Frankfurt airport security scrutinized at Lockerbie trial

By Karen Iley

CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (Reuters) -- The defense at the Lockerbie airliner bombing trial sought on Friday to pick holes in baggage security and procedures at Frankfurt airport in a bid to shift blame from the two Libyan defendants.

The prosecution says Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima and Abdel Basset al-Megrahi posed as Libyan Arab Airlines employees at Malta's Luqa airport to put a suitcase bomb on a plane to Frankfurt.

It says they put stolen transfer tags on the suitcase, which passed through an X-ray machine at Frankfurt airport and onto the New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people.

But the defense hopes to show that failings in baggage security meant it would have been possible for locally based Palestinian guerrillas to have planted the bomb that blew the jumbo jet out of the sky.

Defense counsel Jack Davidson asked witness Wolfgang Manner, a former Pan Am gate agent at Frankfurt airport, if a standby passenger could have checked in luggage without its going through the airport's computerized baggage system.

"That's what I remember, yes," Manner said through an interpreter.

In a morning of highly detailed evidence at the special Scottish court in a former U.S. air base in the Netherlands, the defense also showed that baggage details registered in the airport's computer system were not always completely accurate.

They highlighted a discrepancy in the number of pieces of luggage belonging to one passenger. Karen Noonan's ticket had shown that she checked in three units of baggage, while a document detailing passenger check-in details indicated only two items of her luggage were on the aircraft.

Earlier in the week, the defense had asked witnesses from the airport to account for a series of errors, contradictions, omissions and corrections in baggage handling procedures.

On Wednesday the court, presided over by four Scottish judges, heard how a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration report had slammed Pan Am security at the airport months after the Lockerbie bombing.

The court adjourned for the weekend and will reconvene on Tuesday morning.

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