JAMAHIRYA SECURITY ORGANIZATION (JSO)

The intelligence apparatus of Libya, the JSO played a significant role during the 1970s in support of European and Palestinian terrorist organizations and was implicated in the bombing of the La Belle discotheque in Berlin in April 1986. The JSO also supervised three large consignments of explosives and weapons delivered by ship to the Provisional Irish Republican Army and shot an unarmed police-woman in London in April 1984. One JSO staff officer, Abdelbasset Megrahi, was convicted in a Scottish court convened in The Hague of planting the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988.