Lockerbie truth

[This is the headline over a letter from David Flett published in today's edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

The farcical “evidence” used to convict Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (your report, 22 December) was quite frankly unbelievable. Scotland’s justice system had an obvious and very serious failure as it so obviously locked up (then released just in time before a successful appeal) the wrong man.

Worryingly, the real murdering perpetrators are at liberty.

It may be politically awkward and it may bring questions about the competence of our legal institutions, but the priority must be to get to the truth about who killed all those poor souls a few days before Christmas 1988.

[In today's edition of The Herald there are two letters on the Lockerbie case.  They read as follows:]

You report that during his visit to Washington Scotland's Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland agreed with senior US Government officials that US investigators might join Scottish police in seeking further information on the Lockerbie bombing ("Lockerbie detectives will be in Libya early next year", The Herald December 22).

While I am pleased that Scottish police officers are to pursue answers to the many unanswered questions about the atrocity and the guilt of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and others, I am less sanguine about them being "assisted" by US anti-terrorist agencies.

The main contribution of the CIA and FBI to the original investigation was to offer a huge bribe to jog the memory of the main prosecution witness about his identification of a casual customer in his shop several years earlier, and to magically find a tiny piece of the detonator casing in a Lockerbie field six months after the local police had scoured every inch of the area. We don't need any more of that kind of co-operation.

In seeking justice for the victims' families, and to restore the reputation of the Scottish justice system, what would extremely helpful would be the publication in full of the 800-page Report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which found six reasons to indicate that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the original court conviction.

It is an ongoing disappointment to many who are concerned about the Camp Zeist trial that Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill and his officials have consistently found reasons to conceal this report, despite it being clearly in the public interest that it should be published. Now sections of it are to be revealed in Megrahi's biography early next year and will no doubt appear on the internet for all to see.

There is another possible scenario. Official Libyan Government documents may reveal what many have always suspected, that Libyan involvement was merely as an undercover agent for an Iranian terrorist group backed by Syria, seeking revenge for the unlawful shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner a few months earlier for which the captain and crew of the US warship were decorated and feted as heroes. How would the CIA manage to cover that up? Is that why it wants to be present at a Scottish criminal investigation?
Iain A D Mann

An extraordinarily detailed research paper published last month seems to confirm that US intelligence was well aware that a timer device of the type used by Palestinian terror group the PFLP-GC was used to detonate the bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, because of the flight time, but that even by November 1991, it was still unaware of the Heathrow break-in. The academic paper also reveals the interception of messages of relief from Iran following this switch of suspicion away from her.

During Mr Megrahi's trial in 2000, the Heathrow break-in remained unknown, blinding the court to an all-too-obvious route by which the bomb may well have been infiltrated.

The Heathrow break-in occurred just after midnight, 16 hours before the Lockerbie disaster. Because of the nature of the device, it could not possibly have been put on board in Malta.

Iran seemed to be the motivating force in the time between the US shooting down of her airbus and the "Autumn leaves" operation by the (West) German BKA.

Mr Megrahi is now near to death in Tripoli, but his guilt or innocence seems to tell us nothing about what the Gaddafi regime and Abu Nidal were up to between October and December 1988.

Scotland's compassion in allowing Mr Megrahi to go home to die looks like the release of an innocent scapegoat. The performance of her investigating police in failing to reveal the existence of the Heathrow break-in looks, at best, like a serious omission.

When a person is seriously injured, there is said to be a "golden hour" when life-saving treatment can best be given. At Heathrow 16 golden hours were allowed to elapse between the break-in and the Lockerbie bombing, with no appropriate counter action being taken.

Even so many years after the event an apology would still be welcome, along with proof that things really are done better now.

Having released Mr Megrahi in 2008 Scotland has been unable or unwilling to enforce a comprehensive review of the evidence against him, despite the findings of the SCCRC that the trial may indeed have resulted in a miscarriage of justice.

We hear that the Scottish police are to go to Libya soon to investigate whether other evidence can now be found as to whether the Gaddafi regime was itself involved in the Lockerbie bombing.

I wish them luck when they do finally get to Libya: they will need to remember it's a country where old scores against the Gaddafi regime are certainly still being actively settled.

Should the Scottish police find any such evidence, it is unlikely to connect with the story heard at Zeist, where, in retrospect it seems clear that Megrahi was no more than a convenient scapegoat. That would be a bitter pill for them and the Crown Office to swallow, and they would need great integrity to admit it.

Meanwhile Tehran is immune to accusations over Lockerbie, but the convulsions in Syria may, hopefully lead to new revelations from that direction. Perhaps the failure of the west to indict those two states over Lockerbie added to its boldness in threatening its own people as well as those of other countries.
Dr Jim Swire