The origin of the Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today's edition of The Sunday Times of Malta, following an article in last Sunday's edition of the newspaper. The letter reads as follows:]

After all these years of attempting to discover the truth about the murder of my daughter, Flora and all those 269 others, our group UK Families-Flight 103 have researched the allegations in depth. That search has always and only been for truth.

If there is one aspect of the tragedy about which we are certain, it is that the Lockerbie bomb did not start its journey from Malta.

There seems no robust evidence to show that it did do so, other than the bought ‘evidence’ given by Tony Gauci concerning the buying of clothes from Mary’s House in Sliema and the discovery of a fragment of circuit board produced in the Zeist court from within a Scots police evidence bag.

It is clear that the fragment of circuit board, which was labelled PT35b in the Zeist court, was planted false evidence. It has been repeatedly carefully analysed in the UK by a series of responsible and academic authorities. These analyses showed that the copper tracks on PT35b had been plated with pure tin, not the alloy of tin and lead which was in universal professional use in 1988.

In addition, a series of trial explosions were conducted for the Zeist defence team by a UK based explosives expert of many years standing which found that the circuit board of the bomb would have been reduced to a brown powder by the blast and heat of the IED bomb. PT35b simply could not be genuine, yet, it was said in America to be the one thing that enabled the Zeist trial to be set up.

The court chose both to ignore these findings and failed to explore how a clearly false item could have entered an official Scots police evidence bag. 

If PT35b had been genuine, it would have proved that a digital electronic timer had been used. The flight time from Luqa to Frankfurt is around two hours and 45 minutes and digital timers like that from which PT35b was alleged to have come can be user settable and encompass delays of many hours. Our work shows that an analogue timing circuit with a maximum run time of around 45 minutes was what really triggered the bomb, so no one could have sent it on its way from Luqa without it exploding over the Mediterranean or continental Europe.

We hope that some aspect of truth may emerge from the upcoming trial of the Libyan Masud but there is no way that that trial can be made to bridge this two hours and 45 minutes between your lovely island and the now peaceful fields surrounding the little town of Lockerbie.