President-elect Trump and Lockerbie

[President-elect Donald Trump has featured on many occasions over the years on this blog. The relevant posts can be read here. What follows is a sample from 13 February 2014:]

Wind farms like Lockerbie disaster - Donald Trump

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads in part:]

Donald Trump sparked renewed outrage yesterday when he compared the development of wind farms in Scotland to the Lockerbie disaster.

On Tuesday, the billionaire tycoon announced that the Trump Organisation would be turning its back on Scotland and concentrating on developing a new course on the Republic of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

The announcement came after Trump lost his legal challenge against the Scottish Government’s decision to give the go-ahead to an offshore wind farm in Aberdeen Bay which he claims will blight the view from his luxury golf resort at Menie, on the Aberdeenshire coast.

But yesterday, Trump sparked an angry backlash after renewing his attack on green energy schemes in Scotland in an interview with The Irish Times.

He told the newspaper: “Wind farms are a disaster for Scotland, like Pan Am 103. They make people sick with the continuous noise. They’re an abomination and are only sustained with government subsidy. Scotland is in the middle of a revolution against wind farms. People don’t want them near their homes, ruining property values.” (...)

Trump’s outburst was condemned by MSPs and relatives of the victims.

Susan Cohen, a New Jersey pensioner whose daughter Theodora, an aspiring actress, was 20 when she was killed in the disaster, said: “Obviously, there is no call for that. Donald Trump says many, many things here in the United States and I am, of course, appreciative of anyone who takes a tough stand on Lockerbie which he did at times.

“But, at the same time, I think that is an unfortunate choice of words. I wish he had not made that comparison. Lockerbie was a ghastly tragedy that destroyed many lives and is beyond comparison. It is one of the great and terrible events of man’s inhumanity to man and therefore it’s of an order where it should not be likened to anything.”

Joan McAlpine, the SNP MSP for the South of Scotland, claimed: “Even by Donald Trump’s standards, these comments are unbelievably crass and show a complete lack of respect to the families affected by the Lockerbie bombing – in the US, Scotland and across the world. He should withdraw them as a matter of urgency and apologise for any offence he has caused.”

Alison Johnstone, a Green Party MSP for the Lothians and member of Holyrood’s economy, energy and tourism committee, also hit out at the tycoon’s remarks. She said: “It’s grossly offensive to link renewables with the Lockerbie bombing. Mr Trump has already been reprimanded by advertising authorities for making such distasteful statements and he should apologise for his continued crass behaviour.” Ms Johnstone added: “He didn’t have a shred of evidence that renewables are bad for tourism when he was quizzed in parliament. Twelve-thousand people are now employed in renewables in Scotland, proving that Mr Trump knows nothing about the Scottish economy.”

In December 2012, Trump was accused of “sinking to a new low” and being “sick” for publishing an advert in Scottish newspapers which linked the government’s support of wind farms with the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

The Scottish Green Party lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority over the controversial advert, published in two regional newspapers and urging the public to protest against First Minister Alex Salmond’s support for renewable energy.

Under the banner “Is this the future for Scotland?” the advert featured a picture of a huge wind farm in California and a photograph of the First Minister.

It stated: “Tourism will suffer and the beauty of your country is in jeopardy! This is the same mind that backed the release of terrorist al-Megrahi ‘for humane reasons’ – after he ruthlessly killed 270 people on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.”

The advert was condemned as “misleading” by the Advertising Standards Authority. (...)

[David Milne, a long-standing opponent of the Trump resort:]

Words have been used by Mr Trump on many occasions to accuse others of impropriety and inappropriate behaviour, with little in the way of evidence to support his claims. Having read the Court of Session decision by Lord Doherty, he obviously came to a similar conclusion about the evidence supplied by Mr Trump in that situation.

Unfortunately, grandiose words seem to have failed Mr Trump this time and his use of the Lockerbie bombing in comparison to wind turbines is not acceptable.

To diminish the suffering of the families of that event by trying to compare an international terrorist event that killed people of several nationalities with an attempt to protect and extend the environment of our planet is insensitive and ill considered. I am certain even some of his own supporters back in the USA will be shocked.

Campaigners present Lockerbie bomber inquiry case

[This is the headline over a report that appeared on the BBC News website on this date in 2010. It reads as follows:]

Campaigners calling for an inquiry into the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber have taken their case to Holyrood.

About 1,500 people have signed a petition by the Justice For Megrahi (JFM) group for an independent probe into Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's case.

Members of the group, including Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the 1988 atrocity, appeared before Holyrood's petitions committee.

He said it was "imperative" that the Scottish government opened an inquiry.

Mr Swire said the case had "deeply damaging effects" on the country's criminal justice system.

Megrahi remains the only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, in which 270 people were killed.

The Libyan was released from prison in Scotland in August last year on compassionate grounds when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and thought to have three months to live.

The petition has already attracted the support of Cardinal Keith O'Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, as well as Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Have I Got News for You? TV star Ian Hislop.

The witnesses appearing before MSPs also included Edinburgh University Emeritus Scots Law Professor Robert Black, an architect of the non-jury Lockerbie trial under Scots Law in the neutral Netherlands in 2000.

He has since called the verdict a "miscarriage of justice".

Megrahi dropped a second appeal against his conviction in the run-up to Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill's decision to free him on compassionate grounds.

However, campaigners have said they could possibly try to pick up the appeal against conviction if he dies.

[On the same date Anne McLaughlin (then MSP, now MP) wrote the following on her blog:]

As a member of the Petitions Committee in Parliament I am particularly looking forward to tomorrow's meeting. We will hear evidence from Jim Swire, father of Flora who was one of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. He'll be presenting evidence in support of his petition calling for an enquiry into the conviction of Megrahi. He'll do so alongside Professor Robert Black and Iain McKie, father of Shirley.

I've met Iain McKie a couple of times through previous work and found him to be both charismatic and inspirational. And of course Jim Swire has to be one of the most compassionate people ever. I don't know if they have a point in claiming that Megrahi is innocent. What I do know is that it would be all too easy (and understandable) for Mr Swire to accept Megrahi's guilt and put all of his negativity energy in that direction.

But he didn't accept it. He has been outspoken in his condemnation of the conviction and as you can see is campaigning for an enquiry into it. I guess it's important to him that they get the right person but how tempting must it have been to turn a blind eye and blame the man with the conviction?

The other thing that occurs to me is that tomorrow, as I imagine is always the case, he will give evidence and in the recesses of his mind will be this image of his daughter, his flesh and blood, a young woman with a zest for life who only got to live for 24 years. That pain must never leave him and for that reason I am in awe of him and have nothing but the deepest respect.

[RB: The petition (PE1370) remains open, and is now on the work programme of the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee.]

Permeated with failures to assuage reasonable doubt

[What follows is excerpted from a long commentary by Dr Jim Swire that first appeared on this blog on this date in 2010:]

Following some 18 months of official investigation immediately after the disaster, the finger seemed to point to Iran, seeking revenge, by using a Syrian terror group as mercenaries. having lost an airbus containing some 290 individuals shot down by a US missile cruiser six months before Lockerbie, the captain of the cruiser being presented with a medal following his return to the USA.

Then suddenly in late 1991 indictments were issued simultaneously in Edinburgh and Washington against two of Libya’s citizens.

There followed for the relatives years of hard work attempting to persuade Libya to allow the two to be tried under Scots law. These efforts were strongly supported by the then Professor of Scots at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Black QC and by Nelson Mandela, and many others, but involved multiple trips to talk to Colonel Gaddafi. The first of these was made by myself alone and in great fear, but two others were made jointly with Professor Black, who was himself the originator of the ‘Scottish court in a neutral country' concept.

Together with one other UK relative, I watched the whole of the evidence unfold at Zeist, and though only a layman, to my amazement as the case unfolded it seemed to me that the evidence was failing to support the involvement of either of the accused in the atrocity, let alone the island of Malta as the point of origin of the bomb. The second Libyan suspect, Mr Khalifa Fahima, was accused of conspiring with Mr Megrahi to cause the disaster but was found Not Guilty: a remarkable finding in view of the availability of the Scottish verdict of Not Proven.

Then came the evidence of a German forensic officer who explained to the court the nature of bombs found in the hands of a terror group, but not all confiscated, in Germany, two months before Lockerbie. He explained that the bombs were of Syrian provenance, from an Iranian linked terror group, the PFLP-GC in Damascus. He also carefully explained how these bombs, specifically designed to destroy aircraft in flight, were capable of introduction to an airport well in advance of their actual use. He explained too that put into an aircraft they would always explode between 35 and 40 minutes after take-off, by sensing the drop in air pressure, but that they were inert on the ground indefinitely. They were not adjustable. They came predicated always to explode 35-40 minutes after take-off.

Yet these devices could not have arrived by air from Malta as they would have exploded en route. From that point on, and knowing that the flight time for the Lockerbie aircraft had been 38 minutes, I found it hard to believe that Mr Megrahi, allegedly using a sophisticated digital timer from Malta, had risked his device passing through an Air Malta flight, changing planes at Frankfurt and then changing planes again at Heathrow, only to have it explode 38 minutes after take-off from Heathrow as the Lockerbie flight did. Why would he not set it to explode over mid Atlantic since the timing of the device he was alleged to have used was fully under his control? Why risk this devious route those two changes of airplane and so short a flight time out of Heathrow?

But the FAI had told us to assume that the bomb had been flown in from Frankfurt. What were the chances of a simple time-bomb from Malta happening to explode at just the same time after take-off from Heathrow as one of those described by the German forensic officer to the court would have been obligated to do? The hearings seemed permeated with failures to assuage reasonable doubt: a prerequisite supposedly for reaching a guilty verdict under Scots criminal law

There were great difficulties particularly surrounding the evidence given by Toni Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper alleged to have sold a tranche of clothing later found at the crash site to Mr Megrahi, who he could only say ‘looked a lot like the buyer of the clothes’. The evidence of identification never looked to be of the standard required to incriminate the real perpetrator, yet it was the only supposedly secure proof of Mr Megrahi’s involvement in Malta, there being no evidence to lead as to how he was supposed to have breached security at Luqa airport on the island. Such difficulties and many others will be central to any inquiry into this trial.

It is significant that Professor Black has repeatedly stated that the events and evidence heard in the Zeist trial court itself present difficulties which should have ruled out a guilty verdict under Scottish criminal law, even without reference to events since the verdict was reached. Unlike my lay status, his is a powerful persuasive and professional voice claiming the need for the whole court process to be reviewed if we are to be certain whether justice was delivered for Mr Megrahi or not. Only a few others were prepared openly to express their doubts at first, but re-examination of the evidence and trial transcripts has increased doubts over the validity of the verdict for a number of highly qualified lawyers since. Gareth Peirce, one of Britain’s most respected human rights lawyers is an excellent example of this. Her article in the London Review of Books 'The framing of al-Megrahi' is well worth reading.

After three years of study the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) publicly stated that the trial might be a miscarriage of justice, massively increasing the doubts in the minds of many Scots both within and without our legal community.

Yet the current publicly expressed position of the Scottish Justice Minister and of our First Minister is that they have no doubts concerning the verdict. It is not apparent why they should be considered a more reliable source than the SCCRC, whose special task it is to decide such issues, and which spent so long in careful professional examination of this case.

The Goben memorandum

[What follows is taken from a report on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

Private talks are taking place as the defence team in the Lockerbie trial seeks more time to investigate new evidence.

The case was due to resume in open court on Tuesday but was delayed by a meeting in the judges' chambers. (...)

"The delay is now being caused by a hearing in chambers regarding letters of request," a spokesman for the Scottish court told reporters.

[RB: The principal letter of request sought by the defence related to the Goben memorandum. Part of a copy of this document had been disclosed to the defence, and they now sought the full version from the Syrian government (which in fact refused utterly to cooperate). The following is from a report in the Sunday Express on 8 July 2007:]

Documents viewed by the Sunday Express allege the plot began when a man named Mobdi Goben supplied material for the bomb to Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the PFLP-GC's European cell. He was then introduced to the alleged bomb maker Marwan Khreesat, by Elias, who has both Syrian and American passports.

Very little is known about Elias, but the defence insists he was paid in travellers' cheques by terror leader Dalkamoni in Cyprus, before he took delivery of the bomb in Frankfurt.  Elias was identified as the key suspect although it was never explored in court, even after documents about his role suddenly emerged during the trial.

The Goben Memorandum, said to have been written by a dying member of the PFLP-GC, was handed to the Lord Advocate detailing the group's activities and a confession about Elias. Elias was concerning the FBI before the bombing and was quizzed about cheques deposited in his bank. In August 1988 he met with agents, who knew he was Jibril's nephew. While the SCCRC said there is dubiety over whether Gauci had correctly identified al-Megrahi, documents show the shopkeeper had no such problems identifying Abu Talb.

[RB: The following is from an article by John Ashton in The Herald on 14 March 2012:]

Six months into Megrahi’s trial the Crown disclosed a transcript of a lengthy deathbed confession by Palestinian self-confessed terrorist Mobdi Goben. He claimed that the bombing was the work of his own group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC), a Syrian and Iranian backed faction who were the original prime suspects in the bombing.

The defence interviewed a number of Goben’s relatives and associates who were seeking asylum in Norway, plus a man whom Goben had implicated in the bomb plot.

However, the court refused a defence motion to request further information from the Syrian, Iranian, American and Swedish governments, and the allegations were never raised at trial. Megrahi’s SCCRC submission argued that the Crown’s approach to the matter breached his right to a fair trial.

The SCCRC raised the matter with Megrahi’s junior counsel John Beckett, who said that the Goben evidence would have been difficult to use. It also had access to undisclosed Crown documents, which, in its view, contained nothing the defence didn’t already know. It concluded: the Commission does not consider that the Crown’s handling of matters concerning the Goben memorandum gave rise to a breach of the Crown’s obligations … Accordingly, the Commission does not consider that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in this connection.

Goben’s claims remain unproven, but many who have studied the case, including the British Lockerbie relative Dr Jim Swire, continue to hold the PFLP-GC responsible for Lockerbie.

Mobdi Goben and PFLP-GC member, bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat, each implicated another group member, known as Abu Elias, in the bombing. (…)

A number of Megrahi’s unsuccessful submissions to the SCCRC referred to Abu Elias. Although the Commission could find no direct evidence of his involvement in the bombing, Abu Elias remains the prime suspect for many of those who doubt Megrahi’s guilt.

Megrahi and Libya “were made a scapegoat”

[On this date in 2008 The Times printed a “clarification”. What follows is part of the article by Tam Dalyell to which it related, followed by the clarification itself:]

My deep conviction, as a “professor of Lockerbie studies” over a 20-year period is that neither al-Megrahi nor Libya had any role in the destruction of Pan Am 103.

I believe they were made a scapegoat in 1990-91 by an American government that had decided to go to war with Iraq and did not want complications with Syria and Iran, which had harboured the real perpetrators of the terrible deed. Libya and its “operatives”, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah (al-Megrahi's co-accused) and al-Megrahi, only came into the frame at a very late date. In my informed opinion, al-Megrahi has been the victim of one of the most spectacular (and expensive) miscarriages of justice in history. (...)

Visiting him in prison, I was struck by his self-possession - a self-possession that had struck many people at his trial, possibly because it never occurred to him that he would be found guilty. It explains my passionate involvement over 20 years, as well as that of Robert Black, professor emeritus of Scots law at the University of Edinburgh. It was on our say-so that Libya ever surrendered its citizens to Scottish justice. Whatever happens to al-Megrahi, faced with advanced terminal cancer, the case will continue because on trial is the international reputation of Scottish justice and particularly of the Crown Office...

Almost the last thing that al-Megrahi said to me was: “Yes, of course I want to go back to Tripoli. I have my wife and my five children are growing up, but I want to go back an innocent man.”

Some of us are determined to find the truth and justice that we believe will find him innocent.

The clarification

In Tam Dalyell's article in last Saturday's Times “A civilised, caring man - not a mass murderer”, Mr Dalyell claimed that the prosecution in the Lockerbie case had lied to Lord Coulsfield, the High Court judge, when it told the trial court at Camp Zeist that it had full confidence in the evidence of the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci. Mr Dalyell's claim was based on reported comments made by a previous Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, that Mr Gauci was an unreliable witness who was “not the full shilling”. The present Lord Advocate has asked us to point out that Lord Fraser made it clear in 2005 that he did not have any reservations about any aspect of the prosecution, and had no aspersions to cast on Tony Gauci's evidence and, therefore, that there is no substance to the serious allegation in the article that the Crown had lied to the court about its confidence in the evidence of Tony Gauci.

[RB: It should be noted that there was, and could be, no denial that Lord Fraser of Carmyllie used the words attributed to him by Tam Dalyell.]

Growing opposition to US Libya sanctions

[This is the headline over an article published in Green Left Weekly on this date in 1997. It reads as follows:]

In response to US State Department criticism of his visit to Libya on October 23, South African President Nelson Mandela has accused the US administration of racism and condemned itsarrogance to dictate where South African leaders should go.

US officials had attempted to pressure Mandela into cancelling the visit, arguing that governments should have the lowest possible diplomatic contact with the government of Libya and proclaiming that they would be disappointed by any ratcheting up of South African-Libyan relations.

Mandela said his visit fulfilled a moral commitment to Libya, which supported us during our struggle when others were working with the apartheid regime. The US government said Mandela’s response to its warnings was unfortunate.

This is just the latest attempt by the US to force South Africa to cede to US policy in relation to governments it considers troublesome. Libya, along with Cuba, Iran and Syria, is top of that list.

In 1995, a proposed deal involving the storage of Iranian oil in South Africa was scrapped under pressure from the US. Soon afterwards, concerns were raised in the US Congress about South Africa’s relations with Cuba. The following year, discussions about a possible arms deal between South Africa and Syria were cancelled after strong condemnation and threats from the US.

The US campaign against Libya began when the September 1, 1969, revolution overthrew the US puppet King Idris, refused to renew foreign base agreements and nationalised US, French and British oil interests. Since then, the US and its allies have waged a covert and overt war against Libya, including a series of CIA-orchestrated assassination attempts, provocative incursions into Libyan territorial waters and the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986.

In 1992, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Libya which prohibit arms sales and flights to and from the country. These sanctions were ostensibly to punish Libya for so-called terrorist activities and to force it to extradite two Libyan agents accused by Britain and the US of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, which killed 270 people.

Libya, supported by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), has proposed that the Lockerbie trial be held in a neutral country, conducted under Scottish law. In the words of Mandela, who has been mandated by the OAU to mediate between Britain and Libya on the issue: You can’t have a country like Britain, which is the complainant, the prosecutor and the judge at the same time. For a country to combine the three roles, there can be no justice there.

The British families of those killed in the Lockerbie disaster have welcomed Mandela’s call and endorsed South Africa as a suitable venue for a trial.

The South African government has further angered the US by supporting the OAU’s demand that the UN lift the sanctions against Libya.

Last month the Arab states voted to permit planes carrying Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi to land on their territory and to permit other flights for religious and humanitarian purposes.

Steps on the path towards a neutral venue trial

[The following are two snippets published on this date in 1997 on the Libya: News and Views website:]

The head of the Arab League said on Sunday that Libya would never extradite two of its citizens to Britain or the United States for trial on charges of bombing a US airliner in 1988. Esmat Abdel-Meguid told a news conference on the sidelines of a symposium on the future of the Arab world [in Abu Dhabi] that Libya maintained its offer to let the two men stand trial in a neutral country but with Scottish judges. “Libya would not turn over its citizens because, under international law, it is not possible for one country to surrender its citizens to another country unless the two are bound by a mutual extradition agreement,” Abdel-Meguid said. [Reuter]

Libya has said it is impossible for two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing to get a fair trial in Scotland although the Scottish justice system is fair. The Libyan Foreign Ministry said British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's invitation to the United Nations to send observers to Scotland to evaluate the Scottish legal system in action was a ploy to undermine other initiatives to solve the problem. “Libya does not doubt the fairness of the Scottish judiciary or its equity,” the Libyan Foreign Ministry said in a statement issued at the weekend and obtained from the official Libyan news agency JANA on Monday. “But...the campaign through the press and statements by officials in Britain and the United States has led to a prior condemnation of the two suspects, ruling out any possibility of a fair and just trial for them in Scotland,” it added. [Reuter]

Stand up for justice, not just for the Scottish legal system

[This is the headline over a group of three letters published in today’s edition of The Herald. They read as follows:]

Kenny MacAskill, not for the first time, has demonstrated his ignorance of some of the basic facts of the Lockerbie case (“Gauci and the benefit of doubt on Lockerbie”, The Herald, November 2). His article starts by getting Tony Gauci’s age wrong and goes downhill from there.

He claims that Mr Gauci was not aware that he might be rewarded for his evidence until after he made a partial identification of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi as the man who bought from him the clothes that were used in the bomb suitcase. In fact, declassified police documents show that when he made the identification he was not only aware that reward money was offer, but had also expressed an interest in receiving it.

Like Mr MacAskill, I don’t believe that Mr Gauci lied for money, nevertheless, as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission noted (but Mr MacAskill fails to), his trial testimony was significantly more helpful to the prosecution than his earlier police statements.

Nowhere does Mr MacAskill mention his own reluctant admission that the holes in Mr Gauci’s evidence meant that Megrahi’s conviction was “probably unsafe”. Nor does he express concern that the Crown withheld numerous items of significant evidence from the defence.

Mr MacAskill asserts that the Scottish prosecutors “acted diligently and honourably”. Yet, as he knows full well, key aspects of their conduct have drawn international [criticism].

Standing up for the Scottish criminal justice system is not the same as standing up for justice. If Mr MacAskill is truly concerned for justice, he should temper his patriotism with a recognition that Megrahi, like Mr Gauci, was also entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

John Ashton (biographer of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi)


Kenny MacAskill reiterates one of the main themes of his book, The Lockerbie Bombing, published earlier this year: that the performance of the Scottish criminal justice system, during the investigation into the destruction of Pan Am 103 and the subsequent trial of two Libyans for the crime, was “outstanding”, but was itself overshadowed and undermined by international “commercial and security deals involving the UK, the United States and Libya.

If ever there were an example of somebody crying “It wisnae us” this is it. Innumerable authoritative observers have concluded that the Camp Zeist trial was a travesty of justice. Mr MacAskill himself, in his book, states unequivocally that Megrahi was not the purchaser of clothes, later found to have been packed in the bomb suitcase, from the late Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta. Yet this completely contradicts not only the verdict of the court but also the position Mr MacAskill maintained while Cabinet Secretary for Justice, that he “did not doubt the safety of the conviction”.

In his article Mr MacAskill refers to Tony Gauci both as “a crucial witness for the prosecution” and yet as being only “a small part of the Lockerbie trial”. How can he have been both? Mr MacAskill knows (and concedes in his book) that without Megrahi having been identified by Mr Gauci as the purchaser of the clothes the case against him would have collapsed. He writes that the issues with Gauci’s evidence were less with the actual content of that evidence than that “it was the interpretation put upon it by the court that was critical”.’ How on earth does this square with the idea that the Scottish justice system performed well, and that those of us who think otherwise are somehow traducing it?

James Robertson


I’m afraid I find former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill’s comments on some aspects of the Megrahi case far from convincing. The one person who certainly did not get the benefit of all the doubts that surrounded the trial is Megrahi.

Mr MacAskill does not even comment on how Mr Gauci was able to identify a casual customer to his shop for a few minutes several years earlier. Could that be because he has an incredible memory for faces and details of every sale, or perhaps it was because he was shown a photograph of Megrahi in advance of the trial, by a person or persons unknown (and perhaps with an American accent)?

After the trial, did it come as a complete surprise to Mr Gauci when he found himself in possession of two million US dollars and a supported move to a new home and comfortable life in Australia? Mr MacAskill’s only comment is that “it appears he wasn’t aware of that or any potential personal gain until considerably later”. Aye, that’ll be right.

Mr MacAskill also says that “the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board was right to home in on both of these aspects”. Yet for various reasons a formal appeal and re-trial was constantly denied or delayed, until Megrahi’s fatal illness provided the welcome excuse to ship him off home.

Mr MacAskill’s article also goes into much detail about subsequent relationships between the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi and the United States and UK over trade deals and military support. But he doesn’t even address the question of why Libya should have wanted to destroy an American private airliner in mid-flight. The most obvious reason for such action might have been the shooting down several months earlier of an Iranian civil plane carrying more than 200 passengers by the reckless action of a US warship commander. But strangely that never seemed to occur to anyone in the political or legal hierarchies on either side of the Atlantic.

Much easier to blame a minor Libyan official than risk a major conflict with a real power in the Middle East, and then put pressure on a Scottish court to produce a politically acceptable answer, just because Flight 103 happened to explode just over the Scottish Border instead of in mid-Atlantic. I think Mr MacAskill secretly suspects just that.

Iain AD Mann

Lockerbie relatives fated never to know truth

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater that appears in today’s edition of The Times. It reads as follows:]

After the death of Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, those who could shed light on the tragedy are dwindling

One by one, the key players in the Lockerbie drama fade from the scene, taking with them its secrets. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi himself, prime suspect; Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Lord Advocate, who brought the case against him; and now Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, who died last week. As Kenneth Roy, the editor of the Scottish Review, noted in his obituary: “To say that all three left unanswered questions would be one of the under-statements of our time.”

Gauci, who owned a clothes shop in Malta, where, on some disputed day in 1988, a man came in to buy the items of clothing later found burnt and shredded around the bomb in Lockerbie, did not have a good press. An unsure witness at best, his testimony about when and by whom the clothes were bought, seemed to change each time he was questioned; and he was questioned a lot — 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police, many more by prosecuting counsel, and later by journalists. Was the man who ordered such an odd assortment of clothes — shirts, jackets, trousers, baby clothes, without checking on their sizes — tall and dark-skinned, as Gauci seemed to remember, or medium-built and light-skinned as Megrahi turned out to be? Did he come into the shop two weeks before Christmas, or in late November? Was it raining, or merely dripping? Were the Christmas lights on or not? Which football match was his brother watching on the day? Gauci tried and tried to remember, and each time seemed to retreat further and further from the truth.

All that has led his detractors to mock his evidence, and dismiss him as a witness of no worth. Lord Fraser notoriously once described him as “not quite the full shilling,” though he was more generous later on.

Those who believe Megrahi was innocent, and the prosecution a charade, point to Gauci as its weakest link. As chief witness for the prosecution, they claim that if his evidence falls, then the entire case collapses. One member of the defence team, hearing of his death, said that he went to his grave carrying responsibility for Megrahi’s wrongful conviction.

That is a dishonourable epitaph for a decent man. The more one re-reads Gauci’s evidence, the more one warms to him as a character. A simple man, the only things he really cared about were his clothes business, and his pigeons. When, on several occasions, he was taken to Scotland for his safety by police, he worried more about the pigeons, and who was minding the shop, than whether the scenery was beautiful, or his hotel comfortable. The one thing he was sure about was that the clothes found at the bomb site were bought from his shop, and on that he never wavered. Who could forget a man who bought such a strange assortment of clothes without bothering to check on their sizes?

Much has been made of the alleged rewards offered to him by police or intelligence agencies. No one, however, has been able to prove that money was a motive for Gauci. [RB: A more accurate account of Tony Gauci’s attitude towards “compensation” is to be found here.] His struggles to remember dates, times and descriptions may sometimes be laughable. But they are honest attempts, not those of a bribed man. Here he is, trying to remember whether or not he had had a row with his girlfriend on the day of the purchase: “We had lots of arguments. I am asked whether I had a girlfriend at the time of the purchase of the clothing. I do not recall having a girlfriend in 1988 but I am always with someone. It is possible that I had an argument with my girlfriend that day. My girlfriend would cause arguments by suggesting a wedding day or suggesting that we buy expensive furniture . . . it is possible that in 1988 I had a girlfriend, but I am not sure.” He is like that with days of the week, or the size of the man who bought the clothes. “I did not have a tape measure to measure the man’s height,” he complains.

For all his confused recollections, the trial judges liked him: “The clear impression that we formed was that he was in the first place entirely credible, that is to say doing his best to tell the truth to the best of his recollection, and indeed no suggestion was made to the contrary,” was their verdict. When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission later came up with six reasons for suggesting that there were grounds for an appeal, they did not dismiss Gauci himself, but said that some of his evidence, and the circumstances in which it was given, were withheld from the defence. Whether that would have altered the outcome will never now be known.

In the end, what are every bit as important as Gauci’s evidence, are undeniable facts: Megrahi’s presence in Malta on the day before the bomb was loaded; his departure back to Tripoli the morning after; his use of a false passport supplied by Libyan intelligence — one he never used again; the large sums of money in his bank account; and now, the evidence uncovered by Ken Dornstein. [RB: If, as Dr Morag Kerr has conclusively established, the bomb suitcase was ingested at Heathrow, not Luqa Airport, none of this is of the slightest relevance.]

Mr Dornstein’s brother died at Lockerbie, and, after 15 years of investigations, he discovered that during his trips to Malta in the weeks leading up to the bombing, Megrahi was accompanied by a man called Abu Agila Mas’ud, a convicted terrorist, who today sits in a Libyan jail. Quite what he and Megrahi were doing there, only Mas’ud can reveal, though Abdullah Senussi, the former Libyan intelligence chief who is also languishing in jail, would be able to shed much light on it as well. [RB: Analyses of the revelations in, and omissions from, Ken Dornstein’s film can be found here and here.]

That light, however, is fading. One by one, the witnesses are disappearing. All that remains are the memories of those who lost loved ones at Lockerbie, and who are destined never to know the full truth.

[RB: What follows is extracted from a comment by Morag Kerr on Kenneth Roy’s Scottish Review article:]

It's odd how this type of article keeps resurfacing. Someone has died, who either told everything they possibly knew about it to the authorities years ago and who could not conceivably have remembered anything further, or who knew nothing at all about it in the first place. But now he's dead, oh the secrets he has taken to his grave!

Tony Gauci appears to have served someone connected to the bombing in his shop. His police statements and his evidence at Camp Zeist are in the public record. So too is the diary of Harry Bell, which recounts the (mis)handling of Tony as a witness and the money that was apparently dangled before his eyes. Three separate expert witness reports take this entire sorry episode apart forensically, but even so they only reinforce what common sense tells us - that a shopkeeper cannot possibly be expected to recognise a customer he saw once, for about half an hour, after the extraordinary lengths of time involved in this case.

We don't need Tony to realise that whoever the man was, it was not Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Not only was the day of the transaction (almost certainly 23rd November) one when there is no evidence at all that Megrahi was on the island, the multiple discrepancies between Tony's initial description of the purchaser and Megrahi's actual appearance are glaring.

All this happened almost 28 years ago. Even if we had someone who was now alleged to have been that purchaser, and Tony Gauci was still alive, there is no chance whatsoever that a positive identification could be made. What else could Tony tell us? How much money he was paid? What he did with it? Could he give us any real insight into his thought processes when he repeatedly said Megrahi resembled the purchaser but declined to say he actually WAS the man? I doubt it.

So what has the case lost with the death of Tony Gauci? I'd say nothing at all.