Dubious "evidence" and suspect "witnesses"

[What follows is the text of an article by Linda S Heard that was published in Gulf News on this date ten years ago:]

On December 21 1988, a Pan Am plane mysteriously exploded over Scotland causing the death of 270 people from 21 countries. The tragedy provoked global outrage. In 1991, two Libyans were charged with the bombing.

In the event, only Abdulbaset Ali Mohammad Al Megrahi, a Libyan agent, was pronounced guilty by a panel of three judges, who based their decision on largely circumstantial evidence. Al Megrahi and the Libyan government have protested their innocence all along.

Nevertheless, after suffering punitive UN sanctions which froze overseas Libyan bank accounts and prevented the import of spare parts needed for the country's oil industry, Tripoli reluctantly agreed to pay $2.7 billion to victims? families ($10 million per family), on condition the pay-out would not be deemed as admission of guilt.

In February, 2004, the Libyan prime minister told the BBC that his country was innocent but was forced to pay-up as a "price for peace".

Al Megrahi is currently serving a life sentence but earlier this year the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled there may have been a miscarriage of justice on the basis of lost or destroyed evidence.

Later this month, a Scottish appeals court is due to revisit the case and is expected to overturn Al Megrahi's conviction as unsafe.

The Libyan leader's son Saif Al Islam recently said he is confident Al Megrahi will soon be found innocent and will be allowed to return home.

On Sunday, an Observer expose written by Alex Duval Smith reported "a key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake" with allegations of "international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work" levelled at "the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police".

The Observer story maintains Ulrich Lumpert a Swiss engineer who was "a crucial witness" has now confessed that he lied about the origins of a timer switch.

Recently, Lumpert gave a sworn declaration to a Swiss court, which read "I stole a prototype MST-13 timing device" and "gave it without permission on June 22, 1989 to a person who was officially investigating the Lockerbie affair".

The owner of the company that manufactured the switch - forced into bankruptcy after being sued by Pan Am - says he told police early in the enquiry that the timer switch was not one his company had ever sold to Libya.

Moreover, he insists the timer switch shown to the court had been tampered with since he initially viewed it in Scotland, saying the pieces appeared to have been "carbonised" in the interim. He also says the court was so determined to prove Libya's guilt it brushed aside his evidence.

In 2005, a former Scottish police chief signed a statement alleging the CIA had planted fragments of a timer circuit board produced at trial, evidence supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent to the effect his agency "wrote the script" to ensure Libya was incriminated.

There are also allegations that clothing allegedly purchased by the bomber in Malta before it was wrapped around the bomb, was intact when discovered but by the time it reached the court it was in shreds.

The shopkeeper who sold the item made a statement to the effect Al Megrahi had never been a customer. Instead, he identified an Egyptian-born Palestinian Mohammad Abu Talb - now serving a life sentence in Sweden for a synagogue bombing.

Professor Hans Koechler, appointed by the UN to be an observer at the trial, has termed its outcome "a spectacular miscarriage of justice". Koechler has repeatedly called for an independent enquiry, which, to date, the British government has refused to allow.

Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, insists "no court is likely to get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence".

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, said "Scottish justice obviously played a leading part in one of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, who was earlier second-in-command of Britain's Aviation and Maritime Department from 1989 to 1992, writes about a strange incident on his website.

Murray says a colleague told him "in a deeply worried way" about an intelligence report indicating Libya was not involved in the Pan Am bombing. When he asked to see it, his colleague said it was marked for named eyes only, which Murray describes as "extremely unusual". Earlier, a CIA report that had reached a similar conclusion had been conveniently buried.

If Al Megrahi walks, as is likely, Libya will be vindicated and would presumably be able to reclaim monies paid in compensation along with its reputation.

This would also be a highly embarrassing turn of events for Britain and the US not to mention their respective intelligence agencies, and would leave the question of who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 unanswered.

In a perfect world, Libya should also receive an apology from its accusers and should be allowed to sue for damages for all that it lost as a result of UN sanctions.

But in a world where political expediency often triumphs, the appeal has no foregone conclusion despite the exposure of dubious "evidence" and suspect "witnesses".

Not the finest hour

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2010. The comments following the post are also well worth reading.

An independent judicial review into the Lockerbie bombing is now essential

[This is the heading over a letter in today's edition of The Herald from Iain A D Mann. It reads as follows:]

It is becoming clearer by the day that an independent judicial inquiry is now essential into all the events surrounding the PanAm 103 disaster and the subsequent conviction of one person, the Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, for the crime ...

The pathetic attempt by some US Senators to investigate this deeply complex matter in one afternoon session, by grilling a few foreign politicians on the basis of misguided assumptions and misunderstood facts, underlines how important it now is to have such an inquiry in the United Kingdom (or Scotland) under proper judicial conditions.

If a public inquiry continues to be refused by those in authority, the alternative is to find some way to re-open Megrahi’s second appeal in the Scottish courts. I cannot believe that the Scottish Government and/or the Scottish Justice Department could not devise some way of achieving this if they really wanted to. It pains me to say so, but I believe that the original trial in Camp Zeist, before three High Court judges with no jury, was not the finest hour of our much-vaunted legal system. Its reputation would be repaired, and perhaps enhanced, if it were now seen to provide an opportunity for all the relevant and previously unheard evidence to be reconsidered and tested in court.

Whether that scrutiny is by a public inquiry or a court appeal process, it is imperative that this time both the UK and US governments make available all the relevant documents that they have so far disgracefully refused to disclose, on the spurious grounds of either “national security” or “not in the public interest”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after an exhaustive three-year investigation, reported no fewer than six possible reasons for a possible miscarriage of justice, and these must be properly examined and tested judicially.

I am sure there are many like me who want to prove to the world that our country – Britain and Scotland – is still a true democracy, where justice is not denied or distorted by those in authority for whatever misguided reason. The families of all the 270 victims of the PanAm atrocity deserve to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

[A letter from Tam Dalyell in today's edition of The Scotsman reads:]

... Alex Salmond and his justice secretary should travel to Washington to blurt out the unpalatable truth; namely that their decision to release Mr Megrahi had nothing whatsoever to do with BP, compassion or legal precedent.

It had everything to do with avoiding an appeal which would have revealed the delaying and disgraceful behaviour of the Crown Office over 21 years, the "inexplicable" (the UN observer's word) decision by the judges at Zeist and the shortcomings in Mr Megrahi's original defence, not to mention the involvement of the American government in scapegoating Libya, for the crime that was carried out by Jibril, Abu Talb and the PFLP-GC.

The Americans should now be told that the motive for Mr Megrahi's release was the avoidance of the humiliation of Scottish justice in the eyes of the world.

Tony Gauci’s evidence

[On this date in 2000 the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci gave his evidence at the Lockerbie trial. Glasgow University’s Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit recorded his appearance in the witness box in a brief report that reads as follows:]

The main evidence on Tuesday was that of Mr Tony Gauci. Mr Gauci is the proprietor of the shop 'Mary's House' in Sliema, Malta from where the clothing in the suitcase allegedly containing the explosive device is said to have been purchased. He stated that the man who purchased the clothing resembled one of the accused - Mr Al Megrahi. However, he also admitted that in 1991 he had identified Mohamed Abu Talb as closely resembling the man who had made the purchases. The latter is, of course, one of the individuals incriminated by the defence.'

[RB: A full transcript of Mr Gauci’s evidence can be read here (pages 1467 to 1500). A devastating analysis by Kevin Bannon of the Gauci evidence can be read here.]

When truth is inconvenient

[On this date ten years ago a long article by Hugh Miles headlined Inconvenient Truths was published in the London Review of Books.  The following are excerpts:]

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. (...)

Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the [official] who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi. (...)

Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding … which documents … were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USSVincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. (...)

Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.

Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William [Chasey], a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.

At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases). If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:

It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty. 

Victim of one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in history

[Abdelbaset al-Megrahi died in Tripoli on this date five years ago. What follows is an obituary written by Tam Dalyell that was published in The Independent:]

Acres of newsprint have appeared in recent years, covering various rather separate theories about the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber.

If I thought for one moment that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was guilty as charged in the mass murder of 270 innocent people in the crash of the Pan Am airliner "Maid of the Seas" at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, I would not have agreed to pen an obituary – let alone an affectionate one.

My settled conviction, as a "Professor of Lockerbie Studies" over a 22-year period, is that neither Megrahi nor Libya had any role in the destruction of Pan Am 103. The Libyans were cynically scapegoated in 1990, two years after the crash, by a US government which had decided to go to war with Iraq and did not want complications with Syria and Iran, which had harboured the real perpetrators of the terrible deed.

Libya and its "operatives", Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, only came into the frame at a very late date. In my informed opinion, Megrahi has been the victim of one of the most spectacular (and expensive) miscarriages of justice in history. The assertion of innocence is confirmed in the 497 pages of John Ashton's scholarly and remarkable book, Megrahi: You Are My Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence, published by Birlinn.

This is an opinion shared by the senior and experienced solicitor Eddie McKechnie, who successfully represented Fhimah at Zeist in Holland, where a Scottish court was assembled to try the two accused under rules conducted by the jurisdiction of the laws of Scotland, and who took on Megrahi's case following his conviction; by Tony Kelly, the immensely thorough solicitor who has represented him for the past six years; by the bereaved relatives Dr Jim Swire and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost daughters and attended the entire Zeist trial; by Professor Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, and Lockerbie-born; and by many others in legal Edinburgh.

Furthermore, the Scottish Criminal Review Commission, in the course of its 800-page report, says (paragraph 24, page 708): "The Crown deprived the defence of the opportunity to take such steps as it might have deemed necessary – so the defence's case was damaged." It concluded: "The commission's view is that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred."

Megrahi was not in Malta on the date the clothing, so crucial in the whole Lockerbie saga, was bought from the shopkeeper Tony Gauci. The proprietor of Mary's House identified a number of different people, including Abu Talb, who appeared at the trial to deny his part in the bombing.

Talb was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command and is now serving a life sentence in Sweden for the 1985 bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. These discrepancies were part of the reason why the Scottish criminal review commission concluded that there could have been a miscarriage of justice; another was the unexplained payment of $10m from Iranian sources into the coffers of the Popular Front.

The testimony of Lesley Atkinson, who knew Megrahi well in Tripoli, is interesting. She is the wife of Neville Atkinson, who, in 1972, left a career as a night-fighter pilot in the Royal Navy to take up a position as personal pilot to the president of Libya, Colonel Gadaffi, until 1982. "Megrahi was polite and friendly and worked for Libyan Arab Airlines," Mrs Atkinson told me. "Of course, lots of people who worked for LAA were connected to the security services and I do not doubt that he was one of them. We knew him both at work and at the Beach Club – he was a normal, nice guy. I cannot imagine that he would ever have dreamt of planting a bomb on an airliner. He just would not have done that to passengers."

Eddie McKechnie described Megrahi as a cultured man doing a job for his country, and certainly not a mass-murderer. Had he not been given extremely bad advice not to appear in the witness box Megrahi would have revealed the truth – that he was a sanctions-buster, travelling the world to find spare parts for the Libyan oil industry and Libyan Arab Airlines. This role was confirmed to me by Colonel Gadaffi, when, as leader of the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to Libya in March 2001, I saw him in his tent outside Sirte. Gaddafi's own knowledge or involvement in Lockerbie is a different matter.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi was born in 1952 and educated in Tripoli and in the Engineering Faculty of Benghazi University. He became involved in the Ministry of Trade, and like many other officials, certainly did so in the intelligence services. He served as the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and as director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A genuine believer in what the young Gaddafi was trying to achieve, and in the Great Jamariyah, Megrahi was happy to put his talents at the service of the state. Where else in Africa is there no hint of personal corruption among the leadership, he asked me! He had good relations with engineers at Brown and Root, I was told by their chairman and managing director, Sir Richard Morris (1980-90). Brown and Root was the contractor for the huge irrigation projects in Cyrenerica, south of Benghazi, the man-made river bringing water to desert areas that had been fertile in Roman times.

He was understandably proud of the traditional skills associated with his people. On one occasion, when I visited him in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow and told him that I had been to Leptis Magna, he responded: "You know that my Tripolitanian ancestors were the artists in stone, responsible for work throughout the Empire, not least in Rome itself!" Had the judges had the opportunity to get to know Megrahi, as I knew him, they could never have arrived at the verdict of "guilty" – at most, the good Scots legal term "not proven".

After Zeist, Fhimah, represented by the aggressively formidable barrister Richard Keen QC, was cleared and returned to a hero's welcome in Tripoli. Fhimah talked with knowledge and pride, as did Megrahi, about the wonderful sight of Sabbratah and the glories of the Greek colonial city at Cyrene.

Meanwhile, Megrahi was incarcerated in Barlinnie Prison. I was not his only visitor there and in Greenock who came away with a favourable opinion. Dr Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, a medical student at the University of Nottingham, told me: "On meeting Abdelbaset in Greenock prison, I found him charming, rational, not given to anger or bluster. He made it obvious that his first priority was to clear his name before returning to his much-loved family in Tripoli.

"I saw him for the last time just before Christmas 2008, when, he, a devout Muslim, gave me a Christmas card in which he asked me and my family to pray for him and his family. That card is one of my most precious possessions.

"This meeting was before he could have known just how closely death loomed. I cannot criticise his apparently voluntary decision to spend his last months on earth with his family, above the priority of clearing his name."

I know that in some uninformed quarters, Dr Swire's views are regarded as eccentric. But it is the other British relatives who have studied the position in depth, such as Martin Cadman, who lost his son Bill; Pamela Dix, who lost her brother; and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost a daughter, have arrived at precisely the same conclusions about Megrahi's innocence. Unlike some American relatives, they have bothered to make exhaustive studies of the detail.

In my opinion, whatever Gordon Brown, Kenny MacAskill, Alec Salmond and Jack Straw – all fundamentally decent human beings – may feel they have to say in public due to pressure, and wickedness in Washington and in the Crown Office in Edinburgh, which, above all, did not want their misdeeds exposed by the truth, they all knew that they were acquiescing in the release of an innocent man. I am not quite so sure that Fhimah did not have an inkling about potentially explosive material on its way to the Bekaa valley.

Even in his final hours, controversy never deserted Megrahi. The Libyan authorities were absolutely justified in declining to extradite him, both for reasons of international law and more importantly, that he was not guilty as charged of the Lockerbie crime – also the considered opinion of Dr Hans Koechler, who attended Megrahi's trial as an official UN observer and has examined his appeal process in Scotland.

As James Cusick, who has followed the twists and turns of the Lockerbie saga for many years as a highly informed journalist, wrote in The Independent on Tuesday 30 August, "The truth behind the Lockerbie bombing remains enmeshed in diplomatic gains."

My last sight of Abdelbaset was on TV on 3 October, attended by Mrs Megrahi, with tubes galore, thanking Dr Swire in gentle tones for trying to furnish necessary drugs and hissing out that there were many liars at Zeist. So there were.

Police coached Lockerbie witness to identify Libyan as bomber

[This is the headline over a report published in The Guardian on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

The key witness in the Lockerbie bombing trial was coached and steered by Scottish detectives into wrongly identifying a Libyan sanctions buster as the bomber, his appeal lawyers claim.

Lawyers acting for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi will tell an appeal court that Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before giving the evidence that finally led to Megrahi's conviction for the bombing in 1991.

Their allegations are central to Megrahi's appeal, which begins in Edinburgh tomorrow, against his conviction for the murder of 270 passengers, crew and townspeople when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie on 21 December, 1988.

The first stage of the Libyan's lengthy appeal, which may take until next year to complete, will focus on his claims that the original trial judges were wrong in law to convict him and wrong to discard crucial evidence which undermined their guilty verdict.

Gauci identified Megrahi as the purchaser of clothes at his shop on Malta which were later allegedly packed in the suitcase carrying the Lockerbie bomb. But the Libyan's lawyers will claim there is now substantial evidence undermining the credibility of Gauci's testimony.

Megrahi's lawyers now believe Gauci received a "substantial" reward from the US government after his conviction thought to be as much as $2m - a payment not disclosed at the trial. The case against Megrahi hinges on Gauci's claim that the clothes allegedly packed into the suitcase bomb were bought on 7 December - the only day when Megrahi was in the area. Megrahi's lawyers say they can now prove they were bought up to two weeks before then, when the Libyan was not in the country.

Megrahi's lawyers will claim that in nearly two dozen formal police interviews, Gauci gave contradictory dates of purchase, changed his account of the sale, and on one occasion appeared to identify the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Talb as the purchaser. Gauci's evidence is made unreliable by "undisputed factors", the appeal court will hear. They include an "extraordinary" delay in Gauci recalling the events of December 1988 and naming Megrahi; the "extraordinary amount of post-event suggestion to which the witness was subjected"; and his exposure to photos of Megrahi.

The appeal, which Megrahi is expected to watch live on a video link from Greenock prison near Glasgow, is being contested by the Scottish prosecution service, and the British government.

An A to Z of Lockerbie “conspiracies”

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

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

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

B

is for bomb-maker

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

C

is for coffin

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

D

is for drugs

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

E

is for the Express

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

F

is for fiction

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

G

is for Garrick

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

H

is for Helsinki

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

I

is for Interfor

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

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

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

K

is for Kuwait

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

L

is for Libya

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

M

is for the Maltese connection

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

N

is for not proven

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

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

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

P

is for Palestinians

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

Q

is for Queen's English

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

R

is for red tarpaulin

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

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

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

T

is for Toshiba

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

U

is for US intelligence

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

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

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

W

is for warning

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

X

is for xenophobia

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

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

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

Z

is for Zeist

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