Presiding over a charade

[What follows is the text of a letter by John S Laverie published in the Sunday Herald today:]

In a chilling account of the Gaddafi regime, David Pratt refers to the congratulatory correspondence sent by the MI6 chief officer, Sir Mark Allen, to Moussa Koussa, head of Libyan intelligence (1994-2009) (Rendition, torture, MI6 and the secrets of Libya's gulag, June 12).

The recipient of these letters, which proved that MI6 had been complicit in the abduction and extradition of Libyan dissidents to Tripoli to face years of torture and probable death, defected during the overthrow of colonel Gaddafi and fled to Britain in March 2011. He was immediately taken into police custody, whereupon the then foreign secretary, William Hague, appeared on television to announce that Koussa would be interrogated by MI6.

Crucially, Koussa was also to be interviewed by Scottish prosecutors in relation to Lockerbie, leading to the possibility of a breakthrough, much trumpeted by Hague. Koussa, a close friend of Gaddafi's since their student days, had, after all, been instrumental in the eventual handover of Al-Megrahi for trial, while welcoming the latter's compassionate release nine years later. There followed a deafening silence on the outcome of Koussa's interrogation, and he was not heard of again until five months later when a Channel 4 camera crew tracked him down to a hotel foyer in Qatar. Had he been allowed to leave London with impunity?

If, in March 2011, William Hague (now Baron of Richmond) and the Scottish prosecutors had good intentions to discover the truth about Lockerbie, and were not simply presiding over a charade, then they owe an explanation and an apology to the families of the Lockerbie victims still in pursuit of justice. Absolutely no-one believes that Moussa Koussa had no story to tell.

Lockerbie was an impossible verdict

[This is the headline over an article by Richard Norton-Taylor published in The Guardian on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing - Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.

Two days earlier, senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted.

The FO officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt.

It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.

Doubts about the prosecution's case and the judges' verdict are spelled out in Cover-Up of Convenience, published this week. Two journalists, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, examine in detail what Paul Foot has already succinctly written in Private Eye's special report, Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice.

For more than a year, western intelligence agencies pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril. It is not hard to see why. Two months before the Lockerbie disaster, German police arrested members of the PFLP-GC near Frankfurt where, according to the prosecution, the bag containing the bomb was placed on the Pan Am airliner.

Among those arrested was Marwan Khreesat, who was found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player similar to the one said to have contained the bomb. Khreesat was released. It was later revealed he was a Jordanian double agent.

The Jordanians did not allow him to appear as a witness at the trial. Instead, he was interviewed by an FBI agent, Edward Marshman. Marshman described how Khreesat told him how he infiltrated the PFLP-GC, how a second Toshiba bomb had gone missing, and about his contacts with another member of Jibril's group, Abu Elias, said to be an expert in airline security.

Elias is mentioned in a report written by Mobdi Goben, another member of the PFLP-GC, shortly before he died. The Goben memorandum claims Elias planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese American passenger allegedly involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation. The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal security screening.

The prosecution asked a "foreign government", believed to be Syria, to hand over information about Goben's allegations. Syria refused. Syria was central to the original explanation. This was that the bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.

There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt. An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as a prime suspect.

You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.

The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight inches and 37 at the time.

According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".

The judgment is littered with assumptions and criticisms of prosecution witnesses. They refer to a "mass of conflicting evidence". Megrahi has lodged an appeal. The Scottish appeal judges surely owe it to the victims' families to explain the string of unanswered questions.

New doubt over conviction for Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over a report published in The Guardian on this date in 2007. It reads as follows:]

Lawyers are to make fresh moves to overturn the conviction of a Libyan jailed for the Lockerbie bombing after new evidence emerged. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is widely expected to announce later this month that it has serious concerns about the conviction of Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, jailed for life in 2001 for the murder of 270 people when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie.

Legal concerns about the conviction centre on the reliability of testimony from the Maltese shopkeeper who played a key role in identifying the Libyan as a suspect, and the quality of the forensic evidence about a fragment of circuit board allegedly found at the crash site. The commission, which has been reviewing the case for nearly four years, is ready to return the case to an appeal court in Edinburgh. Many legal observers believe Megrahi's conviction will be quashed, in effect clearing Libya of responsibility and increasing pressure for a fresh investigation into the identity of the terrorists behind the atrocity.

Relatives of the Lockerbie victims believe there is growing evidence which confirms links to Iran and Syria - the two states originally blamed for the bombing - including a series of previously unexplained incidents at Heathrow airport.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was on board the New York-bound flight, told the Guardian he was very suspicious about two events at Heathrow in the hours before Flight 103 took off which suggested strongly that the bomb was planted in the UK and not - as previously alleged - in Malta or in Frankfurt.

The prosecution claimed at the trial in 2000-01 that Megrahi, a Libyan government sanctions buster who frequently went to Malta but insists he is innocent, planted the bomb on a connecting flight from Malta. Many legal and intelligence experts believe the bomb was most likely put on the Pan Am jet at Frankfurt by Syrian and Iranian-backed Palestinian terror groups, in retaliation for the destruction of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Gulf in July 1988, killing 290 people.

Flagrantly distorted picture put forward in Camp Zeist

[What follows is excerpted from a review in The Observer on this date in 2001 by investigative journalist Bob Woffinden of John Ashton and Ian Ferguson’s Cover-Up of Convenience:]

Last year, the case against two Libyans, Abdel Al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was heard at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands before three Scottish law lords. Gadaffi would have been briefed about the vagaries of British criminal justice processes, but he could hardly have appreciated that they would be this enfeebled.

It might have been anticipated that only the most reputable forensic scientists would be used. In fact, the Crown employed the services of three men whose credentials were in some doubt. The evidence of Dr Thomas Hayes in previous trials had contributed to the convictions of several innocent people. At the same time that Sir John May's public inquiry was condemning the laboratory staff for 'knowingly placing a false and distorted scientific picture before the jury', Hayes was retiring to become a chiropodist.

Allan Feraday, whose qualifications extended no further than a 1962 Higher National Certificate in applied physics and electronics, was criticised by the Lord Chief Justice in 1996 in a separate explosives case. Then there was the American Tom Thurman, who was criticised in a Department of Justice report for 'routinely altering the reports... in the FBI explosives unit', with the result that they, albeit unintentionally, became more favourable to the prosecution case.

Earlier this year, Fhimah was acquitted, although Al-Megrahi was convicted on the basis that he had placed the bomb on board a feeder flight in Malta. Not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it wasn't. So the trial led inexorably to the wrongful conviction of Al-Megrahi and the final betrayal of the bereaved families.

If Cover-Up of Convenience occasionally loses narrative focus, that is hardly surprising bearing in mind the difficulties with co-authors on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and the speed with which this book has been produced. It's an admirably thorough, exhaustively researched and gripping exposé of the complete Lockerbie scandal. Someone should use it as a basis of a screenplay. Even if Hollywood did its worst, what remained would still be more accurate than the flagrantly distorted picture put forward in Camp Zeist.

A blot on the conscience of Scotland

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Kenneth Roy headlined The Lockerbie cover-up that was published by Newsnet Scotland on this date in 2010:]

The conviction of Megrahi hinged on the testimony of one man, the chief prosecution witness Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper. Without Gauci there was no case. He was the owner of a clothes shop in Malta called Mary's House. It was alleged at the trial that on 7 December 1988, Megrahi bought some clothes and an umbrella from Gauci's shop. The clothes were then said to have been wrapped around the improvised explosive device that brought down the PanAm aircraft over Lockerbie a fortnight later. This was the only piece of evidence linking Megrahi to the device.

The credibility of Tony Gauci was badly damaged by the man who initiated the prosecution of Megrahi and his co-accused, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, in a remarkable newspaper interview four years ago. The words attributed to him – he has never denied using them – were:

'Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say he was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy. I don't think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.'

When the then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, read this assessment of the Crown's star witness, he was sufficiently moved to ask Lord Fraser to clarify his view of Gauci's credibility; others, including Tam Dalyell and Megrahi's counsel, spoke out more strongly. If Lord Fraser did clarify his view, the world remained unaware of the clarification. Last August, however, Lord Fraser gave a revised opinion in a little-noticed television interview mainly concerned with Megrahi's release and the justice secretary Kenny MacAskill's handling of it. I noted down his reply to a question about Gauci:

'I have always been of the view and I remain of the view that both children and others who are not trying to rationalise their evidence are probably the most reliable witnesses and for that reason I think that Tony Gauci was an extremely good witness.'

What the use of the phrase 'children and others' was intended to convey about Gauci, and how this statement could be compared to Lord Fraser's earlier view of the witness, was not pursued as an issue (except in this magazine). Conveniently, perhaps, all eyes were on Megrahi himself, the 'triumphant' return to Tripoli, and the perceived shortcomings of Kenny MacAskill. Tony Gauci and Lord Fraser of Carmyllie pretty well disappeared off the radar.

Extremely awkward questions remain unanswered, however, and will continue to haunt the Lockerbie case so long as there is an official conspiracy of secrecy. Specifically:

Were the clothes sold to Megrahi?

Were they sold on the date alleged?

As a result of its investigation, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission formed the view (a) that there was 'no reasonable basis' for the court's judgement that the purchase of the clothes from Mary's House took place on 7 December and (b) that the clothes were bought on some unspecified date before then. As 7 December was the only date when Megrahi was in the area, it follows (a) that they could not have been sold to Megrahi and (b) that the case against Megrahi collapses.

This much we know. What we do not know – and what we seem to be further away than ever from knowing – is the nature of the 'additional evidence' which so convinced the commission that the court's judgement was wrong; and, more disturbing still, why this evidence was not made available to the court of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands.

In 2007, the commission concluded that it had identified six grounds where it believed that 'a miscarriage of justice may have occurred and that it is in the interests of justice [my italics] to refer the matter to the court of appeal'. Since there is no possibility of a referral to the court of appeal, and no prospect of the commission's report being published, we have the worst possible outcome – lingering doubt and suspicion, a complete lack of closure, and a continuing affront to the families of all those who died.

I wrote here last August: 'Judicially, the case is at en end. We are therefore left to assume that the interests of justice will never be served. There is a blot on the conscience of Scotland and it is hard to see how it will ever be eradicated'. It is harder still today.

The mess that litters the Lockerbie case

[A lengthy (2,500 words) and devastating review by John Ashton of Kenny MacAskill’s The Lockerbie Bombing appears in today’s edition of the Scottish Review. It absolutely must be read by anyone with an interest in the Lockerbie case. The following are the final few paragraphs:]

The book’s greatest omission is its failure to acknowledge the very Scottish scandal that lies at the heart of the Megrahi case, namely the Crown’s failure to disclose multiple items of exculpatory evidence. We shouldn’t be surprised, because the Scottish Government that he served amplified the scandal by failing to order an inquiry into the Crown’s conduct. (He repeats the government-spun fiction that any inquiry would need to be multi-jurisdictional.) To make matters worse, when the Justice for Megrahi campaign committee sent to him in confidence allegations of criminal misconduct and requested that he appoint an independent investigator to examine them, without consulting them he passed them to the Crown Office, which immediately – and outrageously – dismissed them. Thankfully, Police Scotland took a different view and is now in the third year of a major investigation of the allegations.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by Mr MacAskill’s sidestepping of inconvenient facts – he is a lawyer and politician, and that’s what lawyers and politicians do. Far more surprising is his reliance upon hand-me-down hearsay and pure speculation. There are pages of the stuff. For example, he tells it is 'certain’ that Lamin Fhimah arrived at Malta’s Luqa airport with Megrahi on the morning of the bombing. There is simply no evidence for this. None.

Most jaw dropping is his account of the evidence of the CIA’s Libyan supergrass Majid Giaka, who was the only witness to implicate Fhimah in the bombing, and who was exposed at trial as a money-grabbing fantasist. Among Majid’s baseless claims, made two-and-a-half years after Lockerbie, was that Megrahi had arrived at Luqa airport with a Samsonite suitcase like the one used for the bombing. Having acknowledged that Majid’s evidence was dismissed by the judges, Mr MacAskill counters with: 'Majid is clearly tainted, but some of his evidence has the ring of truth about it'. In the very next sentence, the ring of truth has been forged into cast iron fact: 'Megrahi came in [to Malta] with the Samsonite suitcase and Fhimah accompanied him to escort him through the airport'. What has the greater ring of truth, I would suggest, is the manifest truth from the Air Malta flight that Megrahi took to Malta, which indicates that neither he nor Fhimah had a suitcase. But why let the facts get in the way of a convenient fiction?

Allow me to round off with a little MacAskillesque guesswork. His Megrahi-wasn’t-the-clothes-buyer-but-did-it-anyway line has such a bloke-in-the-pub-told-me feel to it that I would not be surprised if it had been fed to him by a police officer or prosecutor. Some of those responsible for the conviction must accept that Megrahi probably wasn’t the clothes purchaser. They have had years to construct an alternative narrative that salvages their honour by keeping him in the frame. Maybe one of them was happy to share it with the ex-justice minister – it would have saved him the bother of having to do proper research (which clearly he didn’t).

I don’t doubt that Mr MacAskill is a decent man, who tried to do his best in near-impossible circumstances. It’s a pity that his tartan-tinted spectacles blinded him to much of the mess that litters the Lockerbie case. Still he will, at least, now be remembered, not only as the man who freed Megrahi, but also as the first member of the Scottish establishment to break rank on Megrahi’s conviction. For that we should be grateful.

Public interest immunity claim precludes fair hearing

[What follows is excerpted from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2008. It reproduces a report in that day’s edition of The Sunday Times which no longer appears on the newspaper’s website.]

The UN observer at the Lockerbie trial, Hans Köchler, has said that the Libyan convicted of the bombing will not get a fair hearing in Scotland.

Köchler, who advises the European Commission on democracy and human rights, has condemned government interference in the appeal of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and said the hearing should be held in a neutral country.

His intervention follows an attempt by the British government to block the release of secret papers that could help clear the former Libyan intelligence agent convicted of the 1988 bombing, which claimed 270 lives.

Köchler said Megrahi’s case was handled “more like an intelligence operation than a genuine undertaking of criminal justice” and criticised MSPs for failing to hold inquiries into the downing of Pan Am 103 and its judicial aftermath. “It is almost trivial to say that a fair trial requires the availability of evidence to the prosecution and defence. Only in a totalitarian system would the executive power interfere in court proceedings and order the withholding of evidence.”

The Advocate General, on behalf of British ministers, had objected to disclosure of the documents to Megrahi’s legal team, lodging a public interest immunity plea.

Last month senior judges ordered that the papers should be released to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh, where a panel of three judges will decide in camera whether they should be disclosed.

The documents, which are believed to hold information about the electronic timer that detonated the bomb, were not disclosed to the defence during al-Megrahi’s trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Megrahi lost an appeal in 2002, but the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission concluded that he might have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice and referred his case back to the court last year. One of the grounds for referral is believed to be the prosecution’s failure to disclose the secret document to Megrahi’s lawyers.

Köchler said the decision to hear the appeal in Scotland breached a concordat between the UK, the US and the Netherlands. “The fact that the new appeal proceedings take place in Scotland is not in conformity with the original intergovernmental agreement on the Lockerbie trial.” The proceedings totally lacked “transparency”, he said.

Last week, Robert Black, the Edinburgh law professor who helped to arrange Megrahi’s original trial in the Netherlands said the intergovernmental agreement no longer applied. It “existed for the original trial and the appeal. This is now the second appeal.” The agreement was spent, he said.

“Scotland made a mess of the trial and the appeal, and to an outside observer, that might lend justification to Köchler’s view. But I believe that this time it will be done properly and Megrahi will be released.”

Last year, Köchler said Scotland had the reputation of a “banana republic” because of its handling of the case.'

Abu Nidal group member claims responsibility for Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of a report published in the Los Angeles Times on this date in 1994:]

An accused Palestinian assassin confessed Monday to the murder of 270 people, stunning a Beirut courtroom with an unsubstantiated claim that in 1988, he personally blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Lebanese prosecutors said they will investigate Youssef Shaaban's claim but stressed that they doubted his confession. It reportedly came after the 29-year-old follower of terrorist leader Abu Nidal denied charges that he shot and killed a Jordanian diplomat near the diplomat's Beirut home in January.

The Lockerbie bombing, one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in recent years, remains a major international political issue. The American and British governments initially blamed Iran for the crime, then Syria, and finally insisted that two suspected senior Libyan intelligence agents were behind the bombing. They persuaded the UN Security Council to punish Libya with international sanctions in an attempt to force it to turn over the two men to stand trial in the United States or Britain.

On Monday, the lawyer for the two Libyan suspects -- Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah -- applauded Shaaban's confession in Beirut, asserting it proved his clients' innocence. But British and American officials insisted that Libya still bears the blame for a bombing that stunned the world.

American counterterrorism officials said Monday that they had never ruled out a role by others besides the Libyans. "We're going to follow up very hard on all leads, including this one, just to make sure we've left nothing unturned," a senior official said.

But counterterrorism experts, public and private, expressed deep suspicions. "There are enough inconsistencies to make us doubt him," a senior US official said.

Shaaban would have been only 23 at the time of the 1988 bombing. "That's fairly young to have put together a complicated bomb and such a complicated operation all by himself," the official added.

Also, Shaaban's claim does not conform with Abu Nidal's usual tactics. "He never went in for aviation terrorism, especially anything as sophisticated as this," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corp.

American officials and terrorism specialists suggest that Shaaban's claim may be part of a Libyan campaign to shift the blame from the two Libyans indicted by the United States and Scotland and, in turn, to get painful international economic sanctions lifted.

"It's part of an operation. It's deliberately exploiting the use of someone already going down for another crime -- in this case the assassination of a Jordanian diplomat -- to accept responsibility for something that he could not possibly have done," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA terrorism specialist.

Relatives of the bombing victims were skeptical as well.

Jim Swire -- chief spokesman and activist for families of British passengers killed when the Pan Am Boeing 747 exploded en route to New York over the Scottish village, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 more on the ground -- said Shaaban's assertion "should be regarded with grave suspicion."

"It could be that he is seeking to attract what terrorists might regard as kudos for the Abu Nidal organization," Swire said, referring to the Revolutionary Council of Fatah founded by the Palestinian activist.

Shaaban's remarks--which the judge ordered stricken as irrelevant to the case, according to Reuters news service--reportedly came after Shaaban denied gunning down Jordan's second-ranking diplomat in Beirut on Jan 29. Shaaban's public trial has become the centerpiece of a Lebanese government campaign to prove that Beirut's decades of lawlessness are at an end.

[RB: The following comments are taken from The Herald’s coverage of this story:]

Yesterday, Mr Alistair Duff, the Edinburgh lawyer who is a member of the Libyans' international defence team headed by Tripoli advocate Dr Ibrahim Legwell, said: ''This is obviously an interesting development. It will be a matter for discussion with Dr Legwell and the rest of the legal team and we will be doing our utmost to investigate the man's claims.

''Once we have discussed it within the legal team then we will see what can be done about interviewing this man. We will obviously be interested in having him properly interviewed. That may mean a member of the legal team from Malta or, perhaps, Germany, travelling to Beirut to see him,'' he added.

However, in the UK, official sources were treating Shaaban's confession with care. A spokesman for the Crown Office in Edinburgh said: ''The Lord Advocate has not seen any evidence relating to the alleged involvement of Youssef Shaaban in the Lockerbie investigation.

''If anyone has any evidence relating to the case they should make it available to the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. The investigation remains open and we will of course look into anything relevant to the case but we cannot comment on any investigative steps which may be taken.''

A spokesman at the Foreign Office in London said: ''As we have said many times in the past, we believe there is a case to be answered in a court in Scotland or the United States by the two Libyans. If anyone has further information which implicates anyone else, this could be brought to the attention of the Lord Advocate in Scotland or the US authorities.''

Bribery at the heart of Megrahi’s Lockerbie conviction?

[This is the headline over an article by Jon Snow on the Channel 4 News website on this date in 2011.  It reads as follows:]

While Libya continues to burn, an eerie silence has descended over the British media’s interest in reopening the uncertainties surrounding the Lockerbie bombing. The occasional defecting Libyan minister has pretended to hold previously untold secrets, but nothing has come of them.

It was left to Al Jazeera English to try to lance the boil last Thursday when the channel broadcast an explosive documentary on the subject. The programme makers had gained access to the unpublished report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission into the case.

Even more importantly, they managed to see the notebooks and diaries of the Scottish and American investigators written at the time. These were also in the possession of the Review Commission.

In short, the diaries make a blistering allegation – that the central Maltese witness whose testimony was key to convicting Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – had been bribed. The diaries record the apparent “offer of inducements made to Tony Gauci”, the Maltese shopkeeper who identified clothes that were found in the suitcase that carried the bomb on the plane, as having been bought at his shop by al-Megrahi.

Tony Gauci’s brother, Paul, it is claimed, in the same diaries as having “a clear desire to gain financial benefit”. The Review Commissions’ own report states that after the trial Tony Gauci was paid $2 million, and that brother Paul got $1 million reward money.

If true, these would be completely dynamite revelations. Of course, they would have come out in the appeal that Megrahi’s release prevented happening. It is inconceivable that this Scottish Review Commission’s report would not have surfaced at such an appeal. Does this perhaps explain why he was eventually bundled so speedily out of the country?

But the other question remains… why was it left to Al Jazeera to make these allegations?

Terrorists involved in Lockerbie bombing are now fighting with ISIS

[This is the headline over a report by Ben Borland in today’s edition of the Sunday Express. It reads in part:]

Some of the terrorists involved in the Lockerbie bombing are now fighting with Islamic State, according to a former CIA agent who worked on the original investigation.

Robert Baer said it was even possible that the failure to bring all of those responsible for the December 1988 atrocity to justice had contributed to the rise of IS.

The former Middle East case officer was speaking after Kenny MacAskill accused Iran, Syria and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) of plotting Lockerbie.

In his new book, the ex-SNP Justice Secretary says the bombing was ordered by Iran and that Libya "picked up the pieces" after German police raids broke up a PFLP-GC cell.

Two Libyans, Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lameen Fhima, were eventually put on trial and Megrahi was convicted, before being released with terminal cancer almost seven years ago.

Mr Baer, who worked for US intelligence from 1976 to 1997, said MacAskill had shown "enormous courage" in "pointing out the truth" about Lockerbie.

He backed calls for Scottish and US prosecutors to pursue PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril, who the Sunday Express recently traced to the Syrian capital Damascus.

However, he added: "If they handed over Jibril and he talked he would implicate the Iranians and Syria is effectively run by Iran so it would just never happen."

Although Jibril and the PFLP-GC are now fighting with the Syrian regime against IS, Mr Baer said many former members had converted to Islamic extremism.

"Some of the earlier bombers have washed up with the Islamic State," he said. (...)

"Abu Ibrahim [the leader of the May 15 group, another offshoot of the PFLP and an initial Lockerbie suspect] has ended up with IS. He was in a safe house Baghdad in 2003 but he escaped just before we got to him."

Just weeks before Lockerbie, a German anti-terror operation codenamed Autumn Leaves raided a PFLP-GC cell led by Hafez Dalkamoni and including bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat and second-in-command Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar.

Fourteen members, including Khreesat, were released almost immediately, while Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were jailed for several years before being deported to Syria.

The whereabouts of Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar is currently unknown, although Khreesat - who has been described as a double or even a triple agent - is living in Jordan.

Mr Baer said it was "almost certain" that terrorist bomb-makers from the 1980s had gone on to train IS fighters or become fully-fledged members of the group.

He said: "Ibrahim, Khreesat, Dalkamoni. A bunch of them have their signatures in the IS bombings in Fallujah and Baghdad." (...)

Asked if the failure to look beyond Libya in the Lockerbie investigation had contributed to the rise of IS, he replied: "That's possible but more than that we would have a better sense of justice in the world."

Mr Baer, who recently visited Syria to research a book about Islamic fundamentalism, said Jibril - who is said to have received $10million from Iran after Lockerbie - would be living in luxury.