Lockerbie: the Swiss silence

[This is a translation of the headline over a long article in German by Otto Hostettler in collaboration with John Ashton, published on the website of the Swiss magazine Beobachter. The first few sentences, in translation, read as follows:]

Officially, the terrorist attack of Lockerbie has been solved: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan Arab Airlines security chief and officer of the Libyan intelligence service, was sentenced to life imprisonment in early 2001 by a Scottish court. The court held it established that he smuggled the suitcase with the bomb onto the Pan Am jumbo jet which on the evening of 21 December 1988 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 259 people on board and eleven inhabitants of the village died.

The convicted al-Megrahi has been dead for two years, but the case has not come to rest. Last year a 800-page report by an official investigative body became publicly available which listed a number of serious inconsistencies in the investigation. Conclusion: The judgment might well have been different if a lot of information had not been withheld from the defence in advance of the trial. Survivors, lawyers, former police investigators and the renowned law professor Robert Black have been demanding for years that the truth must finally be placed on the table.

In the largest terror attack ever perpetrated in Europe, Switzerland also plays an important role.

[The article goes on to deal with what it describes as three central questions: (1) The case of the Zürich electronics engineer Edwin Bollier; (2) Zürich as a hub for Gaddafi’s buyers; (3) Millions paid into an account in Lausanne.

For those without German, Google Translate does a reasonable job with this article.]