James Wolffe becomes Scotland’s most senior law officer - and is urged to look into Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The National. It reads as follows, accompanied by a legal commentator’s analysis:]

The Dean of the Faculty of Advocates James Wolffe QC is to become Scotland’s most senior law officer in succession to Frank Mulholland QC who is stepping up to be a judge.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has recommended the appointment of Wolffe as Lord Advocate and senior advocate depute Alison Di Rollo as Scotland’s new law officers, the latter becoming Solicitor General.

News of Wolffe’s recommendation was welcomed by Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh Robert Black who has urged him to look into the Lockerbie bombing case. The Scottish Criminal Bar Association has also welcomed him.

Di Rollo succeeds Lesley Thomson, who was appointed to the post in 2011, and who has informed the First Minister that she wishes to pursue new challenges.

The appointments will be made by the Queen on the recommendation of the First Minister, with the agreement of the Scottish Parliament. The appointments, if approved, will complete the First Minister’s newly-appointed ministerial team.

The Lord Advocate is a Minister of the Scottish Government and acts as principal legal adviser, but decisions by him about criminal prosecutions and the investigation of deaths are taken independently of any other person.

The Solicitor General is the Lord Advocate’s deputy. She assists the Lord Advocate to carry out his functions and is also a Minister of the Scottish Government.

First Minister Sturgeon said: “I am extremely pleased to recommend the appointments of James Wolffe and Alison Di Rollo as Scotland’s senior law officers.

“James has an outstanding legal background and extensive experience at all levels, including the House of Lords, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

“Alison led the work of the ground-breaking National Sexual Crimes Unit (NSCU) for three years, having previously held the role of deputy. Her outstanding leadership in this most sensitive of areas has inspired confidence in all connected to it.”

James Wolffe said: “I thank the First Minister for nominating me to the office of Lord Advocate. If I am appointed, it will be a great privilege to serve Scotland in that role.”

Alison Di Rollo said: “I am both delighted and honoured to be nominated for this role by the First Minister and I am looking forward to working with James in his new role.”

The First Minister thanked both Frank Mulholland QC and Lesley Thomson QC for their service.

She said: “In his time as Lord Advocate, Frank has made a substantial contribution to both the law and to Scottish society. The creation of the National Sexual Crimes Unit was just one example of the increased specialisation of the Crown Office that Frank Mulholland presided over.

“In her role as Solicitor General, Lesley’s work, particularly around domestic abuse, was pivotal in moving towards a system that instils confidence in victims of abuse and ensures that their abusers are held to account. I thank both Frank and Lesley for their dedicated service to the Government, to justice and to Scotland as a whole.”

Prof Black said on his blog: “It is to be hoped that one of the first priorities of the new Lord Advocate will be to consider all of the evidence now available about the Lockerbie case and the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi.”

ANALYSIS: Andrew Tickell 

Wolffe has what is needed to help Sturgeon in legal rough and tumble

The Lord Advocate is much more than a public prosecutor. Scotland’s chief law officer heads up the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal service, its independent prosecutors indicting and trying those accused of crime in the public interest. But his coat buttons up tight over a range of other equally important duties. The Lord Advocate is also the Scottish Government’s principal legal advisor – the legal brain in the cabinet, who – confidentially, sympathetically – helps its ministers navigate the increasingly tricky and complex legal rules which constrain their choices. Compared to the blood and thunder of indicting wrongdoers and dishing out punishment to the guilty, his advisory role is unsexy. It catches no eyes and commands no headlines. Most of it, ye and me will never hear about. But it is absolutely essential part of modern government.

Holyrood must steer its legislation safely through the reefs and shoals of European Union law, the European Convention on Human Rights, and a sometimes knotty devolution settlement. Any major, controversial piece of legislation is always vulnerable to a legal challenge.

Land reform, tobacco vending machine bans, minimum alcohol pricing, the Named Persons provisions – all have been subject to well-organised and well-resourced challenges in our courts.

If I was the Scottish Government – so exposed to all these legal challenges to its agenda – I’d want the best legal brain on my side, counselling me, putting my side of the story if things get tough.

Nicola Sturgeon’s nominee – James Wolffe QC – has these qualities in spades. But the pick represents a clear departure for Sturgeon, who has broken with the approach adopted by her predecessor in Bute House.

This is to be welcomed.

When he first took office in 2007, Alex Salmond took the unprecedented step of leaving Jack MacConnell’s Lord Advocate in post. Elish Angiolini – a career prosecutor and solicitor – remained in office until the Holyrood election of 2011, to be replaced by her then Solicitor General and fellow career Crown Office prosecutor, Frank Mulholland. Mr Salmond was keen that his law officers should enjoy an unprecedented “independence from the political process”, establishing themselves as “independent of politics”.

In the event, Mr Salmond discovered that an independent prosecutor can be politically useful. Mr Muholland intervened regularly in political debates during his tenure. But historically, the law officers were explicitly political appointments. The garlands went to party loyalists: folk up to the job, with the requisite legal training, politically sympathetic to the government’s agenda. The Lord Advocate and the Solicitor General were partisan legal problem-solvers who could be relied on to tell legal truth to political power around the privacy of the Cabinet table, who did a bit of prosecuting on the side.

The idea that the law officers should be career prosecutors is a recent – and perhaps not altogether successful – innovation. It was Jack MacConnell who promoted Elish Angiolini to the role. The first woman to occupy the post, Strathclyde-educated Angiolini was a world away from the “Edinburgh legal fraternity” and the members of the Faculty of Advocates, who had filled the post for centuries. Her appointment prompted predictable rhubarbing from dark and dusty corners of Parliament House.

But it wasn’t all sour grapes, snobbery and personal disappointment. Some asked more substantive questions. Could career criminal lawyers effectively advise the governing on all the tough public law issues the government faces? You can’t be an expert in everything. Since 2007, the SNP has faced countless legal headaches, but its law officers have been drawn from a fairly narrow professional range. Mr Wolffe’s appointment suggests the SNP have learned from these bruising experiences before the courts, and are reckoning much more seriously with the legal rough and tumble which the Government will – inevitably – face this session.

This welcome appointment leaves Nicola Sturgeon’s government legally fortified.

CIA Giaka cables and perverting the course of justice

[It was on this date in 2000 that two members of the Camp Zeist prosecution team viewed, at the United States embassy in the Netherlands, CIA cables relating to Abdul Majid Giaka. What follows is an excerpt from an article published in The Herald in March 2012:]

A key witness against Megrahi was a former Libyan Arab Airlines colleague, Majid Giaka, who was also a junior intelligence officer and CIA informant. At trial the defence were provided with partially redacted CIA cables about him.

After two of the Crown team had viewed almost complete cables on 1 June 2000, the Lord Advocate assured the court that the blanked out sections were of no relevance.

However, when less redacted versions were eventually released they cast further doubt on Giaka’s credibility. In their application to the SCCRC, Megrahi’s lawyers, who were not those who represented him at trial, argued that the failure to release the full, unredacted cables breached Megrahi’s right to a fair trial.

Remarkably, the SCCRC was not allowed to view the full cables, but having read the partially redacted ones, it commented:

It is difficult to understand the Lord Advocate’s assurances to the court on 22 August 2000 that there was “nothing within these documents which relate to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid on these matters”. The matter is all the more serious given that part of the reason for viewing the cables on 1 June 2000 was precisely in order to assess whether information behind the redacted sections reflected upon Majid’s credibility.

[RB: These events form the basis of one of the nine allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial made by Justice for Megrahi and which are currently under investigation by Police Scotland. What follows is an excerpt from the section in JfM’s press outline relating to this allegation:]

The witness who testified to having seen Mr al-Megrahi and Mr Fhimah with the suspicious-looking suitcase [at Malta’s Luqa Airport] was one Majid Giaka, a Libyan national who had worked for the Libyan security services and who was a CIA informer. Giaka was originally the Crown’s star witness, and without his evidence it is likely that the indictments would not have been issued against the Libyan suspects in the first place.

Giaka’s testimony was originally contained in contemporaneous cables sent by his CIA handlers to Washington when he provided the crucial evidence - mainly in 1991. These cables were presented in court in a severely redacted form, raising the question of whether the redacted passages might contain information damaging to the Crown case. In June 2000 members of the prosecution team were for the first time allowed by the American lawyers present to see the cables in an unredacted form. The defence applied to the Bench to have similar sight of the cables, however this request was strenuously opposed by the prosecution.

During the course of the discussion of this matter, Lord Coulsfield specifically asked the Lord Advocate Colin Boyd whether the redacted passages contained anything which might possibly bear on the credibility of the witness Majid Giaka. The Lord Advocate then consulted a colleague on the prosecution team who had had personal sight of the unredacted cables. After receiving his reply, the Lord Advocate informed the Bench that “.... there is nothing within these documents which relates to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Majid on these matters.”

Despite this assurance the Bench did in fact order the unredacted cables to be provided to the defence team. The contents of the redacted passages demonstrated Giaka to be entirely untrustworthy, and by referring to these passages Mr Taylor for the defence was able to mount a successful challenge to the credibility and reliability of Giaka’s testimony. It is abundantly clear that the reassurance given to the Lord Advocate and passed on by him to the Court was wholly false. It was accepted by the court that there was no evidence at all to connect either accused to a brown hardshell suitcase, at Luqa or anywhere else.

This provides prima facie evidence of an attempt to pervert the course of justice on the part of those members of the prosecution team who were aware of the contents of the redacted cables, and gave the Lord Advocate information they knew to be false, knowing that he in his turn would communicate this false information to the Court.

These facts have been in the public domain since June 2000, and it is unclear why no action has ever been taken against those members of the legal profession responsible.

Change for the better at the top of the Crown Office

[What follows is excerpted from a report just published on the website of The Herald:]

Scotland's new Lord Advocate has been named as senior lawyer James Wolffe.

The QC - currently dean of the historic Faculty of Advocates - will replace Frank Mulholland, who stood down at the Holyrood election to become a judge.

Mr Wolffe, one of the country's most respected legal thinkers, has been nominated by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon but still must be formally approved by parliament and the Queen.

He will be backed up as head of the Crown Office by a new solicitor general, Alison Di Rollo, currently a senior advocate depute pursuing rapists and one of the prosecutors who successfully convicted Marek Harcar, the murderer of businesswoman Moira Jones in a Glasgow park.

Ms Di Rollo replaces Lesley Thomson, who has told Ms Sturgeon "she wishes to pursue new challenges".

The two law officers complete Ms Sturgeon's cabinet and are, like the rest of her government, gender-balanced.

Ms Sturgeon said: “I am extremely pleased to recommend the appointments of James Wolffe and Alison Di Rollo as Scotland’s senior law officers.

“James has an outstanding legal background and extensive experience at all levels, including the House of Lords, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

“Alison led the work of the ground-breaking National Sexual Crimes Unit (NSCU) for three years, having previously held the role of deputy. Her outstanding leadership in this most sensitive of areas has inspired confidence in all connected to it.”

Mr Wolffe said: “I thank the First Minister for nominating me to the office of Lord Advocate. If I am appointed, it will be a great privilege to serve Scotland in that role.”

Ms Sturgeon thanked Mr Mulholland and Ms Thomson for their service. She said: "In his time as Lord Advocate, Frank has made a substantial contribution to both the law and to Scottish society.

[RB: I am delighted that the First Minister has departed from the recent practice of appointing a Lord Advocate from within the ranks of Crown Office civil servants. This was an experiment that was constitutionally inappropriate and contributed greatly to the low esteem in which the Crown Office has come to be held by the practising profession. It is, however, slightly disappointing that the new Solicitor General is someone who has been a Crown Office employee for over thirty years. 

It is to be hoped that one of the first priorities of the new Lord Advocate will be to consider all of the evidence now available about the Lockerbie case and the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi.]

Truth revealed on Lockerbie bomb timer

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

The top-secret document at the heart of the Lockerbie bombing appeal confirms beyond doubt the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

The document also gives "considerable detail" on how the use of a small bomb concealed inside a radio-cassette recorder was consistent with Palestinian terrorists rather than Libyans, according to a prominent legal source who has seen the paper.

Important pillars of the Crown's case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Libyan serving life for the atrocity, are "knocked down" by the contents of the document, added the source.

Last week, during a three-day hearing in Edinburgh, Scotland's senior judge, Lord Hamilton, and two of his colleagues listened to legal arguments about whether Megrahi's defence should be allowed to see the document, which was passed to the UK by a foreign power.

The UK Government, represented by Advocate General Neil Davidson QC, is opposing the defence application. Lord Advocate Eilish Angiolini has indicated she would hand it to the defence team but for the public interest immunity status afforded to it by Westminster.

The existence of the document emerged during the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's exhaustive three-year investigation into whether Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice when he was convicted of the murder of 270 people.

The information in the document was a key part of the Crown's case that the timer used in the bomb was supplied only to Libya. It also appears to confirm that the method of attack was typical of a Palestinian terror cell in Germany.

Scotland on Sunday's source confirmed: "The document dispels any doubts about the supply of MST-13s (timers] elsewhere."

He added: "There is considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb. The use of a small Semtex bomb concealed inside a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder was not linked to Libyan terror activity, but to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), the first suspects in the case."

The source conceded these matters had been "aired previously or pointed to by other evidence" but added: "(It] puts that evidence on another footing because it gives it 100% credibility because of where it comes from.

"I don't think, in itself, it either clears Megrahi or proves anyone else was responsible, but there is material that would undoubtedly be helpful to his defence and, in isolation, would lean away from the Crown's case and the verdict of the judges."

The source declined to reveal which country had provided the information. But, last night, another well-placed source said there were new and compelling indications that it may have been provided by Germany and contained information from an Iranian defector, Abolghasem Mesbahi. [RB: According to Kenny MacAskill in his book The Lockerbie Bombing the document in fact came from Jordan.]

The MST-13 timer used in the bomb was made by Swiss firm Mebo. Its co-owner, Edwin Bollier, has made it clear that the timers were supplied to others, including the Stasi, the former East German secret police. German intelligence would certainly be able to provide evidence of the Stasi's links to Mebo, and to the PFPL-GC's use of Semtex in Toshiba radio-cassette recorders.

In October 1988, two months before Lockerbie, the German secret police cracked a PFPL-GC cell operating in Neuss and recovered four such devices. The bomb-maker, Jordanian Marwan Khreesat, told German agents that a fifth device had been removed from the flat he was working in by the cell's leader, Hafez Dalkamoni, prior to their raid.

It was never recovered and many, including Khreesat himself, believe it was his device that brought down the flight over Lockerbie.

Mesbahi has provided the Germans with intelligence that has enabled them to clear up terror crimes, but he was discredited by the UK when he was put up as a potential witness at the trial of Megrahi and his co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, who was cleared.

In 1996, Mesbahi claimed the bombing had been ordered by his former masters in Tehran, not Tripoli, and it is believed that the document was handed over to the Foreign Office later that same year.

There is growing suspicion among Lockerbie experts that the document could even provide the UK with a way to get Megrahi out of jail without facing a re-trial and thorough examination of aspects of the case that would embarrass the Crown Office and Westminster.

It is possible Megrahi will be freed this year on the fairly straightforward grounds published by the SCCRC. The normal practice in such a landmark case would be to order a retrial, but that has the potential to discredit the UK and the US on the world stage.

However, if Megrahi's conviction were quashed and the appeal court ruled he could not have a fair re-trial without the hidden material going to his defence, he would be freed on those grounds and the matter would eventually draw to a quiet conclusion.

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora, in the Lockerbie bombing, said he was concerned that the document might prove to be more important than its contents. He said: "If the document is not available to the defence at the appeal, then that appeal will be seen around the world, quite rightly, as unfair.

"The significance is likely to be not in the content, but on the impact it will have on the process, unless we can crack the impasse we're in."

MacAskill is saying that at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice

[What follows is the complete text of James Robertson’s review of Kenny MacAskill’s The Lockerbie Bombing. The shorter version published in The Herald can be read here.]

In May 2000, two Libyan citizens, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, went on trial before a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. They were accused of acting in concert to place a bomb contained in a suitcase on a plane flying from Malta to Frankfurt; the suitcase was then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to another flight going to London Heathrow, and there transferred again to Pan Am flight 103, the target, which was blown up, en route to New York, over the town of Lockerbie on the evening of 21 December 1988. All 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people on the ground, were killed.

In January 2001, the court acquitted Fhimah, but found Megrahi guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He remains the only person convicted of involvement in the bombing. To many people, the verdict did not make sense then, and subsequent revelations have only reinforced a widespread belief that Megrahi was the victim of a shocking miscarriage of justice.

This book is former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill’s account of the atrocity, of the subsequent investigation and trial, and of his own part in what followed. In 2009, it fell to him, in his ministerial role, to decide whether to grant Megrahi, who was by then suffering from terminal prostate cancer, compassionate release from prison. That decision – to allow Megrahi to go home to Libya to die – forms the centrepiece of Mr MacAskill’s narrative, but it is not the most revealing part.

The book suffers from Mr MacAskill’s inflated and syntactically-challenged writing style: ‘The investigation, meanwhile, marched meticulously on. The dynamics of both tension and camaraderie between various agencies continued, though in the main all worked well with each other.’ The narrative is scattered with words like ‘literally’ (bodies were ‘literally destroyed, smashed to smithereens’), and ‘doubtless’ (a prop for assertions unsupported by any evidence). Mr MacAskill deprives many of his sentences of verbs, and fattens others with clichés. Readers who might reasonably expect a full set of references to back up his account of this long, controversial and unfinished story, will be disappointed: there is no index, no bibliography and, of the 93 footnotes, 67 come from just four sources, one of these being the Scottish Government’s own website. A cover quotation from Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer, credits Mr MacAskill with a ‘forensic attention to detail’. I beg to differ.

None of this would matter if Mr MacAskill were writing about UFOs or his favourite movies. His subject, however, is the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history – an event he chooses to describe on page 1 as ‘one of the greatest whodunnits of all time’. It matters greatly that a trained lawyer should use imprecise and careless language to discuss complicated questions of evidence. It matters, for example, that, in referring to the timer which the court at Camp Zeist accepted was used to detonate the bomb, Mr MacAskill calls it ‘the MST-13 model, known as an ice-cube timer’. In fact, MST-13 timers and ‘ice-cube’ timers were completely different, and that difference – as the court’s judgement made clear – was crucial to the prosecution’s case. If the bomb was triggered by an ‘ice-cube’ timer – as many critics of the investigation believe it was – then had it been loaded in Malta it would have exploded between there and Frankfurt, rather than 38 minutes after takeoff from Heathrow. Such a basic mistake does not inspire confidence that Mr MacAskill has a full grasp of his subject.

His publishers, Biteback Publishing – owned by Lord ‘Call Me Dave’ Ashcroft and former blogger and Conservative candidate Iain Dale – do not seem unduly bothered by these shortcomings. Could it be that they don’t mind if the book damages the reputations of the author and the SNP administrations in which he served?

The most astonishing passages occur when Mr MacAskill offers his opinion as to who planted the bomb. Syntax purists, look away now: ‘Megrahi had been to Malta the month before, which was probably preparatory for the scheme and involved discussions on the logistics of clothes, the suitcase and the bomb equipment. He may even have brought the timers in with him.’ At this point Mr MacAskill ratchets up his use of the conditional tense – always a handy tool when indulging in pure speculation: ‘He [Megrahi] would meet with others in the [Libyan] embassy…he would not be the bomb maker. That would have been prepared in the Libyan People’s Bureau…’ Again, there is no attempt to substantiate these wild surmises.

Mr MacAskill proceeds to demolish the findings of the Camp Zeist court. Of the items bought in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta which were packed in the bomb suitcase, he writes: ‘The clothes were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi.’ Correctly describing as ‘rather implausible’ the evidence produced by the prosecution that Megrahi was the purchaser, MacAskill continues, ‘But, if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved.’ Really? How?

Megrahi’s role, it seems, was to fly from Tripoli into Luqa Airport in Malta on 20 December 1988 ‘with the suitcase that was to transport the bomb’. ‘The suitcase,’ we are informed, ‘was a Samsonite model, sold heavily in the Middle East market’ – as if this proves anything. These statements not only disregard the fact that Megrahi and his co-accused Fhimah (the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa) arrived in Malta on that date with no check-in luggage, they also rely solely on the testimony of a CIA-paid informer Abdul Majid Giaka, whom the judges dismissed as an utterly unreliable witness, concluding, ‘We cannot accept the evidence of Abdul Majid that he saw the two accused arriving with a suitcase. It follows that there is no evidence that either of them had any luggage, let alone a brown Samsonite suitcase.’

Mr MacAskill wades deeper into the mire. Further undermining the Camp Zeist judgement, he writes that, on the morning of 21 December, Megrahi took the suitcase (now apparently loaded with the bomb) to the airport, ‘but it was Fhimah who would get it airside and beyond security.…Placing a bag behind and into the system was a relatively simple task given the accreditation and access Fhimah had.’ At the trial the Crown argued that just such a sequence of events had occurred. The judges, however, concluded that ‘there is no evidence in our opinion which can be used to justify this proposition and therefore at best it must be in the realm of speculation. Furthermore, there is the formidable objection that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the second accused was even at Luqa airport on 21 December.’ Fhimah was consequently acquitted.

The judges also observed that ‘the absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [at Luqa] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.’ In just a few bold sentences, Mr MacAskill has completely overcome this difficulty.

Mr MacAskill finds it ‘hard to imagine how there could have been any other verdict in the circumstances.’ This is strange, as neither prosecution, defence teams, the families of the victims nor most independent observers expected one of the accused to walk free and the other to be found guilty. Mr MacAskill continues: ‘In many ways, as with Megrahi and Fhimah, Scots law and its judges were simply actors in the theatre that had been created to circumvent and solve both a diplomatic impasse and political problem. Scots law convened the trial, and yet found itself on trial.’

Read those sentences carefully: a former Justice Secretary is effectively saying that, at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice. For how many years have critics of the proceedings been saying this, while Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Government and the Crown Office have maintained that justice prevailed?

Mr MacAskill’s solving of the problem of how the bomb was placed on flight KM180 relieves him of the need to address with any seriousness the accumulated mass of other evidence pointing in other directions. He pays no attention to the post-trial discrediting of the infamous timer circuit-board fragment linking Libya to the bomb, nor to Morag Kerr’s  convincing explanation, in her 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, of the much more likely scenario that the bomb was loaded directly onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow. He skims lightly over the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s 2007 report which indicated at least six grounds on which Megrahi’s conviction might be unsafe. Of John Ashton’s 2012 book Megrahi: You Are My Jury, the most comprehensive analysis of the entire Lockerbie saga, he writes, ‘There was little new that came out in the book or media other than a rehash of what had gone before and the same lines from all parties involved.’ Mr MacAskill, it seems, is not impressed by arguments that really are based on a forensic attention to detail.

To summarise: Mr MacAskill asserts that Fhimah, acquitted by the court, planted the bomb, and that Megrahi, found guilty by the court, did not buy the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop. He also acknowledges that without Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the purchaser, the case against him would have collapsed. This, then, is the new position of the Cabinet Secretary for Justice who, while in office, repeatedly articulated the Scottish Government’s view that it ‘did not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction’. So, too, did the then First Minister Alex Salmond, who nevertheless endorses Mr MacAskill’s book as ‘the most credible explanation yet published of who was really responsible for the downing of Pan Am flight 103’. They cannot have it both ways: either they think the judges got it right, or they think they got it wrong.

Mr MacAskill admits that, had Megrahi’s second appeal reached court, his conviction might well have been overturned. He then makes this shameful comment: ‘But, this account of how the bombing was carried out and by whom is based on information gathered meticulously by police and prosecutors from the US, Scotland and elsewhere. It’s also founded on intelligence and sources not available for a court or that have only come to light thereafter.’

Well, that’s all right then. Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, the grounds of his conviction were shaky at best, but we know from other sources that he was involved and anyway he’s dead now, so that’s good enough for the Scottish justice system.

If Mr MacAskill does have information pertinent to this still ‘live’ case, he is duty-bound to share it with the police. Police Scotland are currently concluding a major, three-year investigation, ‘Operation Sandwood’, into nine allegations of possible criminality on the part of police officers and Crown representatives during the original investigation and trial. These allegations were made by the organisation Justice for Megrahi (of which I am a member) and six of them were first drawn directly to Mr MacAskill’s attention, in strict confidence, on 13 September 2012. They were passed from his office to the Crown Office, which immediately, before the police had even begun to investigate them, made a public statement declaring the allegations to be ‘without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded’. Some of the allegations relate to the very aspects of the case that Mr MacAskill now says the court got wrong.

For more than a quarter of a century the Lockerbie case has been a dark stain on the Scottish justice system. Kenny MacAskill rubs and rubs at that stain. Whatever his intent, the effect is not to make it vanish but to make it look far worse.

Lockerbie justice prevented by political interference

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today’s edition of The Sunday Times. It reads as follows:]

Your article “MacAskill cites flaws in case against Megrahi” (News, last week) suggests behind-the-scenes moves by America to befriend Libya in search of good trade relations at the time of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s release by Kenny MacAskill.

Those who watched the trial of Megrahi at Zeist unfold in 2000/1 became aware of extraordinary intrusions into court practice on behalf of the US. These included an abortive attempt to deny the court access to the contents of CIA cables which showed that its much-hyped “star witness” Jiaka was in fact known to the CIA to be a liar and a fantasist. The court rejected his evidence as unreliable except for still accepting that Megrahi “must have” carried a sinister suitcase into Luqa airport on the day of the tragedy.

The plot and the motives and methods of execution for revenge seem straightforward enough. Iran used the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command as mercenaries to exact revenge against the USA. What we need is to understand why the stories about Gaddafi’s Libya being involved were invented and supported for so long, and by whom.

Out of respect for the innocent victims of Lockerbie, on the plane and on the ground, justice must never be allowed to be polluted by international politics in such a way ever again.

[RB: Here is the text of Dr Swire’s letter as submitted to The Sunday Times:]

Your article today suggests behind the scenes moves by the US, to befriend Libya in search of good trade relations at the time of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Megrahi's release by Kenny MacAskill.

Those who watched the trial of Megrahi at Zeist unfold back in 2000/1 became aware of extraordinary intrusions into court practice on behalf of the US. These included an abortive attempt, supported to a remarkable extent by Scotland's then Lord Advocate, Lord Colin Boyd, to deny the Court access to the contents of CIA cables which showed that their much hyped 'star witness' aka Jiaka was in fact known to the CIA to be a liar and a fantasist.

The court rejected his evidence as unreliable except for still accepting  that Megrahi 'must have' carried a sinister suitcase into Luqa airport on the day of the tragedy.

Their Lordships had to admit that there wasn't any evidence that Megrahi used his presence there to put a suitcase of any kind onto Air Malta Flight KM180, (presumably on the hope by him that it would be carried round via Frankfurt to Heathrow and PA103).

For such a far fetched plan to work, a long running timer and a lot of luck with transfers at Frankfurt and Heathrow in the pre-Christmas rush would be required.

Post-trial evidence has emerged that a key piece of forensic evidence accepted by the court as part of just such a timer was in fact a fake and could not possibly have come from the Libyan stockpile. It was a clever fake and must have been produced by an organization having the skills of advanced circuit board manufacture at its disposal.

Likewise, not one credible piece of evidence in all these years has emerged confirming any of the other alleged examples of activities indicating Libyan involvement in the plot.

Our own William of Occam, inventor of Occam's razor: (interpreted as the belief that the simplest  explanation which agrees with all the known facts of a case is the most likely to be correct) can perhaps contribute here.

Details well set out in the book Adequately Explained By Stupidity? by Morag Kerr show that evidence from Heathrow, led in court but rejected, indicate that the suitcase containing the bomb was loaded onto Pan Am 103 under Heathrow baggage handler Mr Bedford and his assistant Mr Kamboj; having entered his baggage container well before the connecting flight for 'Megrahi's bomb' had even landed at Heathrow from Frankfurt. [RB: Dr Swire is mistaken on this point. The evidence discussed by Dr Kerr was not led in court and rejected: it was not led at all, though some of it was known to the Crown and not disclosed to the defence.]

At the same time the Syrian terror group the PFLP-GC had developed and tested anti-aircraft bombs whose electronics dictated that if they could simply be got aboard a target aircraft at the airport of take off, they would automatically explode around 40 minutes post take off by sensing the climb to cruise altitude.

The Lockerbie flight flew for 39 minutes from Heathrow until over Lockerbie.

Why would the PFLP-GC allow one of their devices to be used at Heathrow, and how would they get it to Heathrow anyway? The PFLP-GC had close ties to Teheran for funding and were near bankruptcy in 1988. After Lockerbie they were solvent, while at Lockerbie it seems likely that Teheran got its widely expected revenge for the shooting down of one of their Airbuses by a US missile cruiser the USS Vincennes in the Gulf, with the loss of 290 Iranian civilian lives, five months before Lockerbie.

It also so happens that an Iran Air transport aircraft landed at Heathrow on the 21st of December 1988, long before the flight from Frankfurt had arrived.

The plot and the motives and methods of execution for revenge seem straight forward enough. Iran used the PFLP-GC as mercenaries to exact revenge against the USA. What we need is to understand why the stories about Gaddafi's Libya being involved were invented and supported for so long, and by whom.

Out of respect for the innocent victims of Lockerbie, on the plane and on the ground, Justice must never be allowed to be polluted by international politics in such away ever again.