The London origin theory

[This morning, by chance, I rediscovered an article dating from July 2010 headed The London Origin Theory by Caustic Logic on his website The Lockerbie Divide. The leading exposition of this theory is now, of course, to be found in Dr Morag Kerr’s superb book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. However, Caustic Logic’s piece deserves attention, too. So here it is:]

“I want to know when the bomb was placed on the plane and by whom. We have to look more closely into the "London theory" – that the bomb was placed on the plane at Heathrow and not in Malta.” - Hans Köchler, independent UN observer at Zeist trial, 21 Aug 2009 (Source)

"If I was determined to bring down an airplane, I would have put [the bomb] on in London." - Robert Baer, 'former' CIA agent and weapons expert, who doesn't buy the Libyans-did-it story line.

The London Origin theory has emerged as the most logical explanation for what happened to Pan Am 103 on December 21 1988. The official story, all the most widely-seen revisionist arguments, and even Megrahi's defense team's curious "special defense of incrimination" drew on elements of the drug swap theory, with the bomb coming in from Germany or further afield. Megrahi's counsel William Taylor QC did however give reasons to suspect a  London origin (...) to the trial judges and summarized at trial's end in 2001:  “My submission is that all of the above render the choice of Heathrow a much more likely one [than Malta]. And when that possibility is considered, one finds that there is a compelling body of evidence that points to Heathrow as being the point of ingestion.” [day 82 p9862]

But in the earliest days of the investigation, January and February 1989, British investigators labored to clear Heathrow Airport of any lapses and ensure that the bomb's origin would have to be found elsewhere. Years of confusion ensued... (see "Counter-Arguments" below for more on the dismissal of the London theory).

Direct Evidence For the Theory

Among the first clues came from finding where the plane failed, and what luggage container the blast originated in. Container AVE4041 in forward left cargo hold, position 14L, was decided within a few days. The container's blasted out remains were found and reassembled enough to show the blast was down at the bottom of the container, in the aft outboard corner. It had been in the spot closest to the hull, only 25" from the thin and aged skin of Maid of the seas.

Unfortunately, the exact placement, origin, or even number of suitcases in that box was hard to pin down. Records and witnesses helped decide 4041 was loaded with a few bags (6-8 or so) of (apparently) interline luggage, then filled up with a few dozen cases from the feeder/first leg flight 103A out of Frankfurt. But within this generally imprecise body of memories, one stands out as of amazing possible significance.

The Bedford Suitcase(s)

This was always the hard part to get around in order to reject the initially obvious Heathrow introduction theory. A Pan Am worker mentioned to police right after the attack said he saw two brown hardshell samsonite suitcases, placed on the floor of container 4041. The position of these was side-by-side from the far left of the floor, at the (loading) front of the container. If the bags had been later stacked one on the other and the top bag slid a few inches left, it would be in the perfect spot to match the explosion center - aft outboard corner, second suitcase from the bottom - where just such case detonated.

An amazing lead, investigators almost seem to have tried to not follow this one.  Since the cases Bedford saw were on the floor when he saw them, and the blast seemed to have happened one layer up from that, they decided these cases were a coincidence. They must have been moved across the container, and replaced in that lower corner with an identical case from Germany, on top of some other damaged Frankfurt-originating luggage. The leaps of faith here are simply alarming.

The Bedford story is covered in great detail at this site, with the works so far compiled at the link above.

Break-in Reported

A security guard at heathrow Airport reported a break-in at terminal 3 around 12:30 am on  December 21. Ray Manly's report, of a padlock on the floor "cut like butter" was covered up for over a decade. Even at trial in 2000, the defense was not allowed to know of this. Manly came forward in 2001 with the story, soon verified by the long-suppressed police reports. (...)

Mentioned in: Appeal Court Dismissal of the Heathrow Theory

Circumstantial Evidence For the Theory

The 38-Minute Coincidence

Aside from its crew and perhaps some cargo that (probably) doesn't matter here, the 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas landed empty at London's Heathrow airport mid-day December 21, 1988. There the plane took on a load of 243 passengers and their luggage, and took off at 6:25pm for New York as Pan Am Flight 103. Clearly, the bomb went on the plane at London, but the question that comes quickly behind it is where did it come from before that? A van in the parking lot, or another plane?

Such clues were vital to tracking down the perpetrators, and should be embraced when they're found. The time of explosion itself is a valuable clue - 38 minutes after leaving the ground - is a known hallmark of the altimeter bombs made just weeks earlier by terrorist bomb-maker and "double agent" Marwan Khreesat. He had produced four altimeter-triggered, radio-disguised bombs, set to detonate less than an hour after takeoff. Each of the others was a bit different, but the one that was captured and tested thoroughly would have blown up about 45-50 minutes after takeoff.  

The timing compatibility with a Khreesat bomb loaded at London notwithstanding, it's been officially decided and legally established that was a Libyan-ordered and set MST-13 timer that told the bomb to go off over Lockerbie. Officially, legally, by the evidence led at trial, it's an asbolute coincidence the timing so resembles the method first suspected.

Operational Security

When confronted with the official story of a Malta-Germany-London, the most obvious averse reaction of those who know air travel operations is to ridicule the notion that an airline bomb would make any sense being trusted to so many switches. Any functional security screen or time delay along the way coulld screw up the whole operation with a timer-based device as alleged. A trip from Frankfurt only is often suggested to replace this, but it too has one too many stops for a Khreesat bomb, and still a high chanced of the bomb being delayed or intercepted. If one could pierce security at any of the three airports, and it obviously happened at one of them, Heathrow would give one the best chance for success and the only way for a Khreesat bomb to have done what happened.   

Former head of security for British Airways, Denis Phipps, The Maltese Double Cross:

“If a device had been infiltrated into the system at Malta, it would have been necessary for that device to have been carried in an aircraft in the sector from Malta to Frankfurt, to have gone through a handling process, been carried on an aircraft through the sector from Frankfurt to Heathrow, and then timed to detonate during the final sector, Heathrow to New York, presumably whilst the aircraft was over the ocean to avoid discovery of forensic evidence …  one has to say, um, are - terrorists  - idiots? Don’t terrorists plan to have a reasonable degree of success?"  

Explosive Efficacy

If one places a device at the airport the target leaves from, rather than remotely through multiple flights, a new possibility is opened up - depending on the nature and depth of his penetration, a determined terrorist could place the bag himself and chose where in the container it went. As it happened, the bomb in PA103 was placed in the best spot (for the terrorists), and one of the few that could have even worked - the lower outboard quadrant, more or less on the sloping floor nearest the hull. Figure F13 (below) of the AAIB's report shows the deduced center of explosion that officially was achieved by accident. Considering even there, all that was blows from the hull was a chunk the size of a dinner plate. That's all it took, but it wouldn't happen at all if the bomb had wound up in the upper inboard corner, or even in the middle.

It is true, as some have pointed out, that there'd be no guarantee any cases placed in that deadly corner would stay there. But terrorists simply can't wait for guarantees. Certainly having it in the right spot, for sure, at one point, is better than relying on pure chance. Perhaps with this in mind, famous former CIA agent Robert Baer, who may have direct experience in this for all we know, has said:

"I used to teach explosives. The last thing you want to do is put a bomb on in a place like Malta and have two stops along the way ... you couldn't count on this thing hitting its target. ... Malta would not have been my first choice. It would have been London. If I was determined to bring down an airplane, I would have put it on in London." Flight into Darkness video, part two, 5:25

Counter Arguments Addressed

Forensics and the Frankfurt Link to the Rescue

UK and Germany had both been unsettled by the possibility their security forces had allowed the horror of Lockerbie to pass through. Some of their early wrangling is addressed in the post "What did the Germans Know?" British investigators decided the blast - 10 inches above the container floor - was above any possible non-Frankfurt luggage and therefore had to be some other brown, hardshell Samsonite from the one(s) Bedford described, that must have been from the feeder 103A. It was unsound reasoning and wishful thinking until the Erac printout emerged months later, showing an item apparently coming from Malta, to PA103, via Frankfurt.

The Malta Link to the Rescue

The Erac printout, emerging months after the attack from an employee's locker after all official copies somehow disappeared, sealed the deal for Malta origin. But the tiny island nation had already been mentioned in the evidence, as the place of manufacture for some of it. As it so happened, the Erac (Frankfurt) printout in August 1989 spurred a closer look, and the clothes were traced to a store on Malta where Tony Gauci was found...

Malta-based Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka was already on file with the culprits - Megrahi and Fhimah - that some hoped Tony saw one of. By late February 1991, they had a sort of identification of Megrahi from the shopkeeper.  A few months later, Giaka was finally removed to safety and first mentioned the suitcase - possibly the same model Bedford reported - seen on Malta the day before it reappeared on that dubious printout leaving there. The story is clearly false, but formed one basis of the U.S. indictment against Megrahi and Fhimah in November 1991.

And finally, Air Malta has airtight records that the 55 bags on flight 180 were all claimed by its 39 passengers. They've shown this in court, like in their libel suit against Granada television. How the bomb was sneaked around Air Malta's system was never explained or substantiated even back when Fhimah was accepted as an accomplice. Investigators tried to find evidence of Maltese collusion or corruption or incompetence, but came up only with 'well, they must have done it somehow.' After the dismissal of Giaka's Malta stories, the Zeist judges  found that accomplice not guilty, further complicating the feat for Megrahi. They admit it's hard to see just how he did it, but he must have. Guilty.

Chomsky on Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and Iran Air flight 655

[Since the early days of the tragedy of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, I have been at pains to suggest that a better comparator than the Pan Am 103 disaster that lazy politicians and journalists were regularly pointing to was the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of Iran Air flight 655 in July 1988. I am delighted that Justice for Megrahi member Noam Chomsky takes the same view.  Here are excerpts from an article published by him on 14 August:]

Almost every day brings news of awful crimes, but some are so heinous, so horrendous and malicious, that they dwarf all else. One of those rare events took place on July 17, when Malaysian Airlines MH17 was shot down in Eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people.

The Guardian of Virtue in the White House denounced it as an “outrage of unspeakable proportions,” which happened “because of Russian support.” His UN Ambassador thundered that “when 298 civilians are killed” in the “horrific downing” of a civilian plane, “we must stop at nothing to determine who is responsible and to bring them to justice.” She also called on Putin to end his shameful efforts to evade his very clear responsibility.

True, the “irritating little man” with the “ratlike face” (Timothy Garton Ash) had called for an independent investigation, but that could only have been because of sanctions from the one country courageous enough to impose them, the United States, while Europeans cower in fear.

On CNN, former US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor assured the world that the irritating little man “is clearly responsible ... for the shoot down of this airliner.” For weeks, lead stories reported the anguish of the families, details of the lives of the murdered victims, the international efforts to claim the bodies, the fury over the horrific crime that “stunned the world,” as the press reports daily in grisly detail.

Every literate person, and certainly every editor and commentator, instantly recalled another case when a plane was shot down with comparable loss of life: Iran Air 655 with 290 killed, including 66 children, shot down in Iranian airspace in a clearly identified commercial air route. The crime was not carried out “with US support,” nor has its agent ever been uncertain. It was the guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes, operating in Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf.

The commander of a nearby US vessel, David Carlson, wrote in the US Naval Proceedings that he “wondered aloud in disbelief” as “The Vincennes announced her intentions” to attack what was clearly a civilian aircraft. He speculated that “Robo Cruiser,” as the Vincennes was called because of its aggressive behavior, “felt a need to prove the viability of Aegis (the sophisticated anti-aircraft system on the cruiser) in the Persian Gulf, and that they hankered for the opportunity to show their stuff.”

Two years later, the commander of the Vincennes and the officer in charge of anti-air warfare were given the Legion of Merit award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” and for the “calm and professional atmosphere” during the period of the destruction of the Iranian Airbus. The incident was not mentioned in the award.

President Reagan blamed the Iranians and defended the actions of the warship, which “followed standing orders and widely publicized procedures, firing to protect itself against possible attack.” His successor, Bush I, proclaimed that “I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are ... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.”

No evasions of responsibility here, unlike the barbarians in the East.

There was little reaction at the time: no outrage, no desperate search for victims, no passionate denunciations of those responsible, no eloquent laments by the US Ambassador to the UN about the “immense and heart-wrenching loss” when the airliner was downed. Iranian condemnations were occasionally noted, and dismissed as “boilerplate attacks on the United States.”

Small wonder, then, that this insignificant earlier event merited only a few scattered and dismissive words in the US media during the vast furor over a real crime, in which the demonic enemy might (or might not) have been indirectly involved.

One exception was in the London Daily Mail, where Dominic Lawson wrote that although “Putin's apologists” might bring up the Iran Air attack, the comparison actually demonstrates our high moral values as contrasted with the miserable Russians, who try to evade their responsibility for MH 17 with lies while Washington at once announced that the US warship had shot down the Iranian aircraft — righteously.

We know why Ukrainians and Russians are in their own countries, but one might ask what exactly the Vincennes was doing in Iranian waters. The answer is simple. It was defending Washington’s great friend Saddam Hussein in his murderous aggression against Iran. For the victims, the shoot-down was no small matter. It was a major factor in Iran’s recognition that it could not fight on any longer, according to historian Dilip Hiro.

It is worth remembering the extent of Washington’s devotion to its friend Saddam. Reagan removed him from the terrorist list so that aid could be sent to expedite his assault on Iran, and later denied his murderous crimes against the Kurds, blocking congressional condemnations. He also accorded Saddam a privilege otherwise granted only to Israel: there was no notable reaction when Iraq attacked the USS Stark with missiles, killing 37 crewmen, much like the case of the USS Liberty, attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and torpedo ships in 1967, killing 34 crewmen.

Reagan’s successor, Bush I, went on to provide further aid to Saddam, badly needed after the war with Iran that he launched. Bush also invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to come to the US for advanced training in weapons production. In April 1990, Bush dispatched a high-level Senate delegation, led by future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, to convey his warm regards to his friend Saddam and to assure him that he should disregard irresponsible criticism from the “haughty and pampered press,” and that such miscreants had been removed from Voice of America. The fawning before Saddam continued until he turned into a new Hitler a few months later by disobeying orders, or perhaps misunderstanding them, and invading Kuwait, with illuminating consequences that are worth reviewing once again though I will leave the matter here.

"This is not just conspiracy theory"

[Following yesterday’s post about Magnus Linklater’s Lockerbie stance two years ago, here, from an item published exactly five years ago, is more from Mr Linklater as reported originally in Scottish lawyers’ magazine The Firm:]

Magnus Linklater, the editor of The Scotsman newspaper at the time of the Lockerbie investigation, has revealed that UK Government and intelligence services influenced coverage of the Lockerbie inquiry to implicate Iran and Syria.

Linklater admitted that both the police and UK Government ministers directed the newspaper to concentrate their coverage on Iranian and Syrian links with the downing of Pan Am 103, the suspects initially favoured by the US and UK administrations. 

"This is not just conspiracy theory," Linklater said.

"It is sometimes forgotten just how powerful the evidence was, in the first few months after Lockerbie, that pointed towards the involvement of the Palestinian-Syrian terror group the PFLP-GC, backed by Iran and linked closely to terror groups in Europe. At The Scotsman newspaper, which I edited then, we were strongly briefed by police and ministers to concentrate on this link, with revenge for an American rocket attack on an Iranian airliner as the motive." (...)

Linklater does not disclose why the newspaper did not undertake its own investigations. However he did state how former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser expressed concerns to him about whether the CIA could have been involved in planting some of the "evidence".

"I don’t know. No one ever came to me and said, ‘Let’s go for the Libyans’, it was never as straightforward as that. The CIA was extremely subtle," Fraser is reported to have said.

"Crazy conspiracy" slur remembered

[On this date two years ago, The Times published Magnus Linklater’s article headlined Has Scotland really swallowed this crazy conspiracy? Here is what he wrote:]

A remarkable thing happened at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday. Eight senior Scottish judges were accused of presiding over a major miscarriage of justice in the Lockerbie affair — and a packed Scottish audience applauded.

That trust in the judiciary should have descended to this level says much about the way that the long saga of this terrorist atrocity has evolved. A determined campaign to absolve the convicted bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, of guilt, has succeeded to the extent that not only does it appear to have swayed public opinion in his favour, it has also undermined confidence in the most important legal process Scotland has been involved in since the Second World War.

The man who lodged the accusation was Hans Köchler, the UN observer at the Lockerbie trial. He believes that the judges, both at the original trial, and the appeal, were prepared to overlook flawed evidence to ensure a conviction. His fellow panel members, Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the bombing, and the writer John Ashton, who has ghosted al-Megrahi’s own account of the affair, agreed.

They believe not only that the evidence was deliberately manipulated at the trial, but that, from the outset, there was a conspiracy to point the finger at Libya and divert attention from the real instigator, Iran.

Yet that contention has never been challenged in any detail. Because the trial judges and the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service, are bound by convention to remain silent, the counter-argument has gone by default so that we have only heard one side of the case. The opportunity of a second appeal, which might have tested the allegations, was abandoned by al-Megrahi himself when he was released on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya.

But the case mounted by the pro-Megrahi campaigners is every bit as flawed as the one it seeks to dismantle. To demonstrate that Libya was framed, they have to prove that there was a calculated decision to do so. That decision would have had to lead to the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that.

This last contention is perhaps the most controversial. As Brian McConnachie, a senior Scottish QC, puts it: “The idea that eight Scottish judges took part in a deliberate manipulation of evidence for political reasons is simply preposterous.”

But for the conspiracy theorists, who have excluded reason and logic, the preposterous is all that remains.

[And here is the commentary that I appended on this blog to Mr Linklater’s article:]

Mr Linklater made the same points at the EIBF session.  The audience was rightly unimpressed.  As Rolfe commented on this blog:

“Today, I wanted to tell Magnus Linklater he was an idiot. Miscarriages of justice happen all the time, and they don't need a huge conspiracy of eminent people who know the defendant is innocent but conspire to convict him anyway. They just need the cops to latch on to the wrong person and then see guilt in everything they say and everything they do. Then confirmation bias and groupthink do the rest. Although there was a lot of politicking surrounding Lockerbie which added to the pressure, especially the determination of the authorities that SOMEONE had to be fingered for the atrocity, there's nothing fundamentally different about it. Ask the Maguire Seven.”

Mr Linklater is also well aware, but chooses not to mention, that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent and expert body, in 2007 (well after the eight judges mentioned by him had made their respective rulings) reported that on a factual issue absolutely central to Megrahi’s conviction the trial judges had reached a conclusion that, on the evidence, no reasonable court could have reached.

Pan Am insurer suing US Government over Lockerbie pay-out

[What follows is a part of a brief report published yesterday on the website of The Insurance Insider:]

Lloyd's run-off vehicle Equitas is suing the US government for $97mn after it prevented insurers from pursuing the Libyan government for its involvement in terrorism attacks, including the Lockerbie bombing.

Lloyd's insurers, alongside US legacy carrier Aviation & General, paid out $55mn in 1988 after the Pan Am plane exploded over the small town in southern Scotland, killing 270 people.

[Part of the background to this story can be found in a 2003 report in the Scottish Daily Record newspaper:]

The Lockerbie bomber is being sued for £400 million by Pan Am's insurers. 

A record civil action will be raised at the Court of Session this week in Edinburgh against ex-Libyan secret agent Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi. 

Insurers acting on behalf of the now-defunct airline want compensation for the money they paid out to the victims of the disaster. 

The case is the biggest single damages action ever lodged in a Scottish court. 

Megrahi's former co-accused Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, who was acquitted, the Libyan government and Libyan Airlines have also been named in the lawsuit. 

Last week, Megrahi, 51, was told at the High Court in Glasgow he must serve at least 27 years before he can be considered for parole. 

The action at the Court of Session has been tabled by Equitas of London, a subsidiary of Lloyd's of London. 

The legal move comes 15 years after Pan Am Flight 103 was blown to pieces by a bomb, killing 270 people. 

Equitas want to claw back some of the £600 million paid to their families. 

They are also trying to recover money on behalf of creditors of Pan Am, who went bust in 1991. Pan Am were sued by the families of the victims, including the 11 residents killed in Lockerbie. 

Claims were also made by residents whose homes were damaged. 

After the airline folded, power of attorney was transferred to Equitas. 

Equitas who have been pursuing Libya and the bombers since the 1990s have hired Edinburgh legal firm [Shepherd and Wedderburn] to represent them. 

A spokesman for Equitas said: “We are continuing to try and pursue our recoveries and the action in the Court of Session is part of that.'' 

Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi has agreed to pay £1.7 billion compensation to the victims' families after taking responsibility. [RB: The sum was $2.7 billion. The contingency fees of the lawyers representing the families swallowed up around one third of this.]

Equitas hope a win will put pressure on Libya to pay on behalf of the other parties, including Megrahi. 

Yesterday, Dr Iain Scobbie, a lecturer in international law at Glasgow University, said it would be difficult for Equitas to get compensation, even if they win. 

He said: “Under international law, a sovereign state is immune from any action of this kind.'' 

Megrahi's lawyer, Eddie McKechnie, said he could not comment, as he only represents his client on the criminal charge. 

[Another report, from June 2004, can be read here on the website of The Herald. The Court of Session action was settled on 18 February 2005: see Jonathan B Schwartz Dealing with a "rogue state": the Libya precedent, pages 568-69, footnote 92. It appears from an Associated Press news agency report on the website of The Washington Post that the settlement involved a payment in excess of US$31 million.

Given the various successful legal actions taken by Pan Am's insurers against Libya that the above sources specify, it is not immediately clear to me what their present action against the US Government relates to.]

If powerful governments want a guilty verdict they will get it

[A prominent European Union businessman who, over many years, has taken a keen interest in the Lockerbie case, has given me access to a paper that he has recently written about the international reaction to the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight 17. He wishes at present to remain anonymous. The full text of the paper can be read here. The following are extracts:]

The Crime

First let us try and define what the crime is we talk about here.  If it were the rebels who shot down MH17 then what most likely happened is the following. The rebels are engaged in combat with Ukrainian troops which they consider their enemy. The combat involves ground forces and from Ukrainian side also the air force that brings support to the Ukrainian ground forces. The rebels mistake MH17 for a Ukrainian military plane such an IL76 they had shot down recently and launch the fatal missile. If I understand correctly, this is a crime if they did not do proper checks on whether the target was civilian.

A Trial?

So if it would come to a trial, I presume that such trial, provided it was fair, should establish if the rebels did indeed properly check this and condemn them or clear them.  At this point most western European politicians have climbed on the bandwagon to call for action to hold ‘them’ responsible.  It is not completely clear who they mean by ‘them’ but it seems that Russia is included in ‘them’ and for some is even the prime suspect. How one can justify this legally is not very clear but many politicians say that Russia bears responsibility for having supplied the missiles. That reasoning assumes two things: 1) the Russians supplied the rockets and 2) whoever supplied them is also guilty.  We are now entering complicated territory. Let us suppose that Russia did supply the rockets. Under what law would that make them responsible for the use or misuse of the weapons?

Presumed Guilty

It is clear from their public utterances that western politicians ‘want’ a guilty verdict. It would be impossible in the eyes of the world to acquit someone in such a high profile case. One can thus reasonably expect that all means will be used to reach such a verdict. History has told us that if these powerful governments want a guilty verdict in such a case, they will get it (Lockerbie is good enough an example).  In the case of Lockerbie not only was Megrahi found guilty, Libya as a country was also found guilty and condemned to pay huge compensation.  It is not unreasonable to assume that legally sound or not, Russia would be found guilty in this case as well.

Previous incidents

Interestingly, in none of the previous cases of mistakenly shooting down civil airliners did it come to court cases where the people who pulled the trigger or their superiors were found guilty:

• El Al 402  (London-Tel Aviv) shot down by Bulgaria in 1955. 58 death, An apology was eventually issued and compensation paid.

• Libyan Arab Airlines 114 (Tripoli-Cairo) Shot down by Israel over the Sinai in 1973. 108 deaths, 5 survivers; Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, called it an "error of judgment", and Israel paid compensation to the victims' families.

• Itavia 870 (Bologna-Palermo), shot down in 1980 near Ustica (Sicily). 81 deaths. So far no official prosecution although an Italian court has deposited a complaint with France, suspected of shooting down the plane. Justice has for 30 years been seriously obstructed by the Italian Air Force.

• Korean Air 007 (New York-Séoul), shot down 1983 over Soviet territory, 269 deaths. Cold war situation. Due to cold war status no-one was prosecuted but Korean airlines paid compensation money since the plane had made a navigational error.

• Iran Air 655 (Bandar Abbas-Dubai), Shot down by US Navy in 1988. 290 deaths. Blaming it on Iran, United States recognized the aerial incident of 3 July 1988 as a terrible human tragedy and expressed deep regret over the loss of lives caused by the incident. Nobody was prosecuted but compensation money was paid.  

• TWA 800 (New York-Paris-Rome),  Explodes near Long Island, on 17 July 1996. Official inquiry very likely manipulated since earlier denied Navy exercises nearby later turned out to have taken place. 230 deaths. Following the official inquiry, no-one was ever prosecuted. A fatal mistake by US Navy however very likely.

• Siberian Airlines 1812 (Tel Aviv-Novosibirsk), shot down 2001 over Black Sea by Ukrainian army. 78 deaths.  On August 22, 2007 Kiev Appeals Court dismissed the victims' relatives suit against the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, ruling that military of Ukraine bear no liability for the accident.

So in none of the previous cases did somebody go to jail for having pulled the trigger. Nor did anybody who supplied the weapons ever get prosecuted. In the above cases the suppliers were:

Soviet Union

USA

(Most probably) France

It is interesting to see that in all the earlier mentioned cases the people who pulled the trigger and their political leaders denied responsibility and in some cases simply denied they ever did it.  The current position of whoever brought down MH17 is thus no exception. (...)

Public accusers

The two loudest “public accusers” in the case of MH17 are the governments in Kiev and, of course, Washington.

Let us have a look at the current prime minister of Ukraine, the loudest voice in the condemnation of the rebels and Russia. What did this man do when the Ukrainian governments denied all responsibility for the shooting down of Siberian Airlines 1812: Arseniy Yatsenyuk served in the government of Ukraine as Minister of Economy from 2005 to 2006; subsequently he was Foreign Minister of Ukraine in 2007.  So this man was part of the governments that denied justice to the victims of Siberian Airlines 1812.

What about the second loudest voice, the US government?  That their track record in the case of Iran Air 655 and in the case of Lockerbie is highly questionable should by now be clear.  Their position towards the International Criminal Court of Justice is also very clear:  On 17 July 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court was adopted by a vote of 120 to 7, with 21 countries abstaining. The seven countries that voted against the treaty were Iraq, Israel, Libya, the People's Republic of China, Qatar, Yemen, and the United States. (...)

So here we are….

Probably some rebels made a dramatic cock-up. As dramatic as the people who fired the missiles on the planes mentioned in the various earlier examples.

So what to do if you are a Russian rebel that made the fatal mistake?  Admit your mistake and turn yourself in? Hand yourself over to Kiev? Washington? ICC?  Nobody previously did it in any case of a mistakenly shot down plane.  Ironically, the only example of someone turning himself in for an air disaster was Megrahi and his co-accused Fhimah. Maybe they naively turned themselves in because they were innocent.  

With all the knowledge we now have of how the world has dealt with these kind of incidents in the past I cannot really blame the rebels for not admitting their mistake. A fair trial being highly unlikely if we look at who is pulling the strings.  As regards Russia, if the USA, France and Britain who have supplied plenty of arms to governments and rebels all over the world that have killed innocent civilian have never been prosecuted, I guess it is not sure that there is a legal ground for prosecution here either.

One thing is however for sure, the sad death of hundreds of innocent victims is again being exploited by politicians.

All in all, a sad analysis and summing up of the way the world is dealing with air disasters.