The obfuscation of reality

[What follows is the text of an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer that was published on OhmyNews International on this date in 2007:]

"Proper judicial procedure is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services -- from whichever side -- succeed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court … The purpose of intelligence services -- from whichever side -- lies in secret action and deception, not in the search for truth. Justice and the rule of law can never be achieved without transparency."

--Hans Koechler, UN observer at the Zeist trial

On Sept 6, OhmyNews International published a story related to a sensational document known as the Lumpert affidavit. (See "Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury.)

Ulrich Lumpert was a key witness (No 550) at the Camp Zeist trial, where a three-Judge panel convicted a Libyan citizen of murdering 270 persons who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. "I confirm today on July 18, 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 Timer PC-board consisting of 8 layers of fiberglass from MeBo Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22, 1989, to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case," Lumpert wrote. On Sept 7, the agent who led the Lockerbie investigation for the FBI wrote to me and criticized the article on several grounds, but most importantly, he alleged that the Lumpert affidavit was a "total fabrication." Richard Marquise led the US task force that investigated the Lockerbie bombing. He has authored a book on the subject: Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation. He wrote to me: Lumpert's new statement is a total fabrication. He was interviewed several times, including at a judicial hearing in Switzerland as well as the trial itself and he never wavered in his story. His statement that he gave a "stolen timer" to a Scottish officer in 1989 does not even fit the timeline since we had no idea about the origins of PT-35 at that time. We identified MeBo in the summer of 1990. With all due respect, I must state very unambiguously that I remain convinced that the document is authentic and that the story is not a hoax. Moreover, I have obtained a document that strongly suggests that the timeline of the events related to the identification of the MST-13 timer has been fabricated. Since the publication of the article, a well-informed source has told me that Lumpert has signed four affidavits. The documents were certified by notary Walter Wieland under Nr 2069 to 2072. I am now in possession of one of these four documents and I have received confirmation from the proper Swiss authority that Wieland indeed certified these documents on July 18 and that he is competent for doing so. Although I was initially very skeptical of the Lumpert affidavit, I came to the conclusion that I have no reason to doubt its authenticity or the truthfulness of its content. Indeed, both the timing of Lumpert's admission of perjury, his motivation for doing so as stated in the affidavit, as well as the content of the document led me to believe that the story is not a fabrication. Lumpert wrote that he wishes to clear his conscience and that he can no longer "be prosecuted for stealing, delivering and making false statements about the MST-13 Timer PC-board, on grounds of statutory limitation." Moreover, as I explained at length in the Sept 6 article, the Lumpert affidavit, in just seven paragraphs, elucidates all of the longstanding mysteries surrounding the infamous MST-13 timer, which allegedly triggered the bomb that exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988. Conspiracy Theory? I wish to add that I am obviously not the only one who had reached such a conclusion. The possibility that evidence has been fabricated in order to secure the conviction of the Libyans has gained support among many people who could hardly be described as conspiracy theorists. Jim Swire, Robert Black and Hans Koechler are among the best-informed people about the extremely complex Zeist trial. Black QC FRSE (Queen's Council and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh) has been Professor of Scots Law in the University of Edinburgh since January 1981, having previously been in practice at the Scottish Bar. He is now professor emeritus. For various periods he served as head of the Department of Scots Law (later Private Law). He has been an advocate since 1972 and a QC since 1987. From 1987 to 1996 he was general editor of The Laws of Scotland: Stair Memorial Encyclopedia (25 volumes). From 1981 to 1994 he served as a temporary sheriff (judge). He has taken a close interest in the Lockerbie affair since 1993, not least because he was born and brought up in the town, and has published a substantial number of articles on the topic in the United Kingdom and overseas. He is often referred to as the architect of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Black's support for the story is obvious from the fact that he posted my article on his website. In a comment posted on OMNI, Black went out of his way to express his agreement with the 18-page analysis of the consequences of the Lumpert affidavit. "A masterly review of the weaknesses in the Lockerbie court's conviction of [Abdelbaset Al] Megrahi," Black wrote. In April 2000, professor Koechler was appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as international observer at the Lockerbie bombing trial that was held at Camp Zeist, Netherlands. Koechler has also posted the article on his Web site. He wrote this comment on OMNI: This is a well-researched analysis which precisely reveals the serious mistakes and omissions by the official Scottish investigators as well as the carelessness and lack of professionalism of the judges in the Lockerbie case. The Scottish judicial authorities are under the obligation to investigate possible criminal misconduct in the investigation and prosecution of the Lockerbie case. On July 4, 2007, Koechler wrote to Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, reiterating his call for a "full and independent public inquiry of the Lockerbie case." Dr Swire, who lost his daughter in the Lockerbie bombing, is a founder and the spokesperson of the UK Families Flight 103, which campaigns to seek the truth about the worst act of terror ever committed in the UK In a letter addressed to my editor, he wrote that the article was "one of the best informed and most realistic" he had seen. I promised Richard Marquise that I would make an effort "to see things from the other side." And I will. But for now, we must agree to disagree. I leave him with a comment posted by Iain McKie -- someone who knows all about the consequences of forensic mistakes. Another Lockerbie mystery is why, given this latest opportunity [Megrahi's second appeal] to uncover the truth about this terrorist outrage that claimed the lives of people from 21 countries (including 189 Americans), and given the US and British high profile "war on terror," is the political silence so deafening? I find it increasingly difficult to argue with Dr De Braeckeleer's conclusion: "Shame on those who committed this horrific act of terror. Shame on those who have ordered the cover-up. Shame on those who provided false testimony, and those who suppressed and fabricated the evidence needed to frame Libya. And shame on the media for their accomplice silence." The McKies know best than most the cost of injustice. Shirley McKie was a successful policewoman until her life was shattered in February 1997 when four experts from the Scottish Criminal Records Office incorrectly identified a thumbprint from a crime scene as hers. Marquise has made other comments about the article that I will discuss at a later time. However, I wish to point out that Marquise is right to state that the quotes attributed to Michael Scharf, formerly of US State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence, although correct do not represent exactly his opinion, as they have been printed out of context by the British media. (Scharf helped draft the sanctions against Libya.) Scharf wrote to me, The text of the quotes is more or less accurate but is out of context, giving the misimpression that I thought that the two Lockerbie defendants were innocent and the US government knew this all along. In fact, I referred to them as "fall guys" because I felt the case should not have focused exclusively on them, but rather should have gone up the chain of command all the way to Khadaffi [Muammar al-Qaddafi], and should also have focused on the possible involvement of third countries. It is true, as your quote indicates, that I felt the evidentiary case presented at Camp Zeist was not as strong as the Department of Justice had led the Department of State to believe it would be at the time we were pushing for sanctions against Libya in the UN, but that is not to say that I thought the defendants were actually innocent of wrong doing, which is the impression left by the quotes. If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is the fact that no one except the judges is satisfied with the Lockerbie trial. Meanwhile, new extraordinary revelations have surfaced that support my view that the Lockerbie trial was engineered by Western intelligence services to frame Libya. 'Secret' Lockerbie Report Claim Crucial information in the possession of the CIA that is related to the timer issue was withheld from the defense. The Herald of Glasgow revealed on Oct 2 that "a top secret [CIA] document vital to unearthing the truth about the Lockerbie bombing was obtained by the Crown Office but never shown to the defense team." "The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has uncovered there is a document which was in the possession of the crown and was not disclosed to the defense, which concerns the supply of MST-13 timers. Moreover, the commission has determined the decision to keep the document from the defense may have constituted a miscarriage of justice," the paper reported a source as saying. The prosecutors have refused to make public the ultra secret document on the basis of national security. Many have been wondering what national security has to do with the Lockerbie bombing. "It is shocking to me that after 19 years of trying to get to the truth about who murdered my daughter national security is being used as an excuse," said Swire. After having seen the CIA document, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission team that investigated the conviction of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi decided to grant him a second appeal. The document has not yet been seen by the defense. The document is thought to dispute the pivotal fact that the bomb was triggered by the MST-13 timer that linked the case to Libya. The non-disclosure agreement was signed by Norman McFadyen, then one of the leading members of the prosecution, on June 1, 2000. In an exclusive interview earlier this week, Koechler told Gordon Brewer of the BCC's "Newsnight Scotland," The withholding of evidence by the investigators and the prosecution from the defense at the Lockerbie court is a serious breach of the fundamental norms of a fair trial. If such action occurs on the basis of a written commitment given to a foreign intelligence service, as has now been revealed concerning crucial evidence related to the timer that allegedly triggered the explosion of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, the judicial nature of the entire proceedings is to be put into question. If a foreign intelligence service is allowed to determine what evidence may be disclosed in court and what not, judicial proceedings before a court of law are perverted into a kind of intelligence operation the purpose of which is not the search for the truth, but the obfuscation of reality. Black has said, If a foreign intelligence agency says they would be prepared to give the crown access only if they promise to keep the information secret, then it is the responsibility of the crown to say we cannot do that. They have an ethical responsibility not to sign such agreements. This tends to indicate that the crown has not changed its fundamental stance that says they will decide what the public interest is and what information should or should not be disclosed. That is fundamentally wrong. The source in the Herald's report agrees: "The commission was unable to obtain authority for its disclosure. Without access to this document, the defense is disabled from putting before the court full and comprehensive grounds of appeal as to why the conviction should be quashed." CIA Offered $2m to Lockerbie Witnesses It now appears that huge amounts of money were offered by US officials to at least three key witnesses. The defense was never told that the CIA had offered millions of dollars to their star witnesses. "We understand the commission found new documents which refer to discussions between the US intelligence agency and the Gaucis [Tony and his brother Paul] and that the sum involved was as much as $2m," a source close to the case told The Herald, according to an Oct 3 report. "Even if they did not receive the money, the fact these discussions took place should have been divulged to the defense." Tony Gauci was an instrumental witness in the case. On Oct 5, Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based company MeBo, told Koechler that during a visit to the headquarters of the FBI in Washington, DC, at the beginning of 1991, he was offered an amount of up to $4 million plus a new identity in the US if he would testify in court that the timer fragment that was allegedly found on the crash site around Lockerbie stemmed from a MST-13 timer that his company had delivered to Libya. Media Silence Will the media finally cover this extraordinary affair? Perhaps. In France, Le Figaro has published a couple of stories, one of which was entitled: "And if Libya Was Innocent …" Television channel France 3 reported the story of the Lumpert affidavit. In the UK, The Herald has picked up the latest developments in the story. The BBC has published a few lines about it. The London journal Private Eye is rumored to be running the story in its next edition. US media remain amazingly silent. Quo Vadis? "In view of all these revelations and serious allegations, Koechler renewed his call for an independent international investigation of the handling of the Lockerbie case by the Scottish and British authorities," wrote Gordon Brewer of the BCC's "Newsnight Scotland." "It remains to be seen whether the Scottish judicial and political system will live up to the challenge and whether the authorities will allow a full and objective inquiry," Brewer said. I have very little hope that the Scottish judicial and political system will allow an independent international investigation. For now, I encourage my readers to reflect upon a Persian saying. "Shame on those who committed the deed. Shame on those who allowed the deed to be committed."

Probe into Lockerbie timer claims

[This is the headline over a report that was published in The Herald on this date in 2007. It reads as follows:]

The makers of the timer used to explode the Lockerbie bomb will travel to Scotland following the revelation that their former employee planted vital evidence.

Edwin Bollier, whose now bankrupt company Mebo manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya, plans to visit Scotland with police forensics experts, following news that an engineer was asked to fabricate evidence.

Ulrich Lumpert, formerly an electronics engineer with Mebo AG, Zurich, has signed an affidavit admitting he committed perjury before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands.

In his affidavit he states that he stole a handmade sample of an "MST-13 Timer PC-board" from Mebo in Zurich and handed it over, on June 22 1989, to an "official person investigating the Lockerbie case."

He further states that the fragment of the timer, cut into two pieces for "supposedly forensic reasons," which was presented in court stemmed from the same piece.

He further states that when he became aware that this piece was used for an "intentional politically motivated criminal undertaking" he decided, out of fear for his life, to keep silent on the matter.

Mr Bollier has already spoken to prosecutors in Switzerland who will begin their investigation into charges of perjury next week.

The timer was used as a key part of the evidence against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the 1988 bombing which killed 270 people. The revelation will strengthen Megrahi's fresh appeal which was granted in June by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

Despite Megrahi's conviction, there have been persistent claims that Libya was not responsible, some evidence was rigged, and the finger of suspicion pointed elsewhere.

The commission rejected allegations that evidence had been falsified or "spirited away" by the investigating teams, but the affidavit by Mr Lumpert suggests otherwise.

Mr Bollier told The Herald last night: "We hope to go to Scotland with the police and forensics people from Switzerland to see the manipulated fragment. We have forwarded on the papers and affidavit to prosecutors here and they will also be passed to the lord Advocate in Scotland."

In 2001, Mr Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

He told The Herald that the fragments he was shown at the trial were different to those originally shown to him. "The fragments kept changing," he said. "The procurator-fiscal showed me one fragment then the police showed me a fragment in two parts - one was green, one was brown.

"Later in the witness box I was shown a screen and the smaller piece was completely carbonised - you could not even see the colour. It had been manipulated, but when I tried to say that the judge cut me off."

Dr Hans Koechler, international UN observer at the Scottish Court in the Netherlands, has seen a copy of the affidavit made on July 18. He said: "The Scottish authorities are now obliged to investigate this situation. Not only has Mr Lumpert admitted to stealing a sample of the timer, but to the fact he gave it to an official and then lied in court."

US-British conflict over release of Libyan convicted of Lockerbie bombing

[On the afternoon of this date in 2009 Abdelbaset Megrahi was released from HMP Greenock and flew back to Libya. What follows is excerpted from an article by Steve James that was published on the WSWS.org website earlier that day:]

The release of Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, convicted for the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is expected today. (...)

The Obama administration intervened directly to oppose his release and made clear that it would prefer Megrahi to die in Greenock jail, in Scotland, where he has been incarcerated since 2001. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton “fairly strongly” told Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill that “our view is that Megrahi should serve out his entire sentence in Scotland.”

The phone call was followed up by a public statement from Clinton that it would be “absolutely wrong” to release Megrahi. The BBC described this as “uncharacteristically undiplomatic language.” (...)

The trial process was organised as part of a drive to re-open Libyan oil fields to US and UK oil companies (...). Megrahi’s conviction was followed by the Libyan government accepting responsibility for the attack and the payment of billions of dollars in compensation to the families of the 270 victims. In the intervening years Libya has been the focus of an oil bonanza for corporations once excluded by the former pariah regime of Colonel Muammar Gadhaffi. (...)

The claim that Megrahi was solely responsible for the Lockerbie bombing is absurd on its face. His co-accused, Fhimah, was acquitted in 2001 on the basis of there being no evidence against him. Megrahi has consistently maintained his innocence, but could do little more given his inability to directly criticise the Libyan government.

In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), the organisation tasked with investigation into miscarriages of justice, announced that in their opinion there was “no reasonable basis” to place Megrahi in Malta where he had been identified as allegedly purchasing clothing later found to have been wrapped around the bomb. The review agreed that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place and authorised a further appeal. The 800-page SCCRC report has never been published.

Key items, in addition to the disputed identification of Megrahi by Maltese shop keeper Tony Gauci, that might be explored in open court at an appeal include the break-in at Heathrow airport adjacent to where PanAm 103 was parked on the evening prior to the attack. In addition, in 2007, in an affidavit to a Swiss court by Ulrich Lumpert, manufacturer, along with Edmund Bollier of MEBO AG, of the MST13 circuit board alleged to have triggered the bomb, admitted that the MST13 fragment produced in court in 2001 was from a non-operational circuit board handed to Lockerbie investigators in 1989.

The August 16 Sunday Times reported that Megrahi’s defence team were intending to produce cables in court from the US Defence Intelligence Agency accusing Iran of the attack in reprisal for the USS Vincennes destruction of an Iranian airbus in 1987. Writing in the Scottish Mail on Sunday, also August 16, 2009, former Labour MP and father of the House of Commons Tam Dalyell alleged that the US government knew an attack was planned by Iran and that a warning was posted to key US personnel and their diplomatic allies to avoid PanAm 103, while the suddenly available cheap seats in the pre-Christmas flight were taken up by students.

Another article in the Scottish Mail on Sunday claimed that much of the defence case was intended to rest on a report by Jessica de Grazia, a former senior New York prosecutor, and Philip Corbett, a former deputy head of Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Branch. They point to Abu Talb, an associate of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, (PFLP-GC) to whom the Lockerbie attack is alleged to have been contracted, and suggest he was in London with an un-primed bomb. It notes that in return for Libya being blamed for the Lockerbie attack, US planes were allowed to use Iranian airspace during the US 1991 attack on Iraq. The report concludes, “We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a persistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case.”

Megrahi’s illness has provided an opportunity to bury the issue once and for all. A Scottish National Party member of the Scottish parliament, Christine Grahame, warned in the press that she had seen a leaked mail from the Scottish justice department warning that “senior Scottish officials were exerting undue pressure to have Megrahi drop his appeal.”

Release to Libya would only end such difficulties if Megrahi’s continued silence could be counted upon. A number of exchanges have been reported between leading British figures and the Libyan government to smooth Megrahi’s release. A spokesman for Lord Peter Mandelson, the UK business secretary, hinted that “fleeting conversation about the prisoner” had been held between Mandelson and Gadhaffi’s son and likely successor. In addition, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, has travelled on at least three occasions to Libya as a trade representative, while Gadhaffi junior has stayed at Buckingham Palace. Palace courtiers conceded that the prince and Seif al-Islam had “quite possibly” discussed Megrahi. (...)

For their part, the Libyan regime would welcome the re-appearance of someone who has been portrayed as a martyr and hostage. Offering Megrahi a hero’s welcome would serve to prop up the increasingly unpopular regime.

Clinton’s unprecedented intervention into the legal workings of a major ally comes despite the US’s own desire for deeper relations with Tripoli. The Obama administration faces political pressure from the families of US Lockerbie victims, most of who support Megrahi’s conviction as opposed to a large number of UK relatives who do not, and could not be seen to condone the release.

Ulrich Lumpert’s recantation

[It was on this date in 2007 that Ulrich Lumpert, a former employee of Mebo Ltd in Zürich who had given evidence at the Zeist trial about MST-13 timers, swore an affidavit to the effect that his evidence had been false. An English translation of the affidavit can be read here. What follows is a comment that I made at the time:]

Ulrich Lumpert, an engineer at one time employed by MEBO in Zürich, gave evidence at the Lockerbie trial that a fragment of circuit board allegedly found amongst the aircraft debris (and which was absolutely crucial to the prosecution contention that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was linked to Libya) was part of an operative MST-13 timer manufactured by MEBO. In an affidavit sworn in Switzerland in July 2007 (available on the website www.lockerbie.ch) Lumpert now states that the fragment produced in court was in fact part of a non-operational demonstration circuit board that he himself had removed from the premises of MEBO and had handed over to a Lockerbie investigator on 22 June 1989 (six months AFTER the destruction of Pan Am 103).

If this is true, then it totally demolishes the prosecution version of how the aircraft was destroyed, as well, of course, as demonstrating deliberate fabrication of evidence laid before the court.

The dodgy timer fragment

22 June 1989:

“In his affidavit Mr [Ulrich] Lumpert implicitly admits having committed perjury as witness No. 550 before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. He states (para 2) that he has stolen a handmade (by him) sample of an ‘MST-13 Timer PC-board’ from MEBO company in Zurich and handed it over, on 22 June 1989, to an ‘official person investigating the Lockerbie case.’ He further states (in para 5) that the fragment of the MST-13 timer, cut into two pieces for ‘supposedly forensic reasons,’ which was presented in Court as vital part of evidence, stemmed from the piece which he had stolen and handed over to an investigator in 1989.”

From The Lumpert Affidavit, posted on this blog on 29 August 2007.

22 June 1990:

“When interviewed for a Dutch TV documentary in 2009 [Richard Marquise] insisted that PT35b had never been taken to the US. This claim was echoed by the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, and by [Scottish Senior Investigating Officer Stuart] Henderson. Henderson then amended his position, saying that the fragment had never been in ‘the control’ of the US investigators. He had chosen his words carefully, because the truth, as he must have known, was that PT35b was taken to the FBI forensic lab in Washington DC on 22 June 1990, in order to compare it with the MST-13 timer held by the FBI’s Tom Thurman; indeed, Henderson was one of the officers who took it there. It was strange that this fact could have slipped the minds of both the head of the FBI investigation and the chief prosecutor responsible for the Lockerbie indictments.

“The Washington visit was crucial, as it enabled Allen Feraday and the Scottish police to confirm that PT35b matched the MST-13 timer…”

From John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, pp 165,66.

Further details can be found on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website, particularly The Chronology of PT/35(b): 22 June 1990.

24 December 2007: Libya anticipates Megrahi's return

[On this date in 2007 I posted on this blog an item that reads as follows:]

Al-Megrahi May Come Home Very Soon

Today the Libyaonline website runs an article, apparently from the Tripoli Post, with this title. Again, it embodies the assumption that, because the United Kingdom Government and Libya have concluded a prisoner transfer agreement and because Mr Megrahi is not specifically excluded from its operation, therefore he will soon be heading home to Tripoli. This is a quite unwarranted assumption. It is the Scottish Government, not the UK Government, that must consent to any transfer. I have seen no indication anywhere that such consent is likely to be forthcoming or, indeed, that any approaches have been made to the Scottish Ministers to sound them out.

[The website in question no longer exists as a news aggregation site. However, the article is still to be found on The Tripoli Post website. It reads as follows:]

The innocent Libyan citizen, Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi, who have been unfairly convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and has been in a Scottish prison since 2001, may soon come home. 

Britain is about to sign a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) with Libya which will pave the way for the eventual return of Al-Megrahi to Tripoli. A letter was sent by Jack Straw, the British Justice Secretary, to Tripoli Wednesday night outlining the agreement.

According to The Scotsman quoting Thursday unidentified source, "Jack Straw will be signing the prisoner transfer agreement with Libya tonight. Megrahi will not be listed in the treaty as somebody who is specifically excluded." 

"The Libyans would not agree to that. But as Kenny MacAskill discussed with Jack, there is a safeguard in that Scottish ministers will have to decide in each transfer case from a Scottish prison,” The Scotsman added.

The deal comes just 48 hours before the 19th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, which claimed 270 lives in 1988.

New evidence has recently published including an inclusively crucial affidavit from Eng Ulrich Lumpert, to definitely exonerate Mr Al-Megrahi and Libya from any participation in the bombing of PanAm 103.

A Scottish Government source said Justice Secretary Jack Straw spoke to his opposite number north of the border, Kenny MacAskill, and told him Abdelbaset al-Megrahi would not be excluded from the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) expected to be finalised soon, the Associated Press reported.

Al-Megrahi, who is serving life in Greenock Prison, is currently pursuing a second appeal against his 2001 conviction for bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21 1988.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair signed a memorandum of understanding during a visit to Libya in May 2007, kicking off negotiations on an agreement allowing the transfer of prisoners between the justice systems of the two countries.

Fresh twists in the Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over a long article by John Ashton on the Consortium News website. It reads in part:]

On Oct 15, Scotland’s prosecuting authority, the Crown Office, announced that two Libyan men are being treated as suspects in the 28-year-old Pan Am 103 bombing case. They were widely reported to be Abu Agila Masud, an alleged bomb-maker, and Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi’s former security chief. Both were associates of the only person convicted of the bombing, Abelbaset al-Megrahi, who died in 2012.

The development came almost 15 years after Megrahi’s trial, but only two days after the broadcast by PBS Frontline of a three-part documentary My Brother’s Bomber. Trailed by a long article in the New Yorker, the film was made by Ken Dornstein, a former Frontline staffer whose older brother David was one of 270 who died when Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988.

The documentary reveals that Masud was named by a German judge as the technical expert responsible for the 1986 bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin. That attack, which killed three, including two US servicemen, and injured many more, led to the US air strikes on Libya, for which Libya allegedly took revenge with the bombing of Pan Am 103.

Megrahi flew with Masud from Malta to Libya on the morning of the Lockerbie bombing having, according to the prosecution, placed a suitcase containing a bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. The unaccompanied suitcase was allegedly transferred to a feeder flight to London Heathrow and again at Heathrow on to Pan Am 103.

Megrahi denied knowing Masud, yet the two men were on other flights in the run-up to Lockerbie and, according to the film, Masud was in the car that met him on his return to Libya in 2009, following his release from prison in Scotland. (...)

There is no doubt that Libya supported terrorist groups and that at least one Libyan, Musbah Eter, who was an official at the Libyan People’s Bureau in East Berlin, was involved in the La Belle bombing. Eter was convicted for his role following a confession in which he implicated his co-accused, Palestinian Yassar Chraidi, Lebanese-born German Ali Chanaa (both of whom worked at the People’s Bureau) and Chaana’s wife Verana.

He implicated a number of others, including Masud, whom he described as a bomb technician. Masud was never apprehended for the bombing and when German prosecutor Dethlev Mehlis went to Libya to interview witnesses all denied his existence — as did the Libyan witnesses in the Lockerbie case.

Less Straightforward

There is also no doubt that the La Belle case is far less straightforward than portrayed in the film. At the time of the bombing, the Reagan administration was involved in a large, secret and dirty war against Libya. From the time Reagan took office in 1981 his government exaggerated the country’s role in terrorism, which it claimed — falsely — was central to a Soviet-directed global conspiracy against the West.

At the same time, the Reagan administration downplayed the role of equally active terrorist states Syria and Iran. There were two reasons for this: firstly, those countries held far greater strategic power in the Middle East than Libya; and secondly, their militant proxies held US hostages in Lebanon. The hostages’ safe return was an obsession that led the administration into the Iran-Contra scandal.

Under the direction of CIA’s rabidly neocon director, William Casey, the Agency launched a massive covert campaign against Libya, aimed at toppling Gaddafi. It was run from the National Security Council by the same people who ran the Iran-Contra operation, including Oliver North.

Disinformation was central to the campaign. In 1981, the CIA put out a false story that Gaddafi has sent a hit squad to the US to assassinate Reagan. The White House played along using an unmarked car to drive Reagan while decoy limousines were used to dupe the non-existent gunmen.

By the mid-1980s, the White House hardliners were hungry for an excuse to attack Libya and NSC staff drew up plans to provoke Libya in to a response that would provide the excuse they needed. Naval exercises were conducted off the Libyan coast in which Libyan vessels were hit and territorial water repeatedly violated.

Gaddafi appeared not to take the bait. Then, on April 5, 1986, came the La Belle bombing. The White House soon announced that it had irrefutable evidence of Libya’s involvement. Nine days later came the air strikes against Libya, which came within a whisker of killing Gaddafi.

The “irrefutable evidence” was intercepts of incriminatory messages sent between the Libyan government and the East Berlin People’s Bureau. Libyan intelligence traffic was normally processed and evaluated by a group known as G-6 at the National Security Agency, before being forwarded elsewhere.

An investigation by Seymour Hersh for The New York Times established that the La Belle intercepts were never sent to G-6. An NSA official told him “The G-6 section branch and division chiefs didn’t know why it was taken from them. They were bureaucratically cut out and so they screamed and yelled.”

Another explained, “There is no doubt that if you send raw data to the White House, that constitutes misuse because there’s nobody there who’s capable of interpreting it. . . . You screw it up every time when you do it –– and especially when the raw traffic is translated into English from a language such as Arabic, that’s not commonly known.”

The eventual prosecution of Eter and his three co-accused was reliant upon Eter’s confession and corroborating material from the files of the former East German security service, the Stasi. (Chaana also confessed but his evidence was not considered as important and Eter’s.) The Stasi had a number of informants within Berlin’s Arab communities, including Chaana, and kept a close watch on the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau.

Double-Dealing

During the 1980s, Berlin was a pit of Cold War double-dealing. The Stasi files indicate that among the Arab communities survival and personal advancement often trumped loyalty to any particular cause. The information relayed to the Stasi by its Arab informants might be cast iron, but against this background it’s also possible that they were recycling each other’s inventions.

The East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau, in particular, hosted numerous personal rivalries and little mutual trust. Eter was one of the more interesting vipers in the nest. According to the Stasi and a 1998 investigation by the German TV channel ZDF, he was a CIA asset. ZDF discovered that, at the time he made his confession in 1996, he was running a CIA front company in Malta.

The year before La Belle he was named as a suspect in the assassination in West Germany of a Libyan dissident called Jibril el-Dinali. (Der Spiegel reported at the time that dissidents believed that the German federal police, the BKA, had supplied their secret addresses to Libyan officials in return for intelligence about the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction, which had received Libyan support.)

Eter is Ken Dornstein’s key witness and will be central to any prosecution of Masud and Senussi. According to the film, since Dornstein made contact, he has told the FBI that Masud and Megrahi were pivotal to the Lockerbie plot. He claims that Masud told him personally that he was responsible for both the Lockerbie and La Belle bombings.

Unfortunately for anyone tasked with prosecuting at a trial of the new suspects, the CIA connection and his murderous past leave Eter with a credibility problem. So too does the fact that he waited 19 years after confessing to talk about Lockerbie.

Other Stasi informants involved in the case had a relationship with the CIA, as did some of those originally implicated in the bombing. One was a close associate of Chraidi’s, Mahmoud Abu Jaber, who with his brother Mohamed ran a freelance Palestinian terrorist cell that was mistrusted by other Palestinians.

The Stasi learned that the CIA knew that Mahmoud Abu Jaber and another cell member, Khaled Shatta, were involved in the bombing. They mixed regularly with the Chraidi and the other defendants and hours before the attack they travelled to West Berlin. They were watched by the Stasi and KGB, both of which concluded that they were working for Western intelligence.

One declassified KGB document suggested that Mahmoud Abu Jaber was a CIA agent provocateur, who was used to create a case against Libya. Group member Mahmoud Amayiri, who was both Shatta’s brother and Mahmoud Abu Jaber’s right-hand man, confirmed to ZDF through his Norwegian lawyer that he had been working for Mossad. He had fled Germany for Norway in 1990, following the issuing of an arrest warrant, which was later dropped.

The idea that some of the La Belle plotters were western agents provocateur is not far-fetched. A 1997 investigation by British Channel 4 TV’s Dispatches series revealed that the CIA-funded anti-Gaddafi terrorist group Al-Burkan was involved in the 1984 murder of police officer Yvonne Fletcher, who was killed when staff at the London Libya People’s Bureau opened fire on a crowd of anti-Gaddafi demonstrators.

A member of a Berlin criminal gang connected to Al-Burkan described transporting the murder weapon to London and handing it over to an Al-Burkan member. The program uncovered evidence that the fatal shot was fired from a building adjacent to the People’s Bureau used by the UK intelligence services. It also claimed that Al Burkan had moles within the People’s Bureau.

Reluctant Cooperation

The US government was reluctant to share its intelligence about La Belle with the Germans and it was not until 1996 that it did. It appeared to be convincing and included transcripts of intercepted messages, allegedly between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan People’s Bureau. Among other things, these suggested that senior Libyan intelligence official Said Rashid, a friend and relative of Megrahi’s, coordinated the attack.

The US government may well have believed the intercepts to be genuine, but, according to former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky, they were an elaborate hoax. In his 1994 memoir, The Other Side of Deception, he claimed that the messages were in fact part of a Mossad disinformation operation codenamed Trojan.

Ostrovsky said that a few weeks before the bombing Israeli commandos secretly installed special communications equipment in an apartment near Colonel Gaddafi’s headquarters, which was subsequently used to broadcast phony terrorist orders. Neither German prosecutor Mehlis, nor the FBI, contacted Ostrovsky about his claims.

While none of this rules out Libyan sponsorship of La Belle, it does flash a warning that we should treat the official account with caution.

An even thicker fog surrounds Lockerbie. The CIA’s campaign against Libya did not end with the 1986 raids, indeed a few months after them President Reagan signed a secret National Security Decision Directive, which, according to a leak to Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, ordered “covert, diplomatic and economic steps designed to . . . bring about a change of leadership in Libya.”

In view of what we now know about Lockerbie, it’s not outlandish to suggest that those covert steps may have included manipulating the investigation behind the backs of the police and prosecutors.

Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that the bombing was not Gaddafi’s revenge for the 1986 raids, but was rather Iran’s for the US Navy’s accidental shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655 over the Arabian Gulf, which killed 290 people six months before Lockerbie.

According to the documents, the Iranians contracted out the job to the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command, which had a track record of blowing up aircraft. One document, from 1991, stated, without naming the PFLP-GC, that the Iranian interior minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi paid the bombers $10 million.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer has provided some of the details of the Iranian/PFLP-GC plot and another, Richard Fuisz, revealed in a court deposition that he was told by numerous senior Syrian officials closely connected to the PFLP-GC that the group carried out the attack.

Two months before Lockerbie members of the group were arrested in Germany, including bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat, who had made the bombs used in previous attacks. He admitted building bombs into Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players — the same brand that housed the Lockerbie bomb —and said the group was planning to strike a western airliner. Other members of the group and at least one of his bombs evaded detection.

A Strange Warning

Less than three weeks before the bombing, the State Department’s Office of Diplomatic Security (ODS) warned that unnamed radical Palestinians in Europe were planning to target Pan Am. The warning came three days before the better known and entirely separate warning received by the U.S. embassy in Helsinki that an attack on Pan Am was imminent.

Whereas the Helsinki warning was written off as a hoax, the ODS warning, which was not revealed until seven years after the bombing, has never been adequately explained.

The key evidence that led the investigators away from Iran and PFLP-GC towards Libya was a small piece of circuit board known as PT/35(b), found within a blast-damaged piece of a Maltese-made shirt. The prosecution case at Megrahi’s trial was that it matched boards made to order for Swiss company Mebo by its supplier Thüring.

Crucially Mebo used the boards in timers called MST-13s, which it had designed and built 20 for the Libyan intelligence service. Megrahi was a partner in a Libyan company that rented part of Mebo’s Zurich offices.

Well before Lockerbie, the CIA had an MST-13 timer that had been seized in Togo in 1986 and photos of the one seized in Senegal in 1988. Prosecution statements by a CIA technical expert, disclosed six years after Megrahi’s conviction, revealed that the Agency was also aware before Lockerbie that the timers had been made by Mebo and supplied to Libya.

The Agency had a backchannel to Mebo boss Edwin Bollier via the Swiss police, so it’s likely that it knew of Megrahi’s connection to Mebo via his company ABH. (The Stasi, who had a relationship with Bollier from at least the early 1970s, were convinced by the late 1980s that he was a direct CIA asset.)

The story of the PT/35(b) fragment is ridden with evidential anomalies. Megrahi’s trial team highlighted a number of discrepancies concerning the fragment, including the fact that the handwritten description on the police label attached to the piece of shirt had been surreptitiously changed from “Cloth” to “Debris.”

There were numerous other discrepancies not raised at trial. These included German documents that reported that the Scottish police had told the German federal police that PT/35(b) had been found in January 1990, seven months after it was officially found.

In his memoir Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation, the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, revealed that he and his Scottish counterpart, Stuart Henderson, speculated that the fragment was a CIA plant. They dismissed the suggestion on the grounds that “Neither of us believed the CIA or any government official would do such a thing.”

However, Marquise also revealed that their Swiss police counterpart suspected it was a plant. This is especially interesting in view of a claim made in an affidavit by Mebo technician Ulrich Lumpert, who designed the boards and produced prototypes, that a year before the Lockerbie investigators had linked PT/35(b) to Mebo the Swiss police visited him and took with them a prototype board.

Shortly before Megrahi’s trial, the Scottish prosecutors received information from witnesses in the US suggesting that an electronics company in Florida had made replica MST-13s for the CIA, but the lead was not properly investigated.

A Miscarriage of Justice

Documents unearthed by Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) — the statutory body that investigates alleged miscarriages of justice in Scotland — highlighted more anomalies. They included a police memo stating that PT/35(b) had been tested for explosive residues and found to be negative, which contradicted the court testimony of the Crown’s forensic experts, who said that no such tests had been done.

As Frontline’s documentary, My Brother’s Bomber, points out, the SCCRC investigated Bollier’s claim that the fragment was fabricated and found it to be baseless. However, the film fails to mention that both the SCCRC and Bollier missed the most important discrepancy concerning PT/35(b), which only emerged during preparations for Megrahi’s second appeal in 2009.

Metallurgical analysis showed that the fragment’s copper circuitry was plated with pure tin, whereas the boards made by Thüring, which were used in the timers supplied to Libya, were plated with a tin-lead alloy. Crown scientists had speculated that the explosion had changed the plating, but tests commissioned for the appeal disproved the theory. The work demonstrated beyond doubt that the Lockerbie fragment was not, as the court had accepted, a match for the Libyan MST-13s.

Other important forensic items had a dubious provenance. Among them was a collection of small charred circuit board fragments that apparently originated from a Toshiba BomBeat RT-SF16 radio cassette player.

A large proportion of the global production total of the model had been bought by the Libyan General Electrical Company, which was run by Said Rashid. The fragments appeared to be compelling evidence of Libyan involvement in the bombing, but, like PT/35(b), their origin is questionable. They were discovered by an air accident investigator within a folded piece of aluminum from the luggage container that housed the bomb suitcase.

Giving evidence at Megrahi’s trial, the investigator could not suggest how the blast could have caused the fragments to become trapped within the aluminum. He was sure that the fold had not occurred at the time of the explosion, which suggested that someone had placed the fragments within the aluminum after the blast.

Also of great importance to the prosecution case was a fragment of brown checked trousers containing a sewn-in label of a Maltese manufacturer called Yorkie. The item led the police to a shop in Malta called Mary’s House, where the proprietor, Tony Gauci, recalled selling a bundle of clothes — including brown checked trousers and other items found among the Lockerbie debris — to an oddly behaved Libyan a few weeks before the bombing.

Two years later, Gauci picked out Megrahi from a photo line-up, although he was considerably younger, smaller and lighter skinned than the man described by Gauci.

When the trouser fragment was first examined, the Yorkie label was seen by neither the forensic examiner nor the police officer present despite being easily visible. When questioned about it by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, both said they could not have missed it, which suggested that the label appeared after the examination.

The CIA not only knew before Lockerbie that Mebo had supplied MST-13 timers to Libya, they also knew that Megrahi regularly travelled to Malta, that he was related to Said Rashid and others high up within Libyan intelligence and security, and that Rashid was the head of the Libyan General Electrical Company. Much of this knowledge it attempted to conceal.

No Dissident

According to the former deputy chief of the US State Department’s counterterrorism division, the Diplomatic Security Service, Fred Burton, a CIA official told him before New Year in 1988 that the bomb was in a Maltese-originating brown Samsonite.

Burton is no Lockerbie dissident — he believes Megrahi and Libya were guilty — but, if true, his indiscretions throw a big wrench into the prosecution narrative, which held that the evidence to support the claim was uncovered by the police well in to 1989.

A number of rescue volunteers have described to me arriving in Lockerbie within two hours of the bombing to find a group of American agents already present. According to the official narrative, this never happened and the first US government staff only arrived three hours later.

Police officers reported concerns that Americans had unsupervised access to the crash site and a British helicopter crew member told me that the day after the bombing his crew ferried CIA agents around the site.

Some potentially significant forensic items found at the crash site disappeared, among them an AA battery with a piece of wire soldered to one of its terminals. German police photographs of the PFLP-GC’s Toshiba bomb showed that it incorporated AA batteries with wires soldered to their terminals.

Anyone raising these evidential anomalies gets branded a conspiracy theorist by the supporters of the official narrative, yet that narrative and the one newly minted by My Brother’s Bomber are themselves elaborate conspiracy theories.

When the theories and counter-theories are cast aside in favor of hard facts, the official narrative is no longer tenable. Not only did PT/35(b) not originate from one of the timers supplied to Libya, but Megrahi was clearly not the man who bought the clothes for the bomb suitcase and that purchase took place when he was not in Malta. New analysis of the baggage evidence demonstrates that the bomb suitcase originated from London Heathrow, rather than Malta.

Perhaps the hardest fact of all for the defenders of Megrahi’s conviction — which has barely been reported in all the coverage generated by My Brother’s Bomber — is that in 2007 the conviction was referred back to the appeal court by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on no fewer than six grounds.

One of these was that the trial court judgment, delivered by three of Scotland’s most senior judges, was unreasonable. Four of the other grounds concerned non-disclosure by the prosecution of important evidence.

The terminally ill Megrahi abandoned the appeal in the belief that it would aid his application for compassionate release from prison. Sadly, the commission this month rejected an application by family members and relatives of some of the British victims of Pan Am 103 for a further review of the conviction.

It may be that the only way to re-test the evidence against Megrahi will be a trial of the two newly announced suspects. If that happens, don’t hold your breath for a guilty verdict.