Controversy remains 25 years after Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a report by Alasdair Soussi published today on the Aljazeera website. It reads as follows:]

Lockerbie was one of the most infamous attacks of the modern age, a crime that claimed hundreds of innocent lives and thrust a sleepy little town into the full glare of the world's media and watching public.

That crime was the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and Saturday marks 25-years since the American-bound airliner fell out of the skies above Lockerbie, Scotland. Killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 others on the ground, the December 21, 1988 bombing lead to the largest criminal investigation in Scottish legal history.

For the victims' families especially, the anniversary is a chance to remember loved ones who lost their lives that terrible winter's night. But, divisions between those who vigorously endorse the guilty verdict handed down to the only person convicted of the bombing, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, and others who gravely doubt the safety of his conviction and are pressing for the real "truth" behind Lockerbie remain as entrenched as ever. The Libyan himself proclaimed his innocence up until his last breath when, nearly three years after his compassionate release from a Scottish jail, he died from prostate cancer at his Tripoli home in May last year - yet his death did little to unite what has become an ever-increasing divide.

'Red herring'?

"What definitely happened over the course of the Lockerbie investigation is that the police and the forensics people missed a shed load of evidence showing that the bomb was actually introduced at (London) Heathrow," says Morag Kerr, author of the new book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? - Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, who contends that the bomb was not, as the prosecution successfully argued at Megrahi's trial at a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands, loaded onto an Air Malta flight at the island's Luqa airport by the Libyan.

"Whether that was pure incompetence or whether they were being prodded - it may have actually been a combination of both."

Kerr told Al Jazeera that one of the golden threads of evidence against the man who was convicted in 2001 - the clothes, which were said to have been wrapped around the bomb and which were traced to a shop in Malta owned by Tony Gauci who testified to selling them to Megrahi - was "a red herring".

"Once the police saw Malta it was a lost cause," says Kerr, who is also secretary-deputy of the UK-based Justice for Megrahi campaign. "The coincidence of the red herring that led them to Malta I think convinced them that they got the right guy. And, at that point I think it was a lost cause that they were ever going to go back and investigate Heathrow."

Strong 'circumstantial evidence'

While the likes of Kerr are adamant that both the direction of the investigation and Megrahi's guilt were grave errors - others take the opposite view. Richard Marquise led the FBI's task force on Lockerbie and refuses to be swayed by any notion that the investigation was flawed or that Megrahi suffered a miscarriage of justice, though he does lament the acquittal of Megrahi's co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

"When we did the investigation, we collected all the evidence that was available… and when it was all said and done the evidence we collected pointed to Megrahi, Fhimah and Libya," says the retired special agent, speaking to Al Jazeera. "We always hoped that we would get, through the years, more information that would substantiate that in greater fashion, but unfortunately we didn't get a lot. But, the circumstantial case was as strong as I've seen in my career, and I think the judges got it half right - I think Fhimah was involved although the circumstantial evidence was not quite as strong as it was against Megrahi. But, I'm convinced of [Megrahi's] guilt."

Stephanie Bernstein lost her husband on Pan Am Flight 103. Like Marquise, the American is emphatic that all the evidence points towards Megrahi.

"He did not wake up one morning, along with Fhimah, and say 'we've got nothing better to do, lets put a bomb on a plane,' they were agents of the Libyan intelligence service so they were of that part of (Muammar) Gaddafi's Libyan regime," Bernstein told Al Jazeera. "So they absolutely did not act alone - but I've got absolutely no doubt about [Megrahi's] guilt in terms of what he was convicted of."

As a dissenting voice to those of Bernstein, few are more high profile than Jim Swire. The Brit lost his daughter in the bombing and has consistently rejected the trial's outcome, arguing that the wrong man was convicted for the atrocity, and that two crucial points remain unanswered, both of which he and involved members of the British relatives are intending to officially challenge through an application for a further appeal against Megrahi's conviction or another route.

"Our position is that we've always wanted to know the truth about why the plane wasn't protected and who it really was that killed our loved ones," Swire told Al Jazeera. "And, we're not just going to go away because the (Scottish and British governments) are refusing our reasonable requests to give us that information… I've taken steps to organise the British relatives - and we are having a series of meetings with lawyers, but there won't be a satisfying statement about what the British relatives are going to do until the third week of January at the earliest."

Megrahi: A scapegoat?

Yet, as to searching out other avenues of blame for the Lockerbie disaster and giving credence to the claims made by Kerr and others who, by way of published works, have cast doubt on the eyewitness account of Gauci selling the clothes, Malta airport being the starting point for the bomb and other aspects of the evidence, Bernstein remains unmoved.

"These are old recycled stories - none of these are new," says Bernstein, who argues "the real story of Lockerbie is the dogged determination of the Scottish police and the FBI and Scottish law enforcement in general who covered every single inch of that territory (of debris) by foot". "If you said to me a couple of months ago, what would you predict about what would happen about press coverage around the 25th anniversary, I think we all would have predicted this."

But, why the widely-reported difference between the conviction of the US families who believe in Megrahi's guilt and many of their UK counterparts who have expressed grave doubt? Swire claims that the stateside relatives "seem to be ready to accept what their government tells them much more readily than many of us do".

"When the trial was ongoing, it was two British relatives, one of whom was me, who were there and watched the trial unfold - and became convinced to their horror that they were seeing a scapegoating of Megrahi," adds the retired GP, who contends that the American families likely "wish I would just go away and forget it all".

But, even for many of those on the other side of the Atlantic who are themselves yet to be convinced of Megrahi's innocence, there is a belief that efforts to clear his name must be directly confronted if only to lift a shadow from one of Scotland's most revered national institutions.

"Lockerbie is a huge cloud hanging over the Scottish justice system," Magnus Linklater, a leading Scottish political commentator, told Al Jazeera. "It's almost as if the allegation that Megrahi is innocent is the default position. But, that in its turn has not been tested and it's been allowed to go unchallenged and it's high time that it was properly challenged."

Important forthcoming Lockerbie books

[What follows is the text of a message sent today to Justice for Megrahi supporters by JFM’s secretary, Robert Forrester:]

By now, I am sure that very few of you will not already be aware of the fact that preparations for the quarter century anniversary of the Lockerbie atrocity are in hand.

To accompany this event, I wish to draw your attention to two publications which will soon be released to coincide with this commemoration: both courtesy of members of our organisation, namely: John Ashton and our Secretary Depute, Dr Morag Kerr.

You will be aware that John co-authored Cover Up of Convenience: the Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie with Ian Ferguson (one of our original members), and also wrote Megrahi: You are my Jury, which, amongst other things, revealed the forensic flaws and misdemeanours surrounding the infamous shard of PCB claimed to have originated from the timing trigger for the detonator, which COPFS have chosen to blithely ignore for nigh on eighteen months now. Additionally, John was part of the research team working on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's defence. On 3rd October his latest Lockerbie/Ziest related publication, Scotland's Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters will be released by Birlinn. For details, see: http://www.birlinn.co.uk/Scotland-s-Shame.html.

Whilst John and I unstintingly make a point of meeting up when I make my annual summer pilgrimage to Brighton, and clearly, we always discuss matters Lockerbie related, normally, our conversation circulates around the activities of JFM with respect to how matters are advancing regarding the general campaign.

My relationship with Dr Kerr, our Secretary Depute, is quite different. We are in constant contact with each other in advancing the cause of justice on this issue. Morag is a highly qualified scientist, and, as such, has applied her talent/training/call it what you will to the forensic shortcomings of the Lockerbie investigation with some not inconsiderable aplomb.

To coincide with the Twenty-fifth Anniversary, her book: Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies will be published on 21st December 2013, by Troubador to precisely coincide with the anniversary, and is, moreover, introduced with a foreword by Terry Waite CBE (another JFM member). For details, see: http://www.troubador.co.uk/image/books/AI9781783062508.pdf.

John's reputation precedes him, need I say more? However, quite obviously, I have a close working relationship with Morag, and, as such, was privy to Adequately Explained by Stupidity as it took form. In my opinion, having had the immense privilege of proofing aspects of this book, it is, without question, nothing less than a work of genius. Amongst many other features studied, it conclusively demonstrates, via a highly detailed and scholarly analysis of the evidence relating to the luggage carried in the hold of Pan Am 103, how horrifically bungled the Lockerbie investigation was. Its implications are truly shocking. It is high time that executive powers in Scotland were brought to bear on the Police, Crown Office and forensic officials responsible for this outrageous scandal. Inaction is leaving Scotland looking weak, corruptible and, frankly just plain downright feart.

I strongly recommend both publications to you. And please spread the word too.

London link to Pan Am bomb

[This is the headline over a report by Greg Christison in the Scottish edition of today’s Sunday Express (page 14). It does not feature on the newspaper’s website. The article reads as follows:]

More doubt over verdict on Megrahi

A sensational new book claims to provide “conclusive” proof that the Lockerbie bomb was actually planted in London.

Being published to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the tragedy in December, it points to evidence suggesting the explosives were loaded on to Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow.

It challenges judges at the trial of Libyan spy Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was found guilty in 2001 of hiding the bomb in luggage at Malta airport.

Author Morag Kerr claims that lawyers failed to piece together key facts during the 36-week court case, leading to a miscarriage of justice.

Her new analysis centres around the positioning of the suitcase and statements by Heathrow baggage handlers. 

It further strengthens the call from campaign group Justice for Megrahi (JFM) for the Scottish Government to sanction an independent public inquiry into the 1988 attack.

Dr Kerr, a vet and JFM member, said: “I am placing a magnifying glass on the luggage transfer, which is the key point as it determines where the luggage started its journey and whether Megrahi was guilty.”

The trial judges found that Megrahi planted the bomb in Malta before it travelled unaccompanied to Frankfurt anf then London before moving on to Pan Am Flight 103.

They discounted a theory that the device was in fact concealed in a mysterious brown Samsonite suitcase -- spotted by Heathrow baggage handler John Bedford an hour before the German feeder flight arrived.  Mr Bedford said the bag, which matched the description of the suitcase found to have been planted by Megrahi, was in the container near where the explosion occurred.

But the judges decided another Heathrow worker, Amarjit Sidhu, must have moved the case while transferring Frankfurt bags to the Pan Am flight.

But despite making three statements insisting he did not move the so-callked Bedford bag, Mr Sidhu was never calld to give evidence.

Dr Kerr, from West Linton, Peeblesshire, also says judges were not shown passenger and luggage records, which prove there was no Brown Samsonite suitcase among the legitimate luggage loaded by Bedford.  “When the evidence is put together, and these additional bits are added, it proves conclusively that the bomb was planted at Heathrow,” she said.

The book, Adequately Explained By Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, was described as “nothing less than a work of brilliance” by JFM spokesman Robert Forrester.

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.

Megrahi: an unbreakable alibi

[Two letters about the Lockerbie case have been published in the press today. The first is from Dr Morag Kerr in The National and the second from Ruth Marr in The Herald:]

1.  Every article about Lockerbie seems to home in on one specific point, that of the contentious “timer fragment” which led the original police investigation to Libya back in 1990. Kathleen Nutt’s piece in your Monday issue is no exception.

The timer fragment is interesting, indeed fascinating, for many complex reasons.  Nevertheless the perennial implication that it is essential for this item to be a fabrication or a plant in order for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction to be shown to be a miscarriage of justice is unfounded.

The Crown alleged that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 was smuggled into the airline baggage system on the morning of 21st December 1988, at Luqa airport, Malta.  Megrahi was at Luqa airport that morning, caching a flight to Tripoli.  This was and remains the main substance of the case against him, together with the allegation that he was the mysterious customer who bought some of the clothes packed in the suitcase with the bomb.

The SCCRC’s 2007 report effectively destroyed the contention that Megrahi was the clothes purchaser.  More recently, long-held suspicions that the scene of the crime was not Malta but London have been shown to be correct.

In my recent book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? (Matador Books, 2013), I present a detailed analysis of the blast-damaged luggage and its arrangement within the baggage container which shows quite conclusively that the bomb was in a suitcase seen at Heathrow airport fully an hour before the connecting flight alleged to be carrying the “suitcase from Malta” arrived.  The Lockerbie bombing is a crime that occurred in London in late afternoon, at a time when Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli.

The book is included as part of the 2014 submission to the SCCRC referred to in your article, and indeed it is believed that this is the first time a published book has been used in this way in an appeal application under Scots law.  The analysis it contains doesn’t merely cast doubt on the case against Megrahi, it provides him with an unbreakable alibi.

Maybe the timer fragment was planted, maybe it fell from the sky. Either way, Megrahi was a thousand miles away when the lethal suitcase was placed in the unattended baggage container.

2.  When Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was first convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, I thought it strange that his co-accused and fellow Libyan agent should have been acquitted.

Surely agents worked in pairs?

That proved to be not the only question surrounding the Lockerbie tragedy which continues to haunt a great many people who believe that Megrahi's conviction was at the very least, unsafe. Indeed, on the evidence which was presented at his trial, it seems impossible to believe that a jury would have delivered a guilty verdict against him. Given the fact that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found six grounds which point to the possibility of Megrahi suffering a miscarriage of justice, it is incredible that the Crown Office should now declare that a review of the case "confirmed beyond doubt'" that Megrahi was the Lockerbie bomber ("Advice is sought on Lockerbie bomber conviction", The Herald, December 23).

I have grave doubts regarding Megrahi's conviction and I need to know the truth. More importantly, all those who continue to suffer the effects of the atrocity, especially the bereraved families, including the Megrahi family, and the town of Lockerbie, need to know. If there has been a failure in the Scottish Justice system, we all need to know.

A full public inquiry must be held to provide answers to the questions which will not go away, because no matter how inconvenient the truth may be, the victims and their families deserve nothing less.

Megrahi trial and first appeal lawyers defend their performance

[I am grateful to both Richard Marquise and Frank Duggan for sending me the text of the following report published in The Times on 21 December. It was not referred to on this blog at the time because it did not, for some reason, appear on the newspaper website (to which I subscribe, albeit through gritted teeth given my reluctance to contribute to the Murdoch coffers). It reads as follows:]

One of the key lawyers involved in the Lockerbie case has broken silence to condemn critics of the Scottish justice system,  who claim that Libya was not responsible for  the atrocity.

Bill Taylor QC, who defended  the  convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, argues that allegations claiming the attack was ordered by Iran rather than Libya were examined in detail at the time of the trial, and dismissed, because they did not stand up to detailed scrutiny.

“We did raise all of these other possibilities in the course of our defence,” he said. “They were examined in the greatest detail, and fully investigated, but they did not stand up.  It’s like all the theories in the Kennedy assassination. They  are simply doors that have to be opened, and investigated if you are defending – as  we did.”

Mr Taylor’s intervention comes on the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, and follows a spate of conspiracy theories  aimed at undermining  the original verdict, which resulted in the conviction of al-Megrahi. The Libyan was imprisoned in Scotland, before being released and returned home  by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds in 2009.

Campaigners, led by Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, have long claimed that al-Megrahi was innocent, that Libya played no part in the bombing, and that the atrocity was ordered by Iran in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in 1988.

However, lawyers involved at the time of the trial, who have not felt able to speak out in response, say that the Iran connection and other theories were subjected to rigorous scrutiny at the time, and failed to pass the standards required in a court of law.

In particular, the suggestion that the bomb was put on board at Heathrow rather than in Malta as the prosecution stated, was “tested to destruction” by the defence team, whose case would have been vindicated if it had stood up in court.

But it did not. They point out that those who now back the Heathrow theory have not been able to explain how clothes, purchased in Malta, were found in the suitcase in which the bomb was packed.

“If the suggestion is that the bomb was placed on board at Heathrow, how on earth did it occur to anybody to take a trip to Malta in order to buy some children’s clothing,  in order to take that clothing back to London to assemble a bomb?  It just doesn’t stack up,” said one member of the defence team.

Defence lawyers have always argued that  the identification evidence against al-Megrahi supplied by the Maltese shop-keeper Tony Gauci, was weak, and that if it had been tested in front of a jury, rather than being heard by three judges,  the Libyan would have been acquitted on those grounds.

The Scottish Crimninal Cases Review Commission, which examined the evidence in detail, concluded that this did constitute grounds for appeal. However, al-Megrahi returned to Libya before the appeal could be heard.

The evidence that he was involved in the plan to insert a bomb remains strong. At the time of the trial the prosecution sought to introduce additional evidence about the money he was paid by the Libyan government. Accounts totaling several million  dollars were found, which would have undermined al-Megrahi’s claim that he was only a low-level official. The evidence  was disallowed, because not enough time had been given to consider it.

Mr Taylor added  that the  decision by the  Libyan administration,  announced this week by the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, to appoint prosecutors to examine the evidence, undermined the  argument that Libyan was not involved in the outrage.  

He said: “If the bomb  was  planted in Heathrow or Frankfurt by people who were many  miles away in Libya, and of which the Libyans knew nothing, why is the new administration in Libya appointing two prosecutors,  who will be liaising  with the Lord Advocate in the discovery of any fresh evidence?”

[A commentary on this report will appear on this blog in due course. But in the meantime, for a rebuttal of the quite ludicrous assertion that the thesis of Heathrow rather than Malta ingestion of the bomb suitcase was “tested to destruction” by Megrahi’s defence team, readers are referred to Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. An account of the performance of Megrahi’s then legal team during the Zeist trial and the first appeal can be found here.]

Anger that Malta was so unfairly involved

[I am grateful to George Thomson for sending me the following reflections on his trip to Malta during which he conducted question and answer sessions with the audience following performances of the play The Lockerbie Bomber:]

First of all I thought that the play was fantastic.  I met the whole of the cast over a drink and it was great to hear that not all of them were believers in the case until they began their research for the play and now they are all fully on board and they say this adds to the passion which they clearly show in their acting.

Herman [Grech, the director of the play and also head of media for The Times of Malta] and his team were great and they made me very welcome.  We planned only to do a Q and A on the Friday, but that went down so well it was decided that we should repeat it on the final night. The play was performed to full houses on both nights with people disappointed at not being able to secure a ticket.

The questions were very good both nights and it shows that there is a burning interest and a certain amount of anger that Malta was so unfairly involved. Nobody out there believes that the bomb went on at Luqa.  In that area I was able to give Morag's new book some publicity. [RB: Dr Morag Kerr, Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, due to be published on 21 December 2013.]

We were also approached by the head of a local well-known film production company who expressed an interest in doing something on the case.

Jim Swire obviously made a very big impression during his recent visit the locals took him to their hearts and he was the main topic of many conversations I had.

Herman and his team intend to keep up the pressure on the Maltese Government and soon they will run a big piece on the Gauci payments.