Concern MI5 Gaddafi assassination plot could jeopardise Lockerbie trial

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 1998:]

The BBC has broadcast an interview with the former MI5 officier David Shayler in which he spoke about an alleged plot by the UK's Secret Intelligence Service to kill Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. (...)

The revelations, after investigations by BBC journalist Mark Urban, are among the most damaging against the security services for decades and will put further pressure on the government to examine allegations that it has dismissed as "inconceivable".

They could also jeopardise moves to try two Libyan men accused of the Lockerbie airline bombing, which killed nearly 300 people in 1988.

An announcement is imminent over whether, after years of negotiations, Libya will hand over the suspects for trial in a neutral country.

Mr Shayler said he was not worried about the effect his allegations would have on the case because having seen the intelligence reports he said there was no chance of the two being handed over.

But Dr Jim Swire, campaigning for the Lockerbie relatives, said: "It is now over 500 weeks since my daughter was murdered at Lockerbie and this week the head of the Arab League is discussing a neutral country trial under Scottish law with Gaddafi in Tripoli and the last thing we wanted were allegations that British organisations had been trying to kill him."

UK and US detectives oppose release of Megrahi

[What follows is an item posted on this blog on this date in 2009:]

Do not set 'guilty' Lockerbie bomber free, detectives plead

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

The investigating officers who led the original inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing have made an unprecedented intervention in the case to argue against the release of the Libyan convicted of the attack.

In a letter to the Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish police chief and the FBI boss who led the international investigation 20 years ago launch a powerfully worded plea against the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, who is serving a minimum sentence of 25 years for his part in the bombing.

In the letter obtained by The Times, Stuart Henderson, the retired senior investigating officer at the Lockerbie Incident Control Centre, and Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent in charge of the US taskforce, whose detective work helped to convict Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, insist that he is guilty. They also argue that his release would “nullify the dedicated work of dozens of law enforcement and intelligence officials around the world”. (...)

In the letter sent to Kenny MacAskill last month, Mr Henderson and Mr Marquise claim the evidence they gathered added to a “strong circumstantial case” against al-Megrahi, and point out that Libya has admitted culpability for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on a number of occasions since.

They say that releasing him would make a mockery of the work undertaken during the Lockerbie investigation, the biggest murder inquiry in British history, involving Scottish police, Scotland Yard, the FBI and other agencies from around the world.

The pair write: “To release Mr Megrahi to a regime which has admitted culpability for killing 270 citizens of the world would be a mistake. It would nullify the dedicated work of dozens of law enforcement and intelligence officials around the world who only wanted to find the truth.”

The detectives acknowledge al-Megrahi's poor health but contend it should not be a reason to release him.

“The eight judges who have already heard the evidence including three who were able to observe each witness under direct and cross-examination came to the same conclusion the rest of us did - Mr Megrahi was guilty of murder. His current health situation does not change that.”

Mr MacAskill, who is awaiting independent medical reports assessing al-Megrahi's condition, is expected to make a decision on his future by the end of this month. On Wednesday, the minister took the unprecedented step of visiting the Libyan in jail, prompting accusations that he was undermining the legal process. Al-Megrahi's second appeal is currently under way, although he will be forced to abandon his attempt to clear his name if he wishes to pursue a prisoner transfer. Release on compassionate grounds would allow him to continue with the appeal after being freed.

[Note by RB: Mr Henderson and Mr Marquise are gravely in error when they say that "The eight judges who have already heard the evidence ... came to the same conclusion as the rest of us did - Mr Megrahi was guilty of murder." Only the three judges at the Zeist trial heard the evidence and reached that conclusion. The five judges at the 2002 appeal made it clear that they had not considered the sufficiency of the evidence against Megrahi nor whether any reasonable tribunal could have convicted on that evidence. In paragraph 369 of their Opinion they said:

“When opening the case for the appellant before this court Mr Taylor [senior counsel for Megrahi] stated that the appeal was not about sufficiency of evidence: he accepted that there was a sufficiency of evidence. He also stated that he was not seeking to found on section 106(3)(b) of the 1995 Act [verdict unreasonable on the evidence]. His position was that the trial court had misdirected itself in various respects. Accordingly in this appeal we have not required to consider whether the evidence before the trial court, apart from the evidence which it rejected, was sufficient as a matter of law to entitle it to convict the appellant on the basis set out in its judgment. We have not had to consider whether the verdict of guilty was one which no reasonable trial court, properly directing itself, could have returned in the light of that evidence.”

The true position, as I have written elsewhere, is this:

"As far as the outcome of the appeal is concerned, some commentators have confidently opined that, in dismissing Megrahi’s appeal, the Appeal Court endorsed the findings of the trial court. This is not so. The Appeal Court repeatedly stresses that it is not its function to approve or disapprove of the trial court’s findings-in-fact, given that it was not contended on behalf of the appellant that there was insufficient evidence to warrant them or that no reasonable court could have made them. These findings-in-fact accordingly continue, as before the appeal, to have the authority only of the court which, and the three judges who, made them."

In June 2007, after a three-year investigation, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission came to the conclusion that Megrahi's conviction may have constituted a miscarriage of justice. One of its six reasons for so finding was that in respect of absolutely crucial findings in fact by the trial court (the date of purchase of the clothing that surrounded the bomb and, hence, the identity of the purchaser) no reasonable tribunal could have reached the conclusion that the evidence established that it was Megrahi.

And whether Libya has admitted culpability for the Lockerbie tragedy has no bearing on whether a particular Libyan citizen was properly convicted or should now be released on compassionate grounds. But, of course, Libya has not admitted culpability. Here is a link to the official Libyan position which is that "Libya accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials". If, as a result of the present appeal, Megrahi's conviction is quashed there is no Libyan government admission of responsibility or culpability.]

AAIB Lockerbie report submitted 25 years ago

On this date in 1990, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) submitted its report on the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie to the Secretary of State for Transport, Cecil Parkinson. The 58-page report was prepared by a team headed by M M Charles and can be read here.

Pick your villain, pick your story, then bend your laws

[On this date in 2007 an article by Ian Bell headed Trust no-one, believe nothing was published in the Sunday Herald.  It reads as follows:]

A lack of inhibition must come easily when your parent is one of the world's more resilient dictators. Why fib when people rarely contest a word you say? If your dad is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's unchallenged leader and new best friend to the West, you can tell the truth - or not - without much fear of the consequences.

Comments last week to French newspaper Le Monde by Saif al Islam, Gaddafi's 35-year-old son, amounted to an interesting parable, I think, for the democracies of the West. Faced with terrorism and an abundance of threats, they have become economical, to put it kindly, in their use of truth. Just possibly, just once or twice, they have not told us quite everything about reasons and risks. Young Saif, in contrast, enjoys the luxury of frankness.

So, was a deal struck between Tony Blair and Gaddafi to engineer the repatriation of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the "Lockerbie bomber"? That question caused some trouble earlier in the year, you'll recall, when Alex Salmond complained about failures of communication between London and Edinburgh on the issue.

London said, and continues to say, that any decision concerning the prisoner was, and is, "a matter for the Scottish courts and Scottish authorities". Edinburgh said that it would defend the integrity of a legal system already debauched, as it happened, by Megrahi's farcical trial in the Hague. Last week, Saif said in Nice (more or less, for my Arabic isn't up to much): "A deal? Of course."

Saif proclaimed himself confident that Megrahi will soon be returned to Libya and took satisfaction from a developing extradition arrangement between his country and Britain. How does that square, precisely, with all the Downing Street denials, the rubbishing of Salmond's "grandstanding", and the continuing insistence that Scots law remains paramount?

Surely it could not be possible or likely that someone - let's say a departing prime minister - failed to tell us the whole truth? Where Lockerbie is concerned, the difference between likely and probable is paper-thin.

There are complications, of course. The first is fundamental: Megrahi didn't do it. There is not the space here to explain why the man in Greenock Prison did not procure the murders of 270 people on Pan Am flight 103in December 1988. For now, I merely assert that the evidence presented in the Hague would have been laughable in any other circumstance. Scots law disgraced itself in those compromised proceedings.

That being so, however, the Court of Appeal will soon have to decide whether to accept a recommendation from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission calling for the evidence in the Lockerbie trial to be re-examined. The definition of "flimsy" is about to be tested. All the lawyers of my acquaintance say that, in due course, Megrahi will surely walk free, if he is not shipped out of Scotland beforehand.

So what then? Are we asked to believe that the worst atrocity ever inflicted on Scotland involved not a single perpetrator? That a long, allegedly intense, international investigation resulted in nothing better than the persecution of one innocent man? And that a Scottish court, in all its majesty, returned a guilty verdict on such a basis?

To put it no higher: a quick extradition deal, and a few more lies to conceal Blair's untruths, won't cover this. It amounts to an unholy shambles, the unravelling of almost two decades of deceit. Just imagine what follows if "the evidence" is truly re-examined with proper care.

Megrahi was convicted, supposedly after the most thorough investigation the police and security forces of the West could muster. Now the Libyans - those trusting souls - reckon that Blair gave his word guaranteeing the return of the only person we ever managed to convict. Scotland's legal system, and hence the Scottish Executive, therefore have some astonishing questions to answer.

Jack Straw, Westminster's new justice secretary, may have brought a little clarity to relationships between Edinburgh and London since Blair's departure, so it is said, but that hardly alters fundamentals. Sometimes the law misfires: we know this. Sometimes, though, the entire system we seek to defend against terrorists (or politicians) gets bent out of recognition. Corrupted in its own defence: that's almost an epitaph.

The wrong guy was the only guy. Worse, all those who failed to name the actual culprits, thanks to incompetence or intent, face no interrogation. Increasingly, Lockerbie resembles a political-management precursor to our manipulated post-11 September, 2001 world: pick your villain, pick your story, then bend your laws, your politics, and your media to fit. Democracy.

I tried this question in various formulations: are people secure if they cease to believe those defending their security? Can you be defended, truly, by those who lie about your defences, and the need for defence? If we are denied truth, what remains but lies? Who did bomb Lockerbie, and why have a succession of career bastards spent almost 20 years evading the question?

The tree-protected memorial that stands near the little town, amid those wind-blown, moss-green hills, will take your breath away. A "why" this happened is easy - causes are ten a penny. The "how" is harder. How did someone do the thing, how did others agree to it, and how do others still go on cultivating the lies, under democratic sanction, two decades on?

The family and friends of Jean Charles de Menezes may wonder about that. Had you listened late last week to Sir Ian Blair, the lead man at the Metropolitan Police, you would have heard "Britain's top cop" insisting that he had no knowledge whatever of the assassination of a 27-year-old Brazilian in 2005. Not a clue. Not one of his subordinates passed the word of the hit. Believable?

You would also have heard Blair denying that he was telling the public about vast terrorist threats with no understanding of - in the language of the Independent Police Complaints Commission - a "ghastly mistake" at Stockwell Tube station. Assistant commissioner, Andy Heyman, meanwhile, misled no-one; or misled them with the best of intentions; or misled them while enjoying the full support of a superior who, of course, knew nothing about anything. And so forth.

The people in these islands will cope with a very great deal if someone would, just once, honour them with the truth. We know that things go wrong. We know that mistakes are made. We strain to believe that those who defend us would allow a Pan Am jet to be dropped on a small Scottish town.

We wonder, though. Menezes died thanks, we hope to believe, to procedures in need of revision. At a long stretch, most of us would probably accept that he died because of a horrible error committed for the best of reasons. So why the deluge of excuses? Had an authentic terrorist chosen the best possible way to undermine the British public's will to resist, the jihadi would have selected last week's dire remarks by Sir Ian Blair.

Truth is fundamental. Truth is, they tell us, our distinguishing feature as a democracy. It was once the shining virtue of Scotland's jurisprudence. That was the least of Lockerbie's collateral damage, but not the least significant.

Are not the people of this little country entitled to the moral right to know, finally, who bombed Pan Am 103?

If there is no answer, I know, finally, what I think: they lied; they lie.

Anniversary of MacAskill visit to Megrahi

[What follows is the text of a report on the BBC News website on this date in 2009:]

Scotland's justice secretary has visited the Lockerbie bomber amid speculation he might be moved to Libya.

Kenny MacAskill met Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi in Greenock Prison as he considers a transfer request from the Libyan government.

The minister has already heard the views of others, including relatives of some of the 270 victims of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Terminally-ill Megrahi has also asked to be freed on compassionate grounds.

The transfer request was made by Libya to the UK government last May, less than a week after a treaty allowing prisoners to be transferred between the two countries was ratified.

Under the agreement, the country holding a prisoner should give its answer within 90 days.

Decisions about prisoners are the responsibility of the Scottish Government, in effect giving Mr MacAskill the final say.

Mr MacAskill said last week he would miss the 90-day deadline, which expired on 3 August, because he was waiting for more information.

No transfer can take place if criminal proceedings are active, meaning Megrahi would have to drop his latest appeal against his conviction in order to be sent home.

He was ordered to remain in prison for a minimum of 27 years having been found guilty of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103.

Mr MacAskill has embarked upon a series of consultations with interested parties, including relatives of American victims with whom he held a video conference.

While unusual for a minister to discuss a prisoner's case with him while he remains in jail, Mr MacAskill is understood to believe the visit is important to allow him to consider all of the facts.

Megrahi's legal team have also made a separate request for him to released from prison on compassionate grounds as he is suffering from terminal prostate cancer.

An earlier request, made in October 2008, was rejected by Appeal Court judges after they heard medical evidence that with adequate palliative care, Megrahi could live for several years.

The court heard that such requests are normally only granted where a prisoner has less than three months to live.

[RB: Following criticism directed towards Mr MacAskill for visiting Megrahi, I commented on this blog as follows:]

The visit by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice to Abdelbaset Megrahi became inevitable as soon as Mr MacAskill decided, presumably after taking advice from his officials, to take representations in person (and not just in writing) from interested persons, such as relatives of those killed on Pan Am 103. He could not, while complying with the requirement of procedural fairness incumbent upon him, offer the opportunity to make representations in person to categories of interested persons while denying that opportunity to the prisoner himself.

Are the politicians who have rushed to criticise Kenny MacAskill for meeting Abdelbaset Megrahi prepared to criticise him for meeting (in person in some cases, by video link in others) Lockerbie relatives? If not, their criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the legal position and reflects on them, not on Mr MacAskill.

Forthcoming PBS Frontline programme on Lockerbie

The United States PBS Frontline current affairs programme has just announced on Twitter that its new series will start on 29 September 2015 with My Brother’s Bomber, a 3-part serial on Lockerbie. It states that a trailer will soon be available at www.pbs.org/frontline. The Twitter hashtag is #MyBrothersBomber.

Other tweets about the programme read:

@raneyaronson is joined on stage by #MyBrothersBomber producer Ken Dornstein + fmr FBI special agent on Lockerbie Richard Marquise

Only one person was ever convicted for the crime. In #MyBrothersBomber, Dornstein sets out to find who else was involved.

A report in Variety reads as follows:

PBS’ venerable documentary franchise “Frontline” is expanding into multi-part investigative series, exec producer Raney Aronson told reporters Sunday during PBS’ portion of the Television Critics Assn press tour.

“Frontline” has a three-part series, “My Brother’s Bomber,” bowing Sept 29. The series revisits the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland by following Ken Dornstein, the brother of victim David Dornstein, on a five-year trek through the Middle East in search of details and clues about the bombing that killed 270 passengers. The hunt was sparked after the only person convicted of the crime, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was released from a Scottish jail in 2009. (He died three years later in Libya.)

Aronson, who took the reins of “Frontline” from founding exec producer David Fanning in May, said the Boston-based operation has several large-scale investigations in the works that will be presented as multi-part series in the coming years. She said it was impossible to ignore the recent of deeply reported docu-serials such as public radio’s “Serial” and HBO’s “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.”

“Frontline” is looking at options for “telling new stories in different ways,” Aronson told Variety. She would not elaborate on the nature of the investigative reports that are brewing.

In “My Brother’s Bomber,” Dornstein pursued new leads and some information was passed on to US law enforcement. Among those interviewed for the series is former Lockerbie investigator Richard Marquise, a retired FBI Special Agent. But the series “has been a work of journalism,” said Dornstein, a writer and filmmaker who previously worked for “Frontline.”

Ignorant UK politicians

[What follows is the text of a report published in The Herald on this date in 2002:]

The Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing will remain in Glasgow after Jack Straw rebuffed Nelson Mandela's plea for him to be moved from Scotland to a prison in a Muslim country.

The foreign secretary's snub to Mr Mandela, former president of South Africa, was made public yesterday in a letter to Russell Brown, MP for Dumfries. In the letter, Mr Straw confirmed that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi would remain in Barlinnie jail in Glasgow.

''I can assure you there will be no change in policy on the location of Megrahi's imprisonment. He will serve his full prison sentence in Scotland,'' he said.

Mr Mandela, who was a prisoner in South Africa for 27 years, made his call for Megrahi to be moved in June, after visiting him in Barlinnie where he is serving a life sentence for the PanAm jumbo jet bombing which killed 270 people in 1988.

The veteran statesman had played a key role in ensuring that Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, handed over the two men suspected of the bombing.

Mr Brown, whose constituency includes Lockerbie, wrote to Tony Blair last month urging him to reject Mr Mandela's plea.

Yesterday, he welcomed Jack Straw's assurance that Megrahi, 49, would serve out his sentence in Scotland but said that, now speculation on the issue had been brought to an end, there should be a government inquiry into some aspects of the bombing.

In his letter to the Labour MP, Mr Straw said United Nations monitors had described the conditions in which Megrahi was being held as ''clearly very good'' and met all national and international standards. The monitors also said the Libyan's prison guards showed ''commendable'' awareness and respect for cultural and religious difference.

Mr Brown said the last thing he had wanted was to see this issue dropped into the current negotiations between the UK and Libya over sanctions, in an effort to make any deal easier.

He said: ''If you reopen the original agreement with Libya and decide that Megrahi should be moved to a Muslim country, it would only be a matter of time before you start to negotiate on length of the sentence or even the conviction itself.''

Mr Brown said there would not be a full public inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing but that he would like to see further investigations by the government.

[RB: Why Mr Brown or Mr Straw thought that the United Kingdom government had any control over where Abdelbaset Megrahi would serve his sentence is a mystery to me. Mr Mandela can be forgiven for not being aware of the details of the division of authority between the Scottish and the United Kingdom governments, but Messrs Brown and Straw cannot.]

Threadbare ... but the judges bought it

[On this date in 2010, Rolfe posted on this blog a series of comments setting out the inherent unlikelihood of the plot that Megrahi was alleged to have been involved in and the shakiness of the evidence adduced to establish it. These comments are well worth repeating. So here they are, all together:]

In my opinion the tendency for the case to become clogged up with conspiracy theories is unhelpful to the present argument. That doesn't mean I think the conspiracy theories are entirely unfounded. However, speculations and accusations about fabricated physical evidence, high-level agreements to avoid certain lines of enquiry and so on are actually irrelevant to the evidence that was used to convict Megrahi. Even if all the physical evidence is entirely on the level and no political games higher than the classic "let's pin it on this guy because he's handy and we've got to get someone" were played, he didn't do it.

It might be helpful to consider the nature of the plot Megrahi is said to have been involved in.

First, the manufacture of the bomb and its introduction into Malta itself were so cleverly done that no trace of this exercise was ever discovered. The same is true as regards getting it on the Malta-Frankfurt flight. The Malta baggage records were complete and the security was good - even the appeal judges agreed that "there is considerable and compelling evidence that that could not have happened." This was quite fiendishly clever, however it was done. Years of concentrated effort by an international team of investigators never found any trace of the bomb or the suitcase on Malta.

And yet, when sourcing clothes to pack round the bomb, Megrahi chose to go to a small shop only three miles from the airport where the dastardly and completely secret deed would be done, and buy brand new, locally-manufactured clothes, in a most conspicuous and memorable manner, only two weeks before the operation. If the police had been quicker off the mark, they could have been talking to Tony Gauci within six weeks of this purchase, rather than nine months. Almost any source would have been better than this - a big chain store, a second-hand shop, raid a clothes-line or something!

Then, having done that and shown his face to someone who could potentially link him with the clothes, he then showed up at the airport at the time the bomb was being smuggled into the baggage system - for no readily apparent reason, as he appeared to have done nothing while in the airport that could have facilitated this. And although he was travelling undercover, the passport was traceable to him, and he wasn't even wearing a false beard. Was this plot so short of personnel that the same person had to show himself in two capacities like this?

The bomb was then routed unaccompanied across Europe, in winter, with two changes of plane. The chances of it simply becoming lost baggage weren't negligible. The chances of the flights being delayed or disrupted by bad weather weren't negligible. The bomb was routed through Frankfurt, which had a computer-controlled system, which should have allowed that unaccompanied bag to be spotted almost immediately enquiries began, and turn attention to Malta. The reasons this didn't happen are complicated and bizarre, but this development wasn't something that could have been anticipated or influenced by the plotters. In addition, all the baggage for the Frankfurt-Malta flight was x-rayed by a "careful and conscientious operator" who had been specifically alerted to the possibility of a bomb being introduced disguised as a radio-cassette player. Kurt Maier shouldhave intercepted that device.

At Heathrow, it gets even dafter. The amount of Semtex was small, and it could only have penetrated the hull if it was placed right against the skin of the plane. I don't know what percentage of cases in that baggage container were in suitable positions for that to happen, but I think no more than about 30%. An unaccompanied bag coming off the Frankfurt flight would have been placed randomly.

And worst of all, the timing of the explosion. The timer was apparently set for about 7pm, only about 45-50 minutes after the plane was due to take off (38 minutes after it actually did take off). This was Heathrow, early evening, a few days before Christmas. Bad weather, traffic congestion, a late passenger whose baggage was already loaded (that very nearly happened), anything could have delayed that plane so that it was still on the tarmac at 7pm, in which case a lot of not very much would have happened, and those scraps of Maltese clothes would have been right there to be traced. The flight wasn't due to land until 1.40am GMT - any sane conspirator would set that timer for midnight GMT or later.

It's all very well to look with hindsight and say, well it worked, didn't it, but it's a completely insane excuse for a terrorist plot. Especially the clothes purchase completely negating the otherwise total concealment of any trace of bomb or suitcase in Malta.

Conversely, if we look at the possibility the bag being introduced at Heathrow, we find very definite evidence of introduction there. Not just the potential for a rogue suitcase to be introduced, but actual concrete evidence that it was. This skips all the problems of the three-plane daisy-chain, the Frankfurt computer system and x-ray, and allows an opportunity to get the thing in the part of the container where it will do most damage. And as we all know, a barometric trigger would have exploded about 40 minutes after take-off no matter how long the plane had been delayed.

You could still say, well it might have been bizarre, but he still did it. Except, there's no evidence he did!

He wasn't the man who bought the clothes from Tony Gauci. That's what the grounds of appeal we know about were all about. Tony had a remarkable memory for the goods he sold, and remembered the purchaser in terms of vital statistics, as he sized him up for fit (and realised some of the clothes he was buying wouldn't have fitted him). The man he originally described was nothing like Megrahi in height or build, and over 10 years older. And the day he described the purchase as taking place was a day Megrahi wasn't on Malta. The rest is a shocking catalogue of leading the witness, twisting his evidence and pure bribery.

He didn't put the bomb on the plane - not just because he didn't go airside that morning or do anything at all suspicious, but because the bomb didn't go on at Malta. The baggage records proved that to any reasonable standard of proof.

And that's it, really. He knew Edwin Bollier. So did a lot of people, no doubt. He was never shown to have had one of Bollier's timers in his possession, or any bomb-making equipment, or to have any previous record of or expertise in bomb-making. He was a JSO officer. Indeed, and again that hardly proves guilt in this case - there were a lot of JSO officers in the 1980s.

So how come he was charged and convicted? Prof. Black has explained how the evidence that was eventually accepted would never have been sufficient to issue an indictment in the first place, if it had not been for the additional evidence of the witness Giaka. Giaka was going to swear he'd seen Megrahi and Fhimah smuggle the bomb into the airport and so on. Except, Giaka had invented the whole thing at the behest of the CIA and the US Department of Justice, who both bribed and blackmailed him to do that. This all came out in court, and Giaka's evidence was thrown out. Incredibly, the prosecution received no criticism for pulling this trick, or for lying to the court in an attempt to conceal the evidence that their star witness was lying.

After Giaka was discredited, it appears that the whole circus had gathered too much momentum to be stopped, and the prosecution went on to try to stitch together a case from what was left. Threadbare doesn't begin to describe it, but for some reason the judges bought it.

Tony Gauci never positively identified Megrahi - the best he ever mustered, despite all the coaching and bribery, was that Megrahi resembled the purchaser, and a pretty hesitant job it was too. The judges nevertheless decided it was Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt, because - the purchase happened on a day Megrahi was on Malta, and Megrahi was at the airport when the bomb was loaded. And he knew Edwin Bollier and he was a JSO officer, yadda, yadda.

Tony said the purchase happened midweek, early evening, when his brother was home watching a UEFA match, the Christmas lights weren't yet lit, and it was raining a bit. All these features pointed to 23rd November. Megrahi wasn't even on Malta on 23rd November. By torturing the meteorological and other data past breaking point, it was possible to make a highly unconvincing case for the date to have been 7th December. When asked by the SCCRC why he preferred 7th December, DCI Bell said that it was Megrahi's presence on the island which had persuaded him it must have been the latter date. The judges concurred, and it was 7th December beyond reasonable doubt.

The Malta baggage records said loud and clear there was no suspect suitcase on the Malta-Frankfurt flight. The Frankfurt baggage records all vanished completely within a few days of the incident, right under the noses of the German police. And I'd give a minor body part to know what that was all about. Eight months later, a very limited extract of these records was handed over to the Scottish police, having been saved as a souvenir by an IT technician. This appeared to show an item of luggage from the Malta flight being coded for the Heathrow flight. However, this was far from certain, partly due to the very incomplete nature of the records, and it was possible the record in question was due to a coding anomaly. Mistakes in coding were acknowledged to occur at Frankfurt from time to time. (And that's not even considering the bizarre provenance of the souvenir computer printout.)

Faced with this choice, the judges decided that as the defence had not proved there had been a coding anomaly at Frankfurt, they were entitled to find that an unaccompanied bag had indeed travelled on the flight from Malta beyond reasonable doubt, and that some completely dastardly and untraceable method had been used to get it on. They explained this reasoning by saying it fitted the pattern, with Megrahi who had bought the clothes being present at the airport whan that flight left.

I don't think there's a more blatant example of circular reasoning in the criminal justice system.

Looked at from the point of view of the investigators, it's possible to see how this happened. When the disaster happened, there was indecent haste to declare that the device was "almost certainly" not introduced at Heathrow. Most of the baggage in the relevant container came off the Frankfurt feeder flight, so attention was directed back there. The Frankfurt authorities hotly denied the possibility that it had gone on there - and all the baggage records were missing. There was no love at all lost between the Scottish and the German police over all this.

Then, a full eight months after the disaster, evidence appeared pointing to Malta - both the Maltese origin of the clothes in the suitcase and the computer record suggesting the presence of an unexplained item of luggage on the Malta-Frankfurt flight showed up. The investigators became convinced the bomb had actually been introduced there. This conveniently left Heathrow entirely in the clear (as the luggage had been shunted from one plane to the other across the tarmac in about 20 minutes, and had never been unattended), and Frankfurt relatively in the clear as responsibility for security of the flight as regards luggage coming in from another airline (as opposed to the check-in desks) lay with Pan Am.

All the effort shifted to Malta. Eventually, it was discovered that one of the passengers passing through the airport that morning, checking in for a flight to Tripoli which left about the same time as the Frankfurt flight, was a JSO officer travelling undercover. I can sort of see why the cops would have got excited about that. The clothes purchase, the apparent rogue suitcase showing on the Frankfurt computer record, and a suspicious Libyan, all right there.

The trouble was, they wouldn't take no for an answer. Megrahi didn't actually buy the clothes - but Gauci was badgered, coached and bribed, and the meteorological evidence tortured, to say he did. He didn't go airside that morning or do anything suspicious - but it was decided he was up to something, anyway. There was no suspect suitcase on the flight - but the possibility of a coding anomaly at Frankfurt was handwaved away, and an impenetrable and undetectable plot conjured into being to declare there was. And then, in case that wasn't enough (which is wasn't), Giaka's CIA handlers told him to produce evidence to implicate both Megrahi and Fhimah, or else.

Did they know they were framing an innocent man? Some of them probably did. Some may have believed he was genuinely guilty and they were merely ensuring justice was done. Maybe it was OK regardless because a JSO officer was just a terrorist anyway. And other leads has petered out in the sand and it was going to be pretty embarrassing if nobody was ever convicted for this atrocity. And it just so happened that it was extremely politically convenient to lay this on Libya as well. And there you have it, the perfect storm.

However, if you look at it another way, it makes better sense. If you intend to introduce a bomb at Heathrow, say, maybe it's not so daft to make a conspicuous purchase of brand new, locally manufactured, traceable clothes in Malta - a thousand miles away. If they should happen to be traced, it might provide a nice little diversionary red herring. So long as the purchaser is someone Tony Gauci has never seen before and will never see again, why not?

I think it worked beyond someone's wildest dreams.

The coincidence of the Frankfurt computer record seeming to point to Malta and Megrahi having been there under cover at the crucial moment seems to have been too much for the investigators - and the judges. They wrote several times about a "pattern", really referring to this coincidence. However, striking coincidences happen all the time. When examined in detail, they're often not as unlikely as they first appear.

The prosecution referred often to how it was possible to trace baggage through the Frankfurt system using the reasoning they employed to identify the anomalous record as referring to the Malta flight. They showed a number of records relating to known PA103 passengers exactly where they ought to have been. However, nobody ever demonstrated how frequent miscodings and anomalies were. It's possible there were three relating to the Heathrow flight alone. If it was quite usual for there to be two, three or four anomalous records in the loading data for a flight that size, then the chances of one of them seeming to relate to the Malta flight might not be especially low.

Megrahi travelled through Malta quite often, but that's not the data we want for that end. What we don't know is how often a JSO officer, any JSO officer, travelled on LN147 from Malta to Tripoli. If this was a rare occurrence, then it's quite a coincidence. But it might not have been. JSO officers might have been in the habit of catching that flight on a regular basis. In which case it was just Megrahi's rotten luck it happened to be him on 21st December 1988.

So you see, without even mentioning the fact that the provenance of the MST-13 timer fragment in the evidence simply screams "plant", and the identifying page of the radio-cassette manual simply couldn't have survived the explosion it was supposed to have been next to, and ignoring whatever cover-up was going on at Frankfurt, and completely forgetting about all the allegations that the investigation was deliberately headed off from cornering the PFLP-GC with their radio-cassette bombs with barometric timers set to go off about 40 minutes after take-off, and all the rest of the circumstantial evidence against them - it's quite obvious that Megrahi was framed. By the CIA and the US Department of Justice, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the Lord Advocate and the Scottish criminal justice system.

In essence it need be no different from the framing of Barry George for the murder of Jill Dando - all the other leads had gone cold, and here was someone the crime might be plausibly pinned on, so let's do it.

Sorry to have gone on so long, and most people here know all this anyway, but maybe Blogiston didn't, or other lurkers may come by and find some of it helpful.