Delay in reviewing Lockerbie verdict obstructs search for real perpetrators

[This is the headline over two letters in today’s edition of The Herald.  They read as follows:]

Unless relevant material available to the prosecution is also made available to the defence no trial can be considered fair.

Surely Westminster, David Miliband, the Advocate General and the Crown Office know that? They were certainly told it in no uncertain terms by Professor Hans Koechler, the UN special observer, to the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi after the verdict ("How UK Government hid secret Lockerbie report", The Herald, June 1).

If the failure of the Crown to disclose the Jordanian document was the only such failure, perhaps one could park much of the blame onto the UK Government and its supporters.

But we now know that the Crown Office was responsible also for the failure to pass the evidence of the Heathrow break-in to the defence until after the trial was over, despite having been in possession of it from the first month of 1989. There is the strongest of probable links between this break-in and the Jordanian's bombs.

The bombs which the Jordanian Marwhan Kreesat was making for the Syrian PFLP-GC group in 1988 were of the air-pressure-sensitive type. They were all made to explode after 35-45 minutes flight in an aircraft, but never on the ground.

They required access for the terrorist to the actual airport of origin of the plane being targeted. It was the Crown Office (or the police) which failed to pass on information that Heathrow airport had been broken into 16 hours before the Lockerbie plane was destroyed.

Kreesat, after being arrested by German police in possession of one such bomb, was allowed to return promptly to Jordan after a phone call to Amman.

The Crown Office's claim that the absence of the Heathrow evidence made no difference to the verdict is, in my opinion, a blatant attempt at self justification.

The delay in reviewing the verdict may be an obstruction to the search for the real perpetrators.

The Megrahi family is still denied the chance to clear his name posthumously.

When I went to see the late Colonel Gaddafi for the first time in 1991, I knew I was risking my life when the safety catches clicked off on the AK-47s of his female bodyguards.

I had risked it to explain to him that I believed his men would get the fairest of trials under Scottish criminal law.

I blush to think of that now. Even tyrants deserve to be told the truth. So do the relatives.

Dr Jim Swire

I should like to compliment Lucy Adams on her dogged persistence in regard to the Megrahi case.

After 25 years in Saudi Arabia I retired from the desert kingdom in 2005, although I still travel to the Middle East in a consultancy capacity.

I remember July 3, 1988, very well when the USS Vincennes downed an Iranian civil aircraft and the calamitous outrage in the predominately Shia-dominated eastern region of Saudi Arabia following the incident, appeased six months later in the aftermath of Lockerbie. From that time until now, Libya was never mentioned as a culprit although the Palestinians most certainly were in their capacity as mercenaries for Iran.

Roderick MacSween