Faltering steps on the path towards a Lockerbie trial

[Today is St Andrew’s day.  Andrew the Apostle is the patron saint of Scotland. He is also the patron saint of Luqa in Malta, which falls within St Andrew’s Parish.  The bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie is alleged to have started its progress as unaccompanied baggage sent from Luqa Airport via Frankfurt to Heathrow. That version of events cannot, of course, survive the researches of Dr Morag Kerr, as set out in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.

Here is another in the blog’s series of pieces about the tortuous path towards a Lockerbie trial, taken from a report published in The Scotsman on 30 November 1998:]

The United Nations secretary-general is hoping to travel to Libya this weekend to complete the handover of the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing. It is understood from diplomatic sources that Mr Annan is optimistic that the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, is finally prepared to surrender the pair for trial in the Netherlands.

Scottish Office sources indicated that the technical details of a handover are in place, though they insist that the final decision is one which will be taken by Col Gaddafi himself. They suggested that Col Gaddafi's own unpredictability was now the sole obstacle to a handover. Mr Annan will not decide whether or not to travel to Libya until later this week and will go only if he gets an indication from Tripoli that the two accused, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, will he handed over. The UN Security Council has agreed to lift the sanctions when the men are handed over for trial. Although Mr Annan is optimistic, his UN team cannot predict how Col Gaddafi will respond.

In August, Britain and the United States offered a compromise to break the ten-year deadlock. They agreed to allow the suspects to be tried in the Netherlands rather than in Scotland, but under Scots law and with a panel of Scottish judges instead of a jury. Washington and London have hinted that they will push for a strengthening of sanctions if Col Gaddafi does not accept this "non-negotiable" deal, though they are unlikely to be able to command enough support for a full oil embargo. In September, the lawyers used by the accused were dismissed and a new team, including a former Libyan foreign minister, was appointed.

The former legal team, including the Edinburgh lawyer Alistair Duff, refused to guarantee that the suspected bombers would surrender for trial. Their dismissal was interpreted as a sign that Col Gaddafi wanted a legal team that would recommend that the accused accept the new offer from Britain and the US. The new legal team has had long discussions at the UN headquarters in New York with the UN legal counsel, Hans Corell, to seek assurances about their treatment.

It is understood that the only sticking point is the Libyans' demand that the suspects serve their sentences in the Netherlands or Tripoli if convicted. Britain and the US are adamant that they would serve their sentences in Scotland. Libya has said it accepts in principle a trial in the Netherlands. Col Gaddafi is under intense pressure from allies in the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity to accept the offer. It is understood that President Mandela of South Africa and the Egyptian government have been pressing him to accept.

Mr Annan said last week: "I think we have offered most of the clarifications and I had hoped we would be able to bring the issue to closure by the end of November. We are still pressing for that." This was interpreted by diplomats as meaning that Mr Annan is optimistic about securing a trial. He is in North Africa this week and will be in Tunis on Friday. He has scheduled rest time in Djerba, Tunisia.

[And here is part of an invited lecture delivered by me in the year 2000:]

Although the British proposal was announced in late August 1998, it was not until 5 April 1999 that the two suspects actually arrived in the Netherlands for trial before the Scottish court. Why the delay? The answer is that some of the fine print in the two documents was capable of being interpreted, and was in fact interpreted, by the Libyan defence team and the Libyan government as having been deliberately designed to create pitfalls to entrap them. And since the governments of the United Kingdom and United States resolutely refused to have any direct contact with either the Libyan government or the Libyan defence lawyers, these concerns could be dealt with only through an intermediary, namely the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Between 20 and 22 September 1998, Dr Swire and I were again in Tripoli and were able to provide to the Libyan government and the Libyan defence team a measure of reassurance regarding some of the issues that concerned them. However, we it was who (having received the information hot off the presses from a journalist in The Hague) had to inform the Libyan government that the chosen location in the Netherlands for trial was Kamp van Zeist, a former NATO base to which the air force of the United States still had extant treaty rights of access. I anticipated that this information would cause the Libyans to renounce the "neutral venue" concept in high dudgeon and complain of the lack of good faith demonstrated by Her Majesty's Government in selecting, or agreeing to, such a site. But they did not do so. This, more than anything else, convinced me that the Libyan government and the Libyan defence lawyers genuinely wished a trial to take place and that the concerns they had expressed regarding details of the scheme now on offer were genuine concerns, not merely a colourable pretext for evading their earlier commitment to such a solution.

On 22 September we had a further meeting with the Leader of the Revolution. On this occasion the meeting took place not in Tripoli but 400 km to the east in a genuine (not reinforced concrete) Bedouin tent in a desert location inland from the town of Sirte. Surrounded by sand dunes and noisily ruminating camels, Colonel Gaddafi, Dr Swire and I discussed the details of the British scheme. He accepted my assurance that at least some of the concerns that Libyan government lawyers had raised were unwarranted and that it would be worthwhile to continue to seek clarifications and reassurances through the office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations regarding the remaining issues.

The run-up to Megrahi's first appeal

[On this date in 2001, various news agencies were reporting on the preliminary hearing due to be held later that week at Camp Zeist in connection with Abdelbaset Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction in January that year. What follows is a digest of these reports, taken from The Pan Am 103 Crash Website which was run by Safia Aoude:]

Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is due to appear before a Scottish appeals court in the Netherlands Monday to try to overturn a life sentence for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The preliminary hearing at Camp Zeist in the central Netherlands will deal solely with administrative matters before the actual start of the appeal in January or February. "It is a hearing to tie up loose ends before trial," said Paul Geoghan, a spokesman for the court. Megrahi, who has insisted throughout the trial he had nothing to do with the attack, logdged his appeal in February and a Scottish high court accepted the appeal in August. The grounds on which Megrahi is appealing are not known and will not be dealt with at Monday's hearing, according to legal experts at the university of Glasgow school of law.

Defence lawyer Alistair Duff told AFP his client would be present at the preliminary hearing but also said it would be purely procedural. "The judges may ask for written submissions because they may want to know which piece of evidence we intend to direct to in our arguments," he said. In Scottish court, submissions are usually done orally. The appeals chamber will consist of five judges. Although Duff would not comment on the grounds of the appeal, it is believed the defence will challenge evidence which came from Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper in Malta, who identified Megrahi as a man who bought clothes from his store shortly before the bombing. The reliability of Gauci's evidence was called into question during the trial.

The defence is also expected to question wether the trial judges were entitled to decide that Megrahi was the man who bought the clothes. In September, Britain's Daily Mirror reported that the bomb that blew up the Boeing 747 could have been put on board in London. If confirmed, the report would destroy a key plank in the conviction of Megrahi. The prosecution case hinges on the suitcase containing the bomb having been loaded in Frankfurt, Germany after being sent there via an Air Malta flight from Valetta by Megrahi. When Megrahi was convicted [and sentenced to] to life imprisonment in January, the verdict did not lay to rest the many unanswered questions of the families of the Lockerbie victims. The court accepted the prosecution's theory that Libya was behind the bombing, rejecting another scenario put forward that Iran, Syria and the Palestinian group FPLP-CG carried out the attack to avenge an Iranian aircraft accidentally shot down by an American missile in July 1988.

The families of the victims of the bombing have called repeatedly for a full public inquiry by the British government into the case. "What we are after is the whole truth," Jim Swire, a British doctor whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was killed in the tragedy, told GMTV television in August. Relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing are travelling to Holland for the first stage of the appeal of the Libyan convicted of the atrocity. Two British fathers who lost their daughters in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 were today making the journey to Holland to be at the appeal hearing. Dr Jim Swire and the Rev John Mosey were at Camp Zeist for virtually every day of 49-year-old Al Megrahi's trial which began last May and ended in January this year.

Mr Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, said: "We feel it's important that someone from the families is there to see that justice is done." Dr Swire, whose daughter Flora, 23, was killed, said: "We followed the whole of the trial so it makes sense to follow this stage as well." Dr Swire also revealed how he and other members of the UK Families Flight 103 pressed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for a full inquiry into the tragedy at a recent meeting. He said: "We intimated that in our view it's extremely urgent to have an inquiry because Lockerbie was always an avoidable tragedy."

The hearing tomorrow before five Scottish judges - Lords Cullen, Kirkwood, MacFadyen, Nimmo-Smith and McEwan - will consider various procedural and administrative matters. The hearing is expected to last a day and to set the date for the start of the appeal which is likely to be early next year. The full grounds of Al Megrahi's appeal have not yet been made public.

[The appeal was heard early the following year and dismissed on 14 March 2002. An account of the reasons for the failure of the appeal (primarily the astonishing failure by Megrahi’s legal team to argue the correct grounds) can be read here.]

The winding path towards a Lockerbie trial

[On this date sixteen years ago a letter from me was published in The Scotsman. It read as follows:]

Your report ("Lockerbie suspects' lawyers sacked", 24 September [1998]) claims the new Libyan defence team had been appointed by the Libyan Government (or by Colonel Gaddafi).  What evidence is there for this?

I met five members of the team in Tripoli last Monday.  The chairman, Kamel Hassan Maghur, said he and his colleagues (who include the present President of the Tripoli Bar Association and the most senior past-President) had been appointed by the two suspects themselves; that their sole concern was with representing the interests of their clients;  that those interests did not necessarily coincide with the wishes or interests of the Libyan Government; and that if the Government sought to interfere in their work or to influence in any way the advice which the lawyers might render to their clients, they would not hesitate to publicise this fact in the international media.

Mr Maghur (who as well as being a former Foreign Minister, is also a retired Libyan Supreme Court judge) said nothing to indicate that his team wished to dispense with the services of Alistair Duff, the Edinburgh solicitor who for many years has represented the two suspects in Scotland: indeed, quite the reverse.

If, as you state, Dr Ibrahim Legwell is claiming (a) still to represent the suspects and (b) that the new team has been foisted on them without their consent, then this conflict should be speedily resolved by direct consultation with the accused themselves.  I was deeply impressed by the professionalism, commitment and independence of the Libyan lawyers. If they do indeed now represent the suspects, I am convinced that their interests are in capable hands.

[This letter appears no longer to feature in The Scotsman’s online archives. It, and other material relating to the change in Megrahi and Fhimah’s Libyan legal team, can be found here.]

The Charles McKee/Monzer al-Kassar theory

The aangirfan blog today publishes a lengthy article flowing from the piece in yesterday's Sunday Express. It favours the "CIA operation against Charles McKee" explanation for the destruction of Pan Am 103. The article contains a useful list of Lockerbie dramatis personae (but once again repeats that defence counsel Bill Taylor QC has become a sheriff: he has not, but his instructing solicitor, Alistair Duff, has). The full article can be read here.

Where are they now?

As far as I can see from a trawl of the internet and the blogosphere, there were no developments of any significance regarding Lockerbie during my trip to Namibia.

However, it has been reported that Megrahi's junior counsel at the Zeist trial, John Beckett, has been appointed a sheriff (a judge in Scotland's lower court system). Beckett became a QC in 2005 after the trial, and served briefly as Solicitor General for Scotland (deputy to the Lord Advocate, the chief Scottish Government law officer and head of the prosecution system) in 2006 to 2007. See http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/04/10100308

As far as the other lawyers involved in the trial are concerned, most remain in practice but two of the prosecutors, Alastair Campbell QC and Alan Turnbull QC, have become judges of the Scottish supreme courts (the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary); Megrahi's solicitor, Alistair Duff, has become a sheriff; and Richard Keen QC, the senior counsel for the acquitted co-accused, Lamin Fhimah, has been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates (leader of the Scottish Bar). The then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC (later Lord Boyd of Duncansby) has taken the highly unusual step of resigning from the Faculty of Advocates and becoming a solicitor. He is now a partner in a large Edinburgh law firm.

The three judges who presided at the trial, Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean, have all now retired from the bench.

From Terrorism blog

Here are links to two posts, dated 07 September and 11 October 2007 respectively, that I have just discovered on the Terrorism blog. Both contain matter directly or indirectly relevant to Lockerbie.
http://spookterror.blogspot.com/2007/09/classic-false-flag-operation-disco-la.html
and
http://spookterror.blogspot.com/2007/10/lockerbie-truth-will-media-finally.html

As far as the information contained in the second item is concerned, it should be noted that Bill Taylor QC has not become a sheriff, but Alistair Duff has.