Did MI6 officers plot to assassinate Col Muammar Gadafy, the Libyan leader, in February 1996 when a bomb was planted on a road that he was travelling in his motorcade?
And did the plot go wrong when a militant Islamic group, which was allegedly paid u £100,000 by the foreign intelligence service to carry out the bombing, blew up the wrong car, leaving Col Gadafy unhurt and killing several bystanders?
If the former MI5 officer, Mr David Shayler, stands trial in Britain for breaking the Official Secrets Act, then it is possible these allegations and other questions may finally be answered, writes Rachel Donnelly.
Consent for Mr Shayler's prosecution was given by the then attorney general, Mr John Morris, in 1998.
But it is for the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether to go ahead with the prosecution. It was in 1997 that the Mail on Sunday published the first round of damaging disclosures by Mr Shayler, who had by that time left his job at MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, where he had worked on the Libyan desk.
He alleged that MI5 kept files on communist "subversives", among them several political figures, including the former Conservative prime minister, Mr Edward Heath, and Mr Peter Mandelson, now the Northern Ireland Secretary.
In 1997 Mr Mandelson received an apology from the director-general of MI5, Mr Stephen Lander, over the leaking of details from his file. Mr Mandelson's file was opened in the early 1970s when he was briefly a member of the Young Communist League and at the time of the apology he said: "I was not a subversive or a threat to national security. I was a teenager holding ordinary left-wing views."
Television interviews, newspaper interviews and the Internet have all been used by Mr Shayler to expound and defend his claims. The volume of his allegations, and therefore the apparently large amount of access he had to sensitive information, have proved to be a huge headache for the intelligence services.
He has alleged bureaucracy within MI5 prevented the organisation from foiling the IRA bombing of the City of London in 1993 and the Israeli embassy in 1994 and that drunkenness and low morale were features of MI5 during his six-year term.