IRAN blew up Lockerbie jet - not Libya, says defector: Ayatollah 'used Syrian-based terror group to bomb Pan Am 103 in revenge attack'

• Ayatollah Khomeini wanted revenge for U.S. strike on Iranian passenger jet
• He wanted 'everything exactly the same, minimum 290 people dead'
• Claims he hired Syrian-based Palestinian terror group to bomb Pan Am 103
• Also claimed the Lockerbie bomb was planted at Heathrow, not Malta
  

By MARIO LEDWITH

PUBLISHED: 01:39 GMT, 11 March 2014 | UPDATED: 09:13 GMT, 11 March 2014

The Lockerbie bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by a Syrian-based terror group, an Iranian defector has claimed.

Britain’s worst terror atrocity, in which 270 people died when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded above the Scottish town in December 1988, has always been blamed on Libya.

But a former Iranian intelligence agent – now living under a witness protection scheme in Germany – has said publicly for the first time that the attack was ordered by Iran in revenge for the accidental downing of an Iranian commercial jet by the US Navy in 1988.

It is also claimed that the bomb was placed on the doomed flight at Heathrow, rather than in Malta as had been thought.

It was carried out by Palestinian terrorists based in Syria, he says, and not on the orders of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The atrocity killed 243 passengers, 16 crew and a further 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.

Ex-spy Abolghassem Mesbahi claims in a documentary aired tonight on Al Jazeera that former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini wanted to mirror the 1988 US strike on an Iranian Airbus and recruited a Syrian-based group to plan an attack.

Mesbahi, who defected to Germany in the 1990s, said that the supreme leader, who died in 1989, wanted revenge.

He told documentary makers from Al Jazeera: ‘Iran decided to retaliate as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeni.

The target…was to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian Airbus. Everything exactly the same, minimum 290 people dead.’

FULL STORY: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2577930/Iran-blew-Lockerbie...