[This is the headline over a letter from Roger Salvesen in today's edition of Scotland on Sunday. It is a response to last Sunday's article by Kenny Farquharson. The letter reads as follows:]
Kenny Farquharson has second thoughts on the release of Megrahi ... ; I still have many unanswered questions in my mind.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board had discovered evidence which gave grounds for a second appeal. If Megrahi had been transferred to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement, the appeal would have lapsed. But he was released on compassionate grounds so the appeal could have continued in his absence. But Megrahi specifically asked the Appeal Court to abandon the appeal. Did Kenny MacAskill's visit to Greenock prison have anything to do with this?
Did the grounds for the appeal contain doubts about the safety of the evidence relating to the timing device and the testimony of the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci? If those doubts had been upheld would that have raised questions about the involvement of the CIA in providing evidence to the original trial?
If Megrahi's health had not been a factor and the appeal had proceeded to a conclusion and found the original conviction unsafe, what would have been the reaction in the United States? Dr Jim Swire and others believed the conviction was unsafe.
If MacAskill had invoked the Prisoner Transfer Agreement would Libya have honoured its terms and held Megrahi in a Libyan prison for the remainder of his 27-year term?
And if that requirement was ignored would the UK have been able to secure the return of Megrahi to Scotland to serve out his sentence?
I would love to think these questions will be answered one day, but I fear that is very unlikely.
To say that Dr Swire considers Mr Megrahi's conviction unsafe is rather like Emperor Hirohito's first public observation on WWII "that it was not necessarily going to our advantage".
ReplyDeleteCertainly the end of the trial (let alone the appeal) he KNEW that Mr Megrahi had been selected as the fall guy, in what, I consider an elaborate and diabolical (measured word) plot.
And as early as the French charges against 4 Libyans in UTA, six weeks before the Lockerbie charges in 1991, he effectively said Libya was not on his radar.
Perhaps Mr Duggan will tell us what parts of that curate's egg of a case he feels are good. Hint: the original curate's egg in the Punch cartoon was foul, but he could not disoblige his host, the Bishop, at breakfast, by saying so, in case he does not understand the literary allusion, or has never heard of it.
Care to comment Mr Cannistraro?