Discredited forensic science at heart of Lockerbie conviction

What follows is an item posted on this blog on this date five years ago:

Gareth Peirce calls for independent inquiry into Lockerbie bombing

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

An independent inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing was called for last night by a leading human rights lawyer.

Gareth Peirce, who has represented a string of high-profile victims of miscarriage of justice, said that the forensic evidence on which the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was convicted was flawed.

The finding itself was “very, very worrying” and based the same kind of discredited forensic science that was at the heart of several notable miscarriages of justice in the '70s and '80s, she said.

“The [Lockerbie] case was founded on twin pillars: one, that al-Megrahi was linked to a charred fragment of a bomb timer; and second, his identification was ‘claimed’ by a man who could not be sure of his evidence.

“Has everyone forgotten the lessons learned of flawed scientific evidence and identification?

“The point being made by the families over 20 years is that they want to know the cause of the Lockerbie disaster. And at every turn, limitations have been put on their ability to discover it.” (...)

She said that there had been a Fatal Accident Inquiry in 1999, which was limited to the immediate cause of the explosion so as not to prejudice future prosecutions, she said.

Some 15 years later there was the prosecution in the Hague of two Libyans, where the family could only be present and observe. But there had never been a “proper explanation of what they want to hear.”

But a UN assessor appointed to the trial had been scathing of the judges’ verdict, she added, and of the “atmosphere of political interference that permeated the trial”.

It was now down to ministers to set up an independent inquiry, whether Scottish or UK ministers, she said.

“I completely endorse what the families say, that this country, Britain, bears the responsibility for there being an adequate investigation into what actually occurred.”

She added that the fact that the case was referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Scottish Criminal Cases Appeal Commission showed the huge obstacles that al-Megrahi had surmounted.

“It is very difficult to get a case referred back. “He then had a choice of abandoning it and going home to die, or staying a fighting it,” she added.

But it was crucial that the evidence assembled came out. “The families had believed that after 20 years there was about to be a proper investigation. But their wishes have been frustrated.”

Eleven years since removal of UN sanctions against Libya

[Today marks the eleventh anniversary of the removal by the United Nations Security Council of the sanctions against Libya imposed in the wake of Lockerbie. Here are some extracts from the report published at the time by the United Nations News Centre:]

After several delays in recent weeks, the United Nations Security Council today finally lifted decade-old sanctions imposed against Libya over the deadly bombing in 1988 of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, after Tripoli agreed to pay up to $10 million each to the families of the 270 victims.

The vote on the resolution, adopted by 13 in favour with two abstentions – France and the United States – had been postponed repeatedly while Paris negotiated with Libya to improve a settlement of $34 million it had already reached over the similar bombing of a French UTA plane over Niger in 1989, which killed 170 people.

Welcoming the vote, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement he hoped this "important step, along with the settlement arrangements agreed following many years of intensive negotiations, will help bring some comfort to the families of the victims of the tragic events" over Scotland and Niger "as the international community strives to bring this tragic chapter to a close."

The sanctions, which included a ban on military sales, air communications and certain oil equipment, had already been suspended by the Council in 1999 after Libya agreed to hand over two nationals for trial before a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands in connection with the bombing. One of them, Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi, was convicted and jailed for his role.

The United Kingdom and Bulgaria cosponsored the resolution after Libya told the Council in August of its readiness to cooperate in the international fight against terrorism and compensate the families of those killed at Lockerbie, as demanded by Council resolutions 748 of 1992 and 883 of 1993.

Earlier this week, UK Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, who is Council President for the month of September, said Libya’s current compliance with the terms of the earlier resolutions could allow it to move back into the international community.

[A flavour of the current situation in Libya, eleven years after the removal of sanctions and approaching three years after the death of Muammar Gaddafi, can be gleaned here and here and here.]

Story breaks of Heathrow baggage area security breach

[What follows is a report from The Mirror newspaper published on this date in 2001:]

Pan Am's Heathrow baggage area was broken into hours before Flight 103 was blasted apart over Lockerbie, The Mirror has found. But a statement on the incident made to police by security guard Ray Manly 12 years ago was lost and the crucial information never revealed in court. Mr Manly found a padlock cut open, leaving the way clear for a bomb to be planted in an area where luggage was ready to be loaded. The lock, which could yield clues, is also missing. Mr Manly, 63, said: "I can't believe the statement was lost. It's just incredible."

The new evidence throws doubt on the murder conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, 49. Prosecutors said the Flight 103 bomb was flown from Malta to Heathrow. The defence said it was more likely the bomb was introduced at Heathrow. Heathrow security guard Mr Manly was stunned when his evidence of a potential bomb threat to Pan Am's Flight 103 was ignored by the Lockerbie trial. The reason was simple - a statement he made to police disappeared and his information was overlooked. As a result, neither prosecution or defence knew a break-in had taken place. Shocked Mr Manly discovered a professional had sliced through a heavy duty padlock protecting Pan Am's baggage area at Heathrow's Terminal Three hours before the doomed flight took off.

It left the way clear for terrorists to steal a luggage tag and plant a suitcase bomb among baggage already X-rayed and ready for loading. Although Mr Manly reported the break-in, it was NOT investigated before take-off. Anti-terrorist police only questioned him about the incident the next month and never questioned him again. And, 12 years later, there is no sign of the statement or padlock which could hold vital forensic clues. The new evidence could now play a crucial role in the appeal of convicted bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohamet Al Megrahi, 49, who is serving life for the outrage which killed 270. Mr Manly, 63 - who has since been questioned for three hours by prosecutors - told a friend: "I can't believe my evidence was not part of the trial and my statement went missing.

"A terrorist who wanted to put a bomb on that plane would have gained access to the perfect place. The luggage would not be checked again before being loaded on the plane. "Although police took a statement, I never heard from anyone afterwards. When there was no mention of my evidence at the trial I rang police who put me in touch with the defence. "They told me no one knew about my statement or the break-in. I find that just incredible. "My statement has disappeared and so has the padlock. No one can even tell me if it was tested for fingerprints. "This has been weighing on my mind for over 12 years. At last someone is taking it seriously." The Mirror has obtained copies of two sworn affidavits Mr Manly, who has arthritis, made to defence lawyers.

They will form a key part of Al Megrahi's appeal next year. Mr Manly may be called to give evidence. The guard discovered the security breach at 12.30am on December 21, 1988, seventeen and a half hours before Flight 103 was ripped apart at 31,000ft. At the time, he was in charge of four staff stationed at numbered control posts on the public side of the airport to ensure only those authorised could enter the airside section. One control post - CP2 - was on the ground floor of the terminal, less than 50ft from the Pan Am check-in desk. It was next to the entrance to a Pan Am baggage area on the airside used for luggage too big to be processed by normal check-in procedures. There was a door in a corridor linking the check-in area and the control post. But it was never locked. A guard would be posted outside the rubber doors of the baggage entrance at all times when they were unlocked. When there were no more bags to check in, the doors would be locked and a padlocked metal bar placed across. Mr Manly, of Surbiton, Surrey, was making his rounds when he found the broken padlock.

He said in his statement to lawyers: "Position CP2 had been interfered with. The doors were closed. "However, the padlock was on the floor to the left of the doors and had been cut through in a way which suggested bolt cutters had been used. I reported my discovery to my night duty officer, Phil Radley and stayed at the post until I could be relieved. "I did not search the area or enter into the airside through the door. No other person came to the scene. "In the area airside of CP2, baggage containers for use inside aircraft were left. Loose baggage tagged for loading on to flights would also be left. "In the check-in area Pan Am baggage labels of various types were left unsecured in desks. "I believe it would have been possible for an unauthorised person to obtain tags for a particular Pan Am flight then, having broken the CP2 lock, to have introduced a tagged bag into the baggage build up area."

Now retired Mr Manly told his friend: "It was the most serious security breach that I came across in 17 years at Heathrow. "This was a professional job. It would have allowed an intruder direct access to the area where Pan Am bags were stored. "The bags had come from other flights and would already have been tagged and X-rayed." Mr Manly - who recorded the incident in a log book and an incident report form - reported back to his supervisor who alerted police at the airport. He was told to stay at CP2 until he was relieved two hours later. In that time, neither his supervisor or police arrived. Amazingly, Mr Manly was not interviewed by anti-terrorist police until the following month. He said: "I was interviewed by a Mr Robson who took a statement. He had the broken padlock in his possession."

After learning that his evidence was lost, Mr Manly was quizzed in March by a lawyer from Scottish prosecutors. He said: "He wanted to know why I hadn't come forward before. I told him I'd given my evidence to police and assumed it had gone forward to the court. "No one has been able to explain why that didn't happen. "It was lucky the airport authorities were able to find the log book and incident form I'd filled in. Otherwise I doubt anyone would have believed me."

Al Megrahi was jailed for a minimum 20 years in January by a Scottish court sitting in Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Alleged accomplice Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, 44, was cleared. Prosecutors claimed the Libyans placed a suitcase bomb on a flight from Luqa airport, in Malta, to Frankfurt. The case was then "interlined" on to a connecting flight to Heathrow where it was stored before being loaded on Flight 103. But Al Megrahi's defence, Bill Taylor QC, insisted there was no direct evidence of this. Instead, he said, a terrorist could have introduced the bomb at Heathrow as there would be less risk of the device being lost.

Peter Walker, Pan Am baggage supervisor at Heathrow, told the £66million hearing six interline bags were loaded on the flight along with luggage from Frankfurt and Heathrow passengers. At the time, Heathrow did not have guards based inside the airside baggage build-up area. There was also no system to prevent unaccompanied bags being loaded on planes. At first, it was believed Palestinian terrorists carried out the attack on the orders of Iran. Suspicion fell on Megrahi and Fhimah after the CIA received information from a Libyan spy. The Procurator Fiscal's Office in Edinburgh, which brought the case, said last night: "As an appeal is pending it is inappropriate to comment."

[The concealment from Megrahi’s defence team of the evidence relating to the Heathrow break-in is the subject of one of Justice for Megrahi’s allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial that are currently under investigation by Police Scotland.]

Malaysia Airlines flight 17 and Pan Am flight 103 contrasted

[The following are excerpts from a long report published today on the World Socialist Web Site:]

The Dutch Safety Board’s (DSB’s) preliminary report into the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) is being portrayed by imperialist governments and their media spokesmen as confirmation that anti-Kiev rebels in eastern Ukraine shot the plane down with a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile.

While claims of indirect Russian responsibility for the destruction of MH17 are at the heart of the US-NATO propaganda over Ukraine, the report says nothing of the sort. In fact, it does not even state that the aircraft was shot down. MH17 crashed on July 17, in the war zone of eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers and crew members lost their lives.

The DSB’s report states that, in accordance with the stated “sole objective” of “the prevention of similar accidents and incidents,” it does not “apportion blame or liability in respect of any party”—something that the capitalist media downplays or ignores.

The only basis on which the media can again repeat their assertions that pro-Russian separatists were responsible is the report’s statement that “The damage observed in the forward section of the aircraft appears to indicate that the aircraft was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects from outside the aircraft” (emphasis added).

But the report never once identifies what it means by “high-energy objects.” It also claims that, even though enough of the wreckage was recovered to confirm that the aircraft appears to have been particularly badly hit above the level of the cockpit floor, DSB investigators supposedly failed to recover or study any of the objects that penetrated the plane.

The report as issued is equally compatible with radar and satellite data presented July 21 by the Russian military, indicating that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet was in the immediate vicinity and ascending towards MH17 as it was shot down. Missiles and machinegun rounds fired by an SU-25 are also “high-energy objects.” This possibility has not been addressed, let alone refuted by Kiev, Washington or anyone else involved in the investigation.

On August 9 [RB: the correct date is August 7], the Malaysian New Straits Times published an article effectively charging the Kiev regime with shooting down MH17. It stated that evidence from the crash site indicated that the plane was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter with a missile followed by heavy machine gun fire. The report was subsequently ignored by the world’s media. (...)

The DSB does not address the absence of any satellite imagery or radar data, or any other evidence supplied by US intelligence agencies, which operate the most powerful global surveillance network. It is implausible, to say the least, to imagine that Washington’s vast apparatus was paying no attention to the war zone of eastern Ukraine, which is also a regular flight path for many commercial airline flights. (...)

In sharp contrast, following the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, photographs of the area taken by a French satellite were delivered to the investigators within hours. The US Department of Defence and NASA also provided the investigation with high-resolution photographs from spy satellites.

Despite Russia continually requesting that the US administration supply the investigation with the images and data it obviously possesses relating to the MH17 crash, it has refused to do so.

[Further posts on this blog about MH17 as compared with, or contrasted to, Pan Am 103 can be found here.]

Recruitment of the FBI's Lockerbie "golden informant"

[What follows is taken from an article headed Richard Marquise and his "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka - An Extract from "Enemies - A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner posted yesterday on baz’s blog The Masonic Verses:]

Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies - A History of the FBI is a fascinating story of the creation of the FBI within the US Justice Department following American entry into the Great War, not for the purpose of criminal investigation but to counter the threat of radicals, anarchists and communists by means of dubious constitutionality. (...)

The author devotes six pages to an uncritical account of the Bureau's involvement in the Lockerbie case focusing on the role of the leader of the FBI taskforce (of 7 persons) Richard Marquise. (Tom Thurman is not mentioned.)

Marquise was recently quoted in the Dutch media in a story titled "The Lessons of Lockerbie" in relation to the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine. Marquise advocated the recruitment of a "Golden Informant" to solve the case just as he had done in the Lockerbie case (and by ignoring the actual evidence). Weiner's book gives a very interesting summary of how this "Golden Informant" Majid Giaka was recruited (page 372).

"Marquise needed to turn intelligence into evidence.  He needed a witness who would link Megrahi to the Samsonite suitcase with the Semtex.  He needed to find someone who knew that the suitcase carried the bomb from Air Malta to Pan Am 103.  He went back to the CIA. The Agency told him, belatedly, that it had once had a Libyan informant named Abdul Majid Giaka. He had gone on the CIA's payroll four months before Lockerbie. He was on it the night Pan Am 103 was bombed. But the Agency had dropped him a few months later, deeming him a fabricator milking his interrogators for money.

Marquise was dying to talk to Majid, no matter how dubious he seemed to the CIA.  In June 1991 the Agency flew him from a navy ship off the coast of Malta to give the FBI the chance to interview him in Virginia.  Justly wary of its informant, the CIA imposed one condition: don't tell anybody."  (Marquise immediately phoned Stuart Henderson.)  

"Majid was debriefed for at least two weeks during September 1991. He insisted that he knew three facts. He identified Megrahi as an intelligence officer serving as Libya's airline security chief. He said that Megrahi's subordinate in Malta had a cache of Semtex. And he said he had seen Megrahi with a large brown suitcase at the airport in Malta during the weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. Majid was without doubt an unreliable witness. But the FBI had faith that he was telling the truth on those three points. Marquise thought he had the foundation of a case that would stand up in court."

Giaka's account did stand up unchallenged before a patriotic US Grand Jury leading to the November 1991 indictment. However, it crumbled before even the Mickey Mouse Camp Zeist tribunal when in the defence team's finest hour they had admitted in evidence a large number of CIA cables regarding Giaka. What is astonishing is that Megrahi was actually convicted despite Giaka being discredited, a fact not mentioned in Mr Weiner's book.

Perhaps some of the parties to the MH17 atrocity will, (or have already) recruited their own "Golden Informant".

Marquise's wrote his own account of the Lockerbie investigation in his book Scotbom.  (Which I have never read.) Giaka of course never wrote his memoirs and has never been heard of since the close of the Camp Zeist trial.

I am afraid the only "Lesson of Lockerbie" for the families of those murdered on flight MH17 is how Governments fabricate evidence to suit their own political objectives regardless of the facts.

Forthcoming performance of Lockerbie play

[There is to be a performance of Lee Gershuny’s play Lockerbie: Lost Voices at the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock on 3 October 2014. The play was first performed, to considerable acclaim, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. The online advertisement for the forthcoming production reads as follows:]

Friday 3 October at 7:30pm in The Beacon Studio Theatre. Tickets £10 (Concessions £8)

Meet six hypothetical passengers on Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988 before and after the plane explodes over Lockerbie. A mother and her stepdaughter argue about the roots of injustice; a retired couple clash over family versus personal dreams; and a US intelligence agent tries to convince a Scottish journalist to risk her life for the “scoop of the century.” With humour, love and courage, they challenge each other to either accept the unacceptable or take a stand for their personal truth. After the explosion, they speak from the neutrality of death, witnessing and questioning events as they unfold on the ground.

Beacon Arts Centre | 01475 723723

A deafening silence

What follows is an item published on this blog on this date two years ago:

Silence for the dead of Lockerbie

[This is the heading over an article posted recently on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads as follows:]

It is now almost six months since the revelation in John Ashton's book (Megrahi: You are my Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence) that the key evidence on which Baset Al-Megrahi was convicted can no longer be scientifically sustained.

And yet there remains a deafening silence on the part of the judges and Crown Office officials responsible for the investigation and conviction of Al-Megrahi.

The two main planks on which the prosecution's case was founded are:

1. A Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, identified Al-Megrahi as the stranger who had, shortly before the December 1988 bombing, bought clothes in his shop.

2. A fragment of an electronic timer board found at Lockerbie came from a batch of twenty sold to Libya in 1985 by Swiss electronics company MEBO.

1. The Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, during their own three-year investigation of the case, found six grounds for concluding that "a miscarriage of justice may have occurred".

One of the SCCRC's grounds was their discovery of a series of entries in the police diary of chief Dumfries and Galloway police investigator Harry Bell.

Bell recorded from the first days of his investigation that huge offers of reward were available from the United States to principal identification witness Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci.

In a letter sent by Dana Biehl of the US Department of Justice, it was explained that Gauci would receive "unlimited monies, with $10,000 available immediately" if Al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bell's police diary, and all knowledge of this offer and negotiations concerning the offer, were concealed from the trial and first appeal. The judges who convicted Al-Megrahi were unaware of these matters when they concluded that Gauci was a totally reliable witness.

Gauci's final and conclusive identification of Al-Megrahi took place during a police identity parade.

Yet Gauci could not fail to identify the man, since he had possessed for several weeks a copy of a magazine with a colour photo of Al-Megrahi, in which the Libyan was described as "the bomber".

2. The fragment of electronic timer board

It was upon this item that the entire case against Al-Megrahi would turn. In the minds of the judges it proved the Libyan connection, since the evidence appeared to show that it came from a batch sold to Libya in 1985.

It had - according to the available evidence - been manufactured by Swiss company Thüring, on behalf of electronics supplier MEBO. It seemed to be a "golden thread" linking Al-Megrahi to the bomb.

In 2008 the Al-Megrahi defence team discovered an extraordinary anomaly, one which had escaped the attention of the prosecution team, the Scottish Crown Office, and the Scottish police. It concerned the silver-like protective coating on the fragment, which covered the copper circuitry in order to prevent oxidisation.

A hand-written note by the government's chief forensic scientist Alan Feraday had recorded the protective coating as "100% tin".

Feraday's records also showed that he was aware of the difference between the Lockerbie fragment and the coating upon a control sample supplied to the police as part of their investigation. The control sample - manufactured by Swiss company Thüring - contained a 70/30% alloy of tin and lead.

The prosecution and police mistake was to speculate that the heat of the Lockerbie explosion had entirely evaporated the lead content. But no follow-up investigations in order to test this theory were carried out.

During the trial, the judges and defence team were unaware of the anomaly and accepted the provenance of the fragment from the metallurgical point of view.

When in 2008 the defence team checked with Thüring, it emerged that all timer boards made by that company throughout the 1980's were coated with an alloy mixture of 70% tin and 30% lead. Indeed, Thüring had always made, and continue to make, boards with a 70/30% alloy.

In 2008 the Thüring production manager swore an affidavit to this effect and was scheduled to repeat his evidence in Al-Megrahi's second appeal, abandoned in 2009.

Having discovered the anomaly, the defence team commissioned two highly experienced and reputable scientists to investigate the matter. In a series of experiments carried out at separate laboratories, the scientists tested the theory of evaporation of lead content by high temperatures.

In all cases, the lead did not evaporate. Thus they established beyond all reasonable doubt that the fragment found at Lockerbie could not have come from any of the timers sold to Libya by MEBO.

This evidence too was scheduled to be presented in Al-Megrahi's second appeal, abandoned in 2009.

The protocols and data resulting from the defence-commissioned experiments would no doubt be freely available, should the prosecuting authorities request to examine them.

Do the responsible officers not have a duty of conscience to at least enquire into this new evidence?  

And might we ask of Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland how he would feel if it was his own daughter who had been murdered by unknown persons, while a man remains falsely convicted for that offence?

Will not his silence, and that of his officials and the Scottish judiciary, should it continue, be interpreted by historians as the greatest of betrayals of Scottish society and the law?

[RB: Today, two years and six months after the revelation in John Ashton’s book, the deafening silence continues.]

HMG and the release of Megrahi: from a UK ambassador to Libya

What follows is taken from an article by Oliver Miles, a former UK ambassador to Libya, published on this date five years ago, shortly after Megrahi’s compassionate release, in the Mail on Sunday and reproduced on this blog:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s acknowledgement that the prospect of trade and oil deals with Libya played a part in the Government’s handling of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi has heightened the intrigue.

One British motivation is clear: Libya, dirt poor in everything except oil and gas, has been an important energy producer for half a century. It sells £40billion of oil per year – mainly to Europe – and buys from every trading country in the world. Britain has become a major supplier.

Furthermore, Libya is that rare thing, a ‘rogue state’ which sponsored terrorism before being brought back into the international fold by diplomacy. (...)

For 15 years Libya has been slowly emerging from its status as international pariah, and dealing with London is regarded there as a staging post to its ultimate goal – the normalisation of relations with the United States.

There is also the matter of Megrahi, an important man from an influential tribe (...) Megrahi’s close family and tribal elders would have been putting pressure on the Libyan leader to do something about bringing their man home.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Libya has actively sought to deal with the international community, often using Britain as a diplomatic bridgehead to the US, which was in the past much more aggressive. It ended support for terrorism, paid compensation to victims on a vast scale and abandoned illegal programmes of weapons of mass destruction.

All this has made Libya increasingly attractive to the West. The benefits for Britain in having access to Libya’s oil, when gas supplies are subject to disruption by the Russians and nuclear plants are being decommissioned, should be obvious to anyone. (...)

Lockerbie has been central to Libya’s international rehabilitation. Under arrangements worked out in [1998] by Robin Cook and the Foreign Office, involving a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands, Megrahi was convicted of responsibility for the destruction of the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1988 which killed 270 people.

There have always been doubts about the evidence against him. Some believe, as I do, that the Libyans delivered him for trial only because they felt he was unlikely to be convicted.

Having read the legal judgment of his trial, I defy anyone to conclude from it that his guilt was proved beyond reasonable doubt. Yet his first appeal, in 2002, was dismissed. He always insisted on his innocence and only abandoned his second appeal in the hope of a return to Libya. (...)

On his second visit, in 2007, [Tony Blair] launched a number of initiatives, including assisting the return of BP to Libya.

He also unwittingly laid the foundations for the current furore by proposing a Prisoner Transfer Agreement to allow British prisoners convicted in Libya to serve their sentences in Britain and vice versa – an arrangement which exists between many countries.

The Libyans saw it as an instrument to get Megrahi home.

But Blair seems conveniently to have overlooked the fact that Megrahi’s fate rested with the devolved government in Scotland. Given the bad relations between the Labour Party and the Scottish Nationalists, this was more than a formal problem.

Blair also overlooked an even bigger obstacle. Under the Lockerbie trial agreements, any sentence arising from it had to be served in Scotland (the Libyans insisted on this since they feared Megrahi might be handed to the Americans and executed).

The Lockerbie agreements are not properly documented, but the commitments were well known to the Foreign Office, the Americans and the Libyans. Tony Blair may not have bothered about them as he didn’t like inconvenient advice from officials.

As these difficulties emerged, the Libyans began to feel that they had been led up the garden path. And when it became known last year that Megrahi was terminally ill with prostate cancer, Tripoli began to issue not-very-veiled threats that if he died in jail relations between Britain and Libya would suffer.

When his condition deteriorated, two things happened: he inexplicably abandoned his appeal, and a story was leaked to the BBC that Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill was to grant compassionate release.

The reaction in the US was fevered amid rumours of a deal involving business and oil. The Americans have taken a line which they would call robust and I would call vindictive.

Some reactions have been foolish (Obama’s suggestion that Megrahi should have been put under house arrest in Tripoli), and others outrageous.

The demand by Obama and Brown that Megrahi should not receive a ‘hero’s welcome’ was a classic example of demanding that water should run uphill.

I believe Megrahi’s release was influenced more by the Scottish government’s desire to assert its independence rather than by any deal. Others may disagree, but time will tell.

Progress is slow and there are many obstacles to a better way of life in Libya. But BP’s operations continue and Megrahi has returned home to die.