Indicting the Bombers of Pan Am Flight 103

''The defendants and co-conspirators utilized the resources and facilities of the nation of Libya, including the JSO [Jamahariya Security Organization], to carry out their scheme to destroy an American aircraft by means of an explosive device and to kill passengers on board the aircraft."

—US indictment of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Meghrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, Nov. 14, 1991

''It's impossible for us to believe that the [Libyan] government was not involved and that this is not a case of state-sponsored terrorism."

—Marlin Fitzwater, Nov. 14, 1991

"It could have been anybody. It could have been the drug war lords. It could have been Israel to make things worse for the Arabs vis-a-vis the Western world. It could be anybody who wants to smear us. If this was not the case, why didn't they talk to us the first day? . . . Why should I extradite my own people to a different country? This is a matter of sovereignty and this is a matter of legal procedures. There are legal procedures for even extraditing foreign nationals . . . You begin by presenting the facts to the country involved; the country involved would look at the things. And if any of our people did anything wrong, we have sufficient legal procedures and sufficient laws that he gets the toughest punishment possible."

—Saeed Mujbar, Libyan ambassador to France, Nov. 15, 1991

"We reject the idea. It's not a matter for international arbitration of some kind. The murder of US citizens is properly a matter for the investigation and the adjudication by US courts."

—State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, Nov. 15, 1991

''The investigation is not concluded. We are going to continue the investigation, and we will continue it in whatever direction it leads, and if it leads to Syria or leads to Iran, so be it. What we have produced today is an indictment based on the evidence we have to date."

—Assistant Attorney General Robert S. Mueller, Nov. 14,1991

"Israeli officials say their intelligence analysts remain convinced that Palestinian terrorists based in Syria—and not Libyan agents, as charged last week by the United States—bore primary responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. . .Several officials [in Jerusalem] acknowledged that it is to Israel's advantage to make Syria look as bad as possible. But they insisted that their political considerations had played no role in the conclusions reached by Israel's secret services."

—Journalist Clyde Haberman, The New York Times, Nov. 14, 1991

"The Libyans clearly are culpable, but the question remains, to what degree is Syria innocent? Libyan involvement was traced through a terrorist cell operating in Malta. But there was another such terrorist group operating in Europe at the exact same time, this one connected to Syria. Like the Libyan group, it used Toshiba cassette recorders as bombs. Like the Libyan group, it used Malta as a staging base. The Syrian group and the Libyan group both used the same plastic explosive. Both are known to have collaborated with one another in the past. At a minimum, these are striking coincidences.''

—Journalist Steven Emerson, The Washington Post, Nov. 17, 1991

"Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command [PFLPGC] cell members were arrested and several of their bombs seized by West German police in the fall of 1988, but suspicions about the group lingered, in part because a fifth bomb, planted in a single-speaker Toshiba, was carried out of Germany on the day before the arrest and remained unaccounted for. The painstaking investigation, however, determined that the Toshiba on Pan Am 103 had two speakers and that the timer was a digital one, set to go off at a particular time. By contrast, the PFLP-GC bombs had a sophisticated barometric detonator, equipped with both a timer and an altimeter to keep it from exploding before reaching a certain altitude"

—Journalist George Lardner, Jr., The Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1991

"A lot of people thought it was the Syrians. The Syrians took a bum rap on this."

—President George Bush, Nov. 14, 1991

"The fact is that there were teams that had the complicity of the Syrian government and the Iranian government operating at that time and it was pure luck that only the Libyan one succeeded."

—Journalist Tom Oliphant, CBS "inside Washington, " Nov. 16, 1991

"It's pretty clear that President Bush and Secretary of State Baker are leaning over backwards to give the Syrians the benefit of the doubt because of the reasonably constructive role they have played in the Middle East peace process. "

— Journalist Strobe Talbott, CBS "Inside Washington," Nov. 16, 1991

"I'm sure that those who have been indicted are probably guilty as charged. [But] in matters like this, what's important is not who fired the gun, but who paid for the bullet."

—Daniel Cohen, whose daughter was killed on Pan Am Flight 103, Newsweek, Nov. 25, 1991

''While we don't have any clear evidence of direct involvement by Libyain terrorist acts for about the past year, we have to remind you first of all that sometimes it takes many years, as it did in this case, to develop that kind of evidence . . . Libya continues to operate training camps, it continues tooffer financial support, and it continues to host a number of terrorist groups."

—State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, Nov. 14, 1991

"Anger against Libya in the wake of the Pan Am 103 indictment and French judicial action has opened the possibility that oil, virtually the country's only exportable product, may soon be boycotted by several important Western buyers, including France, Italy and Germany."

—Journalist Youssef M. Ibrahim, The New York Times, Nov. 17, 1991

"The idea of squeezing the Libyan people so that they in turn squeeze Qaddafi out does not work in our region . . . Our only hope is that he will continue to create his own problems until his regime becomes so embroiled in them it will simply collapse."

—Libyan opposition leader in exile Mansour Kikhia, Nov. 17, 1991

"The US retaliated with air strikes in 1986 when Libyan terrorists bombed a Berlin cafe, leaving three . . . deal. But the use of force against an Arab state could have an adverse effect on the Middle East peace process, which is now in a delicate stage."

—Journalist George D. Moffett III, Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 18, 1991

''I don't think anything that we do against Libya is going to injure any part of this [peace] process. Nobody in that process is an ally of Libya or cares about Qaddafi."

—Journalist Charles Krauthammer, CBS "Inside Washington," Nov. 16, 1991

"It seems to me that this notion of swift, sure retaliation is really just very simplistic. I mean you don't know who to respond against. What you do is just set off an endless, perpetual chain. It seems to me it's really foolhardy. "

—Eleanor Clift, NBC "McLaughlin Group," Nov. 15, 1991

''There is no good way to respond to terrorism, because all of the options have an unattractive side."

—Henry Schuler, Center for Strategic and International Affairs, Nov. 18, 1991