Public Interest Immunity and the UK Foreign Office

[What follows is an item that was originally posted on this blog on 15 February 2009:]

The FCO and public interest immunity

‘The Foreign Office (FCO) solicited the letter from the US State Department that forced British judges to block the disclosure of CIA files documenting the torture of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, The Observer can reveal.

‘The letter said that the release of papers relating to Binyam Mohamed would damage future intelligence sharing between the two countries.

‘A former senior State Department official said that it was the Foreign Office that initiated the "cover-up" by asking the State Department to send the letter so that it could be introduced into the court proceedings. (…)

‘The former senior State Department official said: "Far from being a threat, it was solicited [by the Foreign Office]." The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: 'Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.' If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court."

‘The letter, sent by the State Department's top legal adviser John Bellinger to foreign secretary David Miliband's legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem, on 21 August last year, said: "We want to affirm in the clearest terms that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements."’

The above are excerpts from an article in today’s edition of The Observer.

The reasons advanced by the Foreign Secretary in the Binyam Mohamed case for asserting public interest immunity are precisely the same reasons as he put forward in his PII certificate in the current Lockerbie appeal. It was claimed in the Appeal Court by the Advocate General that the UK Government had tried, but failed, to obtain the consent of the “foreign power” that supplied the document(s) which Mr Megrahi’s legal team sought to have disclosed and the non-disclosure of which at the original trial formed the basis of one of the grounds on which the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission held that his conviction may have amounted to a miscarriage of justice.

One is now left wondering just how hard the FCO tried to get the foreign power’s consent to disclosure, and whether it was suggested to the foreign power that the FCO’s preferred response to the request would be “No”.

Lockerbie: Bomb trigger or clever fake?

[This is the headline over part three of Dr Morag Kerr’s series of Lockerbie articles. It appears at pages 15 to 19 of the February 2016 edition of iScot magazine. The previous two instalments are referred to on this blog here and here. The February instalment reads in part:]

(...) Once the first pieces of blast-damaged baggage container were brought in on Christmas Eve, the police knew they were dealing with mass murder.  Every piece of debris recovered, down to the smallest rag or scrap of suitcase, was logged with the precise location where it had been found.

The item designated PI/995, which became a crucial clue and a nexus for numerous conspiracy theories, was logged as being picked up near Newcastleton, twenty miles east of Lockerbie, on 13th January 1989.  It proved to be a scrap of shirt collar, burned by close proximity to the explosion.  Much has been written about the provenance of this item, and in particular the scanty and problematic documentation of its most significant feature – a 1 cm square fragment of fibreglass printed circuit board found embedded in the cloth and dubbed PT/35b.

This fragment is at the centre of a confused and confusing mess of renumbered pages, inconsistent dates and general muddle which have led many people to speculate that it was actually a retrospective plant.  These suspicions are heightened by the absence of any record during 1989 of a serious forensic investigation of the item, although the RARDE scientists were obsessing over other pieces of circuit board at that time.  PT/35b apparently sat in a side-room, unremarked, despite a photograph dated May 1989 in which it seems to sit there shouting “look at me, I’m a freaking great CLUE!”

However, detailed examination of the suspect documentation doesn’t categorically prove that any of it was inserted retrospectively.  The examination notes in question, written by forensic scientist Dr Thomas Hayes, are so scrappy, disorganised and unprofessional that it’s impossible to prove anything either way.  While pages 50 and 51 look very much like interpolations (PI/995 is described on page 51), there are many other equally obvious interpolations – it seems to have been the way he worked.  Not only that, the nature of the documentation is such that if he had wanted to add the reference to PT/35b retrospectively he could simply have substituted a single re-written page and nobody would have been any the wiser.

One thing seems reasonably certain.  The scrap of collar really did fall out of the sky, with the shirt it was part of being extremely close to the explosion.  The careful logging of the recovered debris shows four separate parts of that same shirt recovered from widely separated locations which form an almost perfect straight-line continuation of the “southern debris trail”.  While PI/995 itself was found in a field, PK/339 was recovered high on a steep hillside in the depths of the Kielder Forest.  One piece was found fifty miles from Lockerbie, near Otterburn in Northumberland.  This all fits perfectly with the known distribution of the falling, wind-swept debris, and the effort that would have been required to fake it is mind-boggling.

Was PT/35b, the infamous printed circuit board fragment, actually lodged in the cloth at that time?  It’s impossible to say, but at the moment it has not been proved that it wasn’t.  What has been proved is something altogether different, something entirely unsuspected during the years when the defence teams were poring over the forensic notes and wondering if certain pages might have been added at a later date.

The serious attempt to find out what the fragment was began in earnest after it was finally handed over to the Scottish detectives in January 1990.  Physical and chemical analysis was carried out at the University of Strathclyde.  Policemen patiently telephoned and visited manufacturers of electronic components and suppliers of raw materials.  Nothing earth-shattering transpired.  The raw materials were unremarkable, used in millions of gadgets and gizmos worldwide.  A detailed report dated September 1990 catalogues the effort, and notes one particular feature that seemed anomalous.  Printed circuit boards have a coating on the circuitry, known as ‘tinning’, applied to make the components easier to solder.  In mass manufacturing this coating is almost always a tin/lead alloy, however PT/35b had a coating of pure tin, applied in such a way as to suggest this had been done by a method known as electroless plating, used by amateurs making only a few boards as a hobby.

This didn’t help though, and PT/35b’s origins remained elusive.  Finally, in June 1990, the Scottish police allowed the FBI to become involved.  Success was almost immediate, with no need for further analysis.  With the help of a CIA agent, the fragment was matched visually to a circuit board from an electronic timer known as an MST-13 made by a Swiss firm called MEBO.  Inquiries in Switzerland revealed that only twenty of these timers had been produced, as a special order for the Libyan armed forces.

This was the main breakthrough of the investigation, the cause of the switch in direction from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Gaddafi’s Libya as the prime suspects.  It also provided the perfect answer to a conundrum that had plagued the investigators since early 1989.  How had one of the PFLP-GC’s devices travelled on three flights before blowing up, when the triggers used by that group were altitude-sensitive?  The MEBO devices were count-down timers capable of being set to go off days in advance, irrespective of altitude.

The Lockerbie investigators set off to hunt Libyans, and apparently never looked back.

Belatedly, the forensic scientists at RARDE did what they should have done in 1989, and carried out their own physical and chemical analysis of the fragment.  These tests were overseen by Allen Feraday, and his notes dated 1st August 1991 record the same findings as the tests done in Scotland the previous year.  The coating on the circuitry was pure tin.

There was a complication, though.  The investigators by now had samples of the MEBO-produced boards for comparison, and Mr. Feraday analysed these too.  They were different.  They had the usual alloy coating seen on mass-manufactured products.  His notes reveal some puzzlement.  He recorded some tentative suggestions, but the conundrum was never resolved.  The visual match with the MEBO boards was perfect, right down to an oddity in the tracking caused by the Letraset of the template not having been cut quite flush.  The metallurgy discrepancy was put to one side.

The matching of PT/35b to the unique batch of timers supplied to Libya was central to the prosecution of Megrahi and Fhimah in 2000-01.  With the timer off the table, proof that Lockerbie was a Libyan operation would have been absent, and the prosecution would have been in all sorts of trouble.  So how was the metallurgy discrepancy dealt with in court?

It wasn’t.  Mr. Feraday’s original notes weren’t disclosed to the defence, and the matter was covered by having him read out the relevant section of his fair-copy report written some months later.  In that, there was no mention of any discrepancy.  The report read “... it has been conclusively established that the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the ‘MST-13' timer.”

Similar in all respects?  No, it wasn’t.

None of the independent scientists who had carried out testing on the fragment were called to give evidence.  The matter wasn’t brought up with the production manager from the company which had made the boards for the MST-13 timers.  The fact that the composition of the coating showed that PT/35b had been made by a completely different process from the MEBO instruments was never highlighted.

Further investigation carried out by Megrahi’s defence team in preparation for his second appeal revealed that the company which made the PCBs for the MST-13 timers had never used an electroless plating technique.  All the instruments supplied to Libya by MEBO had the usual lead-alloy coating on the circuitry.

PT/35b did not come from a timer sold to the Libyan armed forces, as claimed by the prosecution.

In that case, what was it?  Nobody knows.  The visual match between the fragment and the boards from the MEBO timers is striking, indicating that they all originated from the same template. (...)

Who made it, and why?  Did it fall out of the sky that December night, or was it somehow added to the rest of the debris recovered from the shirt collar at a later date, its dodgy provenance concealed behind the smokescreen of the disorganised forensics notes?  If we knew any of that, we might be a lot closer to solving the mystery of the Lockerbie bombing, still impenetrable after more than a quarter of a century.

Behind the Lockerbie frame-up

[This is the headline over an article by Norm Dixon published on this date in 2001 on the Links website. It reads as follows:]

The eminent barrister Horace Rumpole has often noted that the “golden thread running through the history of British justice” is that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty by the prosecution “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Of course, Rumpole is a fictional character created by writer John Mortimer. As the verdict handed down in the Lockerbie bombing trial proves, the “golden thread” is just as fictional.

On January 31, the three Scottish lords sitting in judgement on the charges against two Libyans accused of planting the bomb that felled Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland on December 21, 1988, found Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi guilty of the murders of the 270 people killed in the disaster. Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah was found not guilty.

The nine-month trial was held in the Netherlands and conducted according to Scottish law. It was the result of an agreement between Libya and the US and British governments that finally allowed the trial — which had been stalled for almost five years by London's and Washington's insistence that the case be held in either the United States or Britain — to be heard in a “neutral” third country.

In their 82-page judgement, the three judges found that, despite “uncertainties and qualifications”, “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused [Megrahi]”.

According to the judges, the evidence showed that Megrahi, Libyan Arab Airlines' security chief at Malta's Luqa airport, had purchased items of clothing from a shop in Malta that were of the same brand and type as those that forensics experts had determined were in the Samsonite suitcase that contained the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103. From the presence of these brands and types of clothes in the suitcase, the judges inferred that Megrahi had somehow succeeded in having the “item of baggage”, unaccompanied by a passenger, transferred from Malta, via Frankfurt, to London's Heathrow airport, where it was loaded onto the doomed aircraft.

The judges added that with “other background circumstances” — such as Megrahi's previous (and seemingly continuing) service with Libya's security organisation (JSO), his “association” with the Swiss company that manufactured a type of timer which the prosecution claimed was attached to the bomb and “his movements [between Malta and Libya] under a false name at or around the material time” — “a real and convincing pattern” formed.

Unexpected

Ian Bell wrote in the Scottish Sunday Herald on February 4, “Last week you would have been hard-pressed to find an Edinburgh lawyer willing to bet on any guilty verdict being reached at Camp Zeist. The same belief was evident, it is reported, in Whitehall.”

Robert Black QC, the highly respected professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University who in 1994 first suggested the plan for a third country trial, told the BBC on February 4: “This was a very, very weak circumstantial case. I am absolutely astounded, astonished. I was extremely reluctant to believe that any Scottish judge would convict anyone, even a Libyan, on the basis of such evidence.”

Michael Scharf, a law professor at the New England School of Law, agreed, telling the February 2 New York Times: “It sure does look like they bent over backwards to find a way to convict, and you have to assume the political context of the case influenced them.”

Even some of the British relatives of the Lockerbie victims were sceptical: “All we know from this trial is that one of the two was innocent. I think we should be grateful... But we have our doubts about the guilt of Megrahi”, Martin Cadman, whose son was killed in the disaster, told the February 2 London Independent.

Beyond reasonable doubt?

The prosecution case, and the judges' verdict, rested fundamentally on two points: it was Megrahi who purchased the clothes which were packed into the suitcase that contained the bomb, and that suitcase began its fateful journey in Malta rather than either Frankfurt airport or at Heathrow.

Yet, Megrahi was never positively identified as the man who purchased the clothing, the prosecution did not provide any physical or documentary evidence to link Megrahi to the suitcase or the bomb components, and no evidence was offered to prove that the suitcase began its journey in Malta, let alone that it was Megrahi who sent it on its way.

The guilty verdict hinged most on the testimony of Tony Gauci, the owner of the clothes shop in Malta. In their judgement, the judges stated: “We are nevertheless satisfied that his identification so far as it went of the first accused as the purchaser was reliable and should be treated as a highly important element in this case.”

In their verdict, the judges described the torturous path Gauci's “identification” of Megrahi had taken. The shopkeeper was first interviewed by police on September 1, 1989, and described the purchaser as being “six feet or more” in height and well-built. On September 13, he told police the man was about 50 years old.

Megrahi is five feet, eight inches tall, of medium-build and was 36-years-old in December 1988.

On September 14, 1989, Gauci was shown 19 photos and identified a man as being “similar” to the purchaser but added that the purchaser was 20 years older. The man's photo — who was not Megrahi — was included because police thought he resembled an artist's impression and an identikit portrait based on Gauci's description.

On September 26, 1989, Gauci viewed more photos and pointed out another man included at the suggestion of German police. On August 31, 1990, Gauci was shown 24 photos and pointed out a man who, he said, had a face with a similar shape and style of hair to the purchaser. It was not Megrahi.

On December 6, 1989, and again on September 10, 1990, Gauci was shown photos but did not identify anybody. Included both times were photos of Abo Talb, a Palestinian jailed in Sweden in 1989 for terrorist bombings. Yet, Gauci told the court that in late 1989 or early 1990 his brother had shown him a newspaper article about the Lockerbie disaster which included a photo of a man with the word “bomber” printed across it. Gauci said he thought it was the man that bought the articles from him or that it resembled the person who bought the clothes from him. The man was Abo Talb.

On February 15, 1991, police showed Gauci 12 photos. Gauci told police that all the men in the photos were younger than the purchaser. The police pressed Gauci to “allow for any age difference” and look again. He pointed to a photo and said the man “resembles the man who bought the clothing ... of all the photographs I have been shown, this photograph 8 is the only one really similar to the man who bought the clothing, if he is a bit older, other than the one my brother showed me [of Abo Talb].” Photograph 8 was Megrahi's 1986 passport photo.

Towards the end of 1998 or the beginning of 1999, Gauci approached police after he was shown a magazine article about the Lockerbie disaster which named Megrahi as a suspect. He told police that the photo of Megrahi in the article “looks like the man” he sold clothes to.

On August 13, Gauci picked out Megrahi from an identification parade with the words: “Not exactly the man I saw in the shop. Ten years ago I saw him, but the man who look a little bit like exactly [sic] is number 5”. At the trial, Gauci pointed to Megrahi and said he “resembles him a lot”.

The defence lawyers protested that Gauci's eventual, less than positive identification of Megrahi had taken place after the defendant's photo had been in the world news for years.

In their verdict, the judges admitted that Gauci “never made what could be described as an absolutely positive identification”. The judges defended their assessment of Gauci's “identification” with the incredible statement that, “There are situations where a careful witness who will not commit himself beyond saying that there is a close resemblance can be regarded as more reliable and convincing in his identification than a witness who maintains that his identification is 100% certain.”

Gauci was also unclear as to when the items were purchased. On the witness stand, he agreed the date was either November 23 or December 7, 1988. The prosecution insisted it was December 7 and in the verdict, the judges did too.

However, in his statements to police and in his testimony at the trial Gauci said that it had been, or was, raining when the purchaser entered the shop. The nearby Luqa airport's chief meteorologist testified that it did not rain on December 7, but did so on November 23.

Interestingly, before the indictment of the two Libyans, the press reported that the police had stated that the clothing had been purchased on November 23.

Why is this important? First, because Megrahi was in Malta on December 7 but investigators could find no evidence that he was there on November 23, and second, because Abo Talb, who Gauci first identified as the purchaser, might have been. Talb had visited Malta from Sweden in late October 1988. When he left on October 26, he flew to Sweden on a return ticket valid for one month, raising the possibility could have returned.

Talb, who testified at the Lockerbie trial, could only prove he was in Sweden until November 10 and most of December, including on December 7. Talb presented no evidence to prove he was in Sweden after November 10 and before December 5. It is therefore possible that Talb entered Gauci's shop on November 23.

In December 1989, it was reported in several major newspapers that Scottish police, in papers filed with the Swedish legal authorities, had named Talb as the suspect “in the murder or participation in the murder of 270 people”.

The judges, however, chose to declare that “there is some support for Abo Talb when he said that he remained in Sweden and did not return to Malta after 26 October 1988”.

PFLP-GC

Talb's possible involvement is in line with the defence team's argument that there was a more plausible — and simpler — theory of how the bomb-laden suitcase reached Heathrow than the prosecution's convoluted speculations.

Talb was a member of the Syria-based Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, which worked closely with another Syria-backed terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). On October 26, 1988 — less than a month before the Lockerbie disaster — West German police raided PFLP-GC safe-houses and seized Toshiba radio cassette players, explosives, detonators, timers, barometric pressure devices, as well as Pan Am timetables and unused airline baggage tags.

The cache suggested a plot to bomb an aircraft. A trade mark of the PFLP-GC's bombs at the time were that they were concealed within Toshiba radio cassette players. The bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 had been concealed in a Toshiba player, although a different model from that generally used by the PFLP-GC. That not all the PFLP-GC's stock of bombs had been discovered was proven when, in April 1989, three explosive devices were seized in a raid.

At first, US and British investigators also were convinced that the PFLP-GC — with the backing of the Syrian and Iranian governments — was the prime suspect in the Lockerbie disaster.

The FBI in April 1989 leaked news that the PFLP-GC had smuggled the bomb onto flight in Frankfurt. The Washington Poston May 11, 1989, reported that the US State Department had stated that the CIA was “confident” that the PFLP-GC had carried out the attack on behalf of the Iranian government. The attack was said to be in retaliation for the 290 pilgrims massacred while returning from Mecca when a US warship blew a Iranian passenger jet out of the sky as it passed over the Persian Gulf.

On December 16, 1989, the New York Times reported that Scottish investigators had announced that they had “hard evidence” that the PFLP-GC was behind the bombing.

In October 1990, US and British authorities suddenly did a backflip as the US build-up in the Gulf was gathering pace following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Investigators attention suddenly shifted from the Syria-backed PFLP-GC to Libya. In 1991, the two Libyans were formally indicted.

What changed between 1988 and 1991? Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad was an enthusiastic participant in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, whereas Libya's leader Moammer Qadhafi opposed the war and campaigned for a peaceful settlement.

The judges rejected this alternative theory, although they did “accept that there is a great deal of suspicion as to the actings of Abo Talb and his circle, but there is no evidence to indicate that they had either the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft in December 1988”.

This contention is based on the claim that the Lockerbie bomb was triggered by a Swiss-made timer of a type (MST-13) that had been supplied to the Libyan army in the mid-1980s. Yet the owner of the company that made the devices testified that MST-13s had also been supplied to the East German Stasi spy agency. East Germany is known to have harboured the PFLP-GC.

Despite the judges' proviso that “we are unable to exclude the possibility that any MST-13 timers in the hands of the Stasi left their possession, although there is no positive evidence that they did and in particular that they were supplied to the PFLP-GC”, their verdict stated that “the evidence relating to [the terrorist activities of the PFLP-GC] does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime”.

‘Major difficulty for Crown’

The judges' verdict doggedly insisted that “we are satisfied that it has been proved that the primary suitcase containing the explosive devise was dispatched from Malta, passed through Frankfurt and was loaded onto PA103 at Heathrow”.

Yet, the judges contradict themselves by admitting that there were no records that showed any unaccompanied baggage was carried on the flight to Frankfurt and that all luggage in Malta was checked by military personnel for the presence of explosives. The judges noted that the Luqa airport had a “relatively elaborate security system” and security procedures that “seem to make it extremely difficult for an unaccompanied and unidentified bag to be shipped on a flight out”.

The judges conceded that: “If therefore the unaccompanied bag was launched from Luqa, the method by which that was done is not established, and the Crown accepted that they could not point to any specific route by which the primary suitcase could have been loaded... The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [the Malta to Frankfurt flight] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.”

The judges' determination to deny that the bomb could have been introduced at a point other than Malta, and by a culprit other than Megrahi, led them to ignore that the security at Frankfurt airport was notoriously lax — something the US law enforcement authorities knew about at the time.

According to an October 30, 1990, US NBC television news report, “Pan Am flights from Frankfurt, including 103, had been used a number times by the [US Drug Enforcement Agency] as part of its undercover operation to fly informants and suitcases of heroin into Detroit as part of a sting operation to catch dealers in Detroit... Informants would put suitcases of heroin on the Pan Am flights apparently without the usual security checks ... through an arrangement between the DEA and the German authorities.”

The report stated that the DEA was investigating the possibility that a young man who lived in the US and regularly visited the Middle East may have unwittingly carried the bomb aboard flight 103.

An investigation commissioned by Pan Am's insurance company in 1989 also concluded that the most likely source of the bomb was that the PFLP-GC had infiltrated the DEA's protected drug smuggling operation and succeeded in having the bag containing the bomb placed on Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt.

Megrahi should have been found not guilty because the prosecution did not prove him guilty beyond “reasonable doubt”. A terrible miscarriage of justice has taken place because the three loyal servants of the British imperialist ruling class who sat in judgement on the fate Megrahi and Fhimah had already decided to find one of them guilty regardless of the facts.

The lords knew that the political stakes were too high to allow both Libyans to walk free. Such a verdict would have exposed the lies upon which nine years of UN sanctions, which have cost Libya US$33 billion and 10,000 lives, have been based. It would have also shed some light on the cynical, sleazy and embarrassing political operations that the US government is involved in throughout the world.

The Heathrow break-in evidence

[What follows is the text of a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2002:]

A former Heathrow Airport security guard has said he found a baggage store padlock "cut like butter" the night before the Lockerbie bombing.

Ray Manly was giving evidence at the appeal by Abdelbasset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi against his conviction for murdering 270 people in the 1988 bombing.

Al-Megrahi's defence team argue that the bomb could have been placed on Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow.

At his trial, one of the key areas of the prosecution case was that the bomb was loaded onto a feeder flight from Luqa Airport in Malta, where al-Megrahi worked.

Evidence about the reported break-in was not introduced at the trial and is only now being heard for the first time.

Mr Manly was on a night shift in Terminal 3 on the night of 20/21 December 1988.

He told the Scottish Court in the Netherlands that the doors separating landside from airside were unmanned at night after they had been locked.

During his rounds, he spotted that a padlock securing the doors had been broken.

'Deliberate act'

"The padlock was on the floor. In my opinion it was as if it had been cut like butter - very professional," he said.

The court was shown Mr Manly's security report, written soon after the incident in which he described the break-in as "a very deliberate act, leaving easy access to airside".

Mr Manly informed his colleague Philip Radley and police were called.

But Mr Manly said he did not see any police officers that night and was only interviewed by anti-terrorist squad officers about the incident the following January, after the Lockerbie disaster.

Giving evidence, Mr Radley told the five appeal court judges that Terminal 3's landside area, where passengers arrived to check in, was separated from airside by two thick rubber doors at the end of a corridor. Access to the airside area was restricted to staff.

The doors were secured by a 4ft long iron bar and a heavy duty padlock and security guards were on duty on each side of the doors.

Mr Radley said he was on the nightshift on 20 December when his supervisor called to tell him that the padlock on the doors had been broken.

A guard was placed on the doors - designated T3 2a and T3 2b - until the morning, when a replacement padlock was found.

Log book entry

The court was shown Mr Radley's log book for the night including an entry recorded at 35 minutes past midnight on December 21: "Door at T3 2a lock broken off."

Questioned by Alan Turnbull QC, for the prosecution, Mr Radley explained that baggage handlers working airside would pass through the doors when starting their shift and leave the same way - unless they were delayed and the doors at T3 2a and 2b had been locked for the night.

In that case, he said, baggage handlers would have to take a longer route out of the terminal and there had been complaints about having to do so. On the night of 20 December, baggage handlers had to stay late because of a delayed flight, he confirmed.

Mr Turnbull suggested that a member of staff taking a short cut, could have forced the door, breaking the padlock.

Handlers' detour

Questioned by the defence Mr Radley said the detour for baggage handlers if the doors were locked was only "a couple of minutes".

He could not recall any previous incident in which staff had forced open locked doors.

The prosecution has also been allowed to present 11 new witnesses, to counter the new evidence.

Although the court's decision to allow the new evidence to be heard can be seen as a boost to the defence case, under Scottish law the appeal judges have to weigh whether the new testimony, had it been heard at the original trial, would have changed the outcome of that case.

Since his conviction, al-Megrahi has remained at the Camp Zeist compound which is surrounded by a six-metre tall concrete wall.

“They're never going to tell”

[On this date in 1990, members of President George [H W] Bush’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) met members of the families of UK Lockerbie victims at the US embassy in London. What follows is taken from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103:]

On 29 September 1989, President [George H W] Bush appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos, former Secretary of Labor, as chairwoman of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) to review and report on aviation security policy in the light of the sabotage of flight PA103. Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's Executive Assistant Director, was assigned to advise and assist PCAST in their task. Mrs Korologos and the PCAST team (Senator Alfonse D'Amato, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Representative James Oberstar, General Thomas Richards, deputy commander of US forces in West Germany, and Edward Hidalgo, former Secretary of the US Navy) submitted their report, with its 64 recommendations, on 15 May 1990. The PCAST chairman also handed a sealed envelope to the President which was widely believed to apportion blame for the PA103 bombing. Extensively covered in The Guardian the next day, the PCAST report concluded:

"National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism. The Commission recommends a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions."

Before submitting their report, the PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US embassy in London on 12 February 1990. Twelve years later, on 11 July 2002, Scottish MP Tam Dalyell reminded the House of Commons of a controversial statement made at that 1990 embassy meeting by a PCAST member to one of the British relatives, Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell." The statement first came to public attention in the 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie and was published in both The Guardian of 29 July 1995, and a special report from Private Eye magazine entitled Lockerbie, the flight from justice May/June 2001. Dalyell asserted in Parliament that the statement had never been refuted.

Megrahi application to European Court of Human Rights dismissed

[On this date in 2003 an application by Abdelbaset Megrahi to the European Court of Human Rights was dismissed:]

On 12 September 2002 the applicant’s defence team lodged an application (number 33955/02) with the European Court of Human Rights in which they argued that the applicant’s right to a fair trial had been infringed by, inter alia, prejudicial pre-trial publicity. On 11 February 2003 the court ruled the application inadmissible on the basis that the applicant had failed to exhaust domestic remedies by raising these issues in the domestic forum.

[RB: The application was made on the advice of English human rights lawyers consulted by Megrahi's Scottish solicitor. There were Scottish lawyers (I was one) who took the view that the application would be unsuccessful because of failure to exhaust domestic remedies (such as application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission). 

The background to the unsuccessful application is outlined in the following report on the BBC News website:]

The Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is having his case taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Lawyers for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi have lodged a petition in which they allege the Libyan's human rights were breached during his trial and subsequent appeal at the special Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

Megrahi was jailed for life for the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 over the Scottish town, in which 270 people died.

He was moved to Glasgow Barlinnie prison in March when he lost an appeal against his murder conviction.

The lawyers who represented him during his appeal have since been replaced.

Eddie MacKechnie, who is now representing Megrahi, said that his client's trial and subsequent appeal under Scottish courts was flawed in several key respects.

Speaking at a press conference in Glasgow, Mr MacKechnie said he believed Megrahi was innocent and was the victim of a massive miscarriage of justice.

He said: "My client's right to a fair trial was prejudiced by unfair publicity and public statements by officials here and abroad.

"This extended over years. His photo and that of is his co-accused were circulated all over the world.

"There was a failure to disclose material information to the defence. The court failed to make sure the defence had access to key information and left it up to the Crown to decide what information was given."

The solicitor also cited intervention by the US government and its defence organisations, particularly the CIA, in the case as further grounds for the action. (...)

Mr MacKechnie acknowledged the European Court had no power to release Megrahi, but said he believed the Government in Britain would bow to pressure if the complaint was upheld. He said he expected the process of bringing the case to court would take about a year, including the time to decide whether there was a case to answer. He added that an application was being prepared to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on Megrahi's behalf alleging among other things that his defence at the trial was inadequately handled.