Lockerbie trial damned by UN report

[This is the headline over an article by William Paul that appeared in Scotland on Sunday on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

A United Nations observer at the Lockerbie trial has branded the verdicts in the case unfair, irrational and politically motivated, saying they should be overturned on appeal.

In a scathing denunciation of the proceedings and the quality of Scottish justice, Professor Hans Koechler, a world-renowned expert in international law, claims there was no basis in evidence for the guilty verdict against one of the accused.

Koechler, personally appointed by UN secretary general Kofi Annan to oversee the trial at Camp Zeist in Holland, said it was tainted by the air of international power politics and was neither fair nor balanced.

The guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational, his report states.

The outcome of the trial may well have been determined by political considerations and may have been the result of a more or less openly -exercised influence... from outside the judicial framework.

Koechler acknowledges that his condemnation of the trial may have a profound impact on the professional reputation and integrity of the three Scottish judges—Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and Maclean—but insists that the verdicts were unfair and adds that he hopes any appeal will correct the deficiencies of the trial. His report has been buried by both the UN and the Scottish authorities for the past two months.

Koechler, president of the Vienna-based International Progress Organisation and professor of philosophy of law at Innsbruck University, reiterated his concerns at a conference in Cairo yesterday. He said: In my opinion, there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict.

He was given privileged access to lawyers and the accused and sat through all sessions of the court. He submitted his analysis within days of Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi being found guilty, and his co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, not guilty of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the mass murder of 270 people.

The publication of his report now will come as a monumental embarrassment to both the Scottish legal establishment and to the UN, which had hoped the end of the trial would signal an improvement in relations between the west and Libya.

After the trial Annan said that justice had taken its course and the authority and legitimacy of the legal process must be respected.

Yesterday, a UN spokesman insisted Koechler’s report was nothing more than a personal opinion and that, as an observer of the trial, he was required only to watch, not to report on its fairness.

Lord Sutherland, the senior trial judge whose verdict was condemned by Koechler, said: It would be inadvisable for me to make any comment. Let the Appeal Court decide whether the verdict was irrational.

A spokesman for the Crown Office said the report appeared to be based on a misunderstanding of the adversarial nature of the criminal justice system in Scotland and other English-speaking countries.

It involves a contest between prosecution and defence rather than an inquiry carried out by judges.

He does not appear to have understood it is for prosecution and defence lawyers to investigate the case and decide what evidence to present to the court. The suggestion that the verdict was politically motivated again proceeds on a complete misunderstanding of facts and the independence of the judiciary.

However, the Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga,19, was killed at Lockerbie, said Koechler’s report touched on many of the issues he had raised with the Lord Advocate during the trial without receiving satisfactory answers. It expresses more eloquently than I managed to do all of the major concerns that many of the relatives had identified, he said.

An A to Z of Lockerbie “conspiracies”

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.

Taking another look at the destruction of Pan Am 103

[This is the headline over an article by Ambassador Andrew I Killgore that was published on the Voltaire.net website on this date in 2010. The following are excerpts:]

In February 1986 Israeli Mossad operatives installed a “Trojan” communications device on the top floor of an apartment house in Tripoli, Libya. The six-foot-long device was able to receive messages on one frequency and automatically rebroadcast the same message on a different frequency—in this case, one used by the government of Libya.

Israeli naval commandos arriving in miniature submarines in the middle of the night had delivered the Trojan, only seven inches in diameter, to the lone Mossad agent in Tripoli, who drove a rented van to their rendezvous point on a deserted beach outside Tripoli. The agent, along with four of the commandos, then took the Trojan to an apartment building in the Libyan capital where he had rented the top floor, and installed the device. By March the Trojan was broadcasting a series of “terrorist” orders to Libyan embassies around the world.

These messages were picked up by Spain, France and the United States. Thinking it odd that normally cautious Libya suddenly would become so careless, France and Spain took them to be fake. The US, however, accepted the broadcasts as real—especially since Washington was assured by Israel that they were indeed genuine.

The foregoing account is taken from The Other Side of Deception, the second of two books written by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky after he left Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

Less than two months after the Trojan was installed, on April 5, 1986, the La Belle nightclub in then-West Berlin was bombed, killing two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. At the same time a false “success” signal was sent, apparently from the device in Tripoli.

“False-flagged” by Israel, President Ronald Reagan on April 14 sent American bombers from Britain and from US aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean to strike Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 101 people, including the adopted young daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi when his house in Tripoli was bombed.

Operation Trojan was one of Mossad’s “great successes,” Ostrovsky wrote. (...)

As soon as Pan Am Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec 21, 1988, Mossad could see the opportunity to repeat its earlier success.

The proximity in time between the Lockerbie crash and the shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3 of that year of an Iran Air passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, with the loss of 290 lives, presented a perfect “revenge” scenario. That, clearly, was the initial premise of the investigators at Lockerbie. Dr Robert Black, professor of criminal law at Edinburgh University in Scotland, told this writer that, for the first two years following the Pan Am crash, investigators were focused on Iran as having hired Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command to carry out a retaliatory bombing.

In a Jan 28, 2009 article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, however, the late Russell Warren Howe cited the book Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas. Thomas quotes a Mossad source as saying, “Within hours after the [Pan Am 103] crash Mossad’s LAP [psychological warfare or disinformation] staff were working their media contacts, urging them to blame and publicize that ‘Libya-did-it.’” (...)

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the crash, has written: “Coming from a scientific educational background, I found that it was the forensic evidence at [the trial at Camp] Zeist…which first convinced me that the prosecution case was a fabrication.”

Another astonishing factor was that the Crown (the prosecutors) ignored evidence of a break-in of the Pan Am luggage area at Heathrow early in the morning of that fatal December day. (...)

Dr Swire, who has described the Court’s conviction of Megrahi as “a cock and bull story,” is not alone in his skepticism. Hans Köehler, the UN observer at the trial, has described the verdict as “incomprehensible,” and Dr Robert Black has denounced the guilty verdict in equally dismissive language.

Thus the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 remains a mystery. If two years of investigating Iran produced no evidence, and the evidence used to convict Megrahi was fake, who was responsible for the horrific crime?

Lockerbie trial: enter the accused

[This is the headline over an item on the Scots Law News website. What follows is an excerpt:]

As expected, on 5 April 1999 the two Libyans accused of planting the bomb aboard the Pam Am jet which exploded over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 (Abdel Baset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah) were given over to the custody of Scottish authorities at Kamp van Zeist near Utrecht in the Netherlands. On 6 April they were accused of murder and remanded in custody before Sheriff Graham Cox, and committed for a trial which will take place in the Netherlands before three Scottish judges and in accordance with Scots law. The prosecution is expected to apply for an extension to the 110-day rule, under which the trial would normally commence within that period.

[RB: An account of the arrest of Abdelbaset Megrahi at Zeist by the Scottish police officer who carried it out can be read here.]

Temporary loss of Lockerbie Truth website

A message from Peter Biddulph:

For reason(s) unknown, lockerbietruth.com is off-line. We are exploring the help sections to discover why. According to the domain company our account and domain are active. But so far, we can't discover what has happened.

Update: The website is once again accessible, 15.00 BST.

A historian's view on Musa Kusa

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Michael Burleigh that appeared on the Mail Online website on this date in 2011:]

A dapper man, with thick grey hair, an icy manner and a fondness for Italian handmade suits, he has been dubbed the Envoy of Death and the Fingernail-Puller-in-Chief. Whatever his moniker, the truth is that, as the main apologist for the Gaddafi regime, he has been up to his eyeballs in murder and torture for years.

Musa Kusa has a sociology degree from Michigan State University where – surprise, surprise – his thesis was a potted biography of Gaddafi. Being well-born to a prominent Tripoli family, he managed to secure an interview with Gaddafi himself for the thesis and before long he was invited to join the dictator’s ruling clique.

Ever since, he has enjoyed the closest relationship with the dictator.

From 1979-80 he was in charge of security at all Libyan embassies in northern Europe, during which time half a dozen exiled Libyan dissidents were cold-bloodedly assassinated in Europe by agents acting on his orders. (...)

In 1980, Musa Kusa became Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain. Within months, though, he was expelled after telling journalists outside his embassy: ‘The revolutionary committees have decided last night to kill two more people (Libyan dissidents) in the United Kingdom. I approve of this’.

Unless the British authorities co-operated, he warned that Libya would encourage terrorism throughout the British mainland by funding the IRA and providing them with weapons. It was a cynical form of blackmail of the type that Gaddafi tried on the German government by threatening to support Leftist terrorists. (...)

Following his brief spell in London, he became the Tripoli-based head of the Mathaba, the fearsome Libyan Bureau for External Security. This role helped him increase his covert support for the IRA. (...)

Intelligence agencies are also convinced he was the man who co-ordinated all operational aspects of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing which blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the air, killing 270 passengers.

In that capacity he would have been the vital link between Gaddafi and the Lockerbie bomber Abdulbaset Al Megrahi.

This may explain why in October last year, it was Musa Kusa who travelled from Libya to see British and Scottish officials dealing with Megrahi’s application for compassionate release.

On the first occasion Musa Kusa was listed as ‘an interpreter’ rather than Minister of Security.

He would have had a very personal interest in securing the man’s release, as part of an agreement that in return for his freedom Megrahi would never reveal who had ordered and organised the bombing. It was, of course, Musa Kusa.

Flight 103 was not the only aircraft he tore from the skies. Western intelligence agents are convinced he systematically planned the deaths of 170 passengers blown up over Niger after Libyan agents planted a bomb on a flight from Chad to Paris. (...)

By 2003, he was at the heart of the MI6-led negotiations which brought the Mad Dog Gaddafi back into the civilised world, after Gaddafi offered to give up Weapons of Mass Destruction and renounce support for terrorism. (...)

The crimes I have described are probably only a handful of those for which Musa Kusa has been directly or indirectly responsible. He will have information on all manner of atrocities as well as on the Libyan arming of several terrorist organisations in Britain, Germany, Japan and the Middle East.

This is the man that Britain is now harbouring.

The Blair New Labour government, and elements in MI6, big business and academia, indulged in sordid dealings with the Gaddafi regime, which shamed this country.

Musa Kusa must be tried in a court of law and be held accountable for his countless crimes. Anything less will be greeted with outrage by the British and America public.

[RB: It appears that a significant figure in the Gaddafi regime, Mohammed Begasem Zwai (or Zway), who was formerly Minister of Justice and later ambassador in London, has just been appointed to an important position in the new regime. His part in the resolution of the Lockerbie impasse can be followed here.]