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.” 

Lockerbie relatives fated never to know truth

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater that appears in today’s edition of The Times. It reads as follows:]

After the death of Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, those who could shed light on the tragedy are dwindling

One by one, the key players in the Lockerbie drama fade from the scene, taking with them its secrets. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi himself, prime suspect; Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Lord Advocate, who brought the case against him; and now Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, who died last week. As Kenneth Roy, the editor of the Scottish Review, noted in his obituary: “To say that all three left unanswered questions would be one of the under-statements of our time.”

Gauci, who owned a clothes shop in Malta, where, on some disputed day in 1988, a man came in to buy the items of clothing later found burnt and shredded around the bomb in Lockerbie, did not have a good press. An unsure witness at best, his testimony about when and by whom the clothes were bought, seemed to change each time he was questioned; and he was questioned a lot — 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police, many more by prosecuting counsel, and later by journalists. Was the man who ordered such an odd assortment of clothes — shirts, jackets, trousers, baby clothes, without checking on their sizes — tall and dark-skinned, as Gauci seemed to remember, or medium-built and light-skinned as Megrahi turned out to be? Did he come into the shop two weeks before Christmas, or in late November? Was it raining, or merely dripping? Were the Christmas lights on or not? Which football match was his brother watching on the day? Gauci tried and tried to remember, and each time seemed to retreat further and further from the truth.

All that has led his detractors to mock his evidence, and dismiss him as a witness of no worth. Lord Fraser notoriously once described him as “not quite the full shilling,” though he was more generous later on.

Those who believe Megrahi was innocent, and the prosecution a charade, point to Gauci as its weakest link. As chief witness for the prosecution, they claim that if his evidence falls, then the entire case collapses. One member of the defence team, hearing of his death, said that he went to his grave carrying responsibility for Megrahi’s wrongful conviction.

That is a dishonourable epitaph for a decent man. The more one re-reads Gauci’s evidence, the more one warms to him as a character. A simple man, the only things he really cared about were his clothes business, and his pigeons. When, on several occasions, he was taken to Scotland for his safety by police, he worried more about the pigeons, and who was minding the shop, than whether the scenery was beautiful, or his hotel comfortable. The one thing he was sure about was that the clothes found at the bomb site were bought from his shop, and on that he never wavered. Who could forget a man who bought such a strange assortment of clothes without bothering to check on their sizes?

Much has been made of the alleged rewards offered to him by police or intelligence agencies. No one, however, has been able to prove that money was a motive for Gauci. [RB: A more accurate account of Tony Gauci’s attitude towards “compensation” is to be found here.] His struggles to remember dates, times and descriptions may sometimes be laughable. But they are honest attempts, not those of a bribed man. Here he is, trying to remember whether or not he had had a row with his girlfriend on the day of the purchase: “We had lots of arguments. I am asked whether I had a girlfriend at the time of the purchase of the clothing. I do not recall having a girlfriend in 1988 but I am always with someone. It is possible that I had an argument with my girlfriend that day. My girlfriend would cause arguments by suggesting a wedding day or suggesting that we buy expensive furniture . . . it is possible that in 1988 I had a girlfriend, but I am not sure.” He is like that with days of the week, or the size of the man who bought the clothes. “I did not have a tape measure to measure the man’s height,” he complains.

For all his confused recollections, the trial judges liked him: “The clear impression that we formed was that he was in the first place entirely credible, that is to say doing his best to tell the truth to the best of his recollection, and indeed no suggestion was made to the contrary,” was their verdict. When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission later came up with six reasons for suggesting that there were grounds for an appeal, they did not dismiss Gauci himself, but said that some of his evidence, and the circumstances in which it was given, were withheld from the defence. Whether that would have altered the outcome will never now be known.

In the end, what are every bit as important as Gauci’s evidence, are undeniable facts: Megrahi’s presence in Malta on the day before the bomb was loaded; his departure back to Tripoli the morning after; his use of a false passport supplied by Libyan intelligence — one he never used again; the large sums of money in his bank account; and now, the evidence uncovered by Ken Dornstein. [RB: If, as Dr Morag Kerr has conclusively established, the bomb suitcase was ingested at Heathrow, not Luqa Airport, none of this is of the slightest relevance.]

Mr Dornstein’s brother died at Lockerbie, and, after 15 years of investigations, he discovered that during his trips to Malta in the weeks leading up to the bombing, Megrahi was accompanied by a man called Abu Agila Mas’ud, a convicted terrorist, who today sits in a Libyan jail. Quite what he and Megrahi were doing there, only Mas’ud can reveal, though Abdullah Senussi, the former Libyan intelligence chief who is also languishing in jail, would be able to shed much light on it as well. [RB: Analyses of the revelations in, and omissions from, Ken Dornstein’s film can be found here and here.]

That light, however, is fading. One by one, the witnesses are disappearing. All that remains are the memories of those who lost loved ones at Lockerbie, and who are destined never to know the full truth.

[RB: What follows is extracted from a comment by Morag Kerr on Kenneth Roy’s Scottish Review article:]

It's odd how this type of article keeps resurfacing. Someone has died, who either told everything they possibly knew about it to the authorities years ago and who could not conceivably have remembered anything further, or who knew nothing at all about it in the first place. But now he's dead, oh the secrets he has taken to his grave!

Tony Gauci appears to have served someone connected to the bombing in his shop. His police statements and his evidence at Camp Zeist are in the public record. So too is the diary of Harry Bell, which recounts the (mis)handling of Tony as a witness and the money that was apparently dangled before his eyes. Three separate expert witness reports take this entire sorry episode apart forensically, but even so they only reinforce what common sense tells us - that a shopkeeper cannot possibly be expected to recognise a customer he saw once, for about half an hour, after the extraordinary lengths of time involved in this case.

We don't need Tony to realise that whoever the man was, it was not Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Not only was the day of the transaction (almost certainly 23rd November) one when there is no evidence at all that Megrahi was on the island, the multiple discrepancies between Tony's initial description of the purchaser and Megrahi's actual appearance are glaring.

All this happened almost 28 years ago. Even if we had someone who was now alleged to have been that purchaser, and Tony Gauci was still alive, there is no chance whatsoever that a positive identification could be made. What else could Tony tell us? How much money he was paid? What he did with it? Could he give us any real insight into his thought processes when he repeatedly said Megrahi resembled the purchaser but declined to say he actually WAS the man? I doubt it.

So what has the case lost with the death of Tony Gauci? I'd say nothing at all.