[This is the headline over an article posted this morning on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. The letter from Dr Jim Swire to which it refers can be read here. The article reads as follows:]
Dr Jim Swire, in a letter sent exclusively to The Firm, has called for the swift securing of case papers relating to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi's second appeal, and for an "honest re-evaluation" of the circumstances of the incident over Lockerbie in 1988.
Swire also criticises Margaret Thatcher's Government for failing to ensure the protection of Pan Am Flight 103, and also blamed subsequent Governments for failing to convene an inquiry into the events.
"We are all in the dock now, and only by honest re-evaluation of how we failed before during and after the disaster, can we retrieve anything of value from the wreckage of how we have dealt with it," he says.
"Although our Fatal Accident Inquiry in 1993 was crippled by the concealment from it of the evidence demonstrating a singularly apposite break-in at Heathrow, just as the Zeist trial court was, the FAI did record that Lockerbie was a preventable disaster. Yet no UK Prime Minister has agreed in 20 years to our call for a full inquiry.
"The failure of prevention was the direct reponsibility of the Thatcher government of the day, very possibly through the woefully inadequate security at Heathrow perimeter, rather than baggage transfer arrangements there, neither aspect had made any useful response to the many known and timely warnings received by the UK government."
Swire, who has frequently expressed his frustration and distrust of the conduct of the Crown Office, also called on Holyrood to act on the findings of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which found that a miscarriage of justice may have occured.
"The Scottish government can now draw on the full findings of our SCCRC. The real possibility they raised that there might have been a miscarriage of justice must be resolved at once," he said.
"Not at the glacial pace imposed upon the early stages of Megrahi's second appeal largely by the Crown Office's delaying tactics, but swiftly."
Dr Swire is right to criticse the Thatcher government for not attempting to establish the exact circulstances of the planting of the device which brought down PA 103. The official version that an unaccompanied suitcase containing the IED was loaded into the system via normal check-in in Malta is not accepted by most civil avaition experts. Yet this was just about the only loophole tightened up after the attack, by requiringing that all bags be linked to a passenger or examined individually if they are unaccompanied. If, for example, the IED was loaded by means of a suitcase switch by baggage handlers at either Frankfurt or Heathrow, then this could easily happen again. Alternatively, if the IED had resulted from the break-in at at the baggage store at Heathrow, this could very easily happen again as Heathrow is still shambolically unsecure. Until an enquiry reveals precisely how where and by whom the IED got on board, the risk remains that it cuold happen again.
ReplyDeleteA very impressive article but surely the year of the FAI is wrong?
ReplyDeleteDr Swire quotes Margaret Thatcher
"The Downing Street Years" that following the Tripoli bombing there "was a marked decline in Libyan sponsored terrorism". Mrs Thatcher knew this to be untrue with the seizure in October 1987 of the Eksund (en route from Malta)and the revelation that Libya had supplied hundreds of tons of weapons and explosives to the IRA.
"The Scotsman" is holding an on-line debate on the story "Families of IRA Terror Victims Call For Libyan Compensation".
I contributed to this debate by pointing out that Libyan support for the IRA was one of the main reasons Libya was blamed for Lockerbie. I pointed out that one of the demands made of Libya subsequent to the imposition of UN sanctions was that Libya renounce support for the IRA and that in the 1994 Dimbleby lecture Stella Rimington claimed it was MI5 who identified "the two Libyan culprits."
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Well, the first step towards a re-evaluation of the Lockerbie case could be that the legal representatives of Mr. Megrahi lay all their files onto the table of the public.
ReplyDeleteThe public debate has for years been seriously impaired by the fact that Mr. Megrahi and his defense team kept silent all the time.