Steering the Lockerbie investigation away from Heathrow

[What follows is a lightly-edited amalgamation of two comments posted today by Dr Morag Kerr (Rolfe) on the thread Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow".]

It is my belief that John Orr deliberately steered the investigation away from Heathrow from the very earliest days of the inquiry. That Times article [Disaster bomb was ‘placed on board Jumbo at Frankfurt’ The Times, 31 December 1988] which must have been written on 30 December didn't come out of nowhere. It has a startling amount of detail on the methodologies of the PFLP-GC as well as the headline that the bomb came from Frankfurt and not Heathrow.

It takes a very special sort of stupid to receive Bedford's 9th January statement describing a brown Samsonite hardshell in the container in the interline shed at Heathrow, and reports (the same month) from the forensic scientists that the bomb had been in a brown Samsonite hardshell, and do NOTHING to connect the two. I mean, Bedford described two suitcases which appeared while he was on his break, and then concentrated on "one of them", which he described in detail. The one on the left was in the correct position to have been the bomb, the one on the right wasn't. Nobody even asked him which of the two cases he was referring to as a brown Samsonite hardshell. (Only at the FAI [Fatal Accident Inquiry], in October 1990, did he answer that he was talking about the one on the left.)

On 2 February 1989 Ray Manly's statement was received at Lockerbie. It was entered into HOLMES and filed away as being of no interest whatsoever to the inquiry. In other words, Heathrow had already been discounted as early as that.

The "nonsense on stilts" at the March meeting about most of the damaged luggage being from Frankfurt so probably the bomb suitcase was too, has more than a whiff of deliberate obfuscation about it. Are we really supposed to believe that a senior detective heading an inquiry of this magnitude is that stupid? But who would dare contradict him?

It wasn't just Orr, though. Parallel with his ignoring of the Heathrow baggage evidence, we see the forensics officers unite as one to declare that the explosion had not been in the suitcase on the floor of the container. This wasn't just the RARDE experts (principally Feraday, but also Cullis and Hayes), but also the AAIB inspectors, principally Claiden and Protheroe. The first report containing this opinion was written by Peter Claiden and is dated April 1989.

Now, the explosion WAS in the suitcase on the floor of the container. That's incontrovertible, once you realise where PK/139 was positioned within the container. (Nobody even mentions PK/139 in any of the reports. It's just sitting there in a composite photo, mutely screaming "look at me", and nobody paid the slightest attention to it.) And PK/139 is just the single most blindingly obvious piece of evidence - multiple strands of evidence reinforce each other to show that there was no suitcase below the bomb suitcase.

So how come we have about six investigators from two different institutes, who were officially working separately on the case, lining up to ignore the bleedin' obvious, and declare a mystic knowledge that the recovered floor of the container would have looked different if the bomb had been in the bottom suitcase?

Not once in any of their reports is there any acknowledgement that the case on the bottom was from Heathrow, while the case on the second layer was from Frankfurt. All that vehemence to exclude the bottom case, and they don't even seem to know that by doing this they are absolving Heathrow. And yet, why bother making the distinction in the first place unless you know that the two cases have different provenances?

So, at the same time Orr was ignoring Bedford, Feraday and assorted hangers-on were insisting that the case in the position of the one Bedford saw wasn't the bomb. Quite independently, of course. And equally in defiance of the evidence in front of them. 

I think Orr probably used this forensic opinion later to justify ignoring the Bedford case, but that's retrospective, as he was ignoring it well before the opinion was reported.

So, if Orr was acting on instructions from on high, it seems quite plausible that someone in the forensics team (probably Feraday) was also receiving instructions to interpret the evidence in a way that would deflect from Heathrow. (I suspect Claiden's April 1989 report might have had a wee nudge from Feraday, although at the FAI he was at some pains to declare that the two teams who were examining the wreckage together - and probably eating lunch together and so on - didn't communicate at all.)

So, was one agency directing both Orr and Feraday in this? Seems likely. All to prevent BAA and Heathrow from being culpable in the loss of 270 lives, and to hell with whether the actual bombers were caught or not. So who?

Who privatised BAA in 1986? Who wrote stuff in her memoirs which pretty clearly indicated she knew full well that Gaddafi had not been behind the Lockerbie bombing? [RB: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 1993, page 449.]

Well, I'm speculating as to motive. However, I have an extremely strong sense of both arms of the investigation (police and forensics) being separately pressurised to deliver opinions that absolved the Bedford case. And it seems only logical that the same person or body was pressurising both groups.

I very much doubt if there was any US influence in this area at all. I think the Americans were frying entirely different fish. It smells home-grown to me. So, I go figure.

I think the Americans wanted to blame Libya and Gaddafi, but if it had been proved to have been the PFLP-GC they'd have had to accept that. At first the evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC appeared overwhelming, and they seem to have conceded the point. However, nobody could find any connection between the PFLP-GC and KM180 at Malta.

If you're looking for the right culprit in the wrong place, you're doomed to fail. The police failed, but never considered that was because they were looking in the wrong place. They ran into the sand. Which was a convenient moment for the US authorities to step in and resurrect the idea that maybe they should all have been looking for Libyans not Palestinians, and maybe if they investigated this Libyan guy they'd find something.

Second Lockerbie air accident investigator speaks about MH17

[Another of the air accident investigators involved at Lockerbie has been talking about the MH17 crash. What follows is excerpted from an article in today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph:]

The painstaking process of investigating the Malaysian Airlines disaster will be made immeasurably more complicated by the crash site’s location in the middle of a country on the brink of civil war, experts said.

The investigation will require scrupulous mapping of debris - to help give a clear picture of how and why the fuselage broke up - followed by recovery of every piece of wreckage and possible forensic examination for traces of explosives.

Peter Claiden, who was a senior engineer in the AAIB investigation into the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, said: “There really needs to be a proper, professional investigation if they want to secure evidence from the wreckage.

“It was difficult enough to achieve at Lockerbie so the problems facing investigators in what is effectively a war zone are very serious indeed.”

Mr Claiden, who was responsible for reconstructing part of Pan Am Flight 103 after it was blown up mid-air above the Scottish town killing all 259 onboard and 11 on the ground, said: “The first problem will be to try to identify how widespread the wreckage is.

“They will need to find the infrastructure to take away the wreckage and store it safely.

“If the aircraft was destroyed by a missile, in an ideal world you must get all that wreckage and reassemble it. Then you might get an idea of the origin of the disaster.”

Air accident investigators must sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to establish the cause of a disaster - as in the case of Lockerbie which became Britain’s largest ever murder inquiry.

Part of the fuselage of Pan Am Boeing 747 - which exploded above Lockerbie in December 1988 - was reconstructed in a hangar in Farnborough, Hants, by the AAIB, where it remained for 24 years while diplomatic and legal machinations wore on.

The reconstruction was essential in proving Flight 103 broke up mid-air after the detonation of Semtex high explosive concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which was contained in a Samsonite suitcase in the aircraft’s hold.

Fragments of the items, plus a long-delay electronic timer made by a Swiss firm, MEBO, were presented in the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi held under Scottish law in Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, in 2000.

Megrahi convicted on evidence designed to prosecute Abu Talb

[What follows is taken from an item posted yesterday on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website:]

George Thomson writes:

Armed with the intelligence on the PFLP-GC’s activities in Neuss in October and the FAA Warning, the Scottish investigators on the ground, assisted by their American friends, were in no doubt that they were looking for the remains of a copper Samsonite suitcase which would contain a semtex-based IED concealed within a Toshiba Radio. The radio would be enclosed in a cardboard box along with an instruction manual. They even knew that the explosives within the radio would be wrapped in Toblerone type wrapping foil.

In no time whatsoever they “found” what they were looking for. […]

AG145 - debris from the identification plate of the luggage container which Feraday was satisfied was from a Toshiba 8016 or 8026 but then he changed his mind later on. [RB: information about AG145 can be found here and here.] At trial however the air accident investigator Claiden testified that the fold in the identification plate which harboured the debris identified as originating from a Toshiba HAD NOT BEEN CAUSED AT THE TIME OF THE EXPLOSION

A black explosion-damaged cardigan with Toblerone foil violently impacted into its fabric was found and initially was described as originating from the bomb suitcase, but later the classification was changed as the emphasis moved away from the PFLP-GC.

Then, impacted into various items of clothing which Gauci later remembered selling to “a suspect”, originally Talb, the scientists found pieces of the cardboard box, the instruction manual and various pieces of plastics and mesh which Hayes claimed was from the IED Radio.

In relation to the detonation device a report was submitted from the Scottish police to the Lord Advocate asking for the detention of various suspects who had been involved with the PFLP-GC in Neuss. In that report the police assert time after time that the bomb had been triggered by a barometric device.

The net was finally closing and by a spectacular piece of detective work a pair of trousers from the bomb suitcase was traced via the manufacturers on Malta to Tony Gauci’s shop where he remarkably remembered selling a variety of clothes to a suspect, which had turned up in the bomb suitcase. To be fair to Tony however he did not make the whole thing up from nothing, he was shown a variety of photographs of items said to originate from the bomb suitcase and he picked them out.

The slight fly in the ointment however is that the police claimed to have been led to Gauci by a manufacturer’s label (Yorkie) attached to the trousers and by a Stamped Number 1705 on a pocket which was an order number for Gauci’s Shop. Unfortunately we now have a police document which indicates that when the trousers first came into the possession of the police there was no such label attached and the number 1705 apparently jumps from one fragment of trousers to another depending on what report or which police statement you chose to read.

Gauci went some way to identifying Talb as the purchaser of the clothing. However Gauci’s identification would have been bolstered by the evidence of a witness with a shop nearby who made a definite identification of Talb being in his own shop at the relevant time. This shopkeeper’s evidence has never been heard.

So sure were the police that Talb was their man, that they even fabricated evidence of a piece of clothing found in his home in Sweden and originally described as a pair of child’s kick-trousers with a size and a manufacturer into being a Babygro with penguins on the front; the same type of course as described in the shipment note lodged at court to prove the evidence of Gauci and his lamb/sheep Babygro he claimed to have sold to the man.

I could go on and on with discrepancies in the case but I want to make the point that Megrahi was in my mind convicted on evidence much of which was designed to prosecute Talb and all they had to do to was change the tentative identification by Gauci of Talb to Megrahi and introduce the small fragment of circuit board, PT35b.

That’s what makes this case so different. Megrahi was convicted on false evidence originally intended to be used against someone else and if any of that evidence was tested in court by a defence team properly briefed by defence investigators then Megrahi’s name would be cleared.

Baset [Megrahi] would be pleased if that were to happen because on his deathbed he asked me to not only try to prove his innocence but prove that he was deliberately convicted on false evidence.

Serious evidence-based concerns never addressed

[What follows is the text of an article by Dr Morag Kerr which is published today on the Scottish Legal News website:]

Dr Morag Kerr, secretary-depute of Justice for Megrahi, replies to Ronnie Clancy KC’s recent articles on Lockerbie and argues that despite the slur of ‘conspiracy theorist’ used by the UK and Scottish governments, the Crown Office, the SSCRC and the Americans, Mr Megrahi still suffered a miscarriage of justice.

I declare that the bomb that caused the Lockerbie disaster was in the suitcase seen by John Bedford in the baggage container in the interline shed at Heathrow at 4.30 pm, an hour before the PA103 feeder flight from Frankfurt landed. I challenge Mr Clancy, or anyone else, to prove me wrong using facts and reason, not the unevidenced opinions of others, and not legal technicalities.

Mr Clancy makes a number of assertions in his two-part article of 6th and 7th January, and delivers a number of ad hominem attacks on critics of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction, but actual evidence is in short supply. Reasoned refutation is conspicuous by its absence. Much of his argument consists of “the SCCRC have looked at this and say it’s fine, nothing to see here folks,” and “these people are dreadful conspiracy theorists.”

The lazy “conspiracy theorist” slur is a repeat of Magnus Linklater’s perennial articles for The Times, built on a false premise, or rather the logical fallacy of the unexcluded middle. There is a third possibility between that of Megrahi being guilty as charged and the police, the justice system and the SCCRC all being complicit in a conscious conspiracy to perpetuate a miscarriage of justice, and that is the aspect of human nature known as confirmation bias. Reading Mr Clancy’s articles it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that he too is a victim of this particular form of fact-blindness.

When one is personally invested in a particular conclusion, whether as an individual or as part of a self-reinforcing group, the act of considering the possibility that one might be mistaken can be repugnant, almost painful. This is particularly true when the consequences of having to acknowledge that a mistake has been made are wide-ranging. The brain will seize on any scrap of evidence, however peripheral to the core argument, any line of reasoning no matter how convoluted and sophistic, to shore up the original conclusion and avoid the cognitive dissonance of seriously contemplating a contradictory one.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to cherry-pick public statements by those advancing the proposition that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted to imply that some grand, conscious and co-ordinated conspiracy is being alleged (how could that possibly be, surely these people are malicious!), rather than the obvious interpretation that what is being proposed is that those determinedly shoring up the conviction are mistaken, in thrall to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. (Indeed, the very title of my own book about the case, referencing the aphorism known as “Hanlon’s Razor”, should have provided something of a clue.)

It is particularly disingenuous do this, and to base an entire argument on the premise that the SCCRC is to be trusted implicitly, in the very week of the debacle in England surrounding the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson and the very credible allegations that the CCRC “has been infected with a culture of denial”. A culture, that is, steeped in confirmation bias. The Malkinson case is not the only one. Can we really, hands on hearts, trust that the SCCRC is a completely different animal?

In the second part of his article Mr Clancy appears to call on specific pieces of evidence to support his position. Nevertheless, once again the argument is little more than “trust the SCCRC, they’ve looked at this very thoroughly,” rather than reasoned, factual refutation.

The timer fragment

Given the mysterious nature of this object it’s hardly surprising to find it surrounded by a fog of speculation and indeed conspiracy theorising. That also is human nature. However, the speculation comes after the observation that this item was not what the prosecution claimed it was, and does not negate that observation.

Dr Swire and Mr Biddulph, and indeed Mr James, are entirely justified in their doubts about the provenance of the fragment, and their criticism of the way this was handled by the SCCRC. To inject some facts into the discussion (a bit of a shock to the system, I know), the central issue is this. It was recognised at an early stage in the investigation that the circuitry of the fragment was coated with pure tin, a technique used by amateur hobbyists making single or small-batch PCBs, and which is not suitable for large-scale commercial use. This was considered a very significant finding when the fragment was first analysed in Scotland in early 1990. While the pattern of the circuitry on the fragment seems to confirm to a high degree of certainty that it was made from a Letraset template produced by the Swiss electronics firm MEBO, all the PCBs for the MST-13 timers that were manufactured from that template for MEBO by Thüring AG had their circuitry coated with a 70/30 tin/lead alloy. Thüring did not have the facilities to apply a pure tin coating. It is one of the many highly regrettable features of the Zeist trial that this discrepancy was fudged and obscured in court, mainly thanks to a highly misleading statement by Allen Feraday, an English forensics expert, and the bench was never made aware of it.

Speculation and conspiracy theorising aside, nobody knows what that fragment is, who made it or when or for what purpose. All that can be said is that it was not from one of the batches of PCBs manufactured by Thüring and which were supplied to Libya by MEBO, as alleged by the Crown. Mr Clancy refers to “… the large body of evidence, including scientific evidence, that questions the accuracy of [these] claims.” What evidence would that be, then? According to their public news release the SCCRC rejected this ground of appeal on the narrow technical point that “… the applicants have not provided a reasonable explanation as to why the fresh evidence concerning the metallurgy issue was not led at the trial,” and because they believed that the failure of the original defence team to uncover the discrepancy did not amount to “defective representation”, not because they had obtained scientific findings which contradicted this evidence.

The suitcase

This is my own personal area of expertise in the case, and Mr Clancy refers to my 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, which is largely devoted to examining this issue. I wonder if he has read it?

According to Mr Clancy, “… the SCCRC carried out a thorough examination of the allegation taking account of all the relevant evidence including information which was not available to Justice for Megrahi. The SCCRC concluded that ‘… it was not arguable that the Justice for Megrahi theory could show conclusively that the bomb had entered the airline luggage in Heathrow’.” (Note, not that this information disproved the proposition, merely that it apparently rendered it inconclusive.)

The evidence presented in my book formed part of Justice for Megrahi’s submission to the COPFS which resulted in the police Operation Sandwood. In the course of that investigation I was interviewed by officers on several occasions, going through the evidence and my reasoning in minute detail. Repeatedly, I assured them that I had no dog in this fight beyond a desire to solve the puzzle (which the original forensic investigators had so signally failed to do). I was (and still am) convinced that the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the bomb suitcase was already in London an hour before the flight supposedly carrying it landed. As a scientist, though, I always strive to maintain an open mind. I begged the police officers on several occasions to tell me if they discovered either additional evidence I didn’t have, or an alternative interpretation I hadn’t thought of, that would cast doubt on my conclusion. I stated categorically that if such evidence were to be found, I would withdraw my thesis and issue a public retraction. Nothing of that nature happened. Contact with Operation Sandwood tailed off and then ceased entirely, with no explanation. All I ever got was a personal jibe from Kenny Macaskill to the effect that (and I paraphrase) “I know something you don’t know, so you’re wrong.”

This is more or less exactly Mr Clancy’s position, echoing the position of the SCCRC. They know “something” that allows an entire book full of minute detail and closely-reasoned argument to be dismissed, but no hint at all is given of what this something might be. I find the secrecy over this point very disturbing.

The best guess I can make is that Operation Sandwood, Mr Macaskill, the SCCRC and Mr Clancy are placing the supposed confession of Abu Agila Masoud to having been involved in the smuggling of the bomb on board Flight KM180 in Malta above my analysis. However, this “confession” is a highly contradictory and confusing document, in places flatly contradicting evidence relied on to convict Megrahi. False confessions are one of the most frequent causes of miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions, and indeed in this case the lord advocate was unable to assure Justice for Megrahi that he was confident that the confession had not been obtained by torture. My position on this matter is that if someone confesses to doing something that provably didn’t happen, it still didn’t happen.

My analysis of the evidence, which is entirely theoretical, has recently been independently confirmed experimentally.[1] A Dutch forensic scientist, Dr Erwin Vermeij, carried out multiple test explosions using used aluminium LD3 containers with mocked-up suitcases and IEDs made to simulate the Lockerbie bomb, with the bomb suitcase in various positions in the container. These experiments were far more rigorously designed and executed than the botched tests carried out in the USA in 1989. His conclusion states:

Regarding the damage to the luggage containers, experiment 7 where the IED suitcase was in the first (bottom) layer with one end slightly elevated on to the horizontal strut comes closest to replicating the damage observed on LD3 luggage container AVE4041. This suggests that the reported so called Claiden spot is probably too high, presuming that 450g explosive was used. If the center of the Lockerbie bomb was really on the Claiden spot, the only possibility is that the explosive charge must have been larger than 450g.

It was demonstrated in court that it was impossible to get more than 450g of Semtex inside the radio-cassette player used to construct the IED. The position that “comes closest” to the damage observed on the Lockerbie luggage container is the one described in my book.

The luggage tags

The single piece of actual evidence discussed by Mr Clancy is the peripheral matter of an entry in the diary of Lamin Fhimah, Megrahi’s co-accused, relating to his obtaining “taggs” (sic) for Megrahi. As a statement by someone other than Megrahi himself, this was held by the trial court not to be evidence against him. However, it was admitted by the court in the 2021 appeal in order to “considerably bolster” the evidence that the bomb was infiltrated in Malta. There’s no evidence that these tags were even obtained, let alone given to Megrahi, or what he did with them if they were. The accuseds’ explanation was that they were needed as samples to get a printing quote. The re-introduction of this extremely trivial and non-probative evidence suggests to me that someone was getting a bit desperate.

The identification evidence

This is barely touched on by Mr Clancy, despite its actually being the central issue as regards Megrahi’s conviction. He describes it as “qualified (resemblance) identification”, which is being remarkably kind. Frankly, no normal human being, as opposed to angels dancing on the heads of pins, could possibly imagine that the bribed and cajoled Tony Gauci’s fifty-year-old, over six feet tall, dark-skinned, heavily-built customer was in fact the 36-year-old, five feet eight, light-skinned, slightly built Megrahi. Even Tony prefaced his line-up “identification” with “Not the man I saw in my shop, but…” The identification is in fact the shaky hook on which the entire daisy-chain of circular reasoning dreamed up by the police investigation and embellished by the trial court was hung. It has been challenged by four eminent experts in the psychology of memory – Prof Timothy Valentine (70 pages, 2008), Professor Steven Clark (49 pages, 2008), Professor David Canter (105 pages, 2010) and Professor Elizabeth Loftus (seven page journal publication, 2013[2]). The full list of problems with it is much too long to go into here, and it seems yet another problem has now arisen.

One of the things Masoud allegedly confessed to doing, in these interviews in the prison dungeon in Tripoli, was buying the clothes from Tony Gauci. Tony described one customer, not two, and as he has since died, the police have no further opportunity to go back and persuade him to change his statement on that point also. If Masoud bought the clothes, Megrahi didn’t, and if he didn’t, the entire case is a pile of daisy-heads on the floor. However, if Masoud’s confession is required in order to refute the suitcase evidence, this must create a bit of a dilemma for his prosecutors.

Conclusion

Over many years Justice for Megrahi has raised serious, evidence-based concerns about the conviction. These concerns have never been addressed in detail, or at all, by the Crown Office or by any of those who support the conviction – they have simply been cavalierly dismissed and those raising them stigmatised as conspiracy theorists. That must now change. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dared to challenge the conviction of Oscar Slater, the response of the prosecution authorities was as dismissive as that of the Crown Office in relation to the Megrahi conviction. But history proved Conan Doyle to be right. 

Reference 1: Vermeij, E. (2024) Survivability of IED components, suitcases, their contents and luggage containers in suitcase bombs. Elsevier: Forensic Science International: Reports, vol 9, July 2024.

Reference 2: Loftus, E. F. (2013) Eyewitness testimony in the Lockerbie bombing case. Memory, vol 21 issue 5, pp 584-590.