Justice for Megrahi petition again on Justice Committee agenda

[At its meeting on Tuesday, 3 June 2014 the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee will again consider Justice for Megrahi’s petition (PE1370) calling on the Scottish Government to institute an independent inquiry into the prosecution, trial and conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (agenda item 4).  The papers for the meeting can be read here.  Among them (last three pages of the document) is a report from Police Scotland on the meeting held on 2 April 2014 with representatives of Justice for Megrahi to discuss progress on the police investigation into JFM’s allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial. It reads as follows:]

MEETING SUMMARY

Police Scotland and Justice for Megrahi (JFM) Tulliallan Castle: Wednesday 2nd April 2014.

Present:

Police Scotland: Deputy Chief Constable Iain Livingstone; Detective Superintendent Stuart Johnstone.

Justice for Megrahi (JFM): Iain McKie; Len Murray; James Robertson.

The meeting was held to facilitate liaison between Police Scotland and JFM in

respect of the ongoing police investigation into JFM’s 9 criminal allegations, with

both parties keen to resolve the recent difficulties and use the meeting as a positive

basis to move forward.

In a full and frank discussion, JFM expressed their concern at the progress of the

investigation to date, the lack of feedback in this regard and sought to restore and

maintain mutual confidence through regular liaison. In acknowledgement of the JFM

position, DCC Livingstone reiterated that Sir Stephen House had stated his priority

was an efficient and effective investigation into the allegations and that DCC

Livingstone had been appointed to ensure that this was delivered. Regular liaison

between Police Scotland and JFM was welcomed and would serve to underline this

commitment.

Police Scotland provided a brief synopsis of the extent of the investigations into the

allegations, to date, with some reassurance through emphasis of the high standard

of work and level of detail applied by Mr Shearer prior to his retirement. This work, in

turn, has been subject to independent scrutiny and review, the opinion of which will

help inform the enquiry as it moves forward. This update and explanation was

welcomed by JFM, and served to dispel some misconceptions that the allegations

were not being effectively investigated.

A robust governance structure is now in place, with the appointment of Detective

Superintendent Johnstone as senior investigating officer, to progress work on the

allegations, as directed by Deputy Chief Constable, Crime and on behalf of the Chief

Constable. The enquiry is now being managed through established major incident

procedures, with immediate effect. This methodology was welcomed by the JFM

Liaison Group, and provided an assurance that the enquiry was being robustly

managed, and following established major enquiry processes. A dedicated enquiry

team of selected officers is being appointed under Detective Superintendent

Johnstone, whose full-time remit and responsibility is now the investigation into the

allegations.

JFM stated that they could find no justification in the August 2013 decision to delay

enquiry into allegations 5, 6 and 7, and also challenged the implication, in the Chief

Constable’s letter to JFM dated 20th February 2014, that effectively investigation into

all 9 allegations had been temporarily halted because of this ‘conflict’. The delay had

arisen because of a perceived ‘conflict’ with investigations being carried out by the

Crown Office/Police team seeking evidence against Abdelbaset al Megrahi and

possible others in relation to the downing of Pan Am 103 and the murder of 270

persons. JFM could see no good reason why the allegations could not be

investigated in parallel with the other Libyan enquiries. It was highlighted that on two

occasions the Justice Committee had been informed that the ‘conflict’ would shortly

be resolved and investigation would be restarted. This had not happened. JFM

maintained that far from being in conflict a number of their allegations actually had

relevance to the separate Crown enquiry.

Police Scotland noted JFM’s position and stated that following liaison between Mr

Shearer and the Crown Office conflict between the two enquiries had been identified

and thus delays occurred in progressing certain of the allegations. It was not

possible to share the exact detail of that conflict due to operational security. The

current position was that, of now, a full investigation of JFM’s allegations was

resuming and that it was accepted that in some aspects the two separate enquiries

had common threads running through them that would require to be examined.

However, should such conflicts present themselves the live investigation will at all

times take precedent. This will not, however, preclude the full, proper, and timeous

investigation to the JFM allegations.

The need for regular liaison was recognised as being an important factor if mutual

confidence was to be restored and maintained during the investigative process. JFM

undertook to be available as required to assist the ongoing investigation, and

proposed the formation of a ‘Liaison Group’ charged with responsibility for

maintaining close police links. While inviting the JFM representatives to contact the

enquiry team at any time Police Scotland indicated that they welcomed the concept

of a ‘Liaison Group’ whereby trust and mutual confidence could develop. They would

institute a series of regular meetings shortly where there would be an opportunity to

meet and review. JFM agreed to this proposal but made it clear that as an

organisation with a specific aim (i.e. ‘Justice for Megrahi’) it reserved the right to

challenge the police during the ongoing liaison. Given the length of time that had

already passed, JFM stated that further unexplained or unreasonable delays in the

investigation would not be acceptable.

In conclusion, JFM representatives stated that while they had reservations about the

way their allegations had been handled in the past they were confident that today’s

discussions would prove to be an excellent basis for moving the investigation

forward. Police Scotland underlined their total commitment to the investigation and

their determination that these high priority allegations would be effectively

investigated.

Both parties agreed that the discussions had been open, frank and extremely useful,

and gave a commitment to build on this accord. Police Scotland and JFM agreed

that further liaison meetings will be held in future.

[[A paper by Justice for Megrahi has been submitted explaining its reasons for contending that the Committee should keep the petition open. This paper does not yet appear on the Justice Committee’s webpage.]

"The stench of cover-up becomes overwhelming"

[Two years ago today I posted on this blog an item taken from John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury website. In this fallow period for new Lockerbie developments (which will not continue much longer) it bears repeating:]

The new edition of Private Eye carries the following article under the headline Justice short-circuited. The newly-revealed document to which it refers can be read here.

For 19 years prosecutors and investigators kept secret a detailed report about the most important forensic evidence recovered from the debris of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie – a fragment of timing device circuit board – which completely undermined their own case against Abdelbasset al-Megrahi.  

That such crucial material, obtained by the Eye, was never disclosed before the Libyan was convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity on UK soil,  should in itself be sufficient grounds for a public inquiry of itself. Added to the wealth of other evidence concealed from his trial (Eyes passim)  the deeply flawed identification evidence “linking”  Megrahi to the  bombing, the use of a discredited Walter Mitty-type FBI informer as a “star witness”, and the fact that other material in the case still remains secret protected by “public interest immunity”, the stench of cover-up becomes overwhelming.

The 11-page document is a detailed summary of the forensic analysis of the circuit board, which reveals that police and experts were well aware, relatively early in the investigation, that there was something “very unusual” about the board. They had found that tracks on it were coated with pure tin, whereas the vast majority in manufacture have a tin/lead mix. This was a significant lead.

“Without exception it is the view of all experts involved in the PCB [printed circuit board] industry who have assisted with this enquiry that the tin application on the tracks of the circuit was by far the most interesting feature”, said the police report.

Scandalously this was never revealed at Megrahi’s trial and not disclosed to his defence lawyers until 2009 – a month before he was freed from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds to return to Libya, where he recently died.   

The Crown’s case against Megrahi regarding the circuit board was always the opposite: namely, that the fragment was identical to circuit boards used in timers that were supplied to Libya by a Swiss company Mebo.  But these were not remotely “unusual” as they had the common tin/lead mix.

Earlier this year writer and researcher John Ashton in his book,  Megrahi: You are my Jury, revealed how the government scientist, Allen Feraday, who had told the trial that the circuit fragment was “similar in all respects” to the Mebo devices,  had, in fact, overseen tests on the fragment and a control sample circuit board, (revealed in recently disclosed notebooks) which pointed up the differences between the two.

As this new document shows, the significance of such findings was known more widely. This raises questions about why the evidence remained buried for years and who exactly knew the Mebo timers were different.

The piece of board was discovered among parts of a man’s shirt recovered from the crash site. The shirt was in turn traced back to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, who put Megrahi in the frame three years after the bombing, saying he resembled the man who had bought the clothing. (As Eye readers know Megrahi bore no resemblance to the man first described by Gauci to investigators, and it later emerged that the shopkeeper and his brother were handsomely “rewarded” by the FBI.)

The new material coupled, and the doubts about the veracity of the Gauci evidence, undermine the two main pillars of Megrahi’s conviction. And while the Libyans were not averse to state-sponsored acts of terrorism at the time of the bombing in 1988, it remains the case – as the late Paul Foot pointed out in an Eye special report, Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice, in 2001 -  that the attack bore the hallmarks of a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist cell which had been caught red-handed with devices equipped to bring down planes.

The excuse for not holding a public inquiry is because the criminal investigation is continuing.  So far investigators only seem to have travelled to Libya – no doubt to see if they can obtain new evidence that might somehow prop up the crumbling conviction.

Libyan settlement terms for Pan Am 103 families

[This is a quiet period as far as public developments in the Lockerbie saga are concerned. Quite a lot is going on behind the scenes and will come into the public domain in the near future. In the meantime, here is some more history.

Twelve years ago today it was announced by US lawyers representing the families of Lockerbie victims that Libya had made an offer to settle their compensation claims.  A contemporaneous report on the CNN website reads in part:]

Libya has offered $2.7 billion to settle claims by the families of those killed in the Pan Am 103 bombing, with payments tied to the lifting of US and UN sanctions, according to lawyers representing some families.

The proposed settlement would work out to $10 million per family, according to a letter from the families' lawyer detailing the offer. It includes relatives of those killed on the ground in the Scottish town of Lockerbie. But compensation would be paid piecemeal, with installments tied to the lifting of sanctions.

The letter says 40 percent of the money would be released when UN sanctions are lifted; another 40 percent when US commercial sanctions are lifted; and the remaining 20 percent when Libya is removed from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Predictable American reaction solicited to James Robertson story

[Today’s edition of the Sunday Post contains an article headlined Mother’s fury over Lockerbie story, in which Susan Cohen reacts predictably to James Robertson’s recent jeu d’esprit.  The article reads as follows:]

The mum of a Lockerbie bombing victim has slammed a top author after he appeared to mock the law chief who led the investigation into the atrocity.

Best-selling Scots writer James Robertson has campaigned in the past to clear the name of the only man convicted of the terrorist attack, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Last week — to coincide with the second anniversary of Al-Megrahi’s death in Tripoli — the writer published a short story charting the appearance of “Lord Cummerbund” at an inquiry examining the questionable conviction of “Henry Ingram”.

The character is clearly based on the late Lord Fraser of Carmylie, who as Lord Advocate brought the case against Al-Megrahi.

Four years after the conviction Lord Fraser, who died at home in Arbroath last June aged 68, cast doubt on the reliability of the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who had sold the clothing used to pack the suitcase containing the bomb, labelling him “an apple short of a picnic”.

In the tale Lord Cummerbund, the “former most senior law officer of the land”, is asked about evidence given by a key witness in the case. He describes it as “crucial” to the conviction even though the witness was, he says, “as thick as two short planks”.

Asked why he “continues to disparage this witness, without whose evidence the guilty verdict could not have been reached”, he responds: “Oh, come on, it’s all over now. We all know Ingram did it.”

Last year, the award-winning author released The Professor of Truth, billed as “inspired by the Lockerbie Bombing”.

It told the story of a university lecturer whose wife and daughter died in the terrorist atrocity in 1988, mirroring the life of Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 victims. But the story prompted a furious backlash by many of the Lockerbie families.

Last night, Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theodora, 20, was on board the Pan Am 103 flight, said: “There’s a sizeable pro-Gaddaffi faction in Scotland, including people like James Robertson.

“I’ve read this story and apart from it being an unflattering reflection of the man who headed up the investigation it’s part of a creeping assertion that Megrahi is innocent.

“Conspiracy theories are always more interesting than the mundane truth.”

Mr Robertson was unavailable for comment.

[Journalists who feel the need to write such a “Lockerbie families outrage” story when scepticism is expressed over the Megrahi conviction know that they can always rely on Susan Cohen to oblige. They also know that they won’t get such outrage and fury from UK Lockerbie relatives which, presumably, is why they don’t go to them for quotes.]

The whole edifice is rotten

[The following item was published on this blog three years ago today, under the heading Gareth Peirce: “layers and layers of deceit” in Pan Am 103 case:]

Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm has just published on its website a long interview with Gareth Peirce, the solicitor for the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, and a related news item. What follows is an excerpt from the latter.

Peirce says that the construction and maintenance of the discredited case against Megrahi has required active participation from those at all levels of the criminal justice system, with both tacit and overt support from the top of the political hierarchy. 

“In the most notorious cases, everyone played their part, absolutely everybody,” she says. 

“A big part of the blame lies within those who form the criminal justice system. It looks as if in the prosecution of the Lockerbie case, the defendants met the same fate, even to the extent of the same personnel featuring, in the person of the forensic scientists.” 

The principal forensic analyst, Thomas Hayes, employed by the Crown to testify against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was the same discredited analyst who was proven to have fabricated his evidence in the manufactured case against the Guildford Four. 

He and Alan Feraday testified that the key forensic evidence, a fragment of circuit board, survived the explosion of Pan Am 103 and left traces of clothing connected to a shop in Malta. The owners of that shop provided the identification of Megrahi to the court, and were later found to have been paid in millions of dollars for their testimony. This testimony has been widely discredited by EU explosives consultant John Wyatt and others who claim that such an thing is not possible in physics. 

“That was the most shocking revelation to me,” Peirce says.

“Exactly the same forensic scientists who produced the wrongful conviction of Guiseppe Conlon, the Maguire family and of Danny McNamee, and had been stood down for the role they played. Yet here they were. Without them, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution, far less a conviction in Lockerbie. 

“What shocked me most was that I thought that all that had been gone through on Guildford and Birmingham, the one thing that had been achieved was that nobody would be convicted again on bad science. But yet in the Lockerbie case, it isn’t just the same bad science, it is the same bad scientists.” 

In July 2007 former MEBO employee Ulrich Lumpert swore an affidavit claiming that he had manufactured the crucial circuit board evidence and passed it to named individuals charged with investigating the Pan Am 103 case during 1989. 

“All of this is screaming out for an inquiry. The ingredients that make up the prosecution’s case are really so rotten. They can’t and they shouldn’t sustain the weight of a presumed safe finding. You can see that they are utterly contaminated. They have no integrity. The forensic findings lack all the ingredients that should make them safe. The continuity of exhibits is all over the place. The only other pillar on which it is held up is this non-identification. It is just a catastrophe. The whole edifice is rotten, and it is astonishing it was ever stood up in the first place.”

Oh, come on, it's all over now

[What follows is today’s daily 365-word story, from the pen of James Robertson. It was written a year ago to mark the first anniversary of the death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and is published for the first time today.]

Lord Cummerbund

‘Lord Cummerbund, as you know there has been considerable public disquiet about the conviction of Henry Ingram. You have come before this inquiry voluntarily but I want you to answer the questions put to you as fully and frankly as possible. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly clear, but as Ingram has been dead for more than a year I don’t really see the point.’

‘Lord Cummerbund, an innocent man may have been found guilty of a terrible crime. If such an injustice has been done, would you not agree, as the former most senior law officer of the land, that it should be undone?’

‘Oh, quite, quite. Fat lot of good it’ll do him, though.’

‘Now, in your former capacity you drew up the charges against Mr Ingram and it was of those charges that he was eventually found guilty. Were you then, and are you still, satisfied that the court reached the correct verdict?’

‘Absolutely. Not a shred of doubt about it.’

‘And do you agree that this verdict could not have been reached without the evidence of the witness Morgan Curtis.’

‘Oh, yes, that was crucial.’

‘Then why in an interview some years after the trial did you describe Mr Curtis, the prosecution’s key witness, as, I quote, “a soft-boiled egg”? What exactly did you mean by that?’

‘Well, you know. You crack open the shell and it’s all a bit runny inside. Underdone.’

‘You also referred to him as “not the sharpest tool in the box” and “an apple short of a picnic”. Were these rather unoriginal clichés intended to suggest that Mr Curtis was not intelligent?’

‘He was as thick as two short planks. Not all there.’

‘So you continue to disparage the intelligence and reliability of this witness, without whose evidence, as you have admitted, the guilty verdict imposed on Mr Ingram could not have been reached?’

‘Oh, come on, it’s all over now. We all know Ingram did it. Does it really matter if Mr Curtis’s paella was missing a few prawns? Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what I say. Right, is that it? Let’s go to the pub.’

‘Wait, Lord Cummerbund!’

‘Who’s buying? Mine’s a Scotch – on the rocks.’

Second anniversary of death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

[Today marks the second anniversary of the death in Tripoli of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. A statement issued by Justice for Megrahi at the time can be read here. Tam Dalyell’s obituary of Megrahi, published two days later in The Independent, reads as follows:]

Acres of newsprint have appeared in recent years, covering various rather separate theories about the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber.

If I thought for one moment that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was guilty as charged in the mass murder of 270 innocent people in the crash of the Pan Am airliner "Maid of the Seas" at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, I would not have agreed to pen an obituary – let alone an affectionate one.

My settled conviction, as a "Professor of Lockerbie Studies" over a 22-year period, is that neither Megrahi nor Libya had any role in the destruction of Pan Am 103. The Libyans were cynically scapegoated in 1990, two years after the crash, by a US government which had decided to go to war with Iraq and did not want complications with Syria and Iran, which had harboured the real perpetrators of the terrible deed.

Libya and its "operatives", Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, only came into the frame at a very late date. In my informed opinion, Megrahi has been the victim of one of the most spectacular (and expensive) miscarriages of justice in history. The assertion of innocence is confirmed in the 497 pages of John Ashton's scholarly and remarkable book, Megrahi: You Are My Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence, published by Birlinn.

This is an opinion shared by the senior and experienced solicitor Eddie McKechnie, who successfully represented Fhimah at Zeist in Holland, where a Scottish court was assembled to try the two accused under rules conducted by the jurisdiction of the laws of Scotland, and who took on Megrahi's case following his conviction; by Tony Kelly, the immensely thorough solicitor who has represented him for the past six years; by the bereaved relatives Dr Jim Swire and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost daughters and attended the entire Zeist trial; by Professor Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, and Lockerbie-born; and by many others in legal Edinburgh.

Furthermore, the Scottish Criminal Review Commission, in the course of its 800-page report, says (paragraph 24, page 708): "The Crown deprived the defence of the opportunity to take such steps as it might have deemed necessary – so the defence's case was damaged." It concluded: "The commission's view is that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred."

Megrahi was not in Malta on the date the clothing, so crucial in the whole Lockerbie saga, was bought from the shopkeeper Tony Gauci. The proprietor of Mary's House identified a number of different people, including Abu Talb, who appeared at the trial to deny his part in the bombing.

Talb was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command and is now serving a life sentence in Sweden for the 1985 bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. These discrepancies were part of the reason why the Scottish criminal review commission concluded that there could have been a miscarriage of justice; another was the unexplained payment of $10m from Iranian sources into the coffers of the Popular Front.

The testimony of Lesley Atkinson, who knew Megrahi well in Tripoli, is interesting. She is the wife of Neville Atkinson, who, in 1972, left a career as a night-fighter pilot in the Royal Navy to take up a position as personal pilot to the president of Libya, Colonel Gadaffi, until 1982. "Megrahi was polite and friendly and worked for Libyan Arab Airlines," Mrs Atkinson told me. "Of course, lots of people who worked for LAA were connected to the security services and I do not doubt that he was one of them. We knew him both at work and at the Beach Club – he was a normal, nice guy. I cannot imagine that he would ever have dreamt of planting a bomb on an airliner. He just would not have done that to passengers."

Eddie McKechnie described Megrahi as a cultured man doing a job for his country, and certainly not a mass-murderer. Had he not been given extremely bad advice not to appear in the witness box Megrahi would have revealed the truth – that he was a sanctions-buster, travelling the world to find spare parts for the Libyan oil industry and Libyan Arab Airlines. This role was confirmed to me by Colonel Gadaffi, when, as leader of the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to Libya in March 2001, I saw him in his tent outside Sirte. Gaddafi's own knowledge or involvement in Lockerbie is a different matter.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi was born in 1952 and educated in Tripoli and in the Engineering Faculty of Benghazi University. He became involved in the Ministry of Trade, and like many other officials, certainly did so in the intelligence services. He served as the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and as director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A genuine believer in what the young Gaddafi was trying to achieve, and in the Great Jamariyah, Megrahi was happy to put his talents at the service of the state. Where else in Africa is there no hint of personal corruption among the leadership, he asked me! He had good relations with engineers at Brown and Root, I was told by their chairman and managing director, Sir Richard Morris (1980-90). Brown and Root was the contractor for the huge irrigation projects in Cyrenerica, south of Benghazi, the man-made river bringing water to desert areas that had been fertile in Roman times.

He was understandably proud of the traditional skills associated with his people. On one occasion, when I visited him in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow and told him that I had been to Leptis Magna, he responded: "You know that my Tripolitanian ancestors were the artists in stone, responsible for work throughout the Empire, not least in Rome itself!" Had the judges had the opportunity to get to know Megrahi, as I knew him, they could never have arrived at the verdict of "guilty" – at most, the good Scots legal term "not proven".

After Zeist, Fhimah, represented by the aggressively formidable barrister Richard Keen QC, was cleared and returned to a hero's welcome in Tripoli. Fhimah talked with knowledge and pride, as did Megrahi, about the wonderful sight of Sabbratah and the glories of the Greek colonial city at Cyrene.

Meanwhile, Megrahi was incarcerated in Barlinnie Prison. I was not his only visitor there and in Greenock who came away with a favourable opinion. Dr Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, a medical student at the University of Nottingham, told me: "On meeting Abdelbaset in Greenock prison, I found him charming, rational, not given to anger or bluster. He made it obvious that his first priority was to clear his name before returning to his much-loved family in Tripoli.

"I saw him [in Scotland] for the last time just before Christmas 2008, when, he, a devout Muslim, gave me a Christmas card in which he asked me and my family to pray for him and his family. That card is one of my most precious possessions.

"This meeting was before he could have known just how closely death loomed. I cannot criticise his apparently voluntary decision to spend his last months on earth with his family, above the priority of clearing his name."

I know that in some uninformed quarters, Dr Swire's views are regarded as eccentric. But it is the other British relatives who have studied the position in depth, such as Martin Cadman, who lost his son Bill; Pamela Dix, who lost her brother; and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost a daughter, have arrived at precisely the same conclusions about Megrahi's innocence. Unlike some American relatives, they have bothered to make exhaustive studies of the detail.

In my opinion, whatever Gordon Brown, Kenny MacAskill, Alec Salmond and Jack Straw – all fundamentally decent human beings – may feel they have to say in public due to pressure, and wickedness in Washington and in the Crown Office in Edinburgh, which, above all, did not want their misdeeds exposed by the truth, they all knew that they were acquiescing in the release of an innocent man. I am not quite so sure that Fhimah did not have an inkling about potentially explosive material on its way to the Bekaa valley.

Even in his final hours, controversy never deserted Megrahi. The Libyan authorities were absolutely justified in declining to extradite him, both for reasons of international law and more importantly, that he was not guilty as charged of the Lockerbie crime – also the considered opinion of Dr Hans Koechler, who attended Megrahi's trial as an official UN observer and has examined his appeal process in Scotland.

As James Cusick, who has followed the twists and turns of the Lockerbie saga for many years as a highly informed journalist, wrote in The Independent on Tuesday 30 August, "The truth behind the Lockerbie bombing remains enmeshed in diplomatic gains."

My last sight of Abdelbaset was on TV on 3 October, attended by Mrs Megrahi, with tubes galore, thanking Dr Swire in gentle tones for trying to furnish necessary drugs and hissing out that there were many liars at Zeist. So there were.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, intelligence officer: born Tripoli, Libya 1 April 1952; married Aisha (four sons, one daughter); died 20 May 2012

[It is to be hoped, even if it cannot be confidently expected, that before the third anniversary of Megrahi's death his conviction may again be before the High Court of Justiciary for review.]

Iran Air 655 provided motive for bombing of Pan Am 103 "by people still unknown"

[The theory that MH370 may have been accidentally shot down in US-led military exercises and is now being covered up to prevent a Lockerbie-style retaliation is now being discussed widely in the media. Here is an excerpt from an article by John Chuckman on the OpEdNews website:]

A second mystery around the disappearance of Flight MH370 has largely gone unnoticed: why hasn't the United States been in the forefront of providing information about it? The implications of this question are massive.

America has a fleet of the most sophisticated spy satellites, called "keyhole" satellites, covering the earth's surface daily with imaging systems comparable to those of the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of data from any of these, we read of data from China and France. One can understand that the CIA does not want others to understand fully the capabilities of its satellites, but surely the lives of more than two hundred people are cause for some information, however indirectly supplied.

Then again, the American military has some of most sophisticated radars on earth, and there is, without a doubt, an installation of the highest capability at the secret base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. How could there not be? But we have read of no data from them, only from others less capable of telling us what happened.

Could it be that the United States shot down Flight MH370, either accidentally or deliberately, and now wants to keep it secret? (...)

There would be nothing unprecedented in such an act: on at least 3 occasions, regrettably, America's military has shot down civilian airliners, only admitting eventually to the one they could not hide. They are also indirectly responsible for a fourth.

Iran Air Flight 655 was stupidly shot down in 1988 by the USS Vincennes in Iranian waters during the Iraq-Iran War, not only killing 290 people including 66 children, but there was a long period afterwards in which the US admitted no wrong-doing, offered no apology, and no compensation to its victims (only 8 years later was a quiet settlement made).

It was a quite vicious set of circumstances and the injustice of it led unquestionably to the motive for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people and 11 on the ground, later the same year by people still unknown.

The credibility of Western justice is now at stake

Today I stumbled upon a Lockerbie website that I had previously known nothing about. It contains links to some interesting material not readily accessible elsewhere. One of the things it brought back to my attention is a long article entitled Libya, Lockerbie & Lies by Susan Bryce dating from 2001, just after the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The final sentence reads, “The credibility of Western justice, that burned at the altar of Camp Zeist, is now at stake – not Libya’s innocence.”

Non-Libyan explanation of Lockerbie increasingly mainstream

[What follows is an excerpt from a review published today on the website of The Sydney Morning Herald of Nigel Cawthorne’s book Flight MH370: The Mystery:]

Seventy-one days after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared, the first book about the disaster will go on sale on Monday with a theory about what might have happened. (...)

Flight MH370: The Mystery, which is made available by NewSouth Books in Sydney, doesn't claim to have any answers but to some extent supports the theory that the aircraft may have been accidentally shot down during a joint Thai-US military exercise in the South China Sea. Searchers were then possibly led in the wrong direction to cover up the mistake, it suggests. (...)

He says this raises the significance that around the time the plane's transponder went off at 01.21, New Zealander Mike McKay, working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Thailand, saw a burning plane. He links that to the joint Thai-US military exercise going on in the South China Sea with personnel from China, Japan, Indonesia and other countries.

''The drill was to involve mock warfare on land, in water and in the air, and would include live-fire exercises,'' he writes.

''Say a participant accidentally shot down Flight MH370. Such things do happen. No one wants another Lockerbie [Pan Am flight 103 by terrorists in 1988 allegedly in retaliation for a US Navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier], so those involved would have every reason to keep quiet about it.''

[RB: It is not clear whether the piece in square brackets in the last paragraph represents the view of the author or of the reviewer about what led to Lockerbie. But in any case it is an indication of just how mainstream the non-Libyan explanation is becoming (except, of course, in Scottish, UK and US official circles).]

Prime Minister visits Lockerbie memorial

David Cameron visited the Lockerbie memorial yesterday during his visit to Scotland. A photograph and a prime ministerial tweet can be seen here.

Fire brigade response to Lockerbie disaster

An interesting timeline of fire brigade activity on 21 and 22 December 1988 during the first hours of the Lockerbie disaster can be found here on the Glasgow Fire Journal website.

Reform that would have helped in review of "deeply dodgy" Megrahi conviction "conveniently parked"

[The current edition of Private Eye (issue 1366) returns to the Lockerbie affair in its In The Back section.  The relevant article reads as follows:]

The Scottish government has quietly shelved for at least a year its controversial Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill, which would have abolished the centuries-old principle of corroboration, requiring two independent pieces of evidence to bring a case to trial.

The move neatly heads off an escalating row with the Bill’s growing body of opponents until after September’s independence referendum. But is also rather conveniently parks another reform, which would have made it easier to get the deeply dodgy conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man jailed for the Lockerbie bombing, back before the appeal court – just as relatives of some of the victims were about to launch an unprecedented legal action to do just that.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 who died in the attack, is leading 25 relatives of the Lockerbie victims who are about to make a new a new application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to send Megrahi’s case back to the court of appeal – for a third time. The families believe proving Megrahi’s innocence, may be the only way they will get nearer the truth behind what happened to their loved ones.

The SNP Government has repeatedly refused mounting calls for an inquiry in to the festering scandal, claiming, absurdly, that the appeal court is the only appropriate forum for airing the issues. Yet it has quietly stacked the cards against one.

Eye readers will know that the SSCRC had already found strong grounds for believing there had been a miscarriage of justice, but Megrahi who had terminal cancer abandoned his second appeal five years ago in order to return to Libya to be with his family. Since then there has been fresh scientific evidence relating to the bombing device which points to his innocence. There has also been mounting concern about the amount of material also suggesting he was not the bomber, which had been withheld from Megrahi’s 2001 trial and his first appeal the following year, by Scotland’s prosecuting authority, the Crown Office now headed by the country’s chief prosecutor, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC.

The new application by the families, which will focus on the new evidence added to the six grounds on which the SCCRC based its previous referral in 2007 including non-disclosure of evidence, will be breaking new territory. First they will have to prove they have a ‘legitimate interest’ in pursuing an appeal on behalf of Megrahi – a task made easier by the fact that Megrahi’s family support the move. They will then have to prove the case is the ‘public interest’ – a far more straightforward argument. But thanks to an arcane piece of legislation, the biggest hurdle facing the families is that before deciding whether to hear a case referred to it by the SSCRC, the appeal court must have regard to ‘the need for finality and certainty in the determination of criminal proceedings’.

"Finality and certainty" isn't defined in the legislation, but it means the court has to decide whether the threat of endless appeals and challenges, outweighs SCCRC concern that there may have been an injustice. With one first failed appeal and the second abandoned, the court might simply say ‘enough is enough’ – especially when Megrahi himself is dead.

That ‘finality’ test was to have been abolished in the new Criminal Justice Bill – but unfortunately for the Lockerbie families it now remains the law.

Megrahi infinitely more innocent than those who contrived, supplied and employed evidence that convicted him

[A letter from Neil Sinclair in today’s edition of The Scotsman contains the following:]

Alex Salmond refuses to apologise over his remarks praising Putin. Alex Salmond refused to apologise over the premature release of the Lockerbie bomber despite protests from American relatives. And Mr Salmond refused to apologise over the promotion of Bill Walker as an SNP MSP despite the SNP being forewarned of his propensity. Alex Salmond does not “do apologies”.

[The first online comment following the letter reads as follows:]

What are being listed by Neil Sinclair are allegations of mistakes and chiefly allegations/accusations from those who have shown themselves keener to malign than to explain. Mr Putin is every bit as admirable as Mr Obama and has probably merited his presidency more than his US counterpart. The Ukraine is far from a cut-and-dried issue. Western politicians are all toeing a line that tolerates violence and ignores violence as befits an agenda that has little to do with any kind of admirable code of conduct. The same applies to the release of al-Megrahi who on the evidence that convicted him is infinitely more innocent than those who contrived and supplied and employed said evidence. As for apologies over Bill Walker, if any is due there then probably every party leader would be obliged to make numerous apologies.