The Justice Committee and the Crown Office

[The Official Report (Hansard) relating to the Scottish Parliament Justice Committee’s consideration on 3 February 2015 of Justice for Megrahi’s petition (PE1370) calling for an independent inquiry into the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial can be accessed here. What follows is an excerpt:]

The Convener (Christine Grahame):

PE1370 is on an independent inquiry into the Megrahi conviction. The committee has received the record of the latest meeting between the Justice for Megrahi campaign and Police Scotland and correspondence from JFM highlighting recent comments by the Lord Advocate on the Megrahi investigation. Do members have any comments to make on the material that we have received, or are we content simply to note the updates and the developments with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission application that are referred to in the paper? I should say that the application to the court will be sub judice—that is a little cautionary line for you. Are members content to continue the petition until we see the outcome of the other matters that are on-going?

John Finnie:

I think that the committee is content to do so and I am pleased about that. However, it is important to pick up on some of the comments that were made by the Justice for Megrahi people, not least those on the role of the Lord Advocate in the broadest sense and not relating specifically to any on-going matter.

In September and December 2012 and, more recently, in December last year, the Lord Advocate compromised—to my mind—the potential for him to be viewed as an honest broker when it comes to receiving the report from Police Scotland. Although I am delighted that Police Scotland gets a ringing endorsement from the Justice for Megrahi committee for the diligent work that it is doing, there are challenges ahead that will relate not only to the delivery of the reports to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and that we might have some regard to in the future.

Gil Paterson (Clydebank and Milngavie) (SNP):

My point is similar but I go in the opposite direction, so I would need to get advice on this at some point. Setting aside the case in question and talking about the generality of people who have been convicted, I think that the Crown Office automatically assumes that they are guilty and will defend that position except when new evidence is brought forward for it to consider, perhaps for an appeal. My understanding has always been that, no matter what crime has been committed, the Crown Office cannot take a “mebbes aye, mebbes naw” attitude but must be clear that, if somebody has been convicted, that is how it is. My view is that the Crown Office will defend that position until new evidence comes forward, but I would need some advice on that.

The Convener:

I think that it is appropriate that, if somebody has been convicted, they are considered guilty—otherwise we would have turmoil within the justice system. However, I take your point and I have some comments to make on that myself.

Roderick Campbell (North East Fife) (SNP):

I highlight the fact that, as Deputy Chief Constable Livingstone says in the note that the committee has received, “an independent QC” was appointed to provide “the police investigation with an appropriate level of scrutiny prior to reporting the findings to Crown Office, which was clearly not the normal procedure.” There is an acceptance that it is an unusual situation. I think that Mr Finnie’s comments should be tempered with that point.

The Convener:

“Tempered” was the word that I was thinking about. Another issue—however we get to the nub of it—is who investigates the Crown Office. The Crown Office cannot investigate itself. I think that that is where you are going with your comments, John, is it not?

John Finnie:

Yes, indeed, and we looked at that area before. I should say that Mr Finnie always seeks to temper his comments and, believe you me, these are extremely tempered comments given what I would like to say.

There is an obligation on the committee to consider the issue when respected citizens are called “conspiracy theorists” and accusations that they make in good faith are described as deliberately false and misleading. That does not suggest that an open posture is being adopted by the COPFS.

The Convener:

Do you think that we are conspiracy theorists, John, as members of JFM?

John Finnie:

I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist.

The Convener:

Neither do I.

Scottish Labour's "astonishing hypocrisy"

An item originally posted on this blog four years ago today:

Kenny MacAskill: I stand by Lockerbie decision

[This is the headline over a report by Ben Borland in today's edition of the Sunday Express. It reads in part:]

Kenny MacAskill yesterday broke his recent silence over the continuing Lockerbie saga and insisted he stood by his controversial decision to free the bomber.

In an exclusive hard-hitting interview with the Sunday Express, the defiant Justice Secretary insisted he was not involved in any “murky machinations” or deals and accused Scottish Labour of “astonishing hypocrisy”.

He also categorically denied that he had been swayed by “economic, diplomatic, or any other considerations” and said he acted in an “open and honest way” at all times.

And in a move designed to end conspiracy theories surrounding the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, Mr MacAskill said he planned to press ahead with changes to the law that would allow secret papers relating to Libyan’s appeal to be made public.

The Justice Secretary’s intervention in the on-going row puts his career on the line and comes amid mounting anger at the emergence of attempted back room deals ahead of Megrahi’s release in 2009.Documents released last week sparked accusations Holyrood ministers had brokered agreements with Westminster over air gun powers and legislative change to save millions in compensation for prisoners forced to ‘slop out’.

But Mr MacAskill told the Sunday Express yesterday: “The decision on Megrahi was mine to take and mine alone – and I did so according to the due process and practice of Scots Law, without regard to economic, diplomatic, or any other considerations.

“I rejected the prisoner transfer application, and granted compassionate release. Many people agree with that decision and many disagree, and I respect the views of all the relatives, in all of the 21 countries affected by the atrocity.

“But I hope that everyone accepts I took it in an open and honest way - in stark contrast to the murky machinations of the former UK Labour Government, who we now know changed their policy in secret and did everything they could to facilitate Megrahi’s release for commercial and political reasons.

"And the astonishing hypocrisy of Labour in Scotland who attacked a decision that their own government in London supported.”

Prime Minister David Cameron last week ruled out an inquiry despite a new report showing the previous Labour government had gone out of its way to help Libya in order to secure lucrative oil and military contracts. (...)

Mr MacAskill has now promised to publish full details of the 2007 Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruling Megrahi may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The father-of-five was granted leave to appeal by the courts watchdog but was struck by illness and dropped the bid shortly before his release.

Mr MacAskill, who has rarely spoken publicly about the decision that will define his career, said: “We should be proud of our justice system in Scotland. We have nothing to hide – that is why I will publish a Bill soon in the new Parliament so that we can make this further report available.

“I believe that Megrahi was guilty, but I accept that many do not. We will never all agree on these matters, but I hope we can agree that no one in Scotland should have anything to fear from having the maximum possible information about this issue in the public domain.”

Campaigners described Mr Mac-Askill’s acknowledgment that many do not believe Megrahi was behind the 1988 disaster – in which 270 people were killed – as a significant development.

Dr Jim Swire, whose 24-year-old daughter, Flora, died in the bombing, said: “Both MacAskill and Salmond have always stuck to the mantra that they absolutely believe in the guilt of Megrahi, although I don’t understand how they can be so sure when the SCCRC has said there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

“This is a very welcome modification acknowledging perhaps for the first time that doubts exist in the community. I think the SCCRC rulings might well be intensely embarrassing to the office of the Lord Advocate and the Crown Office.”

[An interesting article headed Many shades of Gray as Megrahi row hypocrisy emerges appears in today's edition of Scotland on Sunday. It is by regular columnist Duncan Hamilton, one of my former students and a former SNP MSP. I wish he would now turn his journalistic talents towards the scandal of the Megrahi conviction and the shameful and incomprehensible failure of the SNP government to institute an independent inquiry.]

US policy informed by expert dunces

[What follows is an excerpt from an article by Bruce Fein published yesterday on the website of The Washington Times:]

US foreign policy is informed by expert dunces, who chronically give birth to calamities. (...)

Exemplary is the advice of Kenneth M Pollack, a senior fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution, to bring stability and legitimacy to the government of Iraq through a Shiite-Sunni power sharing dispensation. Writing in The New York Times (“ISIS is Losing Iraq. But What Happens Next?” Feb 4, 2015), Mr Pollack insinuates that US national security would be profoundly impaired if Iraq falls into a Shiite-Sunni civil war.

That conclusion is far from self-evident, and Mr Pollack fails to articulate a single reason for believing that it is true. Numerous countries are plagued with civil strife irrelevant to the security of the United States. Think of Somalia, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

The United States does not revel in the misery of other peoples. But our national security would be no more implicated in a Shiite-Sunni civil war than it was by the Rwandan genocide of Tutus by Hutsi in 1994. (...)

In 1991, the United States encouraged Iraq’s Marsh Arabs to revolt against Saddam Hussein, and then abandoned them to Saddam’s mercy. The United State supported Saddam in his 1980-88 war with Iran, and then switched to overthrow and kill him in 2003. The United States normalized relations with Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi for destroying weapons of mass destruction, renouncing terrorism, and paying compensation for the Lockerbie bombing. Then we flipped and commenced war against Gaddafi in 2011, which led to his ouster and murder by our allies.

No Shiite or Sunni in Iraq with minimal intelligence would trust the United States not to double-cross them, for instance, abandoning Iraq’s Sunnis to cut a nuclear deal with Shiite Iran, or betraying Iraq’s Shiites to solidify relations with Saudi Arabia, including undiminished production of oil to keep international prices low and Russia, Venezuela, and Iran economically destitute.

Expert dunces need to be driven out of the nation’s foreign policy arena as Jesus drove out money changers from the Temple.

[Another relevant article by Bruce Fein can be accessed here.]

A conversation with Dr Morag Kerr

Tomorrow evening (Thursday, 12 February) from 19.00 to 20.00 GMT David McGowran will speaking with Dr Morag Kerr, author of Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, to consider her assertion that the bomb that killed 270 people in 1988 was undoubtedly put aboard Pan Am 103 at London Heathrow Airport. You will be able to listen to the programme on Livestream here.

Conflict of interest: a return to the charge

One week ago I posted on this blog an item headed Lockerbie, the Lord Advocate and conflict of interest. It contained the following paragraphs:

“The Lord Advocate is the head of the prosecution system in Scotland. All serious (solemn) cases are brought in his name and prosecuted by him or one of his deputes (or, in the sheriff court, by a procurator fiscal who is a member of his department, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service). In the investigation of crime, the police are legally obliged to obey any directions given by the Lord Advocate or on his behalf.

“Police Scotland are currently investigating serious allegations of criminal misconduct in the course of the Lockerbie criminal investigation, prosecution and trial. The allegations are directed against, amongst others, police officers, Crown Office personnel involved in the prosecution, and forensic scientists instructed and called as witnesses by the Crown Office. The current investigation is a rigorous and professional one. It is likely to be concluded later this year.

“Under the current law the investigators’ report will be submitted to the Lord Advocate. Even if that report reaches the conclusion that there are grounds for prosecution, it is for the Lord Advocate to decide whether any prosecutions should in fact be brought. He could decide not to proceed.”

Here are comments that the present Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, is reported to have made about the allegations of criminal misconduct that are the subject of the ongoing Police Scotland investigation and about the people who made them: “without foundation”; “defamatory”; “conspiracy theorists”; (The Times, 21 December 2012); “During the 26-year-long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in this case.” (The Times, 20 December 2014). Mr Mulholland has not challenged the accuracy of the remarks attributed to him in these reports in The Times.

It quite simply cannot be right in a civilised country which makes any claim to take the administration of justice seriously that the decision on whether criminal proceedings should be brought in a particular case should rest with a person who, or with a Department whose head, has already publicly expressed such views about that case.

As I wrote a week ago: “In these circumstances it is submitted that now, before Police Scotland’s report is ready for submission, the necessary steps should be taken to avoid the Lord Advocate finding himself in the embarrassing position regarding conflict of interest that the report’s landing on his desk would place him and the Crown Office in. The police report should rather be handed to, and the decision whether prosecutions ought to follow should be devolved to, an independent lawyer outwith the Crown Office. Our American cousins in analogous situations make use of a special prosecutor or independent counsel. This is one area in which we can learn from them. Why not start putting the mechanism in place now?”

The farrago of al-Megrahi's farcical conviction

[Yesterday I reproduced on this blog an article by Ian Bell that was published four years ago in The Herald. What follows is the text of a piece that he published the following day on his own blog (regrettably no longer available online, as far as I can see):]

Lockerbie: some shrapnel

Something stuck in my mind. It came to me just after the wave of fatigue you get from the sort of approbation you neither need nor seek. Specifically, it was this: a brief comment in the Telegraph, that blunderbuss among reactionary snipers, on August 21, 2009.

On Wednesday night, I was still thinking about Lockerbie. We had just driven back and forth in a day and night to the Humber’s edge so that my wife could sit with her dying mother. But I’m a hack. In the car, coming back across the border, I thought: Fucking Brian Wilson. Must look it up.

I’m so old, I keep cuttings. Not just any old cuttings; only the important mounds. August 21, 2009.

Wilson is a hack, too, of long-standing, who surely won’t mind if I remind the world that he was locally-minded, once, and may even have made a youthful political gesture of nationalism (with a tiny n), and later gained some expertise as a minister with an energy brief, before he grew energetic, post-ministerially, for Energy. That stuff is none of Scotland’s concern, of course.

Anyhow, in the cutting Wilson’s sub stunted a cunning paraphrase: “The SNP’s Libya stunt has shamed my nation”. With a determination born of free West Highland localism, the writer began: “The Scottish Nationalists have never been too fussy about the international company they keep”.

He then excoriated Alex Salmond for opposing the bombing of Belgrade. This sally was in tribute to the late Robin “Ethical” – unless you happened to have met him – Cook. Apparently, Cookie was Wilson’s companion on the British parliamentary – sorry, I’m straining this joke – road to socialism.

Let the quote do some work instead. Wilson wrote – on August 21, 2009, mind you: “Rarely can so many decent Scottish stomachs have turned than at the sight of the Saltire being flourished in Tripoli as a centre-piece of the repulsive celebrations to welcome home the mass murderer Megrahi, courtesy of the SNP”.

Wilson judged the entire affair to have been a matter of self-aggrandisement. He wrote that, “The vast global audience for the rantings of Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, could have been forgiven for assuming him to be the spokesman for a sovereign state, albeit a tinpot one with curious moral values”.

Bear that phrase in mind: “curious moral values”. History being slow but oddly quick on its feet sometimes, how are those turning stomachs now?

The net’s Nationalists will give you a quick answer. Labour’s multifarious du­plicities stand exposed. MacAskill has been vindicated. I’d get the usual reflex­ive praise just for saying so, over and over.

The rantings of Brian Wilson were of a piece with each of Labour’s stitched-to-order lies levelled against the Justice Secretary. For some people, that’s better than enough. They’d like me to say nothing else from now until – My, is that the time? – May.

But here’s a problem: Kenny MacAskill is still Justice Secretary; al-Megrahi is still “a convicted mass-murderer”; and a government of Nationalists still refuses to attempt to make public the facts that each one of them, MacAskill in the van, under­stands.* To paraphrase that Telegraph sub-editor, someone is shaming my nation.

Labour have had their turn. Wilson’s siblings have been exposed. But they are not in government, currently, in Scotland, where the plane fell from the sky. That would be another party.

Nationalism’s bots course through the local web demanding that the MSM tell the truth. Good luck with that. But here’s weird: MacAskill has part of the truth about Lockerbie at his fingertips. He and Alex Salmond, his First Minister, could find out a great deal more with a full public – not parliamentary, please – inquiry into the mas­sacre. The farrago of al-Megrahi's farcical conviction is a stain on Scotland’s honour: what greater cause for truth could there be?

What’s the worst that could happen? That Salmond and MacAskill could join the likes of Wilson in defending the conviction, yet again? Surely not. Surely it would take a mainstream media plot to make that smear true?

But it is true. Someone else is shaming my nation.

* I should have said that, in this, I exempt Christine Grahame MSP from criticism. Apologies.

[RB: The comment that I appended at the time to this post was “Wow!”  I now repeat it -- Wow!]

Guilty of monumental hypocrisy

[What follows is an item originally posted on this blog four years ago on this date:]

Truth lies hidden beneath the blather about Megrahi

[This is the headline over Ian Bell's column in today's edition of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

Sir Gus O’Donnell’s trawl through certain documents relating to the Lockerbie bombing has become very bad news for Labour.

It is bad in London, bad in Edinburgh; bad for reputations, bad for careers. On both sides of the border, the charge is the same: saying one thing, doing another. The only difference is that some things were shouted in one place and whispered elsewhere.

David Cameron handled the report with a certain vicious elegance in the Commons, in his best more-in-sorrow-than-anger voice. Too many things, he pointed out, were left unsaid by Labour ministers. Whether he would have behaved any differently in their shoes was a point he was happy to leave moot. He had certain aims in mind, and he achieved them.

Thus: blame Labour, blame the SNP, placate America, exonerate BP, and remind us that he was always opposed to the freeing of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi on any grounds. Better still, for the eternal interests of Her Majesty’s Government, nothing in O’Donnell’s document obliged Cameron to deal with a real question: what of profound doubts over the original conviction?

No-one in the Commons, as usual, had a word to say about that.

Labour was all over the place. Gordon Brown was forced into a statement that answered no questions. Jack Straw, England’s Justice Secretary in the period at issue, fell to parsing any phrase that might provide an excuse. Meanwhile, the Scottish party found itself in a truly hideous position.

Either its leading members knew about London’s efforts to “facilitate” a release deal with Libya, or they did not. If not, what does that tell us about relationships between Labour in Edinburgh and Labour in Westminster?

But if all was known, what excused the many, vehement accusations hurled at Kenny MacAskill, the SNP minister who freed Megrahi? Labour in Scotland was still at that game this week, even when it was beyond doubt that its colleagues in London had connived in Libyan efforts. Straw, O’Donnell tells us, even thought of supplying a supportive letter.

It’s possible, of course, that some Scottish Labour figures were “in the loop” and some were not. The Scotland Office, first under Des Browne, and by October 2008 in the charge of Jim Murphy, was under no illusions. The latter minister was certainly given the minutes of calls between Straw and Alex Salmond. So what about Holyrood?

But this means that some passionate opponents of Megrahi’s release were permitted – encouraged? – to go on conducting a campaign against MacAskill while the truth was otherwise kept hidden. Take your pick: scandal, shambles, or a bit of both?

None is easy to spin, but Labour has done its best. Supported by the – no doubt unprompted – right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes, a tale filtered into the London media this week to the effect that MacAskill was prepared, late in 2007, to amend the Scottish Government’s opposition to Labour’s prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. The alleged price: cash to pay off human rights claims over prison slopping out, and devolved control over airgun legislation. And how tawdry would that have been?

O’Donnell certainly relates – of exchanges in November, 2007 – that “it is clear that HMG’s understanding was that a PTA without any exclusions” – meaning Megrahi, the only Libyan in a British prison – “might be acceptable to the Scottish Government if progress could be made with regards to ongoing discussions...” (on slopping out and firearms law). The Cabinet Secretary’s footnotes then refer the reader to letters between Straw and Browne in which the two allude to that “understanding”.

But O’Donnell’s very next sentence in the body of his text records that, “Kenny MacAskill restated the Scottish Government’s position that any PTA should exclude anyone convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in a letter to Jack Straw on 6 December 2007”.

So much was already in the public domain, thanks to the Scottish Government’s website. Nor did the SNP deviate from that position.

Labour’s attempt to establish otherwise this week depends entirely on a “leaked” email from John McTernan, Brown’s adviser, who gleaned his “understanding” from unnamed “officials”.

You wouldn’t base a Scottish election campaign on that, I’d have thought. But what else does Iain Gray and his Holyrood party now possess? Continued demands for the release of Megrahi’s medical records? Such material is redacted even in O’Donnell’s report, on data protection grounds. An oncologist would tell you, meanwhile, that a prognosis is not a prediction, but add that prostate cancer treatments – and hence survival rates – are improving yearly.

Even given the horrific scale of Lockerbie, an attack on compassion is tricky. It’s also beside the point. As is O’Donnell’s report, and Cameron’s lofty satisfaction, and Brown’s floundering response.

The fact that Labour has been found guilty of monumental hypocrisy is important in its own right, no doubt, but it is only one part of a larger argument. In the matter of mass murder, the question of guilt is paramount. Unless it is settled, beyond doubt, every other “row” is chatter, and distracting chatter at that. In the case of Megrahi, despite anything politicians claim, there is no certainty.

We do know, though, of $3 million paid by US authorities to Maltese brothers, Toni and Paul Gauci, for the sake of identification evidence. We know that Lord Peter Fraser, then Lord Advocate, would later describe the former brother, supposedly a star witness, as less than the full shilling and “an apple short of a picnic”.

We know, furthermore, that the forensic “experts” on both sides of the Atlantic, providers of still more “key evidence” at Camp Zeist, were later discredited thoroughly. We know Professor Hans Koechler, Kofi Annan’s UN observer, damned the trial as an outrage and an abuse.

There’s more, much more. We don’t know, though, why Megrahi still fails to provide proof of his innocence. We don’t know why no political party – the SNP included – is prepared to entertain even an inquiry into the conviction.

Those rows over the compassionate release of “the Lockerbie bomber” will do instead, at least until some successor to Sir Gus cares to examine a few more of the papers salted away in the hidden record.

Megrahi's first appeal

[Here is what I wrote on Thelockerbietrial.com website on this date in 2002 about the state of play at the close of week three of Abdelbaset Megrahi’s first appeal:]

In the course of Friday morning [8 February 2002] the Court decided that it was prepared to hear the new evidence proposed by the defence from security personnel on duty at Heathrow's Terminal 3 during the night before the departure of Pan Am 103, regarding a break-in in the luggage marshalling area.  Mr Alan Turnbull QC for the Crown had argued strongly that the proposed new evidence was not of sufficient "significance" to warrant the Court's hearing it.  By their decision the appeal judges indicated that they were of the view that the evidence in question could have the necessary "significance."  The Crown indicated that if this evidence was permitted, they would  themselves wish to lead evidence on the issue from up to eleven witnesses.  The Court suggested that discussions should take place between the Crown and the defence regarding these eleven potential Crown witnesses, with a view to ascertaining whether the attendance of all was really necessary.  It is likely that the Court will begin hearing the new evidence on Wednesday 13 February. 

During the week it has been abundantly clear that the appeal judges have absorbed the submissions made on behalf of the appellant Megrahi and appreciate the force of a number of the criticisms made in them of the reasoning in the written opinion of the trial Court.  Their Lordships have not been slow to draw their concerns to the attention of the Advocate-Depute.  In particular, Lord Osborne and Lord Kirkwood have asked some very pointed questions indeed and have subjected Advocate-Depute Turnbull and Advocate-Depute Campbell to rigorous cross-examination regarding the Crown's stance in supporting the trial Court's conclusions on certain crucial matters, such as the finding that the bomb was ingested at Luqa Airport in Malta; that Megrahi was the person who purchased the clothes from Mary's House in Sliema; and that the date of purchase was 7 December 1988.

Megrahi verdict a powerful tool to deny us objective inquiry

[What follows is the text of a letter submitted by Dr Jim Swire to a newspaper on 5 February but not (yet) published:]

A recent letter from an American Lockerbie relatives' group known as Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc addressed to the Crown Office has been released to the media* by others.

It contains the sentence "it is past time for Dr Swire and the Megrahi supporters to end their disgraceful and expensive campaign".

So far as US relatives of the dead are concerned, of course we all have every right to hold our own views over the atrocity and certainly to believe in the findings of the Zeist court -- a comfort unfortunately denied to some of us. It is very sad that opinions should differ so radically amongst us, since we all hope to know the truth, and are rendered the more unhappy by any suggestions that we may not have reached that truth even yet.

There is also the awesome fact that if our view is correct, then the court process and all the delays that have followed may have protected the real perpetrators from any attempts at justice for fourteen years. On top of that, the Zeist verdict against Mr Megrahi is a powerful tool to deny us the full objective inquiry we have so often sought from Governments. 

I and one other relative, Rev John Mosey, were the only two relatives from the UK or America to listen to all the evidence, as it unfolded, in court. I entered that court believing as a matter of course that the two Libyans must be guilty. I had toiled before the trial alongside such distinguished people as Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh and the late President Nelson Mandela, to try to  persuade Colonel Gaddafi to allow his men to appear, in the sincere belief that they would receive a fair trial under Scots law. But as the trial unfolded, to my lay mind it seemed that the evidence was telling of a very different scenario than that painted by the prosecution.

At the end of the trial, on hearing the verdict, I collapsed, to the point where at least one close onlooker thought I had died. This was widely interpreted as being overwhelming relief that 'we had nailed one of the bastards at last'. In fact it was due to my personal analysis of what the evidence had shown coupled with a personal certainty that the men would be acquitted under Scots law.

It is simply because I am determined to establish the truth as to who did murder my daughter and why the flight was not protected at Heathrow that I feel bound to continue my "disgraceful" campaign. It may be down to deficits in the way I have conducted that campaign that we have so far been unable to establish an objective forum, in Scotland or elsewhere, following the withdrawal of Megrahi's second appeal.

Where blame is being discussed, it may help to know that in a privileged interview with Scotland's Justice Secretary, immediately prior to Mr Megrahi's return to Libya I pleaded for his compassionate release.

In my belief that he should not have been found guilty and in knowledge of the lethal medical condition he carried (researched with one of the professionals involved in his case) and the misery that separation from his family was causing as his life ebbed away, it would have been profoundly wrong, in my view, to take any other position, even though it might make the search for the truth more difficult.

We should be proud that our criminal justice system does include provision for compassion.

I sincerely hope that this public expression of exasperation from US relatives will be seen in Scotland simply as a reminder, if one were needed, of the desperate misery that terrorist atrocities like Lockerbie inject into our communities, and profoundly wish that a genuine determination to establish the facts will settle the burden for all of us.

* I [Dr Swire] had inquiries from The Times of London at around 16.00 hours today, which clearly has already received a copy of the US Victims' letter to the Crown Office.