Iran Denies Lockerbie Bombing Link

Iran Denies Lockerbie Bombing Link

TEHRAN, March 11 (UPI) — Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham said Tuesday there was no basis to claims her country was behind the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

Arab news broadcaster Al-Jazeera said it obtained evidence from classified U.S. documents, which link the Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.

Al-Jazeera reported Tuesday the bombing was done at the request of an Iranian government upset with the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people.

Afkham said there was no basis to the claims that Iran was behind the Lockerbie “act of terror,” Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency reported.

Former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was the only person convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. Megrahi, who died in 2012, said in a December 2011 interview with the Guardian newspaper he was “an innocent man.”

An Iranian national was said to be one of the men traveling on a stolen passport on board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared with 239 people aboard Saturday over the South China Sea.

Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble was quoted by CNN Tuesday as saying the plane’s disappearance “was not a terrorist incident.”

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