“Had he known of the bomb, no force on earth would have stopped him from seeing to it that flight 103, with its deadly cargo, would not have left the airport. The minister is flattered by the allegation of near omniscience.”

Botha’s spokesman Roland Carroll

“Had we been on 103 the impact on South Africa and the region would have been massive. It happened on the eve of the signing of the tripartite agreements.”

Pretorius Official Statement

October 12 2018 — Pik Botha served as his country’s foreign minister for 17 years until the end of the apartheid era in 1994.  He died last night at the age of 86. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that Pik Botha intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY

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Several pieces of evidence suggest that the South Africa authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger.

A handful of senior South African officials including the then Foreign Minister Pik Botha cancelled bookings for the flight at short notice fuelling speculation that they had been tipped off about the bomb.

The suggestion was that there was a plot to assassinate Bernt Carlsson, the designated UN Commissioner for the newly independent Namibia, who died on the flight. (INTEL TODAY – Carlson was rebooked on PA103 because he had been delayed by a meeting with De Beers officials in Brussels.)

Mr Botha confirmed that he had indeed been booked onto the flight and cancelled but described the theory as “absurd and far-fetched” pointing out that security agents did not know which flight he was on. (Telegraph)

Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story. (Guardian – Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z)

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President’s Commission report on aviation security said that “thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat”.

Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as “not real”.

Three days before the Helsinki threat, an intelligence source in the US state department’s office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: “We cannot refute or confirm this”.

In 1994, Pik Botha denied he had been aware in advance of a bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 killing 270 people.

On November 12 1994, REUTERS issued a report titled: “South Africa minister denies knowing of Lockerbie bomb”.

The minister confirmed through his spokesman that he and his party had been booked on the ill-fated airliner but switched flights after arriving early in London from Johannesburg.

He was travelling with South African officials to negotiate peace in Namibia and Angola.

Botha was reacting to a report in The Scotsman newspaper on Saturday which said a documentary film The Maltese Double Cross alleged Botha, now South Africa’s energy minister, and security chiefs were warned of the bomb and did not travel.

“Had he known of the bomb, no force on earth would have stopped him from seeing to it that flight 103, with its deadly cargo, would not have left the airport,” Botha’s spokesman Roland Carroll told Reuters after consulting the minister. “The minister is flattered by the allegation of near omniscience.”

Gerrit Pretorius, at the time Botha’s private secretary, said the then foreign minister and 22 South African negotiators, including defence minister Magnus Malan and foreign affairs director Neil van Heerden, had been booked on flight 103. “But we…got to London an hour early and the embassy got us on to an earlier flight. When we got to JFK airport in New York a contemporary of mine said ‘Thank God you weren’t on 103. It crashed over Lockerbie'”, Pretorius told Reuters.

Darroll said that South African diplomats in the United States were convinced at the time that Botha and his team were on flight 103. He said the flight from Johannesburg arrived early in London after a Frankfurt stopover was cut out. “Had we been on 103 the impact on South Africa and the region would have been massive. It happened on the eve of the signing of the tripartite agreements,” said Pretorius, referring to pacts which ended South African and Cuban involvement in Angola and which led to Namibian independence.

British legislator Tam Dalyell said on Saturday he was going to screen the documentary on the bombing at the House of Commons after it was pulled out of a film festival for legal reasons.

The film by American Allan Francovich challenges the official British and US view that two Libyan agents alone planted a radio cassette bomb that killed everyone aboard the jumbo jet and 11 people in the small Scottish town. The Scotsman said the film claims the United States intelligence service CIA allowed Pan Am flights to be used for regular drug runs to gain leverage with Middle East guerrilla groups.

It said a former CIA agent says in the film he was asked to set up a ‘dirty tricks’ operation to implicate Libya in drug running. The paper said the bomb was unwittingly carried onto the flight from London to New York by suspected drug runner Khaled Jaafar, one of the 270 victims.

Allan Francovich: The Maltese Double-Cross – Lockerbie (1994) 

The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie is a documentary film about the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Produced, written, and directed by Allan Francovich and financed by Tiny Rowland, the film was released by Hemar Enterprises in November 1994.

With a controversial premise, it was immediately threatened with legal action by lawyers acting for a US government official, and the British government prevented screenings at the 1994 London Film Festival, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and at several universities.

But Labour MP Tam Dalyell ignored libel warnings and went ahead and showed the film at the House of Commons on November 16, 1994.

Though it was never widely distributed, the film stirred up a great deal of controversy – particularly in the United Kingdom.

Reviews of the film in major UK publications were mostly negative, even as they said that the film revealed certain problems in the mainstream account of the Lockerbie bombing.

The film came in for fierce criticism from some American family members of victims of Pan Am 103 and from the governments of Britain and the United States. Other (mainly British) family members endorsed the conclusions of the film. [Wikipedia]

REFERENCES

Pik Botha: Key figure in South Africa’s apartheid transition dies — BBC

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Lockerbie Conspiracy — Apartheid Foreign Minister Pik Botha Dies