Lockerbie, the Unanswered Questions

[This is the heading over a post on The New York Times news blog, The Lede. The author is Robert Mackey, the blog editor. The following are excerpts.]

Now that the Scottish government has released Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, the appeal he had filed in a Scottish court will never be heard by a judge.

The firestorm of anger that greeted the decision to release Mr Megrahi, who is terminally ill, on compassionate grounds on Thursday is clearly based on the belief that he was responsible for the bombing, but doubts about his conviction, some of which formed the basis for the legal appeal he filed and then withdrew at the request of the Scottish government as a condition of his release, surfaced years ago. Despite what some readers of The Lede who posted comments yesterday seem to have assumed, those doubts existed outside the murky precincts of the Internet where wild conspiracy theories are spun out.

In a review of the case on Wednesday, the Scottish broadcaster STV reported that Mr Megrahi’s appeal was filed in 2007 after “a four-year review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review [Commission] (SCCRC), who concluded that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian published video of the Rev John Mosey, the father of one of the British victims of the bombing, who expressed his disappointment that halting Mr Megrahi’s appeal before it went to court meant that the public would never hear “this important evidence — the six separate grounds for appeal that the SCCRC felt were important enough to put forward, that could show that there’s been a miscarriage of justice.” Mr Mosey added, “We’d like to know what they are, where will they point?”

In an interview included in this video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News on Thursday, Mr Mosey called for a new public inquiry into the bombing and said of Mr Megrahi, “From the evidence I saw and heard in the court, and what I’ve read and seen, I doubt that he had any involvement in it at all.”

A Scottish reader of The Lede’s previous post on Mr Megrahi’s release drew our attention to this video, of a BBC interview with the father of another British victim of the bombing, Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed. Speaking as Mr Megrahi was being driven from prison, Dr Swire also called for a public inquiry and praised the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill for his “brave” decision. He added: “I don’t believe for a moment that this man was involved, in the way that he was found to have been involved.”

Readers who want to know more about the case against Mr Megrahi, and the suggestions that he may have been wrongly convicted, can consult two documentaries: “Shadow Over Lockerbie,” made for American public radio by John Biewen and Ian Ferguson in 2000, and “Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie,” made for the BBC in 2008.