Thursday, 26 June 2014

No visible progress on Lockerbie "live investigation"

What follows is an item published on this blog on this date three years ago.

[The lead story in today's edition of the Maltese newspaper The Independent on Sunday reads as follows:]

Just when Malta thought it may have been seeing the infamy attached to it by way of the Lockerbie disaster subsiding, Scottish prosecutors are looking into the prospect of retrying acquitted Lockerbie bomber Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

The prospect, if realised, would reopen an ugly chapter in recent Maltese history as having been alleged to be the place where the bomb, concealed in a suitcase, was first loaded. The bomb was eventually loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in Christmas 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

But the Scottish authorities appear unwilling to let the matter die a natural death following the acquittal and the subsequent guilty verdict and release of the second accused person, and rightly so seeing that a new legal window has now opened up.

A change in double jeopardy laws now provides the possibility of an accused person to stand trial a second time if compelling new evidence surfaces, and a specialist unit at the Crown Office in Edinburgh is in the process of re-examining the evidence against Mr Fhimah to ascertain the potential strength of such a case.

Mr Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, had been accused of helping Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi place the bomb into the luggage system at Malta International Airport, where it was claimed the bomb’s fateful journey had begun.

Mr Fhimah had been acquitted in the Lockerbie trial at The Hague in 2001 after his defence argued the case against him was nothing more than “inference upon inference upon inference upon inference leading to an inference”.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the co-accused, had been convicted and the rest of his story is by now well known. He was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 just before he was about to appeal his guilty verdict, on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and had only a short time left to live. He is still alive.

But more than merely seeking once again to bring Mr Fhimah to justice, the Crown Office believes that the collapse of Libya’s Gaddafi regime could provide evidence for still further Lockerbie prosecutions.

Scottish prosecutors recently interviewed Libyan defector Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s former foreign minister and intelligence chief, when he was on British soil, and it is believed a number of questions about Mr Fhimah had been raised during the interview.

In an interview with The Times of London, the new Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC, appealed for Koussa’s fellow high-ranking Libyan defector, former justice minister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, to come forward with information on the bombing. Mr Abdul Jalil, who is now the head of the provisional Libyan government in Benghazi, had said in a number of interviews that he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing.

In one interview, he had told Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” he said, but did not describe the proof.

“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Mr Mulholland meanwhile told The Times of London in the interview, “I cannot send our investigators into an unsafe place but he [Fhimah] could pick up the phone. [RB: Surely the "he" Mulholland is referring to is Abdel-Jalil.] If he has relevant information on Lockerbie we would be delighted to see it.

“If a meeting can be arranged we would be prepared to see him in another country. The interview with Moussa Koussa was easier to arrange because he was in UK jurisdiction so it was quicker.”

[As I have said before on this blog, there will be no re-trial of Lamin Fhimah or any trial of Colonel Gaddafi for the bombing of Pan Am 103. The Crown Office is perfectly well aware that the evidence simply does not exist to make a conviction a realistic prospect; and that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi on the evidence led at Zeist was a travesty perpetrated by a credulous court which has long since been exposed, by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst many others.]

Three years later there are no signs of any move to re-indict Lamin Fhimah or, indeed, that the Crown Office’s much vaunted “live investigation” is making any progress in uncovering supposed Libyan accomplices who can be charged and tried.

4 comments:

  1. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, if you're looking in the wrong place and assuming a false modus operandi, you are not going to solve the crime.

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  2. So amusing that the Crown talked about a new trial for Fhimah.

    Those folks wouldn't want anything brought near a courthouse in this affair. All their efforts is clearly about avoiding it.

    It is laughable bluff, just like when a heavily sought criminal on the run threatens somebody with calling the police.

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  3. Pure bluff. A later press statement in connection with new cases following the change in the double jeopardy legislation confirmed that they had no intention whatsoever of going after Fhimah again. And never had. It looks as if the press were being encouraged to report him as one of the "possibles" when discussing the change in the law, and of course they would oblige since a Lockerbie connection would spice up an article. But there was no serious intent.

    In effect, they terrified Fhimah through the press merely to make it look as if they were doing something.

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  4. Double-jeopardy protection was removed to ensure someone could be convicted for the murder of Stephen Lawrence and illustrates the malignant influence of that justice campaign.

    Two scapegoats were finally convicted of murder, but not on any evidence they were guilty of murder, but on evidence they were guilty of ‘racism’.

    And this followed the nobbling of the judge, jury and defence.

    Proof the dutiful judge was nobbled was his decision to allow inadmissible surveillance film evidence [that recorded racist comments but no admission of guilt].

    This ‘evidence’ would cast the two suspects as pariahs who would deserve everything they got.

    And the jury was intimidated to convict on this ‘evidence’ because at the very same time [by coincidence] there was a nationwide high profile media frenzy condemning ‘racism’ in football.

    That included John Terry losing the England captaincy, match bans and a big fine [a sentence imposed by the FA after he had been acquitted in court] for allegedly calling a black player, black and illegitimate during a football match.

    No information was provided about what the black player may have said or done and the complaint was made [after lip reading] by ‘an off-duty police officer’!

    In this atmosphere the jury was intimidated to deliver a guilty verdict for murder to avoid being accused of racism themselves!

    And the defence failed to question the forensics.

    Allegedly this ‘evidence’ was that a single micro dot of Stephen Lawrence’s blood was found on an item of clothing of one of the accused’s clothing after having been stored in the evidence room for many years!

    The ‘evidence’ against the other was far less compelling [non-existent].

    This case illustrates how the Government is prepared to jail scapegoats in their ‘war on racism’, as well as in their ‘war on terror’!

    And for propagandist reasons Lamin Fhimah’s name appeared [not to be acted upon], but because making a criminal change in the law to convict a mass-murder, at least ‘makes sense’ compared to changing the law due to a single unsolved murder.

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