Who is accused of perverting the course of justice?

In the (redacted) version of Justice for Megrahi’s letter alleging criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation and prosecution that was released to the press on 23 October 2012, allegation no 1 reads as follows:

“1.  On 22 August 2000 the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, communicated to the judges of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands information about the contents of CIA cables relating to the Crown witness Abdul Majid Giaka that was known to members of the prosecution team [A B and C D] who had scrutinised the cables, to be false. The Lord Advocate did so after consulting these members of the prosecution team. It is submitted that this constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.”

A number of journalists have interpreted this paragraph as embodying an allegation that Colin Boyd attempted to pervert the course of justice. The latest of these is Kenneth Roy in an article in today's edition the Scottish Review headlined A High Court judge and an allegation of criminality.  This raises concerns about the standard of English comprehension amongst journalists, because the paragraph makes no such allegation -- indeed was very carefully drafted in order to avoid it. What the paragraph alleges is that two members of the prosecution team, A B and C D,  supplied to Colin Boyd information about the CIA cables which A B and C D knew to be false (because they had scrutinised the cables) and which they knew he was going to, and did, communicate to the court.  That is the perversion of the course of justice that is alleged. 

I am disappointed when journalists attempt to explain or excuse their flagrant misinterpretation of a text by reference to its -- non-existent -- ambiguity. The paragraph quite simply does not say that Colin Boyd perverted the course of justice. To represent that it does is an error on the part of the reader, not the writer.

Angiolini succeeds Boyd as Lord Advocate

[On this date in 2006 the Scottish Parliament approved the nomination of Elish Angiolini as Lord Advocate, in succession to Lord Boyd of Duncansby QC (Colin Boyd). What follows is excerpted from a report on the BBC News website:]

MSPs have approved the appointment of Elish Angiolini as Scotland's first female lord advocate.

Ms Angiolini was nominated as Scotland's new senior law officer by First Minister Jack McConnell after Colin Boyd's sudden resignation.

Her nomination was broadly welcomed by MSPs at Holyrood but the Scottish Conservatives raised concerns about judicial independence. (...)

Scottish National Party Holyrood group leader Nicola Sturgeon welcomed the appointment but questioned the post's dual role.

Tory Leader Annabel Goldie also voiced "real concerns" about the chief legal adviser to the Scottish Cabinet being the country's leading prosecutor.

She said: "There is a real and visible conflict of interest."

Ms Goldie proposed a commission to examine the "proper separation of powers, responsibilities and duties" in relation to the post.

The Scottish Tory leader also questioned whether Ms Angiolini had the "breadth of legal experience" for the job and said she opposed John Beckett QC as the new solicitor general, because he was a Labour member. (...)

She [Ms Angiolini] said her appointment [in 2001] as the first female solicitor general had been "a huge leap of faith".

"It has been a privilege over the past five years to serve along with Colin Boyd as lord advocate," she said."He is a man of great integrity and has been a quiet revolutionary in setting about the way in which the prosecution has gone about its business.

"It has transformed over the past five years but that transformation is something which is a work in progress."

Announcing his intention at a press conference in Edinburgh, Mr McConnell praised Ms Angiolini's performance as solicitor general.

"Five years on, I have no doubt whatever that the appointment of Elish Angiolini as solicitor general is one of the best decisions I have made as first minister of Scotland," he said.

"Our prosecution services today are admired, not ridiculed.

"Victims and witnesses see justice implemented in the system, not delays or chaos."

[On the occasion of the appointment of Ms Angiolini’s successor, Frank Mulholland, in 2011, I wrote the following:]

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

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

Colin Boyd to speak about Lockerbie in New York

[There’s a treat in store for our US friends. Here is the text of a flyer announcing a forthcoming seminar at New York University:]

Thursday, April 16, 12:30–1:50 pm

Vanderbilt Hall, Room 216

CRIMINAL LAW SEMINAR:

Prosecuting the Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing Case

Colin Boyd, Lord Boyd of Duncansby, discusses his experience prosecuting this famously complex and controversial case when he was Scotland’s Lord Advocate.

Lord Boyd is a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland, a Privy Councillor, and a Life Peer.

Lunch will be provided.

Please rsvp to monica.cortez@law.nyu.edu

[Here’s hoping that Lord Boyd’s address will be made available to the rest of us at some point.]

Reaction to Colin Boyd QC's forthcoming elevation

[The following are excerpts from a report by Lucy Adams in today’s edition of The Herald:]

Meanwhile, the news Lord Boyd is due to become a judge has provoked criticism.

He led the prosecution of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and was criticised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for failing to disclose information to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi's defence. He rejected the claims.

When he resigned as Lord Advocate in 2006 there was speculation his decision was connected to the Shirley McKie fingerprint inquiry and Lockerbie case criticisms. He denied that and said it was just time to move on.

Ms McKie's father Iain said the news "took my breath away". He said: "That the Judicial Appointments Board should recommend to the First Minister that Lord Colin Boyd be appointed as a judge to the highest court in the land set new standards for being out of touch."

Tam Dalyell, the former MP and father of the house, said: "The fact he may well become a judge should not inoculate Lord Boyd from the obligation to answer questions on Lockerbie over the period that he headed the Crown Office.

"The Crown Office, and I would have thought Lord Boyd in his position in the Crown Office, have an obligation to address powerful criticisms of non-disclosure."

Trial examines 'secret' CIA papers

[This is the headline over a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

The Lockerbie trial has been shown the CIA documents at the centre of a dispute between prosecution and defence lawyers.

Scotland's senior law official, Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, said the papers - which contain details of cable communications - featured new information.

He said the documents included remarks made by Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka, who worked as a CIA agent at Malta Airport and whom the prosecution wants to call as a witness at the trial.

Mr Boyd said: "This is the first time the CIA has produced evidence for a foreign court.

"It may also be the first time that cables themselves have been used in any court either in the US or outwith.

"It's been emphasised to me that the amount of information now in the public domain far exceeds that ever put in the public domain before by the CIA in relation to these events."

Mr Boyd said he watched last week at the US Embassy in The Hague as a CIA records custodian identified as William McNair undid deletions in the cables from Giaka, whom crown prosecutors refer to as "Mr Majid".

He said: "I can tell the court that everything Mr Majid is reported to have said in these cables is revealed except for three matters."

These refer to the identities of CIA informants and methods of operation.

Newly revealed information included references to CIA payments to Giaka and his request for "sham surgery" to secure a waiver from military service in Libya.

There is also mention of payments from the CIA he could receive in return for giving evidence.

Giaka has been living for the last 10 years under a witness protection scheme in the US and is regarded as a crucial witness against the accused men. He is expected to take the stand later this week. (...)

Arguments over the CIA papers have dominated the last few days of the trial of the two Libyans who are said to have bombed Pan AM flight 103 over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie.

The special court in the Netherlands was adjourned on Monday to give the defence time to consider the new information.

[RB: What follows is part of an account of the CIA cables saga written by me for The Scotsman  some ten years ago:]

The behaviour of the Crown in the Lockerbie trial was certainly not beyond criticism - and indeed it casts grave doubt on the extent to which the Lord Advocate and Crown Office staff can be relied on always to place the interest of securing a fair trial for the accused above any perceived institutional imperative to obtain a conviction.

To illustrate this in the context of the Lockerbie trial, it is enough to refer to the saga of CIA cables relating to the star Crown witness, Abdul Majid Giaka, who had been a long-standing CIA asset in Libya and, by the time of the trial, was living in the US in a witness protection programme. Giaka's evidence was ultimately found by the court to be utterly untrustworthy. This was largely due to the devastating effectiveness of the cross-examination by defence counsel. Their ability to destroy completely the credibility of the witness stemmed from the contents of cables in which his CIA handlers communicated to headquarters the information that Giaka had provided to them in the course of their secret meetings. Discrepancies between Giaka's evidence-in-chief to the Advocate Depute and the contents of these contemporaneous cables enabled the defence to mount a formidable challenge to the truthfulness and accuracy, or credibility and reliability, of Giaka's testimony. Had the information contained in these cables not been available to them, the task of attempting to demonstrate to the court that Giaka was an incredible or unreliable witness would have been more difficult, and perhaps impossible.

Yet the Crown strove valiantly to prevent the defence obtaining access to these cables. At the trial, on 22 August 2000, when he was seeking to persuade the Court to deny the defence access to those cables in their unedited or uncensored form, the then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, stated that the members of the prosecution team who were given access to the uncensored CIA cables on 1 June 2000 were fully aware of the obligation incumbent upon them as prosecutors to make available to the defence material relevant to the defence of the accused and, to that end, approached the contents of those cables with certain considerations in mind.

Boyd said: "First of all, they considered whether or not there was any information behind the redactions which would undermine the Crown case in any way. Second, they considered whether there was anything which would appear to reflect on the credibility of Majid... On all of these matters, the learned Advocate Depute reached the conclusion that there was nothing within the cables which bore on the defence case, either by undermining the Crown case or by advancing a positive case which was being made or may be made, having regard to the special defence... I emphasise that the redactions have been made on the basis of what is in the interests of the security of a friendly power... Crown counsel was satisfied that there was nothing within the documents which bore upon the defence case in any way."

One judge, Lord Coulsfield, then intervened: "Does that include, Lord Advocate... that Crown counsel, having considered the documents, can say to the Court that there is nothing concealed which could possibly bear on the credibility of this witness?"

The Lord Advocate replied: "Well, I'm just checking with the counsel who made that... there is nothing within these documents which relates to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Majid on these matters."

Notwithstanding the opposition of the Lord Advocate, the court ordered the unedited cables to be made available to the defence, who went on to use their contents to such devastating effect in questioning Giaka that the court held that his evidence had to be disregarded in its entirety. Yet, strangely enough, the judges did not see fit publicly to censure the Crown for its inaccurate assurances that the cables contained nothing that could assist the defence.

First sitting of High Court at Camp Zeist

[On this date in 1999 a High Court judge sat for the first time in the Scottish Court in the Netherlands at Camp Zeist. The following are extracts from two reports to be found here and here in The Guardian:]

1.   The prosecution today won the first skirmish in the Lockerbie trial when a Scottish judge ruled that the two Libyan suspects in the Pan Am bombing should stand on conspiracy to murder charges.

In a significant victory for the prosecution ahead of next year's trial, presiding judge Lord Ranald Sutherland rejected a defence motion that the conspiracy to murder charges must be dropped because the December 1988 bombing which killed 270 people had not been planned on Scottish soil.

"I am satisfied that on the basis of what is set out in Charge 1, Scottish courts do have jurisdiction," judge Sutherland said. "When ... a crime of the utmost gravity has been conspired abroad, it appears to me quite illogical to say that we cannot put the conspirators on trial in Scotland, even though the conspiracy has been entered into abroad."

The judge also rejected a defence argument that that the suspects' alleged membership in the Libyan intelligence service was irrelevant to the case, saying "there is sufficient connection" to the men's background and the charges against them. (...)

The defence also wanted the description of the men as Libyan intelligence agents struck from the indictment, asserting that it casts doubt on the character of the defendants in violation of Scottish judicial procedures. The lead prosecutor, Scottish solicitor general Colin Boyd, rejected the notion that the court lacks jurisdiction and said the defendants' alleged membership in the Libyan intelligence agency was "the glue that holds the conspiracy together".

Mr Boyd also maintained that while the plan to blow up the jet was formed in Europe and north Africa, it was a "continuing crime" that ended only at the moment of the explosion over Scotland.

Legal experts said that despite the prosecution's weak showing on Tuesday, when Mr Boyd fumbled in rebutting defence arguments, there was a strong enough legal basis to support the court's authority to hear the conspiracy charges.

2.  Presiding over a pre-trial hearing at a specially-constituted court in the Netherlands, Lord Sutherland struck a serious blow at defence efforts by dismissing arguments that the two men should not face a count of conspiracy.

But he agreed to delay the start of the trial until May 3, and warned that witnesses appearing for the prosecution of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima could not be heavily disguised, despite fears for their safety.

Colin Boyd QC, solicitor-general for Scotland, had referred to the need to protect serving CIA officers as well as former officers of the East German ministry of state security - the Stasi - and a Libyan defector and witness named Abdul Majid Abdul-Salam Giaka, now believed to be living in the US.

Also included in the prosecution request were a Swedish intelligence officer, a Maltese woman translator, and a member of the British security services - "Mr A".

William Taylor QC, for Megrahi, complained: "It would be a travesty of justice and inevitably restrict the court's examination of those individuals."

Lord Sutherland said: "'The court must have regard to the demeanour of a witness, including facial expressions."

Granting the defence request to put back the start of the trial, originally due to start on February 2, the judge said: "It is abundantly clear from the nature of the indictment ... that preparation of the defence case is one of exceptional difficulty."

Over 1,100 witnesses and more than 2,300 documents are expected to be considered in the case against the two Libyans, accused of murder, conspiracy to murder and contravention of the aviation security act for their alleged role in the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 on December 21, 1988.

Lawman's Lockerbie mission

[This is the headline over a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's senior law officer has continued his efforts to reassure members of families of Lockerbie victims in the United States over the trial of two Libyans accused of the bombing.

Colin Boyd QC, the Lord Advocate, is in Washington, where he addressed 20 families in the Office for the Victims of Crime. He is going on to meet US Attorney General Janet Reno in the Justice Department.

He will be outlining to her the protocol and practice for the trial , which is due to start at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands on 3 May.

The purpose of his visit is to reassure the families that last month's resignation of the previous Lord Advocate, Lord Hardie, will not affect the prosecution.

Over the weekend he spoke to 50 families in Boston, Massachusets with the same message.  

Mr Boyd got a positive response from the president of the US families group, George Williams:

"From what I understand Colin Boyd was doing all the nuts and bolts to begin with, and that Lord Hardie was the head honcho but he was the supervisor.

"We feel that they haven't lost anything serious by losing Lord Hardie. We wish he hadn't gone, but we feel he's been replaced admirably."

Earlier, the United Nations said it had no plans to publish a controversial secret letter from its Secretary General Kofi Annan to the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.

The document was written last year shortly before the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing were extradited to the Netherlands.

US President Bill Clinton has been sent an appeal from American relatives of those who died on Pan Am 103 urging him to put pressure on the UN to release the letter.

Some US relatives have claimed it contains details of a secret deal with Libya and they have written to President Clinton.

Bob Monetti, of US Families of Victims of Pan Am 103, said they want to see what is in the letter.

"It's incredibly bizarre for everybody to assure us that the letter means nothing and yet not to show it to us," he said.

Mr Boyd said he had seen the letter and would have no problems if it was published.

The contents of the secret UN letter would not prejudice the trial of the Libyans, due to start on 3 May.  

"I have seen the letter in the past few days, together with the annexe which is referred to in it," he said.

"Neither the letter nor the annexe in any way inhibits my responsibility, which is to prosecute and bring evidence in the case.

"I told the relatives that if it were to be published I would have no difficulty at all with that."

However, a spokesman for the UN secretary general told BBC Scotland that the letter was a private communication between Kofi Annan and a head of state and would not be made public.

Cover-up, conspiracy and the Lockerbie bomb connection

[This is the headline over an article by Marcello Mega that was published in Scotland on Sunday on 19 February 2006:]

If there is a day when the seemingly inconsequential case involving DC Shirley McKie morphed into the crisis which today is threatening the reputation of Scotland's judicial and political system, it is Thursday, August 3, 2000.

It was already more than three years since McKie had visited a house in Kilmarnock where a woman called Marion Ross had been brutally murdered. Since then McKie had been accused of entering that house unauthorised, and leaving her fingerprint on the crime scene. She had been charged with perjury, after claiming in court she had never set foot in there. She had been humiliated at the hands of her former colleagues.

Now, on that August day, a group set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland (ACPOS) to examine the McKie case, was faced with a stunning report. It had already been established that the fingerprint experts at the Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO) had got it wrong and that the print was not McKie's. Now, the document in front of the group - an interim update from James Mackay, the man they had asked to investigate the case - claimed the SCRO officers had acted criminally to cover up their mistakes. The consequences were immense: if Scotland's forensic service was both guilty of errors and of attempting to conceal those errors, what confidence could anyone have in the entire justice system?

Last week, Scotland on Sunday revealed the contents of Mackay's final report, which had been kept secret for six years, and which was never acted upon by Scotland's chief prosecutor, Lord Advocate Colin Boyd. This week, we can reveal that it was not just police and prosecutors who knew its contents; the devastating findings of the interim version were passed on to ministers as well.

Mackay, a much respected former Deputy Chief Constable of Tayside police, had been commissioned to investigate the McKie case after a separate report by HM Inspectors of Constabulary had found that - despite the SCRO's claims - McKie's prints had never been at the crime scene. Mackay now probed deeper. As this newspaper revealed last week, his final report found that a mistake had been made, yet had not then been owned up to. "The fact that it was not so dealt with," he reported, "led to 'cover up' and criminality." (...)

On Friday, [Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC] declared that he had seen the full Mackay report and decided that there was still insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone from the SCRO. This decision, taken in September 2001, astonished Mackay. He is understood to have expressed his "surprise" and "disappointment" to the Crown Office and to have relayed his concerns to the then deputy crown agent, Bill Gilchrist. Indeed, so curious is the Lord Advocate's decision not to prosecute, that many are reaching their own conclusions as to why he didn't press ahead with a prosecution.

One is the theory that such a prosecution would undermine the case against David Asbury, the man jailed for the murder of Marion Ross. Such a fear was misguided: Asbury's conviction was quashed anyway in August 2002 on the back of the McKie revelations.

A second theory brings in the shadow of the Lockerbie bombing. Mackay's explosive report into the McKie case that August came three months after Boyd began the prosecution of Libyan suspects Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. The eyes of the world were focused on Scottish justice. What would it have said of that system if - just as the Crown was trying to convict the bombers - it emerged that fingerprint officials had been involved in "criminality and cover-up"?

Boyd strenuously denies that Lockerbie has any relevance to his judgments regarding the McKie case. When Iain McKie first raised the issue in 2000, Crown Office officials declared that Lockerbie "had not affected in any way the response from this or indeed any other department of the Scottish Executive to the issues raised by you."

But there is clear proof that senior justice chiefs had a stake in both cases; SCRO director Harry Bell, for example - whose agency was coming under such scrutiny - was a central figure in the Lockerbie investigation, having been given the key role in the crucial Maltese wing of the investigation, and given evidence in court.

Today's revelation that two American fingerprint experts who savaged the SCRO over the McKie case were asked by the FBI to "back off" suggests that plenty of people were aware of the danger that the case could undermine the Lockerbie trial.

Former MP Tam Dalyell - who has long campaigned on the Lockerbie case -

said: "I have always felt that there was something deeply wrong with both the McKie case and the Lockerbie judgment. It is deeply dismaying for those of us who were believers in Scottish justice. The Crown Office regard the Lockerbie case as their flagship case and they will go to any lengths to defend their position."

The pressure for a full public inquiry is now growing day by day.

Lockerbie trial personnel

What follows is excerpted from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2008:

Where are they now?

[I]t 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.

[RB: Sheriff Alistair Duff is now Director of the Judicial Institute for Scotland; Richard Keen QC is now Baron Keen of Elie and Advocate General for Scotland; Colin Boyd QC is now a judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary; Lord Coulsfield died in March 2016.]

"...there is a long way to go"

[The following are excerpts from two reports published in The Guardian on this date in 2000:]

Air controller tells historic court of final minutes of bombed Pan Am flight 103 
The final dramatic moments of Pan Am flight 103 before it exploded over Lockerbie nearly 12 years ago were recreated in a packed court yesterday at the start of the trial of two Libyans accused of murdering 270 people.

On the first day of the historic trial, the Scottish court in the Netherlands heard how air traffic controllers watched the radar blip of the doomed Boeing 747 shatter into fragments before it finally disappeared off their screens.

Questioned by Colin Boyd, the Lord Advocate, Alan Topp, descirbed how on the night of December 21 1988 he tracked the path of the aircraft on his radar monitor in the Scottish air traffic control centre at Prestwick, as the plane headed from London Heathrow towards New York.

Mr Topp, 64, of Troon, Ayrshire, said that at about 7pm he made contact with the jumbo as it entered Scottish air space. "Good evening Scottish, Clipper one zero three," he was told by the pilot, according to a transcript introduced in evidence. "We are at level three one zero." Those words were the last ever heard from the plane.

Lord Sutherland, sitting with two other judges, listened as Mr Topp described how at 7.02pm he first noticed a radar abnormality with Pan Am flight 103.

Just a minute later, according to a video recording of the radar screen shown in evidence, flight 103's blip fragmented into first three and then five discrete signals. "I had my radar opened out and you could see that one big bright square is made of up of several squares very close to each other," said Mr Topp.

"I had never seen anything like this happen before. Nobody had."

Several attempts to contact the aircraft were made by the air traffic control centre, but with no success. A KLM aircraft nearby was also unable to make contact with the plane, despite repeated attempts.

The court heard how Mr Topp called over his boss, Adrian Ford, 66, from Ayr, after a British Airways pilot, Robin Chamberlain, told him he had spotted a fire on the ground near Lockerbie. Mr Chamberlain, 52, told the court: "The closest I could put it is that it looked as if a petrol storage tank had blown up. If you imagine the things you see in films, it was like that - like a large explosion or a bomb - something of that nature."

At the air traffic control centre, Mr Ford immediately informed search and rescue teams that the aircraft was missing. "I said to the control there that Clipper 103 has vanished."

Earlier, the two Libyans, described by the prosecution as intelligence agents, pleaded not guilty to murder, conspiracy to murder and contravention of the Aviation Security Act 1982. They also lodged a special defence of incrimination and blamed Palestinian terrorists for the bombing.

In a statement read by the clerk of the court, the defence claimed that members of two Syrian-backed Palestinian groups - one of them a prosecution witness - had planted the bomb on flight 103.

The defence was submitted moments after Lord Sutherland opened proceedings against Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, who surrendered for trial last year. They claim to have been employees of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

The defence statement also named Mohammed Abu Talb, a Palestinian, as one of 10 other alleged conspirators. He is serving a life sentence in Sweden for earlier bombings in Denmark and the Netherlands.

Abu Talb was an early suspect in the case, but investigators abandoned that line of inquiry. He is listed as one of more than 1,000 prosecution witnesses.

Seven other named Arab men, whose whereabouts are unknown, were described as formerly directors of a bakery in Malta,where the suitcase containing the bomb was allegedly loaded on to a feeder flight to Frankfurt, and from there to London.

The defence statement referred also to members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and to Parviz Taheri, who is another crown witness.

First to testify was Richard Dawson, a civil aviation air traffic controller who was on duty at Heathrow airport on the night the plane crashed in flames on to the Scottish Borders town.

Mr Dawson, aged 52, described the routine procedures for departures from Heathrow, and radar control technology which allows the controllers to track the aircraft. He confirmed that the doomed flight made its first appearance in traffic control records at 6.18pm on December 21 1988, identified as Clipper 103, and that later it was cleared for takeoff, leaving the airport shortly afterwards.

Watching the trial throughout were the families of the Libyan accused. In total, 17 family members, including the children of the accused, witnessed the first day's proceedings - 10 of Mr Fhimah's relatives and seven of Mr al-Megrahi's. Mr Fhimah's uncle, Milad Fhimah, said: "We are Muslim, we look to Allah, we believe in God. We are not upset, because it is true that they are innocent."

Bruce Smith, a former Pan Am pilot whose wife, Ingrid, was killed in the crash, said: "This is the start of the trial and we welcome it, but there is a long way to go."

Judges and lawyers
Lord Sutherland, Presiding Judge Ranald Sutherland QC, 68, is one of the most experienced judges on the Scottish legal circuit. He was appointed to the bench in 1985 and has been an advocate, the Scottish equivalent of a barrister, since 1956. He frequently takes charge of the court of criminal appeal in Scotland and is used to high-profile cases.

Lord Coulsfield John Cameron QC, 66, was appointed to the bench in 1987 and first became an advocate in 1960. He took silk in 1973 and has had a long and varied career. He has lectured in law at Edinburgh University and was a judge in the courts of appeal of Jersey and Guernsey.

Lord MacLean Ranald MacLean QC, 61, is the newest of the judges to the Scottish bench. He was appointed to the bench in 1990, although he has been an advocate since 1964. In his advocate days he was most often a prosecutor.

William Taylor QC, Counsel for Al Megrahi Since the early 1980s, Bill Taylor has been one of the most prominent of Scotland's defence QCs. He has won a string of high-profile cases, helped by his good courtroom voice and what is generally regarded to be an extremely agile mind.

Richard Keen QC, Counsel for Fhimah Richard Keen's courtroom gifts are every bit as prominent as those of Bill Taylor. However his relative lack of experience in criminal cases made him, for many, a surprise choice as Fhimah's counsel.

The Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC Since Lord Hardie unexpectedly stepped down at the start of this year, Colin Boyd has led the prosecution team. As the former solicitor general for Scotland, he knows the case well. However, it is widely believed he will hand over the main prosecution role to one of his junior counsel - Alastair Campbell QC and Alan Turnbull QC - when the trial gets under way in earnest.