A vital witness who may make or break the prosecution case against the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing began giving evidence at the special Scottish court in the Netherlands yesterday.
Witness number "684", Abdul Majid Salam Giaka - codenamed "Puzzle Piece WF 140440" by the US witness protection programme - had waited 10 years to speak out against his fellow Libyans and former colleagues - accused of the murder of 270 people at Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988.
Mr Giaka is intended to be the prosecution's trump card, and the Scottish court is hoping the Libyan defector can prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a suitcase bomb loaded on a plane at Luqa airport in Malta travelled via Frankfurt and London to detonate 35,000 ft over Lockerbie.
But the defence maintains that Mr Giaka's credibility is undermined by his eligibility for a $4 million reward on conviction of the two accused. In the first round of cross-examination, his testimony came under strong attack. He moved to the US in 1991 after emerging as a potentially vital witness to events leading up to the attack on Pan Am flight 103 when investigators uncovered forensic evidence indicating that clothes wrapped around the Lockerbie bomb had been bought in Malta.
Mr Giaka's arrival, in a cavalcade of blacked-out vehicles guarded by US marshals and CIA agents at the fortified court complex near Utrecht, involved a massive security operation.
Inside the courtroom, TV monitors showed moving square blocks to obliterate any glimpse of the witness, while 12 special screens were erected to black out the dock from the bullet-proof glass viewing gallery.
Mr Giaka had become so fearful about his safety during his long years in hiding that when defence solicitors interviewed him in the run-up to the trial he insisted they be blindfolded.
In a halting, muffled voice, the former employee of Libyan Arab Airways at Luqa airport and an ex-agent of the Libyan intelligence service told the court that five months before the Lockerbie bombing he went to the US embassy in Malta where he told officials he was disillusioned with the Gadafy regime and wanted to defect.
"I felt uncomfortable about working for the JSO (the Libyan Intelligence Service) because of its involvement in terrorism and its treatment of dissidents," he told the judges. "I wanted to leave the JSO and expressed a desire to move to America."
He began providing monthly reports to the CIA on the movement of Libyan intelligence officers in the hope that the agency would arrange for him to go to the US. He had received some payments of $1,000 for his help.
Worried that he might be recalled to Tripoli and drafted into the army, he got the US authorities to agree to his request to have an old arm injury reactivated through surgery to exempt him from military service.
In the first of several days of testimony, Mr Giaka said he was shown 10 kg of explosives in two boxes which one of the accused men, Lamen Khalifa Fhima, kept in a locked office cupboard together with more than $10,000 in travellers' cheques at the airport. He said he watched the other accused man, Abdel Baset al Megrahi, and another suspected Libyan terrorist removing a suitcase similar to that believed to have contained the Lockerbie bomb from the baggage carousel at Malta airport some weeks before the explosion.
The duration of the Lockerbie trial, which began in May and was sitting for the 50th day yesterday at a cost of tens of millions of pounds, is still unclear but it may now end in a matter of months.