Serious evidence-based concerns never addressed

[What follows is the text of an article by Dr Morag Kerr which is published today on the Scottish Legal News website:]

Dr Morag Kerr, secretary-depute of Justice for Megrahi, replies to Ronnie Clancy KC’s recent articles on Lockerbie and argues that despite the slur of ‘conspiracy theorist’ used by the UK and Scottish governments, the Crown Office, the SSCRC and the Americans, Mr Megrahi still suffered a miscarriage of justice.

I declare that the bomb that caused the Lockerbie disaster was in the suitcase seen by John Bedford in the baggage container in the interline shed at Heathrow at 4.30 pm, an hour before the PA103 feeder flight from Frankfurt landed. I challenge Mr Clancy, or anyone else, to prove me wrong using facts and reason, not the unevidenced opinions of others, and not legal technicalities.

Mr Clancy makes a number of assertions in his two-part article of 6th and 7th January, and delivers a number of ad hominem attacks on critics of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction, but actual evidence is in short supply. Reasoned refutation is conspicuous by its absence. Much of his argument consists of “the SCCRC have looked at this and say it’s fine, nothing to see here folks,” and “these people are dreadful conspiracy theorists.”

The lazy “conspiracy theorist” slur is a repeat of Magnus Linklater’s perennial articles for The Times, built on a false premise, or rather the logical fallacy of the unexcluded middle. There is a third possibility between that of Megrahi being guilty as charged and the police, the justice system and the SCCRC all being complicit in a conscious conspiracy to perpetuate a miscarriage of justice, and that is the aspect of human nature known as confirmation bias. Reading Mr Clancy’s articles it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that he too is a victim of this particular form of fact-blindness.

When one is personally invested in a particular conclusion, whether as an individual or as part of a self-reinforcing group, the act of considering the possibility that one might be mistaken can be repugnant, almost painful. This is particularly true when the consequences of having to acknowledge that a mistake has been made are wide-ranging. The brain will seize on any scrap of evidence, however peripheral to the core argument, any line of reasoning no matter how convoluted and sophistic, to shore up the original conclusion and avoid the cognitive dissonance of seriously contemplating a contradictory one.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to cherry-pick public statements by those advancing the proposition that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted to imply that some grand, conscious and co-ordinated conspiracy is being alleged (how could that possibly be, surely these people are malicious!), rather than the obvious interpretation that what is being proposed is that those determinedly shoring up the conviction are mistaken, in thrall to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. (Indeed, the very title of my own book about the case, referencing the aphorism known as “Hanlon’s Razor”, should have provided something of a clue.)

It is particularly disingenuous do this, and to base an entire argument on the premise that the SCCRC is to be trusted implicitly, in the very week of the debacle in England surrounding the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson and the very credible allegations that the CCRC “has been infected with a culture of denial”. A culture, that is, steeped in confirmation bias. The Malkinson case is not the only one. Can we really, hands on hearts, trust that the SCCRC is a completely different animal?

In the second part of his article Mr Clancy appears to call on specific pieces of evidence to support his position. Nevertheless, once again the argument is little more than “trust the SCCRC, they’ve looked at this very thoroughly,” rather than reasoned, factual refutation.

The timer fragment

Given the mysterious nature of this object it’s hardly surprising to find it surrounded by a fog of speculation and indeed conspiracy theorising. That also is human nature. However, the speculation comes after the observation that this item was not what the prosecution claimed it was, and does not negate that observation.

Dr Swire and Mr Biddulph, and indeed Mr James, are entirely justified in their doubts about the provenance of the fragment, and their criticism of the way this was handled by the SCCRC. To inject some facts into the discussion (a bit of a shock to the system, I know), the central issue is this. It was recognised at an early stage in the investigation that the circuitry of the fragment was coated with pure tin, a technique used by amateur hobbyists making single or small-batch PCBs, and which is not suitable for large-scale commercial use. This was considered a very significant finding when the fragment was first analysed in Scotland in early 1990. While the pattern of the circuitry on the fragment seems to confirm to a high degree of certainty that it was made from a Letraset template produced by the Swiss electronics firm MEBO, all the PCBs for the MST-13 timers that were manufactured from that template for MEBO by Thüring AG had their circuitry coated with a 70/30 tin/lead alloy. Thüring did not have the facilities to apply a pure tin coating. It is one of the many highly regrettable features of the Zeist trial that this discrepancy was fudged and obscured in court, mainly thanks to a highly misleading statement by Allen Feraday, an English forensics expert, and the bench was never made aware of it.

Speculation and conspiracy theorising aside, nobody knows what that fragment is, who made it or when or for what purpose. All that can be said is that it was not from one of the batches of PCBs manufactured by Thüring and which were supplied to Libya by MEBO, as alleged by the Crown. Mr Clancy refers to “… the large body of evidence, including scientific evidence, that questions the accuracy of [these] claims.” What evidence would that be, then? According to their public news release the SCCRC rejected this ground of appeal on the narrow technical point that “… the applicants have not provided a reasonable explanation as to why the fresh evidence concerning the metallurgy issue was not led at the trial,” and because they believed that the failure of the original defence team to uncover the discrepancy did not amount to “defective representation”, not because they had obtained scientific findings which contradicted this evidence.

The suitcase

This is my own personal area of expertise in the case, and Mr Clancy refers to my 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, which is largely devoted to examining this issue. I wonder if he has read it?

According to Mr Clancy, “… the SCCRC carried out a thorough examination of the allegation taking account of all the relevant evidence including information which was not available to Justice for Megrahi. The SCCRC concluded that ‘… it was not arguable that the Justice for Megrahi theory could show conclusively that the bomb had entered the airline luggage in Heathrow’.” (Note, not that this information disproved the proposition, merely that it apparently rendered it inconclusive.)

The evidence presented in my book formed part of Justice for Megrahi’s submission to the COPFS which resulted in the police Operation Sandwood. In the course of that investigation I was interviewed by officers on several occasions, going through the evidence and my reasoning in minute detail. Repeatedly, I assured them that I had no dog in this fight beyond a desire to solve the puzzle (which the original forensic investigators had so signally failed to do). I was (and still am) convinced that the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the bomb suitcase was already in London an hour before the flight supposedly carrying it landed. As a scientist, though, I always strive to maintain an open mind. I begged the police officers on several occasions to tell me if they discovered either additional evidence I didn’t have, or an alternative interpretation I hadn’t thought of, that would cast doubt on my conclusion. I stated categorically that if such evidence were to be found, I would withdraw my thesis and issue a public retraction. Nothing of that nature happened. Contact with Operation Sandwood tailed off and then ceased entirely, with no explanation. All I ever got was a personal jibe from Kenny Macaskill to the effect that (and I paraphrase) “I know something you don’t know, so you’re wrong.”

This is more or less exactly Mr Clancy’s position, echoing the position of the SCCRC. They know “something” that allows an entire book full of minute detail and closely-reasoned argument to be dismissed, but no hint at all is given of what this something might be. I find the secrecy over this point very disturbing.

The best guess I can make is that Operation Sandwood, Mr Macaskill, the SCCRC and Mr Clancy are placing the supposed confession of Abu Agila Masoud to having been involved in the smuggling of the bomb on board Flight KM180 in Malta above my analysis. However, this “confession” is a highly contradictory and confusing document, in places flatly contradicting evidence relied on to convict Megrahi. False confessions are one of the most frequent causes of miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions, and indeed in this case the lord advocate was unable to assure Justice for Megrahi that he was confident that the confession had not been obtained by torture. My position on this matter is that if someone confesses to doing something that provably didn’t happen, it still didn’t happen.

My analysis of the evidence, which is entirely theoretical, has recently been independently confirmed experimentally.[1] A Dutch forensic scientist, Dr Erwin Vermeij, carried out multiple test explosions using used aluminium LD3 containers with mocked-up suitcases and IEDs made to simulate the Lockerbie bomb, with the bomb suitcase in various positions in the container. These experiments were far more rigorously designed and executed than the botched tests carried out in the USA in 1989. His conclusion states:

Regarding the damage to the luggage containers, experiment 7 where the IED suitcase was in the first (bottom) layer with one end slightly elevated on to the horizontal strut comes closest to replicating the damage observed on LD3 luggage container AVE4041. This suggests that the reported so called Claiden spot is probably too high, presuming that 450g explosive was used. If the center of the Lockerbie bomb was really on the Claiden spot, the only possibility is that the explosive charge must have been larger than 450g.

It was demonstrated in court that it was impossible to get more than 450g of Semtex inside the radio-cassette player used to construct the IED. The position that “comes closest” to the damage observed on the Lockerbie luggage container is the one described in my book.

The luggage tags

The single piece of actual evidence discussed by Mr Clancy is the peripheral matter of an entry in the diary of Lamin Fhimah, Megrahi’s co-accused, relating to his obtaining “taggs” (sic) for Megrahi. As a statement by someone other than Megrahi himself, this was held by the trial court not to be evidence against him. However, it was admitted by the court in the 2021 appeal in order to “considerably bolster” the evidence that the bomb was infiltrated in Malta. There’s no evidence that these tags were even obtained, let alone given to Megrahi, or what he did with them if they were. The accuseds’ explanation was that they were needed as samples to get a printing quote. The re-introduction of this extremely trivial and non-probative evidence suggests to me that someone was getting a bit desperate.

The identification evidence

This is barely touched on by Mr Clancy, despite its actually being the central issue as regards Megrahi’s conviction. He describes it as “qualified (resemblance) identification”, which is being remarkably kind. Frankly, no normal human being, as opposed to angels dancing on the heads of pins, could possibly imagine that the bribed and cajoled Tony Gauci’s fifty-year-old, over six feet tall, dark-skinned, heavily-built customer was in fact the 36-year-old, five feet eight, light-skinned, slightly built Megrahi. Even Tony prefaced his line-up “identification” with “Not the man I saw in my shop, but…” The identification is in fact the shaky hook on which the entire daisy-chain of circular reasoning dreamed up by the police investigation and embellished by the trial court was hung. It has been challenged by four eminent experts in the psychology of memory – Prof Timothy Valentine (70 pages, 2008), Professor Steven Clark (49 pages, 2008), Professor David Canter (105 pages, 2010) and Professor Elizabeth Loftus (seven page journal publication, 2013[2]). The full list of problems with it is much too long to go into here, and it seems yet another problem has now arisen.

One of the things Masoud allegedly confessed to doing, in these interviews in the prison dungeon in Tripoli, was buying the clothes from Tony Gauci. Tony described one customer, not two, and as he has since died, the police have no further opportunity to go back and persuade him to change his statement on that point also. If Masoud bought the clothes, Megrahi didn’t, and if he didn’t, the entire case is a pile of daisy-heads on the floor. However, if Masoud’s confession is required in order to refute the suitcase evidence, this must create a bit of a dilemma for his prosecutors.

Conclusion

Over many years Justice for Megrahi has raised serious, evidence-based concerns about the conviction. These concerns have never been addressed in detail, or at all, by the Crown Office or by any of those who support the conviction – they have simply been cavalierly dismissed and those raising them stigmatised as conspiracy theorists. That must now change. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dared to challenge the conviction of Oscar Slater, the response of the prosecution authorities was as dismissive as that of the Crown Office in relation to the Megrahi conviction. But history proved Conan Doyle to be right. 

Reference 1: Vermeij, E. (2024) Survivability of IED components, suitcases, their contents and luggage containers in suitcase bombs. Elsevier: Forensic Science International: Reports, vol 9, July 2024.

Reference 2: Loftus, E. F. (2013) Eyewitness testimony in the Lockerbie bombing case. Memory, vol 21 issue 5, pp 584-590.

Magnus at it again

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Magnus Linklater headlined A chance to challenge Lockerbie conspiracy theories published in today's edition of The Times:]

Suspect’s extradition to the US represents a pivotal moment in a case that has long been dogged by doubt

For those who have followed the tortuous Lockerbie trail, this is a key moment, the first chance to test not just Masud’s involvement but to challenge the long list of conspiracy theories that have dogged the case since the outset. It is almost conventional wisdom to argue that the one man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was innocent; that Libya had nothing to do with the attack and that agencies on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to fix the evidence so as to shift blame away from the most likely perpetrators, a Palestinian terrorist group sponsored by Iran.

Many thousands of words have been devoted to sustaining a sequence of events that has US intelligence agents planting or altering a bomb fragment to implicate Libya, then coaching a Maltese witness into identifying Megrahi as the man who came into his shop in December 1988 to buy clothing later used to wrap the bomb. So dodgy was the witness and so conflicting his evidence, say Megrahi’s defenders, that the charge against him is unsustainable and the Scottish judges and lawyers who convicted him are guilty of a miscarriage of justice.

As with all conspiracy theories, this one requires a massive suspension of disbelief. Not just the falsifying of evidence, or the manipulation of a witness, but the number of people who would have to know about it yet have remained silent — intelligence agents and detectives on both sides of the Atlantic, Scottish lawyers and judges, bomb specialists and other technicians — a rogue’s gallery of experts, all subscribing to a lie.

There is one fact, however, that no conspiracy theory can quite explain. Present in Malta the day when, prosecutors say, the bomb was loaded on to a connecting flight from Luqa airport, was not only the Libyan intelligence officer Megrahi, but a shadowy figure who, like Megrahi, left the island later that day to return to Libya.

A long and detailed investigation to find out who was behind the attack was embarked upon by Ken Dornstein, an American film-maker whose brother died on Pan Am 103. His inquiries began with a bomb exploding in a Berlin nightclub in 1986, killing two US servicemen. Dornstein succeeded in identifying the man who made the bomb and was sent a picture from Libya that confirmed it. That man was Masud. His presence in Malta with Megrahi is confirmed by passport records. Later he appears as a blurred figure behind bars in a Libyan court, facing charges on a separate bombing offence. He is seen again, in the back of a car, among the welcoming party when Megrahi returns to Libya after release from a Scottish jail in 2009.

Those who claim Megrahi was wrongly convicted have a lot of explaining to do. Why, if he was innocent, was he in Malta with a known bomb-maker? And how did all those clever US agents manage to ensure the men they would later frame were in the right place at the right time? I am sure the conspiracy theorists will come up with an answer. It had better be good.

[Magnus Linklater has a long history of branding as conspiracy theorists those of us who remain unconvinced of the legal justification for the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The manifold replies to this repeated Linklater slur can be found here. His silence in response to challenges to answer the points raised in them is eloquent. Examples of such rebuttals by John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr are to be found in Lockerbie and the claims of Magnus Linklater.]

The enduring scandal of al-Megrahi’s conviction

[Don't call this a conspiracy theory is the heading over a letter published in The Times today. It reads as follows:]

Sir, Magnus Linklater (“Why I cannot believe Lockerbie conspiracies”, Scottish edition, Dec 21) has cast as conspiracy theorists those of us who believe that Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted. Yet in making his case he is guilty of a common failing of conspiracy theorists — misrepresenting certain facts and sidestepping others. He suggests that we believe that a fragment of circuit board was substituted for the one that implicated al-Megrahi and Libya. Had he read my biography of al-Megrahi he would know that I knocked down that claim. He would also know that I set out the scientific evidence — much of which had been produced by prosecution experts — that disproved the prosecution’s central claim that the fragment originated from a batch of timers that was supplied to Libya. Mr Linklater also ignores powerful evidence, most of which was unavailable to al-Megrahi’s trial judges, that the Lockerbie bomb began its journey at Heathrow, rather than, as the prosecution claimed, at Luqa airport, Malta. The enduring scandal of al-Megrahi’s conviction is that the prosecution failed to release numerous items of exculpatory evidence to the defence. Whether that was a result of a cock-up or a conspiracy is moot. What matters is that al-Megrahi was denied a fair trial.

John Ashton

Author, Megrahi: You Are my Jury

Only a full court hearing will lead us to the truth on Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Jim Swire in today's edition of The Times.  It reads as follows:]

I am not a campaigning kind of guy by nature, nor a leader. What brought that out in me, and has led me to fight for justice for all these years, was a deep-seated anger. What caused that was my access to a warning that the British government had received in October 1988, two months before the bombing. It was from the West German authorities and said that they had detected a Syrian-based terrorist group constructing fully automatic bombs that were to be used against aircraft.

It said the bombs were designed to explode about 30 minutes after the plane had left the tarmac. A few weeks later, I got hold of a telex from the Department of Transport to Heathrow dated early December 1988. Addressed to security personnel, it said “where searchers cannot satisfy him or herself as to whether an image seen on [an] x-ray machine is satisfactory or not, it should be put in the aircraft hold”.

That took my breath away and left me furious. It led to the death of my daughter Flora, the day before her 24th birthday, and 269 others. I felt the loss of Flora’s life could not be left to be manipulated and lied about.

My hope now is what it has always been: that we get a fair playing field of a court and the circumstances of the disaster are fully examined. If that happens my belief is that the guilty verdict will be overturned and a new inquiry will have to find out why the earlier one went so wrong.

It is time for the truth. We deserve nothing less. I only hope I will remain on this planet long enough to see justice, finally, be done.

[RB: Regrettably, the SCCRC's decision to refer the Megrahi conviction back to the appeal court will not lead to the circumstances of the disaster being fully examined. The new appeal will be limited to the grounds accepted by the Commission, unless Megrahi's lawyers succeed in persuading the court to add additional items to the grounds of appeal, something that I anticipate the appeal court will be in the highest degree unlikely to accede to.

In a comment in today's edition of The Times Magnus Linklater writes that the Commission found "that the original trial reached the right verdict given the evidence available". This is wholly and utterly wrong. Here is what the SCCRC actually said:]

the Commission believes that ... a miscarriage of justice may have occurred because no reasonable trial court, relying on the evidence led at trial, could have held the case against Mr Megrahi was proved beyond reasonable doubt.

[It could hardly be clearer that the SCCRC is saying that, on the evidence led at Camp Zeist, the court reached the wrong verdict, indeed one that no reasonable court could have reached.]

Scottish legal system refusing to face the fact that it made a dreadful mistake

[What follows is the text of a section of Robin Ramsay's The View from the Bridge (starting on page 11) in the current issue (no 77, Summer 2019) of Lobster magazine:]

On 21 March the front page of The Times had a story headlined ‘Former Stasi agents questioned over role in Lockerbie bombing’. It reported that ‘nine officials from the Scottish Crown Office are focusing on the role of the East German intelligence service’ in the event. The piece had three authors, one of them being Magnus Linklater, sometime editor of The Scotsman and much else besides[1]. I shared a platform with Mr Linklater last autumn in Edinburgh. We were nominally discussing conspiracy theories and Linklater regaled us with his experiences on the so-called ‘Hitler diaries’ story while at The Sunday Times. He also told us that he believed the official version of Lockerbie, that the Libyans had indeed done the bombing. I asked the audience who among them believed this: no-one else did.

By coincidence, on the same day as The Times piece I received a prompt to look at an 8 year-old piece on the Lockerbie plane bombing which is on Cryptome[2]. The article, ‘Policing Lockerbie, A Bella Caledonia Special Investigation’, is no longer on the Bella Caledonia site. Let us take this back a step.

In 2005 The Scotsman ran an article, ‘Police chief – Lockerbie evidence was faked’[3]. This began: 

‘A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement
claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.
The retired officer – of assistant chief constable rank or higher – has
testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in
convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.’[4]

The police officer was not named by The Scotsman. The Bella Caledonia article, however, did name him and it was a legal threat from his lawyer (also reproduced on Cryptome) which resulted in the article being taken off the Bella Caledonia site. [RB: That the person named by Bella Caledonia most certainly was not The Golfer was established on this website here and here.]

That the Libyans did Lockerbie is believed by almost no-one[5]. There was little evidence against the unfortunate Al Megrahi who was convicted of it, and what they had was either paid for by the Americans[6] or fabricated and planted[7]. Former CIA officer Robert Baer told the Daily Telegraph in 2014 that the CIA ‘believed to a man’ that Iran not Libya was behind the attack[8].

A tiny fragment of circuit board purportedly found at the Lockerbie site was allegedly made by the Swiss firm MEBO run by Edwin Bollier. At the trial of Al Megrahi, Bollier was questioned and he acknowledged making electronic equipment for the Stasi and Libya[9]. More than eighteen years after the original wrong verdict, the Scottish Crown office is now talking to former Stasi officers. This suggests that, so long as the Scottish legal system can say that they are still ‘pursuing leads’, it won’t have to face the fact that it made a dreadful mistake in going along with the Americans’ fabrication. 

1 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Linklater.

2 https://cryptome.org/0005/cia-golfer.pdf

3 https://www.scotsman.com/news/police-chief-lockerbie-evidence-was-faked-1-1403341

4 Oddly, The Scotsman has got the year of the Pan Am flight 103 bombing wrong. It was on 21 December in 1988, not 1989. 

5 https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi.

6 The key witness was given $2 million by the US See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/02/lockerbie-documents-witness-megrahi.

7 See, for example, http://tinyurl.com/y2f6aort or https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-6502363/Vital-Lockerbie-evidence-doomed-flight.html and http://tinyurl.com/
yytsht45 or https://gosint.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/lockerbie-30th-anniversary-pt-35bthe-most-expensive-forgery-in-history-poll/. A detailed analysis of (the lack of) evidence is at http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com.

8 http://tinyurl.com/y3aupqsn or https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism- 
in-the-uk/10688412/Lockerbie-bombing-CIA-believes-to-a-man-that-Iran-carried-out-attackon-Pan-Am-Flight-103-says-former-agent.html

9 Bollier and Mebo were discussed by Simon Matthews towards the end of his ‘The devil has all the best songs: reflections on the life and times of Simon Dee’ in Lobster 58. See https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster58/lobster58.pdf. On this account Bollier looks more like a CIA asset than anything else. Mr Bollier has his own Website on which some of the Lockerbie issues are discussed. See
http://www.mebocom-defilee.ch.

Ex-leader of Malta casts doubt on conviction of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi

[This is part of the headline over a report published today in The Times. It reads in part:]

Malta’s longest-serving prime minister has claimed it was “impossible” for the Lockerbie bomb to have left the island and suggested that a miscarriage of justice had taken place.

Eddie Fenech Adami, who led the country at the time of the atrocity 30 years ago, also raised doubts about the reliability of the witness whose evidence led to the conviction of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.

A panel of Scottish judges heard evidence that a bomb was loaded onto Air Malta flight KM-180, which left the island for Frankfurt on December 21, 1988, before being taken to London and transferred on to Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie — with the loss of 270 lives — the next day.

Testimony by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, was central to linking al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, to the case and securing his conviction.

However, Mr Fenech Adami, who served as prime minister between 1987 and 1996 and from 1998 to 2004, has challenged the verdict reached by a Scottish court in the Netherlands.

He wrote in his memoirs: “The evidence against al-Megrahi purported to show he had wrapped a bomb in clothing bought from a shop in Sliema and placed it in a suitcase that made its way to Heathrow from Malta via Germany.

“We have never accepted this theory and no one has ever proved us wrong.

“My opinion is that it was technically impossible for the bomb to have taken such a complicated route. It would have been a very haphazard method of executing this act of terrorism.”

He added: “The only evidence against al-Megrahi was the testimony of Tony Gauci. I have always considered Gauci, who was paid by the Americans, to be a very unreliable witness.”

Air Malta insisted that no passengers or luggage had transferred from its Frankfurt flight to Pan Am 103. Its 1989 internal investigation concluded: “All 55 pieces of baggage have been accounted for and every one of the 39 passengers has been identified.”

Mr Gauci had described his customer as 6ft and aged about 50, while al-Megrahi was 36 and 5ft 8in. (...)

Unconfirmed reports have suggested that Mr Gauci, who died in 2016, was paid £1.6 million by the FBI through its “rewards for justice” programme. [RB: It is odd to describe the reports as unconfirmed. There is no doubt that payments were made to both Tony and Paul Gauci: Lockerbie reward payouts ‘above board’.] 

Guido de Marco, Malta’s justice minister at the time of the bombing [RB: and later President of Malta], wrote before his death in 2010: “It seemed unrealistic that a timing device could have been put inside unaccompanied baggage that took such a complicated route to get on the Pan Am plane, since there was so much room for error.”

He also clashed with the UK authorities. He wrote: “I learnt that the British secret service was tapping the telephones of people in Malta without consulting the authorities. I ordered the investigating team to stop any activity in Malta.” Mr Fenech Adami is unable to comment further due to ill health.

[RB: Today's edition of The Times also contains an article by Magnus Linklater headlined Lockerbie conspiracy theories that challenge al‑Megrahi’s conviction. As an antidote to Mr Linklater's notorious hostility to any criticism of the Megrahi conviction, read this piece by John Ashton: Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater.

A further article by Magnus Linklater headlined Lockerbie bombing prosecutors close in on Libyan suspects contains the following:]  

Scottish prosecutors are closing in on two Libyans suspected of planning the Lockerbie bombing.

Using diplomatic contacts that led to an agreement to extradite the brother of the Manchester bomber, US and Scottish investigators are hopeful they will be given permission to interview Abdullah al-Senussi, said to have been the Lockerbie mastermind, and Abu Agila Mas’ud, the bomb maker.

Both are held in a Libyan prison. (...)

So far, 30 years after the terrorist attack, only one suspect, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, has been convicted for the bombing. He died in May 2012.

Some campaigners claim the conviction of al-Megrahi was a miscarriage of justice, but the Crown Office is certain that the original verdict was correct.

Inquiries by The Times have revealed that the Crown Office commissioned an independent report into allegations that there had been a deliberate plan to steer evidence away from Palestinian terrorists and towards Libya. Investigators were asked to “double and triple check” every aspect of the case.

They concluded that the original conviction was sound, and that allegations that evidence had been tampered with, or deliberately withheld could not be substantiated.

A Crown Office official said: “An independent evidence review did not find any evidence to support claims al-Megrahi, the only man jailed for the bombing, was wrongly convicted.”

Ministers must end the Lockerbie secrecy

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater in today's edition of The Times. It reads in part:]

Secrecy is the enemy of truth. It suggests the real facts are being withheld, encouraging suspicion, conspiracy theories and fake news. In the case of the Lockerbie bombing, it plays into the hands of those who believe that we have been hoodwinked about the evidence. They are adamant that prosecutors got the wrong man. The latest disclosures make the search for truth more complicated. (...)

It is 30 years since a PanAm plane crashed on to the town, and in that time the idea has grown that governments colluded in pointing the finger at Libya and away from the real perpetrators. According to this, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted, was innocent and the real plotters were Palestinians backed by Iran.

Why else, goes the theory, would British intelligence have been tapping phones and monitoring calls? As Marc Horne revealed in The Times last week, relatives of those who died are convinced that, in the aftermath of the atrocity, their conversations were recorded. They would hear “clinks and clunks” on the line; files disappeared from computers; odd people pretending to be journalists turned up to interview them. [RB: Marc Horne's articles can be read here and here.]

Papers released by the UK government from the national archives show that Lynda Chalker, a Foreign Office minister, wrote to the late Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, then Lord Advocate and in overall charge of the investigation, to express concern about victims’ groups on both sides of the Atlantic. They “will need careful watching”, she wrote.

Not surprisingly, the surviving relatives, or at least those who believe there has been a miscarriage of justice, smell a rat. They think ministers were worried lest they stumble on an inconvenient truth: that intelligence agencies were busy doctoring facts to implicate Libya.

The latest revelations seem to bolster that view. It is not just the sketchy evidence that has been revealed, but the dozens of documents that are being retained, and will not be released for another five years at least. They include, bizarrely, reports brought back from Libya by the late Labour MP Bernie Grant who travelled several times to Tripoli to interview members of Gaddafi’s regime and left his papers to a London college. They have been closed to members of the public by the government until 2025.

If you wanted to encourage the idea that there has been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, you could hardly do better than that. As Aamer Anwar, the Megrahi family’s lawyer, who hopes to run another appeal, says: “It comes as no surprise that the security services were instructed to spy on those British relatives who to date have never given up in their pursuit of the truth.”

On closer examination, the revelations do little more than muddy the waters. It is intriguing to note, for instance, that the period in 1989 when phones were allegedly being tapped, long precedes the implication of the Libyans. The main suspect was a Palestinian group known as the PFLP-GC, allegedly backed by the Iranian government, seeking revenge for the sabotage of one of its planes. Briefings from Lord Fraser’s office pointed in that direction. Why officials should have wanted to tap the phones of relatives is far from clear.

In May 1989, a fragment of a bomb timer was found in the charred collar of a shirt packed in the suitcase that had held the bomb. The significance of its discovery was not immediately apparent but from it would stem an investigation that eventually pointed to Megrahi and the Libyans.

According to campaigners such as Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the attack, and Robert Black, QC, architect of the Lockerbie trial, that evidence was manufactured, probably by the CIA, because neither UK nor US governments wanted a confrontation with Iran at the time. Libya was a more convenient target, and Megrahi a disposable suspect. They believed their communications continued to be monitored.

Many thousands of words have been published to sustain the case. That does not mean it is true. For all the painstaking work done to cast doubt on the course of the trial and conviction of Megrahi, it takes a massive suspension of disbelief to accept that a decision was made at the highest level to suppress evidence, substitute false information and tilt the Scottish justice system in the direction of a miscarriage of justice. It would have involved hundreds of intelligence agents, criminal investigators and government officials, to say nothing of Scottish lawyers and judges.

Maybe that is what happened, but maybe is not enough. To allow the allegation to hover in the air is to undermine natural justice. It is unfair to the relatives, it casts doubt on the integrity of police and politicians, it clouds understanding of history.

Withholding evidence that might cast light on this matter is no way to resolve it. Many relatives have gone to the grave with uncertainty hanging over them. By 2025, when some or most of the papers are due to be released, others will have followed. There may be an appeal but, in the meantime, the government should come clean over its knowledge on Lockerbie and the investigation. It is hard to believe national security is still at risk 30 years on. Ministers have a responsibility to the dead and to the living. Justice suppressed, they should remember, is justice denied.

[RB: Mr Linklater once again contends that we Lockerbie dissentients are positing a grand conspiracy involving "hundreds of intelligence agents, criminal investigators and government officials, to say nothing of Scottish lawyers and judges". This is just nonsense. Here is what John Ashton wrote on a previous occasion when Mr Linklater made the same allegation:]

According to Mr Linklater's Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: 'the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that'. [RB: Responses to that article can be read here.]

The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Megrahi's supporters, have ever made such a claim.

To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful.

In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: 'I've been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof'. Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Megrahi's supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee has formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.

The US government was motivated to exonerate Iran, I believe, because the Iranians knew where the Iran-Contra skeletons lay and also held sway over the US hostages held in Lebanon – whose safe return was an obsession of the Reagan-Bush White House. Another obsession was Libya. As Watergate journalist Bob Woodward revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency's history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation – that is, lying and fakery – was at its core.

The Lockerbie investigation was supposedly driven by old-fashioned detective work, but, as we have learned over the years, behind the scenes the CIA played a key role. We now know that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 timers to Libya. Is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted it in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing?

I have done many months of my own old-fashioned detective work among the hundreds of people who searched the crash site. They witnessed American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, CIA agents searching the site without police supervision, and substantial drug and cash finds – all things that have been officially denied. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should reveal them. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should do some door knocking of his own.

Lockerbie case review is a welcome step in the interests of justice

[This is the headline over an editorial published today in The Herald. It reads as follows:]

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s decision that it will look again at the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber is welcome.

The SCCRC has decided it is “in the interests of justice” to proceed with a review.

This paper has long argued for a public inquiry into the case, on the basis that there are a number of serious concerns about the way the guilty verdict against the late Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was reached.

This includes the withholding of key evidence from the defence, doubts about the identification of Al-Megrahi, and the motivation of witnesses who were paid.

It is a matter of regret that Al-Megrahi chose to drop his appeal against conviction in 2009. The SCCRC has now accepted the widely held supposition that Al-Megrahi chose not to pursue his appeal because he believed it would help secure his release from jail on compassionate grounds, suffering from terminal cancer.

For Al-Megrahi, any vindication will be posthumous. He continued to deny his involvement until his death from prostate cancer in 2012.

The SCCRC review is not the public inquiry many still seek. But it is important the conviction is scrutinised. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the terrible event of December 21 1998, there will be concern that Scottish justice will not emerge from any review in a good light. But should mistakes have been made, it is important they are acknowledged.

Whether or not Al-Megrahi was guilty of involvement, others must have played a part too. Relatives of those who died have described this as “unfinished business”. This review could put to rest many of their unanswered questions. It is in their interests and in the interests of public confidence in Scottish justice for the truth to finally emerge.

[RB: A leader headed Honest Truth in today's edition of The Times reads in part:]

Those who witnessed the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing on December 21, 1988 will never forget it. An explosion in the baggage hold of Pan Am Flight 103 blew the 747 passenger jet to pieces in the skies above Dumfries and Galloway. (...)

Now the case of the only man convicted of the atrocity is to be re-examined. Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was found guilty in 2001 after a trial held, under Scots law, in a special court constructed in the Netherlands. He died of terminal prostate cancer in Libya in 2012, after being released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds after serving eight years of a 27-year sentence. Yesterday the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said it would carry out a review of al-Megrahi’s conviction. It will consider whether the case should be referred for a new appeal.

Those who lost loved ones in the Lockerbie tragedy have been forced to grieve in public and their desire for justice has manifested itself in a range of different ways. Many of the bereaved, particularly in the United States, believe al-Megrahi’s conviction was just. They largely accept the version of events presented by Scottish prosecutors and supported by the UK and US governments. Other relatives have been troubled by what they see as inconsistencies in the evidence and to varying degrees they have lost confidence in the authorities’ handling of the case. Meanwhile an entire Lockerbie industry has grown up and the story has become a magnet for cranks, activists, self-publicists and conspiracy theorists. They have commandeered the known facts and embellished them to their own purpose. [RB: Magnus Linklater really is a sore loser! I predict that he will eventually have a lot more to be sore about.]

The Lockerbie story has remained in the public eye in the years since al-Megrahi’s conviction because the world keeps changing, casting new light on the facts as they are known. There have been revelations about the circumstances in which Colonel Gaddafi, after talks with Tony Blair in what became known as “the deal in the desert”, surrendered the Lockerbie accused for trial. Investigative journalists have spent much time weighing the evidence supplied by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who was a key witness for the prosecution. The collapse in 2011 of the Libyan regime opened up the possibility of discovering more details of the state-sponsored operation which, according to the Crown Office’s version of events, led to the destruction of Flight 103. Despite the chaos wreaked on Libya by a brutal civil war, those inquiries are still continuing.

This move by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission adds a new twist to an already tangled tale. Some critics of the Scottish authorities’ handling of the Lockerbie case will view it as vindication of years of campaigning. They insist a miscarriage of justice has taken place and that this is the first step to a remedy. Others will observe this development with a weary sigh, wondering when the Lockerbie dead will finally be allowed to rest in peace.

This newspaper welcomes the commission’s decision to hold a review. If there are weaknesses in al-Megrahi’s conviction then it is the duty of the Scottish criminal justice system to acknowledge them. If the conviction is sound, then it does no harm to apply persistent accusations to rigorous analysis by some of the finest minds in Scots law. In both scenarios, what matters is openness, clarity and truth. We owe nothing less to the memory of those who died on that fateful winter’s night.

[RB: An opinion piece by Justice for Megrahi's Iain McKie in the same edition of The Times reads as follows:]

As this year’s 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster approaches Justice for Megrahi (JfM) believes the decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to hold a full review into the conviction of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi to be truly momentous.

After years of the Scottish justice system trying to consign this tragedy to history the commission, having reviewed the available evidence, has accepted that when al-Megrahi abandoned his appeal it was the last resort of a terminally ill man who longed to return home to his family. It would have been easy to conclude in the interests of justice there could not be another bite of the cherry. It is courageous and wise of the commission to decide otherwise.

In 2012 JfM made allegations about the conduct of persons involved in the investigation and trial of al-Megrahi, which became the subject of a four-year inquiry by Police Scotland. The findings of Operation Sandwood are about to be submitted to the Crown Office.

In the past the Scottish government turned down JfM’s requests for a public inquiry into what we believed to be a massive miscarriage of justice. Thankfully the Scottish parliament’s justice committee continues oversight of the situation and our petition for an inquiry remains open. We believe there now is real hope that this deep and abiding shadow over Scotland’s justice system will finally be removed.

[RB: An accompanying opinion piece by Magnus Linklater can be found here. It contains the usual slurs and misrepresentations that have been frequently countered in articles featured on this blog, including this one by John Ashton. A further article in The Times headlined Verdict 'was probably unsafe' reads as follows:]

Senior figures in the Scottish legal and political establishment believe that Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi should not have been convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

Al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah went on trial in 2000 in a Scottish court, convened in the Netherlands, for the mass murder in 1988. Mr Fhimah was acquitted. Observers were shocked when al-Megrahi was found guilty. Critics of the verdict have focused on the testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who said that al-Megrahi “resembled” a man who bought clothes in his store that were later found to have been wrapped round the bomb that destroyed the plane.

It emerged that Mr Gauci was paid $1 million by the US justice department. Kenny MacAskill, the former justice secretary, has described the verdict as probably “unsafe”.

Robert Black, emeritus professor of law at Edinburgh University, said that the Scottish judges had come under pressure to convict.

“This was the most important criminal case in Scotland ever,” he said. “If there was not a conviction, the Lord Advocate really would have egg all over his face. The judges were not prepared to give the Lord Advocate a bloody nose.”

Salmond condemned after casting doubt on Lockerbie conviction

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Times. It reads as follows:]

Alex Salmond has provoked criticism for claiming that the only man jailed for the Lockerbie bombing was wrongly convicted.

The former first minister said he believed that Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was guilty of playing a part in the terrorist attack that killed 270 people in December 1988, but that the court was wrong to convict him.

The declaration by the man who led the Scottish government at the time that Megrahi was released in 2009, on compassionate grounds, provoked surprise and condemnation.

Dick Marquise, head of the US Lockerbie task force between 1988 and 1992, told The Times that Megrahi had been “rightly convicted”.

Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the crash and who has campaigned for Megrahi’s conviction to be re-examined, asked why Mr Salmond had not spoken up earlier, when his views might have had an impact.

Mr Salmond made his comments on his television programme, The Alex Salmond Show, for RT, formerly Russia Today. [RB: The programme can be viewed here.] Mr Salmond said: “Here is my view: is it possible for someone to be guilty, yet wrongly convicted? Yes it is.”

He said that the forensic science evidence showed Libyan involvement and that Megrahi was working for Libyan intelligence at the time. He added: “His conviction was not just based on the strength of that evidence but on identification evidence which is . . . open to question.”

The former SNP leader said he was aware of issues with the identification back in 2009, the year Megrahi was released by Kenny MacAskill, who was justice secretary at the time, because he was gravely ill. He died three years later in Libya. Mr MacAskill has said that while Megrahi was probably involved, others may have played key roles.

Dr Swire said: “Just like Kenny MacAskill, it is a shame Alex Salmond waited until after he left office before revealing these doubts.”

Mr Marquise said: “Based on the preponderance of all the evidence, Megrahi was rightly convicted. For two political types who never spent one minute talking to or observing the demeanour of a witness during the trial, to make comment such as ‘his conviction was not just based on the strength of the evidence but on identification evidence’ is just stupid.

“The inference can be made from these comments that identification evidence is worthless and it is not.”

A Scottish government spokesman said: “Megrahi was convicted in a court of law – his conviction was upheld on appeal — and that is the only appropriate place for his guilt or innocence to be determined.”

Comment

Alex Salmond’s intervention in the Lockerbie saga is puzzling on several counts (Magnus Linklater writes).

First, the timing: he was aware of the grounds for a possible miscarriage of justice, explored by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, five years ago. Yet he has not hitherto voiced doubts about the safety of Megrahi’s conviction. By concluding that he was “guilty” of being a participant in the bomb plot, but wrongly convicted, he must have changed his mind, but offers no real explanation as to why. He must know that the identification issue was only a part of the prosecution case, and he must know that in the past two years the only new evidence to have emerged has gone towards confirming the guilty verdict.

It would be better if Mr Salmond produced the new evidence on which he bases his conclusion, rather than further adding to a thicket of conspiracy theories.

Going down in history as the Lockerbie bomber

[There has been extensive media coverage of yesterday’s submission of an application by the Megrahi family to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. A representative selection can be found here on Google News. Magnus Linklater’s article in The Times unsurprisingly doubts whether the application will succeed, largely relying on the Ken Dornstein film. Serious critiques of the “evidence” in this film can be found here (John Ashton) and here (Kevin Bannon).

The reaction of Christine Grahame MSP to the news is recorded on the Midlothian View website:]

SNP MSP Christine Grahame has welcomed the news that the family of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi have lodged a fresh application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in pursuit of a further appeal against his conviction for the Lockerbie Bombing in 1988. The disaster, which saw Pan Am Flight 103 destined for New York explode above the Scottish town on 21 December 1988, killed 270 people and is considered the most destructive act of terror in Scottish history.

Grahame, who met with the late Mr Megrahi three times whilst he was in prison in Greenock, and has long campaigned against the conviction, said:

“I am pleased that Mr Megrahi’s family has decided pursue an appeal against his conviction. I believe Mr Megrahi was wrongly convicted and that he abandoned his own appeal in desperation to return home before he died”

“I provided a statement for this application to the family’s solicitor Aamer Anwar and I sincerely hope the SCCRC remit the case to the High Court for a further appeal when all the evidence can be heard at last.

“I know how important it was for Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi to have his family’s name cleared. He told me on my final visit to him that he did not want the family name to go down in history as the Lockerbie bomber.

“It is also important for the victims’ families to learn the truth at last.”