Reveal who else you asked to help free Libyan bomber, Labour tells Salmond

[This is the headline over a report (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Times. It is, of course, a scandalously inaccurate headline.  No-one, not even the Labour Party (whose hands are far from clean: remember Tony Blair’s deal in the desert?) is accusing the First Minister of asking Donald Trump or any other international figure to help free Abdelbaset Megrahi. The accusation is that he asked them to support his compassionate release after it had taken place.  The article reads in part:]

An unlikely alliance of an American billionaire and a Labour politician last night ratcheted up the pressure on Alex Salmond to explain his behaviour over what Donald Trump called his “absolutely disgusting” decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.

It has emerged that Mr Salmond’s special adviser prepared a letter supporting the Scottish government’s decision to free Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi and asked Mr Trump to sign. He refused, but other figures, including Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, agreed to endorse the release, in 2009.

“The First Minister was totally outsmarted by the Libyans, who greeted Megrahi, waving, in a mocking fashion, the great Scottish flag,” Mr Trump said.

“As everyone is now aware, Salmond put a great deal of pressure on me and my organisation to sign a letter dictated by him, on Scottish government letterhead, to fully endorse his absolutely disgusting decision.”

While Mr Salmond has refused to comment on the letter drafted for Mr Trump, he suggested on Wednesday that it was no “big deal” that his government had asked international figures to support an important decision.

“Any government is perfectly entitled to seek support for decisions they take,” Mr Salmond said. “Nelson Mandela’s name will appear on the list, but so what? That’s what governments do: if you make decisions, you seek support for those decisions. You are absolutely entitled to do that. There is nothing surprising or untoward about it.”

The Labour MSP Lewis Macdonald has tabled a series of questions seeking to identify a full list of those approached to support the Scottish government’s decision. He said: “This whole episode leaves me with a deep sense of unease about how the First Minister operates.”

Mr Trump insists that it was his refusal to endorse the release of al-Megrahi that soured the First Minister’s attitude to the tycoon’s £750 million golf resort planned for Menie, near Aberdeen.

A time for truth

[This is the headline over a letter from David Flett published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

The revelation that the SNP sought Donald Trump’s public approval of the release of Megrahi (your report, 9 October) paints a sad picture of today’s PR-obsessed political arena.

Spin doctoring, media manipulation and concealment of uncomfortable truths far outweigh integrity, honesty and justice.

Meanwhile, in the court of common sense, 270 murders remain unsolved, while these same deceptive politicians avoid the politically inconvenient process of initiating a public inquiry into the whole Lockerbie atrocity.

The two key pillars of Megrahi’s conviction have been thoroughly and publicly discredited. Through the work of journalists, investigators and those who simply had a genuine interest in uncovering the truth, we have found out that evidence relating to Tony Gauci and the circuit board fragment with the wrong coating should not have been admissible in court.

Yet, in August 2009, as Megrahi’s appeal neared its successful completion, our backroom politicians kicked swiftly into full crisis manipulation mode.

With expert conniving, manoeuvring and a small dose of clandestine blackmail, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi (despite maintaining his innocence) drops his appeal and is allowed to fly home.

So here we are, 24 years after Scotland’s biggest ever crime, stuck with a vanity-fixated government, ineffectual justice system and a deceived group of bereaved relatives.

Alex Salmond has the power and opportunity here to do something statesman-like and assist to dispel the obscurities surrounding Lockerbie.

Will he leave us all in the darkness with secret e-mails, or will he help shine a light on the truth by starting a public 
inquiry?

Scottish Lib Dem leader calls for Lockerbie bombing inquiry

[What follows is the text of a press release issued yesterday by the Scottish Liberal Democrats:]

Commenting on reports that Alex Salmond sought the endorsement of Donald Trump over the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie MSP said:

“The entrails of the close relationship he once enjoyed with Alex Salmond are being dissected by an increasingly bitter Donald Trump in a bid for revenge.

“We can over analyse past decisions. What is important now is that, while we continue a separate investigation, we have a full public inquiry into the Lockerbie tragedy.”

[A previous call by Mr Rennie for an inquiry can be read here.]

Hell hath no fury like a tycoon scorned

[What follows is an excerpt from the coverage (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Times of the revelation that First Minister Alex Salmond solicited a statement of support from Donald Trump after the release of Abdelbaset Megrahi:]

Alex Salmond has been accused of “acting like a dictator” after it emerged that he rang Donald Trump to “demand” he endorse the release of the Lockerbie bomber.

The First Minister then had his aides concoct a statement in which the US tycoon praised the SNP administration’s decision to free Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds as a gesture that “might break the cycle of violence around the world”.

In the statement, apparently drafted by Geoff Aberdein, Mr Salmond’s special adviser, it was suggested that Mr Trump should sympathise with Americans who lost family in the 1988 atrocity but conclude that al-Megrahi’s release “won’t stop my love affair with Scotland and the Scots. “No one should ever demean that country. Too many Scottish soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan for the head of the FBI to lecture Scots on fighting terrorism”, he was urged to say.

Mr Trump refused to endorse the statement. Last night his son, Donald Jnr, said it was inconceivable that the businessman could ever have signed. “We are New Yorkers, we have experienced terrorism at an extraordinary level,” said Mr Trump Jr, who works alongside his father.

“I think there was an element that we thought it must be a joke initially, had it not been so atrocious. No one in their right mind could have possibly asked someone to come out in favour of this decision.”

According to the Trump Organisation, the stand-off had profound consequences for the tycoon’s £750 million golf resort, planned for the Aberdeenshire coast.

After years of cosying up to Mr Trump, the First Minister suddenly turned his back on his scheme, encouraging the siting of 11 giant offshore wind turbines within a mile of the links, as part of the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre.

Mr Trump’s team accuses Mr Salmond of subsequently lobbying other organisations, including the Ministry of Defence and the RSPB, to withdraw their objections to the wind farm.

George Sorial, the executive vice-president of the Trump Organisation, said: “It is not acceptable for the First Minister to be running around acting like a dictator. This is not Cuba, not Iraq under Saddam Hussain.”

Both Mr Sorial and Mr Trump Jr were privy to the conference call in August 2009 when Mr Salmond rang to ask for assistance. The terrorist’s release had provoked a wave of anger in America, and Mr Sorial said he could recall the First Minister’s words.

“He was calling to ask us, but he was really making a demand,” said Mr Sorial. “(Salmond) said: ‘This is one of the low points in my political career, seeing this guy arrive in Tripoli to waving saltires. This is such an embarrassment for me. I need your help, I need your support. I am going to send you a statement and we expect that you will release it’.”

Mr Trump Jr added: “It was almost an expected quid pro quo, because he had supported our development, that we would support every aspect of his policies, even policies that no sane person could support, specifically the release of Megrahi. The First Minister was upset that we couldn’t do it.” (...)

Last night, Mr Trump used Twitter to insist that his refusal to support the release of al-Megrahi had prompted Mr Salmond to withdrawn his support for the golf resort.

“If Alex Salmond had not stupidly released terrorist al-Megrahi (PanAm flight 103) to his friends, there would be no Trump wind farm dispute,” he said.

[Other media reports are to be found today in The Scotsman here; in The Herald here; in the Daily Record here; in the Daily Express here; and in the Daily Telegraph here. This last contains the following reaction from the Scottish Government:]

A spokesman for Mr Salmond claimed the approach broke no rules and the Scottish Government was “perfectly entitled to hope for support from international stakeholders”.

He added: "Indeed, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, among many others around the world, supported this decision."

Salmond sought Trump support for Megrahi release, claims P & J

[What follows is the online trailer for a news story in today’s edition of The Press and Journal, a daily newspaper circulating in the Aberdeeen area:]

Alex Salmond wanted Donald Trump to publicly back the release of the Lockerbie bomber in an attempt to ease the international pressure on his government, the Press and Journal can reveal today.

The first minister turned to the US billionaire for help amid the transatlantic fallout caused by the decision to free Abdelbaset al Megrahi in August 2009.

The pair had been on good terms at the time, not long after the Scottish Government had called in and approved plans for the businessman’s £750million Aberdeenshire golf resort.

For the full story, pick up a copy of today’s Press and Journal or read our digital edition now.

[The idea that a wily politician such as our First Minister could ever have believed for a millisecond that the support of Donald Trump would sway opinion anywhere in the world in favour of the decision to release Mr Megrahi on compassionate grounds strikes me as inherently improbable.

The story has now been picked up on the BBC News website.]

Career prosecutors as law officers have destroyed criminal justice system

[This is the headline over a letter in today’s edition of The Herald from Jock Thomson QC. It reads as follows:]

I see from the Scottish Legal News that Lady Stacey is to preside over a high-powered debate on the abolition of corroboration organised by the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending.

The outcome will be academic since Lord Carloway already has the green light – as ever, the devil will be in the detail.

History will show that the genesis of the destruction of our criminal justice system was the appointment of career prosecutors as law officers: beginning with (now) Dame Elish Angiolini QC as Solicitor General and continuing with a succession of senior members of Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) since who have become and will remain Lord Advocate and Solicitor General for the foreseeable future.

This has led to the unholy, unhealthy alliance of law officers and law makers: Kenny MacAskill and Frank Mulholland, in the same bed. There is no separation of powers. Constitutionally the system now is morally and mortally flawed.

The fall-out from Cadder led to the knee-jerk Cadder Reforms. Ms Angiolini's furore about lack of convictions in rape cases, many of which should never have been raised in the first place, led Mr MacAskill to appoint Lord Carloway to consider whether the law should be amended to abolish the need for corroboration. The current Lord Advocate wants to do away with the accused's right to silence and the logical follow-on from that will be to make the accused a compellable witness. Will the next inexorable draconian step be the replacement of the presumption of innocence with that of a presumption of guilt? It's beginning to look that way. And by that time there may be little or no Criminal Legal Aid.

[Here is something I wrote on this blog on 19 May 2011, when the present Lord Advocate’s appointment was announced:]

This appointment is not unexpected, but it is to be regretted. Virtually the whole of Frank Mulholland's career has been spent as a Crown Office civil servant. This is not, in my view, the right background for the incumbent of the office of Lord Advocate, one of whose functions has traditionally been to bring an outsider's perspective to the operations and policy-making of the department. Sir Humphrey Appleby was an outstanding civil servant of a particular kind, but his role was an entirely different one from that of Jim Hacker and no-one would have regarded it as appropriate that he should be translated from Permanent Secretary of the Department of Administrative Affairs to Minister (or, indeed, from Secretary of the Cabinet to Prime Minister).

The appointment by the previous Labour administration in Scotland of Elish Angiolini as Solicitor General and then as Lord Advocate was a mistake, both constitutionally and practically, as was her retention as Lord Advocate by the SNP minority government (though the political reasons for her re-appointment were understandable). It is sad that the new majority SNP Government has not taken the opportunity to return to the wholly desirable convention of appointing an advocate or solicitor from private practice to fill the office of Lord Advocate. The much-needed casting of a beady eye over the operations of the Crown Office is not to be expected from this appointee. This is deeply regrettable since such scrutiny is long overdue.

"It’s a long process but I’m not giving up" says Lord Advocate

[What follows is the Lockerbie portion of an article reporting on an exclusive interview given by Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, to the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser:]

A steely determination to seek the truth and deliver justice has catapulted Coatbridge-born Frank Mulholland to the powerful top law post in Scotland of Lord Advocate.

And in an exclusive interview with the Advertiser this week, the nation’s top prosecutor reveals his views on the Lockerbie bombing (...)

The 53-year-old former St Bernard’s Primary and St Columba’s High School pupil told how he will not give up on the Lockerbie bombing investigation (...)

Mr Mulholland travelled to Libya in April with the director of the FBI Robert Mueller to discuss opportunities for stepping up the probe into the 1988 bombing, which killed 270 people.

He said: “Going to Libya was the right thing to do.

“The Interim Prime Minister made very helpful statements regarding co-operation.

“I was looked after by a lot of good people and felt safe under their security.

“I would go back if there was good reason to do so and if my visit was not putting others at risk.

“It’s a long process but I’m not giving up. A lot of people lost their lives.”

[Be assured, Mr Mulholland, Justice for Megrahi is not giving up either, notwithstanding Crown Office bluster.]

Lockerbie: would you convict?

[This is the headline over an article in today’s edition of the Maltese newspaper The Times by Robert Forrester, secretary of Justice for Megrahi.  It reads as follows:]

Tragedy is not like smokeless fuel. With tragedy comes victims, it is part of the very essence of the word. The problem with Lockerbie is that the roll call of victims does not begin and end with those who died that night, but with their families and friends, whose suffering never dies.

The manner in which the Scottish criminal justice system dealt with the case actually increased the number of victims.

The very structure of the stage upon which justice performed at Camp Zeist, one where the Crown played the roles of prosecutor, judge and jury, lent itself to potential disaster.

And so it happened their Lordships convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi wholly on the basis of surmise: not evidence but conjecture.

They concluded that he had somehow contrived to have an unaccompanied, bronze-coloured, hardshell Samsonite suitcase containing a bomb travel undetected to Heathrow via Luqa and Frankfurt airports. Well, of course it was undetected, in evidential terms it never existed, except in the minds of the three Zeist judges when this scheme of things was planted there by the Crown as prosecutor.

By complete contrast, there is concrete eyewitness and documentary evidence for there having been a break-in at Heathrow, which gave access to 103’s loading bay at Terminal 3, only hours prior to the fateful departure.

Moreover, there is also eyewitness testimony to the effect that an unexplained suitcase answering to the above description was observed lying at the bottom of the container in which the explosion took place before the arrival of the Frankfurt feeder flight. This case was not pulled to be checked.

The evidence concerning the break-in was not made public until after the court had convicted Mr Megrahi, and that concerning the sighting in the container was simply breezed over at Zeist as if some minor irritant hardly worth bothering about.

Added to this of course, once the testimony of Abd al-Majid Giaka on the happenings at Luqa had been thrown out of court, we have the role played by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci. Laying aside the fact that the court was kept in the dark about allegations that he received $2,000,000, and his brother $1,000,000, from the US Department of Justice, the three judges were at pains to make allowances for shortcomings in his evidence.

Respected, academic, psychological tests have demonstrated that the accuracy of eyewitness identification of individuals beyond a period of 11 months from the initial event is reduced to a matter of chance.

While the parade at Zeist came over a decade later, Mr Gauci had been privy to contemporary photographs of Mr Megrahi shortly before it. Even so, the best he could do in court was to say that Mr Megrahi “resembles” the man in question. Hardly the stuff of “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Since the justice campaign went political in 2008, the Scottish Government has provided the judiciary with extraordinary powers which could easily result in any further appeal being rejected.

Having said that though, the likelihood of the Megrahis making an application at the moment is very slim.

The supposedly “live” investigation (previously being run by one solitary police officer) which took Scotland’s Lord Advocate to Libya in the company of the Director of the FBI only to come home with a “no comment”, and which has now embarked on in camera hearings on Malta in an attempt to salvage a conviction, seems to be getting perilously close to unravelling.

Will the Valletta jaunt elicit yet another “no comment” from the Crown?

It is a perfectly natural, defensive, animal instinct for an institution, even for many institutions acting quasi independently of each other, to close ranks to protect themselves and the status quo which feeds them. Although understandable, it is totally wrong. Placing to one side the most obvious victim of Zeist, Mr Megrahi, those who continue to defend the conviction by blocking any attempts to seek redress and justice ought to consider incidental victims: Kurt Maier, X-ray operator at Frankfurt whose evidence was ignored, became an alcoholic and died after being implicated by the Crown’s fantasy; the reputation of all those employees at Luqa Airport in Malta, an airport whose security regime was clearly infinitely superior to that of Heathrow, as Granada Television found to their cost; the Libyan victims of sanctions associated with the US approach to justice, and so on.

Helmut Kohl made it crystal clear there is no evidence for any bomb having been transferred in Germany.

Malta may be small but its government can have an influence out of proportion to its size as a country – even in an environment dominated by realpolitik.

Justice only need be a victim if it is allowed to become one, and campaigners have no intention of allowing that to happen any time soon.

New evidence that puts Scottish justice on trial

John Ashton, author of Megrahi: You are my Jury, will be speaking about the book and about the Lockerbie case at the Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday, 6 October at 12 noon. What follows is taken from the entry in the festival programme:

“Even after Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s death this year, debate continues to rage over his conviction for the Lockerbie bombing. John Ashton has spent years researching the case, including working for Megrahi’s legal team. He discusses his controversial book, which uses exclusive interviews with Megrahi himself, and presents compelling new evidence that puts Scottish justice on trial.”

We are being cheated of the truth

[What follows is Dr Jim Swire’s reaction to the Crown Office’s intemperate statement about Justice for Megrahi’s letter to Kenny MacAskill alleging serious wrongdoing in the Lockerbie investigation and prosecution:]

This is not the time for the Crown Office to proclaim their innocence. It is the time for them to produce credible proof, if such there be, that the very serious allegations lodged against them by the Justice for Megrahi group are false.

According to an article in The Scotsman, the Crown Office recently quoted the SCCRC as having pointed out it had found no basis for the allegation that any 'police officers or officials' fabricated evidence.

So far as I am aware  no one alleges that Scottish police officers or Scottish 'officials' might have fabricated evidence. This claim presumably refers to the circuit board fragment known as PT35b

PT35b, was a crucial prop for the story of a long running timer having  been used from Malta. We now know that it could not have come, as the Crown claimed in court, from the batch of timers sold to the Libyans by the MEBO company of Zurich and manufactured by Thuring AG..

The pattern of tracks on PT35b were a perfect optical mimic of those on a corner of the Libyan boards, yet as John Ashton's book Megrahi: You are my Jury showed in May of this year, the metallurgy used for PT35b was novel and simply not available to Thuring AG, the manufacturer of the Libyan boards.

This combination of optical mimicry in an item incapable of having come from the crucial Libyan owned boards, certainly seems to carry the stigma of fabrication, including that word's modern gloss of 'the deliberate presentation of an object or story with the  intention to deceive'.

There is however as yet no evidence as to who might have fabricated PT35b, only questions about the way it seems to have entered the evidence chain, claimed to have been found inside a Scottish police evidence bag, whose label had been improperly altered by an unknown hand.

Simpler and very serious in its own right is the question of why the Crown Office (and that includes the Dumfries and Galloway police) withheld information about the Heathrow break-in from the defence and the Zeist court.

The defence would have divulged to the CO well before the trial had even started that they intended to lead a defence of incrimination, and this must have included the intention of incriminating the Syrian group called the PFLP-GC and the use of one of their specialised IEDs (bombs).

The details of these bombs were well known to the (West German) police experts with whom the Scottish police had multiple meetings.

The police (and therefore the CO) knew, or should have known, that these bombs were available to terrorists in 1988 and were inert until they sensed a drop in air pressure following take-off. They also knew or should have known that once triggered following take off, these IEDs would always explode 30-45 minutes into a flight.

The Lockerbie flight lasted 38 minutes out of Heathrow.

The Zeist court was told that the Syrian timers were not adjustable, therefore access to the airport of take-off of the targeted aircraft itself was mandatory for the terrorist.

We now know (courtesy of Chief Constable Patrick Shearer in a letter to myself) that the D & G police were aware by January 1989 that Heathrow had been broken into 16 hours before Lockerbie, close to where the PA103 bags were loaded that evening. Yet the defence and the court were denied this evidence until after the verdict had been reached at Zeist.

Why?

For the UN special observer to the trial, Prof Hans Koechler, the failure by the Crown to share information such as this with the defence team guaranteed that the trial could not be described as fair.

For me as a father the thought that the terrorist infiltrator might have been so close to my daughter below the corridors of Heathrow airport that night, as to be able to hear their chatter as the passengers headed for the excitement of Christmas in America still makes me very angry. Nothing useful had been done to trace the intruder.

We know that Lockerbie was a revenge attack, however to seek revenge for mistakes made by Heathrow or the Crown Office and their investigators as individuals smacks of a sinking towards the level of the terrorists themselves.

Our search as UK relatives has always been for truth and justice. To that we would dearly love to add a contribution to building something good out of something so evil as this atrocity.

Just as in medicine, curing a cancer may mean curetting out the last vestiges of the tumour, so in this dreadful case we must define what went wrong in the greatest possible detail, if the best corrective steps are to be imposed.for the future benefit of all our people.

As a mature society we need to pass the investigation of and the fall-out from serious crime to a justice system immune to extrinsic interference or the favouring of any interests outside the pursuit of truth. The blindfold on the eyes of justice needs to fit perfectly.

We need to have confidence that this is so, and we need to see justice done and done promptly.

Frankly, I was shocked when the current Lord Advocate, in February of this year, told us relatives that he had wondered why the Heathrow evidence had not been available to the Zeist court but had been unable to find out.

The complaints from JFM surely demand independent and prompt investigation, and their call is for a full and independent inquiry.

As relatives, we have a right to know who killed our families and why they were not protected. How sad that nearly 25 years after their brutal murders we still find that we are being cheated of the truth.

I do not wish to know whether the Crown Office considers itself innocent. I have known the answer to that for years. I wish to see independent and fully empowered minds brought to bear at last upon these issues, to our enlightenment, and to the lasting benefit of all of Scotland's people.

US Congresswoman wants answers from Libya

[What follows is the text of a report published yesterday on the website of The Daily Orange, the newspaper of Syracuse University, New York:]

US Rep Ann Marie Buerkle, seizing on public frustration with the new Libyan government after the attack that killed the US ambassador and three other Americans, wants to turn up the heat on the new regime regarding Pan Am Flight 103.

Buerkle has proposed a House resolution that calls for Libya to cooperate with US authorities who have never closed the books on their investigation of the 1988 bombing that killed 270 people when a flight from London exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Among the dead were 35 Syracuse University students returning from a semester abroad and five others with ties to Central New York.

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan agent, was the only person convicted in the attack. The new Libyan government has promised to cooperate with the FBI and Justice Department in finding others who may have conspired in the attack.

Buerkle, R-Onondaga Hill, said her resolution will formally express the “disappointment and concern” of Congress regarding the stalled US probe of the bombing and the “failure of Libya” to grant permission for US authorities to investigate and gather evidence in Libya.

Buerkle’s resolution also would require the Justice Department to report what resources it has devoted to the open investigation over the past 24 years and the costs associated with the investigation.

In December, the new Libyan ambassador to the United States attended the annual memorial service for Pan Am Flight 103 victims at Arlington National Cemetery. Ambassador Ali Aujali told the families at the service that the new government will help bring to justice those responsible for the attack.

Separately, Buerkle is working on a second piece of legislation to help the families of Pan Am 103 victims obtain additional compensation from a fund set up in 2004 after the US received a $1.5 billion payment from Libya. Buerkle could introduce the bill when the House returns to session after the November election.

Double jeopardy and Lockerbie

[What follows is taken from a profile in today’s edition of The Scotsman of Lesley Thomson, Solicitor General for Scotland:]

The Scottish Government’s Double Jeopardy Act 2011 means prosecutors can try people twice if significant new evidence came to light. One case is expected to reach court by the end of 2012, but the Crown Office will not say which.

“What happened in November last year was the launch of the cold case unit and the homicide database,” says Thomson. “That was partly for cold cases but also with an eye towards what was happening in regards to double jeopardy. That was always going to contain double jeopardy as well. At that time, working with police, it was decided to prioritise a group of cases without naming them.”

However, some cases being re-examined are known. The Crown Office has confirmed it has asked police to reinvestigate the murders of Surjit Singh Chhokar, Amanda Duffy and World’s End victims Christine Eadie and Helen Scott.

The Lockerbie investigation has also been linked to double jeopardy, although Ms Thomson will not be drawn on this as it is a live investigation.

If the Crown seeks to bring charges against ­Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah it will need to do so under double jeopardy, because he has already faced one trial where he was found not guilty and acquitted of 270 counts of murder in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing.

However, if the Crown Office goes after other ­individuals, who have not previously faced prosecution for the terrorist atrocity, they will not need to rely on double jeopardy.

What Thomson is keen to stress, however, is that the Crown Office saw double jeopardy coming and had been preparing for the legislation which was introduced in November last year.

“There was already work being done about how we go about an old investigation,” she says. “There was a lot of thinking about how we would run that in parallel with current investigations.”

[As I remarked in an earlier post on this blog: “I would be astounded if prosecutors sought to re-indict Lamin Fhimah.  The Crown Office is just as aware as the rest of us are that the astonishing thing about the Zeist trial was not the acquittal of Fhimah but the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi.  Any 'new evidence' that has emerged since 2001 points clearly towards the innocence of the accused Libyans rather than their guilt, as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst others has pointed out.”]

Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the truth

[This is the headline over an editorial in today’s edition of the Maltese newspaper The Times.  It reads as follows:]

A recent report probing the 1989 Hillsborough disaster revealed the lengths to which the police were prepared to go to divert blame from the failure to control the stadium crush that claimed 96 lives.

The damning conclusions rightly elicited anger from the victims’ families but it also brought closure and a sense of justice, albeit 23 years late.

That tragedy happened a few months after a Pan Am aircraft was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, 11 on the ground.

The only man accused of the 1988 Lockerbie attack died last May. But the mystery over whether Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was really responsible for the bomb explosion failed to be buried when he died.

The American authorities, especially, may have had good reason to pin the blame on a Libyan man. Muammar Gaddafi was perceived as an enthusiastic sponsor of terrorism in the 1980s.

As the Libyan leader was hunted down last year we were told more “facts” would emerge that he had directly ordered the downing of Pan Am. So many months on, we’re still waiting.

Only when Al-Megrahi was on his last breath did the more embarrassing facts start to emerge – but by then the western media did not find the story salacious enough.

What we know is that three Scottish judges, who heard the case at The Hague in 2001, accepted the prosecution’s case that the evidence pointed to the Libyan since he had purchased clothes in Malta – that were wrapped around the bomb – which he then placed on an Air Malta aircraft bound for Frankfurt, from where a feeder flight took it to the departing Pan Am jumbo jet at Heathrow.

But there are several other less convoluted facts that the prosecution conveniently failed to address.

Let’s just mention a few salient points which show that the available evidence was selectively massaged in such a way as to make the verdict against Al-Megrahi possible.

After Al-Megrahi was imprisoned, it emerged that the Scottish police were aware that there had been a break-in at Heathrow airport 16 hours before PA103 was blown up. Why wasn’t this crucial point raised in the original trial?

A Maltese man – Tony Gauci – told international investigators that Al-Megrahi bought the clothes (which were wrapped around the bomb) from his shop in Sliema. But why do the authorities till this day ignore a fact which emerged later that Mr Gauci had been coached and promised compensation from the CIA to point to the Libyan man as the guilty party?

Why did the Crown Office fail to listen to warnings of their own forensic expert that a fragment of circuit board (allegedly originating from the wreckage) simply did not match the Libyan bomb timer board allegedly used? The list of questions is endless.

The Times revealed last week that the Maltese courts have been asked to gather fresh evidence connected to Lockerbie – and this is welcome news. The Maltese Government has claimed Luqa airport had no connection with the atrocity. If that is really the case then the real Lockerbie bomber has never been identified.

As Jim Swire, a man whose daughter was killed at Lockerbie, aptly put it in an opinion piece written last week: “to divert blame away from the actual perpetrators is to protect them and to increase the chances of them striking again.”

Like Hillsborough, it is not too late for the Lockerbie victims’ families to get to know the truth.

[A report in the same newspaper on yesterday’s proceedings before the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee can be read here. The secretary of Justice for Megrahi, Robert Forrester, is extensively quoted.]

The dead still wait...

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads as follows:]

It is true that Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi was found guilty in a court of law and his conviction confirmed by five senior judges. [RB: For the restricted scope of this appeal and the issues which it did not address, see Lockerbie: A satisfactory process but a flawed result, section headed “The Appeal”.]

This - as Scottish government spokespersons continually remind us - remains the situation.

But those judges at trial and appeal are now proven to have been misled and mis-informed by senior British scientists and senior police officers who failed in their duty to the truth and the society they were entrusted to serve.  

This also – as Scottish government spokespersons continually ignore – remains the situation.

During the Lockerbie trial, RARDE scientist Alan Feraday in his evidence stated as follows:

"The conducting pad and tracks present on the fragment PT/35(b) are of copper covered by a layer of pure tin."  

(In other words, the tracking was 100% tin. And Feraday had written in long hand on his notebook just those numbers "100% tin".)  

And later in his evidence Feraday stated:

".. it has been conclusively established that the [PT/35(b)] fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the MST-13 timer."  

Unfortunately for Feraday is has now been conclusively established that the conducting pad and tracks present on all timer boards supplied to Libya by Swiss suppliers MEBO, and from which - according to the prosecution - came fragment PT/35(b), were of copper covered by a layer of 70/30% alloy of tin and lead.

Indeed, Feraday was aware of the difference and asked two scientists to look at the reason for the difference.  They did not do so.

In his evidence at trial, Feraday never mentioned the discrepancy.  The judges remained in ignorance of the discrepancy.  The defence team knew nothing of it.

So the fragment materials were and are not "similar in all respects" to those used on the MEBO MST-13 timer boards.

This phrase "similar in all respects" formed the kernel of the judgement against al-Megrahi.

No-one knows the origin of the Lockerbie fragment, and we will not speculate as to where it came from or who made it. It is, however, clear that PT/35(b) did not originate from any timer boards which the prosecution claimed were used by Al-Megrahi.

The prosecution did not, incidentally, produce any evidence as to where Al-Megrahi had used such timers, nor where or how he had constructed a bomb, nor where he had stored it or deployed it.  The judges, misled as they were by the remaining evidence, accepted such innuendo as fact.

The timer fragment PT/35(b) was not the only matter central to the verdict in which misinformation and concealment by the prosecution and their witnesses occurred. These are serious matters which cry out for independent investigation.  

Earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron, just two days after the revelation of the above information, claimed that such revelations were "an insult" to the Lockerbie dead.  

We must leave it to objective historians to form their own conclusions on such a statement.

An independent inquiry into the Lockerbie tragedy and its investigation and evidence submitted at trial is long overdue.

It is now almost a quarter of a century since the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The two hundred and seventy dead of Lockerbie still wait for truth and justice.