Three terrorists who allegedly made the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, have been identified as having been released from an Israeli jail in a 1985 prisoner exchange.
According to ABC News, the three men, two Palestinians and an Iraqi, identified as Mahmoud al-Makoussi, Tawfik Youssef and Hassan Hadi al-Attar, were recruited specifically for the task by Ahmed Jabril, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
The terrorists, whose whereabouts are presently unknown, were arrested in 1976 in Nairobi, Kenya, as they were preparing to fire rockets at an Israeli airliner.
The men were smuggled to Israel, tried in secret in a short trial and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
The three terrorists, who were among 1,150 Palestinians exchanged with Syria for three Israeli prisoners in May 1985, were reportedly recruited by Jabril to make the bomb and make contact with Hafez Dalkamoni, a senior officer of the Jabril group who was also freed in the 1985 swap.
Dalkamoni was arrested in West Germany on Oct. 26. In his car was found a bomb similar of the kind later suspected as the weapon that destroyed Pan Am 103 on Dec. 21.
HIDDEN IN RADIO-CASSETTE PLAYER
The bomb was inserted in a radio-cassette player, whose inner mechanism contained the Semtex plastic explosive with a barometric detonator timed to explode soon after it was airborne.
The bombing killed all 259 passengers on board the jet and 11 persons on the ground in the village of Lockerbie.
CBS News reported in April that West German investigators believed a relative of Dalkamoni placed the bomb in the suitcase of an unwitting Lebanese-American youth, who boarded the plane in Frankfurt, its point of departure.
The flight continued to London, where most of the passengers bound for New York got on.
A West German investigator was killed and another critically wounded in April while examining a similar bomb concealed in a radio, and a second explosive device was detonated without injuries.
Dalkamoni, 43, and another Jabril group commander, Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar, 38, both reportedly Jordanians, are currently being held in West German prisons on charges of membership in a terrorist organization and possession of weapons and explosives.
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