Daily papers run Exaro News Lockerbie disclosures

Following yesterday’s Exaro News disclosures, the story has been picked up in a good number of the daily newspapers, including The Independent’s Egyptian is ‘the prime suspect for Lockerbie bombing’; the Belfast Telegraph’s Lockerbie bombing: Evidence against Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was faked, claims report; The Scotsman’s Lockerbie suspect to be named after ‘CIA cover-up’; and The Herald’s CIA 'interfered in police probe into Lockerbie'.

None of today’s articles adds anything of significance to what appeared yesterday.  The Scottish Government trotted out its usual mantra (as reported in The Herald):

"Any issues raised in relation to the conviction itself must be a matter for a court of law - Mr al 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.

"As was made clear by the Justice Secretary in his statement to the Scottish Parliament last year, it remains open for relatives of Mr al Megrahi, or others, to ask the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to refer the case back to the court for a further posthumous appeal which Ministers would be entirely comfortable with." 

John Ashton has this morning posted the following on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website:

"A number of press reports on Operation Bird, including the original one published by Exaro News and the one in today’s Scotsman, claim that the Bird investigation would have been central to Abdelbaset’s second appeal. This is completely untrue. The investigation was commissioned in the run up to Abdelbaset’s first appeal, but its findings were not used because the investigation failed to turn up any hard evidence. It was rejected by the SCCRC for the same reason and because some of the findings were contradicted by known facts. For these reasons it would have played no part in Abdelbaset’s second appeal. My reservations about the investigation are set out in yesterday’s blog post."

John Ashton advises circumspection over Operation Bird Lockerbie claims

[Following the flurry of interest engendered today by Exaro News’s disclosures, John Ashton advises circumspection in an article on his website Megrahi: You are my Jury entitled Operation Bird -- some words of caution.  It reads as follows:]

Today’s media contains a number of articles about an investigation codenamed Operation Bird, which was carried out by a firm called Forensic Investigative Associates, on behalf of Abdelbaset’s defence team prior to his first appeal. The main articles, by the excellent John Davison, are published by Exaro news, and can he read here and here. There are follow up pieces in the People and Sunday Mail. The subject was originally covered by the Mail on Sunday on 16 August 2009.

The reports of the Operation Bird investigation claim, in essence, that the Lockerbie bombing was planned by a terrorist coalition led by the PFLP-GC and was carried out by Mohamed Abu Talb. Anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the detail can find a summary in chapter 16 of the SCCRC’s statement reasons, which can be read here. The SCCRC concluded that many of Operations Bird’s central claims were ‘incapable of being regarded as credible and reliable by a reasonable court.’ However, the commission made no serious effort to investigate them.

The Bird investigators – former New York district attorney Jessica de Grazia and former deputy head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch Philip Corbett –undoubtedly had a couple good sources within terrorist groups close to the PFLP-GC. The question is, were those sources telling the truth?

Their main claim, that Lockerbie was the work of the PFLP-GC and fellow travellers, including Hezbollah, is very likely true. However, some of their specific claims strike me as unlikely, while others, I believe, are probably invented.

Among the most important of the unlikely claims is that Mohamed Abu Talb travelled to London by on a merchant ship, arriving in the early hours of 21 December 1988 (the day of the bombing), and organised the placing of the bomb on PA103 at Heathrow. The main reason for my scepticism is that on 1 November, less than a week after the Autumn Leaves raids in Germany, Abu Talb was arrested by the Swedish police and questioned about his activities over the previous weeks. Although released the same day, both he and the PFLP-GC must have feared that he was being monitored and therefore could not risk taking a central role in the bombing operation.

Another unlikely claim is that the bomb contained an MST-13 timer that Hezbollah had obtained from the Russian mafia. OK, not so much unlikely as just plain bizarre.

According to the Bird reports, Abu Talb attended two key planning meetings in Malta, the first on 13 March 1988 and the second, crucial one on 20 October 1988. It is not disputed that Abu Talb was in Malta from 19 to 16 October, however, there is good reason to doubt the March trip. The sources alleged that he entered Malta on a stolen Swedish passport in the name of Fred Edwards. When they received this information, Abdelbaset’s defence team instructed Swedish lawyers to investigate the claim. They made inquiries with the Swedish authorities, who said that only four people called Frederic Evans and one called Freddie Evans had ever been registered in the country. Three of the five had never held a Swedish passport, the fourth emigrated in 1953 and his passport expired in 1963, and the fifth was only four at the time of Lockerbie, so had a child’s passport. The passport could, of course, have been forged, but it seems most unlikely that either the forgers or Abu Talb would have chosen such a suspiciously incongruous name.

The primary cause of my scepticism is the claim that the crucial meeting in Malta on 20 October was attended by the leader of the PFLP-GC’s German cell, Hafez Dalkamoni. Dalkamoni was closely monitored by the German federal police, the BKA, throughout most of October, however, as the Bird investigators noted, there seems to be a break in the surveillance from the evening of the 19th until 22October. BKA and Scottish police reports record that on 20 and 21 October he called the PFLP-GC’s bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat in Nuess and fellow group member Bassam Radi from unknown locations. Maybe, then, he was in Malta – or maybe not.

Dalkamoni was last observed by the BKA meeting Bassam Radi at 18.10 on 19 October at the railway station in Giessen. Giessen is close to Frankfurt, which is where he would need to be if he was flying to Malta. However, evidence buried in the translated BKA files suggests that he never left Frankfurt.  The files show that when the BKA searched his car they found a ticket dated 20 October 1988 for the Atelier X-Hot Maxi porn cinema in Frankfurt. It had the number 063336 printed on it. They showed the ticket to the cinema staff, who said that the number indicated that it had been issued between 10.30 and 14.00. That would, of course, leave him time to get to Malta, if there was a flight, however, the ABC world airlines timetable, which was a Crown production at trial, shows that the only direct flight on a Thursday (the 20th was a Thursday) departed at 09.00 and the only indirect one at 10.15 (arriving 14.55). A further reason to doubt the Bird account is that Khreesat told the FBI that Dalkamoni arrived back in Neuss on the late morning of 21 October. Khreesat was a German intelligence mole, so was hardly likely to cover up for Dalkamoni.

The Bird investigation’s sources reported that the bomb was flown from Cyprus to Heathrow by two of Abu Talb’s in-laws from the Moughrabi family, possibly the brothers Ahmed and Mohamed. As was revealed at Abdelbaset’s trial, four people called Moughrabi flew from Cyprus to London on 21 December on Cyprus Airlines flight CY1634. Could they have included the brothers? No, because the flight manifest shows that two of them were women and the other two children.

Detail aside, there is another, more important, reason to treat the Bird claims with caution. Terrorist sources are, by their nature very tricky: anyone who is prepared to take up armed struggle for their cause is unlikely to have qualms about telling a few fibs to investigators in order to serve their ideological or personal agendas. (The personal agendas might include self enrichment. One of the Bird reports states that one of the sources, codenamed Ivan, had been paid as an “operative to develop critical intelligence.” The report does not specify who made the payment.)

Why should we trust the claims of the Bird sources any more than we should trust those of Mobdi Goben, Tunayb, Atef Abu Bakr and any other former terrorists who claim to have inside knowledge of the bombing? The answer is that we shouldn’t, especially as their accounts contain numerous factual conflicts.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Bird sources were engaged in a classic disinformation exercise: telling a story that was, essentially true, but lacing it with facts that were demonstrably false in order to discredit the whole story. It wouldn’t be the first time that investigators had been led into a wilderness of mirrors.

CIA interfered with Lockerbie case, says former US prosecutor

[This is the headline over a report by John Davison published late yesterday evening on the Exaro News website.  An accompanying report on the same website is headlined Lockerbie probe was ‘directed off course’, say top investigators. An article based on these two reports and headlined Is this the real Lockerbie bomber? appears on the website of the Mirror newspaper and in The Sunday People. It reads in part:]

A shock report called Operation Bird alleges a CIA cover-up points the finger at Mohammed Abu Talb, who was later convicted of a campaign of bombings

If it is correct, Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi may have been wrongly jailed for the pre-Christmas blast on board Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland that killed 270 people in 1988.

The material, seen by The Sunday People and investigative news website Exaro, alleges a cover-up by the CIA led to a travesty of justice.

Other devastating findings claim a key piece of evidence in the prosecution case against al-Megrahi – a fragment of circuit board for a timer – was faked and remnants of a Slalom-branded shirt in which the timer fragment was supposedly found had been doctored.

Furthermore, the bomb was allegedly planted in luggage that was put on the plane at London’s Heathrow airport, NOT, as the prosecution claimed, loaded by al-Megrahi in Malta to connect to a feeder flight from Frankfurt to London.

The new theory was put forward by a London-based team of private investigators, Forensic Investigative Associates.

They were commissioned by lawyers for al-Megrahi, who died of cancer last year aged 60.

And their findings will spark calls for the case to be re-opened.

The report places Talb in key meetings with other Middle East terror suspects in the run-up to the attack.

It also reveals he was a suspect in the initial investigation.

But he ended up giving evidence against al-Megrahi at his trial in 2001 in return for ­immunity from prosecution.

The new report will be aired in an Al Jazeera TV documentary this week.

Its respected authors are Jessica de Grazia, a former New York chief assistant district attorney, and Philip Corbett, who was chief security advisor to the Bank of England after a career as a top-ranking Met police officer.

They conclude: “We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a consistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case.”

The report was written in 2002 and was due to form part of al-Megrahi’s appeal in 2009. But it was never used and its sensational contents have been kept under wraps until now.

Part of the document details the wicked past crimes of Talb.

He was jailed for life in Sweden in 1989 after being convicted of carrying out terrorist bombings in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Amsterdam, Holland, in 1985.

The attacks – on offices of Northwest Airlines and El Al, the Israeli airline – killed one person and reportedly injured another 20 people.

A further seven people were injured in an attack on the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen.

Talb, now 59, has always denied any involvement with the Lockerbie bombing. But the report alleges that he had close links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [-General Command], which was initially blamed for Lockerbie.

It also places Talb in Britain on the day an explosion tore a Boeing 747 apart over the town of Lockerbie 25 years ago next Saturday.

He is alleged to have met other terrorists to place the bomb on the plane at Heathrow.

Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has tracked down Talb, who has been living a quiet life in Sweden since his release. But he refused to comment on claims in the Operation Bird report.

The allegations are spelled out in this week’s documentary, If not Megrahi, then who?

Al-Megrahi’s conviction on the basis that the bomb was placed on a flight from Malta was key to the case.

It was then allegedly transferred in luggage at Frankfurt on to a feeder flight for Pan Am 103, which left Heathrow bound for New York on December 21 1988.

But the private investigation uncovered evidence that Talb had previously bribed a Heathrow worker to smuggle a suitcase through security.

And the report says that is how the Lockerbie bomb could have been planted.

Operation Bird also points to claims by Robert Baer, a retired CIA expert on the Middle East, that Talb was paid 500,000 dollars months after Lockerbie.

In his book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, Baer also raises the possibility that Iran made the payment.

The 2002 report would have been central to a second appeal by al-Megrahi – had it not been abandoned because of his controversial release from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds in 2009.

Former Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi has been accused of ordering the Lockerbie atrocity.

But the investigators concluded that police were misled in their investigation into the bombing – and that a government agency, probably the CIA, was to behind the cover-up.

De Grazia and Corbett wrote that their five-month inquiry “leads us to believe the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing was ­directed off-course as a result of government interference”.

They go on: “In our experience, the decision to intervene would have been made at the highest level of government, most likely a top executive of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

“The decision would have been communicated in both blunt and subtle ways down the chain of command to the line investigators.

"Since political interference in investigations runs counter to the professional ethos of US and UK law-enforcement agents, superiors would have played on fear, timidity, gullibility, greed, ambition, patriotism, and other human frailties to silence the qualms of the line investigators.”

It is not clear what the motive for a cover-up might have been.

But British doctor Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died aged 23 in the Lockerbie bombing, told Exaro: “Talb is a life-long, proven terrorist.

“He has completed 20 years in prison for bombings in Scandinavia, and is now out of prison and living in Uppsala in Sweden.

"I believe he played a crucial part in causing the Lockerbie disaster.

“My elected government actively prevented me from obtaining my human rights to know why my daughter’s life was not protected, and who it was who killed her.

“That still makes me extremely angry and also very sad.” 

[These disclosures should be read along with this caveat from John Ashton.]

Aljazeera documentary "If not Megrahi, then who?" postponed

Reliable sources inform me that the Aljazeera documentary If not Megrahi, then who? will not now be broadcast on Sunday, 15 December and the following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Amongst other reasons for postponement, are (a) the fact that important new material has come to light which must be incorporated into the film and (b) Aljazeera’s decision that the programme should be made available in more geographical areas than was originally planned, including the USA and the Middle East. It is hoped that the documentary can still be shown on or before the 25th anniversary of the Pan Am 103 disaster on 21 December.

The whole world was on fire

[In today’s edition of The Herald there is a long and moving article by Russell Leadbetter headlined 'It was like an atomic bomb going off': the Lockerbie air disaster remembered, in which local inhabitants and emergency services personnel give their recollections of the disaster.  The following are excerpts:]

It was 7pm, December 21, 1988 - a placid, uneventful winter's evening. By midnight, the name of the town would be broadcast to a stunned and disbelieving world.

"I'll never forget that noise," said one young man later. "It got louder and louder. I thought it would never stop."

The sound of the Clipper Maid Of The Seas as it plummeted towards Lockerbie was the loudest thing the townspeople had ever heard. They spoke of it as "like an atomic bomb", a "thunderous black mass" raining down from the sky. The whole world was on fire: rooftops, hedges, houses. Objects were ablaze as they fell to earth. One man saw an entire wing of the Boeing 747, minus its engines, falling earthwards.

One woman sprinted for her life as part of the plane crashed beside the garage where she was filling her car with petrol. "I just left the car and ran like hell," she told a radio reporter. "The tarmac was on fire in different places. I ran from the car and there were flames all round the tyres."

Emergency services were already speeding towards the scene. In newsrooms, editors and journalists were about to work on the biggest story of their lives. (...)

Plasterer Kevin Anderson, now 49, was living in Tundergarth, three miles from Lockerbie, at the time of the disaster. "I was in the garage, changing the oil in my wife's car. It was a dark night, dry but windy.

"I was walking towards a bench under a window that looks on to Lockerbie when I heard a big explosion. I thought, Jesus wept. It was like an atomic bomb going off, like you see on television. I thought something had blown up in Lockerbie - petrol pumps or something like that.

"I went outside a couple of minutes afterwards. I was standing there, and I thought I'd go into the house and get my wife. Then I heard the sound of big things hitting the ground, one after another. I'll never forget that.

"Then there was another noise. You know how loudly a young kid can scream? This was 30 times louder. I thought, what the heck is that? All of a sudden - bang, right in the field opposite my house.

"At first I didn't know what it was. I thought at first it was cardboard boxes. It was dark but I could see the outline of something. I went in and got the wife, and just at that moment the power went off. I told her, 'There's something happening in Lockerbie.' You could see a glow in Lockerbie by this stage.

"I told her, 'Something has landed in that field over there.' I jumped into my car and drove to the field, and as soon as I went in the top gate I could see the words 'Pan Am' on the front of the cockpit. There was nothing but bodies all around.

"I went from there to my father-in-law, who lived up the road. He had folk in for a meal. I went in and told him, 'Jimmy, you need to come with me - there's the front of a plane lying in the field and there's bodies everywhere.'

"I had often taken the mickey out of him. He just smiled and said, 'Now Anderson, don't start that …' I said, 'Honest to God, you need to come.' He'd heard nothing. He'd only been a couple of hundred of yards from where the cockpit had landed.

"So he came out and jumped in my car. My wife had been trying to phone the police. It had taken her a while to get through. At first they thought it was two fighter planes that had collided. I think she was the first to tell them that actually it had been a Pan Am airliner.

"We went to the cockpit with a torch and looked in to see if there was anyone alive. I could see the pilot. There were bodies scattered around the ground outside the cockpit but they were just like rag dolls.

"The police arrived quickly, and a doctor. There was no-one alive. The doctor checked a few and went back to Lockerbie. There was nothing he could do here.

"Did it have any impact on me? To be absolutely honest, I don't think it did, though I do think back on it a lot.

"One thing I do remember is that the people who were found near the cockpit all had their clothes on, but those who were found 300 yards away only had their socks on.

"I can't believe it was all of 25 years ago. It's unreal how quickly it has passed.

"We have met a lot of nice people out of it - a lot of [bereaved] relatives have come here, and they still come. My kids still get Christmas presents from folk in America. There's always some good comes out of bad."

Agnes McLean, a farmer's daughter, is a Lockerbie & District community councillor. "I was making mince pies in the kitchen and listening to The Archers on the radio, which had just started. My 13-year-old son was out delivering Christmas cards for the Scouts, my eight-year-old son was watching television and my daughter, who had turned 15 that day, and my husband were both in their bedrooms.

"At first I thought it was a military plane that had crashed. I looked out of the window and I thought I could see something burning. Two seconds later, it hit like an earthquake. I was later told it measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. I was less than 50 metres away.

"You could smell the fuel from the plane. There were three seconds of silence [where all you could hear was] the wind whistling through the windows; honestly, it felt like three hours. Then all hell let loose.

"I went through and the Christmas tree was burning. I got the family out of the house. My husband quickly went back in to switch the gas off. He also wanted to retrieve the deed box, which would have made things so much easier, but the bedroom was well alight.

"The telly imploded. The windows imploded. My doors opened and it was just a picture of fire as it rolled in. There was none of us hurt, however.

"We couldn't go down the road because it was burning. We stood outside our diesel tank and said, 'What are we going to do?'

"My daughter said, 'Don't be stupid, let's get away from this,' and we went down the field to a neighbour's, where my eight-year-old son went into shock. Then we went to my mum's. My older son, who had been delivering the Scout cards, came back up and saw the whole of our house alight, but the kitchen was still standing, so he went in there and picked up a couple of schoolbags.

"He then went down the dual carriageway and helped people get stuff out of their cars. It took us until 10pm to find him.

"Looking back, I say to people, 'Do you remember the fireball that night? Well, I was in the middle of it.' But we never went back to the house - we just felt we couldn't.

"However, I - like a lot of people in Lockerbie - think we want to be left alone now. This is the 25th year, and we would like to be left in peace. We've lost a lot of community spirit in the last 25 years."

The first fire crews at Lockerbie were confronted with a scene of profound devastation. In the hours that followed, 188 personnel attended and 20 fire-brigade pumps were called into action. It was a huge and profoundly complicated task. Among the firefighters that first night was Tom McAdam, deputy divisional commander in E Division, of what was then Strathclyde Fire Brigade. Now 70 and living in Lanarkshire, he retired in 1990.

"I was on duty at Motherwell fire station, the divisional HQ in those days. We got a call from Control - they wanted thermal-image cameras, which we had deployed a few months earlier, to be taken down.

"I took them in my car to Lockerbie. We knew on the way down there, on the A74, that something terrible had happened. In those days, lorry drivers were notorious for drawing out on hills; you'd get two lorries together and you couldn't get by them. That night, we'd be a mile behind the lorries and they'd be indicating they were pulling over to let us by. The drivers knew something big had happened - they were saying, get on down there.

"We thought the cameras would make a big difference but for various reasons they were no use. There were no living casualties, they were all dead. There was no heat-difference to show up on the cameras. However, the Dumfries and Galloway firemaster asked us to stay on and assist.

"By the time I arrived most of the fires had been extinguished. The role we were asked to do was to organise fire crews to search for fatalities and ensure that all affected properties were searched and identified as having been searched.

"It was such a large incident. Very few firefighters in the world will experience that, which makes the job done by the local guys all the more remarkable.

"When we got to the town, we realised how bad it was. Most of the townspeople had gone inside, which is very unusual. If you get a big incident, there's always lots of people, standing around, talking. That night there was nothing.

"The people knew the best thing they could do was to stay indoors. The pubs were empty, the streets were empty. What was amazing was that those who were out on the street just stood, very quiet and respectful. Teenagers sometimes have a bad reputation but that night they were standing holding each other, crying.

"One thing that has stayed with me over the years is that those who lost loved ones, the people of Lockerbie did them proud that night - they were amazing.

"I came home at 8.30 in the morning. I had an appointment with the chief warden at Dungavel Prison. He told me that at the prisoners' behest he had contacted the Scottish Home and Health Department as they wanted to volunteer for the search of the countryside that would be going on that day. That was a gesture that really touched me.

"I still have a soft spot for the people of Lockerbie and for the way they reacted."

Lockerbie anniversary TV programmes

A reminder that various television programmes about Lockerbie are being broadcast in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the disaster on 21 December. Among them are:

Aljazeera’s If Not Megrahi, Then Who? which features, among others, Justice for Megrahi’s Dr Morag Kerr, to be shown on Sunday 15 December and then on Monday 16, Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 [The showings of this documentary have now been postponed.];

BBC’s Living with Lockerbie, to be shown on BBC One Scotland on Monday 16 December at 22.35, then on the BBC News Channel at various times on 21, 22 and 27 December;

STV’s The Lockerbie Bombing, to be shown on STV on Tuesday 17 December at 21.30 and on other ITV channels at 23.00 and on the US Smithsonian Channel on 21 December at 20.00 Eastern Time and Pacific Time.

Time to reopen Lockerbie case

[This is the heading over a letter from Bill McConnell published in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads as follows:]

Instead of David Mundell spending taxpayers' money jetting off to Washington to remember the events of 25 years ago ("Mundell to attend Washington service in memory of Lockerbie victims", The Herald, December 11), might it not be better to spend his valuable time in persuading the dinosaurs of the Scottish Government and the Crown Office to look at the growing evidence which indicates that Abdel­baset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was not respon­sible for the tragedy and that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, instead of Luqa, Malta? [RB: Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, the chief Crown Office dinosaur, is also going on the Washington jaunt.]

It can only be a vain attempt to try to salvage the reputation of the Scottish legal system which is preventing a further full investigation of these matters and a purdah on any further discussion of the possibility of a miscarriage of justice. Even panels of Scottish judges can get it horribly wrong.