Crown fights to keep 48 pieces of Lockerbie trial evidence secret

[This is the headline over a report in The Herald on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

Prosecutors are trying to keep secret 48 pieces of evidence relating to the Lockerbie trial, including a secret fax that could discredit a key Crown witness.

Lawyers for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 bombing, yesterday began a challenge over material they believe will free their terminally ill client.

But the Crown Office and the UK Advocate General are fighting against disclosure, claiming that in some cases the evidence does not exist.

The Herald can today reveal that the first item on the list is a fax which, the Libyan's defence team claims, places a fundamental question mark against the original trial testimony of Tony Gauci, who sold clothes later found in the wreckage of PanAm 103 at Lockerbie.

Judges at Camp Zeist were told that the first "photoshow" with Mr Gauci took place on September 14, 1989, while the fax at the centre of yesterday's proceedings is allegedly dated six days earlier.

Megrahi's team believes that confusion and disparity further compromises the integrity of a man described as an "important witness" at the trial.

His QC, Maggie Scott, revealed that the appeal, due to start on April 27, will be based on fresh evidence, the Lord Advocate's failure to disclose and irregularities in how evidence was obtained.

She said: "The predominant theme is Toni Gauci. He is the centrepiece in a sense."

Another previously unseen fax from the Joint Intelligence Group (JIG) or committee, which was set up after Lockerbie to investigate the case and included representatives from Scottish forces and the security services, refers to a meeting between Mr Gauci and FBI agents when Scottish police were not present. However, no record or statement has been shared with the defence.

Another JIG fax referred to yesterday indicates that there are other missing statements in relation to Mr Gauci, saying he saw the key clothes purchaser the day afterwards, and identified him as someone other than Megrahi.

That document refers to concerns among the Scottish police at the time that "the witness was trying to please them".

The defence also claims that the Crown pre-trial precognition of Mr Gauci was missing and was only recently discovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. The defence is also seeking "undisclosed information about discussion of reward money".

This is thought to relate to undisclosed discussions that Mr Gauci and his brother, Paul, could be influenced by the rumour of financial remuneration.

Ms Scott warned that there was a "reasonable" or "real" possibility that the Crown's failure to hand over the material could constitute a breach of article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, relating to a person's right to a fair trial.

She explained that, in its written responses to the defence, the Crown had argued that in some cases the calls for information were too wide, in others that the information does not exist and/or that it is not relevant. The hearing continues until at least tomorrow.

The Crown has not yet responded, but is understood to be refusing to disclose details of the September 8 photoshow, along with 47 other areas of information.

Megrahi's appeal itself could last at least 12 months.

Megrahi, who is suffering from advanced prostate cancer, is determined to clear his name but it is far from certain that he would survive such a long appeal case.

Libyan authorities have been encouraged to apply for a prisoner transfer to allow Megrahi to spend his remaining time with his family.

Secret papers show Thatcher's cabinet ruled out public inquiry within hours of Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

A father who lost his daughter in the Lockerbie bombing has hit out after papers showed Margaret Thatcher's cabinet appeared to rule out a public inquiry within hours of the disaster.

Conservative ministers suggested an independent investigation would “serve no useful purpose” the morning after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing a total of 270 people.

Dr Jim Swire, who daughter Flora was one of those who died, said: “One of the things this indicates is the entrenched view among ministers that they should limit the public's access to the truth about what happened.”

He added: "I believe there should be a full, thorough inquiry into the atrocity.”

Relatives of those killed have pressed for a public inquiry into what is still the worst terrorist incident to happen over British soil.

But the idea has been rejected by successive Westminster governments.

At 9.30am on December 22, Mrs Thatcher's cabinet met in London, with the exception of Scottish Secretary who was already in Lockerbie, to discuss its response to the bombing.

Ministers noted that Labour’s transport spokesman had called for a public inquiry into the tragedy.

An investigation by the then Department of Transport was already under way and the procurator fiscal in Dumfries was also expected to hold a Fatal Accident Inquiry.

Cabinet minutes, released under the 30-year rule, show that ministers suggested that it was "not clear whether any further public inquiry would serve a useful purpose provided that the results of the technical investigation were published".

"In general it was important to avoid a plethora of inquiries that caused distress of individuals while unearthing no new facts."

In her summing up, Mrs Thatcher said it was "essential that the cause of the disaster be identified as soon as possible".

She added that "the present investigation by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch of the Department of Transport should be pressed ahead with and it was not clear that any further public inquiry would be required in addition to the local procurator fiscal’s inquiry, and no commitments about such a further inquiry should therefore be made”.

She also said that the cabinet could not agree the government's contribution to a disaster fund until the extent of the damage suffered by Lockerbie became clear.

Despite the nature and scale of the disaster, she added that "the sum would need to be settled in the light of recent relevant precedents".

She also told ministers that she intended to visit Lockerbie herself later that day.

Dr Swire, who believes that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was wrongly convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, has argued that an independent inquiry became "increasingly important" after it emerged that statements about a break-in at Heathrow Airport before the disaster were kept by police until 1999.

Then Prime Minister Gordon Brown ruled out a public inquiry in 2009.

At the time UK ministers suggested that the Scottish Government could hold its own, limited, inquiry.

But Scottish ministers rejected that idea, saying that they did not have power to examine the international dimensions of the case.

Lockerbie: Morag Kerr hits back at Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Morag Kerr in The Café section of the issue of the Scottish Review published on 17 February:]

How dare Magnus Linklater (10 February) repeatedly traduce in print a book he hasn’t even had the courtesy to read! The false assumptions and downright fabrications in his latest sally make it all too clear that this is the case, despite his assurance to me two years ago that he had – even going so far as to call the unread text 'a remarkable piece of work'.

Does Mr Linklater seriously believe that I wrote a book in 2013 based entirely on premises the appeal court rejected in 2002? Of course I didn’t. Does he believe that the book merely points out (for about the ten-thousandth time) that the suitcase John Bedford saw in the baggage container an hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed looks suspiciously like the bomb? There is much more to it than that. Does he imagine that I examined the Heathrow evidence in isolation from the rest of the case? The book would hardly be 220-pages long if that were so.

The break-in into Heathrow Terminal 3 the night before the disaster is irrelevant. It was freely acknowledged in court that airside security in 1988 was abysmal, and it would have been child’s play for anyone to walk in any time they liked. No midnight cutting of padlocks would have been necessary. The break-in happened, but whether it was related to the introduction of the bomb into the baggage container 17 hours later is an entirely moot point. I make this perfectly clear in the book, and I would take it very kindly if Mr Linklater would cease and desist from dragging up this irrelevancy at every turn, as if it somehow discredits my thesis.

The possibility that the bomb might have been in the case John Bedford saw was explored in the original trial, with the defence obviously keen to suggest that it was. What is remarkable is that no evidence was presented of any specific investigation into the provenance of that suitcase by the original inquiry. Apparently, it was merely assumed that it wasn’t the bomb.

The 'meat' of my book is a thorough investigation into the provenance of the case Bedford saw; the investigation which should have been done in 1989 but wasn’t. In the course of this I examine witness statements, passenger and baggage transfer records and detailed photographs of the blast-damaged luggage – evidence that was for the most part not presented either at the original trial or the appeal. The results of this analysis are clear-cut. That was indeed the bomb suitcase, beyond any reasonable doubt. Once again I challenge Mr Linklater, and indeed anyone who has read the book, to explain why they don’t accept this analysis – based on evidence and logic, not dismissive sneers.

Mr Linklater implies that I am ignoring separate evidence of 'an unaccompanied bag coming from Malta that morning'. If he were to read my book he would discover that I pick apart the evidence for the existence of this bag in exhaustive detail, and come down firmly on the side of the German policeman who was originally assigned this task and whose report concludes: 'Throughout the inquiries into the baggage for PA103A there was no evidence that the bomb suitcase had been transferred with the luggage either from or via Frankfurt Main to London'.

Indeed, some clothing packed with the bomb was purchased on Malta, but as that purchase took place several weeks before the disaster it in no way precludes the bomb itself having been introduced at Heathrow. Again I deal with this point in great detail in the book, and in particular with the contention that Megrahi was the man who made that purchase. Clearly he was not, and the SCCRC report of 2007 underlined that pretty effectively.

Far from picking at one small point and ignoring the bigger picture, putting this point in context is exactly what the book is about. Not simply the compelling evidence that the bomb was already in the baggage container an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed, but the extremely tight and well-documented security at Malta airport that shows no sign whatsoever of an illegitimate item of luggage on Air Malta flight 180. In this context I would refer Mr Linklater to the words of Lord Osborne at the first appeal in 2002. 'There is considerable and quite convincing evidence that that could not have happened.'

Mr Linklater, as always, sets great store by what the various judges concluded. In the context of a reasoned argument showing that these conclusions were wrong, this is an unhelpful begging of the question. The evidence I have analysed was not presented in court. Mine is an entirely new and more detailed dissection of the forensics than anything previously attempted.

I ask once again, although with fading hopes, that Mr Linklater go away and read my book, and then explain exactly where he takes issue with my reasoning or my conclusions. Or else refrain from commenting on something he clearly knows nothing about.

Dewar acts to calm anger as Lockerbie prosecutor quits

Circumstances precluded my posting on this blog yesterday (Thursday, 18 February 2016). What follows is what I would have posted had it been possible.

[This is the headline over a report by Gerard Seenan in The Guardian on this date in 2000. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's first minister, Donald Dewar, yesterday moved to allay fears that the prosecution of the Lockerbie bomb suspects was in disarray by quickly nominating a replacement for the man who had been due to lead the prosecution team.

In less than six weeks, Lord Hardie, the lord advocate, Scotland's senior law officer, was supposed to lead the prosecution against the two Libyan suspects at Kamp van Zeist, in the Netherlands. But he quit late on Wednesday - and appointed himself a judge.

The move prompted accusations that Lord Hardie had left the families of the Lockerbie victims in the lurch, and led opposition politicians to call for an immediate review of the way judges are appointed, particularly the notion of self-appointment.

During an angry exchange at first minister's questions, the Scottish National party leader, Alex Salmond, accused Lord Hardie of letting Scotland down in the eyes of the world. Mr Dewar dismissed this as "over-dramatic".

By yesterday morning there was growing concern north of the border that Lord Hardie's decision would leave a vacuum at the heart of the case against the Libyan suspects.

The Scottish executive denied the departure would affect the trial and Mr Dewar announced he was recommending to the Queen that Colin Boyd, the solicitor general for Scotland, should become the new lord advocate.

Mr Boyd has played a prominent role in the Lockerbie case, appearing in person for the prosecution at some of the pre-trial hearings in Edinburgh and the Netherlands.

Roseanna Cunningham, the shadow justice minister, said many people felt let down by Lord Hardie's departure. "He has been responsible for key decisions in the Lockerbie prosecution, and the least he could have done was see this very important trial through to a close," she said.

Families of those who lost their lives in the Lockerbie bombing said they were appalled by Lord Hardie's decision. Susan Cohen, from New Jersey, in the US, who lost her daughter Theodora, said: "I am appalled and amazed at a moment like this, that the lord advocate just decides to leave."

Lord Hardie recently came under fire over his role in the appointment of Scottish judges after a high court ruling that using temporary sheriffs was in breach of the European convention on human rights.

After the SNP claimed Lord Hardie had mishandled the incorporation of the convention into Scots law, the Scottish justice minister, Jim Wallace, gave Lord Hardie his backing.

Lockerbie, Megrahi and the Prisoner Transfer Agreement: a mystery

[What follows is the text of an article by retired British diplomat Sir Brian Barder that was published in The Scotsman on this date in 2011:]

Megrahi at centre of transfer deal mystery

Why did the UK agree a deal  with Gaddafi to send the Lockerbie bomber to Libya in defiance of a binding United Nations resolution?

There’s a major mystery in the newly released British government  documents containing new revelations about the controversial release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.  Moreover it’s puzzling that the mystery was never raised when the prime minister, David Cameron, made a statement and answered questions about the documents in the House of Commons on 7 February.  It’s the hippopotamus in the living-room that everyone is apparently too polite to mention.

Here’s the mystery.  In August 1998 the US and UK governments invited the United Nations Security Council to approve an initiative under which the two Libyans suspected of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing would be tried in a special court in the Netherlands under Scottish law.  The Security Council duly approved the initiative in a formal resolution passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, meaning that the resolution has binding force on all UN member states under international law.  But the relevant point is this:  the US-UK letter setting out the initiative, as approved by the mandatory UN resolution, stipulates in terms that if convicted, the suspects “will serve their sentence in the United Kingdom” – in practice meaning in Scotland, since all the proceedings were to be governed by Scottish law.  One of the two suspects was later acquitted:  the other, Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison with a 27-year tariff.  Megrahi duly began to serve his sentence in a Scottish prison.

Now fast-forward to 2007.  Western relations with Libya have been ‘normalised’ following Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons programme, sanctions have been lifted and UK firms are negotiating for lucrative and now legitimate contracts with Libya.  Tony Blair, then the UK prime minister, on the last of his visits to Libya, signs an agreement with Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in which the two governments promise to sign a Prisoner Transfer Agreement within a year.  The PTA allows a Libyan convict held in a UK prison to be transferred to serve the balance of his or her sentence in prison in Libya (and vice versa).  The Libyans make it clear that agreement to a PTA is the key to approval of various contracts with UK firms.  The only Libyan in a UK jail is Megrahi.  Everyone understands that Libyan insistence on a PTA is intended to open the way to the eventual repatriation of Megrahi to Libya – theoretically to serve the rest of his 27-year sentence in a Libyan prison.  The Scottish Government in Edinburgh, responsible under Scottish law for any decision affecting Megrahi’s future, repeatedly makes it clear that it is strongly opposed to the use of the PTA for transferring him to Libya.  But the PTA is signed under the British government’s foreign affairs power and the Scottish Government has no veto over it.  The mystery here is obvious.  The UK-US initiative approved by the Security Council resolution stipulates that Megrahi must serve his sentence in the UK.  The PTA envisages that he could be transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence in Libya.  The PTA is obviously inconsistent with the initiative and thus with a binding UN resolution.  So what was the point of the PTA?

It emerges from the newly released documents that in the course of discussions about the proposed PTA, the Scottish Government asked the British government whether there would be any obstacle in international law to the transfer of Megrahi to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement if the Scottish Justice Secretary were to agree to such a transfer.  After scratching its head, the British government replied, surprisingly, that there was not.  The documents don’t explain how the British government arrived at this counter-intuitive conclusion, with which (even more surprisingly) the US government had agreed.  But the documents do reveal a sharp disagreement between London and Washington over whether Megrahi’s transfer to Libya under the PTA would be in breach of the UK’s political (as distinct from legal) commitment to Megrahi serving his sentence in a UK prison.  The Americans said it would;  the UK government said it would not.  Moreover, the Americans maintained that Megrahi could not be transferred to a Libyan prison under the PTA without their prior agreement, since the whole initiative under which Megrahi had been tried and jailed had been jointly devised by the US and UK governments.  Again, the UK government disagreed, claiming that for it to transfer Megrahi under the PTA it would only need to inform the Americans (and the UN): American agreement, said the British, was not required.

How were the UK government’s lawyers to square this awkward circle?  They argued that the UK commitment could not have been “absolute”, because no British government could commit its successor (a novel and inherently subversive doctrine in international relations) and also because it could not have ruled out the possibility of a change in UK relations with Libya – another novel doctrine, allowing any government to wriggle out of its commitments at will.  For whatever reasons, the British government apparently decided not to disclose to the Scottish Government either its disagreement with the Americans over the status of the (“political”) commitment that Megrahi must serve his sentence in the UK, nor the grounds for its contention that there was no conflict between the two instruments.

It’s understandable that Tony Blair and his government were keen to satisfy Libyan demands implicitly concerning Megrahi so that valuable UK-Libyan commercial contracts could go ahead.  Getting Megrahi back to Libya would clearly be in Britain’s commercial and diplomatic interests.  But did Blair point out to the Libyans during the lengthy negotiation of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement that under the US-UK initiative and the UN resolution Megrahi could not be transferred to a Libyan prison?  If not, why not?  Were the Libyans or indeed Blair and his officials aware of the inconsistency?  Could they have failed to notice it?  The feeble grounds devised by the UK for its argument that there was no inconsistency, and that the UK could have legitimately gone ahead unilaterally in obvious breach of a mandatory UN resolution, suggest that the UK decision to have a Prisoner Transfer Agreement was taken first, and the lawyers were only later instructed to devise a justification for its obvious conflict with the UN resolution.

In the event Megrahi’s diagnosis with terminal cancer spared the Scottish Justice Secretary the need to respond to an application for his transfer to a Libyan prison under the PTA, which he had always opposed and would not have agreed to: his decision instead to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds was fully consistent with the US-UK initiative, the UN resolution embodying it, Scottish law and precedent, and humanitarian principles – although that hasn’t stopped the new British prime minister, the President and several Senators and Congressmen of the United States, and some (but not all) of the relatives of the Lockerbie victims passionately denouncing the decision.  There’s no love lost between Mr Cameron on the one hand and the Scottish government or the former Labour government on the other, so his denunciation of Kenny MacAskill’s compassionate release decision is understandable in political terms, if not in human ones.  But  why did David Cameron not point out in his Commons statement that to have transferred Megrahi under the PTA would have flagrantly contravened not only the whole agreed basis for Megrahi’s trial and imprisonment but also a mandatory resolution of the Security Council? How on earth did he fail to spot the dirty great hippo in that living-room next door?

• Sir Brian Barder is a former British ambassador to both Ethiopia and Poland and a former High Commissioner to Nigeria [and Australia — BLB].  He never had any official involvement in relations with Libya or the Lockerbie affair.

US 'maltreating' spy who blew whistle on Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in the Electronic Telegraph, issue 632, on this date in 1997. It reads as follows:]

Lockerbie campaigners in Britain and America are voicing concern over the US authorities' treatment of a renegade American spy who claims there has been a massive international cover-up over the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

Lester Coleman, a former agent with the US Defence Intelligence Agency, provoked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic by claiming that the tragedy in which 270 people died was caused by an American drug "sting" operation in Lebanon that went badly wrong. He was serving in the Middle East at the time.

Mr Coleman and his family were forced to go into hiding in Europe after US intelligence chiefs ordered his arrest on charges of perjury. His supporters claim that the charges were brought because he had contradicted the official American view that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

But, after living in exile for six years and in failing health, Mr Coleman returned to the US at the end of last year intending to clear his name. He was arrested at Atlanta airport and has been held since at New York's Manhattan Detention Centre, which houses murderers, rapists and drug-dealers.

Numerous bail applications have been rejected, even though he has been diagnosed as suffering from cancer and the charges he faces are relatively petty ones.

Vivian Shevitz, his defence lawyer, last week wrote to the judge responsible for the case, condemning as "an outrage" the medical treatment Mr Coleman has received since being remanded in custody. Miss Shevitz claims that Mr Coleman, now in his sixties, has been denied proper medical care since being returned to jail a few days after undergoing surgery.

"The way the authorities are treating Coleman is a total overreaction," she said. "There is no justification for treating him like this. It suggests the authorities are afraid of something, and want to keep him quiet."

Dr Jim Swire, the spokesman for British relatives of the Lockerbie victims, said he was disturbed at how the US authorities were handling the case. "The gross maltreatment of Coleman by the American authorities appears to fit a pattern of the victimisation of people who challenge the official version that Libya was solely to blame for Lockerbie," he said.

Certainly, the manner in which various American intelligence agencies have reacted to Mr Coleman's claims over Lockerbie suggest they deserve a more thorough investigation than they have so far received.

When I interviewed Mr Coleman for The Sunday Telegraph in 1993 at a secret location in Portugal, he was escorted by an armed Scandinavian bodyguard who had been lent by a friendly European government that supported his claims.

In essence, Mr Coleman's story, as related in his book, Trail of the Octopus, is relatively straightforward. During the late 1980s, Mr Coleman was working for the Defence Intelligence Agency, based in Cyprus, then a major intelligence-gathering post for the Middle East. Part of his task was to spy on the activities of a second American organisation, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Mr Coleman claims that the DEA was operating a number of Beirut-based "sting" operations, by which agents allowed "controlled" deliveries of drugs from Lebanon to America through Frankfurt airport, in the hope of arresting US-based drug gangs. But Mr Coleman says the operation was infiltrated by Iranian-financed terrorists, who had been ordered to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus in July 1988: instead of placing a suitcase of heroin on the flight, they checked in a suitcase full of explosives.

Mr Coleman initially made these allegations in an affidavit to Pan Am during the airline's own investigation into the tragedy.

But it was only after he reiterated them in his book, which was published three years later, that the US intelligence establishment responded by accusing him of perjury.

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.