Botha and his team arrived early in London on an SAA flight which �inexplicably cut out the scheduled Frankfurt stopover�. Botha and five members of his team were hastily booked on the morning flight PanAm 101 flight; the remaining seventeen South African delegates did not use their tickets on PanAm 103 but returned to South Africa. (Patrick Heseldine, Lockerbie Trial: A Better Defence of Incrimination, 2005.)
The Swedish newspaper iDaG, 12 March 1990, reported that Carlsson had been due to return to New York on 20 December but was �persuaded� to visit De Beers in London and therefore was forced to take PanAm 103 in order to be present at the signing ceremony.
A Reuters news report, 12 November 1994, confirmed that the South African party had been booked on PanAm 103, as did the South African Minister of Justice Dullah Omar when he was asked in the South African parliament on 12 June 1996 whether Pik Botha and his entourage had �had any plans to travel on [PanAm 103].�
The second parliamentary question: �Whether the South African intelligence service had any reason to be concerned about or was aware of concerns expressed by the intelligence services of the [USA] or the [UK] about a threat of a possible terrorist attack on PanAm 103?� drew a �curiously equivocal� response from the Minister: �As far as I could ascertain, the answer to both questions is no� (Private Eye, 2 April 1999).
On Patrick Heseldine, the Foreign Office diplomat who was dismissed after writing a letter to the Guardian in which he criticised Mrs Thatcher for operating a �double standard� on South African state terrorism, see the Guardian 7, 17 December 1988, 3 August 1989
