[This is the headline over an article by Steve James published today on the WSWS.org website. It reads in part:]
Relatives ... of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi have won the right to posthumously appeal his 2001 conviction for murder following a decision by the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC). (...)
The Lockerbie attack came only six months after an Iranair Airbus, IR655, was shot down in an unprovoked act of mass murder, by the US missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes. In that instance 290 passengers and crew were killed. At the time, most commentary and media coverage assumed that the Lockerbie atrocity was an act of revenge.
From the outset, however, it was apparent there was some level of foreknowledge or complicity on behalf of the US and British intelligence services. Warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights had been issued. PA103, flying just before Christmas, was half empty because of cancellations. On the crash site in Scotland, numerous reports emerged of unrecorded activity by the FBI, items of wreckage being removed under armed guard, and luggage interfered with.
In 1990, UK citizen Martin Cadman, whose son Bill was killed on the flight, attended a briefing at the US Embassy for relatives of victims of the attack. Cadman was, without prompting, told by an unnamed member of the US President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, “Your government and ours know exactly what happened and they are never going to tell.”
By 1991, around the time the Iranian government declared its neutrality during the US Desert Storm war on Iraq, the British and US authorities shifted responsibility for Lockerbie to Libya.
Pinning the blame on Libya served to isolate and pressure the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and provided a pretext for punitive economic sanctions, which undermined the North African country’s oil-based economy.
Magrahi’s trial, at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, was held under Scots law as part of a deal brokered by South African leader Nelson Mandela between the British and Libyan governments. Its purpose was to allow some veneer of legal process on the rapprochement between the two countries, as Gaddafi abandoned his former radical posturing and US and British imperialism eyed the country’s oil resources.
The trial, however, revealed extraordinary inconsistencies in the Scottish Crown Office case. Not least was that there was no proof that Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, had ever loaded a comparable suitcase in Luqa airport in Malta, no proof that any unaccompanied suitcase had travelled from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow, to be loaded onto PA103, and no explanation of how Luqa airport’s rigorous security was overcome.
Nevertheless, Magrahi was convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, later increased to 27.
In another of countless inconsistencies, Megrahi’s co-accused, Llamen Fhimah was set free. For his part, Gaddafi duly offered compensation to the attack’s victims without accepting Libyan responsibility. [RB: Libya accepted "responsibility for the actions of its officials" and nothing more.]
Megrahi had an initial appeal rejected in 2002, but the passage of time has only increased the perception that he was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up and show trial.
In 2007, the SCCRC authorised another appeal, reporting there was “no reasonable basis” to place Megrahi in Malta where he had been identified as allegedly purchasing clothing identified as being in a suitcase containing the bomb. However, in 2009 Megrahi, in prison in Greenock, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was allowed to return to Libya following an understanding reached with the Scottish government that his appeal should be dropped. Megrahi died in 2012, still protesting his innocence.
In 2011, 10 years after the trial, US, French and British imperialism launched a bloody neo-colonial war to overthrow Gaddafi. It ended with Gaddafi being hunted down and butchered. The country was pitched into a catastrophic civil war, which continues to this day.
This latest appeal was launched by Megrahi’s family and [supported by] the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) campaign. This includes relatives of several victims of the disaster such as Dr Jim Swire, who has steadfastly campaigned for the truth around his 23-year-old daughter’s murder on PA103.
JFM members include Robert Black, a lawyer and one of the architects of the original Camp Zeist trial. Another member is former police superintendent Iain McKie, whose daughter Shirley was the subject of a debacle which, in the end, discredited the Scottish Criminal Records Office entire finger-printing methodology. Shirley McKie was charged with perjury before finally being exonerated and compensated.
A SCCRC press statement reported grounds for allowing the new appeal. Referring to the identification of Megrahi as the purchaser of clothing in the bomb suitcase by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the SCCRC concluded that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred because no reasonable trial court, relying on the evidence led at trial, could have held the case against Mr Megrahi was proved beyond reasonable doubt.”
The SCCRC statement found that the Crown failed to “disclose a statement and a police report” confirming that Gauci had photographs of Megrahi in his possession before he identified him. This “deprived Mr Megrahi a real chance of an acquittal.” The commission also found that “reward money to be paid to Mr Gauci under a scheme administered by the US Department of State” meant that “Mr Megrahi was denied a fair trial.”
Gauci was coached by the Scottish police and bribed by the US government—$2 million was eventually said to have been handed over.
The SCCRC rejected further grounds for appeal relating to:
The date on which Megrahi was identified as having been in Gauci’s shop in Malta
* Evidence emerged of the date at which Christmas lights were switched on in Sliema, Malta and which contradicts the prosecution claim that Megrahi made the purchases. Yet, the SCCRC “decided that the fresh evidence in question is not likely to have assisted Mr. Megrahi’s cause.” In a repeated theme, the SCCRC’s pointed to the fact that Megrahi’s defence team “chose not to lead it in connection with his appeal in 2002.”
The metallurgical characteristics of circuit board fragment PT/35(b)
* This fragment was claimed to be part of an MST-13 timer constructed by MEBO AG of Switzerland. The fragment appeared late in the investigation with records of its discovery apparently altered. PT/35(b)’s significance in the case against Megrahi is that it implicated the Libyan government, which had purchased 20 such timers.
Evidence emerged, and was available early in the investigation, to confirm that the MST-13 circuit board fragment could not have been part of the batch of timers sold to Libya, as the board’s soldering had different characteristics from control samples provided by MEBO. When this was made available to Megrahi’s original defence team, they again, for reasons unclear, declined to use it.
The SCCRC nevertheless found that “the decision by the defence team to proceed without investigating the metallurgy issue did not mean that Mr. Megrahi’s defence was not presented to the court.”
Suitcase ingestion at Heathrow
* This is most damaging to the entire case against Megrahi and was clearly explained in the 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by JFM member, Dr Morag Kerr.
Kerr makes a detailed and methodical examination of the recorded progress of all items of luggage through Luqa, Frankfurt and Heathrow airports, their position in the luggage container AVE4041 at Heathrow airport, and their subsequent condition and location when discovered on the hills around Lockerbie. Her conclusion is that the bomb suitcase, a Samsonite Silhouette 400, was introduced in London prior to a feeder flight, PA 103A, arriving from Frankfurt carrying any luggage from Malta.
Kerr makes clear that, despite the vast and complex investigation, this suitcase has no known provenance and its owner has never been identified. It was noticed by several airline staff prior to and during transfer to PA 103. It appeared the day after a highly unusual break-in to the Heathrow luggage storage area adjacent to where AVE4041 was loaded.
The SCCRC agreed that “If accepted, this would fatally undermine the Crown case,” but claimed the allegation lacked information highlighted by Operation Sandwood—a four-year police inquiry into allegations of police criminality during the Lockerbie investigation made by JFM.
This counterclaim is not substantiated. Operation Sandwood concluded in 2018 that “no criminality” had been found. Its report has not been published, nor the basis of its findings released.
Learning of the news of the appeal being allowed, Megrahi’s youngest son, Ali, told The Times “If the world discovers the identity of the true bomber, it will have to accept that it was not my father. Those who lost their loved ones deserve to know the truth, who was responsible and why it happened.”
Showing posts sorted by date for query Morag Kerr book. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query Morag Kerr book. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Wednesday 18 March 2020
Saturday 6 July 2019
Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation with author Richard Marquise
[This is the title of a podcast uploaded yesterday to the Stratfor Worldview website. It takes the form of an interview with Richard Marquise conducted by Stratfor's Chief Security Officer Fred Burton. The podcast can be listened to, and a transcript can be read, here. The introduction reads as follows:]
On December 21, 1988, a plane full of travelers bound from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. All on board were killed, as were 11 people on the ground. The subsequent investigation into the bombing spread over hundreds of square miles in a hunt for evidence that had been blown to smithereens.
The FBI's lead investigator in the case, Richard Marquise, was assigned to the monumental task of helping determine what had happened, who was responsible and, eventually, how to prosecute the case. He talked about his book detailing those efforts, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation with Stratfor Chief Security Officer Fred Burton.
[RB: The podcast does not cover the criticisms of the investigation, prosecution and trial that have subsequently been made by the United Nations appointed observer at the trial, Professor Hans Köchler; by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission; by John Ashton; by Dr Morag Kerr and by many other persons and organisations. However it does contain interesting material, particularly on relations between the FBI and the Scottish police, and between the Scottish (and UK) authorities and the United States government.]
On December 21, 1988, a plane full of travelers bound from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. All on board were killed, as were 11 people on the ground. The subsequent investigation into the bombing spread over hundreds of square miles in a hunt for evidence that had been blown to smithereens.
The FBI's lead investigator in the case, Richard Marquise, was assigned to the monumental task of helping determine what had happened, who was responsible and, eventually, how to prosecute the case. He talked about his book detailing those efforts, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation with Stratfor Chief Security Officer Fred Burton.
[RB: The podcast does not cover the criticisms of the investigation, prosecution and trial that have subsequently been made by the United Nations appointed observer at the trial, Professor Hans Köchler; by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission; by John Ashton; by Dr Morag Kerr and by many other persons and organisations. However it does contain interesting material, particularly on relations between the FBI and the Scottish police, and between the Scottish (and UK) authorities and the United States government.]
Friday 2 November 2018
Air Malta wins out-of-court settlement over Lockerbie programme
[This is the headline over a report published on this date in 1993 in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads as follows:]
Air Malta has won an out-of-court settlement from an independent British television company over a programme it felt implied negligence on its part in the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner bombing, lawyers for the Maltese carrier said yesterday.
Granada Television agreed to pay Air Malta Company Limited £15,005 to settle the dispute in connection with a dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? About the bombing of the Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.
The payment was made without any admission of liability, Air Malta’s lawyers said in a statement.
Air Malta had objected to a reconstruction of how the bomb might have been smuggled into the international airline system. The dramatized segment showed an Arab checking the bag on to an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt.
The Pan Am flight from London to New York, carrying some passengers who had travelled from Frankfurt, was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. Two suspected Libyan intelligence agents have been accused of carrying out the attack but Tripoli has not handed them over for trial.
[RB: Granada was compelled to settle because there was no credible evidence that the bomb started from Luqa Airport in Malta. The judges at the Zeist trial held that it had done so. What follows is my published comment at the time of the verdict:]
The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.
[RB: Dr Morag Kerr has since, in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, conclusively established that the bomb suitcase started its fatal progress at Heathrow Airport, not Luqa.]
Air Malta has won an out-of-court settlement from an independent British television company over a programme it felt implied negligence on its part in the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner bombing, lawyers for the Maltese carrier said yesterday.
Granada Television agreed to pay Air Malta Company Limited £15,005 to settle the dispute in connection with a dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? About the bombing of the Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.
The payment was made without any admission of liability, Air Malta’s lawyers said in a statement.
Air Malta had objected to a reconstruction of how the bomb might have been smuggled into the international airline system. The dramatized segment showed an Arab checking the bag on to an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt.
The Pan Am flight from London to New York, carrying some passengers who had travelled from Frankfurt, was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. Two suspected Libyan intelligence agents have been accused of carrying out the attack but Tripoli has not handed them over for trial.
[RB: Granada was compelled to settle because there was no credible evidence that the bomb started from Luqa Airport in Malta. The judges at the Zeist trial held that it had done so. What follows is my published comment at the time of the verdict:]
The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.
[RB: Dr Morag Kerr has since, in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, conclusively established that the bomb suitcase started its fatal progress at Heathrow Airport, not Luqa.]
Monday 18 June 2018
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.
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.
Tuesday 15 May 2018
What is source of information on which Kenny MacAskill's opinions based?
[The following are two letters submitted a few days ago to The Scotsman but not, as far as I can see, selected for publication:]
As the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie Pam Am disaster approaches it appears as if a light is finally going to be shone into the murkiness surrounding the UK’s worst ever terrorist outrage.
Police Scotland is finalising its four-year investigation into Justice for Megrahi’s (JfM’s) nine criminal allegations against some of those involved in the investigation and trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and is preparing its report for Crown Office.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has decided that it is in the interests of justice to conduct a full review of Mr Megrahi's conviction in order to decide if the case should be referred back to the Court of Appeal.
The Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament continues its consideration of JfM’s petition for a public enquiry and is monitoring the police, Crown Office and SCCRC initiatives.
At such a critical time therefore it is surprising that Kenny MacAskill (Scotsman 10 May - Kenny MacAskill: Lockerbie bomber’s conviction may well collapse) should yet again see it appropriate to speculate publicly about the likely outcome of these enquiries and Mr Megrahi’s guilt.
It must be remembered that Mr MacAskill, as Cabinet Secretary for Justice, made the controversial 2009 decision to release Mr Megrahi on compassionate grounds and in 2013 turned down JfM’s request for a public enquiry, underlining that the Scottish Government 'did not doubt the safety of the conviction'. Yet, since leaving office, he has repeatedly, in writing and in interviews, questioned and dismissed key pieces of the evidence on which Mr Megrahi was convicted. If, as Mr MacAskill avers, that evidence is in doubt, then as he himself acknowledges the case against Mr Megrahi falls.
Both in reaching his decision to release Mr Megrahi and in making the statements that he has since leaving office Mr MacAskill must have received substantial confidential information from the police, Crown Office and other sources which he now chooses to release into the public arena before the various investigations are complete and apparently without regard to the effect this might have.
Has Mr MacAskill reported his concerns to Police Scotland and/or Crown Office? Where did he obtain the information on which he is basing his speculation and opinions? Was this confidential information received while acting as Cabinet Secretary for Justice and should it have been used for public speculation and profit?
It is in the interests of justice that these questions are asked and that Mr MacAskill passes any relevant evidence to the authorities as a matter of urgency.
As the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie Pam Am disaster approaches it appears as if a light is finally going to be shone into the murkiness surrounding the UK’s worst ever terrorist outrage.
Police Scotland is finalising its four-year investigation into Justice for Megrahi’s (JfM’s) nine criminal allegations against some of those involved in the investigation and trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and is preparing its report for Crown Office.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has decided that it is in the interests of justice to conduct a full review of Mr Megrahi's conviction in order to decide if the case should be referred back to the Court of Appeal.
The Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament continues its consideration of JfM’s petition for a public enquiry and is monitoring the police, Crown Office and SCCRC initiatives.
At such a critical time therefore it is surprising that Kenny MacAskill (Scotsman 10 May - Kenny MacAskill: Lockerbie bomber’s conviction may well collapse) should yet again see it appropriate to speculate publicly about the likely outcome of these enquiries and Mr Megrahi’s guilt.
It must be remembered that Mr MacAskill, as Cabinet Secretary for Justice, made the controversial 2009 decision to release Mr Megrahi on compassionate grounds and in 2013 turned down JfM’s request for a public enquiry, underlining that the Scottish Government 'did not doubt the safety of the conviction'. Yet, since leaving office, he has repeatedly, in writing and in interviews, questioned and dismissed key pieces of the evidence on which Mr Megrahi was convicted. If, as Mr MacAskill avers, that evidence is in doubt, then as he himself acknowledges the case against Mr Megrahi falls.
Both in reaching his decision to release Mr Megrahi and in making the statements that he has since leaving office Mr MacAskill must have received substantial confidential information from the police, Crown Office and other sources which he now chooses to release into the public arena before the various investigations are complete and apparently without regard to the effect this might have.
Has Mr MacAskill reported his concerns to Police Scotland and/or Crown Office? Where did he obtain the information on which he is basing his speculation and opinions? Was this confidential information received while acting as Cabinet Secretary for Justice and should it have been used for public speculation and profit?
It is in the interests of justice that these questions are asked and that Mr MacAskill passes any relevant evidence to the authorities as a matter of urgency.
Iain A J McKie
Secretary of Justice for Megrahi
I am sorry to see that Kenny MacAskill's article contains a number of easily refutable errors, but I value his continued contributions.
One of the more obvious errors is that there is, so far as we know, no proof that Gaddafi ever admitted responsibility for Lockerbie.
That means that when, as I believe will eventually happen, the Megrahi verdict is seen as untenable, it is likely that many will continue to believe that 'it must have been Libya's work through Malta somehow'.
When I last met members of the Tripoli based Government after the murder of Gaddafi, senior members were seized with a determination to blame Lockerbie onto their fallen leader, perhaps in the hope of reducing blame on others. It seemed to be a belief without any 'proof', except for their own enthusiasm for it.
Among all the conspiracy theories of thirty years, my friend has always been William of Occam [1287-1347] who seems to have believed quaintly that the simplest explanation compatible with the actual facts was the most likely to be true. Here are some facts about Lockerbie, suggesting a relatively simple explanation:-
One of the more obvious errors is that there is, so far as we know, no proof that Gaddafi ever admitted responsibility for Lockerbie.
That means that when, as I believe will eventually happen, the Megrahi verdict is seen as untenable, it is likely that many will continue to believe that 'it must have been Libya's work through Malta somehow'.
When I last met members of the Tripoli based Government after the murder of Gaddafi, senior members were seized with a determination to blame Lockerbie onto their fallen leader, perhaps in the hope of reducing blame on others. It seemed to be a belief without any 'proof', except for their own enthusiasm for it.
Among all the conspiracy theories of thirty years, my friend has always been William of Occam [1287-1347] who seems to have believed quaintly that the simplest explanation compatible with the actual facts was the most likely to be true. Here are some facts about Lockerbie, suggesting a relatively simple explanation:-
1. Iran had an airbus containing 290 innocent victims destroyed by a US missile 5 months before Lockerbie, and received no timeous apology whatever for that dreadful error. Indeed the man responsible for firing the missile, Captain Will Rogers of the USS Vincennes, received a medal.
2. Iran publicly swore revenge.
3.Iran was linked to the Damascus based terror group known as the PFLP-GC and their bomb maker, the Jordanian, Marwan Khreesat. The CIA knew this and also were aware of a payment by Iran into a numbered PFLP-GC bank account discovered in the possession of an arrested member of that group.
4. A letter from the King of Jordan to John Major claiming that Lockerbie was not the work of the Libyans was in possession of the Zeist prosecution, but when later requested for defence purposes was hastily given a PII certificate by the then Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, at the request of Scotland's Advocate General.
5. Kreesat had developed anti-aircraft bombs based on an air pressure sensitive switch and crude timer. His bombs were not adjustable, were stable at ground level, but constructed to explode automatically within 30 - 45 minutes of take off if placed in an aircraft.
6. A detailed analysis of these devices by the West German police had been sent to UK and US authorities well before Lockerbie, confirming that not all the examples of these devices were thought to have been recovered from the terrorists.
7. Steps taken to block insertion of such devices at Heathrow were wildly inappropriate.
8. In the light of Morag Kerr's book Adequately explained by stupidity? there is powerful reasoned argument for re-assessment of the happenings at Heathrow that evening, and in particular uncertainty over the origins of two suitcases loaded there aboard the fatal flight, and placed close to the origin of the explosion.
9. The fatal flight exploded in the very middle of the designed fixed flight time for Khreesat's devices.
These are but a few simple facts from among many others. It is to be hoped that the question of ingestion of the bomb at Heathrow, not just Malta or Frankfurt as well as the bomb's most probable origins, will soon accompany new steps by the Scottish authorities to review this dreadful case in detail, on behalf of the late Mr Megrahi's family.
Dr Jim Swire
Friday 16 December 2016
Lockerbie is a stain on the Scottish legal system
[What follows is the text of an article by James Cusick that was published in The Independent on this date in 2013:]
After 25 years of denials and diplomatic games, we're yet to learn the truth about the Lockerbie bombing
It's sometimes said in Scotland that you can't escape from the past and, like sand clinging to wet feet, it's carried around as a burden. Just how uncomfortable the burden can be will be evident in important rooms in Edinburgh, London and Washington during the next week or so as governing politicians, distinguished lawyers, high-ranking police officers, intelligence officials and interconnected diplomats continue nearly a quarter of a century of denial and obfuscation. The conversations may be similar because the inconsistent official explanation of how and why a Boeing 747 was blown out of the sky above the Dumfries town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 remains a truth too far.
Some 38 minutes after Pan-Am Flight 103 Maid of the Seas left Heathrow en route to New York, a bomb built into a Toshiba radio-cassette player, placed inside a Samsonite suitcase, went off. The brief horror inside the aircraft's cabin and flight deck is unimaginable. All on board the disintegrating jet were killed – 243 passengers and 16 crew – and 11 people died on the ground in Lockerbie. It remains the deadliest single terror attack on European soil.
In the fantasy world of Hollywood CSI science, Lockerbie would be a closed case. Meticulous factual analysis would be unchallengeable. Justice would be seen to be done. Reputations would be forged by its success. Feature films would celebrate dogged heroes determined to find the truth. The reality? Despite a mountain of evidence and a supposedly ground-breaking Scottish trial on "neutral" territory in the Netherlands before learned judges, Lockerbie remains a byword for state silence on evidential inconsistencies, surrounded by dark, covert diplomatic games.
A Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted of mass murder in 2001 and sentenced to 27 years in jail. In 2009, supposedly on compassionate grounds, he returned home to die of prostate cancer, which he did in 2012. He remains the official answer to the question: who did this? However, the evidence against Megrahi now wouldn't stand up in any court – unless that court were one where verdicts are determined ahead of what's heard, and any duty to disclose evidence which doesn't suit the prosecuting authorities is seen as an unnecessary luxury.
Lockerbie, then, is a stain on the Scottish legal system; dirty judicial laundry that Alex Salmond and his nationalist administration would rather remained bagged up until well after next year's independence vote. This is one reputation which, if tarnished, would have immediate political implications.
In the months after the mid-air explosion, debris was recovered from hundreds of square miles of Scottish and Northumberland countryside. Pieces from an aluminium cargo hold container – marked AVE4041PA – were pieced back together. Official evidence by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch identified this container as the location of the blast.
For the Semtex hidden inside the radio to have had the effect it did, breaking through the fuselage and creating a small hole that led to the "skin" of the aircraft peeling off at 31,000ft, the suitcase must have occupied a precise bottom-row location inside AVE4041, close to the edge of the plane's hull.
Seven aluminium containers had been filled with the luggage of Pan-Am passengers who had checked in at Heathrow's Terminal 3. The eighth container, AVE4041, was for baggage from a transfer flight from Frankfurt. No security screening of the Frankfurt luggage took place. It was assumed that this had been done in Germany. The feeder flight was due at 17.20. Pan-Am 103 was timed to push off at 18.00.
One of the staff in the loading area where AVE4041 was being filled was John Bedford. He told police in a statement given in January 1989 that he noticed a hard-shell Samonsite suitcase had already been loaded into the bottom of the "tin" container before the feeder flight had even landed.
If an inquiry is ever allowed to re-examine the Heathrow luggage procedures, security in the baggage area at Terminal 3 and the timing and chances of a bag from a late-arriving feeder flight being accidentally placed exactly where needed to blow a hole in a 747's fuselage, the currently accepted account will be made to look ridiculous. Adequately Explained by Stupidity, a new book by Dr Morag Kerr, from the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) team, focuses largely on Heathrow.
Bedford's account has altered over time, but what he said first remains crucial. If correct, what happened before Heathrow – in Frankfurt and Malta, where Megrahi was supposed to have placed the unaccompanied suitcase bomb on flight KM108 from Luqa, which later transferred to Pan-Am 103 – is all irrelevant.
Take Malta out of the equation, and Libya's alleged role in the bombing fades dramatically. But how did Libya figure in the first place? If Flight 103 had been delayed, which is common enough at busy Heathrow, the bomb, if on a simple timer set in Malta, could have exploded with the plane yet to take off. A small hole at ground level would have killed no one. But if the device used was barometric, triggered by atmospheric pressure levels, why did it not detonate on the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow flights?
Terrorist groups in the frame in the early weeks and months of Lockerbie had links to the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians and Iranians. Libya would have been in the mix. The motives were varied – anything from state-sponsored revenge against the US, to murkier aspects of covert bilateral deals that backfired. The initial suspects were from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PLFP-GC), a Syrian-based terror group headed by Ahmed Jibril. A Maltese chapter of the group was on international intelligence radar. Frankfurt, as the location where the bomb was apparently loaded, had not been discounted.
Another early suspect was Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian member of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF). When Talb was arrested in Sweden on suspicion of being involved in the bombing of a train in Denmark, items of clothing found at his house were traced to a Maltese manufacturer.
According to informed media reports in 1989, Talb had links to the PLFP-GC and had been in Malta with a known terrorist bomb expert. This information was regarded as sound enough for Scottish police to plan a trip to Sweden to interview Talb in prison. The case against him never progressed. However, a report by Megrahi's team in 2002 suggested that Talb was still in the frame at precisely the time that attention switched to Megrahi.
In January 1989, a scrap of shirt collar was found in the area of debris where most of AVE4041 was recovered, The singed material held fragments of the Toshiba radio casing, some speaker mesh and a fragment of a printed circuit board. That fingernail-sized bit of board was to gain prominence in the summer of 1990.
The Scottish police failed to source the origin of this evidence, labelled PT/35b. But a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI in June 1990 matched the circuit board to a timer held in a Langley archive that had been part of a coup attempt in Togo, West Africa. At any future inquiry, the FBI should be asked, why they visited the Zurich offices of Mebo, the timer company, a month before the Scottish police were told of the timer's ID.
The link to Libya was now advanced. It was claimed that the PT/35 fragment was part of an MST-13 timer unit – a specific Mebo order from the Libyan armed forces. By January the following year, Megrahi, a Tripoli airport control manager briefly assigned to Libyan intelligence for bureaucratic rather than specialist tradecraft reasons, was on the investigation's radar.
For a journalist who has observed 25 years of the changing importance of key Lockerbie evidence, examined allegations of deliberate non-disclosure, new whodunnit theories and material reinterpreted for the appeals launched by Megrahi's lawyers, there's an overwhelming sense of one thing – a lack of certainty. What is certain is that the Mebo fragment, a principal piece of evidence against Megrahi, holds none of the hallmarks claimed for it by the prosecution at the Camp Zeist trial in the Netherlands. Mebo gave the investigation control samples from the original batch that had been produced in an outsourced deal with a company called Thuring. Expert technical witnesses claimed that there was no material difference between the Thuring sample and the fragment recovered from the debris. That wasn't true.
During preparations for Megrahi's second appeal, tests showed that the PT/35 fragment was manufactured with a pure tin coating, and the Thuring sample was covered with a standard alloy of tin and lead. The pure tin manufacturing method had never been used by Thuring and all the circuit boards supplied to the Libyan armed forces involved the Thuring process. So whatever PT/35b was, it did not match the timers ordered by and supplied to Libya.
The Mebo-Libya link was crucial to Megrahi's conviction. This is still regarded as key evidence. But without the Malta flight connection and without the timer fragment's Libyan origins, the case against him falls apart. If these developments had been openly scrutinised in court at a second Megrahi appeal, the Scottish police and judiciary risked being made to look, at best, like a collection of amateur investigators.
Details of a second appeal in 2007 were examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The commission's report granted leave for the Megrahi conviction to be challenged. Six grounds were cited as cause for serious concern, including undisclosed payments of around £2m by the US Justice department to Tony and Paul Gauci, the owners of a clothes shop in Sliema, near Malta's airport. Like the Samsonite case's journey from Luqa to Heathrow, and PT/35's link to Libya, the case against Megrahi required someone to link him to the suitcase. Tony Gauci provided the link.
Among the recovered debris from AVE4041 were the remains of a pair of trousers which had been close to the bomb. The label was intact. The manufacturer was traced to Malta and a clothing company called Yorkie, with a unique order supplied to Mary's House, Gauci's shop. Whatever the inconsistencies in Gauci's account, the clothes packed into the suitcase that sat alongside the bomb were bought at Mary's House. But the Crown's certainty that it was Megrahi who bought them is far from clear. Gauci's statements as to the dates when Malta's Christmas lights were on, and whether or not the purchases had been made when it was raining are key factors that placed Megrahi on the island at specific times. Again, this evidence has been shown to be inconsistent.
His identification of Megrahi was crucial to the verdict. However, the SCCRC acknowledged that if the payments to Gauci had been revealed, then this "was capable of affecting the course of the evidence and the eventual outcome of the trial". The review commission also found that three days before Gauci picked out the Libyan in a formal identification parade, he had held a magazine featuring an article on the Lockerbie bombing, complete with a picture of Megrahi as the culprit. In December 1988, Megrahi had indeed been in Malta. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Gauci's account of the man who bought the clothes that ended up inside the Samsonite suitcase was influenced by the prospect of a sizeable US reward.
The negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi that brought Megrahi and his co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, to the Netherlands in 1999 involved Libya offering £8m in compensation to the victims' families. In return, the United Nations lifted sanctions that were crippling Libya's economy. Reward, blackmail or diplomatic and tribal trading? Whatever the true background, there is still a whiff of West and Middle East deal-making surrounding Lockerbie.
"If not Megrahi then who?" should be the question troubling Scotland's criminal justice system 25 years on, because those who brought down Pan-Am Flight 103 have still not been brought to justice. This anniversary, supposed to remember the innocent dead, is also marked by an ongoing shame – the pretence that a Scottish court got it right. It didn't. And as Martin Luther King said: "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Monday 30 May 2016
MacAskill is saying that at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice
[What follows is the complete text of James Robertson’s review of Kenny MacAskill’s The Lockerbie Bombing. The shorter version published in The Herald can be read here.]
In May 2000, two Libyan citizens, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, went on trial before a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. They were accused of acting in concert to place a bomb contained in a suitcase on a plane flying from Malta to Frankfurt; the suitcase was then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to another flight going to London Heathrow, and there transferred again to Pan Am flight 103, the target, which was blown up, en route to New York, over the town of Lockerbie on the evening of 21 December 1988. All 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people on the ground, were killed.
In January 2001, the court acquitted Fhimah, but found Megrahi guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He remains the only person convicted of involvement in the bombing. To many people, the verdict did not make sense then, and subsequent revelations have only reinforced a widespread belief that Megrahi was the victim of a shocking miscarriage of justice.
This book is former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill’s account of the atrocity, of the subsequent investigation and trial, and of his own part in what followed. In 2009, it fell to him, in his ministerial role, to decide whether to grant Megrahi, who was by then suffering from terminal prostate cancer, compassionate release from prison. That decision – to allow Megrahi to go home to Libya to die – forms the centrepiece of Mr MacAskill’s narrative, but it is not the most revealing part.
The book suffers from Mr MacAskill’s inflated and syntactically-challenged writing style: ‘The investigation, meanwhile, marched meticulously on. The dynamics of both tension and camaraderie between various agencies continued, though in the main all worked well with each other.’ The narrative is scattered with words like ‘literally’ (bodies were ‘literally destroyed, smashed to smithereens’), and ‘doubtless’ (a prop for assertions unsupported by any evidence). Mr MacAskill deprives many of his sentences of verbs, and fattens others with clichés. Readers who might reasonably expect a full set of references to back up his account of this long, controversial and unfinished story, will be disappointed: there is no index, no bibliography and, of the 93 footnotes, 67 come from just four sources, one of these being the Scottish Government’s own website. A cover quotation from Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer, credits Mr MacAskill with a ‘forensic attention to detail’. I beg to differ.
None of this would matter if Mr MacAskill were writing about UFOs or his favourite movies. His subject, however, is the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history – an event he chooses to describe on page 1 as ‘one of the greatest whodunnits of all time’. It matters greatly that a trained lawyer should use imprecise and careless language to discuss complicated questions of evidence. It matters, for example, that, in referring to the timer which the court at Camp Zeist accepted was used to detonate the bomb, Mr MacAskill calls it ‘the MST-13 model, known as an ice-cube timer’. In fact, MST-13 timers and ‘ice-cube’ timers were completely different, and that difference – as the court’s judgement made clear – was crucial to the prosecution’s case. If the bomb was triggered by an ‘ice-cube’ timer – as many critics of the investigation believe it was – then had it been loaded in Malta it would have exploded between there and Frankfurt, rather than 38 minutes after takeoff from Heathrow. Such a basic mistake does not inspire confidence that Mr MacAskill has a full grasp of his subject.
His publishers, Biteback Publishing – owned by Lord ‘Call Me Dave’ Ashcroft and former blogger and Conservative candidate Iain Dale – do not seem unduly bothered by these shortcomings. Could it be that they don’t mind if the book damages the reputations of the author and the SNP administrations in which he served?
The most astonishing passages occur when Mr MacAskill offers his opinion as to who planted the bomb. Syntax purists, look away now: ‘Megrahi had been to Malta the month before, which was probably preparatory for the scheme and involved discussions on the logistics of clothes, the suitcase and the bomb equipment. He may even have brought the timers in with him.’ At this point Mr MacAskill ratchets up his use of the conditional tense – always a handy tool when indulging in pure speculation: ‘He [Megrahi] would meet with others in the [Libyan] embassy…he would not be the bomb maker. That would have been prepared in the Libyan People’s Bureau…’ Again, there is no attempt to substantiate these wild surmises.
Mr MacAskill proceeds to demolish the findings of the Camp Zeist court. Of the items bought in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta which were packed in the bomb suitcase, he writes: ‘The clothes were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi.’ Correctly describing as ‘rather implausible’ the evidence produced by the prosecution that Megrahi was the purchaser, MacAskill continues, ‘But, if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved.’ Really? How?
Megrahi’s role, it seems, was to fly from Tripoli into Luqa Airport in Malta on 20 December 1988 ‘with the suitcase that was to transport the bomb’. ‘The suitcase,’ we are informed, ‘was a Samsonite model, sold heavily in the Middle East market’ – as if this proves anything. These statements not only disregard the fact that Megrahi and his co-accused Fhimah (the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa) arrived in Malta on that date with no check-in luggage, they also rely solely on the testimony of a CIA-paid informer Abdul Majid Giaka, whom the judges dismissed as an utterly unreliable witness, concluding, ‘We cannot accept the evidence of Abdul Majid that he saw the two accused arriving with a suitcase. It follows that there is no evidence that either of them had any luggage, let alone a brown Samsonite suitcase.’
Mr MacAskill wades deeper into the mire. Further undermining the Camp Zeist judgement, he writes that, on the morning of 21 December, Megrahi took the suitcase (now apparently loaded with the bomb) to the airport, ‘but it was Fhimah who would get it airside and beyond security.…Placing a bag behind and into the system was a relatively simple task given the accreditation and access Fhimah had.’ At the trial the Crown argued that just such a sequence of events had occurred. The judges, however, concluded that ‘there is no evidence in our opinion which can be used to justify this proposition and therefore at best it must be in the realm of speculation. Furthermore, there is the formidable objection that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the second accused was even at Luqa airport on 21 December.’ Fhimah was consequently acquitted.
The judges also observed that ‘the absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [at Luqa] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.’ In just a few bold sentences, Mr MacAskill has completely overcome this difficulty.
Mr MacAskill finds it ‘hard to imagine how there could have been any other verdict in the circumstances.’ This is strange, as neither prosecution, defence teams, the families of the victims nor most independent observers expected one of the accused to walk free and the other to be found guilty. Mr MacAskill continues: ‘In many ways, as with Megrahi and Fhimah, Scots law and its judges were simply actors in the theatre that had been created to circumvent and solve both a diplomatic impasse and political problem. Scots law convened the trial, and yet found itself on trial.’
Read those sentences carefully: a former Justice Secretary is effectively saying that, at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice. For how many years have critics of the proceedings been saying this, while Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Government and the Crown Office have maintained that justice prevailed?
Mr MacAskill’s solving of the problem of how the bomb was placed on flight KM180 relieves him of the need to address with any seriousness the accumulated mass of other evidence pointing in other directions. He pays no attention to the post-trial discrediting of the infamous timer circuit-board fragment linking Libya to the bomb, nor to Morag Kerr’s convincing explanation, in her 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, of the much more likely scenario that the bomb was loaded directly onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow. He skims lightly over the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s 2007 report which indicated at least six grounds on which Megrahi’s conviction might be unsafe. Of John Ashton’s 2012 book Megrahi: You Are My Jury, the most comprehensive analysis of the entire Lockerbie saga, he writes, ‘There was little new that came out in the book or media other than a rehash of what had gone before and the same lines from all parties involved.’ Mr MacAskill, it seems, is not impressed by arguments that really are based on a forensic attention to detail.
To summarise: Mr MacAskill asserts that Fhimah, acquitted by the court, planted the bomb, and that Megrahi, found guilty by the court, did not buy the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop. He also acknowledges that without Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the purchaser, the case against him would have collapsed. This, then, is the new position of the Cabinet Secretary for Justice who, while in office, repeatedly articulated the Scottish Government’s view that it ‘did not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction’. So, too, did the then First Minister Alex Salmond, who nevertheless endorses Mr MacAskill’s book as ‘the most credible explanation yet published of who was really responsible for the downing of Pan Am flight 103’. They cannot have it both ways: either they think the judges got it right, or they think they got it wrong.
Mr MacAskill admits that, had Megrahi’s second appeal reached court, his conviction might well have been overturned. He then makes this shameful comment: ‘But, this account of how the bombing was carried out and by whom is based on information gathered meticulously by police and prosecutors from the US, Scotland and elsewhere. It’s also founded on intelligence and sources not available for a court or that have only come to light thereafter.’
Well, that’s all right then. Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, the grounds of his conviction were shaky at best, but we know from other sources that he was involved and anyway he’s dead now, so that’s good enough for the Scottish justice system.
If Mr MacAskill does have information pertinent to this still ‘live’ case, he is duty-bound to share it with the police. Police Scotland are currently concluding a major, three-year investigation, ‘Operation Sandwood’, into nine allegations of possible criminality on the part of police officers and Crown representatives during the original investigation and trial. These allegations were made by the organisation Justice for Megrahi (of which I am a member) and six of them were first drawn directly to Mr MacAskill’s attention, in strict confidence, on 13 September 2012. They were passed from his office to the Crown Office, which immediately, before the police had even begun to investigate them, made a public statement declaring the allegations to be ‘without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded’. Some of the allegations relate to the very aspects of the case that Mr MacAskill now says the court got wrong.
For more than a quarter of a century the Lockerbie case has been a dark stain on the Scottish justice system. Kenny MacAskill rubs and rubs at that stain. Whatever his intent, the effect is not to make it vanish but to make it look far worse.
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