Feraday’s legacy

[On this date in 2005 Hassan Assali’s explosives conviction was quashed by the English Court of Appeal. His conviction in 1985 was founded on evidence given by Allen Feraday. What follows is a comment that appeared during the Zeist trial on the website edited by Ian Ferguson and me:]

As one of the Crown's key witnesses gave his testimony this week in Camp Zeist at the trial of the two Libyans accused of the bombing of Pan Am 103, one man, Hassan Assali watched news reports with interest as Allen Feraday took the witness stand.

Assali, 48, born in Libya but who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1965, was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to nine years. He was charged under the 1883 Explosives Substances Act, namely making electronic timers.

The Crown's case against Assali depended largely on the evidence of one man, Allen Feraday. Feraday concluded that the timers in question had only one purpose, to trigger bombs.

While in Prison Assali, met John Berry, who had also been convicted of selling timers and the man responsible for leading the Crown evidence against Berry was once again, Feraday. Again Feraday contended that the timers sold by Berry could have only one use, terrorist bombs.

With Assali's help Berry successfully appealed his conviction, using the services of a leading forensic expert and former British Army electronic warfare officer, Owen Lewis.

Assali's case is currently before the [English] Criminal Cases Review Commission, the CCRC. It has been there since 1997. Assali believes that his case might be delayed deliberately, as he stated to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw in a fax in February 1999: "I feel that my case is being neglected or put on the back burner for political reasons."

Assali believes that if his case is overturned on appeal during the Lockerbie trial it will be a further huge blow to Feraday's credibility and ultimately the Crown's case against the Libyans.

There is no doubt that a number of highly qualified forensic scientists do not care for the highly "opinionated" type of testimony, which is a hall mark of many of Feraday's cases.

He has been known, especially in cases involving timers to state in one case that the absence of a safety device makes it suitable for terrorists and then in another claim that the presence of a safety device proves the same, granted that the devices were different, but it is the most emphatic way in which he testifies that his opinions are "facts", that worries forensic scientists and defence lawyers.

In his report on Feraday's evidence in the Assali case, Owen Lewis states, "It is my view that Mr. Feraday's firm and unwavering assertion that the timing devices in the Assali case were made for and could have no other purpose than the triggering of IED's is most seriously flawed, to the point that a conviction which relied on such testimony must be open to grave doubt."

A host of other scientists, all with vastly more qualifications than Feraday concurred with Owen Lewis.

A report by Michael Moyes, a highly qualified electronics engineer and former Squadron Leader in the RAF, concluded that "there is no evidence that we are aware that the timers of this type have ever been found to be used for terrorist purposes. Moreover the design is not suited to that application."

Moyes was also struck by the similarity in the Berry and Assali case, in terms of the Feraday evidence.

In setting aside Berry's conviction in the appeal Court, Lord Justice Taylor described Feraday's evidence as "dogmatic".

This week in the Lockerbie trial, Feraday exhibited that same attitude when questioned by Richard Keen QC.

Keen asked Feraday about Lord Justice Taylor's remarks on his evidence, but Feraday, dogmatically, said he stands by his evidence in the Berry case.

He was further challenged over making contemporaneous notes on items of evidence he examined. Asked if he was certain that he had made those notes at the time, he said yes. When shown the official police log book which showed that some of the items Feraday had claimed to have examined had in actual fact been destroyed or returned to their owner before he claimed to examined them, his response, true to his dogmatic evidence was the police logs were wrong.

Under cross-examination though, it did become clear that Feraday completed a report for John Orr who was leading the police Lockerbie investigation and in that report he stated he was,  "Completely satisfied that the Lockerbie bomb had been contained inside a white Toshiba RT 8016 or 8026 radio-cassette player", and not, as he now testifies, "inside a black Toshiba RT SF 16 model."

As recently as May [2000], the leading civil liberties solicitor, Ms Gareth Peirce, told the Irish Times that the Lockerbie trial should be viewed with a questioning eye as lessons learned from other cases showed that scientific conclusions were not always what they seemed.

Speaking in Dublin Castle at an international conference on forensic science, Ms Peirce said she observed with interest the opening of the Lockerbie trial and some of the circumstances which, she said, had in the view of the prosecution dramatically affected the case.

She asked herself questions particularly relating to circuit boards which featured in the Lockerbie case and also in a case that she took on behalf of Mr. Danny McNamee, whose conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions in connection with the Hyde Park bombings (another case in which Feraday testified) was eventually quashed. She asked herself whether the same procedures were involved.

Danny McNamee may be the most recent Feraday case to be overturned, Hassan Assali believes his case will be the next.

[RB: As mentioned above, Assali’s conviction was quashed on 19 July 2005. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, stated that Allen Feraday “should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics”.]

Flagrantly distorted picture put forward in Camp Zeist

[What follows is excerpted from a review in The Observer on this date in 2001 by investigative journalist Bob Woffinden of John Ashton and Ian Ferguson’s Cover-Up of Convenience:]

Last year, the case against two Libyans, Abdel Al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was heard at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands before three Scottish law lords. Gadaffi would have been briefed about the vagaries of British criminal justice processes, but he could hardly have appreciated that they would be this enfeebled.

It might have been anticipated that only the most reputable forensic scientists would be used. In fact, the Crown employed the services of three men whose credentials were in some doubt. The evidence of Dr Thomas Hayes in previous trials had contributed to the convictions of several innocent people. At the same time that Sir John May's public inquiry was condemning the laboratory staff for 'knowingly placing a false and distorted scientific picture before the jury', Hayes was retiring to become a chiropodist.

Allan Feraday, whose qualifications extended no further than a 1962 Higher National Certificate in applied physics and electronics, was criticised by the Lord Chief Justice in 1996 in a separate explosives case. Then there was the American Tom Thurman, who was criticised in a Department of Justice report for 'routinely altering the reports... in the FBI explosives unit', with the result that they, albeit unintentionally, became more favourable to the prosecution case.

Earlier this year, Fhimah was acquitted, although Al-Megrahi was convicted on the basis that he had placed the bomb on board a feeder flight in Malta. Not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it wasn't. So the trial led inexorably to the wrongful conviction of Al-Megrahi and the final betrayal of the bereaved families.

If Cover-Up of Convenience occasionally loses narrative focus, that is hardly surprising bearing in mind the difficulties with co-authors on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and the speed with which this book has been produced. It's an admirably thorough, exhaustively researched and gripping exposé of the complete Lockerbie scandal. Someone should use it as a basis of a screenplay. Even if Hollywood did its worst, what remained would still be more accurate than the flagrantly distorted picture put forward in Camp Zeist.

Was this really the best we had to offer?

[What follows is the text of a letter from Dr Jim Swire that was published in The Herald on this date in 2010:]

Flaws in evidence at Lockerbie trial

The Chilcot Inquiry has examined the role of the Blair government’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, allegedly converted to believing the Iraq war to be legal following “consultations in the USA”.

Should not the Lockerbie inquiry, when we get it, examine why the government of the day chose to ignore the words of its Lord Chief Justice, and appointed [Alan] Feraday to supply the forensic input to the Lockerbie trial?

Mr Feraday was criticised by the Lord Chief Justice in the case of R v Berry (1991). He declared that the nature of his evidence was dogmatic in the extreme and that he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in this field. Also, the Home Office has paid compensation from the public purse to Mr Berry because he was jailed on the erroneous evidence of Mr Feraday.

The Lockerbie case depended heavily upon a piece of timer circuit board allegedly recovered from the wreckage and labelled “PT35B” presented to the court by the same Mr Feraday, who also had consultations with the USA.

Assuming the British Government wanted the Lockerbie trial to reach a fair verdict, was this really the best we had to offer?

Feraday's "expert" evidence

[The following are brief excerpts from a long article published in The Herald on this date in 2005. I strongly recommend that the full text be read:]

[T]he man I am interviewing, Gilbert McNamee ... usually known as Danny ... is the man who was accused of being the "master bomb-maker" behind the devastating 1982 Hyde Park blast which killed four members of the Household Cavalry. McNamee was found guilty in 1987 and sentenced to a 25-year jail term. He served 12 years before his release under the Good Friday Agreement. It wasn't until 1998 that his conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions was quashed on appeal and declared unsafe. (...)

During his trial, the Crown put forward in evidence three fingerprints and two pieces of electronic circuit board. The fingerprints were from a bomb left on a London street, and from sticky tape found in two separate arms caches, recovered in 1983 and early 1984. One of the circuit boards had been found in one of the arms caches; the other fragment was said to have been discovered after the bomb explosion at Hyde Park in 1982. The Crown's key scientific witness, Allen Feraday, said the two were matched in design and "artwork" and therefore made by the same master bombmaker. The prosecution based its case on the link between McNamee's fingerprint, the circuit board found in the arms cache, and the fragment of circuit board from Hyde Park.

When I mention Feraday to McNamee he looks directly at me. "I don't hate him, " he says. "I don't hate any of them. But I hate their methods."

McNamee's case was not the first conviction Feraday helped secure which was later overturned as unsafe. Feraday was severely criticised by the Lord Chief Justice in another case - Regina v Berry - before McNamee's conviction was finally quashed. John Berry, jailed in 1983 for selling timers to the Middle East, had his conviction quashed in 1993 after military experts challenged Feraday's evidence. The then Lord Chief Justice said the nature of Feraday's evidence in Berry's case was "dogmatic in the extreme" and "open to doubt at the very least".

In July this year, the conviction in a third case involving Feraday's expert advice was overturned. After a 20-year legal battle, the Lord Chief Justice ruled that the conviction of 53-year-old Hassan Assali, a Libyan, on terrorist conspiracy charges, was unsafe.

Assali's Hertfordshire factory was raided in 1984 and timing devices were seized. Feraday, the prosecution's only expert witness, said there was no lawful purpose for the devices, which Assali claimed were for domestic use.

"I am unable to contemplate their use in other than terrorist bombs, " Feraday told St Albans Crown Court at Assali's trial. After Assali's release, his legal team commissioned military experts from Berry's case, with backgrounds in explosives and electronics, whose subsequent report cast doubt on Feraday's evidence. The case was referred to the Court of Appeal in 2003, and the conviction was then overturned.

Perhaps more controversially, Feraday told judges in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi - the Libyan convicted of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, in which 270 people died - that a fragment of a circuit board found in the wreckage was part of the bomb's detonator. The trial judges accepted his conclusion. In 2001, judges at a special court at Camp Zeist in Holland found Megrahi, now 53, guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in jail. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was cleared.

Feraday, now in his sixties, carried out some of the principal work on the key piece of forensic evidence at the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead in Kent. RARDE, the main UK forensic centre for examining terrorist incidents, was subsumed into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) after re-organisation. Feraday retired after 42 years' distinguished work.

Papers about Feraday's evidence in the previous cases have been sent to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which is investigating Megrahi's conviction, and speculation is rife that the Libyan could be freed if the commission refers his case to the appeal courts. There are also reports that he might be repatriated to his home country. Last month it was reported that the British, American and Libyan governments were negotiating the transfer of Megrahi to a prison in his home country on condition that he drops his appeal, suggesting that both the British and American governments would rather the case was not re-opened. Tony Kelly, who represents Megrahi, refused to comment on the pattern of quashed convictions: "My client has taken the firm view that we will not comment on the case while it is with the SCCRC."

Having worked on both the Berry and Assali cases, forensic expert Major Owen Lewis (retired), who served with the Royal Signals for 22 years, is, according to one source, investigating crucial forensic elements of the Lockerbie case on behalf of Megrahi.

Throughout his career, Lewis, who had particular experience of the Middle East, acquired specialist knowledge of electronic warfare, triggers, improvised explosive devices and surveillance.

The source said: "By now he's already got the modus operandi. And he knows how it works. Lewis is a very shrewd man, a very clever man." Kelly, Megrahi's lawyer, steadfastly refuses to comment. (...)

Dr Michael Scott, now a senior lecturer in computing at Dublin City University, gave evidence at the High Court in London where McNamee appealed his sentence. Scott has a degree in electronics from Queen's University, Belfast, and in engineering from Trinity College, Dublin. In 1977 he finished his doctoral dissertation at the University of Dundee. In spite of heading the government's explosives unit, Feraday's only relevant qualification was a Higher National Certificate in Applied Physics and Electronics. Throughout his career, however, he has spent a number of years studying explosives, and also specialised in analysing the capability of the IRA. He has also given testimony in many cases where his evidence was upheld. In June 1989 Feraday was made an OBE in the Queen's birthday honours.

When I contacted Scott in Dublin, he told me: "Taking circuit boards out of the explosives context, which in many cases was appropriate, then any number of electronic engineers would be better qualified than Feraday. Feraday's most damning conclusion was to point at a piece of electronics and say that it was part of a bomb, a purpose for which it was specifically designed and constructed, and that it could not be for any other purpose.

"However, his knowledge of electronics is in fact elementary, and his conclusions often just plain wrong. The electronics indeed could have other uses. His advantage is his explosives experience. However, even in this context there would be others better qualified than him. At the Berry appeal, where Berry had access to British army expertise, Feraday's evidence was, if you will excuse the expression, completely blown away."

Scott also described as "just nonsense" Feraday's assertion that the circuit board found in McNamee's case could only be used for bomb-making. "The simple circuit board found in this particular context could have had many other uses. Indeed, it was just an amplifier board, which is itself just a component. Just because an alarm clock can be used to make a bomb, it doesn't make possession of an alarm clock tantamount to possession of a bomb." (...)

The voice at the other end of the telephone is more upbeat than I expected. "I'm just getting on with my life, " says Hassan Assali, buoyantly. It's just over three months since his conviction on terrorist conspiracy charges was ruled unsafe, following a 20-year battle to clear his name. Having lost his house, his successful business and his first wife (he was divorced while in prison but has since remarried), he now lives in rented accommodation in Surrey. He is reluctant to discuss his case now that he intends suing the Crown for his false conviction, but he believes his freedom has given him his own sense of moral justice. (...)

He served six and a half years. After his release, his legal team commissioned military experts . . . Major Lewis, Lt Colonel John Wyatt (retired; a 23-year veteran of the Royal Engineers, involved in bomb disposal and counter terrorist operations) and Squadron Leader Michael Hoyes (retired; a chartered engineer who spent 22 years with the RAF) . . . whose report cast doubt on Feraday's evidence. As a result his conviction was overturned by the Lord Chief Justice.

According to the Appeal Court judgment:

"There is no doubt that an important part of the Crown's case against the appellant [Assali] depended on the evidence of Mr Feraday . . .

He examined all the devices that had been recovered. His evidence supported the Crown's case with regard to the nature of those devices."

The judgement also cited the Berry case, which had similarities to Assali's. It stated:

"On the appeal in that case, evidence was given by Major Lewis and Colonel Wyatt, together with Dr Bora, who were highly experienced and impressive court experts who concluded that similar devices to those in this case were simply timers. Mr Feraday had also given evidence in the case of Berry. The evidence which was given by the three experts to whom we have just referred rebutted the evidence of Mr Feraday that the absence of safety devices in the timers prevented their use for legitimate purposes.

Accordingly, the Court of Appeal concluded in Berry that Mr Feraday's opinions were central to the trial and were open to doubt at the very least. They therefore quashed Mr Berry's conviction. As the evidence of Mr Feraday was equally crucial to the prosecution in this case, the implications for this case were obvious."

Of Allen Feraday, Hassan Assali simply says: "He's a very, very experienced evidencegiver. If his evidence managed to convince a judge, he must have been bloody good."

Part of the prosecution's response to the Assali appeal stated: "Critical to the case against the appellant [Assali] was Allen Feraday's evidence. The Crown is of the view that there is a reasonable argument to suggest that the . . .

material [meaning the report by Assali's defence experts] might well have left his [Feraday's] evidence open to reasonable doubt. In the circumstances, the Crown does not feel it is in a position to advance argument to support the safety of the conviction on this basis, and will not seek to resist the argument of the appellant that this material renders his conviction unsafe."

Assali was officially a free man on July 19, 2005.

Assali believes the successful challenge to the evidence in his own case "will have significance on the Megrahi case". He also believes his own case was delayed in a bid to prevent Feraday's evidence being scrutinised before Megrahi's appeal. "The authorities didn't want to rock the Lockerbie boat. This bollocks about Megrahi . . . absolute shit. I know there is some devastating stuff. The SCCRC will have it at the moment. And they can dig up further because they have extreme powers.When that comes up . . . by God. That's the satisfaction I have at the moment." (...)

Allen Feraday lives in Halling, in Rochester, Kent. He was invited to comment when contacted at his home, but declined.

Danny McNamee lives a life now where people don't really know about his past. (...)

"The system cannot handle someone who says, 'But I didn't do this, boys.'" Curiously, he says he always knew the legal process . . . though not necessarily British justice . . . would free him. "Not in those terms, " he explains. "What it did do was make me understand the value of the legal system being properly implemented. The rules are there to be followed. If there was anger, it was towards the people who should know better . . . the people who don't obey the rules and they know the rules."

Before finishing up, he talks briefly about the Lockerbie case and the impact his own case … and the cases of Berry and Assali ... might have on it. "They know Feraday's judgement is, at the very least, questionable, " he says, his voice weighed down by his past. "But you have to ask not really a question about him, but a question about the prosecuting authorities who then seek to rely upon someone whose evidence has been discredited."

He shrugs. His life has moved on. It's not come tumbling down. But the ripples of his story are still being felt. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is serving his sentence in Greenock Prison near Glasgow, where he continues to protest his innocence. The case is being considered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, whose findings are expected to be announced early in 2006.

According to one source, "the unmasking of the judicial system and all its hubris will be there for all to see".

“It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent"

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James that was published on the World Socialist Web Site on this date in 2009:]

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

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

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

She points to the advance warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights from London, the role of the FBI and others who flooded the crash site, the lack of security on the site and tampered evidence, including moved bodies. She notes the initial trajectory of the investigation, which pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) acting on behalf of Iran having used a barometric bomb to bring down the 747. She also notes that a barometric bomb, one triggered by changes in air pressure, would have exploded only after PA 103 reached a certain height—some 38 minutes into the flight from Heathrow—precisely when the plane disintegrated.

She reviews the subsequent change in focus from Syria and Iran to Libya, which was in line with US foreign policy objectives at the time. Firstly, then US President George Bush, senior, instructed then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to keep the Lockerbie investigation “low key” to assist hostage negotiations underway in Beirut. As a result, rather than a judicial inquiry and prosecution, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) with no powers of subpoena was held.

Then, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, Iran and Syria both assisted the US invasion of Iraq. It was at this time that the focus of the Lockerbie investigation was shifted. Vincent Cannistraro, the architect of the Reagan administration’s CIA campaign of destabilisation against the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gadhaffi, was brought out of retirement to head the new line of investigation.

Peirce writes, “It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the cooperation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on ‘identification’ evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy”.

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Llamen Khalifa Fhimah, were handed over by the Libyan government in 1999. The trial opened at a converted US airbase in the Netherlands in 2000. The indictment against Megrahi read that an MST 13 bomb timer was made in Switzerland, by MEBO AG, and sold exclusively to Libya. Identification of the timer rested on the efforts of Thomas Hayes and Alan Feraday of the Royal Armament and Development Establishment (RARDE), along with Thomas Thurman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

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

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

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

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

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

Following an investigation into RARDE by Sir John May, Hayes resigned and is now reported to be working as a chiropodist.

Pierce then turns to the visual identification of Megrahi.

“Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard”.

Pierce notes the numerous failings in the evidence provided by Gauci, his initial identification of Abu Talb, of the PFLP-GC, and reiterates the suggestion that Gauci was “handsomely rewarded” for his services.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dramatic shortcomings and errors

[What follows is the text of a press release issued by Professor Hans Köchler on this date in 2005:]

Vienna, 14 October 2005/P/RE/19402c-is

The Austrian professor who was appointed by the United Nations as international observer at the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands today commented on reports in the Scottish and British media about new doubts on the handling of the case by the judicial authorities.

Dr Hans Koechler said that the dramatic shortcomings and errors in the conduct of the trial that have been brought to the attention of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) confirm his earlier assessment that the Lockerbie trial resulted in a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” (BBC News, 14 March 2002) Dr Koechler pointed to the following information that transpired in the media and that puts in doubt the very integrity of the judicial process in the Lockerbie case:

1.          The credibility of a key forensic expert in the trial, Mr Allen Feraday (UK), has been shattered. It was revealed that “in three separate cases men against whom Mr Feraday gave evidence have now had their convictions overturned” (BBC, 19 August 2005). Mr Feraday had told the Lockerbie court that a circuit board fragment found after the disaster was part of the detonator used in the bomb on board Pan Am flight 103. In the first case where Mr Feraday’s credibility had been questioned the Lord Chief Justice had stated that Mr Feraday should not be allowed to present himself an expert in electronics.

2.          A retired Scottish police officer has signed a statement confirming that the evidence that found Al-Megrahi guilty was fabricated. The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, testified “that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan” for the bombing of the Pan Am jet (Scotland on Sunday, 28 August 2005). The fragment was supposedly part of the timing device that triggered the bomb. The circumstances of its discovery – in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity – have been mysterious from the very beginning.

3.          Much earlier, a forensic specialist of the American FBI, Tom Thurman, who was publicly credited with figuring out the fragment’s evidentiary importance, was later discredited as a forensic expert. A 1997 report by the US Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found “that in a number of cases other than Lockerbie, Thurman rewrote lab reports, making them more favorable to the prosecution. The report also recommended Thurman be reassigned to a non-scientific job because he lacked a background in science.” (American RadioWorks / Public Radio, March 2000)

4.          The most recent revelation relates to a mix-up of forensic evidence recovered on the ground in Lockerbie with material used during a series of test explosions in the course of the investigation. In one case, a garment which was damaged in a test explosion was presented as if it was the original garment found on the ground (which was completely undamaged). This garment was supposedly placed in the suitcase containing the bomb. “It casts serious doubts over the prosecution case because certain items that should have been destroyed if they were in the case containing the bomb are now known to have survived the blast.” (The Observer, London, 9 October 2005)

All these facts – which are now before the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission – confirm the serious doubts about the Lockerbie proceedings originally raised by the UN-appointed observer, Dr Hans Koechler. In his comprehensive reports on and evaluation of the Lockerbie trial (2001) and appeal (2002) as well as in his statement on the compensation deal made between the US, UK and Libya in 2003, Dr Koechler had criticized the highly politicized circumstances in which the case was handled and drew the attention of the international public to the possible interference of intelligence services from more than one country.

New light is being shed on his original conclusion that the trial was not fair and that the basic requirements of due process had been neglected by what The Herald (Glasgow) most recently has referred to as a “distasteful political fix” (12 October 2005). It has been reported that secret talks are under way to transfer the convicted Libyan national to a North African country, which may frustrate the efforts at a retrial under Scottish law. It is worthy to note, in that regard, that the decision of the SCCRC about a retrial or new appeal has again been delayed until some time next year, Dr. Koechler said. As reported by The Herald, it appears that the key players – the three countries involved in the Lockerbie dispute – “are so anxious to avoid a retrial that officials are said to have held secret talks to secure a get-out clause.” Commenting on these revelations, Dr Koechler stated that only a retrial, if conducted in a fair, impartial and transparent manner according to the requirements set by UN Security Council resolution 1192 (1998), including the presence of international observers, will do justice to the convicted Libyan national and to the victims’ families who deserve to know the full truth about the case. This is also imperative under the fair trial standards set by the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, he said.

Dr Koechler reiterated his call for an independent public inquiry about the background of the terrorist crime as well as the criminal investigation and prosecution by the Scottish judiciary and the institutions of the United Kingdom. He stated that the falsification of evidence, selective presentation of evidence,  manipulation of reports, interference into the conduct of judicial proceedings by intelligence services, etc. are criminal offenses in any country. In view of the above new revelations and in regard to previously known facts as reported in Dr Koechler’s reports, the question of possible criminal responsibility, under Scots law, of people involved in the Lockerbie trial should be carefully studied by the competent prosecutorial authorities.

In a TV talk with Anne Mackenzie for BBC Newsnight Scotland (1 September 2005) Dr Koechler said that, while he does not question the integrity of Scots law as such, the handling of the Lockerbie trial has nevertheless seriously damaged the reputation of the Scottish legal system. A “political fix” such as the one reported last week in the Scottish and British media would confirm these doubts and further undermine the confidence in the integrity of the Scottish judicial system. He also said that he is afraid that, because of the political interests involved in the case, the full truth – including the identity of those responsible for the planning, financing and actual perpetration of the crime – may never be known.

In today’s statement Dr Koechler emphasized that the “global war on terror” cannot be fought credibly and with a chance of success if – in the worst case of terrorism in the history of the United Kingdom – the search for truth is abandoned for political expediency and criminal justice, i.e. the rule of law, is sacrificed on the altar of political and commercial interests.

Sunday Times INSIGHT "The Lockerbie Files" 1990

[On this date in 1990 The Sunday Times published an article of almost 8000 words entitled The Lockerbie Files. It is no longer to be found on the newspaper’s website. What follows is taken from the version posted on 29 October 2012 on the International Skeptics website:]

It was the biggest murder ever committed in Britain. Tomorrow, 21 months after a bomb sent a PanAm jumbo jet plunging into the town of Lockerbie, the public inquiry into the deaths of the 270 victims will open, at last, before John Mowat, sheriff principal of South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway. He will hear dozens of witnesses and scrutinise thousands of pages of evidence over the next three months.

Since the bombing, the Lockerbie investigators have probed the depths of terrorism, challenged powerful foreign interests and extended the frontiers of forensic detection. But most of the fruits of this painstaking police investigation will not be presented at the inquiry.

Lord Fraser, the Lord Advocate, the law officer leading for the crown at the inquiry, has decided not to present evidence that would cover such questions as how the bomb was put on the plane, who did it, and where. Nor will he introduce evidence uncovered by the extensive international criminal investigation evidence of security lapses at foreign airports and allegations of blunders by foreign police, including a bungle over a baggage loading list that may have enabled one of the terrorists to avoid capture by a matter of hours.

The inquiry is not equipped to probe the obstruction, bureaucracy, rivalry and incompetence that may have shielded the killers from justice. Nor is it able to consider the international political pressures behind the fact that today after an investigation costing Pounds 8.5m not one arrest has been made in direct connection with Lockerbie.

After an INSIGHT inquiry ranging over the whole breadth of police investigations in Britain and Germany, The Sunday Times is able to tell the story that the official inquiry will not hear. It is a story full of questions that the investigators still cannot answer. They may never be resolved.

Nobody noticed the undercover police officers as they sat in their unmarked cars in a quiet suburban street in the West German city of Neuss. It was Monday, October 24, 1988. Members of the anti-terrorist unit of the federal police the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) were watching a block of grey council flats at 16 Isarstrasse in the city's Arab quarter. Their targets were terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

This group had been dormant since the early 1970s, when it carried out spectacular attacks on Western airliners. But, alerted by Israeli tip-offs that the group had smuggled weapons into Europe to attack Israeli and American targets, the BKA had begun round-the-clock surveillance of 16 suspects across West Germany. The police called the operation Autumn Leaves.

The Isarstrasse flat belonged to an Arab greengrocer. But the BKA was more interested in his visiting brother-in-law, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni, 43, and a recently arrived companion, Marwan Abdel Khreesat, also 43.

Dalkamoni was a Syrian terrorist identified by the Israelis as leader of the PFLP-GC's European network. He had been captured by the Israelis after losing a leg during a cross-border raid in 1969 and released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange arranged by Ahmed Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC.

Officially, the limping, grey-haired Palestinian was in Germany for medical treatment. But the BKA suspected him of smuggling detonators into the country in his artificial leg.

Khreesat's presence was even more alarming to the BKA. He had arrived on October 13 with his wife and two bronze Samsonite suitcases. Inside one, Dalkamoni admitted later, was a black Toshiba ''bombeat 453'' radio cassette recorder. Remains of a similar model were later found among the debris at Lockerbie.

Balding and paunchy, Khreesat seemed typical of the thousands of Arabs who regularly visit the large Middle Eastern community in West Germany. He was silent for most of his stay, rarely leaving his room except to listen to his hosts' young son practising on a small electric piano in the living room. His wife explained that he liked music and that he owned a television repair shop back in Amman.

But Khreesat was no ordinary TV repairman. He was one of the world's most skilled aviation bombers. Italian secret service files showed he was wanted in connection with the bombing of an Israeli airliner in 1972, when ammonium nitrate concealed in a Philips record player had exploded minutes after take-off from Rome airport.

The BKA wondered, in October 1988, whether Khreesat was now planning an attack against a target in West Germany. As the surveillance team followed Khreesat and Dalkamoni on shopping trips around Neuss and Frankfurt, they began to fear the worst. Why else were the two men buying clocks, batteries, switches and glue?

BKA wiretappers heard Dalkamoni telephone Khreesat from Frankfurt to tell him that an accomplice would deliver ''black boxes with lids'', ''gloves'' and ''paste''. Dalkamoni also promised to bring ''at least seven white pointed aluminium buttons, four of which would be electric''.

On the morning of October 24, as the BKA monitored the flat, Khreesat settled himself at a table in his bedroom with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Dalkamoni arrived with some packages covered in aluminium foil and sealed with black sticky tape. Khreesat opened the back of his Toshiba radio cassette player and set to work.

He worked alone for the rest of the day and the whole of the next; others in the flat were told he was putting together an amplifier. Then Khreesat made a long distance call to Damascus, monitored by the BKA, and said: ''I've made some changes to the medication. It's better and stronger than before.''

Fearing an attack was imminent, the BKA moved in next day. Manfred Klink, its senior anti-terrorism officer, was taking no chances. Armed officers seized Dalkamoni and Khreesat near their green Taunus car. In its boot they found a black Toshiba radio cassette recorder armed with about 300 grammes of Semtex-H high explosive and a barometric trigger designed to close an electric circuit at altitude.

''The detonating mechanism ... is suited to detonate explosives automatically in an aircraft,'' the BKA reported later. ''When the necessary operating height has been reached the fall in pressure connected with it will start the timing mechanism, and when the delay period has elapsed the detonator will be activated''.

The BKA simultaneously raided addresses in Frankfurt and four other cities, seizing 14 more supects and a lethal arsenal that included an anti-tank gun, sub-machine guns, mortars, rifle and hand grenades, TNT and five kilos of plastic explosives.

The Germans also issued an international alert to airline and airport security chiefs about the possibility of other Toshiba radio bombs made by Khreesat. They had reason to congratulate themselves. It seemed a massive plot to bomb an aircraft had been foiled and a terrorist cell taken out.

Events swiftly proved otherwise. For, in an astonishing decision that Scottish detectives would later believe had a direct bearing on the Lockerbie disaster, Khreesat was set free.

After holding him for two weeks on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime, the German police needed a new warrant to keep him in custody. On November 10, Dr Christian Rinne, an investigating judge of the federal high court in Karlsruhe, let Khreesat go.

Rinne said there was insufficient evidence to connect him with the Autumn Leaves gang's arsenal; nor had it been possible ''to discover a target or location for a crime of explosion''. If the BKA suspected Khreesat of involvement in earlier bombings, they did not disclose that to Rinne. ''According to the facts known so far, the accused is certainly suspected of the alleged charge. The strong suspicion of crime necessary for a warrant of arrest is, however, lacking,'' said Rinne.

Dalkamoni and one other suspect had been positively linked with the Frankfurt arsenal and were still under arrest. They would later be charged for bomb attacks aimed at American military trains. But the other suspects seized in the Autumn Leaves round-up were all out of custody. Marwan Khreesat, master bomb-maker, walked out of the courthouse and vanished without trace.

Seven weeks later, a terrorist bomb weighing less than a bag of sugar exploded on flight PA103 as it flew six miles high over Lockerbie. It was 7.03pm on Wednesday December 21, 1988. Many of the passengers were Americans going home for Christmas. All 259 people on board were killed; so were 11 Lockerbie residents.

The following day, from his temporary headquarters in the Lockerbie Academy, John Boyd, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway police, Britain's smallest force, began a vast search and recovery effort. He appointed Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr to head a team of 130 detectives to hunt down the bombers. Orr had no experience of airline bombings; but he quickly focused on three lines of inquiry.

One was that a suicidal terrorist had smuggled a bomb aboard. But tests on the bodies of the victims showed no indication that any of them had recently handled explosives. ''Profiling'' of their backgrounds by Special Branch revealed no terrorist connections.

Another possibility was the ''mule theory'': an innocent passenger had been duped into taking the bomb aboard. This was only ruled out after every single bag belonging to every passenger had been shown not to contain a bomb.

Lastly there was the ''inside man'' theory: an airport worker had managed to smuggle a bomb on to the aircraft in unaccompanied baggage.

It would take months and a tortuous journey through more than 9,250 leads before Orr would discover the answer. [...]

They found that a small magnet had been fused by the heat of the explosion into the metal frame of one damaged suitcase. A tangled piece of scorch-marked clothing in another case yielded a fragment of black-painted loudspeaker grille. A tiny screw melted into a third suitcase was a further pointer. By mid-February 1989, Feraday had identified a crucial piece of evidence pointing to the bomber the tiny piece of circuit board.

''I am completely satisfied that those fragments originate from a Toshiba-brand radio cassette recorder types RT 8016 or RT 8026,'' he wrote to Orr. ''The fragments are shattered in a manner consistent with their intimate involvement in an explosion and I therefore conclude that the bomb was contained in the aforementioned Toshiba-type portable radio cassette player.''

A charred instruction manual written in Arabic and English indicated that the radio had been sold in the Middle East. But there was no prospect of tracing the buyer.

Orr assigned a specialist search team to trawl five square miles of bush and shrubland on the western fringes of Newcastleton forest 23 miles from Lockerbie. It was laborious work. But the team members were fired up by the belief that they might bring the killers to justice.

They eventually found 27 pieces of a suitcase that Rarde was able to establish had contained the bomb. The pieces of scorched or melted brown plastic were all, Rarde concluded, part of a hard-sided brown Samsonite, the kind Khreesat had with him at the bomb flat in Neuss.

Harry Bell, a detective chief inspector, flew to Samsonite's headquarters in Denver, Colorado, where the suitcase was identified as an Antique Copper System Four Samsonite. The model had been manufactured between 1985 and 1988 and sold in the Middle East. But more than 3,500 had been made and there was no way of tracing the buyer. As with the fragments of the Toshiba bomb, the remains of the Samsonite seemed to lead to a dead end.

It was time to look elsewhere for clues. Since the first days after the bombing, Orr had been aware of a possible connection between Lockerbie and the Autumn Leaves operation in West Germany. On his advice, a formal British request went to the BKA for all possible assistance. But as February turned to March, Scottish detectives began to complain of BKA obstructiveness. At first it just seemed like bureacratic red tape. ''There were delays in answering our specific requests,'' said one detective. ''Later it became deliberate prevarication.''

The BKA at first rejected requests to interview detainees connected to the Autumn Leaves gang. When interviews finally did take place, the BKA insisted on asking the questions, and in German. Orr complained privately that the Germans were withholding the full Autumn Leaves files.

It was a delicate situation. A provincial Scottish police force, with little previous experience of terrorism, was challenging the counter-terrorism department of West Germany's equivalent of the FBI; the BKA is probably Europe's most efficient police organisation.

Matters came to a head in late March at a co-ordinating meeting of Scottish and German investigators at the inquiry headquarters in Lockerbie, where Orr outlined the growing evidence of connections between the PFLP-GC in West Germany and the Lockerbie bombing.

Evidence from Autumn Leaves proved conclusively that the group was once more planning to attack aircraft, said Orr. The Toshiba radio bomb, Samsonite suitcase and the use of Semtex were common factors pointing to links between the cell and the Lockerbie bombing. Orr also pointed out that, although Dalkamoni had been in custody when flight PA103 exploded, other members of the gang, including Khreesat, had been free for seven weeks.

Orr argued that it was essential to know the whereabouts of the Autumn Leaves gang after they had been released. ''It is vital to know where the PFLP-GC people arrested and then released were from 2829 October 1988 onwards; the whereabouts of their associates; if all the property capable of being used in bomb-making had in fact been recovered?'' Orr demanded that the BKA release their full files on Autumn Leaves.

''He made it clear,'' notes of the meeting read, ''that while he did not wish to interfere in any way with the investigation of the crimes committed by these people in West Germany, his first priority lay in solving the murder of 270 people in Scotland.''

The following month the long-delayed Autumn Leaves files at last arrived in Lockerbie from the BKA. They held some surprises for Orr. For weeks, he had been puzzled by Judge Rinne's decision to free Khreesat. Now, as he sifted through hundreds of pages of the English translation of Autumn Leaves, his bewilderment turned to horror.

The prima facie case against Khreesat appeared to be overwhelming. Dalkamoni had told the BKA that Khreesat had built bombs not just inside the Toshiba radio that police had seized but also in two tuners and a video screen. He modestly explained: ''Mr Khreesat was the expert. I brought him specially to Germany from Amman.''

Traces of explosives had been found on the table where Khreesat had worked in the Autumn Leaves flat, and Khreesat himself had revealed to police an extensive knowledge of the workings of the PFLP-GC. He had admitted that, about a month previously he had been in Dalkamoni's office in Damascus when he overheard a discussion by four PFLP-GC members about an attack on an American club.

But the really stunning discovery was that on November 5, while still in custody, Khreesat had telephoned Jordan. The call was monitored by an Arab-speaking intelligence officer who reported that Khreesat appeared to be taking orders from an official of the Jordanian intelligence service.

Suddenly the whole investigation took on a different complexion. Was Marwan Khreesat, television repairman and master bomber, also a Jordanian spy? More disturbingly, had a decision been made to let the bomb-maker go free because German intelligence knew he was employed by the Jordanians as an informer on Palestinian terrorism in Europe? Had he even helped the German police to break up Dalkamoni's group?

Perhaps this explained why the case to remand Khreesat had collapsed. Had the evidence against him been ''badly led'' by the police? Did Khreesat's ambiguous role lie behind the apparent reluctance of the BKA to hand over the Autumn Leaves file? It would certainly explain why the BKA was so keen to deny any link between the Autumn Leaves gang and the PanAm bombing.

For the detectives in the Lockerbie schoolhouse, this was a glimpse of a world they knew little about, where the priorities of police work and intelligence diverged, and morality played a subordinate role.

Further shocks lay ahead. In May 1989, police searchers returned from Newcastleton Forest in triumph with the lock to the Samsonite suitcase that had contained the bomb. If the key could be found, it could lead to the Samsonite's owner.

More than 100 luggage keys were scattered among the estimated 10,000 items from the wreckage stored in the investigators' warehouse. Superintendent Angus Roxburgh, the man in charge of the property store, spent the next 48 hours wrestling to fit one key after another into the lock. But none fitted. So Orr asked the BKA about keys he knew had been recovered in the Autumn Leaves raids. Perhaps one would fit: a terrific breakthrough. But the Germans prevaricated. They said no keys had been found, then that they had been house keys, and then that they had been destroyed.

Angrily, the Lockerbie detectives pursued the suitcase connection, and their suspicions about the BKA grew even stronger.

They were intensely interested in the bronze Samsonites which Khreesat had brought to Germany. One of Dalkamoni's relatives had told police that, just minutes before Dalkamoni and Khreesat were arrested, he had seen a bronze Samsonite in the boot of their car. Between this sighting and the arrests, Dalkamoni had parked the car and Khreesat had made a call from a street telephone.

No reference to a Samsonite appeared in German police files. The BKA had reported finding a Toshiba bomb in the boot, but no suitcase What had happened to it?

The Lockerbie police conjectured: ''It is possible that the brown suitcase was delivered to another person while Dalkamoni was 'parking the car', and that the suitcase contained another IED (bomb) and that the suitcase referred to is the brown Samsonite suitcase which contained the IED on PA103.''

In other words, the Scottish detectives suspected that the vanished suitcase was the missing link between Germany and Lockerbie. They surmised that, perhaps unknown to Khreesat himself, one of the bombs he had made had eventually sent 270 people to their deaths.

Such was the atmosphere in the Lockerbie incident control centre (LICC) over this question that Orr ordered an examination of the BKA's scene-of-crime photographs of the car. These showed cigarette packets and other litter in the interior yet a spotlessly clean and empty boot where the Samsonite had been seen. Suspicious, the Scots examined the film, and discovered that the picture of the boot had been taken on a separate roll. The BKA said it had run out of film. The Scots suspected dirty tricks.

What were the Germans up to? As the Lockerbie team chewed over such facts and as it knew about the arrest of Khreesat and Dalkamoni, another suspicion took shape. If Khreesat had been a known informer for the Jordanians, had he actually tipped off German intelligence that he had made his bombs and that it was time to arrest the Autumn Leaves gang before Dalkamoni could distribute them?

That might explain the BKA's apparent efforts to obfuscate what had happened. If it knew about Khreesat's double identity, it would have had to detain him to maintain his cover.

Dalkamoni also had suspicions on these lines. Months later, as he sat in a high security cell in Hessen, he reflected on whether a man he had regarded as a trusted associate in the cause of Palestinian terrorism had all along been working for the West. During a prison visit by his wife in April 1989, he told her that he thought Khreesat had ''played a double game''. [...]

Once again the imperatives of a team of detectives pursuing mass murderers had clashed with those of the intelligence community. The Scottish investigators were under public and political pressure to get at the truth of a dreadful crime; but no intelligence service would willingly unmask its operatives to prying eyes. In their schoolhouse, some of the Scots felt that they were fighting a losing war against encircling secrecy.

Their sense of helplessness grew with the realisation that the tide of international politics was also turning against them. The West was moving towards better relations with Syria, host to the PFLP-GC, and with Iran, whose radical former interior minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was suspected of instigating the Lockerbie bombing in revenge for the American destruction of an Iranian airbus in July 1988.

Orr had been told that he would be unable to produce a shred of evidence against Iranian or Syrian officials in court. But he told his men not to worry about politics.

''He repeatedly told us to keep our heads down and get on with the job,'' said one detective. ''But only a fool could ignore the implications if we got a successful result.''

While gloom spread at Lockerbie, the forensic team at Rarde was trying to resolve another dispute between the two police forces. Had the suitcase packed with the bomb slipped past airport security at Heathrow or at Frankfurt, where a feeder flight to PA103 had originated?

Britons and Germans were blaming each other, and Orr was under pressure from the joint intelligence steering group of the Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates intelligence and security policy, to resolve the disagreement. There was a danger that the festering dispute would compromise co-operation between the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and its German counterparts in the hunt for IRA terrorists on the European mainland.

It was a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Luggage pallet AVE4041, holding the bomb in the Samsonite suitcase, had been loaded at Heathrow; but Special Branch detectives had established that none of the bags in it had originated in London. Most had been transferred off feeder flight PA103A from Frankfurt, apart from seven or eight bags in the bottom layer which had come direct from Cyprus and other airports.

If the scientists could establish the exact location of the bomb suitcase within the pallet, this would indicate the airport where it had been loaded.

Feraday, Rarde's expert, flew to America for a series of secret tests at the US Navy's explosive ordnance disposal technology centre at Indian Head, Maryland. Pointedly, the Germans were not invited.

Moulding varying amounts of Semtex into Toshiba 8016 radios, Feraday built five bombs which were wrapped in clothes and packed into five Samsonite suitcases. Each suitcase was loaded into luggage pallets similar to AVE4041 and the bombs were blown up.

The test report concluded: ''Results clearly indicate that the case containing the IED (the bomb) was not ... in the bottom layer of passenger baggage.'' This meant the bag had come from Frankfurt. It was a rare victory for the Scots.

For the BKA, one embarrassment followed another. Returning in April to a greengrocer's shop owned by Dalkamoni's brother-in-law, which it had already searched during the Autumn Leaves raids the previous October, the BKA found that it had overlooked two home-made bombs in a Sanyo data monitor and an Ultrasound radio tuner. Primed with Semtex, both had barometric pressure switches linked to time delays.

To Orr's men, this discovery was more evidence that the Autumn Leaves gang had been planning attacks against aircraft using bombs made by Khreesat and powerful support for the theory that the Pan Am device had been put aboard PA103A at Frankfurt.

The Germans disagreed, and a battle of scientific memoranda began. The BKA now had three bombs in its possession: one seized with Khreesat and Dalkamoni in October, the other two found in the greengrocer's. It asked its forensic section, ST33, to report if these could survive a flight from Frankfurt to London (flight time 1 hour 18 minutes) without detonation, and then explode, as the Pan Am bomb had done, 38 minutes after take-off from Heathrow.

Unfortunately, one of the bombs blew up while being examined at BKA headquarters, killing a junior technician; and in the resulting panic, another exploded after being rushed outside and blasted with water from a firehose.

Although the BKA was left with only one fully functioning example of Khreesat's bombs, it reported that all three had a time delay of between 30 and 45 minutes, and concluded: ''Presupposing that an explosive device of the same construction was used in the attack, then this must have been taken on board for the first time in London, or at least made acute by insertion of the master switch.''

Bombs built by Khreesat had a maximum time delay of 45 minutes, argued the BKA. Therefore, if he had made the PA103 bomb it must have been loaded at Heathrow. It could not have been loaded at Frankfurt, on a flight of more than an hour, because it would have activated within 45 minutes; so it could not have been made by Khreesat and was not overlooked by the BKA during the arrest of the Autumn Leaves gang. Either way, the BKA had not been responsible.

This logic infuriated senior Lockerbie detectives, who complained that the BKA was ignoring a wealth of circumstantial forensic evidence pointing to Khreesat, Dalkamoni and the rest of the Autumn Leaves gang. [...]

Between the rows there was important progress. By August, after months of painstaking work, Hayes and Feraday had drawn up a detailed list of clothing that had been with the bomb in the suitcase. This gave the police the strongest clue yet to its owner.

The clothing included a white singlet; brown tartan trousers marked ''Yorkie, size 34''; a grey shirt or blouse; a blue and white pin-striped shirt or blouse; a grey herringbone pattern jacket; a coarse herringbone pattern skirt, a cream and brown striped jacket and a blue Babygro romper babysuit. They all showed scorch marks. Fibres from them had been fused into parts of the Samsonite suitcase. The Babygro provided the single most important lead in the whole inquiry. It was labelled ''Malta Trading Company''.

Rarde had also identified a second category of bomb-damaged clothes. None of the clothing showed traces of the radio bomb or the Samsonite suitcase. But the damage was so intense that the clothes must have been inside or at least very close to the bomb suitcase.

These other clothes included: a pair of white jogging trousers or longjohns; a multicoloured headscarf; a purple sweatshirt; a tartan pattern grey jacket a white singlet, a white bra and part of a green slip- on tennis shoe. Most revealing of all was a pair of cream jogging trousers marked "Noonan". The passenger list revealed that Karen Elizabeth Noonan, a 20-year-old American student from Potomac, Maryland, had been on board. Her background revealed she had spent time in Vienna and had befriended an Arab called Bilbassi.

The point did not escape Hayes. "We are therefore able to conclude," he wrote, "that all of the above clothing, much of which could be regarded as lady's clothing, could have originated from within the prime suitcase and, in the case of the first listing above, in all probability did originate from within the prime suitcase,." Had Noonan been a "mule"?

Follow-up inquiries on the Babygro indicated it had been sold at outlets throughout Europe, including Dublin. Noonan had been to Dublin just weeks before the bombing to watch her college team play football.

Hayes's memo caused a stir of excitement at the Lockerbie Academy. During one of his daily phone calls to Douglas Gow, the FBI's supervisory officer in Washington, Orr made it clear that the Noonan lead was the strongest yet, Gow agreed. Noonan fitted the profile of a "mule" perfectly. Could she provide the answer the Scots were looking for?

On the morning of August 16, the telephone rang in John Orr's office. He switched the device on to the orange scrambling machine. Detective Inspector Watson McAteer, deputy liaison officer with the BKA, said the Germans had at last produced the baggage loading list for PA103A, the feeder flight from Frankfurt.

The computerised printout was an itemised list of 111 bags which had been loaded on the afternoon of December 21. Orr had been asking for it since early Janaury. "First the Germans said it didn't exist; then they said they had lost it. Finally they said it had been destroyed," claimed one detective.

This was the goldmine Orr had been waiting for. Casting his eye down the left side of the list, he saw a handwritten cross in the margin beside one entry. It referred to a bag, numbered S0009, which had been entered into the computer at 13.07pm. A separate typewritten worksheet showed that this bag had gone through handling station 206. A third worksheet revealed only one bag had been recorded at station 206 at 13.07pm. It was from Air Malta flight KM180, which had left Valletta at 9.45am that morning, docking at Frankfurt's terminal B at 13.40pm. [...]

Police in Scotland and Germany hope the shifting allegiances and faction fighting within the world of Palestinian terrorism will produce and evidence they need. "It won't be today or tomorrow, but I'm confident that one of these days somebody involved will break their silence," said one Western intelligence official.

But as the fatal accident inquiry opens in Dumfries tomorrow, the Scots and the Germans are still far apart in their theories about what that evidence will be.

The Scots police remain convinced that the Pan Am bomb was one of those made by Marwan Khreesat as he sat at his bedroom table on October 24 and 25, 1988. They suspect the BKA missed this device when it seized the Autumn Leaves gang and that the device was subsequently smuggled out of the country and, somehow, taken to Malta via Cyprus. But this is a theory with several holes.

Principally, how could the bomb have been taken to Malta? There is the Talb link, and there is a report of a member of the Autumn Leaves gang traveling by train to Vienna with a Toshiba radio under his arm after his release from custody. But would terrorists take a homemade bomb with a propensity to go wrong halfway around Europe, rather than move a bomb-maker to the point where the device was needed?

Furthermore, if the bomb was a barometric device made by Khreesat, why did it explode neither on the Malta-Frankfurt flight nor on the Frankfurt-London flight? The fact that it blew up 38 minutes our of Heathrow when, but for a diversion caused by high winds, PA103 would have been over the Irish sea suggests that it was precisely primed to send the plane plunging into deep water, where no evidence would ever be found.

As a result, the Germans treat the argument implicating Khreesat with a mixture of irritation and contempt. They argue that a bomb originating in Malto must have been constructed to a different design by another bomb-maker.

"The Scottish evidence is rather flimsy," said one senior German security official in charge of the case. "If you have a point and you like that point you try to fit everything into that scheme. That's what they are doing." He said evidence pointing away from Khreesat is in the hands of the Scottish police, "they might not like it, but it's there". Yet just what this evidence is he would not say.

Twenty-one months on, while the police bicker, the political steam has started to go out of the Lockerbie issue. Morale amount the investigators has plummeted, and men and resources have been diverted elsewhere. Just 35 of the original team of 130 detectives remain at the Lockerbie Academy; Orr has been promoted to deputy chief constable of the region. In Germany, Klink's Lockerbie team has dropped from 20 to just a handful.

On Thursday, as Sheriff Mowat's fatal accident inquiry enters its fourth day, Hafez Dalkamoni will appear before Frankfurt high court accused of possessing weapons and membership of a terrorist organization. He is expected to plead guilty to possessing one of Khreesat's bombs. But he insists this was meant for a target in Israel. With remission for good behaviour and the time already spent in custody, Dalkamoni can expect to be free within a few years.

Khreesat himself, television repairman and bomb-maker, is believed to be living in Amman, almost certainly under the protection of the Jordanian government. Senior Western intelligence officials refuse to discuss his real allegiances.

"We never confirm or deny the identity of our agents, " said one intelligence official who has supervised the Lockerbie case. "All I can say is that if Khreesat is a penetration agent, I wish we could have many of his sort."

Compromised by such sentiments, the hunt for the truth about the Lockerbie disaster faces an even greater obstacle: the Gulf crisis.

When James Baker, the American secretary of state, visited Syria earlier this month seeking solidarity against Iraq, he indicated that the CIA and West German intelligence had extensive evidence linking the Damascus-based PFLP-GC to the Lockerbie bombing, and he asked President Assad to expel the organization from Syria. Baker said American-Syrian relations could not be normalized until Assad acted.

The Syrians replied that if there was hard evidence to link any person or group in Syria with any terrorist acts, then those responsible would be placed on trail. But pressure to make the Syrian fulfil that promise is increasingly unlikely.

For, in a world suddenly endangered by the Gulf crisis, Syria and Iran have become unexpected partners with the West against Saddam Hussein. When Syrian troops stand shoulder-to-shoulder with British and American soldiers, the 270 victims of Lockerbie take second place in the struggle for justice.