A Swiss businessman wrote to the CIA shortly after the Lockerbie bombing, blaming Libya for the atrocity which led to the deaths of 270 people, the bombing trial at Camp Zeist heard yesterday.
Mr Edwin Bollier, who had long-term business links with the Libyan army and whose firm, MEBO, allegedly supplied the MST-13 timer which triggered the Lockerbie bomb, linked Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi and another man, Abdullah Sunussi, to the disaster in his letter.
Mr Bollier said yesterday he delivered a typewritten letter to the American Embassy in Vienna in January 1989 which blamed Libya and said the bomb had been contained in a suitcase.
Mr Bollier, 62, claimed he was ordered to implicate Libya by a ''mystery man'' from the secret services who visited the offices of his firm in Zurich soon after the tragedy. He said he ''made up'' the letter, describing it as ''pure fantasy''.
However, the court heard that in a 1991 interview with the Swiss authorities he said the purpose of the letter was ''to get the investigators away from the wrong track and bring them on to the Libyan track''.
The ''wrong track'' was the investigation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).
Under cross-examination from Mr David Burns, QC, defending one of the accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, Mr Bollier denied he wanted to implicate Libya to deflect attention away from East Germany's secret police - the Stasi - for whom he had also manufactured MST-13 timers and who had allegedly supplied them to groups including the PFLP-GC.
He said he had been told to write the letter on a typewriter with a Spanish letter set.
It said the CIA could contact him using a codename and also suggested he should be paid for any ''classified information''.
Mr Bollier completed his evidence in chief yesterday at the trial in the Netherlands of Libyans Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.
Mr Megrahi, 48, and Mr Fhimah, 44, alleged members of the Libyan Intelligence Services, deny conspiracy to murder, murder and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act.
They are alleged to have caused a suitcase containing a radio-
cassette player packed with Semtex attached to an MST-13 timer to be placed on a Frankfurt-bound flight from Luqa Airport, Malta.
From Frankfurt it was placed aboard Flight 103 to Heathrow, exploding on the plane's next leg from Heathrow to New York.
The trial continues.
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