Evidence weak, key winesses highly suspicious

[What follows is excerpted from a long article by Dr Jim Swire published today on the Mail Online website:]

... in August [1989], the British and American relatives started a campaign for an inquiry into the bombing and I found myself appointed their British spokesman. I knew I couldn't just sit and think about Flora; I'd go mad. So I began to channel all my emotional energy into a campaign to find the truth.

As my recipe for survival, I searched tirelessly and single-mindedly for details of the political events that had led to the outrage. This led to extensive travels — to Malta, Germany, France, Sweden, the US and Libya — as the trail grew ever more murky.

I also campaigned to tighten up the lax airline security systems that had allowed the bombing to occur. At one point, I even flew to America with a fake bomb in my luggage — with a slab of marzipan doubling for the Semtex. No one challenged me, even when I took an internal flight in the US.

Eventually, in 2001, the former Libyan secret agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi — a man I passionately believed to be innocent — was convicted of the bombing. The verdict left me in such despair that I fainted in the courtroom. [RB: The only evidence that Megrahi was a Libyan intelligence agent came from Majid Giaka, a witness assessed by the trial judges as wholly devoid of credibility except, for some unexplained reason, on this one single issue.]

I'd watched every moment of the year-long trial, yet to me the evidence was weak, and the key witnesses had seemed highly suspicious.

It was clear by then that the intelligence services were concealing important evidence. Would I go to my grave, I asked myself, without ever knowing who murdered my daughter?

On August 20, 2009, al-Megrahi, who was suffering from prostate cancer, was released from his Scottish jail on compassionate grounds. Later I visited him in Libya as he lay dying.

He clasped my hands. 'I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora,' he said. 'I will tell her that her father is my friend.' He died barely six months later.

Even now, in spite of deeply compromised witnesses — two of whom were paid millions of dollars for their testimony — and disproven evidence, our repeated calls for an inquiry into our greatest terrorist atrocity in modern times have been rejected by multiple prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron.

So much evidence points to the bomber being a Jordanian terrorist, but that man was also a valuable CIA asset.

It's my belief that the US and British governments collaborated to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya, and that the two countries worked together to ensure any evidence undermining the case against al-Megrahi would never see the light of day.

Has there ever been a greater outrage with less action taken? Do transatlantic national interests trump all other values? Are the dead of Lockerbie not to be weighed in the balance?

Jane and I are now in our 80s — but we will not cease campaigning for the truth about the Lockerbie disaster to be revealed.

THE LOCKERBIE BOMBING: A FATHER'S SEARCH FOR JUSTICE by Dr Jim Swire, published by Birlinn at £14.99