NATION : DEA Denies Pan Am Bomb Link
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WASHINGTON — The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration today dismissed as groundless reports that terrorists might have pierced a DEA undercover operation to plant the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
“In particular, we determined that no one on that aircraft was acting on behalf of, or was an informant of the DEA,” the agency’s administrator, Robert Bonner, said on NBC-TV’s “Today” show.
Bonner cited the findings of an internal investigation he ordered of reports that guerrillas might have tricked Khalid Jaafar, a 21-year-old Lebanese-American who died along with 269 other people aboard the plane in the 1988 bombing, into smuggling a bomb onto the flight.
Both ABC and NBC reported in October that Jaafar of Dearborn, Mich., might have been recruited to ferry heroin to the United States as part of a sting operation targeting traffickers in the Detroit area.
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