The Sunday Times can reveal that two years before the Lockerbie bombing Gadaffi attempted to blow up an American airliner over Israel.

Disclosing this for the first time last week, western and Pakistani intelligence sources said Gadaffi had hired a group of Palestinian terrorists to hijack a Pan Am jumbo jet carrying 379 passengers and crew, including 89 Americans, and explode it over Tel Aviv.

Had the jumbo jet blown up and crashed into the city, as the Libyan leader intended, the carnage would have been colossal — much greater than that caused by the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, in which 281 people died.

But Gadaffi’s bomb plot failed. Pakistani troops stormed the plane while it was on the ground at Karachi airport. Twenty-two people, including two Americans, were killed and 100 wounded. All the terrorists were captured.

They have now completed their prison sentences in Pakistan. The first one to be freed has been rearrested by the American authorities, however, and convicted a second time for the hijacking.

Just before Christmas, Zayd Hassan Safarini was given three consecutive life sentences by a Washington court for murder, air piracy and hostage-taking after he struck an agreement with the court to escape a death sentence. When he was released he went to Amman, Jordan, but was later arrested by the FBI while changing planes at Bangkok airport. He had already spent more than 15 years in jail.

As a result the four others, including the Libyan mastermind, are refusing to leave prison in Pakistan. They fear that the moment they are free they too will be seized by a vengeful America and tried a second time.

Gadaffi himself has nothing to fear. Unlike Lockerbie, the Karachi hijacking has never been publicly blamed on him, although Pakistani and western intelligence agencies were soon aware that he was responsible and that the hijackers had been on a suicide mission.

In a clever ruse, Pakistani intelligence agents tricked the arrested hijackers into confessing that they were working for the Libyan leader. The incriminating details have remained secret until now, and the full details of the plot did not even come out at the trial.

One reason Libya was never publicly linked to the incident was Pakistan’s reluctance to tarnish the head of a Muslim state. There is widespread Pakistani sympathy for the Palestinian cause, which the hijackers said they were seeking to promote.

Indeed President Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani leader at the time, described the hijackers as “very motivated and highly volatile youngsters”.

Last week Blair flew to Tripoli, shook Gadaffi’s hand and said Libya could be an important partner in the war on terror. Gadaffi has gone from a reviled sponsor of state terrorism to a partner of Britain after abandoning his weapons of mass destruction programmes.

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