden had finally found and convicted the culprits behind the bombings in my town. Their names were Marten Imandi, Mustafa and Mahmoud Magrebi and a relative of the last two with the name Mohamed Abu Talb.
Suddenly at the trials in Sweden in 1989 the name Mohamed Abu Talb was connected to the Lockerbie incident - now it seems his name pops up again. But who is Mohamed Abu Talb ?
Mohamed Abu Talb
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Born in Port Said, Egypt in 1954. He participated in the first stages of the civil war in Lebanon where he - not surprisingly - was shot at in 1976, ending up as a semi-criple with a funny way of walking. To make things even worse, someone stabbed him in the back with a knife in early 1988. In 1986 he arrived in Sweden with a Moroccon passport, asking for political asylum, which he received quickly. Friends know him under his second name as "Abu Intiqam", the father of revenge. Aside from serving a life-sentence in Malmø Prison in Sweden for blowing up parts of Copenhagen, Abu Talb is also a wellknown artist: under the name Samir Abdelmajeed he has published a novel describing the life of a Palestinian boy, whos parents got killed by Israeli invasion forces. During his stay in prison, Abu Talb has been a keen writer! But his past involved military training in Egypt, Syria and the Sovjet Union. |
In Malta he made business with another Palestinian, who had a bakery and with the bakers brother; a clothes manufacturer. In Cyprus his main business associate was Amar Dajani, owner of Kings Take Away restaurant in Nicosia. He also had friendly chats with Nabil Maksoumi, a telephone engineer and member of the PFLP on the sunny island. But guess with whom Abu Talb also spent his business-holidays in Cyprus in 1988? It was a fellow criple with a plastic leg: Hafez Dalkamouni, the same man who is suspected to have manufactured and hidden bombs in Frankfurt, Germany.
Yet Abu Talb seemed to have made another trip to Malta. The evidence list from Swedish police from the apartment of Abu Talb, dated May 18th 1989, shows an item listed as "flight ticket", route Malta, Rome, Stockholm, the ticket (with Abu Talb's name) was used November 26th, 1988.
Does this ring a bell ? And there are more connection to the Lockerbie incident:
1) During a razzia in the house of his ex-wife Djamila el-Magrebi, Swedish police in 1989 found a series of clothes which Abu Talb first claimed he had bought in Malta.
2) Mohamed Abu Talb owned a brown Samsonite travel bag - at least in 1985, according to a report from the Swedish Police.
3) A razzia in Abu Talb's apartment in Uppsala, Sweden, produced a calendar of 1988. On the page of December a circle had been drawn around the 21st.
4) Tony Gauci, the shopkeeper of Mary's House, alternately identifies and does not identify Abu Talb when shown pictures of him.But right after the Lockerbie investigation started, he had absolutely no doubt that the man who bought the clothes that were later found among the remains of Pan Am 103 was Mohamed Abu Talb.
5) Do I have to mention Abu Talbs many trips to Malta in November 1988 - and to Cyprus and Malta on the same trip in October 1988
One year after Pan Am 103 blew up in the air, on December 21st 1989 in a Swedish court room Abu Talb received his sentence: life in prison. The judge asked, if he had anhything to add. "If it's a crime for a Palestinian to love his country, then I am the biggest terrorist of all!", the former artist and ex-terrorist promptly replied. But until now he has always denied that he had anything at all to do with the blowing up of Pan Am 103.
Note: in Sweden the prison term "life" usually means about 16-20 years. A model prisoner could be free after having served 2/3 of the term. But even before release, a model prisoner can get out of prison during weekends and holidays to visit family etc.
What is happening now ?
Abu Talb is currently serving his time in Malmø Prison in the south of Sweden. Since one month he has currently undergone a hungerstrike to protest against his present prison conditions. Last month a Scottish police team came to Sweden to interview him. After this the prosecution put Abu Talb on the witness list.(translated excerpt from article in Swedish newspaper EXPRESSEN 23/11/99)
Abu Talbs current wife denies her husband had anything to do with the alleged bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988. "My husband is innocent. He has documents both from SAPO (Swedish intelligence police) and from the Scottish police, stating that he is innocent. He was in Sweden when it happened (i.e. the crash). How could he have done it ? Scottish police promised him, he should only testify in court. He didn't want to refuse. What he is going to do now, I don't know."
Abu Talb is sitting under constant supervision in a cell in the observation section of the criminal custody institution in Malmö. He is physically exhausted from a hungerstrike and emotionally upset over how he finds the system has treated him. He has been locked up for ten years in various "heavy" institutions in Mid-Sweden. latest in the institution in.
A month ago he was transferred to Malmö, since he was regarded as one of the leading forces behind unrest among the inmates of Norrtälje. In Malmö he refused to enter a normal cell. That is his way of protesting against the fact, that his wife and children now have a long way to travel when visting him. The criminal justice authorities have decided that Abu Talb is to be transferred to Hall Criminal Institution outside Södertälje as soon as a vacancy becomes available. Abu Talb has tried two times to get a fixed time limit for his penalty. The Swedish government refused his first request and has not answered the other request yet. (translation from Swedish mine * end of article)
Below are some excerpts from articles and TV-programmes talking about Abu Talb and his possible relation to the Lockerbie disaster. And yes, before I forget, guess who messed up the German police investigation into Abu Talb and PFLP's bombing-plans in Germany in 1989 ??? It was Oliver Revell!
From Bill Blum's PanAm 103, The Charge Against Libya: Case Closed? Or Disinformation?
In October 1988, two months before Lockerbie, the German police staged several raids against these cells, uncovering all but one of their five known bombs. In May 1989, Talb was arrested in Sweden, where he lived, and was later convicted of taking part in several bombings of the offices of American airline companies in Scandinavia. In his Swedish apartment, police found large quantities of clothing made in Malta. Police investigation of Talb disclosed that during October 1988 he had been to Cyprus and Malta, at least once in the company of Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the German PFLP-GC, who was arrested in the raid.
The men met with group members who lived in Malta. Talb was also in Malta on November 23, which was originally reported as the date of the clothing purchase before the indictment of the Libyans, as mentioned earlier. After his arrest, Talb told investigators that between October and December 1988 he had retrieved and passed to another person a bomb that had been hidden in a building used by the PFLP-GC in Germany. Officials declined to identify the person to whom Talb said he had passed the bomb. A month later, however, he recanted his confession. Additionally, Talb was reported to possess a brown Samsonite suitcase, and to have circled December 21 in a diary seized in his Swedish flat. After the raid upon his flat, his wife was allegedly heard to telephone Palestinian friends and say: Get rid of the clothes.
In December 1989, Scottish police, in papers filed with Swedish legal officials, made Talb the only publicly identified suspect in the murder or participation in the murder of 270 people. 40 Since that time, the world has scarcely heard of Abu Talb, who was sentenced to life in prison in Sweden, but never charged with anything to do with Lockerbie.
In Allan Francovich's film, members of Khalid Jaafar's family which long had ties to the drug trade in Lebanon's notorious Bekaa Valley are interviewed. In either halting English or translated Arabic, or paraphrased by the film's narrator, they drop many bits of information, but they are difficult to put together into a coherent whole. Among the bits: Khalid had told his parents that he had met Talb in Sweden and had been given Maltese clothing; someone had given Khalid a tape recorder, or put one into his bag; he was told to go to Germany to friends of Ahmed Jabril who would help him earn some money; he arrived in Germany with two kilos of heroin; He didn't know it was a bomb. They gave him the drugs to take to Germany. He didn't know. Who wants to die?
It cannot be stated with certainty what happened at Frankfurt airport on that fateful day, if, as seems most likely, that is the place where the bomb was placed into the system. Either Jaafar, the DEA courier, arrived with his suitcase of heroin and bomb and was escorted through security by the proper authorities, or this was a day he was a courier for Manzer al-Kassar, and the baggage handlers did their usual switch.
from BBC Scotland's "Silence over Lockerbie":
In November 1989 Tony Gauci's brother showed him an article and a photo in the Sunday Times of a Palestinian terrorist, Abu Talb. Talb, who's currently serving a life sentence in a Swedish jail, was reported to have clothing from Malta in his possession. Four months later Mr Gauci told Scottish police: "I think the photograph printed in the newspaper may have been the man who bought the clothing". The detective asked Gauci if the name was Abu Talb.
He replied: "That was the name, Abu Talb". But the US State Department fact sheet tells a different story. It says In February 1991, Al-Megrahi was described as resembling the man who had purchased the clothing items, yet Mr Gauci's statement from February 1991 actually says: "I can only say that of all the photographs I have been shown, this photograph, number 8, is the only one really similar to the man who bought the clothing, if he was a bit older, other than the photograph my brother has shown me".
DR EDGAR MIZZI (Chair of the Law Revision Commission, Malta): The man identified, or rather indicated by Gauci as the man who purchased the goods was fifty years old, about six foot high, and of strong build. Now Abdelbaset is not of strong build, he's less then six feet high, and certainly not fifty years of age. In 1988 he was only thirty-six years of age, fourteen years younger.
SHELLEY: So in your view Mr Gauci hasn't actually identified Abdelbaset at all?
DR MIZZI: He certainly has not in my view, no.
SHELLEY: Not only is identification of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi up for question, but so too is the date he's supposed to have bought the clothing. Although neither Tony Gauci not his brother could remember exactly when the purchase was made, there are a few clues available.
DR MIZZI: The indictment says that the goods were purchased on 7th December. Now Gauci says that on the day the goods were purchased he was alone in the shop because his brother was watching a football match - the European Cup Now these matches are played on a home and away basis, one on the 23rd November and the other one on 7th December. The game was played at 1 o'clock in the afternoon on 7th December, and after five on 23rd November. The man had gone to the shop at around 6.30 in the evening, so it must have been 23rd November that the goods were purchased on.
SHELLEY: And there's more evidence that the clothing was purchased on 23rd November and not 7th December as the indictment claims. At 6.30 when the clothes were bought, the customer also bought an umbrella because it was raining. We've checked the Maltese Meteorological records. On 23rd November it was raining between six and seven. But on 7th December there was no rain after 9am. So it must have been the earlier date. Airport arrival cards allegedly show that Megrahi was in Malta on December 7th, but there's no evidence that he was on the island on the earlier date.
MICHAEL MANSFIELD QC: The evidence to show here that, for example, the description of the person that he gave sometime afterwards, doesn't appear to fit, and certainly in so far as the age is concerned there's a big difference between fifty and thirty-six and the nature of the build and so on. Now one appreciates you might mis-describe somebody, even if you have seen them, you might remember certain details incorrectly, so that doesn't automatically invalidate.
But the fact that he's actually picked out someone else altogether to begin with would almost certainly render the identification inadmissible. Now the further question - date seems to be very much at large, because the shopkeeper associates the purchase with a time at which his brother is watching a football match, and it now appears that the football match that the brother was watching must have occurred on another date in view of the time of the broadcast of the football match itself. Now if it's on another date altogether than the one being alleged, namely 7th December as opposed to an earlier date in November, it throws the whole business of this identification into disarray. And I can't see at the moment any thread that's left in tact.