Wind farms like Lockerbie disaster - Donald Trump

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

Donald Trump sparked renewed outrage yesterday when he compared the development of wind farms in Scotland to the Lockerbie disaster.

On Tuesday, the billionaire tycoon announced that the Trump Organisation would be turning its back on Scotland and concentrating on developing a new course on the Republic of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

The announcement came after Trump lost his legal challenge against the Scottish Government’s decision to give the go-ahead to an offshore wind farm in Aberdeen Bay which he claims will blight the view from his luxury golf resort at Menie, on the Aberdeenshire coast.

But yesterday, Trump sparked an angry backlash after renewing his attack on green energy schemes in Scotland in an interview with The Irish Times.

He told the newspaper: “Wind farms are a disaster for Scotland, like Pan Am 103. They make people sick with the continuous noise. They’re an abomination and are only sustained with government subsidy. Scotland is in the middle of a revolution against wind farms. People don’t want them near their homes, ruining property values.” (...)

Trump’s outburst was condemned by MSPs and relatives of the victims.

Susan Cohen, a New Jersey pensioner whose daughter Theodora, an aspiring actress, was 20 when she was killed in the disaster, said: “Obviously, there is no call for that. Donald Trump says many, many things here in the United States and I am, of course, appreciative of anyone who takes a tough stand on Lockerbie which he did at times.

“But, at the same time, I think that is an unfortunate choice of words. I wish he had not made that comparison. Lockerbie was a ghastly tragedy that destroyed many lives and is beyond comparison. It is one of the great and terrible events of man’s inhumanity to man and therefore it’s of an order where it should not be likened to anything.”

Joan McAlpine, the SNP MSP for the South of Scotland, claimed: “Even by Donald Trump’s standards, these comments are unbelievably crass and show a complete lack of respect to the families affected by the Lockerbie bombing – in the US, Scotland and across the world. He should withdraw them as a matter of urgency and apologise for any offence he has caused.”

Alison Johnstone, a Green Party MSP for the Lothians and member of Holyrood’s economy, energy and tourism committee, also hit out at the tycoon’s remarks. She said: “It’s grossly offensive to link renewables with the Lockerbie bombing. Mr Trump has already been reprimanded by advertising authorities for making such distasteful statements and he should apologise for his continued crass behaviour.” Ms Johnstone added: “He didn’t have a shred of evidence that renewables are bad for tourism when he was quizzed in parliament. Twelve-thousand people are now employed in renewables in Scotland, proving that Mr Trump knows nothing about the Scottish economy.”

In December 2012, Trump was accused of “sinking to a new low” and being “sick” for publishing an advert in Scottish newspapers which linked the government’s support of wind farms with the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

The Scottish Green Party lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority over the controversial advert, published in two regional newspapers and urging the public to protest against First Minister Alex Salmond’s support for renewable energy.

Under the banner “Is this the future for Scotland?” the advert featured a picture of a huge wind farm in California and a photograph of the First Minister.

It stated: “Tourism will suffer and the beauty of your country is in jeopardy! This is the same mind that backed the release of terrorist al-Megrahi ‘for humane reasons’ – after he ruthlessly killed 270 people on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.”

The advert was condemned as “misleading” by the Advertising Standards Authority. (...)

[David Milne, a long-standing opponent of the Trump resort:]

Words have been used by Mr Trump on many occasions to accuse others of impropriety and inappropriate behaviour, with little in the way of evidence to support his claims. Having read the Court of Session decision by Lord Doherty, he obviously came to a similar conclusion about the evidence supplied by Mr Trump in that situation.

Unfortunately, grandiose words seem to have failed Mr Trump this time and his use of the Lockerbie bombing in comparison to wind turbines is not acceptable.

To diminish the suffering of the families of that event by trying to compare an international terrorist event that killed people of several nationalities with an attempt to protect and extend the environment of our planet is insensitive and ill considered. I am certain even some of his own supporters back in the USA will be shocked.

[Further blogposts relating to Donald Trump’s Lockerbie and Megrahi outbursts can be read here.]

Lockerbie bombing inquiry: lawyer warns police over al-Senussi interview

[This is the headline over an article in yesterday’s edition of The Guardian.  It reads as follows:]

Interviewing potential suspect in Tripoli jail without lawyer would break precedent, Scotland's lord advocate told

The British lawyer for Libya's former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, has called on Scottish police not to interview him as part of a new Lockerbie bombing inquiry without a lawyer being present.

Scottish detectives are due to interview Senussi, once the right-hand man of Muammar Gaddafi, hoping he can provide details of the bombing that killed 270 people in December 1988.

Last month Scotland's lord advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, visited Tripoli to arrange details of the visit after Libya dropped earlier objections.

But Ben Emmerson QC, appointed to represent Senussi by the international criminal court (ICC), said Libya has so far refused him permission to visit his client.

In a letter to Mulholland, Emmerson said detectives are in danger of breaking Scottish precedent if Senussi, a potential Lockerbie suspect, is interviewed in his Tripoli jail cell without a lawyer.

He wrote: "Mr Al-Senussi has been held incommunicado without access to legal advice in respect of any proceedings. I am certain that you would wish any interview to be conducted between Mr Al-Senussi and Scottish police officers to be scrupulously fair, putting its admissibility in subsequent proceedings beyond any doubt."

Scottish police are hoping Senussi, Gaddafi's spy chief for most of the dictator's 42-year-rule, can answer questions about the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 that have eluded investigators for quarter of a century.

A senior member of Emerson's legal team, Amal Alamuddin, said: "Any new inquiry into the events surrounding Lockerbie needs to be scrupulously fair, and this needs to start with Mr Senussi being given legal counsel during any interview with Scottish law officers."

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing, died in 2012 in Libya protesting his innocence.

Libya has appointed two officers to work with Scottish and American Lockerbie investigators, with the justice minister, Salah al-Marghani, saying: "We should know everything about what happened."

Senussi, indicted by the Hague for crimes against humanity, was captured in Mauritania after fleeing Libya after the 2011 Arab spring revolution. He was extradited to Libya and last year went on trial, amid tight security, accused of crimes committed during the revolution.

Emmerson, who represented the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is also appealing against the ICC's decision in October that Libya could take the Senussi case, arguing that the country's turmoil raises doubts about its ability to hold a fair trial.

[Posted from Middelpos, Northern Cape, South Africa.]

A missive from Frank Duggan

[What follows is the text of an email sent yesterday by Frank Duggan to me, Jim Swire, Father Pat Keegans and lots of others. I reproduce it here to illustrate, if further illustration were necessary, what a delightful human being Mr Duggan is:]

This monster [Gaddafi] was aided and abetted for the last quarter century by the likes of Prof Black and his always wrong legal experts; a sensationalist and disgraceful media, including news outlets (Scottish Herald, The Scotsman, and comical tabloids); media producers from BBC and others; shameless UK politicians like that dingbat Christine Grahame; book and movie promoters (the latest being John Ashton and Morag Kerr); the businessmen and diplomats who assisted Gaddafi's successful effort to have Megrahi released from the Scottish prison; and more.  Added to this incomplete list should be the UK family member, a supporter of Gaddafi from the very beginning, who sat with the Libyans during legal proceedings, went to Libya to hug Gaddafi, the man who murdered his daughter, and who called the detestable little murderer Megrahi "my friend" and a "gentle Muslim".

No one can take any pleasure reading these revelations about Gaddafi, but at least the thousands of investigators, police, prosecutors and law enforcement professionals who worked on the Lockerbie bombing can take some pride in not being persuaded by the many shills supporting Gaddafi. The Scottish justice system and the Crown Office is still being slandered, amazingly, in the UK press, even as they are seeking further proof in Libya. A handful of journalists, most recently Magnus Linklater, are derided when they report on the Libya supporters, who are more interested in publicity than justice. 

When Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, in cooperation with the new Libyan investigators, find more evidence, as they will, the enablers will do little to change their execrable promotion of Megrahi and his Libyan government sponsors.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/arts/television/9130692/why-the-west-let-gaddafi-get-away-with-murder/

[Posted from Swakopmund, Namibia.]

This is a big deal, Mr Linklater

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Morag Kerr published in today’s edition of the Scottish Review.  It reads as follows:]

Magnus Linklater tells me he has read my book (Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, Troubador, £12.99), but you really wouldn't know from his treatment of it in his article for the Scottish Review (8 January). He quotes a couple of ambiguous passages that might have been taken from the publicity material, and then proceeds to criticise what seems to be an entirely different volume.

Surely the very title might suggest to him that his favourite pejorative, 'conspiracy theorist', might be misapplied, but not a bit of it. This is a contemptuous dismissal, nothing more than a lazy slur, used to avoid a proper examination of challenging facts and evidence. It is a put-down, intended to insult, discredit, belittle and embarrass. And Mr Linklater pulls it out repeatedly.

I'll say it one more time. I do not allege any conspiracy. I see an investigation that went off the rails at an early stage for reasons that are unclear, which pursued a red herring down a blind alley, which refused to backtrack when it could find no evidence of the obvious suspects in that cul-de-sac, and in the end found some poor person called Abdelbaset al-Megrahi who happened to be in the right place at the right time with just enough nebulous suspicion surrounding him for a case to be manufactured.

The eventual conclusion of the investigation was politically convenient, to put it mildly, but that tells us nothing about the sincerity of those who arrived at that conclusion. As I said in my book, there is nothing quite so lethal as a policeman, or a prosecutor, or indeed a forensic scientist, who is absolutely and sincerely convinced of a suspect's guilt.

Mr Linklater admits that he is not a Lockerbie expert, seeming to base his position mainly on a blind trust in the court and the judicial processes, plus a few talking points gleaned from insiders with an axe to grind. Those of us who have become convinced of Megrahi's innocence, however, have based this conviction on the facts of the matter. The case against Megrahi (and his associate Fhimah) was founded on a few crucial points, and if these are disproved the entire house of cards falls to pieces. These points have indeed been thoroughly disproved, and it is this that Mr Linklater must confront, rather than taking refuge in insults and unsubstantiated assertion.

The investigators were convinced that the bomb had been introduced into the baggage system at Luqa airport, Malta, as illegitimate unaccompanied luggage. It was then, they proposed, transferred to the Pan Am 103 feeder flight at Frankfurt, then again to Maid of the Seas waiting at Heathrow. There were two reasons for this belief. First, because some of the clothes which appeared to have been packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to a small shop only three miles from Luqa airport, and second, because analysis of the confused and partial baggage records recovered at Frankfurt seemed to show an item of luggage being transferred from a flight from Malta, although there was no passenger booked to make such a transfer.

The provenance of the clothes appears to be quite genuine, however the proposition that clothes bought on Malta weeks before the disaster prove that the bomb began its journey that day from the island is clearly nonsense. Whatever he may say about it now, Megrahi's advocate Bill Taylor understood this perfectly well at the time of the trial, pointing out quite rightly that clothes may be transported anywhere at all in the time available, and that such a conspicuous purchase of easily-traceable items in a small shop might well have been intended as a deliberate red herring pointing away from the real scene of the crime.

The baggage records are another matter. The security system at Luqa in 1988 was extremely stringent. Years of investigation on Malta failed to find any evidence that an illegitimate suitcase had been smuggled on to the plane in question, and indeed the evidence that this had not happened was extremely strong. The judges at Camp Zeist acknowledged this, but sailed right on past the 'major difficulty' without further comment.

The evidence relied on to assert the Malta origin lay not at Luqa but at Frankfurt, in a single page of luggage listing which was all that was recovered after the computer record for the day was accidentally wiped a week after the disaster. Lacking the full dataset, its interpretation was problematic. Twenty-five items were recorded as being transferred to the PA103 feeder from incoming flights, but only 10 of these could be matched to legitimate transfer luggage by the method prescribed for interpreting the listing. Eight or nine additional items were discovered which must also have been transferred in this way, but these could only be matched to the written records by guesswork. This left not just one but six or seven of the recorded transfer items unidentified, and there were no further known items of luggage to fill these slots. These mystery items seemed to come from four airports – Bombay, Berlin, Warsaw, and Malta. The investigators were so enchanted by the match to the Maltese clothes that they didn't even visit the other three airports.

Tray 8849, the listing apparently connecting to the Malta flight, is far from an isolated anomaly screaming 'bomb here!'. We have no idea what was in any of these unidentified trays, but they certainly weren't all carrying the bomb. The fact is, the surviving records are simply too incomplete to support the interpretation being placed on them. The reason the judges were prepared to trust these confused and confusing records over the complete and perfectly clear Luqa records was not, of course, simply that the clothes had been purchased on Malta.

They came to their conclusion because it was alleged that Megrahi, who was present at Luqa airport when the flight to Frankfurt departed, was the man who made that purchase. The so-called eyewitness identification that supported this allegation has however been the subject of detailed and damning criticism, not least by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission itself.

The SCCRC in effect declared the Camp Zeist verdict to be unreasonable, when it noted that 'there is no reasonable basis in the trial court's judgement for its conclusion that the purchase of the items took place on 7 December 1988'. Make no mistake about it, this one statement destroys the entire judgement, because the date of 7 December for the clothes purchase was the hook on which the whole daisy-chain of inference and supposition was hung. If the clothes weren't bought on 7 December, Megrahi wasn't the man who bought them. And if the man who bought the clothes wasn't at Luqa airport when the flight for Frankfurt departed, then the justification for the finding that the bomb suitcase must have been in the mysterious tray 8849 vanishes.

Of course there was more to it than that, which Mr Linklater must be aware of as he claims to be familiar with the SCCRC report, and indeed to admire it. Tony Gauci, the shopkeeper, originally described his customer as a burly, dark-skinned man, about 50 years old and over six feet tall. Megrahi was of slight to medium build, light-skinned, five feet eight inches tall, and in 1988 he was only 36 years of age. Gauci first picked out a very poor-quality passport photo of Megrahi well over two years after the clothes purchase, and it was a mind-boggling 11 years after the encounter before he picked Megrahi out of a live identity parade.

Even the judges acknowledged that the composition of the line-up meant that Megrahi was 'comparatively easy' to pick out as the suspect, and of course by 1999 he was nearing the age the customer was said to have been in 1988. Gauci never made a confident identification, merely testifying to a resemblance, and indeed his first words following the 1999 identity parade were, 'not the man I saw in the shop, but...'.

The other points relating to police pressure on Gauci to make an identification, his familiarity with photographs clearly identifying Megrahi as the Lockerbie accused before his attendance at the identity parade, his awareness of the eye-watering reward being offered by the US Department of Justice, and the eventual payment to him of at least $2 million after Megrahi's conviction had been secured, will also be familiar to anyone who is a fan of the SCCRC report.

A quite separate piece of evidence apparently linking Megrahi to the bombing was the tiny fragment of printed circuit board said to have been part of the timer which had detonated the bomb. This was said to have been one of only 20 such items to have been manufactured, all of which had been supplied to the Libyan military. Megrahi was the co-owner of a company which rented office space in the same building in Zurich as the manufacturer, and had done business with that company – though not in relation to the timers.

The identification of the small shard of PCB as apparently originating from a type of timer supplied exclusively to Libya was a major breakthrough in the investigation. However, as has been ably demonstrated by John Ashton, this identification was fatally flawed. A crucial metallurgical peculiarity of the fragment, known about from an early stage in the investigation, was not present in the timers supplied to Libya. The simple fact is that we do not know what this PCB fragment is or where it came from, but one thing we do know is that it is not what the prosecution said it was.

Despite having read my book, Mr Linklater failed to make any reference to its central revelation, the whole point of the narrative. He continues to assert that the trial court, the first appeal and indeed Megrahi's defence 'tested to destruction' the theory that the bomb suitcase was introduced not on Malta but at Heathrow airport. This was never the case. The defence made a spirited and rational case for a Heathrow introduction, however the judges, while acknowledging this as a possibility, chose to prefer the fragmented and inferential case for the Malta-Frankfurt routing. The court, however, was not shown the full story.

A careful and detailed analysis of the totality of the evidence from Heathrow, something which was never undertaken either by the original forensic investigation, the prosecution team or the defence experts, shows quite conclusively that the bomb was indeed in a suitcase that was seen in the baggage container while it was still in the interline shed at Heathrow, an hour before the feeder flight landed.

The court judgement depended on the assumption that a blue American Tourister suitcase was underneath the bomb suitcase. The forensic evidence clearly shows it was on top. The judgement depended on the assumption that the bomb suitcase had not been the one on the bottom of the stack. The forensic evidence clearly shows that is exactly where it was. The judgement depended on the assumption that the Heathrow interline luggage was rearranged when the feeder flight luggage was added to the container. The baggage handler who carried out that task (who was not called as a witness) was insistent that he did no such thing.

Mr Linklater notes that Megrahi was in Malta on the day of the bombing, and presents this as a major point for the prosecution. However, if the scene of the crime was Heathrow, then far from Megrahi's location that day being incriminating, it provides him with an unbreakable alibi. At the time the bomb suitcase appeared in that baggage container, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was in fact in Tripoli, having travelled there from Luqa on a morning flight.

I realise it can be hard to take on board the fact that something this simple and this obvious has only emerged 25 years down the line, but that's how it is. This is a big deal, Mr Linklater, and it deserves a more honest response than misdirection and point-scoring.

Something which an astute journalist might want to investigate is why the Scottish police and the Crown Office have failed even to interview the metallurgist who demonstrated the discrepancy between the PCB fragment found at Lockerbie and the timers supplied to Libya, nearly two years after the discrepancy was first made public.

Similarly, it is nearly a year since the detailed analysis showing the bomb to have been introduced at Heathrow was made available to the police, but they have still not commissioned an independent forensic evaluation to test and verify the findings presented. Instead they continue chasing off to Libya, where the much-trailed evidence pointing to Megrahi's so-called accomplices has so far proved as elusive as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Something else a journalist with a real nose for a story might find interesting is the sheer amount of exculpatory evidence that was not disclosed to the defence at Megrahi's original trial or indeed later. The documents that led to the discovery of the metallurgical discrepancy relating to the PCB fragment were not disclosed until July 2009, six weeks before Megrahi returned to Libya. The unedifying saga of the non-disclosure of the unredacted CIA cables, which revealed the Crown's original 'star witness' Majid Giaka to be a money-grabbing fantasist, is there to be read in the court transcripts themselves. And these are only two examples.

Mr Linklater seizes on this aspect to bolster his favourite allegation. This is a conspiracy you're alleging. Therefore you are a conspiracy theorist. And so the uncomfortable facts are given a body-swerve. Whether or not the non-disclosure may be described as a conspiracy is a subjective matter, but the non-disclosure itself is a matter of simple fact which doesn't go away simply because the c-word is used.

A final matter Mr Linklater takes issue with is the suggestion that the real bombers might have been a Palestinian terrorist group known as the PFLP-GC. This group had extensive experience in bringing down airliners in flight dating back to the 1960s, and they were known to have re-formed in Germany in October 1988. This time, they were said to be in the pay of the Iranian government, who had commissioned them to exact revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by a US warship a few months previously. The PFLP-GC were the original suspects for Lockerbie, and remained such until 1990 when the PCB fragment was linked to the timers supplied to Libya.

Mr Linklater insists that the involvement of this group was thoroughly disproved by the original inquiry, and that neither the defence nor the SCCRC were able to find anything to substantiate their involvement. I've got one thing to say about this. If investigators are looking in the wrong place, at a false modus operandi, they are not going to solve the case, even if they are looking for the right suspects. These are the people who failed to carry out the extremely simple analysis of the blast-damaged suitcases that shows quite clearly that the explosion happened in the bottom suitcase in the stack, the one loaded at Heathrow.

Forgive me if I don't immediately assume that their failure to close the deal on the PFLP-GC means that that group, which we know was making bombs designed to bring down a plane in just the way Maid of the Seas was brought down, may be assumed to be innocent.

Lastly, though, I will concede that the title of my book includes a question mark. Can this atrocious debacle really be completely explained by tunnel vision and confirmation bias? While I don't allege a conspiracy, it would be naive to assume that a conspiracy can be categorically ruled out. Just as irrational as the propensity to see nefarious conspiracies in every major public event is the blind refusal to admit that anything could ever be a conspiracy. From Iran Contra to Watergate to Hillsborough, we know that conspiracies happen. The Lockerbie investigation may yet prove to be one of them.

However, at this stage, that isn’t the point. The point is that Megrahi was not 'the Lockerbie bomber'. The evidence against him falls apart under even moderately close scrutiny, and worse than that, he was provably more than 1,000 miles away when the bomb was introduced into the baggage container. This is what those Mr Linklater dismisses as 'Megrahi's supporters' are seeking to highlight. Wild accusations of 'conspiracy theorist' are a distraction to avoid reasoned argument, and unworthy of anyone making a serious contribution to the debate.

Morag Kerr is the author of 'Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies' 

[Posted from Lüderitz, Namibia.]

Brief intermission

Between now and 12 February it is probable that there will be few, if any, posts to this blog.  I am off very early tomorrow on a trip to Namibia (Keetmanshoop, Lüderitz, Solitaire, Swakopmund, Windhoek, Grünau). While I am likely to encounter a few WiFi hotspots and internet cafés en route, establishments serving ice-cold Namibian draught beer will almost certainly be higher on my visiting list.

A thirteen-year travesty of justice

It was thirteen years ago today that the judges of the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist delivered their verdict of Guilty against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (and Not Guilty against Lamin Fhima) for the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. The Opinion of the Court justifying the verdicts can be read here. In the version originally issued on 31 January 2001, in the very first sentence, their Lordships mis-stated the date of the disaster. This is indicative of the quality of the Opinion as a whole. My critique of the judgment can be read here.

Lockerbie: Libya deal could see new prosecutions

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

A deal signed by the Lord Advocate during a two-day visit to Libya has raised hopes more people will face justice for the Lockerbie bombing.

Frank Mulholland QC, who returned from the talks on Tuesday, described the meetings as “extremely positive”.

He said a “memorandum of understanding” had been signed which will see Libyan investigators work with those from the UK and US. (...)

Libya is the home country of the late Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted of the atrocity, and the Crown Office believes Libya holds the key to uncovering who may have helped him.

Supporters of Megrahi, who are planning a new appeal against his conviction, believe the Crown Office is looking in the wrong place. However, they hope the investigations could help to clear his name.

Last month, The Scotsman revealed the Libyan attorney general had appointed two prosecutors to work on the Lockerbie investigation.

For the first time, they met Scottish and US investigators who are trying to establish whether there are other individuals in Libya who could be brought to trial for involvement in the attack.

Mr Mulholland said: “The meetings were extremely positive and there is a commitment on behalf of the Libyan authorities to work with both Scotland and the US to progress the investigation, within the parameters of the Libyan criminal procedure code, a mutual legal assistance treaty between the UK and Libya on criminal matters and a memorandum of understanding between the US and the Libyan ministry of justice.”

The Crown Office would not comment further on the memorandum of understanding or whether it would give them access to key individuals, such as Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and head of his intelligence services, and Megrahi’s immediate boss, who has been arrested and is currently held in Libya.

It is unclear how much evidence will have been retained following the uprising which led to the death of Gaddafi in October 2011.

Graeme Pearson MSP, a former detective, said: “I hope all concerned act in good faith in order that the families of those involved can have the peace of mind in knowing the full picture in regard to who was involved in this atrocity and why.

“Libya has come through some terrible times of late. It may therefore be difficult to obtain evidence that we can know is reliable and untainted.”

Robert Black QC, the architect of the Kamp van Zeist Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands, said: “I don’t think there’s any suggestion that, before the Gaddafi regime collapsed, they destroyed all of their records.”

Mr Black believes the investigations could help clear the name of Megrahi, who died from cancer in Libya last year, three years after being released from prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds.

Robert Forrester, secretary of the campaign group Justice for Megrahi, described the visit as a “complete waste of taxpayers’ money”.

He added: “It does seem the Crown is rather more interested in its own reputation than pursuing the interests of justice.”

[I would be astonished if material were uncovered in Libya that justified charges being brought against supposed “accomplices” of Abdelbaset Megrahi. I would not be particularly surprised if there were material there that supported his innocence. But I am less than confident that any such material would ever see the light of day, given the doleful history of prosecution non-disclosure of evidence in the Lockerbie case, as pointed out most tellingly by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, four of whose six grounds for holding that there might have been a miscarriage of justice in the Megrahi case related to the Crown’s failure to disclose material that would have been of assistance to the defence.]

Lockerbie bombing: Libya visit 'positive'

[This is the headline over a report published this afternoon on the BBC News website.  It reads in part:]

The Lord Advocate has said meetings with senior members of the Libyan congress to discuss the Lockerbie bombing case were "extremely positive".

Frank Mulholland QC led a delegation of Scottish and US law enforcement officers and prosecutors to Tripoli this week.

It followed the announcement by the Libyan Attorney General that he had appointed two prosecutors to the case.

The visit was a chance for them to meet their Scottish and US counterparts.

Mr Mullholland said there was a commitment from the Libyan authorities to progress the investigation.

"Requests for assistance in the investigation have been made to the Libyan authorities and information has been provided to the Libyan prosecutors to assist them in their understanding of the case," he added.

"Discussions focussed on the need for a framework of co-operation in terms of mutual legal assistance and the Libyan criminal procedure code.

"It was agreed that there will be regular meetings to assess developments and progress."

[This is becoming boring. Every few weeks there is an announcement about Libyan cooperation with Scottish/UK/US Lockerbie investigators. The fruits of such “cooperation” so far? Zilch. Here is what I wrote on an earlier occasion:]

As I have said before, if the "new investigation" limits itself to seeking evidence of Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie, it is likely to prove futile.  Closed minds are the last thing that a true and meaningful investigation requires.