The Lockerbie affair and Scottish society

[This is the title of the 2011 Saltire Society Lecture delivered at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 28 August by Scotland's most distinguished living novelist, James Robertson. What follows is the text of the lecture.]

Since it is because of my occupation as a writer of fiction that I am giving this talk, why do I wish to devote it to something so clearly and tragically real as the Lockerbie bombing and its aftermath? There are two reasons. First, I believe that fiction and reality are by no means mutually exclusive: through fiction, or literature more generally, there is sometimes the possibility of reaching for truths about the human condition that cannot readily be grasped as we lead our daily lives, either because our lives are too busy or too difficult, or because other people and powers keep those truths from us. Second, this session is sponsored by the Saltire Society, which, as its website says, was founded 75 years ago ‘to encourage everything that might improve the quality of life in Scotland’. While the Saltire Society’s principal concern over those years has been with the cultural life of the nation, ‘culture’ is a very big concept, and I don’t think it is possible, or indeed desirable, to treat such things as architecture, arts and crafts, history, music, science and literature as if they are separate and distinct from the political, legal and social framework of the community in which they happen. The health and wellbeing of a community, of a country, of a nation – and Scotland is each and all of these – can be measured in many different ways, but if those of us engaged in ‘culture’ shrink from engaging with politics and the law, then neither our politics, nor our law, nor our culture in the widest sense, will be honest or progressive, or in tune with the Saltire Society’s aim of improving the quality of Scottish life. Quite the reverse: without that engagement, at a time in our history when there is so much public rhetoric about Scots taking more responsibility for running our own affairs – an aim I completely support – we run the risk of suggesting to our lawmakers and elected leaders that we hand them that responsibility without much caring what they do with it. I for one care very much.

With regard to the Lockerbie affair, many serious questions have been asked over the years, honestly, reasonably and intelligently by many different people, some of them directly affected by the event, some not – questions about the conduct of the investigation, about the resulting trial, about the conviction of one of the two accused, and about the subsequent release from prison of that same man. Where they remain unanswered, or have been answered in wholly unsatisfactory ways by the authorities, these questions hang like spectral shadows over the future of our country. If we cannot feel confident that the biggest criminal trial in Scottish history achieved a just, and convincingly just, outcome, then not only do those whose loved ones were murdered go on suffering, but Scotland as a whole suffers.

When I decided, back in March, to make Lockerbie and its continuing reverberations the subject of this session, I was conscious that the background against which I would be speaking might be very different to that which then existed. So indeed it has turned out. It was possible, for example, that the man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, who as we all know was released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds, might have died from the prostate cancer from which he was suffering. It was possible that Colonel Gaddafi would have been removed from power by the rebellion in Libya, and that he too might be dead. It seemed highly probable that NATO – or elements within NATO – would not be much dismayed if its bombing campaign in Libya resulted in eliminating not only Gaddafi but also Megrahi, neither of whom would then be able to dispute what might be termed ‘the conventional wisdom’ on Lockerbie, as it has been maintained since Mr Megrahi’s conviction in January 2001. Mr Megrahi appears to have survived the NATO bombs, but it remains to be seen whether he will escape being snatched by, or handed over to, the Americans, some of whom are keen to set an example to their new friends in Libya of how to dispense justice by retrying a convicted man, changing the sentence he received – quite possibly to a lethal one – and overriding the justice system of another country (Scotland) because they don’t like its perfectly legal and properly conducted processes and outcomes. God help us all and not only Mr Megrahi if the new Libyan administration and the Scottish Government do not resist such moves. There is precious little, in statements made by William Hague, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, to indicate that the UK Government will object, although I am gratified to read statements from the National Transitional Council in Libya that they have no intention of handing Mr Megrahi over to anybody.

Other changes in circumstance between March and now were also possible: for example, some specific evidence might have been provided by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan Justice Minister, now chair of the National Transitional Council, to support his claim, made in February, that he had proof that Gaddafi personally ordered the bombing. What have we heard from Mr Jalil since about Lockerbie? As far as I am aware, absolutely nothing of any substance. Or we might have heard from Moussa Muhammad Koussa, who was Libya’s Foreign Minister until he defected to the UK in March. Mr Koussa was formerly Head of Libyan Intelligence from 1994 to 2009,and before that worked for the Bureau for External Security, the Mathaba, which has been accused of responsibility for the bombing itself. If Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie, Mr Koussa is the man who would know. He was duly interviewed by British intelligence and the Scottish police, then allowed to leave the UK for Qatar. Had he told the police anything that incriminated either himself or other Libyans, or provided more details to support the conviction of Mr Megrahi, it is hard to imagine that the British Government would not have been eager to tell us. But neither they nor the police have said anything. Who, one might ask, is the more cynical? Those of us who are not surprised by this silence, or those who maintain it while also maintaining that they – to recycle the oft-used phrase – ‘do not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction’?

We have heard from Guma el-Gamaty, the UK co-ordinator for the National Transitional Council, who two weeks ago said that Mr Megrahi’s release by the Scottish Government had ‘handed a political and diplomatic victory’ to the Gaddafi regime. But his statement was essentially about distancing the NTC from the regime’s past activities, and it studiously avoided admitting Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie. If Megrahi and his co-accused were involved, Guma el-Gamaty said, they were ‘very, very small fish in the chain’. He criticised previous British Governments’ dealings with Gaddafi and pointed an accusing finger at Moussa Koussa. None of this reveals anything new about Lockerbie.

It might also have been posited back in March that the political landscape of Scotland would change after the parliamentary election in May. This of course did happen, dramatically so, and the result – an SNP government with an overall majority – does have a bearing on the continuing significance of the Lockerbie affair. Before the SNP came to power in 2007 as a minority administration, it was, unlike the Conservatives and Labour, a party with clean hands as far as Lockerbie was concerned, largely because it had not previously been in government. Many of us hoped then that this would enable a fresh appraisal of the case to take place, especially as, in June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission announced its decision to refer Mr Megrahi’s case back to the High Court for a second appeal because it concluded that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred at his trial. But for the next two years legal proceedings dragged on, and the appeal remained unheard. Mr Megrahi meanwhile, in September 2008, was diagnosed with cancer. By the summer of 2009 his illness was considered by medical advisers to have progressed so far that the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill authorised his release from prison on compassionate grounds. Mr Megrahi dropped his second appeal just before he was released, although there was no legal requirement for him to do so. The political storm that followed his release and his return to Libya completely diverted attention from the question, should he have been in prison in the first place?

It appears to me that, whether one approved or disapproved of Mr MacAskill’s decision, the Scottish Government acted absolutely according to protocol and legal process as far as prisoner release on compassionate grounds was concerned. The howls of outrage from the then Labour Government have since been revealed to be, largely, howls of hypocrisy and dishonesty. Nevertheless, the Scottish Government repeatedly stated at the time that it did not doubt the safety of Mr Megrahi’s conviction. Given the absolute consistency with which it has maintained this position, the exercise of the Justice Secretary’s discretionary powers to release him was and continues to be highly controversial. Arguably, though, one could hardly have expected the Government to express doubts about the conviction. Had it done so, it – the executive component of our political system – would effectively have been challenging the efficacy and independence of the judicial component.

With the May election result, however, we entered new political territory. The SNP has an overall majority, and will presumably be in power till 2016. Within weeks of the election, a furious row broke out over the relationship between the Scottish courts and the Supreme Court in London. The Scottish Government objected to the Supreme Court’s ruling that in a criminal case heard at the High Court in Scotland the human rights of the accused, as defined by the European Convention, had been infringed by the Crown’s failure to disclose vital evidence to the defence. On this occasion the First Minister and Justice Secretary showed no reluctance at all in expressing their opinions about the efficacy and independence of the judiciary. They seem to have objected to the Supreme Court’s decision not because they disagreed with the idea of accused persons having human rights, but because the Supreme Court was based in London rather than Strasbourg. There may have been some validity in their arguments, but the way those arguments were made did not indicate much respect for the principle of the separation of executive from judicial powers. It indicated instead a worrying complacency that everything in the Scottish judicial system was working perfectly well, and that any suggestion that it was not, even from two of the most experienced Scottish legal figures of their generation, Lord Hope and Lord Rodger, was unwelcome.

There was a sense, nevertheless, that the Scottish political context for discussing the correctness of the Lockerbie judgment might have shifted. But has it? One of Alex Salmond’s pre-election pledges was that, recognising the widespread concerns about Mr Megrahi’s case, his government if re-elected would bring forward primary legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish its findings without the consent of the various interested parties who had supplied information to the Commission. Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University, architect of the Camp Zeist trial in the Netherlands and a persistent critic of the outcome of that trial, has argued that the laborious process of introducing primary legislation through Parliament is not necessary: ‘It can, and should be done by Statutory Instrument (secondary legislation),’ Professor Black has said, ‘just as the Scottish Government did earlier when it permitted publication but only if those who supplied the information to the SCCRC consented. An unqualified permission to publish can be given through exactly the same legal mechanism as the earlier qualified permission.’ But, this aside, even were such legislation to be passed, what would change? It has been stated several times by the Government that the SCCRC’s ability to publish its findings would still be subject to ‘legal restrictions applying to the Commission such as data protection, the convention rights of individuals and international obligations attaching to information provided by foreign authorities’. This sweeping set of conditions, it seems to me, all but wipes out the possibility of the SCCRC being able to publish its findings – certainly not without serious further delays.

In June Al Jazeera’s English language channel showed a new documentary film called Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber. This film raised fresh concerns over particular aspects of the case. After watching it, I wrote to the First Minister, urging the establishment of an inquiry into Lockerbie, something many others have argued for. I received a reply on his behalf from the Justice Directorate, which stated that it was ‘not possible for the Scottish Government to comment on decisions of the courts’, that the conviction of Mr Megrahi was a judicial matter and that ‘it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to either influence the process or to make comment’ – something it had certainly not been backward in doing vis-a-vis the Supreme Court. The letter reiterated that ‘the Scottish Government do [sic] not doubt the safety of the conviction of Megrahi’ – which is surely a comment of some sort.

With regard to an inquiry, the Scottish Government has repeatedly argued, from Kenny MacAskill’s statement explaining his reasons for releasing Mr Megrahi onward, that ‘the questions to be asked and answered in any such inquiry would be beyond the jurisdiction of Scots Law and the remit of the Scottish Government, and such an inquiry would therefore need to be initiated by those with the required power and authority to deal with an issue, international in its nature.’ I hear the sound not so much of hands being tied as of hands being washed. Here we have a Nationalist administration – keen to persuade us of the virtues of independence, and willing to attack what it considers the interference of the Supreme Court in matters under Scottish jurisdiction – using the limitations of its devolved status as an excuse for inaction. I am sorry to sound so critical of the current Scottish Government, because I believe it has acted with more honesty over Lockerbie than any British Government has since 1988. But it is precisely because Scotland has in the intervening years acquired a substantial measure of devolved power and responsibility, and is in the process of acquiring more – in my view an entirely positive development – that I make these points. There is no prospect of the British authorities addressing the outstanding issues surrounding Lockerbie – it is not in their interests to do so. But it is in the interests of Scotland to address them. What is the point of a Scottish government if it will not, or the point of the Scottish Parliament if it cannot, engage with legitimate concerns raised over a judgment made by a Scottish court about an event that took place in Scotland? We are not talking about local planning regulations here. We are talking about the biggest criminal case in Scottish history.

In forming a view on the Lockerbie affair, I have always tried to keep at a distance anything that has the whiff of a conspiracy theory. The thing about conspiracy theories, though, is that they rush to fill an information vacuum. The more I look, the more I am forced to the conclusion that if there is a conspiracy around Lockerbie, it is not one concocted by those who doubt the guilt of Mr Megrahi but a conspiracy of silence in which the US, UK and Scottish Governments are all, though not from shared motives, implicated. And this has far-reaching consequences for the wider relationship between those who govern and those who are governed, and I want to say something more about that in a few minutes.

First, however, I need to revisit some of the reasons for doubting the judgment of the special Scottish court at Camp Zeist, which in 2001 found Mr Megrahi, but not his co-accused, guilty of the bombing. And let me say here and now that if anybody can demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that my doubts are unreasonable, I will put my hand up and apologise for my scepticism. I think nearly everybody who has expressed concerns about Mr Megrahi’s conviction would be prepared to say the same thing.

The difficulties with the case against Mr Megrahi are too many to list in full here, so I will outline just six of them. First, there is no convincing evidence of an unchecked, unaccompanied suitcase having been put on the Air Malta flight (KM180) that left Luqa Airport in Malta on 21st December 1988, nor of such a case being transferred at Frankfurt to Pan Am feeder flight 103A, before finally being transferred onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow. The judges themselves acknowledged this: ‘If… the unaccompanied bag was launched from Luqa,’ they said, ‘the method by which that was done is not established, and the Crown accepted that they could not point to any specific route by which the primary suitcase could have been loaded. The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crown case.’ Second, the only location where a brown Samsonite hardshell suitcase like the one containing the bomb was actually identified by a witness, was at Heathrow, a much more probable ingestion point for the bomb. Third, it is highly debatable whether Mr Megrahi was in Malta on the day that the clothing which ended up in the suitcase containing the bomb was purchased at Tony Gauci’s shop in Sliema, Malta. There were two possible dates for the purchase of the clothing: overwhelmingly the circumstantial evidence points to one of these dates as that on which the purchase was made; the judges opted for the other. Fourth, there is the problem of a crucial fragment of circuit board which was found embedded in a piece of that clothing, and which indicated that the bomb was detonated by an MST-13 timer rather than by a barometric device. Again, all the circumstantial evidence points to the latter type of detonator (activated by air pressure change) having been used, apart from the fragment of circuit board, which was introduced into the chain of evidence through a highly contentious route. Time prohibits me from saying more on this complex matter of the circuit board fragment, but the information is in the public domain for anyone who wishes to explore it. Fifth, during the night of 20th/21st December 1988, about 16 hours before Pan Am Flight 103 took off, a padlock was cut through on a door giving access to the Pan Am baggage build-up area at Heathrow, the very location where the hardshell Samsonite suitcase was seen next afternoon. The fact of this breach of security was either mislaid or suppressed by the police and Crown during the trial, and though known to his lawyers by the time of Mr Megrahi’s first appeal, was dismissed by the appeal court as ‘coincidence’. Sixth, we have three witnesses whose identification of Mr Megrahi linked him to the atrocity. One of these witnesses, a Libyan CIA informant based in Malta called Abdul Majid Giaka, the judges said they were unable to accept as a ‘credible or reliable witness’. The second, Edward Bollier, who supplied electronic timers to Libya, the judges found to be ‘at times an untruthful and at other times an unreliable witness’, although they did accept some of his evidence. The third and key witness was Tony Gauci, the owner of the shop where the clothes that were later packed around the bomb were bought: Mr Gauci initially so signally and emphatically failed to identify Mr Megrahi as the purchaser that he had to be visited over and over again by police till he did. The court recognised that Mr Gauci’s was ‘not an unequivocal identification’. He was coached, given treats and financial inducements, and according to documentation now in the public domain was offered, and after the trial paid, a sum of $2million through the United States ‘Rewards for Justice’ programme. This last fact was not known to the court at Camp Zeist, and indeed appears to have been withheld by the police and the Crown prosecutors. Had it been known, Mr Gauci’s evidence would have been tainted beyond redemption, and probably deemed inadmissible by the court. Ironically, had all or even some of this information been presented to a jury in, say, Glasgow or Dundee, it is hard to imagine that Mr Megrahi would have been convicted.

If you read the judgment, as anybody can on-line, it is hard not to be struck by the number of gaping chasms in the chain of evidence, and the impressive leaps across those chasms that the judgment manages to perform. In the penultimate paragraph of the judgment the most acrobatic leap of them all is made: ‘We are aware,’ the judgment concludes, ‘that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified. However, having considered the whole evidence in the case, including the uncertainties and qualifications, and the submissions of counsel, we are satisfied that … there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty.’

In the documentary film already mentioned, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber, the matter of treats and financial inducements to Mr Gauci, was put to Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who as Lord Advocate in 1991 drew up the original charges contained in the warrants for the arrest of Mr Megrahi and his co-accused (Lamin Khalifa Fhimah). Lord Fraser’s response was as follows: ‘I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it.’ He has also been quoted as saying, ‘I… warned our investigators that the eyes of the world were on us, and everything had to be done by the book. It would be unacceptable to offer bribes, inducements or rewards to any witness in a routine murder trial in Glasgow or Dundee, and it is obviously unacceptable to have done it in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.’ This, incidentally, is the same Lord Fraser, the same former Lord Advocate, who, according to the Sunday Times on 23rd October, 2005, described Mr Gauci, the Crown’s key witness, as having been ‘not quite the full shilling’ and ‘an apple short of a picnic’, and the same Lord Fraser who has just been appointed as an adviser to the Scottish Government on standards of ministerial conduct. I am not aware that Lord Fraser has ever disputed these attributions or retracted them.

Let us accept, as we must, that what is displayed in a court of law, any court of law, is not the truth but evidence, and that truth and evidence are two very different things. This is not a cynical view, merely a realistic one. Accepting it, and looking objectively at all the evidence, I for one cannot conclude that it proves beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Megrahi planted the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103, or indeed that he had anything to do with it. What the truth of the matter is – who really carried out the atrocity – we do not know. But we certainly will not arrive at the truth by studiously avoiding the compelling arguments that challenge the rightness of Mr Megrahi’s conviction. One wrong does not cancel another; it compounds it.

What are the consequences of all this for Scotland as it moves further down the road of political self-determination, that is to say as our politics and form of governance become more like our legal system, the independence of which was so jealously guarded at the Union of 1707? I believe that a failure to deal for so long with what are very legitimate concerns in the Lockerbie case is symptomatic of a malaise in the Scottish body politic, a failure of accountability. This malaise has been in part exposed by the re-establishment of a Parliament in Edinburgh, and indeed through that Parliament’s existence huge strides to cure it have been taken in the last dozen years. But devolution has also in part exacerbated the malaise, because sometimes political accountability falls conveniently somewhere between London and Edinburgh. It could be argued that this is a straightforward constitutional matter that will be resolved if and when Scotland becomes fully independent, but that I think would be naïve and wrong-headed: about as wrong-headed as the old Unionist canard that the Scots are somehow uniquely incapable of running their own affairs, and for the same reason – because it is not a uniquely Scottish problem. The implications of the Lockerbie affair have particular application to Scotland but are relevant to all democratic societies trying to balance freedom of information and open justice with issues of confidentiality and security. What kind of trust is there to be between the governed and those who govern? Can a culture of trust be built, or should we, the governed, trust only in the natural tendency of governments, of whatever complexion, to withhold information from us?

It seems to me that if as a community, a country, a nation, we do not address the outstanding matters of the Lockerbie case, then we are unlikely to address these wider concerns of trust and openness when they arise elsewhere, as they already have and inevitably will again, in our justice system and in our politics. This is not just about politicians, the makers of laws; it is at least as much about the legal system and the dispensers of justice. Faith that justice will ultimately prevail is a laudable virtue; but faith alone will not ensure that it does. We also require scepticism. It will be necessary to question, to doubt, and to require those who make and dispense the law to have the courage to answer those questions and allay those doubts, if we are to build the mature, dignified, morally defensible society that we should all want Scotland to be.

To return to where I started, to literature, but to poetry this time, not fiction. Do you remember the poem by Edwin Morgan that Liz Lochhead read on his behalf at the opening of the new Parliament building in 2004? What the people do not want, Morgan wrote, is a nest of fearties, a symposium of procrastinators, a phalanx of forelock-tuggers or a collection of ‘it wizny me-ers’? The poem, which is, appropriately, entitled ‘Open the Doors!’, goes on to say this:

Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians,
you are picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem
that has been almost but not quite, oh no not quite,
not ever broken or forgotten…
We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest and dearest wish to govern well,
don’t say we have no mandate to be so bold.

That is the spirit in which I have said what I have said this evening.

Prosecution policy over Lockerbie

[On the formation of Tony Blair’s Labour government following the general election held on 1 May 1997, Andrew Hardie QC became Lord Advocate. What follows is an exchange in the House of Lords on this date in 1997 between him and the Lord Advocate who had been in office in 1991 when charges were brought against Megrahi and Fhimah:]

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie asked Her Majesty's Government:

What is their policy concerning the prosecution of those responsible for the murder of those on flight Pan Am 103 and of residents of Lockerbie in December 1988.

The Lord Advocate (Lord Hardie) My Lords, the Government's policy in relation to the prosecution of any crime is that those allegedly responsible should be brought before the courts having jurisdiction for such matters in order that the accused may receive a fair trial.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie My Lords, the noble and learned Lord has not quite answered the Question that I put to him. As the new Administration takes up office and as the noble and learned Lord as the new Lord Advocate takes over responsibility for these matters, it would be helpful if a clear signal were given not only to this country but also to the rest of the world that the policy pursued by previous Lord Advocates will be maintained. Even in the absence of a clear answer from the noble and learned Lord, I hope I may ask him two questions. First, he will appreciate that as the public prosecutor in Scotland in that respect he does not share a collective responsibility with other ministerial colleagues but has a singular and possibly rather lonely duty to determine whether or not there should be a prosecution. Will he guard against any attempt, however well intentioned, to fetter that discretion for foreign policy or trade reasons?

Secondly, if the noble and learned Lord should determine at any stage that there should not be a prosecution in this matter, will he give an assurance that he will explain that to your Lordships' House? It is not just the relatives of those 270 people who died at Lockerbie who would like to know on what evidence the original decision was taken, but those of us who were involved in the prosecution and the original investigation, who have had our integrity impugned as conspiracy theory has piled upon conspiracy theory, would like the opportunity to reflect on how we would wish to take the matter forward.

Lord Hardie My Lords, I assure the House—as I did in my maiden speech—that I intend to guard the independence of the office which I hold. I assure the noble and learned Lord that I shall not allow anyone from any side of the House to fetter my discretion in any way. As regards reaching any decision, as the noble and learned Lord will be aware, I was involved, along with him, in the public inquiry into the Lockerbie disaster. Since taking up office I have had access to much information that was not available to me at that stage and which is not in the public domain. I can assure the House that I am satisfied on the information available to me that there is no reason not to proceed with the petitions. The noble and learned Lord will be aware that the situation is still fluid in the sense that if additional information becomes available any decision would have to be reviewed. I can also assure the noble and learned Lord that should it be decided that no prosecution will take place I shall return to the House and make a Statement to that effect.

HL Deb 25 June 1997 vol 580 cc1571-3

"Important and permanent" contribution to Lockerbie affair

[A report on the memorial service for Lord Fraser of Carmyllie was published yesterday on the STV News website.  It reads in part:]

Friends, family and former colleagues have paid their last respects at a thanksgiving service to Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the former Conservative MP and Lord Advocate who died suddenly last month.

The peer served in Margaret Thatcher and John Major's governments and drew up the indictments against the two Libyan men accused of orchestrating the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

A string of Tory grandees filed in to Dundee Parish Church St Mary's for what was described as a moving and humorous tribute to one of the party's elder statesmen.

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson said: "It is a sad day. Peter was a huge personality and he served both in Parliament and in Government with great intelligence but also a great deal of wit and humour and that's what we remember today." (...)

Former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind said: "Peter had a lot of specialist knowledge to provide on legal issues.

"Obviously he was associated with the Lockerbie affair and put a huge amount of effort into that and made a fantastic and important and permanent contribution to that work, but more broadly he had a range of interests and, of course, in the later years in the House of Lords he was amongst other experts and I know they respected him greatly as well."

[A rather more balanced assessment of Peter Fraser’s career can be found here and here.]

Swire is victim of Stockholm Syndrome, says Lord Fraser

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC, the Lord Advocate in 1991 at the time when charges in respect of the destruction of Pan Am 103 were brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi, has been a busy little bee. Two Sunday newspapers, The Sunday Times and Scotland on Sunday run interviews in which he accuses Dr Jim Swire of suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Stockholm syndrome relates to the behaviour of kidnap victims who, over time, become sympathetic to their captors, and can, accordingly have no application whatsoever to Dr Swire. But why should Peter Fraser allow anything as trivial as accuracy get in the way of a good headline?

Dr Swire and Rev John Mosey attended virtually the whole of the proceedings in the Scottish Court at Zeist. Both of them, having heard the evidence, have the very gravest doubts about the justifiability of the conviction of Megrahi. Those doubts are shared by many others who have taken the trouble to consider the evidence and the trial court's written opinion. And, of course, the independent (and expert) Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has referred the case back to the Criminal Appeal Court on six grounds, one of which is that in respect of crucial findings in fact, no reasonable court could have reached those conclusions on the evidence led.

For Peter Fraser in these circumstances to suggest that a relative who doubts the validity of Megrahi's conviction is labouring under a psychological aberration such as Stockholm syndrome is outrageously insulting and casts more doubt on the psychological state of the maker of the statement than on that of the person at whom it is directed.

Ministers must end the Lockerbie secrecy

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater in today's edition of The Times. It reads in part:]

Secrecy is the enemy of truth. It suggests the real facts are being withheld, encouraging suspicion, conspiracy theories and fake news. In the case of the Lockerbie bombing, it plays into the hands of those who believe that we have been hoodwinked about the evidence. They are adamant that prosecutors got the wrong man. The latest disclosures make the search for truth more complicated. (...)

It is 30 years since a PanAm plane crashed on to the town, and in that time the idea has grown that governments colluded in pointing the finger at Libya and away from the real perpetrators. According to this, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted, was innocent and the real plotters were Palestinians backed by Iran.

Why else, goes the theory, would British intelligence have been tapping phones and monitoring calls? As Marc Horne revealed in The Times last week, relatives of those who died are convinced that, in the aftermath of the atrocity, their conversations were recorded. They would hear “clinks and clunks” on the line; files disappeared from computers; odd people pretending to be journalists turned up to interview them. [RB: Marc Horne's articles can be read here and here.]

Papers released by the UK government from the national archives show that Lynda Chalker, a Foreign Office minister, wrote to the late Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, then Lord Advocate and in overall charge of the investigation, to express concern about victims’ groups on both sides of the Atlantic. They “will need careful watching”, she wrote.

Not surprisingly, the surviving relatives, or at least those who believe there has been a miscarriage of justice, smell a rat. They think ministers were worried lest they stumble on an inconvenient truth: that intelligence agencies were busy doctoring facts to implicate Libya.

The latest revelations seem to bolster that view. It is not just the sketchy evidence that has been revealed, but the dozens of documents that are being retained, and will not be released for another five years at least. They include, bizarrely, reports brought back from Libya by the late Labour MP Bernie Grant who travelled several times to Tripoli to interview members of Gaddafi’s regime and left his papers to a London college. They have been closed to members of the public by the government until 2025.

If you wanted to encourage the idea that there has been a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, you could hardly do better than that. As Aamer Anwar, the Megrahi family’s lawyer, who hopes to run another appeal, says: “It comes as no surprise that the security services were instructed to spy on those British relatives who to date have never given up in their pursuit of the truth.”

On closer examination, the revelations do little more than muddy the waters. It is intriguing to note, for instance, that the period in 1989 when phones were allegedly being tapped, long precedes the implication of the Libyans. The main suspect was a Palestinian group known as the PFLP-GC, allegedly backed by the Iranian government, seeking revenge for the sabotage of one of its planes. Briefings from Lord Fraser’s office pointed in that direction. Why officials should have wanted to tap the phones of relatives is far from clear.

In May 1989, a fragment of a bomb timer was found in the charred collar of a shirt packed in the suitcase that had held the bomb. The significance of its discovery was not immediately apparent but from it would stem an investigation that eventually pointed to Megrahi and the Libyans.

According to campaigners such as Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the attack, and Robert Black, QC, architect of the Lockerbie trial, that evidence was manufactured, probably by the CIA, because neither UK nor US governments wanted a confrontation with Iran at the time. Libya was a more convenient target, and Megrahi a disposable suspect. They believed their communications continued to be monitored.

Many thousands of words have been published to sustain the case. That does not mean it is true. For all the painstaking work done to cast doubt on the course of the trial and conviction of Megrahi, it takes a massive suspension of disbelief to accept that a decision was made at the highest level to suppress evidence, substitute false information and tilt the Scottish justice system in the direction of a miscarriage of justice. It would have involved hundreds of intelligence agents, criminal investigators and government officials, to say nothing of Scottish lawyers and judges.

Maybe that is what happened, but maybe is not enough. To allow the allegation to hover in the air is to undermine natural justice. It is unfair to the relatives, it casts doubt on the integrity of police and politicians, it clouds understanding of history.

Withholding evidence that might cast light on this matter is no way to resolve it. Many relatives have gone to the grave with uncertainty hanging over them. By 2025, when some or most of the papers are due to be released, others will have followed. There may be an appeal but, in the meantime, the government should come clean over its knowledge on Lockerbie and the investigation. It is hard to believe national security is still at risk 30 years on. Ministers have a responsibility to the dead and to the living. Justice suppressed, they should remember, is justice denied.

[RB: Mr Linklater once again contends that we Lockerbie dissentients are positing a grand conspiracy involving "hundreds of intelligence agents, criminal investigators and government officials, to say nothing of Scottish lawyers and judges". This is just nonsense. Here is what John Ashton wrote on a previous occasion when Mr Linklater made the same allegation:]

According to Mr Linklater's Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: 'the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that'. [RB: Responses to that article can be read here.]

The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Megrahi's supporters, have ever made such a claim.

To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful.

In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: 'I've been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof'. Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Megrahi's supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee has formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.

The US government was motivated to exonerate Iran, I believe, because the Iranians knew where the Iran-Contra skeletons lay and also held sway over the US hostages held in Lebanon – whose safe return was an obsession of the Reagan-Bush White House. Another obsession was Libya. As Watergate journalist Bob Woodward revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency's history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation – that is, lying and fakery – was at its core.

The Lockerbie investigation was supposedly driven by old-fashioned detective work, but, as we have learned over the years, behind the scenes the CIA played a key role. We now know that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 timers to Libya. Is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted it in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing?

I have done many months of my own old-fashioned detective work among the hundreds of people who searched the crash site. They witnessed American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, CIA agents searching the site without police supervision, and substantial drug and cash finds – all things that have been officially denied. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should reveal them. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should do some door knocking of his own.

Lockerbie: Human rights lawyer states Megrahi was framed

[This is the headline over an article on the World Socialist Web Site. It consists largely of a summary of Gareth Peirce's recent contribution in the London Review of Books. The following are excerpts from the new article.]

Leading British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce has stated that, in her opinion Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man ... convicted of the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was framed.

Peirce has a long track record of defending those caught in the British legal system’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. Her clients have included the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and Judith Ward, all of whom were Irish people accused and wrongly convicted of IRA bomb attacks in the 1970s. More recently Peirce has taken up a number of high profile cases of individuals accused in the so-called “war on terror”, including the Tipton Three and Moazam Begg, held illegally by the US government in Guantánamo Bay. She has represented the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead by British police in Stockwell underground station in 2005.

Writing in the September edition of the London Review of Books, Peirce, of the law firm headed by Benedict Birnberg, summarises some of the most concerning, and well known, aspects of the entire Lockerbie disaster in which 270 people died, and the subsequent investigation. (...)

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Llamen Khalifa Fhimah, were handed over by the Libyan government in 1999. The trial opened at a converted US airbase in the Netherlands in 2000. The indictment against Megrahi read that an MST 13 bomb timer was made in Switzerland, by MEBO AG, and sold exclusively to Libya.

Identification of the timer rested on the efforts of Thomas Hayes and Alan Feraday of the Royal Armament and Development Establishment (RARDE), along with Thomas Thurman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In 1997, following an investigation by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, Thurman was barred from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich described Thurman as “circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in...therefore fabricating evidence”.

Thomas Hayes claimed that on May 12, 1989, he found a fragment of circuit board in the collar of a shirt later traced to a Maltese shop. The fragment itself had been found in January 1989 by British police investigating the crash site.

Peirce states, “Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful”.

“Hayes”, Peirce continues, “played his part in the most notorious [miscarriage case] of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper”.

Hayes’s information regarding this crucial piece of Lockerbie evidence was also flawed. Despite having carefully documented every other piece of evidence he found, Hayes had made no drawing of this particular item and had not assigned it a reference number on discovery. He had not carried out a test for explosives. Hayes said he had “no idea” when the pagination of his notes recording findings had been altered to include an additional page, and it was an “unfathomable mystery” as to why the alterations should have occurred. (...)

She describes the verdict delivered in 2001 by three experienced judges, upheld later by five appeal court judges as “profoundly shocking”, and makes the following devastating assessment:

“Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial”.

Peirce concludes that there is “pressing need to investigate in details how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case—the death of justice—and who should be found responsible”.

Subsequent to Peirce’s comments, more revelations have emerged about the crucial piece of MST 13 circuit board. Following a Freedom of Information request raised by Scottish Nationalist Member of the Scottish Parliament Christine Graham, the Scottish Crown Office has confirmed that evidence item PT-35, the piece of circuit board found by Hayes, was taken for examination to both Germany and the US. Graham claimed that this was done with the knowledge of the then chief prosecutor, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who recently told a Dutch television company that he was unaware of the fragment’s movements.

Megrahi was released by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny Macaskill in August, allegedly on humanitarian grounds. It occurred at a time when the Libyan government had made clear that, if the terminally ill Megrahi had been allowed to die in Greenock prison, British oil contracts would have been imperilled. In addition, Megrahi had agreed to drop a long delayed appeal against his conviction in order to secure his release.

The release triggered outrage from the US in particular and was attacked by President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the head of the FBI, and the US Joint Chief of Staff amongst many. Commentary went as far as suggesting that the so-called “special relationship” between British and US imperialism, and Scotland in particular, was imperiled.

All this has been forgotten. On September 21, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly informed the world that the US had “deep abiding ties with Scotland”. Kelly continued, “We are very close allies, and I don’t think we’re looking to punish anybody per se. There’s no tit for tat here”.

Three weeks later, speaking before a meeting with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Clinton stated, “I have a special relationship with the prime minister. And of course, I think it can’t be said often enough, we have a special relationship between our countries”.

What was said between the two regarding Lockerbie is not clear, but the meeting came immediately prior to the British government’s decision to send an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan. Brown has subsequently ruled out a public inquiry into the bombing, while the Scottish government have denied they had the power to hold an authoritative inquiry in the first place.

Clinton also called in the Libyan government, speaking for 15 minutes en route to Egypt with Libyan Foreign Minister and former intelligence chief Musa Kusa. According to US Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley, the two talked of “Sudan, Darfur, cooperation about terrorism and the possibility of advancing our relationship”.

Crowley claimed that Megrahi was not discussed, lamely stating that “the Libyans understand our concerns about Megrahi very, very well”.

MacAskill prison visit absurd, says Lord Fraser

One of Scotland’s most respected legal figures has bitterly attacked Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister, for his decision to visit the convicted Lockerbie bomber in prison.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who as Lord Advocate was responsible for drawing up the indictment in 1991 against Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi and his co-accused, described Mr MacAskill’s decision to go to Greenock Prison on August 5 as “absurd”.

Lord Fraser, who also led the public inquiry into the Scottish Parliament building cost scandal, said in a television interview that instead of going to see al-Megrahi, Mr MacAskill would have done better to have gone to the United States to explain his decision to free the Lockerbie bomber, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, on compassionate grounds.

He added: “The idea that he [Mr MacAskill] goes to Greenock Prison and he doesn’t get on a plane and go to Washington and explain his position to those who are really important ... just seems to me to be quite extraordinary ... I just think that was absurd.”

Lord Fraser, in the interview, made clear that he supported the decision to release al-Megrahi. His criticism was directed at the way the affair had been handled.

Mr MacAskill’s defence of his prison visit is that he was “duty bound” to go because of a commitment given by Jack Straw, the UK Justice Minister. Under the terms of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement, the prisoner must be given the opportunity to make representations. “Mr Al-Megrahi chose to do so in person,” Mr MacAskill said.

Mr Straw has denied this, saying that he only recommended that a prisoner make representations in writing.

[The above is the text of an article in today's edition of The Times.

The description of Peter Fraser as "one of Scotland’s most respected legal figures" will be causing unbridled mirth in the Scottish legal profession. He may be a respected figure, but it certainly is not for his eminence as a lawyer.

The visit by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice to Abdelbaset Megrahi became inevitable as soon as Mr MacAskill decided, presumably after taking advice from his officials, to take representations in person (and not just in writing) from interested persons, such as relatives of those killed on Pan Am 103. He could not, while complying with the requirement of procedural fairness incumbent upon him, offer the opportunity to make representations in person to categories of interested persons while denying that opportunity to the prisoner himself.

Are the politicians who have rushed to criticise Kenny MacAskill for meeting Abdelbaset Megrahi prepared to criticise him for meeting (in person in some cases, by video link in others) Lockerbie relatives? If not, their criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the legal position and reflects on them, not on Mr MacAskill.]

Criminal acts and the Lockerbie evidence

What follows is the text of an item posted on this blog four years ago on this date:

Angiolini tells Parliament “no evidence of any criminal act” in Pan Am 103 evidence chain

[This is the headline over a news item just published on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. It relates to the written answers given by the Lord Advocate to questions submitted by Christine Grahame MSP. The news item reads in part:]

The Lord Advocate has told the Holyrood Parliament that “there is no evidence of any criminal act having been carried out in relation to any of the forensic evidence in the Lockerbie investigation.” 

Elish Angiolini was responding to a Parliamentary question from MSP Christine Grahame (...)

Grahame asked Angiolini if she was aware of the reported comments of former FBI scientist Frederic Whitehurst implying that the FBI laboratory in Washington DC may constitute an additional crime scene in the case. 

Former Lord Advocate at the time of the trial, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, has stated publicly in a television interview for Dutch television in 2009 that he was not aware that the timer fragment known as PT35 was sent to the United States of America for examination by FBI officials, and that he would have opposed such transportation of this fragment on the basis of concerns that it might be lost in transit or provoke accusations that it had been tampered with. 

Angiolini said in her Parliamentary answer that she was aware of this information, and confirmed that the fragment was taken to the United States of America by Scottish police officers and a British forensic scientist in June 1990 as part of the investigation into the Lockerbie event. 

"There is no evidence of any criminal act having been carried out in relation to any of the forensic evidence in the Lockerbie investigation," she said.

“The fragment remained in the custody and control of the Scottish police officers and the British forensic scientist during the visit to the United States and was subsequently identified as having come from an electronic timer manufactured by a Swiss company, MEBO, to the order of the Libyan intelligence service,” she said. 

In July 2007, one week after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case back to High Court for Megrahi’s appeal, former MEBO employee Ulrich Lumpert swore an affidavit stating that he had personally manufactured the fragment, and that it had been introduced falsely into the Crown’s evidence chain. He said that he handed the fragment to authorities investigating the case on 22 June 1989, and admitted committing perjury in the Zeist trial, citing fear of his life if his testimony reflected what he narrated in his affidavit. (...)

Angiolini's answers did not narrate what investigations may have been undertaken within the Crown Office or in Scottish police forces to reach the conclusion that there was no evidence of criminal acts.

This is not the first time the conduct of the trail and its handling has been considered a crime. On 14 October 2005, UN Special Observer Hans Koechler concluded that the conduct of the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmend Al Megrahi had concerned him to the extent that a crime may have taken place at Camp Zeist to manufacture the conviction of Megrahi. 

“The falsification of evidence, selective presentation of evidence, manipulation of reports, interference into the conduct of judicial proceedings by intelligence services, etc. are criminal offenses in any country,” Koechler's office said in a statement. 

“In view of the above new revelations and in regard to previously known facts as reported in Dr. Koechler’s reports, the question of possible criminal responsibility, under Scots law, of people involved in the Lockerbie trial should be carefully studied by the competent prosecutorial authorities.”

[RB 2014: While the Lord Advocate in 2010 may have believed that there was no evidence of any criminal act having been carried out in relation to any of the forensic evidence in the Lockerbie investigation, no such belief can be honestly held today in the light of the revelation that PT35 had a metallurgical profile entirely different from the circuit boards in the timers supplied by MEBO to Libya. And, since the Crown knew this long before 2010 (indeed before the Zeist trial in 2000-2001) but did not disclose it to the defence, it is perhaps permissible to be somewhat sceptical that that belief was honestly held within the Crown Office in 2010. This issue features among the allegations of criminal conduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial that are currently under investigation by Police Scotland.]

Dr David Fieldhouse and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer published on this date in 2008 on the OhmyNews website. It reads in part:]

Back in 1988, Dr David Fieldhouse was a police surgeon from Bradford, Yorkshire. On Dec 21, Fieldhouse heard about the crash of Pan Am 103 on News at Ten. He immediately phoned the Lockerbie police station to volunteer his help and experience, which the Lockerbie Police eagerly accepted.

Minutes later, Fieldhouse was driving on the highway to Scotland and arrived to Lockerbie shortly before midnight. There, he reported to the police station. After having received his instructions, he was sent out with a police officer to find bodies and certify them dead.

"My work began after briefings and involved several square miles of the crash scene over a period of about 16 hours -- ending, as I recall, at about 1600 hours on 22nd December 1988.

"During those hours of the search for and confirmation of death in the case of many bodies, I was accompanied by one or more police officers at all times. We occasionally met others both during the night and the ensuing day," Fieldhouse told me.

Fieldhouse was working to the east and southeast of Lockerbie between Middlebie and Tundergarth, which happens to be the earliest place where the bodies fell from the plane.

When he reported to the police station that evening, he had certified 58 bodies dead and labeled them accordingly from DCF 1 to DCF 58.

"I saw 58 bodies during that period of the search. Fifty-five of them were to the Northwest of a road that runs from Middlebie to Bankshill and only three were to the Southeast of that road.

"I confirmed death in the case of many bodies including one that I afterwards learned was that of McKee [an American intelligence operative returning from Lebanon]. At the time I saw the bodies I made brief notes which included, in some cases, a note of any clothing remaining on them and in every case, the sex and any major injuries visible, such as decapitation or loss of a limb," he said.

For several weeks after the explosion, Fieldhouse traveled on one day per week to Lockerbie to work on the computers installed at the temporary headquarters of the team at the Academy, a school in Lockerbie, in order to help the police identify the bodies and where they had been found. On each of those occasions, Fieldhouse was officially signed, or logged, in on arrival and logged out on departure.

"I always had a police officer, not always the same one, to assist me in the work. The aim was to work out the identities of the bodies I had certified as dead at the scene of the crash during the night of 21st and the daylight hours of 22nd December 1988 by looking through all the information available at the time such as statements, post mortem notes, other reports," Fieldhouse explained to me.

Fieldhouse was told that information was made available on a "need to know" basis only. It is thus likely that so some was probably withheld from him. He was told that the computers were linked to Washington.

"My identification was limited to correlating the bodies I had certified as being dead with those logged by the police. My sole aim in doing so was to enable me to write an accurate report of which persons I had pronounced deceased and at roughly what times I had done so," he said.

Nearly two years later, during the Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) into the Lockerbie disaster, Fieldhouse was unjustifiably tarnished by a police officer in official sworn evidence.

Led by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the Scottish Lord Advocate, Sgt David Johnston of the Strathclyde police started his evidence about Fieldhouse as follows.

"On the evening of the disaster, and in the early hours of the following day, Fieldhouse went out and examined a number of victims on his own, pronouncing life extinct, and attached on them his own form of identification. This was not known to us until some considerable time later," Johnston said.

The Lord Advocate continued with a series of similar questions that were all intended to destroy the credibility of Fieldhouse. After asking about the discovery of the body of American businessman Tom Ammerman, Fraser went as far as suggesting that Fieldhouse was not a medical doctor.

"Would this be another example of or Mr Fieldhouse carrying out a search on his own?" the Lord Advocate asked.

"It would, my Lord," Johnston said.

"And marking the body of a person who is dead without notifying the police?"

"That is correct."

In fact, Fieldhouse was accompanied throughout by police officers, three of whom he has named. Ammerman's body had been found by Fieldhouse and an accompanying police officer. Both men agreed on the report.

On Jan 22, 1991, Fieldhouse appeared at the inquiry. He had no difficulty to swiftly dispose of all the false allegations that had been tossed against him.

"I would record my thanks to Fieldhouse and my apologies for the undeserved criticism of his activities," concluded Sheriff Mowat, who was in charge of the inquiry.

"I was accompanied by three Police Officers at about 1500 hours GMT on 22nd December 1988," stated Fieldhouse. "One of them made notes for me as I dictated what I wished to be recorded. There were several bodies in a few fields near a monument south of Tundergarth church, near to Lockerbie town.

"I labeled one body DCF 49 and recorded: Heavy adult male, multi-colored T-shirt, blue jeans, field going northwest from monument.

"I knew that the identification of McKee was absolutely correct because of the clothing which correlated closely with the other reports and statements, and the computers that were linked up to Washington," he concluded.

In a letter to me, former FBI agent R Marquise, who led the Lockerbie investigation, wrote: "I would like to know about the statement attributed to Fieldhouse where he spoke of the clothing worn by McKee based on reports and statements and the computers that were linked up to Washington. Please we are talking about FBI computers I assume and we did not have any then. Before we ever had any infrastructure in place, I would imagine that McKee was identified."

Fieldhouse explained: "The quote is very slightly incorrect and should have read: … reports and statements on the computers that were linked to Washington. I noted this at the time of reading the FAI report, but did not make any comment as I did not think that it was relevant, though the sense is slightly altered by the correct version of what (I think) I said."

In the early weeks of 1989, Fieldhouse studied the records held on the computers in the Academy (Investigation Headquarters) at Lockerbie.

He noted that none of the codes (DCF 1 to 58) he had given to bodies was recorded on the computers. He was amazed that all except two of his labels had all been thrown away and replaced with others. "This was astounding to me," Fieldhouse said.

Fieldhouse claims that the computer record, which seemed to match his notes relating to DCF 49, gave the mortuary body number as 225 and although he did not recall and did not note the description of the clothing on the computer file, it would certainly have correlated with his findings sufficiently for him to be confident that he had correctly "married them up."

Fieldhouse told me a very disturbing story. He is adamant that nobody on the computer files matched the location of the one that he recorded as "DCF 12." He is almost certain of this because the body was found at a very particular location. DCF 12 was one of the three bodies southeast of the road that runs from Middlebie to Bankshill.

"I saw 58 bodies during that period of the search," Fieldhouse told me. "Fifty-five of them were to the north of a road and only three were to the south of that road. DCF 12 was one of the three bodies south of the road. I was as confident as I could have been that I had not made any errors, but I do accept it is possible that I misunderstood the location of the body when trying to pinpoint its position on a map and trying to provide a map reference number.

"However, if the police had recorded my codes (DCF 1 to DCF 58) on the computer records which they were compiling, there would have been no difficulty in marrying up the bodies which I had seen and the ones which they had recovered.

"When the bodies were being examined by the pathologist, all notable characteristics such as sex, fractures, clothing were noted, but apparently not my labels. It seems inconceivable that 58 consecutive numbered codes on 58 bodies could be disregarded. Clearly it would have been obvious to the most ignorant observer that they served a purpose and that, in any event, it would have been better to record the details in case they had a usefulness not then apparent to the person recording the details in the mortuary.

"You could not, for example get any results for a 'search and find' instruction given to the computer for 'DCF 12,' whereas it was easy enough to get results in the search for a 'black … face … ewe.' It does make one wonder why they ignored, for official purposes at least, all my reference codes and labels and this gives rise to suspicions that there was an ulterior motive on their part."

Nearly two years later, in December 1993, Fieldhouse gave an interview for a film about Lockerbie, The Maltese Double Cross, in which he narrates some of the events discussed in this article.

A few days after the interview, Fieldhouse was summoned to a meeting with two senior West Yorkshire police officers at Wakefield. Without explanation, he was sacked as police surgeon with a three-month notice.

"In my wildest dreams, I did not realize that I was to set a ball rolling which resulted in the ensuing lies by the police to the Fatal Accident Inquiry about what I had done or about the apparent missing body -- DCF 12," Fieldhouse wrote to me.

The day before the Lockerbie bombing McKee called his mother. "Meet me at the Pittsburgh airport tomorrow night," McKee told his mother.

"This was the first time Chuck ever telephoned me from Beirut," McKee's mother said. "I was flabbergasted. It's a surprise. Always before he would wait until he was back in Virginia to call and say he was coming home."

McKee's mother says she is sure her son's sudden decision to fly home was not known to his superiors in Virginia.

If indeed McKee was returning unannounced, one is left wondering how the computers in Washington had information concerning the clothes he was wearing on Dec 21.