[This is the headline over a report (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Times, which has at last caught up with the rest of the UK media. The report reads as follows:]
A Maltese court has heard fresh testimony from witnesses called as part of the continuing Crown investigation into the Lockerbie bombing.
Several local witnesses gave evidence at the hearing last week before Claire Stafrace Zammit, a magistrate.
The court reviewed evidence connected to travel logistics, The Times of Malta reported.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the atrocity, died in May, but the Scottish investigation into the 1988 terrorist attack continues. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, remains the biggest single act of terrorism in Britain.
Robert Black, QC, who designed al-Megrahi’s trial at Camp Zeist, in which a Scottish Court sat in the Netherlands in 2000, said that all the evidence in the case should now be reviewed.
“They are not investigating the doubts about whether Megrahi was the culprit — that they take as a given,” said Professor Black, Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh.
A spokesman for the Crown Office and Dumfries & Galloway Constabulary said: “This is a live investigation to bring to justice the others involved in this act of State sponsored terrorism.”
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
The British media on the Malta court story
Following yesterday’s report in the Maltese newspaper The Times about a closed-doors Lockerbie court hearing before a magistrate on the island, pursuant to a request for judicial assistance from Scotland (which was first revealed in the UK on this blog) some of the British media have picked up the story. Scottish lawyers’ magazine The Firm has an article which can be read here; the BBC News website has a report here; the STV News website here; The Scotsman’s coverage can be read here; The Herald's here; The Press and Journal’s here; and the Daily Record’s here. These reports add little, if anything, to the Maltese newspaper article, apart from a statement from the Crown Office: “Dumfries and Galloway Police are working with US law enforcement in lines of inquiry. It would not be appropriate to offer further comment.”
Monday, 17 September 2012
Lockerbie and Hillsborough: the deliberate diversion of blame
[This is the headline over an article by Dr Jim Swire published today on the website of Scottish lawyers’ magazine The Firm. It reads as follows:]
Dr Jim Swire writes exclusively for The Firm, following the revelations in the Hillsborough papers, and sees the thread linking the common behaviour of the legal and political institutions that bind the Pan Am 103 affair with the tragic deaths at Hillsborough.
In the world confrontation between the terrorists and the developed communities of the West, the complex structures that regulate our societies have intelligence, high technology, well orchestrated military might and the precepts and respect of our peoples for the rule of law as their main resources.
From the nature of terrorism and the front line responses of Western intelligence springs a great temptation: to use the innately secretive culture of intelligence to react to terrorism in ways which their defended populations might denounce, were they only privy to them. 'Extraordinary rendition' is a good example of this. Yet reliance upon secrecy from their own populations can only ever be a temporary protection for those who overstep the line and use that privileged secrecy in ways that defy the rule of law, which they ostensibly support.
To cross that line and use our State resources in ways that are illegal is in the end to hand a moral victory to the terrorists. To divert blame away from the actual perpetrators is to protect them and to increase the chances of them striking again. The American response to terrorism has been profoundly different from the British. America has turned to intelligence/military responses in 'the war on terror'. Britain has striven to use intelligence/criminal law. Except where our leaders have got carried away by enthusiasm for the 'special relationship' with the US and dragged us, the people protesting, into military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But State pressure upon our law to produce politically desired convictions has produced terrible distortions of that law such as detention without trial and the warped trials of alleged terrorists such as the Maguire and other IRA related cases.
It is my belief that in the case of Lockerbie the law of Scotland has been subsumed into the priorities of American foreign policy.
Douglas Hurd, a man deserving of great respect for his personal intelligence and integrity has said to Tam Dalyell and Robin Cook, referring to Lockerbie: "I do ask you two to believe that as Foreign secretary I cannot tell the Scottish Crown Office (which was in charge of the Lockerbie case) what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves."
Yet I have come to believe over the past 25 years that not only did the US manipulate the Scottish criminal legal process, but that the Scottish Crown Office has ever since, fought a battle to maintain the fiction that it acted with integrity throughout the legal prosecution process.
In so doing they are in effect protecting the perpetrators of the dreadful terrorist massacre of the innocents that was Lockerbie in 1988, and damaging positive responses to better protect the future (such as making it a criminal offence for an airport not to report and take immediate appropriate action over break-ins perhaps?). I believe that in the long run it will be less damaging to the reputation of the West, and certainly for my favourite country, Scotland, to address these issues, and to take corrective action ourselves for the future, rather than allow our failures to be eventually exposed at the bar of history.
In a democratic society the more citizens who assess such matters for themselves, the greater is likely to be the integrity of the decisions which their politicians must eventually take to resolve the issues.
[An email sent to me by Dr Swire, in addition to the text reproduced above, contains the following:]
25 years ago my elder daughter, Flora walked the aisles of Heathrow airport, traversed the security check points, left the departure lounge on an exciting trip to board Pan Am 103 in order to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend.
38 minutes later this beautiful, brilliant and innocent 23 year old, along with 269 others was slain by a bomb loaded at Heathrow and exploding aboard her plane high above the heads of the unsuspecting people of Lockerbie as they innocently prepared their homes for Christmas.
I have always been determined that the truth should come out about who did this dreadful thing, our search has been always and resolutely for truth and justice.
Those who oppose that protect the real perpetrators.
We relatives also have a right to know why she and all those who died with her were not protected.
Why was it that as she and all the others walked those long Heathrow corridors neither they nor anyone outside the airport knew that there had been a break-in there 16 hours before PA103 was blown up and that despite raised worries about impending terror attacks, no appropriate steps had been taken there to identify the intruder, nor his motive? Maybe the lurking terrorist even heard their happy voices.
Why was it that during the ensuing trial of Baset al-Megrahi evidence was led, but rejected, of the availability of Syrian-made IEDs to mid East terrorists which were obligated always to explode between 35 and 45 minutes after take off, and for the use of which money appeared to have been paid by Iran, the State having the most pressing need for revenge against the US?
Why was it that although we now know the investigating Scottish police were fully aware of the Heathrow break-in, it remained hidden from view and from the Zeist court until after the verdict?
Why was the unlikely story of Megrahi having used a long running and fully adjustable timer in Malta to arrange for his bomb to traverse Frankfurt and a change of planes at Heathrow only to have it explode a mere 38 minutes into the flight rather than over the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, accepted by the court?
Why on earth would he take such a risk of delays to the take-off time?
The court did hear how an available type of air pressure sensitive IED made by a Syrian terror group, if put aboard a target aircraft at the airport of take-off would always explode between 35 and 45 minutes following take off. Why did the court decide that this cock and bull story about Malta and Megrahi should take precedence over the so simple concept that one of the Syrian IEDs might in fact have been put aboard at Heathrow?
Why did the Crown Office and their investigators withhold the information from the court about the Heathrow break-in until after the verdict?
Why was it that the court was not made fully aware of the known excitement between the Maltese Gauci brothers who claimed to identify Megrahi, over the prospects of multi million dollar rewards if they would only identify him?
Why was the court not made fully aware of the police methodology used to 'encourage' those brothers to identify Megrahi, contrary to the accepted police identification processes?
Why was it that the Crown Office failed to listen even to the warnings of their own forensic expert Feraday that a fragment of circuit board (allegedly originating from the wreckage) simply did not match the Libyan bomb timer board allegedly used?
Why was it that this fragment was found within the only police evidence bag which showed signs of having had its label tampered with, in such a way as to draw attention to debris such as the fragment, rather than simply cloth within the bag's contents?
Who changed that label?
What was his motive?
What else might have been done to the contents of the bag?
Since it is now known, courtesy of a book Megrahi: You are my Jury that the famous fragment could not have come from a Libyan timer circuit board as believed in the court, where might it have originated?
The sole justification for the acceptance of the fragment as genuine evidence was that it was found inside the police evidence bag (with its corrupted label) and the ensuing (now known to be erroneous) belief that the fragment had been part of a Libyan timer. Now that we know that the scientific evidence shows irrefutably that it could not have come from a batch of Libyan timers sold to Libya by the Swiss firm MEBO, where could it have come from?
The fragment contains evidence of the use of a most unusual plating process, provably not available to the Swiss firm which made the Libyan timers. There was not a scrap of evidence of any other possible origin for this fragment, such as other electronic equipment among the wreckage. So where did it originate and how did it get into that evidence bag?
Why was it that the police notebooks of some of the officers involved in the searches of the crash site were destroyed?
Who ordered that?
What was their motive for doing so?
Now that we know that PT35b, the fragment, did not come from a Libyan timer in the bomb, we find that we know of no other origin in the wreckage for it. If it really was recovered from the crash site, a full search of all police notebooks relevant to the search at the wreckage field, and to the transactions occurring over the sorting of wreckage taken into hangers etc would be mandatory if the fragment's point of origin is to be established. Yet key police notebooks appear to have been destroyed.
How can today's Lord Advocate expect us to believe that everything is being done to reach the truth through an active ongoing criminal investigation, when his Department, the Crown Office appears to have allowed the destruction of substantial tranches of what might have been key evidence, in addition to appearing to have allowed illegal changes to have been made to at least one police evidence bag label?
Frankly, on the basis of common sense it looks as though the role of 'fall-guy', prepared by the police at Hillsborough for the fans in the crowd was replaced in this case by the Libyan Megrahi. It seems the available evidence has been selectively massaged in such a way as to make the verdict against him possible.
Who could have wanted such an outcome?
Where in the world was the extraordinary plating process used on the 'famous fragment' available before Lockerbie?
In whose interest would it be to divert blame to a Libyan individual?
We have fought for nearly 25 years for our right to see the truth about how our lovely families came to be murdered.
Personally I would still wish to avoid attacking those who made mistakes, but I would also want to see the truth about Lockerbie used to enhance the protection that we have against future terror attacks partly through the protection we afford in future to our legal systems against insidious and improper infiltration.
There is a warning in Christian faith against seeking revenge against our enemies, and until now I have tried politely to request a full and objective inquiry into all these and many other aspects of this dreadful business, believing that the judicial process should supplant the human lust for revenge.
If the judicial process has indeed failed, then it needs to be improved. If the outcome of the trial was achieved by deliberate manipulation of the evidence with destruction of parts hostile to the desired outcome, then criminal charges will be mandatory.Those individuals through whom it failed should certainly be identified and the nature of and motives for their failures analysed, the better to prevent recurrence, but the overall aim should be to ensure that such manipulation of our justice system can never occur again, rather than the hounding of individuals.
For years now, ever since I heard the description of the Syrian bombs with their obligated 35-45 minute flight times revealed in the Zeist court, I have been convinced that justice got it wrong over Lockerbie and that other interests than justice and truth were allowed to intrude. Much has come to light since to reinforce that view, to the point where serious study of the evidence is incompatible with an objective belief in the propriety of the court's findings
There is also a special case for compassion for the majority of the US relatives. They have suffered every bit as much as we have, yet they believe they have 'closure' in the blaming of Megrahi.
Together with one other UK relative I was present throughout the trial of Megrahi. There was a capacious lounge set aside for the relatives who came to watch the trial. The US Department of Justice offered each American family an 'all expenses paid' fortnight. As those families trooped through the relatives' lounge they (and we) were treated to evening reviews by a mixed group of Scottish prosecution lawyers and US lawyers invited to sit on the prosecution bench in court. The content was choreographed to convey, right from the start the message 'these are the bastards who murdered your families, we got them they are going to go down for a very very long time'. The defence side was not represented.
This was grooming writ large and official, and our Scottish prosecution lawyers were an integral part of it.
It now transpires that a similar campaign of propaganda has continued ever since, culminating in disgraceful attempts by US Secretary Clinton with the full backing of some US relatives, to extradite Megrahi from his family and from Libya in his last few dying days, to face a new sentencing in the US.
Whilst we cannot blame US relatives for believing what their country and our justice system were telling them, this looks to me like the very thirst for revenge that Christ warned us against. It has long been a worry to me that insistence on trying to unravel the real facts about Lockerbie was making bereavement more difficult for those who thought they found closure over the Megrahi case.
Three events this year have triggered my belief that there is evil stalking the corridors of power over this case.
1. In February the current Lord Advocate explained to us that he was puzzled as to why the Heathrow evidence had not been available to Megrahi's defence during his trial. Here the evil might simply be complacency and sloth. Surely twelve years is long enough for the Crown Office to find the answer to that one.
Consequent to this meeting I asked for help and received a reply from the current Chief Constable of the D & G police. I then wrote to the Crown Office about the D & G letter writing that:- 'It (the letter) shows that despite prompt investigations at Heathrow by the Met. and the passing of their findings to the Lockerbie incident control centre certainly by February 1989, a decision must have been taken not to follow the implications of this information, and to assume that the bomb had come to Heathrow from Frankfurt via Pan Am 103A.'
I have now received a reply to that letter in which the head of Serious and Organised Crime Division of the Crown Office,on behalf of the Lord Advocate, writes:
'In relation to the insecurity at Heathrow, you suggest that "a decision must have been taken not to follow the implications of this information and to assume that the bomb had come from Frankfurt to Heathrow via Pan Am 103 A." No such decision was taken and no such assumption was made.'
Really? I feel no match for the skill of the Crown Office in using words in this way. Why then did this information not get passed to Megrahi's defence team till after the verdict?
2. In May John Ashton's book Megrahi: you are my Jury was launched in Edinburgh by the doughty publishing company Birlinn. The book tells of sound scientific evidence that the 'famous timer fragment' simply could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers as alleged in court.
That very May morning, before they had had time to review the book, Downing Street issued a statement alleging that 'The book is an insult to the Lockerbie relatives'. Since I had written to [Prime Minister David] Cameron long before to ask him to review the Lockerbie case and received no help whatsoever for such a suggestion, he was presumably intending to speak for the US relatives.
In fact the book adds very significantly to what is now known about the truth, that is no insult. What is the full fear that Westminster seems to harbour over the exposure of truth in this case?
It is not the job of a British Prime Minister to speak for US relatives and ignore his own citizens. Surely it was his predecessors' job to protect our families on board an aircraft at Heathrow. It is not alleged even by the Crown Office that the bomb was loaded aboard PA103 itself anywhere other than at London Heathrow.
No help for British relatives there then...
3. The Hillsborough disaster has revealed the lengths to which the police there were prepared to go to divert blame from the failure to provide for the safety of citizens by their own and other organs of state.
In the case of the D & G police and Crown Office over Lockerbie diversion of blame was to the Libyan Megrahi. I don't know why the Scottish Crown Office allowed themselves to divert the blame from Iran/Syria and the criminal negligence of the security at Heathrow airport. Perhaps it was all down to human error, but consider these two paragraphs below from Tam Dalyell's foreword to a previous book from John Ashton [and Ian Ferguson] titled Cover-up of Convenience written in 2001 and published by Mainstream also of Edinburgh.
a) Tam was told by an off duty Scottish police officer that....'American agents were swarming around the (crash) area openly removing items of debris.....the police were doing nothing to stop them'.
b) “Douglas (Hurd) swooped down on Robin (Cook) and myself (Tam). He said 'I do ask you two to believe that as Foreign secretary I cannot tell the Scottish Crown Office (which was in charge of the Lockerbie case) what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves.’”
So it is indeed from 'the Scottish Crown Office' and their agents the D & G police that answers must come. They may be a 'law unto themselves' yet they must abide by the parameters of the justice system which they are supposed to serve.
In previous years the Chinook and McKie (fingerprint) cases north of the border have shown similar police failings. With the blatant diversion of blame over Chinook, diverting it away from the Ministry of Defence to the pilots, and in the McKie case, away from the Scottish fingerprint service onto his innocent daughter Shirley McKie.
I doubt that those seeking to protect their own reputations understand the anguish that such deceit adds to the burden of families. The need for the truth does not fade for the families, and deceit achieves nothing in the long run, except to add to their suffering and to undermine public confidence in the blindfold against becoming partial which justice should always wear.
Never ever should the families be denied the truth.
There are lessons to be taken from Hillsborough, the magnificent persistence and determination of the families and the fallibility of inadequate inquiries which actually increased the anguish of those families.
I dread seeing other families traumatised in the future by failure to learn the lessons of Lockerbie.
At Lockerbie the majority of the deaths were Americans and what happened? The US groomed the relatives to 'help' them to believe they were seeing justice at Zeist.
John Mosey and I were there throughout we saw it all but were too naive and too polite to tell them to go away and let us make up our own minds.
The result? Those relatives mostly still believe that the Megrahi story was true, despite all that has come out since.
I think both John and I have felt restrained by the US relatives whose pain and loss is just as great as ours, and we have tried not to cause additional distress to them by directly challenging their 'closure'. We have even watched silently as Hillary Clinton and others, in the last days of Megrahi's life, and egged on by those very relatives, made efforts to extract him from Libya to be 'retried'. That was difficult.
Thus many of the US relatives unwittingly have been forged into a useful tool in the hands of those who want the wickedness of the trial to remain in position.
The 'police wickedness' over Lockerbie is very real and very Scottish. Not for nothing did I use Tam Dalyell's foreword to John Ashton's previous book at the [Edinburgh International] Book Festival meeting. His words describe how the D & G police were allowing Americans to run freely all over the crash site doing what they liked and making no effort to prevent them from doing so. From day one that became the pattern, and thus the dictates of US foreign policy have been enabled to become the overriding guide for how the prosecution was designed to work out.
During Megrahi's second appeal the Advocate General was sent scuttling to Westminster to ask permission for a revealing document to be released to the defence. The result was the imposition of a Public Interest Immunity (PII) Certificate by the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband blocking the document's release. In a radio four programme in August 2009, David Miliband was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Great Lives. He had stated that he believed there are circumstances in which terrorism is "justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective" – though he added that "it is never effective on its own".
The ability of terrorism to inflict damage on its target State and that State's citizens is hugely amplified if that State allows the normal parameters of its legal system to be blunted in order to transfer the attribution of blame to an innocent third party. The impartial rule of law is arguably the strongest weapon we have against the anarchy of terrorism. To restrict the freedom of our law in favour of such anarchy by the deliberate transfer of blame away from the real perpetrators is indeed to make terrorism more effective.
In the case of Lockerbie the terrible damage that terrorism inflicted on its targets at the time has been amplified by the actions of its target states themselves in distorting their own justice systems.
Dr Jim Swire writes exclusively for The Firm, following the revelations in the Hillsborough papers, and sees the thread linking the common behaviour of the legal and political institutions that bind the Pan Am 103 affair with the tragic deaths at Hillsborough.
In the world confrontation between the terrorists and the developed communities of the West, the complex structures that regulate our societies have intelligence, high technology, well orchestrated military might and the precepts and respect of our peoples for the rule of law as their main resources.
From the nature of terrorism and the front line responses of Western intelligence springs a great temptation: to use the innately secretive culture of intelligence to react to terrorism in ways which their defended populations might denounce, were they only privy to them. 'Extraordinary rendition' is a good example of this. Yet reliance upon secrecy from their own populations can only ever be a temporary protection for those who overstep the line and use that privileged secrecy in ways that defy the rule of law, which they ostensibly support.
To cross that line and use our State resources in ways that are illegal is in the end to hand a moral victory to the terrorists. To divert blame away from the actual perpetrators is to protect them and to increase the chances of them striking again. The American response to terrorism has been profoundly different from the British. America has turned to intelligence/military responses in 'the war on terror'. Britain has striven to use intelligence/criminal law. Except where our leaders have got carried away by enthusiasm for the 'special relationship' with the US and dragged us, the people protesting, into military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But State pressure upon our law to produce politically desired convictions has produced terrible distortions of that law such as detention without trial and the warped trials of alleged terrorists such as the Maguire and other IRA related cases.
It is my belief that in the case of Lockerbie the law of Scotland has been subsumed into the priorities of American foreign policy.
Douglas Hurd, a man deserving of great respect for his personal intelligence and integrity has said to Tam Dalyell and Robin Cook, referring to Lockerbie: "I do ask you two to believe that as Foreign secretary I cannot tell the Scottish Crown Office (which was in charge of the Lockerbie case) what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves."
Yet I have come to believe over the past 25 years that not only did the US manipulate the Scottish criminal legal process, but that the Scottish Crown Office has ever since, fought a battle to maintain the fiction that it acted with integrity throughout the legal prosecution process.
In so doing they are in effect protecting the perpetrators of the dreadful terrorist massacre of the innocents that was Lockerbie in 1988, and damaging positive responses to better protect the future (such as making it a criminal offence for an airport not to report and take immediate appropriate action over break-ins perhaps?). I believe that in the long run it will be less damaging to the reputation of the West, and certainly for my favourite country, Scotland, to address these issues, and to take corrective action ourselves for the future, rather than allow our failures to be eventually exposed at the bar of history.
In a democratic society the more citizens who assess such matters for themselves, the greater is likely to be the integrity of the decisions which their politicians must eventually take to resolve the issues.
[An email sent to me by Dr Swire, in addition to the text reproduced above, contains the following:]
25 years ago my elder daughter, Flora walked the aisles of Heathrow airport, traversed the security check points, left the departure lounge on an exciting trip to board Pan Am 103 in order to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend.
38 minutes later this beautiful, brilliant and innocent 23 year old, along with 269 others was slain by a bomb loaded at Heathrow and exploding aboard her plane high above the heads of the unsuspecting people of Lockerbie as they innocently prepared their homes for Christmas.
I have always been determined that the truth should come out about who did this dreadful thing, our search has been always and resolutely for truth and justice.
Those who oppose that protect the real perpetrators.
We relatives also have a right to know why she and all those who died with her were not protected.
Why was it that as she and all the others walked those long Heathrow corridors neither they nor anyone outside the airport knew that there had been a break-in there 16 hours before PA103 was blown up and that despite raised worries about impending terror attacks, no appropriate steps had been taken there to identify the intruder, nor his motive? Maybe the lurking terrorist even heard their happy voices.
Why was it that during the ensuing trial of Baset al-Megrahi evidence was led, but rejected, of the availability of Syrian-made IEDs to mid East terrorists which were obligated always to explode between 35 and 45 minutes after take off, and for the use of which money appeared to have been paid by Iran, the State having the most pressing need for revenge against the US?
Why was it that although we now know the investigating Scottish police were fully aware of the Heathrow break-in, it remained hidden from view and from the Zeist court until after the verdict?
Why was the unlikely story of Megrahi having used a long running and fully adjustable timer in Malta to arrange for his bomb to traverse Frankfurt and a change of planes at Heathrow only to have it explode a mere 38 minutes into the flight rather than over the far reaches of the Atlantic Ocean, accepted by the court?
Why on earth would he take such a risk of delays to the take-off time?
The court did hear how an available type of air pressure sensitive IED made by a Syrian terror group, if put aboard a target aircraft at the airport of take-off would always explode between 35 and 45 minutes following take off. Why did the court decide that this cock and bull story about Malta and Megrahi should take precedence over the so simple concept that one of the Syrian IEDs might in fact have been put aboard at Heathrow?
Why did the Crown Office and their investigators withhold the information from the court about the Heathrow break-in until after the verdict?
Why was it that the court was not made fully aware of the known excitement between the Maltese Gauci brothers who claimed to identify Megrahi, over the prospects of multi million dollar rewards if they would only identify him?
Why was the court not made fully aware of the police methodology used to 'encourage' those brothers to identify Megrahi, contrary to the accepted police identification processes?
Why was it that the Crown Office failed to listen even to the warnings of their own forensic expert Feraday that a fragment of circuit board (allegedly originating from the wreckage) simply did not match the Libyan bomb timer board allegedly used?
Why was it that this fragment was found within the only police evidence bag which showed signs of having had its label tampered with, in such a way as to draw attention to debris such as the fragment, rather than simply cloth within the bag's contents?
Who changed that label?
What was his motive?
What else might have been done to the contents of the bag?
Since it is now known, courtesy of a book Megrahi: You are my Jury that the famous fragment could not have come from a Libyan timer circuit board as believed in the court, where might it have originated?
The sole justification for the acceptance of the fragment as genuine evidence was that it was found inside the police evidence bag (with its corrupted label) and the ensuing (now known to be erroneous) belief that the fragment had been part of a Libyan timer. Now that we know that the scientific evidence shows irrefutably that it could not have come from a batch of Libyan timers sold to Libya by the Swiss firm MEBO, where could it have come from?
The fragment contains evidence of the use of a most unusual plating process, provably not available to the Swiss firm which made the Libyan timers. There was not a scrap of evidence of any other possible origin for this fragment, such as other electronic equipment among the wreckage. So where did it originate and how did it get into that evidence bag?
Why was it that the police notebooks of some of the officers involved in the searches of the crash site were destroyed?
Who ordered that?
What was their motive for doing so?
Now that we know that PT35b, the fragment, did not come from a Libyan timer in the bomb, we find that we know of no other origin in the wreckage for it. If it really was recovered from the crash site, a full search of all police notebooks relevant to the search at the wreckage field, and to the transactions occurring over the sorting of wreckage taken into hangers etc would be mandatory if the fragment's point of origin is to be established. Yet key police notebooks appear to have been destroyed.
How can today's Lord Advocate expect us to believe that everything is being done to reach the truth through an active ongoing criminal investigation, when his Department, the Crown Office appears to have allowed the destruction of substantial tranches of what might have been key evidence, in addition to appearing to have allowed illegal changes to have been made to at least one police evidence bag label?
Frankly, on the basis of common sense it looks as though the role of 'fall-guy', prepared by the police at Hillsborough for the fans in the crowd was replaced in this case by the Libyan Megrahi. It seems the available evidence has been selectively massaged in such a way as to make the verdict against him possible.
Who could have wanted such an outcome?
Where in the world was the extraordinary plating process used on the 'famous fragment' available before Lockerbie?
In whose interest would it be to divert blame to a Libyan individual?
We have fought for nearly 25 years for our right to see the truth about how our lovely families came to be murdered.
Personally I would still wish to avoid attacking those who made mistakes, but I would also want to see the truth about Lockerbie used to enhance the protection that we have against future terror attacks partly through the protection we afford in future to our legal systems against insidious and improper infiltration.
There is a warning in Christian faith against seeking revenge against our enemies, and until now I have tried politely to request a full and objective inquiry into all these and many other aspects of this dreadful business, believing that the judicial process should supplant the human lust for revenge.
If the judicial process has indeed failed, then it needs to be improved. If the outcome of the trial was achieved by deliberate manipulation of the evidence with destruction of parts hostile to the desired outcome, then criminal charges will be mandatory.Those individuals through whom it failed should certainly be identified and the nature of and motives for their failures analysed, the better to prevent recurrence, but the overall aim should be to ensure that such manipulation of our justice system can never occur again, rather than the hounding of individuals.
For years now, ever since I heard the description of the Syrian bombs with their obligated 35-45 minute flight times revealed in the Zeist court, I have been convinced that justice got it wrong over Lockerbie and that other interests than justice and truth were allowed to intrude. Much has come to light since to reinforce that view, to the point where serious study of the evidence is incompatible with an objective belief in the propriety of the court's findings
There is also a special case for compassion for the majority of the US relatives. They have suffered every bit as much as we have, yet they believe they have 'closure' in the blaming of Megrahi.
Together with one other UK relative I was present throughout the trial of Megrahi. There was a capacious lounge set aside for the relatives who came to watch the trial. The US Department of Justice offered each American family an 'all expenses paid' fortnight. As those families trooped through the relatives' lounge they (and we) were treated to evening reviews by a mixed group of Scottish prosecution lawyers and US lawyers invited to sit on the prosecution bench in court. The content was choreographed to convey, right from the start the message 'these are the bastards who murdered your families, we got them they are going to go down for a very very long time'. The defence side was not represented.
This was grooming writ large and official, and our Scottish prosecution lawyers were an integral part of it.
It now transpires that a similar campaign of propaganda has continued ever since, culminating in disgraceful attempts by US Secretary Clinton with the full backing of some US relatives, to extradite Megrahi from his family and from Libya in his last few dying days, to face a new sentencing in the US.
Whilst we cannot blame US relatives for believing what their country and our justice system were telling them, this looks to me like the very thirst for revenge that Christ warned us against. It has long been a worry to me that insistence on trying to unravel the real facts about Lockerbie was making bereavement more difficult for those who thought they found closure over the Megrahi case.
Three events this year have triggered my belief that there is evil stalking the corridors of power over this case.
1. In February the current Lord Advocate explained to us that he was puzzled as to why the Heathrow evidence had not been available to Megrahi's defence during his trial. Here the evil might simply be complacency and sloth. Surely twelve years is long enough for the Crown Office to find the answer to that one.
Consequent to this meeting I asked for help and received a reply from the current Chief Constable of the D & G police. I then wrote to the Crown Office about the D & G letter writing that:- 'It (the letter) shows that despite prompt investigations at Heathrow by the Met. and the passing of their findings to the Lockerbie incident control centre certainly by February 1989, a decision must have been taken not to follow the implications of this information, and to assume that the bomb had come to Heathrow from Frankfurt via Pan Am 103A.'
I have now received a reply to that letter in which the head of Serious and Organised Crime Division of the Crown Office,on behalf of the Lord Advocate, writes:
'In relation to the insecurity at Heathrow, you suggest that "a decision must have been taken not to follow the implications of this information and to assume that the bomb had come from Frankfurt to Heathrow via Pan Am 103 A." No such decision was taken and no such assumption was made.'
Really? I feel no match for the skill of the Crown Office in using words in this way. Why then did this information not get passed to Megrahi's defence team till after the verdict?
2. In May John Ashton's book Megrahi: you are my Jury was launched in Edinburgh by the doughty publishing company Birlinn. The book tells of sound scientific evidence that the 'famous timer fragment' simply could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers as alleged in court.
That very May morning, before they had had time to review the book, Downing Street issued a statement alleging that 'The book is an insult to the Lockerbie relatives'. Since I had written to [Prime Minister David] Cameron long before to ask him to review the Lockerbie case and received no help whatsoever for such a suggestion, he was presumably intending to speak for the US relatives.
In fact the book adds very significantly to what is now known about the truth, that is no insult. What is the full fear that Westminster seems to harbour over the exposure of truth in this case?
It is not the job of a British Prime Minister to speak for US relatives and ignore his own citizens. Surely it was his predecessors' job to protect our families on board an aircraft at Heathrow. It is not alleged even by the Crown Office that the bomb was loaded aboard PA103 itself anywhere other than at London Heathrow.
No help for British relatives there then...
3. The Hillsborough disaster has revealed the lengths to which the police there were prepared to go to divert blame from the failure to provide for the safety of citizens by their own and other organs of state.
In the case of the D & G police and Crown Office over Lockerbie diversion of blame was to the Libyan Megrahi. I don't know why the Scottish Crown Office allowed themselves to divert the blame from Iran/Syria and the criminal negligence of the security at Heathrow airport. Perhaps it was all down to human error, but consider these two paragraphs below from Tam Dalyell's foreword to a previous book from John Ashton [and Ian Ferguson] titled Cover-up of Convenience written in 2001 and published by Mainstream also of Edinburgh.
a) Tam was told by an off duty Scottish police officer that....'American agents were swarming around the (crash) area openly removing items of debris.....the police were doing nothing to stop them'.
b) “Douglas (Hurd) swooped down on Robin (Cook) and myself (Tam). He said 'I do ask you two to believe that as Foreign secretary I cannot tell the Scottish Crown Office (which was in charge of the Lockerbie case) what to do, nor does the Foreign Office have detailed access to evidence which they say they have. You must understand that law officers really are a law unto themselves.’”
So it is indeed from 'the Scottish Crown Office' and their agents the D & G police that answers must come. They may be a 'law unto themselves' yet they must abide by the parameters of the justice system which they are supposed to serve.
In previous years the Chinook and McKie (fingerprint) cases north of the border have shown similar police failings. With the blatant diversion of blame over Chinook, diverting it away from the Ministry of Defence to the pilots, and in the McKie case, away from the Scottish fingerprint service onto his innocent daughter Shirley McKie.
I doubt that those seeking to protect their own reputations understand the anguish that such deceit adds to the burden of families. The need for the truth does not fade for the families, and deceit achieves nothing in the long run, except to add to their suffering and to undermine public confidence in the blindfold against becoming partial which justice should always wear.
Never ever should the families be denied the truth.
There are lessons to be taken from Hillsborough, the magnificent persistence and determination of the families and the fallibility of inadequate inquiries which actually increased the anguish of those families.
I dread seeing other families traumatised in the future by failure to learn the lessons of Lockerbie.
At Lockerbie the majority of the deaths were Americans and what happened? The US groomed the relatives to 'help' them to believe they were seeing justice at Zeist.
John Mosey and I were there throughout we saw it all but were too naive and too polite to tell them to go away and let us make up our own minds.
The result? Those relatives mostly still believe that the Megrahi story was true, despite all that has come out since.
I think both John and I have felt restrained by the US relatives whose pain and loss is just as great as ours, and we have tried not to cause additional distress to them by directly challenging their 'closure'. We have even watched silently as Hillary Clinton and others, in the last days of Megrahi's life, and egged on by those very relatives, made efforts to extract him from Libya to be 'retried'. That was difficult.
Thus many of the US relatives unwittingly have been forged into a useful tool in the hands of those who want the wickedness of the trial to remain in position.
The 'police wickedness' over Lockerbie is very real and very Scottish. Not for nothing did I use Tam Dalyell's foreword to John Ashton's previous book at the [Edinburgh International] Book Festival meeting. His words describe how the D & G police were allowing Americans to run freely all over the crash site doing what they liked and making no effort to prevent them from doing so. From day one that became the pattern, and thus the dictates of US foreign policy have been enabled to become the overriding guide for how the prosecution was designed to work out.
During Megrahi's second appeal the Advocate General was sent scuttling to Westminster to ask permission for a revealing document to be released to the defence. The result was the imposition of a Public Interest Immunity (PII) Certificate by the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband blocking the document's release. In a radio four programme in August 2009, David Miliband was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Great Lives. He had stated that he believed there are circumstances in which terrorism is "justifiable, and yes, there are circumstances in which it is effective" – though he added that "it is never effective on its own".
The ability of terrorism to inflict damage on its target State and that State's citizens is hugely amplified if that State allows the normal parameters of its legal system to be blunted in order to transfer the attribution of blame to an innocent third party. The impartial rule of law is arguably the strongest weapon we have against the anarchy of terrorism. To restrict the freedom of our law in favour of such anarchy by the deliberate transfer of blame away from the real perpetrators is indeed to make terrorism more effective.
In the case of Lockerbie the terrible damage that terrorism inflicted on its targets at the time has been amplified by the actions of its target states themselves in distorting their own justice systems.
Maltese courts gather fresh Lockerbie evidence
[This is the headline over a report published today in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads as follows:]
'Scotland's letter asked for judicial assistance'
The Maltese courts have been asked to gather fresh evidence connected to the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, The Times has learnt.
Hearings took place behind closed doors last week before Magistrate Claire Stafrace Zammit. Several Maltese witnesses were called to testify.
The court appears to be reviewing evidence connected to travel logistics but no further information could be obtained from Maltese or Scottish sources.
So high was the level of secrecy surrounding the hearings that the court ushers placed brown, government-issue envelopes in front of the peep-holes on the doors of the courtroom, to prevent even passersby from having a look inside.
The development comes as a group of Scottish lobbyists, who reject the conclusion of the investigation and subsequent conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, prepare to present arguments for the case to be re-examined in an inquiry.
They will appear before the Scottish Parliament later this month.
Speaking to The Times, Lockerbie campaigner Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the attack with another 269 victims, said he was unaware that the Scottish authorities had re-opened any investigation into the atrocity but did not find it surprising.
Over recent years, key elements of the prosecution’s case have been called into question, he pointed out, adding it would be entirely plausible for there to be an attempt to shore up questioned evidence in view of a potential fresh probe into the case.
Attempts to contact the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service, were unsuccessful, while locally the Attorney General’s office would not confirm or deny information about the hearings.
Nonetheless, multiple sources have confirmed that the hearings were connected with the Lockerbie case and were instigated by what is known as a Rogatory Letter from Scotland.
In the letter, a foreign judicial or prosecution institution asks a counterpart in another country for judicial assistance, usually the taking of evidence.
Serious doubts have been raised over the years about crucial evidence that underpinned the trial of former Libyan intelligence officer al-Megrahi.
In August of 2009, hopes that his appeal would shed new light on the matter were dashed when he withdrew his right to challenge his 27-year prison sentence, in return for an early release on compassionate grounds – he suffered from terminal cancer and died in May of this year.
Yet, interest in the case has been re-ignited in the wake of the revolution in Libya.
The upheaval brought about access to previously inaccessible documents and the capture and repatriation late last month of the regime’s infamous intelligence chief, Adbullah al-Senussi – the man who would have had most access to Gaddafi’s darkest secrets.
Lockerbie campaigners such as Dr Swire hope that these developments, as well as an impressive body of evidence disputing the official case, will be reconsidered in an inquiry.
Malta stands to clear her name should such an inquiry take place.
The officially accepted version, underpinned by the disputed testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, is premised on the idea that the bomb left Malta – where al-Megrahi worked at the time – and was then transferred onto Pan Am flight 103 through Frankfurt.
Mr Gauci had identified Mr al-Megrahi as the person who in December 1988 made a random purchase of clothing, the fragments of which were found scattered on the disaster site in Lockerbie.
However, evidence that Mr Gauci had been coached, along with a promise of compensation from the CIA, have undermined the credibility of his testimony.
Inconsistencies in his version have also been pointed out along the years.
The Maltese Government has consistently denied that the bomb could have gone through Luqa airport but has, over recent years, been hesitant to support calls for the case to be re-investigated.
'Scotland's letter asked for judicial assistance'
The Maltese courts have been asked to gather fresh evidence connected to the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, The Times has learnt.
Hearings took place behind closed doors last week before Magistrate Claire Stafrace Zammit. Several Maltese witnesses were called to testify.
The court appears to be reviewing evidence connected to travel logistics but no further information could be obtained from Maltese or Scottish sources.
So high was the level of secrecy surrounding the hearings that the court ushers placed brown, government-issue envelopes in front of the peep-holes on the doors of the courtroom, to prevent even passersby from having a look inside.
The development comes as a group of Scottish lobbyists, who reject the conclusion of the investigation and subsequent conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, prepare to present arguments for the case to be re-examined in an inquiry.
They will appear before the Scottish Parliament later this month.
Speaking to The Times, Lockerbie campaigner Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the attack with another 269 victims, said he was unaware that the Scottish authorities had re-opened any investigation into the atrocity but did not find it surprising.
Over recent years, key elements of the prosecution’s case have been called into question, he pointed out, adding it would be entirely plausible for there to be an attempt to shore up questioned evidence in view of a potential fresh probe into the case.
Attempts to contact the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service, were unsuccessful, while locally the Attorney General’s office would not confirm or deny information about the hearings.
Nonetheless, multiple sources have confirmed that the hearings were connected with the Lockerbie case and were instigated by what is known as a Rogatory Letter from Scotland.
In the letter, a foreign judicial or prosecution institution asks a counterpart in another country for judicial assistance, usually the taking of evidence.
Serious doubts have been raised over the years about crucial evidence that underpinned the trial of former Libyan intelligence officer al-Megrahi.
In August of 2009, hopes that his appeal would shed new light on the matter were dashed when he withdrew his right to challenge his 27-year prison sentence, in return for an early release on compassionate grounds – he suffered from terminal cancer and died in May of this year.
Yet, interest in the case has been re-ignited in the wake of the revolution in Libya.
The upheaval brought about access to previously inaccessible documents and the capture and repatriation late last month of the regime’s infamous intelligence chief, Adbullah al-Senussi – the man who would have had most access to Gaddafi’s darkest secrets.
Lockerbie campaigners such as Dr Swire hope that these developments, as well as an impressive body of evidence disputing the official case, will be reconsidered in an inquiry.
Malta stands to clear her name should such an inquiry take place.
The officially accepted version, underpinned by the disputed testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, is premised on the idea that the bomb left Malta – where al-Megrahi worked at the time – and was then transferred onto Pan Am flight 103 through Frankfurt.
Mr Gauci had identified Mr al-Megrahi as the person who in December 1988 made a random purchase of clothing, the fragments of which were found scattered on the disaster site in Lockerbie.
However, evidence that Mr Gauci had been coached, along with a promise of compensation from the CIA, have undermined the credibility of his testimony.
Inconsistencies in his version have also been pointed out along the years.
The Maltese Government has consistently denied that the bomb could have gone through Luqa airport but has, over recent years, been hesitant to support calls for the case to be re-investigated.
Author warning over Lockerbie
[This is the headline over a report by Marcello Mega in today’s edition of The Herald. It reads in part:]
One of Scotland's leading authors has warned the Scottish Government not to hold a vote on independence before tackling the "enormous stain" on Scotland's justice system left by the Lockerbie bombing.
James Robertson, acclaimed by First Minister Alex Salmond and many others as Scotland's finest living writer, says he is in broad terms in favour of Scottish independence.
But he adds: "I wouldn't want to go into a referendum with people saying our justice system is not in good health and able to point to Lockerbie to support that view."
He said that because of the uncertainty surrounding the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, "there is an enormous stain on the Scottish justice system and we cannot move forward without erasing it".
Mr Robertson, best known for And The Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, has taken a profound interest in Lockerbie, and it has influenced his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, to be published by Penguin in May 2013.
Last year he delivered a compelling Saltire Society lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, spelling out why he believed Megrahi had suffered a miscarriage of justice.
He also wrote to Mr Salmond to express support for the calls of the UK relatives for a full and independent inquiry, and was disappointed to receive the standard response – that the Scottish Government had no reason to doubt the safety of Megrahi's conviction.
Mr Robertson said: "If the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission saw clear grounds for a second appeal, it's hard for the Government to continue to justify that position.
"We need a full and independent inquiry to resolve it, very obviously for the sakes of the relatives, but also to underline Scotland's integrity if we are to move towards independence." (...)
The Scottish Government insists it lacks the powers to preside over a sufficiently wide-ranging probe, but the Crown Office is continuing to investigate the bombing in the hope of bringing others to justice.
Last night, the Scottish Government said: "It remains open for relatives of Mr al Megrahi or the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie atrocity to ask the SCCRC to refer to the case to the Appeal Court again on a posthumous basis, which ministers would be entirely comfortable with."
[The Scottish Government’s excuse that it lacks the powers to convene a sufficiently wide-ranging inquiry is becoming boring. It has been comprehensively refuted on many occasions. Here is one example.
The attempt by the Scottish Government to deflect attention away from an inquiry towards a new appeal is disingenuous in the exterme, not to say shameful, given the new hurdles that that government’s own recent legislation has erected to any fresh application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and, assuming a successful SCCRC application, to getting an appeal heard by the High Court of Justiciary.]
One of Scotland's leading authors has warned the Scottish Government not to hold a vote on independence before tackling the "enormous stain" on Scotland's justice system left by the Lockerbie bombing.
James Robertson, acclaimed by First Minister Alex Salmond and many others as Scotland's finest living writer, says he is in broad terms in favour of Scottish independence.
But he adds: "I wouldn't want to go into a referendum with people saying our justice system is not in good health and able to point to Lockerbie to support that view."
He said that because of the uncertainty surrounding the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, "there is an enormous stain on the Scottish justice system and we cannot move forward without erasing it".
Mr Robertson, best known for And The Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, has taken a profound interest in Lockerbie, and it has influenced his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, to be published by Penguin in May 2013.
Last year he delivered a compelling Saltire Society lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, spelling out why he believed Megrahi had suffered a miscarriage of justice.
He also wrote to Mr Salmond to express support for the calls of the UK relatives for a full and independent inquiry, and was disappointed to receive the standard response – that the Scottish Government had no reason to doubt the safety of Megrahi's conviction.
Mr Robertson said: "If the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission saw clear grounds for a second appeal, it's hard for the Government to continue to justify that position.
"We need a full and independent inquiry to resolve it, very obviously for the sakes of the relatives, but also to underline Scotland's integrity if we are to move towards independence." (...)
The Scottish Government insists it lacks the powers to preside over a sufficiently wide-ranging probe, but the Crown Office is continuing to investigate the bombing in the hope of bringing others to justice.
Last night, the Scottish Government said: "It remains open for relatives of Mr al Megrahi or the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie atrocity to ask the SCCRC to refer to the case to the Appeal Court again on a posthumous basis, which ministers would be entirely comfortable with."
[The Scottish Government’s excuse that it lacks the powers to convene a sufficiently wide-ranging inquiry is becoming boring. It has been comprehensively refuted on many occasions. Here is one example.
The attempt by the Scottish Government to deflect attention away from an inquiry towards a new appeal is disingenuous in the exterme, not to say shameful, given the new hurdles that that government’s own recent legislation has erected to any fresh application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and, assuming a successful SCCRC application, to getting an appeal heard by the High Court of Justiciary.]
Sunday, 16 September 2012
An iron law
[The following are a few sentences from Martin Ivens’s column (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Sunday Times:]
The Hillsborough disaster not only brought out the worst in the police on duty in South Yorkshire that day in April 1989 but also establishment indifference. The families and friends of the 96 people who died have had to wait 23 years for the full truth to be told.
It is now confidently asserted by senior officers that the police have cleaned up their act: Hillsborough could never happen again. Are they right? The initial refusal to hold an inquiry into the killing by armed policemen on the London Underground of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian, in 2005 shows some habits die hard. (...)
Lord Justice Taylor’s contemporary inquiry condemned a police “blunder of the first magnitude” and officers’ accounts, he said, “were close to deceitful”. Alas, that judgment only scratched the surface. The coroner’s inquest was a joke. Another official inquiry failed to reveal the extent of the cover-up. No criminal prosecutions were mounted despite newspaper revelations of police tampering with the evidence.
It took a bishop, aided by two investigative journalists, to bring the full truth to light last week where government-appointed judges had failed. There appears to be some iron law that it takes two decades for the Crown to redress grievous wrongs committed by its servants. The imprisonment of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six spring to mind.
[As does the imprisonment of Abdelbaset Megrahi.]
The Hillsborough disaster not only brought out the worst in the police on duty in South Yorkshire that day in April 1989 but also establishment indifference. The families and friends of the 96 people who died have had to wait 23 years for the full truth to be told.
It is now confidently asserted by senior officers that the police have cleaned up their act: Hillsborough could never happen again. Are they right? The initial refusal to hold an inquiry into the killing by armed policemen on the London Underground of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian, in 2005 shows some habits die hard. (...)
Lord Justice Taylor’s contemporary inquiry condemned a police “blunder of the first magnitude” and officers’ accounts, he said, “were close to deceitful”. Alas, that judgment only scratched the surface. The coroner’s inquest was a joke. Another official inquiry failed to reveal the extent of the cover-up. No criminal prosecutions were mounted despite newspaper revelations of police tampering with the evidence.
It took a bishop, aided by two investigative journalists, to bring the full truth to light last week where government-appointed judges had failed. There appears to be some iron law that it takes two decades for the Crown to redress grievous wrongs committed by its servants. The imprisonment of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six spring to mind.
[As does the imprisonment of Abdelbaset Megrahi.]
Friday, 14 September 2012
Libyan newspaper report on Lockerbie compensation trial
[What follows is the text of a report
published on the website of the Libya Herald:]
Libyan
prosecutor says payout to Lockerbie victims “a waste of public money”
The trial of Mohamed Zway, the former
secretary of the General People’s Congress, and Abdul-Ati Al-Obeidi, the
secretary of the People’s Committee for Foreign Liaison and International
Cooperation, opened in Tripoli on Monday.
The charges have surprised many observers as they imply that the two should have been more effective in serving the Qaddafi regime and that the Lockerbie deal should not have happened.
Both men denied the charges in court.
Their lawyer made several requests, the most important of which was a postponement of proceedings in order to give the defence time to examine all the documentary evidence. He also asked to see his clients in private and, pending a postponement, requested the court to release them on bail.
Bail was refused but the court permitted the lawyer to meet the defendents in private. It accepted the request to photocopy some of the evidence but none of the classified documents.
The trial was adjourned to 15 October 2012.
At a press conference on Sunday, former Justice Minister Mohamed Al-Alagy claimed that this trial and and those of other Qaddafi officials were “invalid” because the law was not being properly implemented. He said that the prosecution was sidestepping due process whereby such cases must first go the Indictment Court to be processed.
[When I first met Mr Zway (or Zwai or al-Zwai) in 1994, he was himself Libya’s Minister of Justice. He was one of the army officers who, with Muammar Gaddafi, mounted the 1969 coup against the king, Idris al-Senussi, and the only one still holding high office in the regime. Abdel Ati al-Obeidi was then Libyan ambassador to Morocco but subsequently held many other offices, including ambassador to Italy, Deputy Foreign Minister with responsibility for European relations, head of Gaddafi’s private office and Foreign Minister. In all of these incarnations he remained as chairman of the Libyan Government committee on Lockerbie.]
Thursday, 13 September 2012
Are Lockerbie relatives less deserving than Hillsborough's?
The following was posted yesterday on Facebook by journalist Marcello Mega: “Credit where it's due. For whatever reason, the Government has allowed the exposure of the failures, cowardice, lies and cover-ups around the Hillsborough tragedy. Delighted for the loved ones of the 96 who have campaigned tirelessly for truth and justice. But I know another group of relatives who have campaigned just as hard, and for a few months longer, for the same things. Are the Lockerbie relatives somehow less deserving?”
A comment today on the Facebook page Friends of Justice for Megrahi reads: “Hillsborough: full-scale establishment cover-up in the late 1980s... Hmm.”
On Twitter the Aurora News Agency (@auroranewsfeed) posted: “#Hillsborough, #BloodySunday, #Lockerbie, #MullofKintyre ... official state cover-ups to protect the elite and top careers, that hide the truth”.
And here are just a few sentences from today’s editorial in The Guardian: “Brand a view of events a conspiracy, and you lump it in with moon landing denials and wilder accounts of the Roswell UFO incident. But conspiracies can happen in real life too; on Wednesday we learned about one that took place within the South Yorkshire police in 1989. (...) The wider lesson, however, is surely – and once again – that where blocking out daylight is a possibility, there will be dark motives for seeing that it is done.”
A comment today on the Facebook page Friends of Justice for Megrahi reads: “Hillsborough: full-scale establishment cover-up in the late 1980s... Hmm.”
On Twitter the Aurora News Agency (@auroranewsfeed) posted: “#Hillsborough, #BloodySunday, #Lockerbie, #MullofKintyre ... official state cover-ups to protect the elite and top careers, that hide the truth”.
And here are just a few sentences from today’s editorial in The Guardian: “Brand a view of events a conspiracy, and you lump it in with moon landing denials and wilder accounts of the Roswell UFO incident. But conspiracies can happen in real life too; on Wednesday we learned about one that took place within the South Yorkshire police in 1989. (...) The wider lesson, however, is surely – and once again – that where blocking out daylight is a possibility, there will be dark motives for seeing that it is done.”
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Anniversary of removal of UN sanctions against Libya
Today is the ninth anniversary of the removal by the United Nations Security Council of sanctions against Libya over the Lockerbie affair. Thirteen members voted in favour; France and the United States of America abstained. The report on the BBC News website can be read here. The conditions for removal that the Security Council had imposed when sanctions were imposed included surrender of Megrahi and Fhimah for trial; acceptance by Libya of responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am 103; and payment of compensation to the relatives of the victims. The terms of the Libyan "acceptance of responsibility" can be read here. Posts on this blog relating to the compensation paid by Libya can be read here. Two senior officials of the Gaddafi regime are now on trial in Tripoli for their rôle in negotiating the compensation arrangements.
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
US media misconception on Libyan Lockerbie compensation trial
Some of the media in the United States are reporting that the trial of Abdel Ati al-Obeidi and Mohammed Belkasem al-Zwai which recently opened and was adjourned in Tripoli involved an accusation of their "squandering $2.7 billion in public money meant to compensate families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing." Examples, which seem to be based on a report from The Associated Press news agency, can be found here and here and here. This is, of course, wrong. The accusation is not that the officials diverted or embezzled money intended for Lockerbie relatives, but that they were involved in negotiating the payment that was made to the relatives.
The Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper, bases its coverage on the Reuters news agency report and gets it right.
[This blog post has been reproduced in full on the Libyan Mathaba website.]
The Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper, bases its coverage on the Reuters news agency report and gets it right.
[This blog post has been reproduced in full on the Libyan Mathaba website.]
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