“I wonder who killed our relatives?”

[The following are excerpts from an article published on this date in 2000 on the website of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs by Ambassador Andrew I Killgore, the magazine’s editor and publisher:]

“I wonder who killed our relatives?”—A middle-aged American man on a BBC-TV program about the Lockerbie trial.

Pan American Flight 103 was destroyed by an on-board explosive device over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec 21, 1988. All 259 persons on board, most of them Americans, and 11 people on the ground were killed.

Two Libyans, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, are on trial for the crime. The trial is being conducted, by Scottish judges under Scottish law, at Camp Zeist, a former US military base near Amsterdam, the Netherlands. According to Scottish law, the three judges may reach a finding of guilty, not guilty or not proven.

The prosecution’s operating theory is that the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was in retaliation for the US bombing of Tripoli in 1986, which itself was in retaliation for Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by American servicemen. As often seems to be the case, however, the US and Libya were not the only countries involved in the ever-ratcheting rounds of retaliation. (...)

The trial of the two accused Libyans has taken some bizarre turns. The most astonishing development is that the prosecution’s highly touted key witness, the pseudonymous Libyan intelligence service defector Abdul Majid Giaka, proved on the witness stand to lack any credibility. Moreover, CIA cables reluctantly made available to the Court depicted Giaka as an unsavory character whom CIA personnel themselves had distrusted.

A BBC television broadcast showed a group of people leaving the courtroom on the day Giaka performed so badly on the witness stand. Many in the group were relatives of Pan Am 103’s victims attending the trial at the expense of the US Department of Justice’s Office of Victim Services. The quote at the beginning of this article, by a member of the group who appeared to be an American, reflected a puzzled doubt of the Libya-did-it scenario.

Even more puzzling, if that is possible, is that CIA agent Harold M Hendershot, brought to the stand to buttress Giaka’s shaky testimony, himself turned out to be vague and not very credible. In view of the fact that Hendershot had been deeply involved in the case from the time of the crash in December 1988, one is left with a growing sense of confusion, rather than answers, about Lockerbie.

The Lockerbie trial recessed at the end of October for several days while the Court considered how to handle a mass of new material on Lockerbie presented by an “unnamed country.” Whether the material in this weird new turn in the trial is helpful to the prosecution or defense is unknown, although University of Edinburgh criminal law professor Robert Black speculates that it must help the defense.

The twists and turns of Lockerbie raise intriguing questions, some of them troubling. If Libya did not bomb Pan Am 103, who did? Why would the United States present a case that didn’t hold up? Was the case ever expected to be brought to trial? Or was it basically a device for keeping Qaddafi in the doghouse with unproven charges?

Perhaps these twists and turns should not be unexpected, however—for the most significant surprise occurred on the day of the crash itself. According to its normal flight plan, Pan Am 103 “should” have blown up over the sea, where evidence of criminality never would have been found. Instead, unusually strong gale force winds that day led the pilot to fly north to get “above” the tempests—and thus to be over Scotland when the bomb exploded. Are the real criminals who blew up Pan Am 103 trembling in fear lest a fluke of nature that left evidence on the ground eventually will point to them?

Taking another look at the destruction of Pan Am 103

[This is the headline over an article in the March 2010 edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs by the magazine's publisher, Ambassaador Andrew I Killgore. It reads in part:]

In February 1986 Israeli Mossad operatives installed a “Trojan” communications device on the top floor of an apartment house in Tripoli, Libya. The six-foot-long device was able to receive messages on one frequency and automatically rebroadcast the same message on a different frequency—in this case, one used by the government of Libya.

Israeli naval commandos arriving in miniature submarines in the middle of the night had delivered the Trojan, only seven inches in diameter, to the lone Mossad agent in Tripoli, who drove a rented van to their rendezvous point on a deserted beach outside Tripoli. The agent, along with four of the commandos, then took the Trojan to an apartment building in the Libyan capital where he had rented the top floor, and installed the device. By March the Trojan was broadcasting a series of “terrorist” orders to Libyan embassies around the world. (...)

Less than two months after the Trojan was installed, on April 5, 1986, the La Belle nightclub in then-West Berlin was bombed, killing two American soldiers and a Turkish woman. At the same time a false “success” signal was sent, apparently from the device in Tripoli.

“False-flagged” by Israel, President Ronald Reagan on April 14 sent American bombers from Britain and from U.S. aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean to strike Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 101 people, including the adopted young daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi when his house in Tripoli was bombed. (...)

The proximity in time between the Lockerbie crash and the shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3 of that year of an Iran Air passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, with the loss of 290 lives, presented a perfect “revenge” scenario. That, clearly, was the initial premise of the investigators at Lockerbie. Dr Robert Black, professor of criminal law at Edinburgh University in Scotland, told this writer that, for the first two years following the Pan Am crash, investigators were focused on Iran as having hired Ahmad Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command to carry out a retaliatory bombing.

In a Jan 28, 2009 article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, however, the late Russell Warren Howe cited the book Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas. Thomas quotes a Mossad source as saying, “Within hours after the [Pan Am 103] crash Mossad’s LAP [psychological warfare or disinformation] staff were working their media contacts, urging them to blame and publicize that ‘Libya-did-it.’”

They could have blamed Iran, of course, but that would have gone against the Israeli grain. Iran was a large, non-Arab Muslim nation — and, as such, always of potential benefit to an Israel heavily outnumbered by the Arabs. Israel had even “done business” with the Islamic Republic a few years earlier, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair. It’s also possible, of course, that the Israelis know Iran was not the guilty party.

The perpetrators of the crime against the passengers and crew of Pan Am Flight 103 had intended that it crash at sea, leaving no physical evidence and no bodies to tell the tale. But turbulent weather over Heathrow Airport had led the pilot of the giant Boeing 747 to steer slightly more northward than usual, so the plane was still over land when it crashed at Lockerbie, Scotland.

The criminals thus had to think fast. A fragment from the alleged bomb trigger device was “found” several days after the crash. However, as the BBC program “Newsnight” reported on Jan 8 of this year, tests aimed at reproducing the blast indicated that no such fragment would have survived the mid-air explosion. The “evidence,” moreover, was placed in a sack which was labeled in a certain way—but the label was subsequently changed by an unknown person, causing suspicion that evidence was being altered. As Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the crash, has written: “Coming from a scientific educational background, I found that it was the forensic evidence at [the trial at Camp] Zeist…which first convinced me that the prosecution case was a fabrication.”

Another astonishing factor was that the Crown (the prosecutors) ignored evidence of a break-in of the Pan Am luggage area at Heathrow early in the morning of that fatal December day. One wonders whether Pan Am had been alerted to security problems at Heathrow by Isaac Yeffet, the former head of security at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, where security is airtight. In an article in the March 1989 issue of the now-defunct Life magazine entitled “The Next Bomb,” Edward Barnes wrote, “in 1986 Yeffet was part of a team commissioned by Pan Am to survey 25 of its branches around the world…Yeffet now runs a security consulting business in New Jersey.”

Dr. Swire, who has described the Court’s conviction of Megrahi as “a cock and bull story,” is not alone in his skepticism. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at the trial, has described the verdict as “incomprehensible,” and Dr Robert Black has denounced the guilty verdict in equally dismissive language.

Thus the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 remains a mystery. If two years of investigating Iran produced no evidence, and the evidence used to convict Megrahi was fake, who was responsible for the horrific crime?

[The past week's absence of posts on this blog was due to my having taken a trip across the border to Namibia. But as far as I can see, little worthy of mention has appeared in the media during my absence.

For those with the stomach for it, a nasty little story in today's edition of the Sunday Mirror headed "The man who will not die ..." can be read here.

Since I posted the link to the piece in the Sunday Mirror, the headline over the report on the newspaper's website has been altered to "Lockerbie bomber Abdul-Basset Al-Megrahi has 30,000 visitors and babies named after him". Can it be that a humble blogger can arouse feelings of shame in a tabloid journalist or sub-editor? Surely not.]

Secret Agreement Increases Odds That Convicted Pan Am 103 Bomber May Be Freed

Ambassador Andrew Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, has an article with this title in the December 2007 issue of the magazine. It is sceptical about the safety of Mr Megrahi's conviction. See
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/December_2007/0712013.html

It is instructive that influential US publications are now, at last, joining the consensus. See also http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2007/12/congressional-quarterly.html

RIP Archbishop Desmond Tutu

[I am saddened to learn of the death today at the age of 90 of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who was a convinced and long-time supporter of the Justice for Megrahi campaign. What follows is an article posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph's Lockerbie Truth website:]

Today's sad news about the death of former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu holds a feature common to much of the media in the UK and USA. 

The selective amnesia of certain media editors is clear: Effusively praise those issues in which Tutu agrees with your agenda, and ignore those in which he opposes.

And so it is, once again, with the campaign for an inquiry into the factors surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and subsequent trial.

On the 15th March 2015 we reported that a petition had been submitted to the Scottish Parliament by the Justice for Megrahi group of bereaved relatives. That petition was rapidly and publicly supported by prominent personalities around the world. The petition, even after six years, still runs current on the Scottish Parliament's agenda.

Among those signing in support of the petition was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He proved to be a strong supporter of the imprisoned Baset al-Megrahi and a South African colleague Nelson Mandela.  Mandela's support for al-Megrahi, too, remains ignored by the main British and US media. 

On 15th March 2015 we published the following post: [Names in alphabetical order].

Campaign for the acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi and an official inquiry into Lockerbie

A petition requesting that the Scottish authorities undertake a comprehensive inquiry into Lockerbie is supported and signed by the following world renowned personalities. All support the campaign for acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi, who was in 2000 convicted for the murder of 270 people on Pan Am 103.

Kate Adie was chief news correspondent for the BBC, covering several war zones 

on risky assignments. Currently hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme 

From Our Own Correspondent.

Professor Noam Chomsky has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, 

and has authored over 100 books. In a 2005 poll was voted 

the "world's top public intellectual".

Tam Dalyell, former Member of British Parliament and Father of the House. 

An eminent speaker who throughout his career refused to be prevented 

from speaking the truth to powerful administrations.

 

Christine Grahame MSP, determined advocate of the Lockerbie campaign.

Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye magazine.

Father Pat Keegans, Lockerbie Catholic parish priest at the time of the tragedy. 

 Mr Andrew Killgore, former US Ambassador to Qatar. Founder of Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.

John Pilger, former war correspondent, now a campaigning journalist and film maker. 

Dr Jim Swire.

Sir Teddy Taylor, British Conservative Party politician, MP from 1964 to 1979. 

Desmond Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa. 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr Terry Waite. Former envoy for the church of England, held captive from 1987 to 1991

THE FULL LIST OF SIGNATORIES

Ms Kate Adie (Former Chief News Correspondent for BBC News).

Mr John Ashton (Author of ‘Megrahi: You are my Jury’ and co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Mr David Benson (Actor/author of the play ‘Lockerbie: Unfinished Business’).

Mrs Jean Berkley (Mother of Alistair Berkley: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Peter Biddulph (Lockerbie tragedy researcher).

Mr Benedict Birnberg (Retired senior partner of Birnberg Peirce & Partners).

Professor Robert Black QC (‘Architect’ of the Kamp van Zeist Trial).

Mr Paul Bull (Close friend of Bill Cadman: killed on Pan Am 103).

Professor Noam Chomsky (Human rights, social and political commentator).

Mr Tam Dalyell (UK MP: 1962-2005. Father of the House: 2001-2005).

Mr Ian Ferguson (Co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Dr David Fieldhouse (Police surgeon present at the Pan Am 103 crash site).

Mr Robert Forrester (Secretary of Justice for Megrahi).

Ms Christine Grahame MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament).

Mr Ian Hamilton QC (Advocate, author and former university rector).

Mr Ian Hislop (Editor of ‘Private Eye’).

Fr Pat Keegans (Lockerbie parish priest on 21^st December 1988).

Ms A L Kennedy (Author).

Dr Morag Kerr (Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi).

Mr Andrew Killgore (Former US Ambassador to Qatar).

Mr Moses Kungu (Lockerbie councillor on the 21^st of December 1988).

Mr Adam Larson (Editor and proprietor of ‘The Lockerbie Divide’).

Mr Aonghas MacNeacail (Poet and journalist).

Mr Eddie McDaid (Lockerbie commentator).

Mr Rik McHarg (Communications hub coordinator: Lockerbie crash sites).

Mr Iain McKie (Retired Superintendent of Police).

Mr Marcello Mega (Journalist covering the Lockerbie incident).

Ms Heather Mills (Reporter for ‘Private Eye’).

Rev’d John F Mosey (Father of Helga Mosey: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Len Murray (Retired solicitor).

Cardinal Keith O’Brien (Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church).

Mr Denis Phipps (Aviation security expert).

Mr John Pilger (Campaigning human rights journalist).

Mr Steven Raeburn (Editor of ‘The Firm’).

Dr Tessa Ransford OBE  (Poetry Practitioner and Adviser).

Mr James Robertson (Author).

Mr Kenneth Roy (Editor of ‘The Scottish Review’).

Dr David Stevenson (Retired medical specialist and Lockerbie commentator).

Dr Jim Swire (Father of Flora Swire: victim of Pan Am 103).

Sir Teddy Taylor (UK MP: 1964-2005. Former Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner).

Mr Terry Waite CBE (Former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury and hostage negotiator).

First anniversary of death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

[Abdelbaset al-Megrahi died one year ago today.  Here is the statement that Justice for Megrahi issued on that occasion:]

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has now died without having been able to clear his name of the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 on the 21st of December 1988 during his lifetime. Now all those politicians and Megrahi-guilt apologists who regard compassion as being a weakling's alternative to vengeance, who boast of their skills at remote medical diagnosis, and who persistently refuse to address the uncomfortable facts of the case, will doubtless fall silent. Finally, the ‘evil terrorist’ has been called to account for himself before a “Higher Power”.

The prosecution case against him held water like a sieve. We are expected to believe the fantastic tale of the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow transfer of an invisible, unaccompanied suitcase which miraculously found itself situated in the perfect position in the hold of 103 to create maximum destructive effect having eluded no fewer than three separate security regimes. There is no evidence for any such luggage ever having left the ground in either Malta or Germany, it is mere surmise. Not only that but we have accusations of the key Crown witness having been bribed for testimony; a multitude of serious question marks over material evidence, including the very real possibility of the crucial fragment of PCB having been fabricated; discredited forensic scientists testifying for the prosecution; Crown witness testimony being retracted after the trial and, most worryingly, allegations of the Crown’s non-disclosure of evidence which could have been key to the defence. Added to which, evidence supporting the alternative and infinitely more logical ingestion of the bomb directly at Heathrow was either dismissed at the trial or withheld from the court until after the verdict of guilty had been returned.

The judges were under immense pressure to bring in a verdict of guilty. Zeist was the most high profile trial that the Scottish High Court of Justiciary had ever presided over. There was massive international interest, and this was compounded by the fact that the judges played the dual roles of judge and jury in a case in which the indictments were brought by the same official body that had appointed them as judges in the first instance, the Lord Advocate. Anyone hoping, therefore, to discover an application of sound, empirical reasoning based on concrete evidence being exercised in the field of jurisprudence would do well to avoid the Zeistjudgement. Indeed, the most exceptional of Zeist’s many exceptional features is the judgement. Anyone reading this extraordinary document could be forgiven for thinking that in Scotland there is a presumption of guilt and the burden of proof is on the defence. In the words of Professor Hans Köchler (UN appointed International Observer at the Kamp van Zeist Trial) commenting on the second appeal: “[it] bears the hallmarks of an intelligence operation.”

The Crown and successive governments have, for years, acted to obstruct any attempts to investigate how the conviction of Mr al-Megrahi came about. Some in the legal and political establishments may well be breathing a sigh of relief now that Mr al-Megrahi has died. This would be a mistake. Many unfortunates who fell foul of outrageous miscarriages of justice in the past have had their names cleared posthumously. The great and the good of western civilisation who have clamoured for Mr al-Megrahi’s blood of late may find it a salutary experience to reflect on the case of Derek Bentley: convicted and hanged in 1953, aged nineteen, for a crime for which in 1998 he was acquitted on his posthumous appeal. However long it takes, the campaign seeking to have Mr al-Megrahi’s conviction quashed will continue unabated not only in his name and that of his family, who must still bear the stigma of being related to the ‘Lockerbie Bomber’, but, above all, it will carry on in the name of justice. A justice which is still being sought by and denied to many of the bereaved resultant from the Lockerbie tragedy.

It took almost half a century to resolve the Bentley case. With the Zeist justice campaign now in its twelfth year, one has to ask, when faced with such intransigence, precisely whom the democratically elected, executive arm of state represents. Historically, all the major parties, both in Holyrood and Westminster, must shoulder equal responsibility. However, since first coming to power in 2007, the SNP government has actively taken measures which hinder any progress towards lifting the fog that lies over events, much to the dismay of its own party supporters and activists who take an interest in the case. In 2009, a statutory instrument which was supposed to remove the legislative prohibition on publication of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s statement of reasons for the second appeal (a document that cost tax payers in excess of £1,000,000 to produce) was so drafted as to render publication effectively impossible. In 2010, the government also fired new legislation through parliament (‘Cadder’ Section7) that makes any prospect of opening another appeal in the interests of justice a forlorn hope. Even today, ignoring the fact that, with the support of the Scottish Parliament Public Petitions Committee, campaigners finally forced the government to admit that it does in law (under the Inquiries Act of 2005) have the power to open an inquiry into the case, the government persists in sending out correspondence claiming that it doesn’t; this, of course, is accompanied by the hackneyed old mantra of their not doubting the safety of the conviction. Furthermore, during the consultation period of the Criminal Cases (Punishment and Review) (Scotland) Bill, campaigners established that the Data Protection Act posed no legal obstacle to the publication of the SCCRC’s statement of reasons for the second appeal, however, the government maintained otherwise with the result that it was ultimately left to the courage and commitment of members of the journalistic community to test the government’s position to destruction. All of the aforementioned, and the regrettable habit of appointing Crown Office insiders to the position of Lord Advocate, are not reassuring signs that this matter is being treated with a sense of balance and objectivity by the authorities. The record has stuck. The longer this goes on, the more the doubts over the government’s true loyalties will increase.

This case has now become emblematic of an issue which affects each and every one of us and poses some profoundly basic questions which we ignore at our peril, namely: what do we perceive justice to be, what role ought it to play in our society and whom should it exist to serve? Our laws and how we apply them to our society are the most fundamental descriptor of how we function as a cohesive and coherent entity. They are effectively a portrait of our identity as a people. If, through complacency, we permit cosy, established authority to dictate the terms and to brush under the carpet concerns over how justice is defined and dispensed for the sake of convenience, expediency and reputation, we will only have ourselves to blame for the consequences.

The Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice, Kenny MacAskill, says that “Scotland's Criminal Justice system is a cornerstone of our society, and it is paramount that there is total public confidence in it.” Scotland’s independent and professional arbiter in the matter of referrals to the Court of Appeal, the SCCRC, believe that, on no fewer than six grounds, Mr al-Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice at Zeist. Whether or not the courts are the right and proper platform to deal with this case, the conviction has been in the hands of the High Court of Justiciary since 2001 producing no resolution whatsoever and, moreover, how amenable are the courts now likely to be towards sanctioning another appeal given that they have been invested with new powers which allow them to reject applications which question their own judgements? Fine words are not enough. Action is required. After all, the government took executive action to release Mr al-Megrahi following the dropping of his appeal (something he was under no legal obligation to do). 52% of respondents to an opinion poll conducted by a major Scottish national newspaper supported the call for an independent inquiry into the case. Over a two week period, and with minimal publicity, 1,646 individuals put their names to a petition for an inquiry, which still remains open before the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee. If Scotland wishes to see its criminal justice system reinstated to the position of respect that it once held rather than its languishing as the mangled wreck it has become because of this perverse judgement, it is imperative that its government act by endorsing an independent inquiry into this entire affair. As a nation which aspires to independence, Scotland must have the courage to look itself in the mirror.

Signed:

Ms Kate Adie (Former Chief News Correspondent for BBC News).

Mr John Ashton (Author of ‘Megrahi: You are my Jury’ and co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Mr David Benson (Actor/author of the play ‘Lockerbie: Unfinished Business’).

Mrs Jean Berkley (Mother of Alistair Berkley: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Peter Biddulph (Lockerbie tragedy researcher).

Mr Benedict Birnberg (Retired senior partner of Birnberg Peirce & Partners).

Professor Robert Black QC (‘Architect’ of the Kamp van Zeist Trial).

Mr Paul Bull (Close friend of Bill Cadman: killed on Pan Am 103).

Professor Noam Chomsky (Human rights, social and political commentator).

Mr Tam Dalyell (UK MP: 1962-2005. Father of the House: 2001-2005).

Mr Ian Ferguson (Co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Dr David Fieldhouse (Police surgeon present at the Pan Am 103 crash site).

Mr Robert Forrester (Secretary of Justice for Megrahi).

Ms Christine Grahame MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament).

Mr Ian Hamilton QC (Advocate, author and former university rector).

Mr Ian Hislop (Editor of ‘Private Eye’).

Fr Pat Keegans (Lockerbie parish priest on 21st December 1988).

Ms A L Kennedy (Author).

Dr Morag Kerr (Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi).

Mr Andrew Killgore (Former US Ambassador to Qatar).

Mr Moses Kungu (Lockerbie councillor on the 21st of December 1988).

Mr Adam Larson (Editor and proprietor of ‘The Lockerbie Divide’).

Mr Aonghas MacNeacail (Poet and journalist).

Mr Eddie McDaid (Lockerbie commentator).

Mr Rik McHarg (Communications hub coordinator: Lockerbie crash sites).

Mr Iain McKie (Retired Superintendent of Police).

Mr Marcello Mega (Journalist covering the Lockerbie incident).

Ms Heather Mills (Reporter for ‘Private Eye’).

Rev’d John F Mosey (Father of Helga Mosey: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Len Murray (Retired solicitor).

Cardinal Keith O’Brien (Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church).

Mr Denis Phipps (Aviation security expert).

Mr John Pilger (Campaigning human rights journalist).

Mr Steven Raeburn (Editor of ‘The Firm’).

Dr Tessa Ransford OBE  (Poetry Practitioner and Adviser).

Mr James Robertson (Author).

Mr Kenneth Roy (Editor of ‘The Scottish Review’).

Dr David Stevenson (Retired medical specialist and Lockerbie commentator).

Dr Jim Swire (Father of Flora Swire: victim of Pan Am 103).

Sir Teddy Taylor (UK MP: 1964-2005. Former Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner).

Mr Terry Waite CBE (Former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury and hostage negotiator).

US media on the death of Megrahi

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2012.

The American press on the death of the "Lockerbie bomber"

[This is the heading over an article by Ambassador Andrew I Killgore just published on the website of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.  It reads as follows:]

The Washington Post, New York Times and the US edition of the Financial Times all carried articles on the May 20 death in Tripoli, Libya of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of bombing Pan American Flight 103 on Dec 21, 1988.

The Post, whose pro-Israel sympathies cause its Middle East coverage to be unreliable at best, had a straight one-column article. It expressed no doubts that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 was transported from Valletta, Malta to Frankfurt, Germany to London, where it was loaded onto the doomed plane.

Determined to publish as little as possible on the Lockerbie tragedy, the news of Megrahi's death was published in the Post's little-read obituary section—alongside the death of singer Robin Gibb of the disco group the Bee Gees. In a stunning example of the paper's priorities, the Post devoted nearly twice as much space to Gibb's obituary as it did to Megrahi's.

The Financial Times article is better, and much less linear. "Discrepancies at the trial led many to believe in Megrahi's innocence," it informs its readers. The former Scottish lord advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, in expressing his doubts about Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci's identification of Megrahi as having bought certain clothes from his shop in Valletta, remarked that Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic." The Financial Times also notes that "there were reports that Gauci received at least $2 million from the US, possibly via the CIA."

As a result, the paper concludes, "we may never know who placed the bomb that brought down terror and death to a planeload of passengers, to the crew that served them, and civilians in a sleepy Scottish town [Lockerbie] below."

The New York Times carried two articles on Megrahi's death, one by John F Burns and the other by Robert D McFadden. Neither is bad, given the American media's strange silence on the Lockerbie issue. Burns writes, "Even Megrahi's death may not end the saga of Flight 103."

Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the Pan Am 103 crash, is mentioned by name, but Dr Robert Black is not. It was Black, professor emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, who originated the idea of holding the Lockerbie trial in The Netherlands with Scottish judges under Scottish law. Nor is any mention made of the Justice for Megrahi Committee (of which this writer is a member).

Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, noted in a television interview that the Scottish police investigation of the bombing had never been closed, and that Libya's new government had "promised to cooperate" in an effort to settle who was responsible.

Dr Swire, whom Burns describes as "the most persistent — and most controversial — of Megrahi's defenders in Britain," fainted in court when Megrahi was convicted and his indicted co-defendant Lamen Khalifa Fhimah acquitted. Swire is a vigorous advocate of an independent inquiry into the bombing, Burns writes, and was reported to have said in broadcast interviews on May 20 that there were two false pieces of evidence in Megrahi's conviction. According to Swire, shopowner Gauci had been paid "millions of dollars" by Western intelligence agencies. Also, the bomb's circuit board was one used by Iranian — not Libyan — intelligence.

McFadden provides much evidence on doubts about Megrahi's guilt. The Lockerbie court "found the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable," he writes, but nevertheless left "no reasonable doubt" on Megrahi's guilt. He quotes Hans Koechler, a United Nations observer at the trial, as calling it "a spectacular miscarriage of justice." McFadden continues: "Many legal experts and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Megrahi a scapegoat for a Libyan government long identified with terrorism." While denying involvement, he writes, Libya paid $2.7 million to the victims' families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.