Abu Nidal was no stranger to Iraq.
He had operated from Baghdad, Damascus and the Libyan capital of Tripoli when the regimes wanted to use him as a "gun for hire". It was Iraq which paid him to organise the attack on the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in 1982, an attempted assassination which prompted Israel to accuse Yasser Arafat of responsibility and to begin its disastrous invasion of Lebanon, and Colonel Muammur Gaddafi later established a close relationship with Abu Nidal. In 1985, his crazed gunmen attacked Israelibound passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing a total of 18 people.
His biographer Patrick Seale, who suggests that for some time Abu Nidal even worked for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, has written of how, when he feared treachery in his own ranks, a suspected spy would be buried alive, fed through a tube for days and then - if Abu Nidal's "court" deemed death appropriate - a bullet would be fired down the tube.
His own interrogation at the hands of Saddam's secret police, will therefore appear equally appropriate punishment for so cruel a man. Among the other crimes of which he was accused in the Iraqi intelligence report was the preparation of 14 booby-trapped suitcase bombs to be used on foreigners - Swiss and Austrian, according to the intelligence file - in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq, at the time a US-supported "safe haven", and an attempt to recruit new members for his so-called Fatah Revolutionary Council among Palestinians wounded by the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza who were recovering in Baghdad hospitals.
There are some oddities in the report and some unanswered questions.
It says, for example, that Abu Nidal originally infiltrated Iraq from Iran on a false Yemeni passport years earlier, but that this was facilitated by his own representative in Kuwait, named as Nabil Uthman. Abu Nidal was said to have communicated to Kuwait via coded messages sent through Lebanon and Dubai. The papers give his date of birth as 1939 - he is believed to have been born in Jaffa in what was then Palestine in 1937 - and state that he resided in Libya in 1984 but "had no links with the Libyan authorities". He is also stated to have been imprisoned by the Egyptian security services for two months. The man who is said to have provided Abu Nidal with a "safe house" in Baghdad was interrogated in 2002 alongside the Palestinian and is named as Abdulkareem Mohammed Mustapha.
Could Abu Nidal really have entered Iraq from Iran, whose own intelligence services, would surely have questioned him? Could Abu Nidal have lived in secret in the Baathist state of Iraq without Saddam's own mukhabarat finding him? And for how long was he interrogated? The documents give us no answers to these questions.
His end is, however, recorded bleakly. "Upon being asked to accompany those charged with guarding him to a more secure location to continue the interrogation procedures, he requested that he be allowed to change his clothes. On entering his bedroom, he committed suicide.
“Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him." Nothing is known of the fate of Abdulkareem Mustapha, only that he was "submitted to court". But we do know where Abu Nidal now lies.
"The corpse of Sabri al-Banna", the final report concludes, "was buried on 29/8/2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery [in Baghdad]. Until a final resting place is found, a marker designates the place of burial and it was documented on video as well as on still photographs as 'M7'." No "final resting place" for this savage man appears ever to have been found.
Robert Fisk
CHAPTER 4
STATE TERRORISM
LIBYA
Muammar Gaddafi, former Libyan leader
Saturday, 29 August 2009
PAN-AM 103, LOCKERBIE, SCOTLAND
The biggest festivity that Libya has ever seen in effect starts tomorrow, as visitors from around the world converge on Tripoli to join the country's mercurial leader, Muammar Gaddafi in celebrating 40 years of absolute rule.
Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of the country that once held Libya as a colony, will be one of the first on to the red carpet. Vladimir Putin, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and the King and Queen of Spain are expected, not to mention that elusive alleged war criminal, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. A summit of African heads of state will be held on the fringe of the celebrations.
Highlights of the week will include a military parade by contingents from 18 countries, with more than 80 combat, transport and aerobatic planes flying overhead, including Raffle jet fighters from France, and Italy's aerial exhibition team, followed by a late-night spectacular show on a specially constructed 3,000 square metre stage.
But observers here and in the United States, watching on satellite television, will be keeping their eyes out for just one figure amid the sea of famous faces, a sickly man just out of prison.
Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, has promised that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, will not be on parade next week. But then, Libya promised that he would not be given a hero's welcome when he returned to Tripoli after being freed from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds, only to lay on a reception that has caused waves of offence in Britain and the US.
That seems to have been part cock-up and part defiance by the Libyans, who scaled down the reception they had originally planned, and seemed to think it was all rather low key. Besides, Colonel Gaddafi has said that when Libya repatriated five Bulgarian nurses who had been accused of infecting Libyan children with HIV, they were immediately pardoned, and given an ovation when they appeared in the European Parliament.
European politicians say that the difference is that the nurses were innocent, whereas Megrahi is a mass murderer; but Colonel Gaddafi claims the opposite, and therefore might yet be tempted to put Megrahi on display as an act of defiant bravado.
Although he has ruled Libya with an iron hand for 40 years, Colonel Gaddafi still needs to consider what the Libyans think of him. Handing Megrahi over to the Scottish authorities for trial looked to his people like an act of weakness. The Libyans have always claimed that Megrahi is an innocent man, a political prisoner, which raises the question why they handed him over to rot in a foreign prison.
But their anxiety to get Megrahi back was not driven simply by an altruistic wish to right an injustice. Megrahi is not just an ordinary Libyan. He was a man with inside knowledge of the murky world of terrorism and political violence, a well-connected former intelligence officer, loyal to the Libyan regime and privy to many of its secrets. In prison, he was making notes with a view to writing a book about his trial and its aftermath. If that book is written, it will pass through Libyan censorship before anyone reads it.
For many years, Megrahi faced the prospect of spending the rest of his active life in high-security Scottish prisons, as the only person to suffer for a crime of which he was not the only perpetrator. While there are divided views in Britain about whether he was implicated in the bombing of Pan-Am 103, what is certain is that if he did it, it was because he was ordered to.
It was 40 years ago on Tuesday that a group of young Libyan army officers led by the 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi deposed Libya's prowestern king, Idris, and declared Libya a republic. The West's first official reaction was that this need not affect relations with Libya, while King Idris seemed to think it would not last long anyway.
For the next 30 years, Colonel Gaddafi's regime hurled defiance at the West. He nationalised foreign oil companies, including BP, and was the main driving force behind the sudden hike in oil prices in 1973 that sent the West's economies, and Britain's especially, into recession.
More seriously, he was a paymaster for terrorists across the world. Libya was a source of weapons for the Provisional IRA, and reputedly bankrolled the Venezuelan killer known as Carlos the Jackal. The feared Palestinian terrorist group Abu Nidal set up headquarters in Tripoli, until they were expelled in 1999.
Britain broke off relations