Lockerbie, too?

[The following are excerpts from an article by Mark Lawson in today’s edition of The Guardian:]

In an early scene of the new Channel 4 drama series Utopia, an academic rejects a student's proposal for a PhD on conspiracy theories with the clincher: "I mean, conspiracies aren't very now, are they?" The line is winking inwardly because Utopia is the second conspiracy thriller in a row on this network, following Secret State – with a third, Complicit, soon to come.

So conspiracies are very now, and about to become even more so with the return of the genre's dark lord and author of what is more or less the bible of the form, The Da Vinci Code or, as it is known to non-believers, The Bad Book. Dan Brown revealed this week that his new novel, Inferno, will be published on 14 May. (...)

Although Brown's books frequently present religion as an agent of conspiracy, his literary career has benefited from a general western decline in faith. The human instinct to see a shape to our days, which once drove people to the Bible and Dante's Inferno, now sends them to The Da Vinci Code and Brown's Inferno. In frightened, sceptical times, conspiracy theories flourish.

And those who question official histories have recently received vindication, though not in the areas they hoped. While no truth has ever been proved in the favourite fantasies of conspiracy theorists – that, for example, the Apollo moon landings were faked, Princess Diana was murdered or President Obama is not an American – numerous grave conspiracies have been exposed.

The work of Bishop James Jones's commission of inquiry has exposed that the circumstances and causes of the deaths of 96 football supporters at Hillsborough were hidden by the police and other authorities in establishment machinations far more concrete and shocking than those long summoned up in sceptics' seances over the Kennedy assassination or the moonshots.

During much of the same period of British history, the activities of Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Cyril Smith benefited from at the very least a conspiracy of silence, if no greater collusion, among some of those in the circles in which they moved. And, at a lesser level of human suffering, it is now established that intrigues and cabals existed in the banking sector to fix the Libor lending rate and seems likely that other collusions contributed to the wider banking collapse. And who knows what secret deals may be revealed by the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war if (after a delay that is itself the subject of conspiracy theories) it is eventually published?

We also now know that the private lives of the well known and those thrown into the news by tragedy or grief were routinely suffering intrusion from a conspiracy of journalists. (...)

The biggest conspiracies are to be found not in fiction about the far past, but in the facts of the present.

The case that never goes away

[What follows is the text of a talk given by Dr Morag Kerr on Saturday, 16 June 2018 at a rally at Inch Park, Edinburgh:]

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, the case that never goes away.

I've heard people say, drop it, it's history.  But it's not much longer ago than Hillsborough, and that was only resolved to public satisfaction very recently.  And I personally have an aversion to a false narrative going down in history.  Other people feel the same way, including people personally impacted by the atrocity, and that's why we still have active campaigns.

Why is it that there's still so much concern about Lockerbie?Fundamentally, because the verdict in 2001 never made any sense.  As the court proceedings unfolded the prosecution case appeared to be falling apart.  The evidence against the accused was far far weaker than the public had been led to believe and credible alternative culprits and lines of inquiry had never been properly investigated.  The guilty verdict against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi came as a genuine shock to many informed observers, and their concerns have never been laid to rest.

Two separate but parallel campaigns have been going on for the last few years, and both are seeing significant developments unfolding.  First, there is the application by Megrahi's family for a posthumous appeal against his conviction.

This case has already had two appeals come to court.  The first appeal, the automatic one immediately after the conviction, was brought on the wrong grounds by Megrahi's inept advocate, and was dismissed essentially on a string of technicalities.  The second appeal was the result of a prolonged investigation by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and it came to court in 2009.  But by that time Megrahi had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and was anxious to return home to his family before he died, and he formally abandoned that appeal immediately before he was granted compassionate release.

This introduced a legal controversy.  Megrahi himself and his legal team maintained that he had withdrawn the appeal to make it more likely that compassionate release would be granted.  Kenny MacAskill denied having made that a condition of granting compassionate release.  When Megrahi's family applied to the SCCRC for a third appeal, the point that had to be decided was, how many bites at the cherry is anybody allowed to have?  The appellant abandoned his appeal voluntarily, so why should another be allowed?

The SCCRC's decision on this was reported last month.  They accepted that Megrahi withdrew the appeal because he believed it would improve his chances of being allowed to go home, and that it wasn't in any way a capitulation or an admission of guilt.  They have therefore decided to carry out a full evaluation of the new application from his family.  I anticipate that this will result in a third appeal being allowed and going to court.

The second campaign is an initiative by the pressure group Justice for Megrahi, of which I'm secretary depute.  The JFM committee includes retired senior lawyers and a retired senior police officer as well as relatives of Lockerbie victims, so we have a lot of expertise to call on.  Back in 2012 when the prospects of getting a third appeal to court were looking remote, we had a look at other options to force the authorities to look again at the case.  The thing is, you can't just go to the police or the Crown Office and say, look, here's why I think you got this wrong, you must reconsider.  It doesn't work like that.  What you can do, is force the police to look at the case again by making formal allegations of criminality against other people, which they are then duty bound to investigate.

I'm not talking about allegations against alternative suspects, but against people involved in the original investigation and the trial at Camp Zeist.  We had very good reason to believe that significant shenanigans had taken place at both stages of the proceedings, and that we had sufficient evidence to compel the police to investigate this seriously.  Eventually we submitted nine separate allegations to the authorities, backed up with credible evidence in each case.  These included police misconduct, forensic fraud and/or criminal negligence, perjury, and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Now of course talk is cheap and anyone can allege anything, but if there had been no substance to our allegations the police could have disposed of them quickly with very little trouble.  That's what they thought they were going to do, at first.  However it was eventually realised that there was serious substance to what we were saying, and in 2014 a dedicated Police Scotland investigation was set up, codenamed Operation Sandwood.  I think the fact that it has taken these detectives four years to finalise their report says a lot about how well-founded our position is, and how thorough the investigation has been.

It seems likely that the Operation Sandwood report will be submitted to the Crown Office before the SCCRC is ready to report, but I don't really know how much longer it will be for either of them.  Both reports will be confidential and will not automatically be made public, so we're going to have to do a fair bit of reading between the lines.

Although the two investigations are separate, they are essentially investigating the same thing -- the evidence in the Lockerbie case.   There's a huge amount of that, but systematic analysis boils it down to three critical points, only two of which specifically incriminate Megrahi.

The first of these is the identification evidence.  Clothes packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to their manufacturer, and from there to the shop where they were sold.  Amazingly the shopkeeper remembered selling more than one of these items to a customer, and he had some recollection of what that man looked like.  The prosecution alleged that it was Megrahi who had bought these clothes.

The first SCCRC report detailed six grounds on which the commission believed it was possible that a miscarriage of justice had occurred, and all of these related to the clothes purchase.  It seems to me inevitable that the new SCCRC investigation will have to allow a new appeal on these grounds if nothing else.  However, we hardly need to wait for the SCCRC on that one.  Kenny MacAskill has already, belatedly, conceded the point.  In his recent book and again in press articles, he agrees that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes.

In fact that's all it should take to overturn the conviction entirely.  If he didn't buy the clothes the case against him falls apart in logic.  However, Kenny doesn't see it that way, and pins his continued assertion that Megrahi was involved in the bombing on the second main point which appears to incriminate him, the fact that he was present at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane.  This also seems to be the fall-back position of the Crown Office.  Well, maybe someone else bought the clothes, but Megrahi was there when the crime took place and he was a Libyan security agent so go figure.

That aspect of the case is my own personal speciality.  Was Megrahi present at the scene of the crime?  There's no doubt he was at the airport in Malta that morning, catching a short-hop flight back to Tripoli after an overnight business trip to Malta.  The question is, was that actually the scene of the crime?  There was no evidence at all that security at Malta airport was breached that morning, no evidence that an illicit, unaccompanied suitcase was smuggled on to the flight to Frankfurt, and considerable evidence that no such thing actually happened.  Exactly how the prosecution managed to persuade the judges that it had happened is one of the enduring conundrums of the Lockerbie saga.

The Crown case depends absolutely on their preferred modus operandi, the story of the suitcase that was smuggled on to an aircraft in the morning on Malta, was transferred automatically through the baggage transfer system at Frankfurt without anyone realising that there was no passenger attached to it, and was then in due course transferred to the transatlantic airliner Maid of the Seas at Heathrow.  It was the transatlantic leg that blew up over Lockerbie.

However, as I said, there's no evidence at all of that suitcase being present at Malta airport, and the evidence from Frankfurt that was used to assert that it must have been there is tenuous beyond belief.  It's only when you look at the evidence from Heathrow itself that things get a lot clearer.  To cut a long story short, there is clear and incontrovertible evidence that the bomb suitcase was already in the baggage container at Heathrow a full hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed.  This evidence was available to the investigation at an early stage, but it appears the investigating officers simply didn't want to know.  The amount of effort expended in ignoring that suitcase is quite remarkable.

But once that is accepted, Megrahi really is exonerated.  This smear of "well maybe he didn't buy the clothes but he was there when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane so obviously he was involved" simply doesn't stand up.  He was 1,500 miles away at the time -- the distance from London to Tripoli.

The Crown Office case simply collapses.  It's not a situation where the crime has been more or less solved but there just isn't enough admissible evidence to get a conviction to stick, the Lockerbie investigation was up a gum tree almost from the beginning. Despite clear and compelling evidence that Heathrow was the scene of the crime, the police chased a red herring down a blind alley to Malta, and refused to think again even when prolonged investigation there turned up no sign of the bomb.

This admission would be hugely embarrassing for the legal establishment.  Millions of pounds spent on an investigation that was investigating the wrong airports.  An entire country ruined by punitive sanctions imposed on the assumption that its nationals were guilty of the atrocity.  Millions more spent on that three-ring-circus of a trial.

So I think we can anticipate some pretty strenuous resistance to this finding.  I expect the SCCRC to be pressurised to confine their investigation to the original six grounds of appeal, which were all about the clothes purchase, and not to extend their remit to the route of the bomb suitcase or indeed to the third point of contention, the identity of the fragment of printed circuit board that was alleged to have been part of the bomb's timing mechanism.

I also expect the Crown Office to try to bury the Sandwood report into our allegations of criminality.  There's an unavoidable weakness there.  The stratagem that we had to use was to accuse individuals of criminal offences in the course of these matters being wrongly investigated and wrongly presented to the court.  However, even if Operation Sandwood agrees with us on all three main headings -- that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes, that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow not Malta, and that the fragment of circuit board was not what the prosecution said it was -- it's quite possible that no actual prosecutions will result.

The people involved are now quite elderly, in their seventies or older.  Some of them are dead.  John Orr, the first senior investigating officer assigned to the case, who was prominent in turning a blind eye to the Heathrow evidence, died about four months ago.  Even if Operation Sandwood concludes that there is credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing as opposed to blind incompetence, it's not impossible that a decision might be taken that prosecutions are not in the public interest.

So I'm somewhat prepared for the announcement that no prosecutions are to be brought as a result of the Operation Sandwood investigation.  That, in my opinion, will not be good enough.  The public paid for that investigation, and the public is entitled to know the broad outcome of its inquiry into the facts.  Does the Sandwood report accept that the witness Tony Gauci was groomed and pressurised into identifying Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes, even though he looked absolutely nothing like him?  Does it agree that the Lockerbie bomb started its journey in the late afternoon at Heathrow airport, not in the morning on Malta?  And does it agree that the scrap of printed circuit board, whatever it was, was never part of one of the timers in the batch that was sold to Libya?

We may have to wait for the third appeal coming to court to get to the bottom of all this, but these are the questions that the public, and in particular journalists, should be asking.

Now if anyone wants to hear a lot more detail about this, I will be giving a longer, illustrated talk on the evidence at the Yes Hub in a couple of weeks time, and there will be more opportunity for questions, and you won't have to stand in the rain to do it.  But if anyone has anything they want to ask now, fire away.

Don't forget Lockerbie

The families of those who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 will continue searching for the truth. First, we need an inquiry

One of the first questions asked of me by every journalist and reporter covering the story about Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is: why is there such an apparent divide between the US and British relatives? Why do they believe he is guilty, and we remain to be convinced? Some imply that doubts about Megrahi's guilt by some UK representatives put the interests of a mass murderer before those of justice, a folly of the woolly liberal. This is far from the truth and I think the reasons for the differences in view are more complex.

Within days of the bombing, the then transport secretary, Paul Channon, stood in the House of Commons and obscured the truth about the number of credible warnings against US aviation. Our suspicions of a cover-up began and have remained to this day. Within three months, the UK families formed a support group, with the motto "The truth must be known". By then, the families knew that we would have a hard fight ahead to get to that truth.

The bombing of Pan Am 103 is often referred to as an American disaster. Yet it killed people from 21 countries, 47 of them British and Irish. I believe that the fact that it happened on our soil leaves the British relatives feeling a sense of responsibility for all the victims. The bomb was loaded on to the plane at a British airport and it was our government's responsibility first to protect travellers from such an attack, and second to understand how and why it was allowed to happen and ensure that lessons were learned for air travellers around the world. And finally, to seek and bring to justice those responsible for carrying out the attack.

UK families took this responsibility within the context of a country that has experienced terrorism first-hand for many years, and has also seen numerous miscarriages of justice where innocent people were convicted and jailed for terrorist crimes they did not commit. So it is no surprise that many British relatives have a scrupulous desire to ensure this does not happen again. If Pan Am 103 had taken off from JFK airport, we don't know what difference this would have made to the way the UK families have responded.

I am not arguing Megrahi's innocence and I feel that his decision to exercise his right to silence in the original trial did nothing to strengthen his defence. His co-accused was found innocent, a strong outcome in a Scottish court, where there is the option of a "not proven" verdict. I welcomed the decision of the Scottish criminal cases review commission to refer Megrahi's case back to the high court for appeal, an opportunity for us to hear any evidence that might get us nearer to the truth. The abandonment of the appeal is the worst possible outcome, as that evidence will now not be heard. But whatever his guilt or innocence, one thing everyone agrees on, including the court, is that he did not act alone.

I find it astounding that the UK government seems to have washed its hands of the whole affair and passed on responsibility to Scotland. Jack Straw's involvement includes stints as home secretary, foreign secretary and justice secretary, and in each of these posts he has had dealings with UK relatives. It was he who concluded the Prisoner Transfer Agreement negotiations with Libya, started by Tony Blair. Yet, when we contacted him about the impact this would have on the families, he said it was a Scottish government responsibility.

Why was Megrahi not excluded from the agreement? Now, the Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, has to decide whether to repatriate Megrahi or to release him on compassionate grounds. It is extraordinary when such a momentous decision is to be made by a man with no background in the case. I understand why US senators are putting pressure on MacAskill not to release Megrahi, but wish they would also put pressure on the UK government to hold an independent inquiry that might establish some of the answers to the bigger questions: who ordered the bombing? What was the motivation for it? Why was it not prevented? These answers must be sought whatever Megrahi's guilt or innocence.

The primary reason given by Straw and others in government through the years is that such an inquiry might prejudice the criminal process. Now, that argument has no validity. Westminster must not wash its hands of Lockerbie. One step the UK government could take is to follow the example of the Hillsborough case, by releasing all official papers (now, more than 20 years after the bombing).

We will resolutely continue our search for the truth. If the UK government fails to hold an inquiry, we will lobby the Scottish government do so and ensure that all responsible British government ministers and officials are called to account.

[The above is the text of an opinion piece by Pamela Dix, a relative of one of the British victims of the Lockerbie disaster, on The Guardian's Comment is free website.]

Atrocious failures blight our justice system

[What follows is excerpted from an editorial in today’s edition of The
Observer. The  “atrocious failures” referred to in it apply equally in the
Scottish prosecution system and, as the Megrahi case demonstrates
only too clearly, extend beyond the police to the prosecution service
itself.]

Atrocious failures blight our justice system. Should disclosure decisions be taken

away from the police?

The right to a fair trial is a linchpin of the rule of law and a free and democratic

society. So it is right that the collapse of two rape prosecutions in recent days,
both due to police failure to disclose relevant material to the defence, has cast
a fresh spotlight on whether that right is under jeopardy.

The obligation of police and prosecutors to disclose unused material that might

support the defence case is critical to ensuring a fair trial. Indeed, a failure to
disclose relevant information to the defence team is one of the most common
causes of miscarriages of justice. In the cases of Liam Allen and Isaac Itiary, both
accused of rape, the Met police failed to hand over relevant text messages to
defence lawyers in a timely fashion. When this finally happened, both cases were
dropped, but not before Itiary had spent four months in jail awaiting trial and Allan
two years on bail. The attorney general rightly labelled this an “appalling failure” of
the criminal justice system.

There are competing narratives about what lies behind this. Some hold up these

cases as a sign that the pendulum has now swung the other way in a police force
once notorious for its failures to take rape allegations seriously. (...)

But it is irresponsible to imply police failures in disclosure are a problem specific to

rape prosecutions. In July, a joint report on disclosure by the police and
prosecution service inspectorates raised concerns about disclosure practices within
the police and CPS across all types of cases. (...)

Others have argued this is about austerity: police and CPS budgets have been cut

significantly since 2010 and the number of police officers has declined by more
than 20,000 even as recorded crime has increased. Not only that, the government
has instituted massive cuts to legal aid.

There is no question that our criminal justice system is becoming more and more

stretched. The result is that access to justice is impeded for growing numbers of
people.

But the story does not start and end with government cuts. Rules around
disclosure were first introduced in the 1990s after a series of high-profile

miscarriages of justice, such as the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham Six.
Twenty years later, the amount of data involved in criminal cases has ballooned,
thanks to the proliferation of computers, tablets and mobile phones.

This makes the investigation and prosecution of criminal offences far more complex

and time-consuming than ever, while the massive volume of data confronting the
police in all sorts of cases makes meeting their obligations on disclosure
increasingly difficult. The implications of this accelerating burden on the criminal
justice system have never been properly debated; rather, they have been shoved
into the “too difficult” box.

Police cultures also impede disclosure. The role of the police is to act as an

impartial investigator; it is the CPS whose job it is to prosecute a case. But the
nature of police work means detectives and officers have to develop theories about
their cases. Some officers may wilfully conceal evidence that undermines the case
they have constructed. But basic human psychology – none of us much likes to be
proved wrong – means that many more may be blinkered by unconscious bias
that draws them away from evidence that undermines their case theory. This has
led some to question whether it is right to leave disclosure decisions to the police.
At the very least, the police need proper training, but it has been found to be
inadequate across the majority of police forces.

The police wield immense power over our lives. From Hillsborough to Stephen

Lawrence, the Birmingham Six to child sex abuse in Rotherham: the past tells us
that when they are not adequately held accountable for that power, the result can
be deep injustices of the very worst kind.

Accountability has increased significantly in the past 20 years, with the

establishment of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and independent
inspectorate. But police failings on disclosure have been swept under the carpet
for too long, even as they are further aggravated by austerity and the sheer
volume of data in the modern world. If we continue to ignore them, we will pay
the ultimate price: the guarantee of a fair trial.

It is time to cut the puppeteer’s strings

[In the Scottish edition of the Sunday Express today, the main article on the leader page (p 36) comes from the pen of Robert Forrester, secretary of Justice for Megrahi. As far as I can discover, the article does not (yet) appear on the newspaper’s website.  Here is the text as submitted:]

On Tuesday morning the Justice Committee at Holyrood will reach a decision which could colour Scotland’s perception of our elected representatives in terms of their relationship with the Crown for generations to come. It is a simple matter. Namely, whether or not to throw out the Justice for Megrahi petition calling for an independent inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Those who argue that it ought to be shut down, like the Crown Office, will doubtless say that the issue is a matter exclusively for the courts. Justice campaigners, however, feel that the courts have proven incapable of resolution and the Crown downright obstructive.

It is important to understand the facts of this case in order to appreciate its potential as a massive miscarriage of justice.

At the Kamp van Zeist trial, the first time ever that the Scottish High Court had operated on neutral, international territory, the Crown, acting as prosecutor, judge and jury offered a simple scenario.

Mr al-Megrahi contrived to place an unaccompanied and unaccounted for bronze coloured, hard shell Samsonite suitcase containing a bomb operated by a simple count-down timer on to a flight from Luqa airport on Malta destined for Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the bomb suitcase was transferred to a feeder flight bound for Heathrow. Once there, the suitcase, still unaccompanied and unaccounted for, was loaded on to Pan Am 103 resulting in the tragic deaths of 270 souls in Lockerbie.

No direct evidence, of any nature whatsoever, was presented at Zeist or has ever been found to support these allegations. Importantly since the trial a mass of evidence has transpired to undermine the Crown case.

Indisputable eye witness and documentary evidence does exist which says that Heathrow Terminal 3 airside was broken into only hours before the departure of Pan Am 103, thus providing access to the  loading area. Vitally  before the arrival of the Frankfurt flight, an unaccounted for suitcase, which investigators eventually concluded answered to the description of the bomb suitcase, was observed in the luggage container in which the explosion took place.

Of the prosecution’s star eye witnesses the first, Abdul Majid Giaka, was dismissed as a ‘fantasist’ by their Lordships, and the second, Tony Gauci, has been tainted by allegations of having accepted bribes from the US justice Department.

Nothing in the Crown case passes the test of credibility let alone guilt beyond reasonable doubt, which is, of course, partly why the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) supported the need for a second appeal.

Zeist is as uncomplicated and incredible as that.

Following the application for the second appeal, a Public Interest Immunity Certificate was placed over part of the evidence by the last UK Labour government. Scotland’s High Court, in the full knowledge of Mr al-Megrahi’s terminal medical condition, took an unreasonably long period deciding how to go about hearing the appeal. As the appeal was progressing to a point where it was looking as if it might be successful, Mr al-Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds and the appeal was dropped. Yet again clouds of suspicion masked the truth.

As things stand members of the al-Megrahi family could apply to resurrect the appeal. However, Libya is riven with murderous political factionalism where not even the US ambassador is immune. What hope then does this family stand of receiving justice with all the internal and external political pressures against them?

Even the efforts of the Crown to locate new evidence in the shambles of today’s new Libya, in order to resuscitate flagging public confidence in the verdict back in Scotland, have turned out to be fruitless.  Now in desperation they appear to have given up and turned their attentions to Malta a country that has always denied guilt for involvement in Lockerbie.

Quite exceptionally an application for a third appeal could be left to families of the victims of the atrocity but it is far from clear how successful such an appeal would be given the miserable state of Scotland’s criminal justice system.

The question is: Will Scottish parliamentarians show courage and vision and support our call for an inquiry or will they act against the interests of justice and the truth and support the Crown’s continuing defence of the indefensible?

Last month’s damning report into the Hillsborough Disaster revealed double dealing and cover up on a massive scale. Lies and deceit came before truth and understanding and justice to the victims.

Such are the echoes of Lockerbie.

It is time to cut the puppeteer’s strings.

Scottish justice system exposed

[The following are excerpts from an item on the Justice for Megrahi press conference published on the Miscarriage of Justice? website:]

The Justice for Megrahi (JfM) Campaign Group have held a Press Conference in which they accuse the Scottish Crown Office of criminality in the investigation and prosecution of the Lockerbie Bombing case.  In response, the Crown Office have called the allegations defamatory and without substance following an earlier review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. (...)

They allege that the State has been interfering in the investigation and prosecution of the crime and continues to exert influence by not fully examining the concerns that they have raised with the Justice Secretary.

The allegations are all the more serious as this case dates back to 1988, covering periods when Scotland was governed by UK and Scottish Parliaments of all political persuasions.

In a week when South Yorkshire Police are being investigated for claims that police officers were told to falsify statements taken in the wake of the miners' strike and when the Hillsborough investigations are so serious and numerous that the Independent Police Complaints Commission can hardly cope, Scots should have been able to proudly declare that would never happen in Scotland. That however would appear to not be the case.

This case exposes the Scottish Justice System to a global stage in a way never seen before. This case has broken the normal jurisdictional boundaries, involved several of the most distinguished legal minds and should be proving beyond doubt, that the criminal law, with its strong emphasis on justice and protections for the rights of the accused, is the finest criminal system in the world.  Why am I not surprised therefore that this is not the case?

With the questions surrounding this case continuing for so long and long after Megrahi and his political leaders are dead, it is time for a full and independent examination of the allegations. The continuing denials by the Crown Office in the face of the evidence only serves to prove what a corrupt organisation they really are.

But then again, I know this from personal experience of them!

[A report on the press conference on the Edinburgh Wired website can be read here.]

This is a big deal, Mr Linklater

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Morag Kerr published in today’s edition of the Scottish Review.  It reads as follows:]

Magnus Linklater tells me he has read my book (Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, Troubador, £12.99), but you really wouldn't know from his treatment of it in his article for the Scottish Review (8 January). He quotes a couple of ambiguous passages that might have been taken from the publicity material, and then proceeds to criticise what seems to be an entirely different volume.

Surely the very title might suggest to him that his favourite pejorative, 'conspiracy theorist', might be misapplied, but not a bit of it. This is a contemptuous dismissal, nothing more than a lazy slur, used to avoid a proper examination of challenging facts and evidence. It is a put-down, intended to insult, discredit, belittle and embarrass. And Mr Linklater pulls it out repeatedly.

I'll say it one more time. I do not allege any conspiracy. I see an investigation that went off the rails at an early stage for reasons that are unclear, which pursued a red herring down a blind alley, which refused to backtrack when it could find no evidence of the obvious suspects in that cul-de-sac, and in the end found some poor person called Abdelbaset al-Megrahi who happened to be in the right place at the right time with just enough nebulous suspicion surrounding him for a case to be manufactured.

The eventual conclusion of the investigation was politically convenient, to put it mildly, but that tells us nothing about the sincerity of those who arrived at that conclusion. As I said in my book, there is nothing quite so lethal as a policeman, or a prosecutor, or indeed a forensic scientist, who is absolutely and sincerely convinced of a suspect's guilt.

Mr Linklater admits that he is not a Lockerbie expert, seeming to base his position mainly on a blind trust in the court and the judicial processes, plus a few talking points gleaned from insiders with an axe to grind. Those of us who have become convinced of Megrahi's innocence, however, have based this conviction on the facts of the matter. The case against Megrahi (and his associate Fhimah) was founded on a few crucial points, and if these are disproved the entire house of cards falls to pieces. These points have indeed been thoroughly disproved, and it is this that Mr Linklater must confront, rather than taking refuge in insults and unsubstantiated assertion.

The investigators were convinced that the bomb had been introduced into the baggage system at Luqa airport, Malta, as illegitimate unaccompanied luggage. It was then, they proposed, transferred to the Pan Am 103 feeder flight at Frankfurt, then again to Maid of the Seas waiting at Heathrow. There were two reasons for this belief. First, because some of the clothes which appeared to have been packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to a small shop only three miles from Luqa airport, and second, because analysis of the confused and partial baggage records recovered at Frankfurt seemed to show an item of luggage being transferred from a flight from Malta, although there was no passenger booked to make such a transfer.

The provenance of the clothes appears to be quite genuine, however the proposition that clothes bought on Malta weeks before the disaster prove that the bomb began its journey that day from the island is clearly nonsense. Whatever he may say about it now, Megrahi's advocate Bill Taylor understood this perfectly well at the time of the trial, pointing out quite rightly that clothes may be transported anywhere at all in the time available, and that such a conspicuous purchase of easily-traceable items in a small shop might well have been intended as a deliberate red herring pointing away from the real scene of the crime.

The baggage records are another matter. The security system at Luqa in 1988 was extremely stringent. Years of investigation on Malta failed to find any evidence that an illegitimate suitcase had been smuggled on to the plane in question, and indeed the evidence that this had not happened was extremely strong. The judges at Camp Zeist acknowledged this, but sailed right on past the 'major difficulty' without further comment.

The evidence relied on to assert the Malta origin lay not at Luqa but at Frankfurt, in a single page of luggage listing which was all that was recovered after the computer record for the day was accidentally wiped a week after the disaster. Lacking the full dataset, its interpretation was problematic. Twenty-five items were recorded as being transferred to the PA103 feeder from incoming flights, but only 10 of these could be matched to legitimate transfer luggage by the method prescribed for interpreting the listing. Eight or nine additional items were discovered which must also have been transferred in this way, but these could only be matched to the written records by guesswork. This left not just one but six or seven of the recorded transfer items unidentified, and there were no further known items of luggage to fill these slots. These mystery items seemed to come from four airports – Bombay, Berlin, Warsaw, and Malta. The investigators were so enchanted by the match to the Maltese clothes that they didn't even visit the other three airports.

Tray 8849, the listing apparently connecting to the Malta flight, is far from an isolated anomaly screaming 'bomb here!'. We have no idea what was in any of these unidentified trays, but they certainly weren't all carrying the bomb. The fact is, the surviving records are simply too incomplete to support the interpretation being placed on them. The reason the judges were prepared to trust these confused and confusing records over the complete and perfectly clear Luqa records was not, of course, simply that the clothes had been purchased on Malta.

They came to their conclusion because it was alleged that Megrahi, who was present at Luqa airport when the flight to Frankfurt departed, was the man who made that purchase. The so-called eyewitness identification that supported this allegation has however been the subject of detailed and damning criticism, not least by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission itself.

The SCCRC in effect declared the Camp Zeist verdict to be unreasonable, when it noted that 'there is no reasonable basis in the trial court's judgement for its conclusion that the purchase of the items took place on 7 December 1988'. Make no mistake about it, this one statement destroys the entire judgement, because the date of 7 December for the clothes purchase was the hook on which the whole daisy-chain of inference and supposition was hung. If the clothes weren't bought on 7 December, Megrahi wasn't the man who bought them. And if the man who bought the clothes wasn't at Luqa airport when the flight for Frankfurt departed, then the justification for the finding that the bomb suitcase must have been in the mysterious tray 8849 vanishes.

Of course there was more to it than that, which Mr Linklater must be aware of as he claims to be familiar with the SCCRC report, and indeed to admire it. Tony Gauci, the shopkeeper, originally described his customer as a burly, dark-skinned man, about 50 years old and over six feet tall. Megrahi was of slight to medium build, light-skinned, five feet eight inches tall, and in 1988 he was only 36 years of age. Gauci first picked out a very poor-quality passport photo of Megrahi well over two years after the clothes purchase, and it was a mind-boggling 11 years after the encounter before he picked Megrahi out of a live identity parade.

Even the judges acknowledged that the composition of the line-up meant that Megrahi was 'comparatively easy' to pick out as the suspect, and of course by 1999 he was nearing the age the customer was said to have been in 1988. Gauci never made a confident identification, merely testifying to a resemblance, and indeed his first words following the 1999 identity parade were, 'not the man I saw in the shop, but...'.

The other points relating to police pressure on Gauci to make an identification, his familiarity with photographs clearly identifying Megrahi as the Lockerbie accused before his attendance at the identity parade, his awareness of the eye-watering reward being offered by the US Department of Justice, and the eventual payment to him of at least $2 million after Megrahi's conviction had been secured, will also be familiar to anyone who is a fan of the SCCRC report.

A quite separate piece of evidence apparently linking Megrahi to the bombing was the tiny fragment of printed circuit board said to have been part of the timer which had detonated the bomb. This was said to have been one of only 20 such items to have been manufactured, all of which had been supplied to the Libyan military. Megrahi was the co-owner of a company which rented office space in the same building in Zurich as the manufacturer, and had done business with that company – though not in relation to the timers.

The identification of the small shard of PCB as apparently originating from a type of timer supplied exclusively to Libya was a major breakthrough in the investigation. However, as has been ably demonstrated by John Ashton, this identification was fatally flawed. A crucial metallurgical peculiarity of the fragment, known about from an early stage in the investigation, was not present in the timers supplied to Libya. The simple fact is that we do not know what this PCB fragment is or where it came from, but one thing we do know is that it is not what the prosecution said it was.

Despite having read my book, Mr Linklater failed to make any reference to its central revelation, the whole point of the narrative. He continues to assert that the trial court, the first appeal and indeed Megrahi's defence 'tested to destruction' the theory that the bomb suitcase was introduced not on Malta but at Heathrow airport. This was never the case. The defence made a spirited and rational case for a Heathrow introduction, however the judges, while acknowledging this as a possibility, chose to prefer the fragmented and inferential case for the Malta-Frankfurt routing. The court, however, was not shown the full story.

A careful and detailed analysis of the totality of the evidence from Heathrow, something which was never undertaken either by the original forensic investigation, the prosecution team or the defence experts, shows quite conclusively that the bomb was indeed in a suitcase that was seen in the baggage container while it was still in the interline shed at Heathrow, an hour before the feeder flight landed.

The court judgement depended on the assumption that a blue American Tourister suitcase was underneath the bomb suitcase. The forensic evidence clearly shows it was on top. The judgement depended on the assumption that the bomb suitcase had not been the one on the bottom of the stack. The forensic evidence clearly shows that is exactly where it was. The judgement depended on the assumption that the Heathrow interline luggage was rearranged when the feeder flight luggage was added to the container. The baggage handler who carried out that task (who was not called as a witness) was insistent that he did no such thing.

Mr Linklater notes that Megrahi was in Malta on the day of the bombing, and presents this as a major point for the prosecution. However, if the scene of the crime was Heathrow, then far from Megrahi's location that day being incriminating, it provides him with an unbreakable alibi. At the time the bomb suitcase appeared in that baggage container, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was in fact in Tripoli, having travelled there from Luqa on a morning flight.

I realise it can be hard to take on board the fact that something this simple and this obvious has only emerged 25 years down the line, but that's how it is. This is a big deal, Mr Linklater, and it deserves a more honest response than misdirection and point-scoring.

Something which an astute journalist might want to investigate is why the Scottish police and the Crown Office have failed even to interview the metallurgist who demonstrated the discrepancy between the PCB fragment found at Lockerbie and the timers supplied to Libya, nearly two years after the discrepancy was first made public.

Similarly, it is nearly a year since the detailed analysis showing the bomb to have been introduced at Heathrow was made available to the police, but they have still not commissioned an independent forensic evaluation to test and verify the findings presented. Instead they continue chasing off to Libya, where the much-trailed evidence pointing to Megrahi's so-called accomplices has so far proved as elusive as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Something else a journalist with a real nose for a story might find interesting is the sheer amount of exculpatory evidence that was not disclosed to the defence at Megrahi's original trial or indeed later. The documents that led to the discovery of the metallurgical discrepancy relating to the PCB fragment were not disclosed until July 2009, six weeks before Megrahi returned to Libya. The unedifying saga of the non-disclosure of the unredacted CIA cables, which revealed the Crown's original 'star witness' Majid Giaka to be a money-grabbing fantasist, is there to be read in the court transcripts themselves. And these are only two examples.

Mr Linklater seizes on this aspect to bolster his favourite allegation. This is a conspiracy you're alleging. Therefore you are a conspiracy theorist. And so the uncomfortable facts are given a body-swerve. Whether or not the non-disclosure may be described as a conspiracy is a subjective matter, but the non-disclosure itself is a matter of simple fact which doesn't go away simply because the c-word is used.

A final matter Mr Linklater takes issue with is the suggestion that the real bombers might have been a Palestinian terrorist group known as the PFLP-GC. This group had extensive experience in bringing down airliners in flight dating back to the 1960s, and they were known to have re-formed in Germany in October 1988. This time, they were said to be in the pay of the Iranian government, who had commissioned them to exact revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by a US warship a few months previously. The PFLP-GC were the original suspects for Lockerbie, and remained such until 1990 when the PCB fragment was linked to the timers supplied to Libya.

Mr Linklater insists that the involvement of this group was thoroughly disproved by the original inquiry, and that neither the defence nor the SCCRC were able to find anything to substantiate their involvement. I've got one thing to say about this. If investigators are looking in the wrong place, at a false modus operandi, they are not going to solve the case, even if they are looking for the right suspects. These are the people who failed to carry out the extremely simple analysis of the blast-damaged suitcases that shows quite clearly that the explosion happened in the bottom suitcase in the stack, the one loaded at Heathrow.

Forgive me if I don't immediately assume that their failure to close the deal on the PFLP-GC means that that group, which we know was making bombs designed to bring down a plane in just the way Maid of the Seas was brought down, may be assumed to be innocent.

Lastly, though, I will concede that the title of my book includes a question mark. Can this atrocious debacle really be completely explained by tunnel vision and confirmation bias? While I don't allege a conspiracy, it would be naive to assume that a conspiracy can be categorically ruled out. Just as irrational as the propensity to see nefarious conspiracies in every major public event is the blind refusal to admit that anything could ever be a conspiracy. From Iran Contra to Watergate to Hillsborough, we know that conspiracies happen. The Lockerbie investigation may yet prove to be one of them.

However, at this stage, that isn’t the point. The point is that Megrahi was not 'the Lockerbie bomber'. The evidence against him falls apart under even moderately close scrutiny, and worse than that, he was provably more than 1,000 miles away when the bomb was introduced into the baggage container. This is what those Mr Linklater dismisses as 'Megrahi's supporters' are seeking to highlight. Wild accusations of 'conspiracy theorist' are a distraction to avoid reasoned argument, and unworthy of anyone making a serious contribution to the debate.

Morag Kerr is the author of 'Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies' 

[Posted from Lüderitz, Namibia.]