The World - News from Jan. 16, 1989

An ex-Israeli intelligence officer blamed a Palestinian faction for blowing up a Pan Am passenger jet over the Scottish village of Lockerbie last month and killing 270 people. Raphael Eitan, a former high-ranking officer in the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, told Scotland’s Sunday Post that those responsible “belong to a little-known Palestinian faction calling themselves May 15. The man responsible is Abu Ibrahim.” A British Foreign Office spokesman gave little credence to the report. Meanwhile, The Sunday Express newspaper in London said a member of the U.S. armed forces may have been duped into taking a bomb on board. The story followed reports that U.S. troops in West Germany had been offered money to take packages of diamonds to New York.