By Cyrus Safdari | Iran Affairs | March 12, 2014
I am having a nice chuckle at the latest bit of rubbish promoted by the Telegraph which was recycled through al Jazeera about Iran: that Iran was secretly behind the Pan Am 103 downing, according to a “former Iranian intelligence official.” Of course, this is just a rehash of a claim that is 14 years old.
What the Telegraph — and all the news outlets that repeated the story, often adding their own bit of dramatic flourish to the tale — don’t mention is that the witness in question, Abolghasem Mesbahi, is considered to be a serial fabricator who has a long history of making outrageous claims about secret Iranian shenanigans, which never quite pan out.
This is the same ‘Witness C’ who claimed that Iran was behind the Mykonos assassinations, but then withdrew his testimony, then claimed that Iran was behind the Argentina bombings, and 9-11, and now Pan Am 103 too. I’m sure I forgot a few more in there.
Gareth Porter noted this about Mesbahi:
“But in a November 2006 interview, the former head of the FBI’s Hezbollah Office, James Bernazzani, said that U.S. intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the access to Iranian intelligence officials that he had claimed in his affidavits to Argentine officials. Bernazzani said intelligence analysts regarded Mesbahi as someone who was desperate for money and ready to ‘provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran’.”
Do you think it is entirely a coincidence that this assertion gets rehashed now, along with the capture of yet another “Iranian arms shipment”? I don’t.