Megrahi defence team loses bid to access secret document

[This is the headline over an article by Lucy Adams that appeared in The Herald on this date in 2008. It reads as follows:]

The defence team for the Libyan jailed for the Lockerbie bombing yesterday suffered a set-back in its attempts to get access to a top-secret document.

The document, which originated in an unknown foreign country, is thought to contain vital information about the timer which detonated the bomb that killed 270 people in 1988.

At the previous hearing, the UK Government said the document could not be disclosed for reasons of national security, leading the defence team to accuse it of "interference" in the appeal.

Margaret Scott QC, senior counsel for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan currently serving 27 years in Greenock prison for the bombing, objected to the Advocate General for Scotland - the law officer who represents the UK Government in Scottish affairs - playing a part in the debate.

She accused the government of meddling - an allegation hotly disputed by Lord Davidson, the Advocate General, and by Elish Angiolini QC, the Lord Advocate and head of prosecutions in Scotland.

However, yesterday the appeal judges ruled against her. Their decision opens the way for several days of future debate about whether letting lawyers see the document would have any security implications.

The Libyan's defence team say it needs to see the document in order for Megrahi to have a fair appeal.

Earlier this year, the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh was told that Ms Angiolini would be prepared to disclose the document but that has also been disputed.

The document itself was uncovered during the three-year investigation of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which resulted in the case being referred back to the courts for a new appeal last summer.

The commission concluded the failure during the original trial to disclose this document, which is thought to contain information about the electronic timer used to detonate the bomb, could constitute a miscarriage of justice.

Although the Crown allowed the commission to see the material they have refused to disclose it to the defence.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband claims the document should remain confidential.

Now Lord Davidson will be allowed to put the case for "public interest immunity", on his behalf, at a future hearing - for which no date has yet been set. The hearing of Megrahi's actual appeal is still months away.

Megrahi, who was jailed in 2001, was not in court yesterday - but the appeal judges have been told he would like to attend future appeal hearings.

Is Megrahi conviction "widely considered correct"?

[What follows is excerpted from the obituary of Lord Coulsfield that is published in today’s edition of The Scotsman:]

John Cameron, Lord Coulsfield, was an eminent member of the Court of Session and an outstanding member of the Scottish legal profession. He had a distinguished career on the bench and because of his profound knowledge of the law he was chosen to be one of three judges to sit in Holland on the controversial trial at Kamp van Zeist of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. For the 84 gruelling days Coulsfield sat with his two colleagues, Lords Sutherland and MacLean with Lord Abernethy as associate judge, listening to the complex and involved evidence that became a historic case of epic proportions. The case made a strong impact throughout Scotland and, indeed, throughout the world. Coulsfield was involved in the minutiae of the case and ensured the court concentrated on the facts and the propriety of the evidence. He fully realised the importance of the case for both the Scottish judiciary and for the 270 people on the plane and the inhabitants of Lockerbie who were killed on that horrendous night just before Christmas in 1988. (...)

Coulsfield distinguished himself in many criminal and civil cases but it was the Lockerbie trial for which he shall be remembered. Libya made three stipulations when agreeing to hand over the two accused: that they would not be interviewed by the police; no-one else in Libya would be sought for the bombing and the trial should be before three Scottish judges sitting without a jury. It was a celebrated trial and signs to the camp were posted to SCIN (Scottish Court in the Netherlands) and the area was designated as Scottish land. Despite its complexities, the trial was fair and conducted with a scrupulous balance – the defence being given every opportunity to present their case. In fact the defence listed 121 witnesses but only called three. The fact that Megrahi chose not to be cross-examined meant that certain points could not be comprehensively explored.

Over the years the verdict has become a much-debated subject – akin to the deaths of President Kennedy and Princess Diana – and many contentious aspects of the case are still aired. But the decision to free one Libyan and sentence Megrahi to life imprisonment was widely considered correct.* The judges concluded that the “conception, planning and execution of the plot which led to the planting of the explosive device was of Libyan origin”. Megrahi was imprisoned in Scotland but only served nine years – he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and survived until 2012. Controversy bedevilled this legal saga even after an appeal unanimously upheld the judgment.

*[RB: The conviction of Megrahi was and is not “widely considered correct”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission considered that the finding that Megrahi was the purchaser on Malta of the clothes that surrounded the bomb (a finding without which he could not have been convicted) was one that no reasonable tribunal, on the evidence, could have reached. The view of the guilty verdict expressed by Ian Hamilton QC is only a very slight exaggeration: "I don't think there's a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted.”]

Judges back Lockerbie evidence suppression

[This is the headline over a report published on the website of The Guardian on this date in 2008. It reads as follows:]

A legal battle to release a secret intelligence report which could free the Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is to continue after judges ruled the foreign secretary had the right to suppress the document.

The ruling from the Lord Justice General, Lord Hamilton, dashes the hopes of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi that he would be quickly released.

It emerged last year that two secret papers had been given to the UK by a foreign government in September 1996, four years before al-Megrahi's trial began, but had never been disclosed to his defence team even though Scottish police and prosecutors had seen them.

Last July, the Scottish criminal cases review commission said that one of those documents raised further doubts about his guilt, and had played a key role in its decision to return al-Megrahi's conviction to the appeal court. It refused to disclose its contents or origin, however.

The Libyan's lawyers claim the document is essential to his appeal and are contesting the decision by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, to grant public interest immunity suppressing the papers on behalf of the British government.

The lawyers told three appeal judges last month that only the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, had the right to withhold papers in a Scottish court and she had said she had no objection to them being released.

However, the judges ruled that the Lord Advocate had said that disclosure of those papers was a decision for the foreign secretary – an opinion they upheld. Al-Megrahi's lawyers will make a further attempt to force disclosure of the documents later this summer.

Miliband has told the court that releasing either document would cause "real harm" to the UK's national security, its counter-terrorism efforts and its relations with the country which supplied the papers.

Government lawyers have denied claims it came from the US government or the CIA, but said the foreign government involved had refused requests to release it.

Al-Megrahi, then a sanctions buster for Colonel Muammar Gadafy, was convicted in 2001 of murdering 270 passengers, crew and townspeople after planting a suitcase bomb in Malta which eventually blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, the small town in south west Scotland.

He has been ordered to serve at least 27 years for the bombing.

[RB: A similar report on the BBC News website can be read here.]

Lawman's Lockerbie mission

[This is the headline over a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's senior law officer has continued his efforts to reassure members of families of Lockerbie victims in the United States over the trial of two Libyans accused of the bombing.

Colin Boyd QC, the Lord Advocate, is in Washington, where he addressed 20 families in the Office for the Victims of Crime. He is going on to meet US Attorney General Janet Reno in the Justice Department.

He will be outlining to her the protocol and practice for the trial , which is due to start at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands on 3 May.

The purpose of his visit is to reassure the families that last month's resignation of the previous Lord Advocate, Lord Hardie, will not affect the prosecution.

Over the weekend he spoke to 50 families in Boston, Massachusets with the same message.  

Mr Boyd got a positive response from the president of the US families group, George Williams:

"From what I understand Colin Boyd was doing all the nuts and bolts to begin with, and that Lord Hardie was the head honcho but he was the supervisor.

"We feel that they haven't lost anything serious by losing Lord Hardie. We wish he hadn't gone, but we feel he's been replaced admirably."

Earlier, the United Nations said it had no plans to publish a controversial secret letter from its Secretary General Kofi Annan to the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.

The document was written last year shortly before the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing were extradited to the Netherlands.

US President Bill Clinton has been sent an appeal from American relatives of those who died on Pan Am 103 urging him to put pressure on the UN to release the letter.

Some US relatives have claimed it contains details of a secret deal with Libya and they have written to President Clinton.

Bob Monetti, of US Families of Victims of Pan Am 103, said they want to see what is in the letter.

"It's incredibly bizarre for everybody to assure us that the letter means nothing and yet not to show it to us," he said.

Mr Boyd said he had seen the letter and would have no problems if it was published.

The contents of the secret UN letter would not prejudice the trial of the Libyans, due to start on 3 May.  

"I have seen the letter in the past few days, together with the annexe which is referred to in it," he said.

"Neither the letter nor the annexe in any way inhibits my responsibility, which is to prosecute and bring evidence in the case.

"I told the relatives that if it were to be published I would have no difficulty at all with that."

However, a spokesman for the UN secretary general told BBC Scotland that the letter was a private communication between Kofi Annan and a head of state and would not be made public.

Mystery of Flight 103

[This is the headline over an article by Dara MacNeil published on this date in 1998 by An Phoblacht/Republican News. It reads as follows:]

On the night of 21 December 1988 a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am flight 103 flying from Frankfurt to New York. The plane was literally blown out of the air above Lockerbie in Scotland. All 259 people on board were killed.

Since November 1991, Britain and the US have publicly blamed Libya for the bombing. They allege two Libyan airline officials - Abdel Baset Ali Mohammed and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah - placed the bomb aboard the flight, on the orders of the Libyan government. Both have consistently demanded the pair be extradited to stand trial in either Scotland or the US.

Libya has refused to comply. Instead it offered to try the two suspects in Libya, a stance which is supported by international aviation law.

By way of response, Britain and the US employed their considerable muscle on the UN Security Council to have sanctions imposed on Libya.

In 1995, however, Libya made a dramatic concession. It indicated that both men could be tried in a neutral country - Holland was suggested - by Scottish judges, and under Scottish law.

Remarkably, both the US and Britain rejected the offer. Relatives of the 259 dead were perplexed and angered. For some, Britain and the US appeared not to want the case ever to come to trial.

Officially, the `mystery' of flight 103 remains unsolved. However, in a judgement delivered at the end of February the International Court of Justice signalled a possible end to the dispute. In an apparent rebuke to the stance taken by Britain and the US, the court ruled that it could decide whether the Libyan suspects could be tried at home, or abroad.

In doing so, the International Court of Justice has effectively relieved Britain and the US of sole responsibility for resolving the case of flight 103.

The decision was welcomed by the Flight 103 Association, a group composed of relatives of those killed at Lockerbie. The Association has been severely critical of the strange intransigence shown by Britain and the US on the issue.

There are many who suspect that the charges against Libya are fraudulent. They have been aided by the fact that the official version of events has repeatedly been found wanting. In addition, the case has thrown up a number of puzzling anomalies for which no satisfactory answer has ever been provided.

Some days after the disaster, as crash investigators sifted through the wreckage, a local farmer came across a suitcase filled with packets of white powder. He assumed they were drugs.

Relatives of the dead later discovered that the name on the suitcase did not correspond with any name on flight 103's passenger list.

Strangely, the farmer was never questioned about his find - which he reported to the police - at a subsequent crash inquiry. Official sources denied the drugs find.

Furthermore, volunteers helping to search the debris reported how they were warned to stay away from parts of the wreckage.

Some told how they had come across a large object that had been covered with a red tarpaulin. As they approached, they were warned off by armed men standing in the doorway of a hovering helicopter.

Similarly, a local farmer was also warned - by unidentified Americans - to stay away from an area of woodland on his own farm, a few miles east of Lockerbie.

In February 1989 a local reporter - with excellent police contacts - claimed the bomb on Flight 103 had been planted in the baggage of a team of US intelligence agents, on their way back from Beirut.

Immediately after his story was broadcast, the journalist was visited by senior police officers demanding to know his source.

He refused to disclose it. He was first threatened with prosecution and then, strangely, asked if he would reveal his source directly to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in the privacy of Downing Street. He refused that curious offer also.

In the months after the bombing it emerged that the authorities had received at least two separate warnings of a plot to bomb Pan Am flights. Both correctly identified the timeframe in which the attack was to occur. One of the warnings - telephoned to the US embassy in Helsinki - specifically mentioned a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York.

The warnings were considered serious enough for the US embassy in Moscow to post an alert on its staff noticeboard. And in 1989, a German newspaper alleged that then South African Foreign Minister, Pik Botha was alerted to the danger of taking flight 103. Botha and his party took an earlier Pan Am flight to New York that same day.

In 1995, British journalist Paul Foot revealed that US authorities had received notice of the plot a full ten days before the bomb aboard Flight 103 exploded. The informant had warned that Pan Am flights were among the intended targets of “teams of Palestinians not associated with the PLO.”

Foot also revealed evidence collected by German authorities which strongly suggested that the bombing of Flight 103 had been carried out by a group under the protection of Syria.

Pressure piles up for independent prosecutor in Lockerbie case

This is the headline over a lengthy report by John Davison published today on the website of Exaro news agency. Today’s article can be read here. Earlier Lockerbie-related reports by Exaro can be accessed here.

His life had never been the same after Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from an obituary of Lord Coulsfield that appears in today’s edition of The Herald:]

John Taylor Cameron, Lord Coulsfield, who has died aged 81, was one of the three judges who picked through the evidential wreckage of Pan Am flight 103, blown up by terrorists over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, with the total loss of 270 people on the plane and in the quiet Scottish border town.

As a Scot, a friend of the United States and a humanitarian in general, Lord Coulsfield had to bury his own pain to do his objective job – to determine what exactly had happened, who had carried out the atrocity and bring judgement down upon them. He played a major and historic part in trying to do so, even though questions still remain and possibly always will over the tragedy.

At the time of the disaster, still grieving, it was hard for all of us, both here and in the US, to understand the legal labyrinth the case entailed, why it moved from Scotland to the Netherlands for example. Despite the protests of the late Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi*, it was decided to hold the case in a neutral country rather than Scotland or the US – where most of the victims came from. The fact that the trial was held in a disused former US Air Force base, Camp Zeist near Utrecht, added to the poignancy since the camp was a Nazi transport centre for Jews, taken over during the Cold War by the Americans.

For the trial, Camp Zeist was declared Scottish soil, beholden to Scots Law. That law was broken in September 2000 when Lord Coulsfield's bicycle was stolen despite tight security around the Camp Zeist judges.

In January 1991 [sic; actually 2001], after a nine-month trial, Lord Coulsfield and his two fellow Scottish judges found the Libyan agent Abdelbaset al-Megrahi guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment for murder. A second Libyan, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted.

Al-Megrahi was jailed in Scotland until, after various defence appeals which said he had prostate cancer, he was freed by the Scottish government "on compassionate grounds" and put on a flight to Libya. On his arrival home, a pro-Gaddafi Libyan rent-a-mob waved a giant Scottish flag as he stepped from his aircraft in Tripoli. To foreign news services such as CNN, it seemed to apply some sort of Scottish collusion, which was most certainly not the case.

Edinburgh and Oxford-educated Lord Coulsfield was chosen as one of three Scottish judges – along with presiding judge Lord Sutherland and Lord MacLean, with Lord Abernethy as a non-voting associate judge – to peruse the intricate, complex evidence and rule on the case. Scots Law remaining historically distinct from its English equivalent, a specially-convened Scottish Court was set up at the disused Camp Zeist. That court would become a world news focus for nine months until Lord Coulsfield and his two colleagues found al-Megrahi guilty of murder by organising the downing of PanAm 103. (...)

Lord Coulsfield married Bridget Sloan in 1964. They had no children. He retired in 2002, admitting his life had never been the same after Lockerbie. He died after a short illness.

*[RB: There were no such protests from Gaddafi. Indeed, the neutral venue scheme was formulated to meet Libyan objections to a trial in Scotland (objections that emanated from the Libyan defence team, not the Libyan Government). The true sequence of events is set out in the blogpost The neutral venue proposal.]

Lockerbie: Scene of the crime

[This is the headline over the fourth in Dr Morag Kerr’s series of articles for iScot magazine. It is to be found at pages 19 to 23 of the March 2016 issue. The following are excerpts:]

When Pan Am 103, Maid of the Seas, exploded over Lockerbie and crashed down on the Dumfriesshire market town, resulting in the biggest terrorist atrocity in the UK to date, it sparked a mystery which has been the centre of controversy for more than quarter of a century.

One thing is known, when the Boeing 747 began its journey from London on 21 December 1988 it was loaded from empty at Heathrow airport.  So, inevitably, the suitcase containing the bomb was put on board at Heathrow.  However, like almost everything else in this story it wasn’t quite that simple.  

While the bulk of the luggage had indeed been security checked in London, one batch was not.  Pan Am 103 had a feeder flight from Frankfurt that connected with the transatlantic flight at Heathrow, and it was carrying about 45 items of luggage that had been screened in Germany.  As pieces of blast-damaged aluminium were brought in from the fields over the Christmas weekend of 1988, it became clear that the explosion had been in the container holding this transfer luggage.

The reaction of the investigators seems to have been relief.  London’s flagship international airport was not responsible for the security breach that had allowed a bomb to destroy an aircraft and kill 270 people.  The news was headlined in the Times on Hogmanay.  The paper was confused about the change of aircraft at Heathrow, but the message was clear.  This was Germany’s responsibility.

There was more.  The German police themselves had reason to take the same view.  Only two months earlier they had arrested members of a Palestinian terrorist group, the PFLP-GC, who were found with improvised explosive devices designed to attack aircraft in flight. Most of these men had been released without charge, and it was feared they had regrouped and completed their mission.  Thus, by the end of the New Year holiday weekend, the investigation was on course.  The bomb had flown in on the feeder flight and the scene of the crime was Frankfurt.

Remarkably, this mindset remained unchanged as witness statements from Heathrow were collected and a rather different picture began to emerge.  On 31st December the baggage handler who had dealt with the transfer luggage (Amarjit Sidhu) stated that a number of suitcases were already in the container before he added the items from the Frankfurt flight.  On 3rd January the baggage handler who had dealt with the container earlier in the afternoon (John Bedford) confirmed this, and told a remarkable story.  He himself had loaded only a few cases along the back of the container, hinge-down-handle-up, before going for a tea break.  On his return he noticed two additional suitcases lying flat in front of these cases.  He said the x-ray operator Sulkash Kamboj told him he had loaded them in Bedford’s absence, but in his own statements Kamboj denied any knowledge of this.

On 9th January Bedford told the police that he remembered one of the extra cases being a brown Samsonite hardshell, and the other much the same.  It was already obvious that the explosion had occurred low down in the front left corner of the container, and by mid-January the forensic scientists were picking pieces of brown hardshell out of various other suitcases and finding larger pieces of the same case severely blast-damaged.  They had identified the bomb suitcase – a brown Samsonite hardshell.

The reaction of the investigators to this accumulation of information was extraordinary.  They ignored it.  While it was occasionally acknowledged that a Heathrow loading hadn’t been entirely ruled out, the investigation was going full steam ahead for Frankfurt.  Nobody, in January 1989 or later, made the slightest effort to figure out if the case Bedford described was legitimate passenger baggage.  Nobody attempted to match it to any of the luggage recovered on the ground. (...)

The judges declared that since the defence hadn’t proved the bomb was in the case Bedford saw, it could be disregarded, and chose to favour the Frankfurt route despite the missing data from that airport, the multiple unidentified items of transfer luggage, and the complete absence of an unaccompanied suitcase on Malta.

Nevertheless, huge questions remained unanswered.  What did Bedford see, if it wasn’t the bomb?  Could it have been legitimate passenger baggage?  Could it be matched to anything found on the ground?  Frustratingly, the information to allow this to be assessed wasn’t presented to the court.

To cut a long story short, the information was and is available, and it was finally analysed in 2012-13.  The key to the Crown’s abandoning of the theory that the luggage already in the container hadn’t been rearranged is the realisation that if the case Bedford saw had been under the bomb suitcase as the original investigation believed, it would inevitably have been blown to bits.  The search across Roxburghshire and beyond was thorough, and pieces of blast-damaged luggage were high priority.  Multiple pieces of the bomb suitcase and those surrounding it were recovered.  It beggars belief that nothing would have been found of the case that had been under the bomb.  But nothing was.

Set against this damning finding, all the prosecution had was the subjective opinions of the forensic scientists that the floor of the container would have shown “pitting and sooting” if the bomb had been in the bottom-level case.  However, that was shaky, as it had never been tested by experiment.  (Last year the experiment was finally done by an independent forensic institute, and sure enough, even with the bomb suitcase on the bottom, no pitting or sooting was seen.) (...)

Three baggage handlers who saw the container before the Frankfurt luggage was added were asked to reconstruct the loading as they remembered it.  All needed seven suitcases to make it look right, not six.  There was an extra, undocumented case in that container that afternoon, and it was the one lying to the front left, the one virtually bang on the position of the subsequent explosion, the one John Bedford described as a brown Samsonite hardshell.

Further evidence cements the conclusion that the bomb was in the suitcase on the bottom layer.  Although “pitting and sooting” were absent from the container floor itself, they were present on the section of the airframe under the floor, demonstrating that it was not protected by another intervening suitcase.  Examination of the two suitcases behind the explosion, which were loaded upright, shows the most severe damage right down at floor level, not halfway up the sides.  This really is “the picture that speaks a thousand words”.

The Lockerbie bombing was a crime that happened at Heathrow airport, at about half past four in the afternoon – not on Malta at nine in the morning.  At 4.30 pm on 21st December 1988 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli.

Where does that leave the Lockerbie investigation, in 2016?  There are two Police Scotland investigations currently open – one operating on the assumption that the bomb was somehow smuggled on to KM180 on Malta and attempting to identify Megrahi’s alleged “accomplices”, the other looking at matters from an entirely different perspective.  Next month’s article will focus on the ongoing search for a resolution.

Death of Lockerbie judge Lord Coulsfield

[The death has today been announced of Lord Coulsfield. What follows is taken from the notice on the website of the Faculty of Advocates:]

One of the judges who presided over the Lockerbie trial, Rt Hon Lord Coulsfield, has died, aged 81.

As John Taylor Cameron, he was admitted to the Faculty in 1960, and took Silk in 1973. He served as Keeper of the Library from 1977 to 1987.

On being appointed a Senator of the College of Justice in 1987, he took the judicial title Lord Coulsfield. He sat with Lords Sutherland and MacLean at Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands when Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

The announcement of Lord Coulsfield’s death is at http://announce.jpress.co.uk/edinburgh-evening-news-and-scotsman-publications/obituary/rt-hon-john-taylor-cameron-coulsfield/45336530?s_source=jpsc_scot

[RB: Lord Coulsfield was a very distinguished judge whose reputation was tarnished by his acquiescence in the guilty verdict returned against Abdelbaset Megrahi (acquiescence that, within the Scottish legal profession, is widely believed to have been reluctant).]

If he wanted to go home, he had no real choice

[What follows is the text of a review by Lucy Adams of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury that was published in The Herald on this date in 2012:]

For the relatives of the 270 people who died in December 1988 as a result of the bombing of Pan Am 103, this book will make for difficult reading.

For more than 23 years they have had to deal with their grief while wrangling with the stories of politicians, spooks, government agencies and conspiracy theorists. For others, it may well provide compulsive reading.

The only man convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity to have taken place on mainland Britain did not take the stand at his trial and consequently very few have heard his side of the story. There are many who will not want to, many for whom it may be too painful or too difficult to change views strongly held for more than two decades.

Rather than tell the whole story in the first person, the book is split between the formal revelations of the author John Ashton – a former member of Megrahi's defence team – and the italicised first-person views of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing, who spent eight years imprisoned in Scotland.

For someone like me, who has covered Lockerbie for more than a decade, and met Megrahi and his family, to hear the details of his life, to be able to fill some of the gaps and answer questions that even his greatest supporters found uncomfortable makes this book compelling. For others the fact he is still alive, two and a half years after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and released on compassionate grounds, and has been allowed to express his views, may prove sickening.

In Megrahi's preface he explains that the decision to abandon his appeal was a "terrible choice" to have had to make. He writes: "From the moment I made that decision, I was determined that, if I could not be judged in a court of law, then I should be judged in the court of public opinion." He says the relatives of the victims have his "utmost sympathy" and asks that they judge him with their heads as well as their hearts.

Much later in the book he reveals that he felt compelled to drop his appeal as he gained the impression from Scottish ministers that if he wanted to go home, he had no real choice. Legally, to be released on compassionate grounds, there was no requirement to drop the appeal. However, he describes the former Libyan ambassador and foreign minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi being taken aside by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.

He writes: "Obeidi said that, towards the end of the meeting, MacAskill had asked to speak to him in private. Once the others had withdrawn, MacAskill told him it would be easier for him to grant compassionate release if I dropped my appeal. He said he was not demanding that I do so, but the message seemed to me to be clear. I was legally entitled to continue the appeal, but I could not risk doing so."

Such interference was vehemently denied by the Scottish Government then and is denied now.

In the opening chapters Megrahi reveals less than flattering details – how he lied to his wife, for example, because he was travelling abroad a great deal to import different embargoed goods – illegal under the US trade sanctions at the time. And why he was in Malta on a false passport – a fact used against him in the trial to impugn his innocence. He says that, for those involved in importing embargoed goods, it was commonplace at that time to use a coded passport. He points out too that, if he were a terrorist, he was a very bad one. He held on to this coded passport for 10 years and willingly handed it over to the trial at Camp Zeist, such was his belief that he was and would be found innocent. The coded passport has repeatedly been used by the Crown as evidence of his guilt and his role as a security agent – something the book denies.

As the surface is peeled back from each of the key tenets of the case – witnesses and forensics – Megrahi gives his own version of events. Through his words the reader is given an insight into what he was doing when he heard about the indictment against him and then, towards the end of the book, what happened when he dropped his appeal and was granted compassionate release.

One of the weaknesses of the book is that we never really get to see inside his mind or his feelings. When he learns he is going home he writes: "The enormity of the relief that I experienced is impossible to describe. For 18 years I had been the victim of politics. Now, finally, I was its beneficiary." There are moments of greater poignancy, as when he sees his parents for the first time. "It was so incredible to see them all again," he writes, "that I had to ask one of the children to slap my face to ensure I wasn't dreaming." But, on the whole, the book lacks any illumination of his inner thoughts and emotional state.

Ashton presents layer upon layer of a circumstantial case which points towards the guilt of Iran and the Palestinian terror group, the PFLP-GC. Every point is carefully referenced back to police statements, precognition statements, security documents and critical information unearthed by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). It was, critically, the SCCRC which referred the case back for a fresh appeal in June 2007 on six different grounds. A summary of these was presented at the time but the details of the 800-page report have never been published despite efforts by campaigners and the Scottish Government.

Ashton had access to the full report and draws upon it throughout each chapter, referring to new statements and documents unearthed by the SCCRC, which point to major inconsistencies in the evidence of key witnesses such as Tony Gauci – the shopkeeper who claimed to have sold Megrahi the clothes found in the suitcase thought to have housed the bomb – plus holes in the forensics arguments.

Gradually Ashton pulls together a palimpsest of the Lockerbie story, scraping away at the original prosecution case, revealing how key witnesses were compromised by reward money and their roles as security or double agents, and how the Scots police were often undermined by the American security services.

The book states: "Being in the dark was, by then, a familiar experience for the Scottish police. It was not until September 1990 that they finally learned of the existence of Mebo [the Swiss company the prosecution claimed sold the timers to the Libyans], having once again been spoonfed information by the intelligence services - the day before the [Scots police] visit, CIA officers met with the Swiss police and intelligence services."

It is the author's encyclopedic unpackaging of all the key elements of the prosecution case, new evidence, previously undisclosed documents and the grounds of the SCCRC that make this the definitive Lockerbie account. Undoubtedly there is much that will be contested by the Crown, and there are many who will not want to read of the possibility that the only man convicted of this terrible atrocity may not in fact have been responsible. Certainly, the book indicates that, had the second appeal taken place, Megrahi would have been acquitted. Whether he is guilty or not is up to the reader to decide.

Megrahi – You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence  John Ashton, Birlinn, £14.99

Megrahi petition to be considered by new Justice Committee after May election

[The Minute of Proceedings for yesterday’s meeting of the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee records its decision on Justice for Megrahi’s petition seeking an independent inquiry into the conviction of Megrahi as follows:]

Petition PE1370: The Committee considered the petition by Dr Jim Swire, Professor Robert Black QC, Robert Forrester, Father Patrick Keegans and Iain McKie on Justice for Megrahi. The Committee agreed to write to Police Scotland seeking further information regarding the progress of Operation Sandwood, to keep the petition open and to recommend that a future justice committee gives further consideration to it.

[RB: A press release issued by Justice for Megrahi shortly before the meeting can be read here.]