Lockerbie questions remain

[This is the heading over a letter from Jean and Barrie Berkley in the current issue of The Economist.]

Our son was killed in the Lockerbie disaster. He was on his way to spend Christmas with us in New York, where we were living at that time. We read your article following up the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (“Nowhere to hide”, September 5th). UK Families Flight 103 is a group of relatives and friends of most of the British victims of the Lockerbie bombing. When the group was founded in 1989, it adopted the maxim “The Truth Must Be Known”. After more than 20 years we are still asking for answers to many more crucial matters concerning the disaster.

Members of the group have varying views about the guilt or innocence of Mr Megrahi, which colour their reaction to his release on compassionate grounds. Some think that he is innocent. Others, including ourselves, believe that we are not in a position to know whether he was involved in some way or not, since much of the evidence at the trial was circumstantial and unconvincing to many, including an official UN observer and a prominent academic who is an authority on Scottish law. It is also a fact that in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after considering the matter for more than three years, concluded that there were six grounds for an appeal against the verdict in Mr Megrahi’s trial.

It is deeply disappointing that the appeal has now been—unnecessarily, in the case of compassionate release—abandoned. We were expecting to learn something new from the evidence we understood would have been presented. We still hope that some way will be found to release the evidence and our members are united in continuing to demand a full independent inquiry into the whole Lockerbie story. We have asked for such an inquiry many times in meetings with past and present senior government ministers, including Tony Blair. We were appalled that the ratification of the prisoner-transfer agreement, which stipulates that there must be no ongoing criminal proceedings if a prisoner is to be released, took place just as the first part of Mr Megrahi’s appeal was about to begin.

We are now hearing much talk of realpolitik, but we believe this has been the case right from the night of the crash. Why else would there be such difficulty in establishing answers to questions about, for example, the motive for the bombing of a Pan Am flight? The American attack on Tripoli in 1986 was said by Margaret Thatcher to have resulted in a marked decline in terrorist activity from Libya. Retaliation from Iran for shooting down one of its passenger jets by the Americans in July 1988 remains a distinctly plausible motive. We are told no evidence could be found to involve Iran, but we wonder how much effort went into finding evidence at a time when it would have been highly inconvenient to accuse that country or Syria.

Another unanswered question is about who else was involved. No one believes that Mr Megrahi could have operated alone and he was charged with “acting in concert with others”. Somehow, it has not been possible to establish who these others were. Surely, this is a major failure of the criminal investigation team? There were also numerous recorded warnings, some very explicit, and a prediction from the International Civil Aviation Organisation that retaliation from Iran was likely. We would like to know why the intelligence and security services failed to stop what was described at the Fatal Accident Inquiry as “a preventable disaster”.

It cannot be useful in preventing further terrorist attacks for Lockerbie to remain “a mystery”, as it was called recently by a well-informed academic. And the victims’ families surely have the right to know the full truth about the tragedy in which their loved ones died.