Saturday 15 March 2014

I do know for certain Megrahi never got a fair trial

[A letter from Tom Minogue headed Rough justice is published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

Thomas Crooks (Letters, 14 March) says the Scottish legal system is blind to justice and the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is acting out of a desperate distraction by searching in the rubble of Libya for evidence of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi’s accomplices.

Given the lawless situation in Libya, which deteriorates by the day, I doubt the COPFS will have any further photo opportunities in that regard.

So I don’t expect we will see our Lord Advocate in the media again posing in front of that enormous bookcase, full of weighty, leather-bound, legal text books, announcing his latest initiative to bolster the Megrahi conviction by visiting Libya on the trail of his supposed accomplices. I don’t pretend to know if Megrahi is innocent of the crime or not, but I do know for certain he never got a fair trial by the Scottish Court in the Hague. [sic]

My certainty in this regard was confirmed when the UN-appointed observer to the trial reported that there were unidentified US Justice Department people in the dock of the court apparently supervising the COPFS prosecution team.

Independence gone.

Any lingering doubts I may have had were allayed when our then Lord Advocate stated that the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, was “an apple short of a picnic; not quite the full shilling”.

We now know Gauci was every penny in the shilling, because he received a reward for his testimony reported to be $2million (ex-diplomat Craig Murray says this was only the first instalment of $7m reward) and his brother got $1m too, making the prosecution totally flawed.

If the COPFS travels to Libya with promises of rewards in the region of those doled out at to the Gaucis, it may just manage to get a host of further witnesses to testify regarding Megrahi’s accomplices.

Just a thought: it couldn’t add to the damage already inflicted on the reputation of our legal system, could it?

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