Dodgy circuit board fragment makes first appearance at trial

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Pan Am 103 Crash Website on the proceedings of this date in 2000 at the trial at Camp Zeist:]

The Lockerbie trial heard references Monday to a circuit board, part of a suitcase and charred clothing found among debris after a bomb destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988. A spokesman for the prosecution declined to say if the items were the same pieces of key evidence expected to be introduced later as alleged remnants of the timer, case and clothes used to pack and detonate a bomb.

A Scottish police officer testifying in the trial of two Libyans said today that he raised concerns about the possibility of missing evidence early on in the bombing investigation of Pan Am Flight 103. Douglas Roxburgh testified about evidence-tracking procedures during the fourth day of the proceedings against alleged Libyan intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.

Roxburgh, 63, was the acting deputy chief ... of a police unit that catalogued debris brought in from around Lockerbie and identified pieces that might be of interest to investigators. He told prosecutor Alan Turnbull that “tens of thousands” of items were brought to a collection point near Lockerbie, where they were catalogued and stored.

Mr Roxburgh said he set up the storage centre at Dexstar. It was guarded 24 hours a day and split into sectors which corresponded to the sectors of Lockerbie and the surrounding areas being searched by teams of officers. Any suitcases brought in would be examined by sniffer dogs for explosives as police feared there could be secondary devices.  He told the court: “It would be put through an x-ray machine like at an airport for the detection of explosives. It would then be booked in and given priority examination in case it was going to be required for further forensic examination.”

If there were any explosive marks, for example, the item would be logged and taken to a special area where AAIB staff or explosive experts could examine it, he said. Mr Roxburgh said: “We started off by ensuring that items were not required in the legal process and we started releasing stuff back to the relatives sometimes via consulates but it was mainly personal possessions like rings, jewellery and wallets.” He told how a laundry was set up at Dexstar to clean clothing before it was returned to the victims' families. (...)

Under cross-examination, Fhimah lawyer Richard Keen talked about worries that agencies other than police were dealing with items and that some property was removed by those agencies.

Roxburgh admitted he raised such concerns at a meeting with superiors in the days following the tragedy after “someone had taken off property where there had been traces of explosion.”  But he later said he had ascertained that the “someone” had been from a legitimate investigating authority in Britain, suggesting it did not constitute a security breach. He also refused to answer Keen's question about whether British and foreign intelligence agencies were involved in the collection of evidence.

Taylor also questioned the identity of one American, who was said to wear hearing aids in both ears and told police at the scene he was an explosives expert working for the Pan Am airline. (...)

Two police officers were asked to describe the discovery of a piece of charred circuit board and a mangled remnant of an aluminum baggage container. The special attention given these two pieces of evidence suggested they would figure as significant items later in the trial, when prosecutors seek to link the two suspects to the bombing.

The prosecution also introduced as evidence part of a brown suitcase and referred to pieces of charred clothing, but again did not specify whether these were the Samsonsite case and tweed jacket allegedly used by the accused to pack the bomb. The evidence was wrapped in plastic and not clearly visible to reporters watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Some items were referred to only by coded numbers or the labels police gave them at the time. (...)

Alexander Arnott, 57, a former detective constable, said he had been part of a team given a remit to check metal debris for signs of damage by an explosion. He had been assisted by an American, Walter Cosguard, an expert in explosive substances. “He said he was from Pan Am’s investigation branch and had been involved with explosives all his life, so much so he had to wear two hearing aids because he was almost deaf,” said Mr Arnott.

The expert had indicated that a piece of container frame found in the countryside around Lockerbie appeared to have been marked and pitted by an explosion.

Dr David Fieldhouse and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer published on this date in 2008 on the OhmyNews website. It reads in part:]

Back in 1988, Dr David Fieldhouse was a police surgeon from Bradford, Yorkshire. On Dec 21, Fieldhouse heard about the crash of Pan Am 103 on News at Ten. He immediately phoned the Lockerbie police station to volunteer his help and experience, which the Lockerbie Police eagerly accepted.

Minutes later, Fieldhouse was driving on the highway to Scotland and arrived to Lockerbie shortly before midnight. There, he reported to the police station. After having received his instructions, he was sent out with a police officer to find bodies and certify them dead.

"My work began after briefings and involved several square miles of the crash scene over a period of about 16 hours -- ending, as I recall, at about 1600 hours on 22nd December 1988.

"During those hours of the search for and confirmation of death in the case of many bodies, I was accompanied by one or more police officers at all times. We occasionally met others both during the night and the ensuing day," Fieldhouse told me.

Fieldhouse was working to the east and southeast of Lockerbie between Middlebie and Tundergarth, which happens to be the earliest place where the bodies fell from the plane.

When he reported to the police station that evening, he had certified 58 bodies dead and labeled them accordingly from DCF 1 to DCF 58.

"I saw 58 bodies during that period of the search. Fifty-five of them were to the Northwest of a road that runs from Middlebie to Bankshill and only three were to the Southeast of that road.

"I confirmed death in the case of many bodies including one that I afterwards learned was that of McKee [an American intelligence operative returning from Lebanon]. At the time I saw the bodies I made brief notes which included, in some cases, a note of any clothing remaining on them and in every case, the sex and any major injuries visible, such as decapitation or loss of a limb," he said.

For several weeks after the explosion, Fieldhouse traveled on one day per week to Lockerbie to work on the computers installed at the temporary headquarters of the team at the Academy, a school in Lockerbie, in order to help the police identify the bodies and where they had been found. On each of those occasions, Fieldhouse was officially signed, or logged, in on arrival and logged out on departure.

"I always had a police officer, not always the same one, to assist me in the work. The aim was to work out the identities of the bodies I had certified as dead at the scene of the crash during the night of 21st and the daylight hours of 22nd December 1988 by looking through all the information available at the time such as statements, post mortem notes, other reports," Fieldhouse explained to me.

Fieldhouse was told that information was made available on a "need to know" basis only. It is thus likely that so some was probably withheld from him. He was told that the computers were linked to Washington.

"My identification was limited to correlating the bodies I had certified as being dead with those logged by the police. My sole aim in doing so was to enable me to write an accurate report of which persons I had pronounced deceased and at roughly what times I had done so," he said.

Nearly two years later, during the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) into the Lockerbie disaster, Fieldhouse was unjustifiably tarnished by a police officer in official sworn evidence.

Led by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the Scottish Lord Advocate, Sgt David Johnston of the Strathclyde police started his evidence about Fieldhouse as follows.

"On the evening of the disaster, and in the early hours of the following day, Fieldhouse went out and examined a number of victims on his own, pronouncing life extinct, and attached on them his own form of identification. This was not known to us until some considerable time later," Johnston said.

The Lord Advocate continued with a series of similar questions that were all intended to destroy the credibility of Fieldhouse. After asking about the discovery of the body of American businessman Tom Ammerman, Fraser went as far as suggesting that Fieldhouse was not a medical doctor.

"Would this be another example of or Mr Fieldhouse carrying out a search on his own?" the Lord Advocate asked.

"It would, my Lord," Johnston said.

"And marking the body of a person who is dead without notifying the police?"

"That is correct."

In fact, Fieldhouse was accompanied throughout by police officers, three of whom he has named. Ammerman's body had been found by Fieldhouse and an accompanying police officer. Both men agreed on the report.

On Jan 22, 1991, Fieldhouse appeared at the inquiry. He had no difficulty to swiftly dispose of all the false allegations that had been tossed against him.

"I would record my thanks to Fieldhouse and my apologies for the undeserved criticism of his activities," concluded Sheriff Mowat, who was in charge of the inquiry.

"I was accompanied by three Police Officers at about 1500 hours GMT on 22nd December 1988," stated Fieldhouse. "One of them made notes for me as I dictated what I wished to be recorded. There were several bodies in a few fields near a monument south of Tundergarth church, near to Lockerbie town.

"I labeled one body DCF 49 and recorded: Heavy adult male, multi-colored T-shirt, blue jeans, field going northwest from monument.

"I knew that the identification of McKee was absolutely correct because of the clothing which correlated closely with the other reports and statements, and the computers that were linked up to Washington," he concluded.

In a letter to me, former FBI agent R Marquise, who led the Lockerbie investigation, wrote: "I would like to know about the statement attributed to Fieldhouse where he spoke of the clothing worn by McKee based on reports and statements and the computers that were linked up to Washington. Please we are talking about FBI computers I assume and we did not have any then. Before we ever had any infrastructure in place, I would imagine that McKee was identified."

Fieldhouse explained: "The quote is very slightly incorrect and should have read: … reports and statements on the computers that were linked to Washington. I noted this at the time of reading the FAI report, but did not make any comment as I did not think that it was relevant, though the sense is slightly altered by the correct version of what (I think) I said."

In the early weeks of 1989, Fieldhouse studied the records held on the computers in the Academy (Investigation Headquarters) at Lockerbie.

He noted that none of the codes (DCF 1 to 58) he had given to bodies was recorded on the computers. He was amazed that all except two of his labels had all been thrown away and replaced with others. "This was astounding to me," Fieldhouse said.

Fieldhouse claims that the computer record, which seemed to match his notes relating to DCF 49, gave the mortuary body number as 225 and although he did not recall and did not note the description of the clothing on the computer file, it would certainly have correlated with his findings sufficiently for him to be confident that he had correctly "married them up."

Fieldhouse told me a very disturbing story. He is adamant that nobody on the computer files matched the location of the one that he recorded as "DCF 12." He is almost certain of this because the body was found at a very particular location. DCF 12 was one of the three bodies southeast of the road that runs from Middlebie to Bankshill.

"I saw 58 bodies during that period of the search," Fieldhouse told me. "Fifty-five of them were to the north of a road and only three were to the south of that road. DCF 12 was one of the three bodies south of the road. I was as confident as I could have been that I had not made any errors, but I do accept it is possible that I misunderstood the location of the body when trying to pinpoint its position on a map and trying to provide a map reference number.

"However, if the police had recorded my codes (DCF 1 to DCF 58) on the computer records which they were compiling, there would have been no difficulty in marrying up the bodies which I had seen and the ones which they had recovered.

"When the bodies were being examined by the pathologist, all notable characteristics such as sex, fractures, clothing were noted, but apparently not my labels. It seems inconceivable that 58 consecutive numbered codes on 58 bodies could be disregarded. Clearly it would have been obvious to the most ignorant observer that they served a purpose and that, in any event, it would have been better to record the details in case they had a usefulness not then apparent to the person recording the details in the mortuary.

"You could not, for example get any results for a 'search and find' instruction given to the computer for 'DCF 12,' whereas it was easy enough to get results in the search for a 'black … face … ewe.' It does make one wonder why they ignored, for official purposes at least, all my reference codes and labels and this gives rise to suspicions that there was an ulterior motive on their part."

Nearly two years later, in December 1993, Fieldhouse gave an interview for a film about Lockerbie, The Maltese Double Cross, in which he narrates some of the events discussed in this article.

A few days after the interview, Fieldhouse was summoned to a meeting with two senior West Yorkshire police officers at Wakefield. Without explanation, he was sacked as police surgeon with a three-month notice.

"In my wildest dreams, I did not realize that I was to set a ball rolling which resulted in the ensuing lies by the police to the Fatal Accident Inquiry about what I had done or about the apparent missing body -- DCF 12," Fieldhouse wrote to me.

The day before the Lockerbie bombing McKee called his mother. "Meet me at the Pittsburgh airport tomorrow night," McKee told his mother.

"This was the first time Chuck ever telephoned me from Beirut," McKee's mother said. "I was flabbergasted. It's a surprise. Always before he would wait until he was back in Virginia to call and say he was coming home."

McKee's mother says she is sure her son's sudden decision to fly home was not known to his superiors in Virginia.

If indeed McKee was returning unannounced, one is left wondering how the computers in Washington had information concerning the clothes he was wearing on Dec 21.

At the start of the trial

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James which was published on this date in 2000:]

On May 3, the trial began of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.

Abdelbaset Ali Muhammad Al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah are charged with planting a Semtex-packed cassette recorder on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane killing its 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents.

For years it was assumed that no legal proceedings into the Lockerbie tragedy would ever be held, as Libya would be unlikely to give up the accused individuals. That the case has come to court is the outcome of a significant shift in political and economic relations internationally. The European Union (EU) has led efforts to normalise relations with Libya in order to gain access to the country's considerable oil resources.

The accession of Blair's Labour government to office in 1997 provided a means for Britain—concerned that French and Italian oil companies were reaping the benefits of the USA-UK embargo on Libya—to develop its interests in the country. After protracted negotiations with South Africa's Nelson Mandela and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi agreed to hand over Al-Megrahi and Fhimah last year—provided they would not be tried on US or British soil. They have been held in the Netherlands ever since.

Once the suspects were handed over, the EU lifted its sanctions against Libya, and a considerable trade in oil, natural gas, and machinery has opened up, from which the US remains largely excluded. A steady stream of EU ministers have also visited the Libyan capital Tripoli. Only the awkward business of Flight 103 remained to be resolved for business as usual to be resumed.

For the purposes of the trial, Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, was designated as Scottish territory. The proceedings, expected to last many months, are being held in accordance with Scottish law and will involve hearing thousands of witnesses. It is the first time that a British court has sat outside British territory. This arrangement was agreed after protracted negotiations between the Libyan, British, US and Dutch governments, and also involved Scottish legal officials and the families and friends of those killed in the crash. Four Scottish judges, sitting without a jury, are hearing the case. The prosecutor is Scotland's Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

The trial began with the indictment against the two men being read out. They are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder, and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. The two pleaded not guilty and the clerk to the court read out a list of Arabic names of people he said the defence would allege were the real Lockerbie bombers. This included members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) — the two groups originally suspected of the bombing.

The Pan Am jumbo Maid of the Seas blew up on December 21, 1988, shortly after taking off from London's Heathrow airport. The plane disintegrated in mid-air, shedding debris over a wide area. The bulk of the wreckage impacted on and around the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, also killing 11 local residents.

Early investigations into the atrocity by Dumfries and Galloway police pointed to the bomb having been a reprisal for the US navy's shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in the Persian Gulf six months earlier. On July 3, 1988 the US warship the Vincennes was operating within Iranian waters, providing military support for Iraq in the ongoing Iran/Iraq war. During a one-sided battle against a small number of lightly armed Iranian gunboats, the Vincennes fired two missiles at the Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilians onboard were killed.

This act of mass murder by the US has never resulted in any court case. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were militarily decorated. Attempts by relatives of the victims to bring legal action against the American government were rejected by the US Supreme Court in 1993. Despite the fact that the vast majority of victims were Iranian, the US paid $2.9 million in compensation only to non-Iranian victims of the shooting.

The Iranian government promised revenge attacks at the time and it is alleged that it reached an agreement with the PFLP[-GC] to this end, which was led by ex-Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril and had links with the Syrian government.

Discussion between Dumfries and Galloway police and the West German police revealed that members of the PFLP had already been arrested in West Germany in possession of a bomb similar to the one blown up over Lockerbie. It was also discovered that four other bombs, disguised in cassette players, had been made but were unaccounted for. The suspicion grew that the PFLP had planted the bomb on Flight 103, or arranged for it to be planted, and that it was intended to blow up over Atlantic.

The suitcase containing the explosive device had been loaded at the Frankfurt airport. The bomb's timing mechanism was pressure activated and set to explode four hours after it first reached 8,000 feet. [RB: I have no idea where the author picked up this egregious error.] But Flight 103 was delayed at Heathrow before embarking on its transatlantic journey. As a result, the plane blew up over Lockerbie.

Several warnings were forwarded to American embassies and intelligence staff that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York would be attacked in December 1988. US intelligence staff based in Moscow and elsewhere scheduled to fly on Pan Am flights over that period cancelled their seats due to the warning. Many students took advantage of the cheap flights this made available. Flight 103 was only two-thirds full a mere four days before Christmas.

Crash investigators subsequently found more evidence indicating a possible link between the explosion and the PFLP. Clothing found in the case that had contained the bomb was identified as having been bought in Malta. A PFLP associate, Abu Talb, recently returned from Malta was later identified in the shop where the clothes were bought. By 1990, Dumfries and Galloway police announced they were on the brink of arrests. Talb is one of the individuals named by the Libyans' defence team.

Allegations have been made that what happened subsequently points to an attempt by the US government to divert police investigations away from Iran and Syria. According to the British journalist Paul Foot, in March 1989 US President George Bush rang the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask her to "cool it" on the Lockerbie case. Foot, in a 1994 review of the book Trail of the Octopus by Donald Goddard and ex-US intelligence agent Lester Coleman, noted that Paul Channon, the British Transport Minister, had briefed journalists that arrests were imminent just hours before Bush's call. Channon was sacked shortly after and no arrests were made. A US commission of inquiry into Lockerbie did not mention the PFLP.

In 1990, a timer fragment was belatedly recovered from the wreckage by US investigators. They identified this as coming from a batch of timers sold by the Swiss makers MEBO to Libya. MEBO subsequently insisted that the timer in question was part of a batch, which had never been electrically connected, sold to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Goddard and Coleman's book outlined a scenario in which the US government was not only politically responsible for the Lockerbie bomb, vis-à-vis the Vincennes incident and their long-standing domination of the region, but were practically responsible for it having been placed on Flight 103.

According to Coleman, America's Defence Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency were all active around the region looking for information on Middle Eastern factions, drug trafficking, and spying on each other. Coleman suggests that the CIA, on the assumption that it contained heroin, identified the bag with the bomb as being safe for transit. Goddard and Coleman suggest that PFLP members, who switched some drugs for the bomb, had infiltrated the drug-running operation.

Coleman and others, including an investigator Juval Aviv employed by the now defunct Pan Am, have subsequently been vilified, framed for petty misdemeanours, and/or generally harassed by the US state.

Coleman's allegations were repeated in a 1994 British TV programme, The Maltese Double Cross, produced by Channel 4. In 1997, the Libyan government showed the Channel 4 film at a hearing it had won before the UN International Court of Justice to protest against the sanctions imposed by the US in 1992. The impact of sanctions on Libya between 1992 and 1995 had been drastic, causing many deaths through lack of medical supplies and costing the country $6 billion in lost agricultural exports alone.

It is alleged that blame for the bombing was pinned on Libya in order to turn attention away from the Iranian regime, which the US was now developing as its ally in the Middle East as a counterweight to Iraq. By the late 1980s, longstanding US plans for a major escalation of their military involvement in the Persian Gulf, the world's leading oil-producing area, were coming to fruition. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 gave the US the pretext it required. The US and NATO were able to assemble a broad coalition of support for the intervention—from the Soviet Union, Europe and most of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East.

Libya opposed the bombardment of Iraq and was defined by the US as a "pariah" state. The US had bombed Tripoli in 1986, killing Libyan leader Gadhaffi's daughter, and had severed diplomatic relations with the country, accusing it of sponsoring international terrorism.

Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

Novelist (and Justice for Megrahi stalwart) James Robertson will be speaking on 22 May during The University of Edinburgh’s Spy Week 2015. His contribution is advertised as follows:]

Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

Date and time:  May 22 at 5.30pm

Venue:  Informatics Forum

From Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, literature of or about Scotland has often focused on hidden agendas, double-lives and the deceits of power and authority. James Robertson looks at some aspects of this tradition, and draws examples from his own work, including The Fanatic, And the Land Lay Still and his most recent, Lockerbie Bombing-inspired novel The Professor of Truth.

This event is free and open to all, if you would like to attend please book a place as seats will be limited:

Book a seat for Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

James Robertson is one of Scotland’s leading novelists.  His novels are explorations of darker aspects of Scottish character, and political and social history: The Fanatic came out in 2000, and Joseph Knight in 2003, the winner of both the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. The Testament of Gideon Mack appeared in 2006, and And the Land Lay Still in 2010, another winner of the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.  His most recent novel is The Professor of Truth.

‘One of Britain’s best contemporary novelists’, Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

Libya's prisoner transfer request

[On this date in 2009, while Abdelbaset Megrahi’s second appeal was ongoing, the Libyan Government submitted to the Scottish Government an application for his transfer to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement between Libya and the United Kingdom that had come into force on 29 April 2009.  A report on the BBC News website can be read here.

What follows is what I wrote on this blog about the law applicable to the transfer of Megrahi back to Libya on the day the PTA was ratified:]

Prisoner transfer: the relevant legal provisions

The relevant provisions of the prisoner transfer agreement between the United Kingdom and Libya which was ratified today are as follows:

“Art 2(2): A person who has received a liberty depriving sentence in the territory of one Party may be transferred to the territory of the other Party, in order to complete the sentence imposed upon him. To that end he may express his interest to the transferring State or to the receiving State in being transferred under this Treaty.

Art 2(3): Transfer may be requested either by the transferring State or the receiving State.

Art 3: A prisoner may be transferred under this Treaty only if the following criteria are met: (...)

(b) the judgment is final and no other criminal proceedings relating to the offence ... are pending in the transferring State; (...)

(e) the transferring and receiving States agree to the transfer.”

The relevant UK legislation, which the Scottish Government would have to apply in the case of Mr Megrahi, used to be the Repatriation of Prisoners Act 1984 (c 47), section 1 of which provided:

“(1) Subject to the following provisions of this section, where—

(a) the United Kingdom is a party to international arrangements providing for the transfer between the United Kingdom and a country of territory outside the British Islands of persons to whom subsection (7) below applies, and

(b) the relevant Minister [defined, in the case of prisoners in Scotland as "the Scottish Ministers"] and the appropriate authority of that country or territory have each agreed to the transfer under those arrangements of a particular person (in this Act referred to as “the prisoner”), and

(c) the prisoner has consented to being transferred in accordance with those arrangements

the relevant Minister shall issue a warrant providing for the transfer of the prisoner into or out of the United Kingdom.”

This provision requiring the prisoner's consent was removed in 2006, but it is abundantly clear that, irrespective of the wishes of the UK, Scottish and Libyan authorities, Megrahi cannot in fact be transferred back to Libya without his consent since he cannot be transferred without his current appeal being abandoned and no-one but Megrahi can instruct the abandonment of that appeal.

"...there is a long way to go"

[The following are excerpts from two reports published in The Guardian on this date in 2000:]

Air controller tells historic court of final minutes of bombed Pan Am flight 103 
The final dramatic moments of Pan Am flight 103 before it exploded over Lockerbie nearly 12 years ago were recreated in a packed court yesterday at the start of the trial of two Libyans accused of murdering 270 people.

On the first day of the historic trial, the Scottish court in the Netherlands heard how air traffic controllers watched the radar blip of the doomed Boeing 747 shatter into fragments before it finally disappeared off their screens.

Questioned by Colin Boyd, the Lord Advocate, Alan Topp, descirbed how on the night of December 21 1988 he tracked the path of the aircraft on his radar monitor in the Scottish air traffic control centre at Prestwick, as the plane headed from London Heathrow towards New York.

Mr Topp, 64, of Troon, Ayrshire, said that at about 7pm he made contact with the jumbo as it entered Scottish air space. "Good evening Scottish, Clipper one zero three," he was told by the pilot, according to a transcript introduced in evidence. "We are at level three one zero." Those words were the last ever heard from the plane.

Lord Sutherland, sitting with two other judges, listened as Mr Topp described how at 7.02pm he first noticed a radar abnormality with Pan Am flight 103.

Just a minute later, according to a video recording of the radar screen shown in evidence, flight 103's blip fragmented into first three and then five discrete signals. "I had my radar opened out and you could see that one big bright square is made of up of several squares very close to each other," said Mr Topp.

"I had never seen anything like this happen before. Nobody had."

Several attempts to contact the aircraft were made by the air traffic control centre, but with no success. A KLM aircraft nearby was also unable to make contact with the plane, despite repeated attempts.

The court heard how Mr Topp called over his boss, Adrian Ford, 66, from Ayr, after a British Airways pilot, Robin Chamberlain, told him he had spotted a fire on the ground near Lockerbie. Mr Chamberlain, 52, told the court: "The closest I could put it is that it looked as if a petrol storage tank had blown up. If you imagine the things you see in films, it was like that - like a large explosion or a bomb - something of that nature."

At the air traffic control centre, Mr Ford immediately informed search and rescue teams that the aircraft was missing. "I said to the control there that Clipper 103 has vanished."

Earlier, the two Libyans, described by the prosecution as intelligence agents, pleaded not guilty to murder, conspiracy to murder and contravention of the Aviation Security Act 1982. They also lodged a special defence of incrimination and blamed Palestinian terrorists for the bombing.

In a statement read by the clerk of the court, the defence claimed that members of two Syrian-backed Palestinian groups - one of them a prosecution witness - had planted the bomb on flight 103.

The defence was submitted moments after Lord Sutherland opened proceedings against Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, who surrendered for trial last year. They claim to have been employees of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

The defence statement also named Mohammed Abu Talb, a Palestinian, as one of 10 other alleged conspirators. He is serving a life sentence in Sweden for earlier bombings in Denmark and the Netherlands.

Abu Talb was an early suspect in the case, but investigators abandoned that line of inquiry. He is listed as one of more than 1,000 prosecution witnesses.

Seven other named Arab men, whose whereabouts are unknown, were described as formerly directors of a bakery in Malta,where the suitcase containing the bomb was allegedly loaded on to a feeder flight to Frankfurt, and from there to London.

The defence statement referred also to members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and to Parviz Taheri, who is another crown witness.

First to testify was Richard Dawson, a civil aviation air traffic controller who was on duty at Heathrow airport on the night the plane crashed in flames on to the Scottish Borders town.

Mr Dawson, aged 52, described the routine procedures for departures from Heathrow, and radar control technology which allows the controllers to track the aircraft. He confirmed that the doomed flight made its first appearance in traffic control records at 6.18pm on December 21 1988, identified as Clipper 103, and that later it was cleared for takeoff, leaving the airport shortly afterwards.

Watching the trial throughout were the families of the Libyan accused. In total, 17 family members, including the children of the accused, witnessed the first day's proceedings - 10 of Mr Fhimah's relatives and seven of Mr al-Megrahi's. Mr Fhimah's uncle, Milad Fhimah, said: "We are Muslim, we look to Allah, we believe in God. We are not upset, because it is true that they are innocent."

Bruce Smith, a former Pan Am pilot whose wife, Ingrid, was killed in the crash, said: "This is the start of the trial and we welcome it, but there is a long way to go."

Judges and lawyers
Lord Sutherland, Presiding Judge Ranald Sutherland QC, 68, is one of the most experienced judges on the Scottish legal circuit. He was appointed to the bench in 1985 and has been an advocate, the Scottish equivalent of a barrister, since 1956. He frequently takes charge of the court of criminal appeal in Scotland and is used to high-profile cases.

Lord Coulsfield John Cameron QC, 66, was appointed to the bench in 1987 and first became an advocate in 1960. He took silk in 1973 and has had a long and varied career. He has lectured in law at Edinburgh University and was a judge in the courts of appeal of Jersey and Guernsey.

Lord MacLean Ranald MacLean QC, 61, is the newest of the judges to the Scottish bench. He was appointed to the bench in 1990, although he has been an advocate since 1964. In his advocate days he was most often a prosecutor.

William Taylor QC, Counsel for Al Megrahi Since the early 1980s, Bill Taylor has been one of the most prominent of Scotland's defence QCs. He has won a string of high-profile cases, helped by his good courtroom voice and what is generally regarded to be an extremely agile mind.

Richard Keen QC, Counsel for Fhimah Richard Keen's courtroom gifts are every bit as prominent as those of Bill Taylor. However his relative lack of experience in criminal cases made him, for many, a surprise choice as Fhimah's counsel.

The Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC Since Lord Hardie unexpectedly stepped down at the start of this year, Colin Boyd has led the prosecution team. As the former solicitor general for Scotland, he knows the case well. However, it is widely believed he will hand over the main prosecution role to one of his junior counsel - Alastair Campbell QC and Alan Turnbull QC - when the trial gets under way in earnest.