Lockerbie justice prevented by political interference

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today’s edition of The Sunday Times. It reads as follows:]

Your article “MacAskill cites flaws in case against Megrahi” (News, last week) suggests behind-the-scenes moves by America to befriend Libya in search of good trade relations at the time of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s release by Kenny MacAskill.

Those who watched the trial of Megrahi at Zeist unfold in 2000/1 became aware of extraordinary intrusions into court practice on behalf of the US. These included an abortive attempt to deny the court access to the contents of CIA cables which showed that its much-hyped “star witness” Jiaka was in fact known to the CIA to be a liar and a fantasist. The court rejected his evidence as unreliable except for still accepting that Megrahi “must have” carried a sinister suitcase into Luqa airport on the day of the tragedy.

The plot and the motives and methods of execution for revenge seem straightforward enough. Iran used the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command as mercenaries to exact revenge against the USA. What we need is to understand why the stories about Gaddafi’s Libya being involved were invented and supported for so long, and by whom.

Out of respect for the innocent victims of Lockerbie, on the plane and on the ground, justice must never be allowed to be polluted by international politics in such a way ever again.

[RB: Here is the text of Dr Swire’s letter as submitted to The Sunday Times:]

Your article today suggests behind the scenes moves by the US, to befriend Libya in search of good trade relations at the time of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Megrahi's release by Kenny MacAskill.

Those who watched the trial of Megrahi at Zeist unfold back in 2000/1 became aware of extraordinary intrusions into court practice on behalf of the US. These included an abortive attempt, supported to a remarkable extent by Scotland's then Lord Advocate, Lord Colin Boyd, to deny the Court access to the contents of CIA cables which showed that their much hyped 'star witness' aka Jiaka was in fact known to the CIA to be a liar and a fantasist.

The court rejected his evidence as unreliable except for still accepting  that Megrahi 'must have' carried a sinister suitcase into Luqa airport on the day of the tragedy.

Their Lordships had to admit that there wasn't any evidence that Megrahi used his presence there to put a suitcase of any kind onto Air Malta Flight KM180, (presumably on the hope by him that it would be carried round via Frankfurt to Heathrow and PA103).

For such a far fetched plan to work, a long running timer and a lot of luck with transfers at Frankfurt and Heathrow in the pre-Christmas rush would be required.

Post-trial evidence has emerged that a key piece of forensic evidence accepted by the court as part of just such a timer was in fact a fake and could not possibly have come from the Libyan stockpile. It was a clever fake and must have been produced by an organization having the skills of advanced circuit board manufacture at its disposal.

Likewise, not one credible piece of evidence in all these years has emerged confirming any of the other alleged examples of activities indicating Libyan involvement in the plot.

Our own William of Occam, inventor of Occam's razor: (interpreted as the belief that the simplest  explanation which agrees with all the known facts of a case is the most likely to be correct) can perhaps contribute here.

Details well set out in the book Adequately Explained By Stupidity? by Morag Kerr show that evidence from Heathrow, led in court but rejected, indicate that the suitcase containing the bomb was loaded onto Pan Am 103 under Heathrow baggage handler Mr Bedford and his assistant Mr Kamboj; having entered his baggage container well before the connecting flight for 'Megrahi's bomb' had even landed at Heathrow from Frankfurt. [RB: Dr Swire is mistaken on this point. The evidence discussed by Dr Kerr was not led in court and rejected: it was not led at all, though some of it was known to the Crown and not disclosed to the defence.]

At the same time the Syrian terror group the PFLP-GC had developed and tested anti-aircraft bombs whose electronics dictated that if they could simply be got aboard a target aircraft at the airport of take off, they would automatically explode around 40 minutes post take off by sensing the climb to cruise altitude.

The Lockerbie flight flew for 39 minutes from Heathrow until over Lockerbie.

Why would the PFLP-GC allow one of their devices to be used at Heathrow, and how would they get it to Heathrow anyway? The PFLP-GC had close ties to Teheran for funding and were near bankruptcy in 1988. After Lockerbie they were solvent, while at Lockerbie it seems likely that Teheran got its widely expected revenge for the shooting down of one of their Airbuses by a US missile cruiser the USS Vincennes in the Gulf, with the loss of 290 Iranian civilian lives, five months before Lockerbie.

It also so happens that an Iran Air transport aircraft landed at Heathrow on the 21st of December 1988, long before the flight from Frankfurt had arrived.

The plot and the motives and methods of execution for revenge seem straight forward enough. Iran used the PFLP-GC as mercenaries to exact revenge against the USA. What we need is to understand why the stories about Gaddafi's Libya being involved were invented and supported for so long, and by whom.

Out of respect for the innocent victims of Lockerbie, on the plane and on the ground, Justice must never be allowed to be polluted by international politics in such away ever again.

MacAskill’s book has a point of ‘enormous significance’

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Morag Kerr published yesterday on the website of The National. It reads as follows:]

May I correct an inadvertent error in your article “MacAskill reported over Lockerbie book” (The National, May 17)?

The article implied that the material in my own book, Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies was included by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in its six grounds for believing that the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing might have been a miscarriage of justice. This is not the case.

The six grounds cited by the SCCRC in its 2007 report all relate to the identification of Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes packed around the bomb.

As your article correctly observed, Megrahi’s actual appearance differed wildly from the witness Tony Gauci’s original description of the purchaser, and the weather conditions (and incidentally evidence relating to the Christmas lights in the town) placed the purchase on a day when there is no evidence Megrahi was even on Malta.This flawed identification was absolutely fundamental to the original conviction of Megrahi in 2001, and Mr MacAskill’s repudiation of the identification in his forthcoming book is thus of enormous significance.

My own book deals principally with a different aspect of the case, that of the method by which the bomb suitcase was introduced into the airline baggage system.

This analysis was not carried out until after the SCCRC had completed its investigation, and thus it was not included in its 2007 report.

The issue is however now assuming overwhelming importance.

It appears that both Kenny MacAskill and Alex Salmond (on Scotland Tonight, May 16) now accept that Megrahi did not buy these clothes, nevertheless they continue to insist that he was “involved somehow”, based principally on his presence at Malta airport on the morning of the disaster.

The original Lockerbie investigation believed that the bomb suitcase was smuggled on to an Air Malta flight at that time.This belief was however fundamentally mistaken, based on a flawed and incomplete analysis of the recovered crash debris.

Careful analysis of the blast-damaged suitcases and adjacent items shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the bomb was in a suitcase seen in the baggage container at Heathrow an hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed.

Mr MacAskill is thus incorrect in his assertion that “there is no suggestion” that the bomb suitcase was not transferred to the Pan Am feeder flight at Frankfurt. The evidence for this having happened is extremely questionable. The evidence for the bomb’s presence at Heathrow is, in contrast, well-nigh irrefutable. This being the case, not only did Megrahi not buy the clothes, he was a thousand miles away from the actual scene of the crime.

I do not know who carried out the Lockerbie bombing, still less who masterminded it.

It is plain that this will never be known until the authorities understand that they need to be looking for people who were in London in the afternoon, not on Malta in the morning.

MacAskill concession destroys foundation of Megrahi conviction

[Today’s Scottish newspapers have at last latched on to the most important revelation in the extract from Kenny MacAskill’s Lockerbie book that was published in The Sunday Times this week:]

The National:  Campaigners who believe Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent of the Lockerbie bombing have reported former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to Police Scotland over his new book on the atrocity and the compassionate release of the only man ever convicted of it.

Justice for Megrahi had previously made a series of criminal allegations concerning the investigation and trial which they said would throw serious doubt on Megrahi’s conviction and “point to possible malpractice by Crown Office personnel, police and other prosecution witnesses”.

A spokesman for the group told The National yesterday: “We have made a formal report to Police Scotland in respect of Mr MacAskill’s book as we believe that some of the contents relate directly to our nine criminal allegations which are currently being investigated by the police.”

In a statement, a Police Scotland spokesman said: “We are aware of the imminent publication of the book and will assess any new information should it come to light.”

MacAskill’s book The Lockerbie Bombing: The Search for Justice is being serialised by a Sunday newspaper but has already come under fire from the architect of the Camp Zeist trial of Megrahi, the only man to be convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. Professor Robert Black QC said the book casts further doubt on the conviction.

MacAskill took the decision to release Megrahi in August 2009 on compassionate grounds. He was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and died three years later in Libya.

Black, emeritus professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, told The National the most important thing to emerge from the book’s early extracts concerned the clothes that linked Megrahi to the bombing of PanAm flight 103.

He said MacAskill had written that “clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved”.

However, Black said: “This is huge. If the trial court hadn’t concluded that Megrahi bought the clothes in Gauci’s shop, he couldn’t have been convicted. This finding was absolutely crucial to the verdict.

“So Kenny is saying that the court was wrong on a matter absolutely essential to its verdict.”

Black also said MacAskill had cited among the reasons for his belief that Libya and Megrahi had been involved in the bombing “an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003”.

But he said: “There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran.”

Black added there had been no mention of findings from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that the conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice on six grounds. He said they included evidence in Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.

This, he said, established beyond reasonable doubt “that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived”. (...)

Controversial identification was key to Megrahi's conviction

Central to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction was his identification by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shop-owner, who testified that the Libyan had bought clothes that were later deemed to have been packed in the lethal suitcase bomb that brought down the PanAm flight.

In 19 separate statements made to police before the trial, Gauci had failed to positively identify Megrahi as the purchaser. During the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, the shopkeeper was asked several times if he recognised anyone in the courtroom, but could only answer when a prosecutor pointed to Megrahi sitting in the left of the dock.

Gauci had also told police that the man who bought the clothes on either November 23 or December 7 was 6ft tall and more than 50 years of age. Megrahi was 5ft 8in tall, and in 1988 he was 36.

The shopkeeper said the buyer also purchased an umbrella because it was raining heavily outside. Yet Maltese meteorological records introduced by the defence team showed that while it did rain all day on November 23, there was almost certainly no rain on December 7.

If it did rain on the later date, the shower would have been barely enough to wet the pavement.

The Herald:  Campaigners claim a former Scottish minister has called into question the conviction of the only man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing.

Former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill controversially released Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds after he was diagnosed with cancer.

But in a new book Mr MacAskill appears to dismiss crucial evidence that helped to convict Mr Megrahi.

He writes that he does not believe the claim he bought clothes in a store in Malta that were packed around the bomb.

He maintains, however. that Mr Megrahi played a role.

All 259 people on board and 11 on the ground where killed when a Pan-Am airliner exploded over Lockerbie in 1988.

James Robertson, of the Justice for Megrahi campaign group, said that MacAskill’s comments raised serious questions.

He said: “The most interesting thing in all this is that Kenny MacAskill has said that he does not believe that Megrahi was the man who bought those clothes.

"But this calls into account the whole Camp Zeist judgement and it would mean that Megrahi could not have possibly been behind the bombing.

“As Justice minister Kenny MacAskill repeatedly stuck to the line that he had no doubt Megrahi was guilty, but now appears to be saying the opposite.

“Alex Salmond also stuck to this line, and the Justice for Megrahi campaign will be asking if what was said in public was the same as was said in private.”

Trade deal link to Lockerbie bomber release

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Sunday Times. It reads in part:]

The politician who freed the Lockerbie bomber today reveals the full story of how the Westminster government made him eligible for return to Libya, including the role of trade deals potentially worth £13bn to British companies.

In a dramatic new book, serialised exclusively in The Sunday Times, former justice minister Kenny MacAskill also admits his decision to free one of the world’s most notorious terrorists was partly motivated by a fear of violent reprisals against Scots if the killer died in Scottish custody.

His account divulges:

•Ministers refused to travel with MacAskill amid threats to his life;

•The SNP sought concessions from Westminster in exchange for Megrahi’s possible return;

•His view on who was really responsible for Britain’s worst terrorist attack.

MacAskill claims the UK government made Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi eligible for return to his Libyan home under a “trade for terrorist plan” to try to secure a massive oil and gas deal for BP which was in doubt. He says Jack Straw, then UK justice secretary, shared the details in a “highly confidential” telephone call which casts new light on a controversy that has dogged Tony Blair since his 2007 “deal in the desert” with the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

That deal was to give British industry access to Libyan oil reserves worth up to £13bn and £350m of defence contracts as the former rogue state was rehabilitated, and involved a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) allowing offenders to be moved between the countries.

Six months after that desert summit, MacAskill claims Straw warned him Gadaffi was threatening to cancel the energy contact and award it to a US firm unless Megrahi was covered by the PTA, after learning the new SNP regime was trying to exempt him.

Sensing that the British government, which had previously been prepared to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, was going to give in to Libya’s demands, MacAskill reveals that he and Salmond then tried to extract concessions in exchange for the agreement.

Although the Scottish government denied this five years ago, MacAskill says the concessions sought were changes to the law to give Holyrood power to regulate firearms and to curb lawsuits from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had been forced to use slop-out buckets in their cells instead of toilets.

Straw rejected MacAskill’s claims as a “highly embroidered version of what happened” while Salmond said his administration “played the whole thing with a straight bat from start to finish”. (...)

Within weeks of the UK government agreeing not to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, Gadaffi ratified the BP deal with Libya’s national oil corporation.

Negotiations for Megrahi’s return were interrupted after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and the Scottish government opted to free him on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in Libya three years later.

A spokesman for BP said the company had no comment on the UK government’s actions or discussions.

In The Lockerbie Bombing, to be published on May 26, MacAskill reveals he feared the potential for a violent backlash in the Arab or wider Muslim world if Megrahi had been allowed to die while in Scottish custody.

Just a few weeks before MacAskill’s announcement to free him, UK hostages taken prisoner in Iraq had been murdered, which followed the execution of other Western nationals captured in the area.

He writes: “There was hostility to the West and ordinary citizens were becoming targets. Most in North Africa or the wider Arab world neither knew of Scotland nor cared about it. I was aware of the deaths of prison officers that had occurred in Northern Ireland where some had died through terrorist attack.

“The last thing I wanted was to have Scotland become a place that was demonised and its citizens targeted. I would not allow Scottish oil workers or others, wherever they might be, to face retribution as a consequence of my decision.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, MacAskill, whose own safety was thought to be at risk as he considered whether to free Megrahi, added: “I think, looking at events in Brussels and Paris, I stand by that. We would have kept him in if we had decided that was necessary but he would never have been allowed to die here.”

In a book extract in this newspaper today, the former minister argues that a coalition involving Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestinian terrorists were behind the Lockerbie bombing, in revenge for the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US naval ship in July 1988.

[RB: In the extract published in The Sunday Times today, Mr MacAskill cites three reasons for his belief in Libyan (and Abdelbaset Megrahi’s) involvement in the atrocity. They are (1) an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003; (2) Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s statement reported in the Swedish newspaper Expressen; and (3) Scottish investigators’ and prosecutors’ belief in the accuracy of the information disclosed in Ken Dornstein’s recent films. It is interesting, however, that Mr MacAskill explicitly states "Clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved." If the Zeist court had not made the finding-in-fact that Megrahi purchased the clothes, it would not, and could not, have convicted him.

As regards (1): There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to, as is clear from the “quote” from Col Gaddafi that he provides, is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran. De Borchgrave’s account of this conversation can be read on this blog here. My comment at the time was as follows:

“On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.”

As regards (2): An account of the statement by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil can be read here. Evidence that he promised to supply never materialised. The best he could come up with was the assertion that the Gaddafi regime paid Megrahi’s legal expenses -- something that had never been hidden or denied. A response to Abdel-Jalil by John Ashton can be read here. Blistering commentaries by the late Ian Bell can be read here and here.

As regards (3): A lengthy response by John Ashton to the disclosures in the Dornstein films can be read here. Another long and detailed commentary by Dr Kevin Bannon can be read here. Dr Neil Berry makes critical comments on the films here.

Nowhere in The Sunday Times coverage is there mention of (a) the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s findings that, on six grounds, the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of Justice; (b) the evidence disclosed in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury and, in particular, the metallurgical discrepancy between the dodgy circuit board fragment PT35b and circuit boards used in the MST-13 timers supplied to Libya; and (c) the evidence supplied in Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived. Perhaps these issues are dealt with elsewhere in Mr MacAskill’s book. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case

[What follows is the text of a contribution by John Ashton in The Café section of today’s edition of the Scottish Review:]

Does Magnus Linklater run his Lockerbie articles through reverse fact-checking software before submitting them? How else I wonder could almost every one he writes contain so many basic errors?

His latest piece accuses me of failing to address new evidence concerning Mr Megrahi's relationship with alleged bomber Abouagela Masud. No one reading my recent articles could have failed to miss the fact that I acknowledged the evidence's potential significance and expressed my wish that it be put before the court. I also set out the reasons to treat it with scepticism, which I suspect is Mr Linklater’s real beef. Being sceptical is not the same as failing to address, but maybe his software conflates the two.

Mr Linklater acknowledges that he hasn't looked in detail at the evidence assembled by Dr Morag Kerr, which demonstrates that the bomb originated from Heathrow, rather than Malta (the latter being where Megrahi and Masud flew from to Tripoli on the morning of the bombing). He doesn't need to, he says, because the evidence was considered and dismissed by the appeal court and Megrahi’s trial lawyers. Except it wasn’t. Dr Kerr has in fact gone far further than anyone else in considering the bomb’s origin. If Mr Linklater doesn’t believe me, I’ll be happy to send him the defence paperwork and copies of the appeal court transcripts. I challenge Mr Linklater to read Dr Kerr's book and tell us why it doesn't stand up.

Mr Linklater also asserts that '[for] a long time those who argued for the Heathrow theory placed a lot of weight on the evidence that there had been a break-in: a padlock had been cut, allowing access to a potential bomb-carrier. That theory, I believe, has now been abandoned, because the timing is not right'. Wrong again. The break-in may or may not be significant, but the evidence of Heathrow ingestion stands separately to it and has never been considered as reliant upon it. Furthermore, Dr Kerr, who is the most prominent proponent of Heathrow, has always said that the break-in was likely irrelevant.

Mr Linklater goes on to tell us: 'When you have a large and complex circumstantial case, everything has to to fit into a coherent picture. Picking one part and analysing it in detail is unconvincing if what you come up with ignores other contradictory evidence'. The trouble is, very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case that he is so keen to defend. Mr Megrahi allegedly bought the clothes from a Maltese shop that were placed in the bomb suitcase, yet the evidence shows that he looked nothing like the purchaser and that the clothes were bought when he was not on the island. The Crown claimed that a fragment of circuit board found among the clothes matched ones in timers supplied exclusively to Libya, but we now know that it did not. Most importantly, the Crown’s central claim that the bomb originated from Malta has been destroyed by Dr Kerr. Take Malta out of the equation and Megrahi's presence there, his lies and his shady associations are irrelevant.

None of this has been properly addressed by Mr Linklater in any of his numerous articles on Lockerbie. Apparently it's okay to ignore contradictory evidence when it's the Crown case that is contradicted.

Lockerbie: Morag Kerr hits back at Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Morag Kerr in The Café section of the issue of the Scottish Review published on 17 February:]

How dare Magnus Linklater (10 February) repeatedly traduce in print a book he hasn’t even had the courtesy to read! The false assumptions and downright fabrications in his latest sally make it all too clear that this is the case, despite his assurance to me two years ago that he had – even going so far as to call the unread text 'a remarkable piece of work'.

Does Mr Linklater seriously believe that I wrote a book in 2013 based entirely on premises the appeal court rejected in 2002? Of course I didn’t. Does he believe that the book merely points out (for about the ten-thousandth time) that the suitcase John Bedford saw in the baggage container an hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed looks suspiciously like the bomb? There is much more to it than that. Does he imagine that I examined the Heathrow evidence in isolation from the rest of the case? The book would hardly be 220-pages long if that were so.

The break-in into Heathrow Terminal 3 the night before the disaster is irrelevant. It was freely acknowledged in court that airside security in 1988 was abysmal, and it would have been child’s play for anyone to walk in any time they liked. No midnight cutting of padlocks would have been necessary. The break-in happened, but whether it was related to the introduction of the bomb into the baggage container 17 hours later is an entirely moot point. I make this perfectly clear in the book, and I would take it very kindly if Mr Linklater would cease and desist from dragging up this irrelevancy at every turn, as if it somehow discredits my thesis.

The possibility that the bomb might have been in the case John Bedford saw was explored in the original trial, with the defence obviously keen to suggest that it was. What is remarkable is that no evidence was presented of any specific investigation into the provenance of that suitcase by the original inquiry. Apparently, it was merely assumed that it wasn’t the bomb.

The 'meat' of my book is a thorough investigation into the provenance of the case Bedford saw; the investigation which should have been done in 1989 but wasn’t. In the course of this I examine witness statements, passenger and baggage transfer records and detailed photographs of the blast-damaged luggage – evidence that was for the most part not presented either at the original trial or the appeal. The results of this analysis are clear-cut. That was indeed the bomb suitcase, beyond any reasonable doubt. Once again I challenge Mr Linklater, and indeed anyone who has read the book, to explain why they don’t accept this analysis – based on evidence and logic, not dismissive sneers.

Mr Linklater implies that I am ignoring separate evidence of 'an unaccompanied bag coming from Malta that morning'. If he were to read my book he would discover that I pick apart the evidence for the existence of this bag in exhaustive detail, and come down firmly on the side of the German policeman who was originally assigned this task and whose report concludes: 'Throughout the inquiries into the baggage for PA103A there was no evidence that the bomb suitcase had been transferred with the luggage either from or via Frankfurt Main to London'.

Indeed, some clothing packed with the bomb was purchased on Malta, but as that purchase took place several weeks before the disaster it in no way precludes the bomb itself having been introduced at Heathrow. Again I deal with this point in great detail in the book, and in particular with the contention that Megrahi was the man who made that purchase. Clearly he was not, and the SCCRC report of 2007 underlined that pretty effectively.

Far from picking at one small point and ignoring the bigger picture, putting this point in context is exactly what the book is about. Not simply the compelling evidence that the bomb was already in the baggage container an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed, but the extremely tight and well-documented security at Malta airport that shows no sign whatsoever of an illegitimate item of luggage on Air Malta flight 180. In this context I would refer Mr Linklater to the words of Lord Osborne at the first appeal in 2002. 'There is considerable and quite convincing evidence that that could not have happened.'

Mr Linklater, as always, sets great store by what the various judges concluded. In the context of a reasoned argument showing that these conclusions were wrong, this is an unhelpful begging of the question. The evidence I have analysed was not presented in court. Mine is an entirely new and more detailed dissection of the forensics than anything previously attempted.

I ask once again, although with fading hopes, that Mr Linklater go away and read my book, and then explain exactly where he takes issue with my reasoning or my conclusions. Or else refrain from commenting on something he clearly knows nothing about.