Lockerbie sentence “too lenient”

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in the Daily Mail on this date in 2003. It reads as follows:]

The sentence handed down to the Lockerbie bomber last month is to be challenged on the grounds that it was unduly lenient, prosecutors said.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi was told by three Scottish judges he must spend at least 27 years in jail before he was considered for parole.

The hearing at the High Court in Glasgow took place to determine the "punishment part" of Megrahi's mandatory life sentence as required under European Human Rights legislation.

Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, Scotland's senior legal figure, has lodged an appeal against that length of term.

American relatives, who said the sentence passed in November was too little for the crime, welcomed the move, while British reaction was critical.

Megrahi's legal team said they were concerned they had not been informed of the move by the Crown Office and said they were considering their own appeal against sentence.

The Libyan's solicitor Eddie MacKechnie said the length of the punishment was irrelevant because his actual term in jail may be longer.

"The period of 27 years is that which he has to serve before he is even considered for release and it does not follow that he will be released."

He added: "Mr Megrahi is currently considering an appeal himself on technical grounds, but it has not yet been decided whether to proceed."

He said it would not be appropriate to comment further without studying grounds on which the Lord Advocate's appeal had been lodged.

The former Libyan intelligence agent was convicted at a special trial in the Netherlands in 2001 of killing 270 people in the 1988 atrocity and is serving a life sentence at Barlinnie prison in Glasgow.

At the High Court in the city on November 24, Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean ruled he must spend at least 27 years in jail before a parole board could review whether he should be released. The sentence was backdated to April 1999 when he was extradited from Libya for the trial at Camp Zeist in Holland.

[RB: The Lord Advocate dropped this appeal on 21 August 2009, one day after Abdelbaset Megrahi was released from prison on compassionate grounds.]

Police close in on Lockerbie killers

On this date in 1989 an article by David Leppard and Nick Rufford headlined 'Police close in on Lockerbie killers' was published in The Sunday Times. It asserted that police officers leading the investigation had informed foreign counterparts that under Scottish law ‘charges are now possible against certain persons’. Who were these chargeable suspects? The persons named, and whose photographs appeared in the article, included not one single Libyan.

The article does not now appear to be available online. However, a brief account of its contents can be found here.

Recent Richard Marquise interview about Lockerbie

A lengthy podcast interview with the FBI chief Lockerbie investigator, Richard Marquise, has just been made available. It can be accessed here. The text accompanying the podcast reads as follows:]

Retired agent Richard “Dick” Marquise served with the FBI for 31 years. He is an expert in the fields of counter terrorism and crisis management, both as an investigator and as a manager. Marquise is interviewed about Pan Am Flight 103, blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, four days before Christmas. Two hundred and seventy people were killed. Marquise was involved with the investigation from its inception and, after being named to lead the US Task Force which included the FBI, Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency, he managed the investigation through the return of indictments in 1991. He also played an active role through the court proceedings and in August 2001, with the successful resolution of the trial, he received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service. Following the case, which had been code-named Scotbom, his Bureau career included the role of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Oklahoma City Division.  He has provided training to law enforcement officials all over the United States and internationally and has appeared on television and radio talk shows and has given hundreds of speeches all over the world on the topic of terrorism. In order to document the facts of the investigation, Marquise wrote Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation a non-fiction account of the international terrorism case.

Lockerbie is a stain on the Scottish legal system

[What follows is the text of an article by James Cusick that was published in The Independent on this date in 2013:]

After 25 years of denials and diplomatic games, we're yet to learn the truth about the Lockerbie bombing

It's sometimes said in Scotland that you can't escape from the past and, like sand clinging to wet feet, it's carried around as a burden. Just how uncomfortable the burden can be will be evident in important rooms in Edinburgh, London and Washington during the next week or so as governing politicians, distinguished lawyers, high-ranking police officers, intelligence officials and interconnected diplomats continue nearly a quarter of a century of denial and obfuscation. The conversations may be similar because the inconsistent official explanation of how and why a Boeing 747 was blown out of the sky above the Dumfries town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 remains a truth too far.

Some 38 minutes after Pan-Am Flight 103 Maid of the Seas left Heathrow en route to New York, a bomb built into a Toshiba radio-cassette player, placed inside a Samsonite suitcase, went off. The brief horror inside the aircraft's cabin and flight deck is unimaginable. All on board the disintegrating jet were killed – 243 passengers and 16 crew – and 11 people died on the ground in Lockerbie. It remains the deadliest single terror attack on European soil.

In the fantasy world of Hollywood CSI science, Lockerbie would be a closed case. Meticulous factual analysis would be unchallengeable. Justice would be seen to be done. Reputations would be forged by its success. Feature films would celebrate dogged heroes determined to find the truth. The reality? Despite a mountain of evidence and a supposedly ground-breaking Scottish trial on "neutral" territory in the Netherlands before learned judges, Lockerbie remains a byword for state silence on evidential inconsistencies, surrounded by dark, covert diplomatic games.

A Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted of mass murder in 2001 and sentenced to 27 years in jail. In 2009, supposedly on compassionate grounds, he returned home to die of prostate cancer, which he did in 2012. He remains the official answer to the question: who did this? However, the evidence against Megrahi now wouldn't stand up in any court – unless that court were one where verdicts are determined ahead of what's heard, and any duty to disclose evidence which doesn't suit the prosecuting authorities is seen as an unnecessary luxury.

Lockerbie, then, is a stain on the Scottish legal system; dirty judicial laundry that Alex Salmond and his nationalist administration would rather remained bagged up until well after next year's independence vote. This is one reputation which, if tarnished, would have immediate political implications.

In the months after the mid-air explosion, debris was recovered from hundreds of square miles of Scottish and Northumberland countryside. Pieces from an aluminium cargo hold container – marked AVE4041PA – were pieced back together. Official evidence by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch identified this container as the location of the blast.

For the Semtex hidden inside the radio to have had the effect it did, breaking through the fuselage and creating a small hole that led to the "skin" of the aircraft peeling off at 31,000ft, the suitcase must have occupied a precise bottom-row location inside AVE4041, close to the edge of the plane's hull.

Seven aluminium containers had been filled with the luggage of Pan-Am passengers who had checked in at Heathrow's Terminal 3. The eighth container, AVE4041, was for baggage from a transfer flight from Frankfurt. No security screening of the Frankfurt luggage took place. It was assumed that this had been done in Germany. The feeder flight was due at 17.20. Pan-Am 103 was timed to push off at 18.00.

One of the staff in the loading area where AVE4041 was being filled was John Bedford. He told police in a statement given in January 1989 that he noticed a hard-shell Samonsite suitcase had already been loaded into the bottom of the "tin" container before the feeder flight had even landed.

If an inquiry is ever allowed to re-examine the Heathrow luggage procedures, security in the baggage area at Terminal 3 and the timing and chances of a bag from a late-arriving feeder flight being accidentally placed exactly where needed to blow a hole in a 747's fuselage, the currently accepted account will be made to look ridiculous. Adequately Explained by Stupidity, a new book by Dr Morag Kerr, from the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) team, focuses largely on Heathrow.

Bedford's account has altered over time, but what he said first remains crucial. If correct, what happened before Heathrow – in Frankfurt and Malta, where Megrahi was supposed to have placed the unaccompanied suitcase bomb on flight KM108 from Luqa, which later transferred to Pan-Am 103 – is all irrelevant.

Take Malta out of the equation, and Libya's alleged role in the bombing fades dramatically. But how did Libya figure in the first place? If Flight 103 had been delayed, which is common enough at busy Heathrow, the bomb, if on a simple timer set in Malta, could have exploded with the plane yet to take off. A small hole at ground level would have killed no one. But if the device used was barometric, triggered by atmospheric pressure levels, why did it not detonate on the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow flights?

Terrorist groups in the frame in the early weeks and months of Lockerbie had links to the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians and Iranians. Libya would have been in the mix. The motives were varied – anything from state-sponsored revenge against the US, to murkier aspects of covert bilateral deals that backfired. The initial suspects were from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PLFP-GC), a Syrian-based terror group headed by Ahmed Jibril. A Maltese chapter of the group was on international intelligence radar. Frankfurt, as the location where the bomb was apparently loaded, had not been discounted.

Another early suspect was Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian member of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF). When Talb was arrested in Sweden on suspicion of being involved in the bombing of a train in Denmark, items of clothing found at his house were traced to a Maltese manufacturer.

According to informed media reports in 1989, Talb had links to the PLFP-GC and had been in Malta with a known terrorist bomb expert. This information was regarded as sound enough for Scottish police to plan a trip to Sweden to interview Talb in prison. The case against him never progressed. However, a report by Megrahi's team in 2002 suggested that Talb was still in the frame at precisely the time that attention switched to Megrahi.

In January 1989, a scrap of shirt collar was found in the area of debris where most of AVE4041 was recovered, The singed material held fragments of the Toshiba radio casing, some speaker mesh and a fragment of a printed circuit board. That fingernail-sized bit of board was to gain prominence in the summer of 1990.

The Scottish police failed to source the origin of this evidence, labelled PT/35b. But a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI in June 1990 matched the circuit board to a timer held in a Langley archive that had been part of a coup attempt in Togo, West Africa. At any future inquiry, the FBI should be asked, why they visited the Zurich offices of Mebo, the timer company, a month before the Scottish police were told of the timer's ID.

The link to Libya was now advanced. It was claimed that the PT/35 fragment was part of an MST-13 timer unit – a specific Mebo order from the Libyan armed forces. By January the following year, Megrahi, a Tripoli airport control manager briefly assigned to Libyan intelligence for bureaucratic rather than specialist tradecraft reasons, was on the investigation's radar.

For a journalist who has observed 25 years of the changing importance of key Lockerbie evidence, examined allegations of deliberate non-disclosure, new whodunnit theories and material reinterpreted for the appeals launched by Megrahi's lawyers, there's an overwhelming sense of one thing – a lack of certainty. What is certain is that the Mebo fragment, a principal piece of evidence against Megrahi, holds none of the hallmarks claimed for it by the prosecution at the Camp Zeist trial in the Netherlands. Mebo gave the investigation control samples from the original batch that had been produced in an outsourced deal with a company called Thuring. Expert technical witnesses claimed that there was no material difference between the Thuring sample and the fragment recovered from the debris. That wasn't true.

During preparations for Megrahi's second appeal, tests showed that the PT/35 fragment was manufactured with a pure tin coating, and the Thuring sample was covered with a standard alloy of tin and lead. The pure tin manufacturing method had never been used by Thuring and all the circuit boards supplied to the Libyan armed forces involved the Thuring process. So whatever PT/35b was, it did not match the timers ordered by and supplied to Libya.

The Mebo-Libya link was crucial to Megrahi's conviction. This is still regarded as key evidence. But without the Malta flight connection and without the timer fragment's Libyan origins, the case against him falls apart. If these developments had been openly scrutinised in court at a second Megrahi appeal, the Scottish police and judiciary risked being made to look, at best, like a collection of amateur investigators.

Details of a second appeal in 2007 were examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The commission's report granted leave for the Megrahi conviction to be challenged. Six grounds were cited as cause for serious concern, including undisclosed payments of around £2m by the US Justice department to Tony and Paul Gauci, the owners of a clothes shop in Sliema, near Malta's airport. Like the Samsonite case's journey from Luqa to Heathrow, and PT/35's link to Libya, the case against Megrahi required someone to link him to the suitcase. Tony Gauci provided the link.

Among the recovered debris from AVE4041 were the remains of a pair of trousers which had been close to the bomb. The label was intact. The manufacturer was traced to Malta and a clothing company called Yorkie, with a unique order supplied to Mary's House, Gauci's shop. Whatever the inconsistencies in Gauci's account, the clothes packed into the suitcase that sat alongside the bomb were bought at Mary's House. But the Crown's certainty that it was Megrahi who bought them is far from clear. Gauci's statements as to the dates when Malta's Christmas lights were on, and whether or not the purchases had been made when it was raining are key factors that placed Megrahi on the island at specific times. Again, this evidence has been shown to be inconsistent.

His identification of Megrahi was crucial to the verdict. However, the SCCRC acknowledged that if the payments to Gauci had been revealed, then this "was capable of affecting the course of the evidence and the eventual outcome of the trial". The review commission also found that three days before Gauci picked out the Libyan in a formal identification parade, he had held a magazine featuring an article on the Lockerbie bombing, complete with a picture of Megrahi as the culprit. In December 1988, Megrahi had indeed been in Malta. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Gauci's account of the man who bought the clothes that ended up inside the Samsonite suitcase was influenced by the prospect of a sizeable US reward.

The negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi that brought Megrahi and his co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, to the Netherlands in 1999 involved Libya offering £8m in compensation to the victims' families. In return, the United Nations lifted sanctions that were crippling Libya's economy. Reward, blackmail or diplomatic and tribal trading? Whatever the true background, there is still a whiff of West and Middle East deal-making surrounding Lockerbie.

"If not Megrahi then who?" should be the question troubling Scotland's criminal justice system 25 years on, because those who brought down Pan-Am Flight 103 have still not been brought to justice. This anniversary, supposed to remember the innocent dead, is also marked by an ongoing shame – the pretence that a Scottish court got it right. It didn't. And as Martin Luther King said: "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Libya’s highest state organ approves Lockerbie trial plan

[The following are two snippets from the Libya: News and Views website on this date in 1998:]

Libya's General People's Congress said Tuesday it was satisfied with a plan to try two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing in a neutral country. Libyan television, monitored in Tunis, said the congress had also called on the three parties involved in the case, Libya, Britain and the United States, to “remove any obstacle” preventing the trial going ahead as soon as possible.

A resolution of the Congress read live on Libyan television said: “(The Congress) expresses its satisfaction with the agreement between the Libyan, British and American parties for the trial in a third country of the two suspects in the Lockerbie incident. It constitutes the fundamental basis to settle this issue.

“It (the Congress) demands to these parties (Libya, the U.S. and Britain) to work to remove any obstacle that prevents the two suspects standing trial before justice as soon as possible.” [Reuters]

Britain gave a cautious welcome on Tuesday to reports that the Libyan People's Congress had expressed suppport for a plan to try two Libyans wanted for the Lockerbie bombing in a neutral country. But Foreign Office officials and relatives of those who died when the Pan Am jet crashed on to the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 warned that any handover of the two men could still be a long way off. “If it is true, it is good news. But at the moment it is only a Libyan media report. We have to be circumspect unless and until we have a formal response,” said a Foreign Office spokesman. [Reuters]

[RB: Here is what I wrote a few years ago about this stage in the path towards a Lockerbie trial:]

It was clear to me [after meetings in Libya in late September 1998] that the Libyan authorities at the highest level wanted [a trial] to happen and that the accused men wanted their families and themselves to be able to get on with their lives, something that could never happen, even within the boundaries of Libya, while the charges against them remained unresolved and UN sanctions remained in place.  One possible impediment was the hard-line attitude towards surrender for trial overseas that had been taken over the years by the Libyan People’s Congress (the highest legislative and policy-making body under Libya’s idiosyncratic constitution).  However, this potential hurdle was removed on 15 December 2008 when the People’s Congress, at a session held in Sirte, announced that it approved the trial proposal and adjured all three interested governments -- Libya, the United Kingdom and the United States -- to take all necessary steps to remove any remaining obstacles.

In fact, such was the distrust between the various concerned parties that removal of the obstacles was not easily achieved and it was another three months before Megrahi and Fhimah arrived in the Netherlands.

Donald Trump ‘sick’ for using Lockerbie in a rant against wind farms

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in The Scotsman on this date in 2012. It reads in part:]

Tycoon Donald Trump has been accused of “sinking to a new low” and being “sick” for linking his opposition to wind farms in Scotland to the Lockerbie disaster.

The Scottish Green Party has lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority over a controversial advert published in two regional newspapers.

In the full-page advert, the US billionaire – who has publicly denounced plans for an offshore wind farm near his new golf resort in Aberdeenshire – urges the public to protest against First Minister Alex Salmond’s support for renewable energy.

Under the banner “Is this the future for Scotland?” his protest displays a picture of a huge wind farm in California. It states: “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.”

Green Party co-convener Patrick Harvie MSP said: “Trump has sunk to a new low. Linking renewables policy to Lockerbie victims is sick.

“Not only did he have no shred of evidence that tourism would suffer when we quizzed him during the parliament’s inquiry into renewables, he has already been censured by the authorities for placing similar anti-renewables adverts.

“Trump’s organisation has already trashed a unique environment on the coast of Aberdeenshire and trampled on the rights of local people.

“Now he appears to be determined to buy up chunks of the Scottish press. It’s vital that Scotland doesn’t allow a bully to think he can flash his cash and get his own way.”

Media reports of launch of Justice for Megrahi campaign

[What follows is excerpted from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2008:]

The Scottish "heavy" daily newspapers have good coverage of yesterday's launch of the Justice for Megrahi campaign.

The Scotsman concentrates on the experiences of the parish priest of Lockerbie at the time of the disaster, Father Pat Keegans. The report reads in part:

'Father Patrick Keegan, 62, said he believed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, was innocent and should be freed on compassionate grounds before an appeal against his conviction.

'"I wrote to Mr Megrahi offering him my support, telling him that I was convinced he was innocent, and that I would willingly offer support to him and his family," said Fr Keegan, who was living in Lockerbie at the time of the bombing, just yards from where a wing section of the Pan Am flight crashed in 1988.

'Describing the Libyan and his family as "victims" of the bombing, Fr Keegan said he believed there had been a mellowing of opinion, even among those previously convinced of his guilt.'

The comments from members of the public that follow the story are also well worth reading.

Lucy Adams in The Herald has an article headed "Priest claims police interference in aftermath of Lockerbie bomb". It reads in part:

'As the Justice For Megrahi campaign was launched yesterday, Father Patrick Keegan, the priest in Lockerbie at the time, revealed that he had been visited by police during the inquiry and asked to keep to the official line - that Libya was responsible. (...)

'"I really became convinced of his innocence when the whole thrust of the case shifted from Syria and Iran to Libya alone. Interference in my own life by the investigation team convinced me.

'"A police officer asked to come along and speak to me. I listened to him for quite a while and then I said: Have you come here to ask me to be silent? He said that the point was that when you speak people listen and we would appreciate it if you could follow our line of Libya alone.

'"I complained to the Lord Advocate about it at the time and got a very bland response. The very fact that they interfered and took the trouble to come to talk to me made up my mind that I was on the right track. Other people had similar experiences."' (...)

The Press and Journal has a good account by Joe Quinn. The BBC News website's report of the launch can be read here.

[RB: Eight years later, the Justice for Megrahi campaign is still alive and kicking.]

“I was convinced he was innocent”

[What follows is the text of a report that appeared in The Scotsman on this date in 2008:]

A priest who witnessed the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing yesterday called for the man convicted of it to be freed.

Father Patrick Keegans, 62, said he believed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, was innocent and should be freed on compassionate grounds before an appeal against his conviction.

"I wrote to Mr Megrahi offering him my support, telling him that I was convinced he was innocent, and that I would willingly offer support to him and his family," said Fr Keegans, who was living in Lockerbie at the time of the bombing, just yards from where a wing section of the Pan Am flight crashed in 1988.

Describing the Libyan and his family as "victims" of the bombing, Fr Keegans said he believed there had been a mellowing of opinion, even among those previously convinced of his guilt.

Fr Keegans spoke out during the launch of the "Justice for Megrahi" campaign, to lobby for the release of Megrahi on compassionate grounds. The group includes Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the victims of the bombing.

Two hundred and seventy were murdered, and still we fail them

[On this date in 2015, I learned with deep sadness of the death of Ian Bell. His writings on Lockerbie can be found listed here. What follows is an example from April 2011:]

One of my favourite pictures is Raeburn’s portrait of Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn, once judge within the Court of Session. It’s there in a glance, cool as you like, direct from an age of reason. It says: here are my principles; convince me.

I once entertained a theory that most of Scotland’s high-end prose, Walter Scott’s most obviously, descended from Scots law. Years ago, I even tried to convince an audience that Robert Louis Stevenson could not have written nit-picking tales of moral difficulty without Hume and the Faculty of Advocates. They wondered what I was on about.

Scotland is soaked in the language of lawyers. After the churches and education, the law was the one inviolable (supposedly) thing we rescued from Union. We are a country of laws, of legal tradition, and of reasoned prose. Most of our politicians have been lawyers, and most of our hired legal hands have been political. They can’t help themselves.

Cockburn concludes his Memorials with the news that he’s getting on in the world. Thanks to the usual patronage, the boy from Edinburgh’s Hope Park is to be Solicitor-General. He writes: “I trust that we [Jeffrey had bagged Lord Advocate] shall do our duty. If we do, we cannot fail to do some good to Scotland. In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”.

So, Cocky: what would you have made of Moussa Koussa?

Here we have an unresolved mass murder. Here we have a witness. Here we have (it is suggested) “abuses of our representative and municipal systems”. Here we have certain subservient protocols attendant to a treaty of Union. Still, one would wish to at least detain the witness, surely?

We get a legal letter instead. The indefatigable Brian Fitzpatrick writes, in timely fashion, to the oldest daily newspaper in the English-speaking world with a note of support, it seems, for a public inquiry into the Lockerbie atrocity.

Or rather, one from the Faculty suggests, there might be “scope” – Cockburn would have flinched – “for laying to rest some of the more egregious claims of the tribe of Lockerbie conspiracy theorists – those who have made a life’s work of the now unravelling assertion that somehow Libya and its senior operatives, including Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, were not to blame".

Send lawyers, as the song used to go, guns and money.

The brief then goes on to lavish praise on pillars of our legal temples. He suggests that the Camp Zeist trial was terribly hard – unpaid? – work for those who allowed security spooks to infest the well of the court. He overlooks the Socratic wisdom that entertained the bribing ($3 million to a pair of those crucial Maltese witnesses) of participants by American “authorities”. He does not trouble himself with forensic difficulties.

But, first and foremost, this lawyer nowhere mentions the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). It counts as a significant omission. It makes no odds to me whether “Gaddafi did it” or not. I just want to know what went wrong with Scots law, why the SCCRC found six reasons – after years of work, and 800 pages – for doubting the conviction of al Megrahi, and why the rest of us, we sometime citizens, are barred from knowledge granted as pub gossip to every lawyer in the land. And then told to forget about it.

“Conspiracy theorists” is neat. It suggests that anyone who might wonder about the habits of our legal-political establishment has problems – a ticklish inversion – with reality. It is meant to shut down argument. The conviction is as safe, it seems, as all those blasted, bloodied Lockerbie houses that no longer stand.

The real mistake was to believe that Gaddafi’s fall would give oxygen to the truth. Instead, in the blood and the mire, there’s a big carpet being unfurled, and a lot of sweeping going on. On this point, I am liable to sound repetitive: why isn’t Moussa Koussa under arrest?

More particularly: why has he not been taken into custody by officers from Dumfries & Galloway? Students of the Treaty of Union may take another view, but I had thought – certainly in the case of al Megrahi – that Scots law held sway. So why has our Crown Office been “negotiating” with the Foreign Office over this witness, of all witnesses?

Saif Gaddafi, heir to idiocy, says there are no secrets. Washington and London, he tells the BBC, know all there is to know about Lockerbie. Scotland’s lawyers, some of them, know exactly what he means. But Scotland’s people have been given no such advantages.

What was asked of Moussa Koussa? That’s not a complicated, nor legally compromised, question. Having won London’s sanction – ignoring questions of jurisdiction – what followed? Just state the question, or the area of inquiry: we have a right to know. Disclosure is in no sense be prejudicial to a possible trial, far less to a public inquiry.

The obvious fact is this: “Gaddafi did it” is not the point. The safety of a conviction, and the suborning of a legal system by security services is another, bigger, deal. Cockburn wouldn’t have sat still for it. Brian Fitzpatrick prefers a lesser prose.

You have to ask yourself: why does it still matter, and matter so much, to those who promenade around Parliament Hall? Why does it still, after all these years, infect every party? You might have thought, if naive, that an SNP government would be rushing to settle the Lockerbie business, if only to discomfit Labour placemen and Tory hacks. No chance.

Three hundred and odd strollers in the Faculty count for more, in Scottish public life, than any other constituency. Which is odd. Lockerbie wasn’t their doing. They did not infect the evidence. They didn’t nobble the politicians, or write the editorials, nor do a squalid deal in the desert. They were just legal cabs for hire.

Henry Cockburn saw them coming. I don’t even know if Memorials of His Time is in print. Still, the good judge had witty things to say about small countries and the profession of principle. The reason we don’t know about Lockerbie is this: the lawyers don’t like it. And they respond to argument by any means necessary.

How come? What worries them so much? Why has there been no public inquiry? Who – pace Fitzpatrick – would be harmed? Why isn’t Moussa Koussa under close arrest? Why does the government of Scotland, another party to the safety of an absurd conviction, fail to assert the rights of an independent legal code?

So: is Brian Fitzpatrick supporting a properly independent public inquiry into all that befell the Lockerbie prosecutions? He doesn’t quite say as much. Why not? Instead, he seems to believe that anyone in doubt over the independence of our judiciary has fallen in with “a tribe”.

I’d be interested in a test case. What would one propose, tomorrow, as a paid defence strategy – with an SCCRC judgement to hand – for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi? And how would the betting go, up at the courts, around the dockets, or by the Shirra’s seat, for that one?

Cockburn said: “In the abuses of our representative and municipal systems alone, our predecessors have left us fields in which patriotism may exhaust itself”. Two hundred and seventy were murdered, and still we fail them.

Solution to Lockerbie impasse in sight

[The following are two snippets from the Libya: News and Views website on this date in 1998:]

Libya's justice minister said a Libyan legal team intended to hold a new round of talks with the United Nations legal counsel for additional clarification on a trial in the Netherlands of two suspects in the 1988 bombing of a U.S. airliner. ''Preparations are going on for a new round of talks between the Libyan legal team and the UN counsel aimed at clarifications so that the trial would be fair and honest without the interference of any ambiguity or hidden intentions,'' Mohamed Belgasem al-Zwai told the Libyan Congress. [Reuters]

South African President Nelson Mandela predicted on Tuesday that a solution may be in sight to the impasse between Libya, the United States and Britain over the trial of two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie plane bombing. Mandela addressed a press conference in Abu Dhabi, where he spoke at the opening session of the annual summit of the Gulf Co-operation Council.

He said he had spoken in the last few days to US President Bill Clinton and to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and planned to speak to Libyan leader Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi once he returned home. "Things are moving in a satisfactory manner," Mandela said. He said Britain had agreed to remove the problem created by the lack of Libyan diplomatic representation in London by permitting the establishment of a Libyan office in Scotland, where the two suspects will serve their sentences if they are convicted at a trial set to take place in Holland. [ANC-SAPA]

[RB: A Libyan consulate was established in Glasgow after Megrahi was convicted. The consul, Abdel Rahman Swessi, was amongst the Libyan diplomats expelled from the UK in April 2011.]