Moussa Koussa and the mystery of UTA Flight 772

The dramatic defection of Libya's former foreign minister Moussa Koussa to Britain has inevitably focused attention on what role he might have played in planning the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. But as Scottish police prepare to grill Col Gaddafi's one-time intelligence chief, counter-terrorism experts in France will be pressing for the opportunity to question him about another airborne atrocity laid at the door of the Libyan regime.

A powerful explosion aboard a DC-10 aircraft operated by the French-owned Union des Transport Aeriens (UTA) over the Sahara desert in September 1989 - less than a year after Pan Am flight 103 was blown up - killed all 170 passengers and crew.

The downing of Flight 772, bound from Brazzaville via Chad to Paris Charles de Gaulle, never attracted the level of international outrage that greeted the Lockerbie disaster, though the French authorities spent years investigating the explosion.

After hundreds of fragments were recovered from the stricken aircraft, and traces of the explosive PETN were found in a baggage area, the senior French judge in charge of the UTA dossier, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, indicted six Libyans linked to Gaddafi's security apparatus (one of then the dictator's brother-in-law).  

The working hypothesis of Bruguiere's investigation was that Gaddafi had been enraged by French support of the government in neighbouring Chad during a period of high tension between the two nations that eventually erupted into a brief but vicious desert war which ended when Libyan troops were routed in 1987.    

Bruguiere was an eleventh generation judge who was then head of the French anti-terrorism unit and was regarded as one of the world's most knowledgeable and effective investigators. Under intense pressure from France, the Libyans allowed him to visit Tripoli and question a number of intelligence officials.  

Among them was Moussa Koussa, then Gaddafi's security chief, whom French sources present at the time reported had turned pale and become extremely agitated when Bruguiere confronted him with a damning array of evidence of  Libyan involvement in the bombing.  

Following Gadaffi's refusal to hand over any of Bruguiere's suspects, six Libyans were charged, tried and convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999. Although Koussa was not named in the formal indictment, Bruguiere has never made any secret of his belief that the UTA attack could not have been authorised without Koussa's knowledge.

Bruguiere's close relationship with US counter-terrorism specialists working on the Pan Am flight 103 investigation provided access to much highly sensitive intelligence about the operations of the Libyan security services.

The Frenchman's gut instinct would later be underpinned by the findings of of a US court in 2007, which ruled that the Libyan authorities were "directly responsible" for the UTA attack and awarded millions of dollars to the families of those who died.

Libya has still not paid put the full sum involved. Nor has Moussa Koussa ever acknowledged his personal involvement. ·