An easy target required as some kind of scapegoat

[What follows is excerpted from an article headlined Kill 290 innocents: Get an award for bravery posted today on Peter Biddulph and Dr Jim Swire’s Lockerbie Truth blog:]

How do you kill 290 innocent people: men, women, including 66 children?

And how do you get a medal for bravery in action against America's imagined enemies?

July 1988.  This is how you do it.  See the maps, the paranoia, the stupidity. America called it an unfortunate mistake. Yet they gave the captain a medal for bravery in action against an enemy.

This was the reason for the December 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 290 innocent people.  At least, that's what CIA classified reports said for almost two years.

After that, America needed Syrian and Iranian support in the 1991 Gulf war. So an easy target was required as some kind of scapegoat. Those CIA reports were quietly shelved, and in November 1991, out of the blue, came evidence against Libya. (...)

Temporary loss of Lockerbie Truth website

A message from Peter Biddulph:

For reason(s) unknown, lockerbietruth.com is off-line. We are exploring the help sections to discover why. According to the domain company our account and domain are active. But so far, we can't discover what has happened.

Update: The website is once again accessible, 15.00 BST.

A welcome departure

[What follows is an item posted on this date in 2016 on Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s Lockerbie Truth website:]

Scotland's Lord Advocate [Frank Mulholland] is to step down from his position as Scotland's leading law officer. Click here for more…

His decision comes just days after a media conference held in Edinburgh's Dynamic Earth conference centre on 16th March, chaired by representatives of Justice for Megrahi.

At that conference there were calls for the Lord Advocate to consider his position, following a special police investigation - Operation Sandwood - into allegations of criminality [by police and prosecutors] and a key forensic witness during the Lockerbie trial of Libyan Baset al-Megrahi.

It is understood that the Operation Sandwood report will be available for consideration in approximately two months time. [RB: It is now expected later this year. Justice for Megrahi's liaison group has regular meetings with the investigation team and is confident about the rigour of the complex investigation.]

Recently in an unusual move, the National Scottish Police Force has appointed an independent QC to advise it on the Sandwood inquiry because it felt unable to ask Crown Office lawyers to assess the evidence of alleged wrongdoing against certain Crown officers.  Click here for more on this story.

Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2000 for the Lockerbie bombing, in which 259 passengers and eleven townspeople were killed by a bomb placed on flight Pan Am 103.

[RB: Frank Mulholland QC was installed as a judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary on 15 December 2016. His disgraceful comments about Justice for Megrahi’s criminality allegations gravely compromised the Crown Office’s position in relation to Operation Sandwood.]

Lockerbie: The 28 year lie.

[This is the headline over an item posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s Lockerbie Truth blog. It reads as follows:]

On this day in 1988, 21st of December, a terrorist bomb destroyed flight Pan Am 103 during its journey from Heathrow Airport in the UK to New York.

Sections of the dismembered plane and 259 passengers [and crew] fell across the Scottish town of Lockerbie and surrounding farms and fields.

In 1991 two Libyan security officers were indicted for the crime. Their trial began in May 2000.

The key prosecution claims were:

1.  Several weeks before the attack, one of the accused, Baset al-Megrahi, purchased a selection of clothes from a Maltese clothing shop.

2. Pieces of the clothing were found at the crash site.

3.  Embedded within one of the pieces was a 4mm square fragment - PT35(b) - of an electronic timer board.

4.  The FBI had proved that the fragment came from a batch of 20 such boards delivered in 1985 to Libya by Swiss electronics supplier MEBO.

5.  Two witnesses would identify the suspects and prove the case beyond doubt. The first, a CIA informant Majid Giaka; the second, a Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci.

The trial judges decided that Giaka  was untrustworthy, leaving Gauci as the sole identification witness.

On 31st January 2001 al-Megrahi was found guilty. The second accused, Khalifa Fhimah, was freed with "No case to answer". [RB: The court ruled that there was a case to answer, but at the end of the trial returned a verdict of Not Guilty.]

In the years since the verdict it has become clear that the world has been cynically misled by the FBI, the CIA, and British and Scottish governments.

1. In 1989 Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher was advised by the Americans not to enquire into the attack.

2.  Even though she and her entourage had walked across the devastated town one day after the attack, she could not - in her 1993 memoir "The Downing Street Years" - recall the existence of Lockerbie. When asked by Father of the House MP Tam Dalyell why, she said: "I know nothing of Lockerbie, and do not write about something I do not know about."

3.  Seven years after the verdict the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) discovered significant new evidence that had been concealed from the trial judges and defence team.

4.  The SCCRC discovered a secret letter written by the King of Jordan to British prime minister John Major indicating that the Libyans were innocent of the crime.

The King's letter claimed that the attack had been Iranian-funded in revenge for the 1988 destruction by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca.

5. Unknown to most journalists and public, the King had agreed to place in protective custody Marwan Khreesat, expert bomb-maker for a Palestinian group, the PFLP-GC. Khreesat had made bombs for the group in Germany, to be used to bring down American passenger planes heading for the US.

6.  US and German intelligence knew that Iran had funded the attack. They had assembled a full dossier of intelligence proving that Khreesat and the Palestinian group were guilty.

7.  On the sudden discovery of PT35(b), however, US intelligence reversed direction and accused Libya of the crime.

8. The British government tried on two occasions to prevent the king's letter becoming public. The first, a Public Interest Immunity Certificate signed by Foreign Secretary David Miliband; the second, an unsuccessful attempt by Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt to close down a Scottish newspaper to prevent publication of the story.

9.  The SCCRC re-examined evidence given in the trial and discovered that al-Megrahi was not on the island of Malta on the day that the clothing was purchased.

10.  The SCCRC also discovered that police diaries of chief police investigator Harry Bell contained a record of multi-million dollar offers of payment to the Maltese shopkeeper Gauci "provided" - in the words of a letter to Harry Bell from the US Department of Justice - "he gives evidence."

11.  The SCCRC also re-examined all the evidence given by Gauci. They concluded that his so-called "identification" was founded on numerous viewings of photographs of al-Megrahi in the media and magazines, all linking him to the bombing. Gauci's evidence was therefore not credible, and the trial judges had been mistaken.

****

Was the Lockerbie fragment PT35(b) a fake? During the trial in 2000 there were suspicions about how it had been discovered and reported on by government scientists. The trial judges had discounted these suspicions.

Then in 2009 the al-Megrahi defence team made a startling discovery. In the years since the trial and first appeal they had managed to obtain a huge set of documents from police and Scottish Crown archives. Among the documents was the forensic notebook of scientific witness Allen Feraday.

Feraday had compared PT35(b) with control samples from MST13 timer circuit boards similar to those supplied to Libya in 1985 by MEBO.

He told the trial judges: "the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects" to that of the MST13 timer.

But nine years prior to the trial, on 1st August 1991, when examining both the fragment and a MEBO MST13 timer circuit board, he had made two hand-written entries in his notebook which contradicted this.

The first recorded that tracks on fragment PT35(b) were protected by a layer of "Pure tin". The second said that tracks on the circuit of a control sample MST13 board were covered by an alloy of "70% tin and 30% lead".

Feraday and the police were fully aware of the difference. Two police scientific advisers suggested that the heat of the explosion might have evaporated the lead content of the alloy, leaving pure tin.

Another police adviser working for Ferranti International noted that fragment PT35(b) had indications of being "home made".

Neither the scientist's reports nor the Ferranti letter were followed up. All remained hidden in police files. The judges and defence team were unaware of their contents.

In the light of this new information the defence team consulted two prominent independent experts in the field. The experts repeatedly heat tested the evaporation theory with temperatures exceeding that of the bomb explosion. But the alloy of 70/30 tin/lead remained just that.

Thuring, the company which manufactured the circuit boards used in MST13 timers , confirmed in an affidavit that they had always used a 70/30 tin/lead combination.  Fragment PT35(b) did not, therefore, come from one of their circuit boards. How it was made and by whom remains a mystery.

Feraday either perjured himself or was grossly negligent. It was upon his statement and the identification evidence by Gauci that the case against Baset al-Megrahi would turn.

All this information has been put repeatedly to the Scottish and British governments and police. They have totally ignored it. Instead, for almost two years they have claimed to be "pursuing other suspects" in the chaos that is today Libya.

The Lockerbie campaign will continue. We intend to ensure - with the help of prominent friends from around the world - that the Lockerbie verdict will prove to be a disastrous miscarriage of justice.

Gauci brothers rewarded

[What follows is the text of an item posted today on the Lockerbietruth.com website run by Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

On this day, 1st September 1989, the sole identification witness in the Lockerbie trial, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, met with a police investigation team headed by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell.

At this first meeting Gauci offered a vague account of a customer who had come into his shop to buy an assortment of clothes. In no way did it resemble the convicted Libyan al-Megrahi.

Gauci's next two interviews were on the 14th and 26th of that month. Neither indicated that al-Megrahi was the purchaser of the clothes.

Two days later on the 28th of that month, Bell wrote in his police diary that "The US Department of Justice are prepared to offer unlimited money to Tony Gauci, with $10,000 available immediately."

The purpose of the "immediately available" $10,000 was clear. Gauci could draw on it for his immediate use. There can be no other interpretation.

These three interviews would be the first of many extending over two years, each interview adding more and more detail. Only in February 1991 did Gauci finally say "he resembles the man a lot".

Every discussion at which money was mentioned was recorded in Bell's diary. But he concealed this diary from the trial judges and the defence team. It was discovered in 2007, six years after the conclusion of the trial and a subsequent appeal.

At the conclusion of the trial Tony Gauci was paid $2 million and his brother Paul Gauci $1 million.

But what did Tony have to do to get the money to be shared between himself and his brother? In the words of the US Department of Justice, "only if he gives evidence".

Since the original 1991 indictment against al-Megrahi was substantially based on eye witness evidence by Tony Gauci it was clear what that evidence would be. It would prove that al-Megrahi was guilty.

Lockerbie revisited

[This is the headline over an article published on this date in 2010 in the online Edinburgh Festival magazine Fest. It reads as follows:]

When David Benson set about translating the story of Dr Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, to the Edinburgh stage, he could not have predicted the whirlwind of renewed controversy. He talks to Joe Pike about an unexpectedly relevant piece of personal and political theatre

Flora Swire boarded a Boeing 747-100 named Clipper Maid of the Seas at London Heathrow. On 21 December 1988—the day before her 24th birthday—she was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend Hart Lidov. Earlier that year she had graduated in medicine with a first-class degree and top of her class.

There was no touch-down at JFK. At 7.03pm, 30,000 feet above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a bomb exploded on board ripping through the aircraft's fuselage. PanAm Flight 103 gradually disintegrated over two horrific minutes before impact on Sherwood Crescent creating a large crater and destroying homes. There were 270 fatalities.

Since the disaster, Flora's father Dr Jim Swire has fought to bring those responsible for the Lockerbie bombings to justice. Now he's now the focus of a play by writer and actor David Benson. When we meet in an office on a hot day in London's West End, Benson is nervous: “I'm feeling of course all that sense of anticipation, and fear that one feels when you have a new show that you're launching in that intense market place...Edinburgh is, for four weeks on earth, the most judgmental place you could be”.

Recent events have not helped to reduce the pressure. David Cameron's recent visit to Washington, along with the investigations of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations into last year's release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombings, have put Lockerbie back at the top of the news agenda. This renewed relevance won't hurt ticket sales, but the show wasn't planned to capitalise upon it. Applications for Fringe shows are finalised in May, months before the recent developments. Since then, Benson has received calls from newspapers across the world, yet his main concern remains learning his lines.

Lockerbie seems at first a curious choice of topic for a writer and actor whose most successful performances have explored the camp, comic and completely un-political lives of entertainers Kenneth Williams, Noel Coward and Frankie Howerd. When I suggest that his current show marks a departure from more frivolous entertainment, Benson seems offended citing that the focus of much his work is complex personalities: “I like to do something that challenges me and the audience."

Ironically, when deciding the subject of Benson's next production, his producer James Seabright was convinced he should create a solo show based on the war-time sitcom Dad's Army. That never happened because at the end of the 2009 Fringe when Benson was finishing his run of a show on Dr Samuel Johnson, he started investigating Pan Am Flight 103.

“I was doing some research online on the subject of Lockerbie, idly browsing news stories, and I came across the website of Dr Jim Swire. I saw he had written a book—as yet unpublished—giving his account of what had happened, written with a co-researcher, Peter Biddulph.”

“They had a note saying to leave your email address if you'd like to know when the book is published. So I sent them an email and had a message back very quickly from Biddulph saying 'I see that you're an actor and you write one-man shows. Perhaps you'd be interested in having a look at this unpublished text and seeing if there's anything you can do with it'.”

Even though the topic was not on his agenda, Benson replied. “I would love to read it anyway so he sent me a copy of it and I was absolutely transfixed.” Fascinated by Dr Swire's traumatic journey, his campaign of enormous courage, and his anger and grief at the loss of his daughter, Benson spent months reading up on the subject and secured a rare 90-minute meeting with Swire. “He answered every question I had. Thoroughly as he always does. And I felt able to go away and write a script that would tell his story and tell things that maybe he can't tell.”

Swire is an enigmatic figure. When I tried to contact him to for an interview, the intermediary said: “I haven't heard back from him. He does rather go to ground from time to time.” His dogged efforts to bring the suspects to trial led to him visit the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi three times. In an interview with The Herald in 2007 he said: "You might not think there was any common ground between a GP from the Midlands and an army colonel turned dictator based in an Arab country. But there was.” Swire continues: "He had lost his adopted daughter Hannah when she was just 15 months old, when the US bombed Tripoli in 1986. I took a book of pictures of Flora, making sure there was one of her at just that age."

When I ask Benson, now 48, if constructing his play has been emotional, he reveals it has generated anger above all else. He blames governments for “doing everything they could do block the Lockerbie relatives' path to justice. They had many reasons for not wanting the true story coming out and they very cynically produced a cover story that these Libyans were supposed to have done it. That is a horrendous, sickening insult to the grief of the people who are still seeking justice.”

Yet behind Benson's anger is deep sympathy for his subject, something he is not accustomed to finding in his work: “When I look at Dr Swire's story and realising how much he's lost, understanding the depth of his grief that I sometimes find it quite overwhelming in even speaking the lines I've written myself.

“He goes from being very formal and in control, giving out this information fact by fact about what happened, and then once in a while having to admit that his beautiful lovely daughter who he adored is dead, died in a horrible way and that he will never see her again. I think it's impossible not to be touched by that, and also to realise one has an awesome responsibility in telling that story to get it right. Because you're dealing with some of the deepest human emotions.”

[RB: David Benson is again performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year but in a very different play, Boris: World King, of which I have written “If there's a better Edinburgh Fringe performance than David Benson's in Boris: World King, I'll be amazed. This is a fantastic show -- screamingly funny, but also serious and sad. See it.” Details here.]

The metallurgy of the circuit board fragment

[On this date in 1991 Allen Feraday of RARDE noted that tests had established that PT35b, the fragment of circuit board alleged to have come from the timer of the Lockerbie bomb, was metallurgically distinct from the circuit boards in MST-13 timers manufactured by MEBO Ltd. What follows is taken from an article on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s website Lockerbietruth.com:]

Here are three photographs.

The first is of the fragment of timer circuit board said by the prosecution to have been found at Lockerbie.

Photographs two and three are of annotations written by Allen Feraday, the forensic officer on whose forensic report the Lockerbie verdict of Guilty was founded.

Photograph two is of his note dated 1st August 1991 concerning the above fragment. The words are "Plating on the two thin lines is of pure tin (Cu [copper] breaking through from underneath. Alan F.)"

The third is of his note on the same day concerning a set of circuit boards sent to him for comparison by the Swiss company Thuring. The words are "Tinning on the thin tracks is of 70/30 sn/pb [tin/lead]. However this may be dipped or roller tinned on top of either the Cu tracks? or the Cu tracks with a layer of pure tin? Alan F."

There is a clear metallurgical difference between the two items. Feraday indicates some puzzlement as to why this may be the case, hence his two question marks.

But did he draw this difference and his two questions to the attention of the judges in the Lockerbie trial?

No. He stated with absolute certainty:

“The particular tracking pattern of the fragment has been extensively compared with the control samples of the [Thuring] MST-13 timers and circuit boards and it has been conclusively established that the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the `MST-13' timer.”

"Conclusively established ... materials and tracking pattern similar in all respects ..." Ten simple words. Yet on this false statement a man was condemned to a lifetime of imprisonment.  

What was the origin of the Lockerbie fragment? Who made it, where and when? It clearly did not come from Thuring and was not from the batch sold to Libya in 1985. Whatever its origin, it contradicts the unique central feature of the prosecution case.  

The Scottish Crown Office continues to stonewall the nation and Scottish Government by pronouncing that this evidence can only be considered in a court of law.  Well, here are the pictures. Please judge for yourself.

[RB: Further details can be found here (John Ashton) and here (Dr Morag Kerr).]

Nicola Sturgeon has a duty to set up an immediate inquiry

This is the heading over an item posted today on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph. It reads as follows:]

Former Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill, in his book The Lockerbie Bombing (Biteback), writes:

"Clothes in the suitcase containing the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi."

This totally contradicts the written verdict of the Lockerbie trial judges regarding the identification evidence given by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci:

"[88] A major factor in the case against [Baset al-Megrahi] is the identification evidence of [Maltese shopkeeper] Mr Gauci... We accept the reliability of Mr Gauci on this matter."

If MacAskill is correct and Megrahi did not purchase the clothes from Tony Gauci's shop in Malta, then how could Gauci have seen him and recognized him from photographs and in a police identity parade, and in the courtroom?

As Justice Minister MacAskill was privy to all security reports and the entire trial evidence. He worked closely with the office of the Lord Advocate. [RB: Mr MacAskill, of course, did not become Cabinet Secretary for Justice until long after the Zeist trial and first appeal. However, he was in office when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission delivered its report on the Megrahi case and during the appeal that followed (and which was abandoned, in murky circumstances, prior to his repatriation).]

If he knows of evidence indicating that Megrahi was not the person who purchased clothes from Gauci's shop, then he has a legal and moral duty to say what it is.

If there is such evidence, then the entire testimony of the only identification witness in the Lockerbie trial, Tony Gauci, is invalid, and a major miscarriage of justice has occurred.

MacAskill's moral and legal duty, and that of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, extends not only to those bereaved relativeswho believe Megrahi to be innocent, but to all bereaved Lockerbie relatives in America and elsewhere.

Nicola Sturgeon must grasp the nettle in this matter and instigate an urgent and immediate inquiry.

Hillsborough and Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of a letter dated 28 April 2016 sent to the editor of The Guardian by Peter Biddulph, but not (as yet) published:]

Twenty seven years is indeed a damning indictment. (Owen Jones: Think Hillsborough couldn't happen today? Think again). And not only in the case of Hillsborough.

It is now almost thirty years since the Lockerbie bombing of December 21st 1988, in which 270 people were murdered by a terrorist bomb. Two Libyans were accused and tried at a specially located court at Kamp Zeist in Holland. One - Baset al-Megrahi - was convicted, the other acquitted with no case to answer.

Only eight years after the trial and two appeals did it emerge that the top police investigator had concealed his diary of his investigations from the defence team and the trial court. When examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and members of the defence team, it was found to contain a chronological record of discussions with the US department of Justice and the sole identification witness concerning massive rewards, in the words of the US Department of Justice, of "unlimited monies" and "only if he gives evidence". The witness received $2m, and his brother $1m. This discovery was one of six areas of concern which led the SCCRC to conclude that "there may have been a miscarriage of justice".

Similarly, only after eight years was the forensic notebook of the prosecution's leading forensic scientist available for scrutiny by the defence team. This contained proof of either gross negligence or perjury when he told the trial judges that a fragment of timer circuit board found at the crash site was materially and structurally identical with timer boards delivered in 1985 to the Libyan government. In fact, his hand-written annotations revealed that the metallurgy of the fragment and the control samples were quite different. The fragment was protectively coated with 100% tin, whereas the sample was coated with an alloy of 70/30% tin/lead.

These issues, and several others with serious implications concerning both police and Crown officers, have been repeatedly brought to the attention of the Scottish government, the Scottish Crown Office, and the police. At all stages, those who have helped to expose them to public scrutiny have been pilloried as "conspiracy theorists".

Campaigners for justice in the Lockerbie case now await the results of Operation Sandwood, a police investigation into allegations of criminality by the Scottish Crown and certain Scottish police officers and government scientists. There is concern that campaigners for the truth have been forced to await an investigation of the police, by the police.  Whatever Sandwood contains, however, those areas of alleged criminality will still stand, and the fight for truth will continue.

Hillsborough has given truth and justice to the people of Liverpool. Let us hope that in time the same will be said for the bereaved of Lockerbie.

[RB: Further posts on this blog drawing analogies between Hillsborough and Lockerbie can be read here.]

Thatcher banned Lockerbie inquiry

[This is the heading over an item posted yesterday on Lockerbietruth.com, the website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph. It reads as follows:]

Today's release of Thatcher cabinet papers from 1988/89 contains a sinister footnote to the Lockerbie story.

Pan Am 103 was blown from the skies over the Scottish town of Lockerbie just after 7 pm on the evening of the 21st December 1988. Within hours US FBI teams arrived in Lockerbie to "assist" the Dumfries and Galloway police force.

Phone lines between the White House, the US embassy in London, and the offices of MI6 were running hot. The US ambassador to the UK had been kept informed. The secret US Navy base at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre had been alerted and at dawn a surveillance helicopter would be scrambled.

At 9.30 on the morning of the 22nd December Thatcher and her cabinet met to decide what to do.  Information about the tragedy had flooded into Downing Street from 8 pm the previous evening. Thatcher and entourage would fly to Scotland later that morning to survey the devastation.

At the cabinet table was head of MI6 Sir Christopher Curwen. He reported that US intelligence had instructed that on no account was there to be any form of public inquiry. His advice was supported by British Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon.

The tragedy would prove to be the biggest attack on the British mainland since the Second World War, yet no public inquiry must be allowed. If such an inquiry were to happen, the following matters would be open to public scrutiny and questioning:

1. On board Pan Am 103 was a six-man CIA team returning from Beirut. In the suitcase of the team leader Charles McKee were sensitive state papers. The team had been on a praiseworthy mission to attempt to negotiate the release of US hostages at that time held in the Middle East.

2. One of the Pan Am passengers was Khaled Jafaar, a drug courier for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). His job was to take consignments of heroin originating from the Bekaa Valley to the US, to assist with the capture of drug traffickers in Mexico and the USA. UK security authorities cooperated with the drug shipments, known as "controlled deliveries" and sometimes "high risk flights". Passengers and public were unaware of the process.

3. Transport Minister Paul Channon was aware of a telephoned warning - made just days before the bombing - about possible bombs on US aircraft flying to the US. Known as the "Helsinki" warning it was, in the view of Heathrow security chiefs, a hoax. And yet the Department of Transport telexed the warning to Interpol and all airlines. Why would they do that, if the warning was a hoax?

4. Channon was aware also of a second warning from the German authorities in the form of a multi page coloured brochure. This included a photo of a mock-up of a bomb discovered in late October made by a terrorist group funded by Iran and Syria. It was certain that five bombs had been made by the group. Four were retrieved. A fifth bomb was never found.

5. In both warnings the Department of Transport had instructed airline check-in and security staff that if a tape recorder or radio in a passenger's luggage seemed suspicious, it should be "consigned to the hold of the plane". That is, exactly where the terrorist would want it to be.

6. Paul Channon was aware that Heathrow security was known to be in chaos. On the day of the Lockerbie attack 70,000 airside passes were in circulation at Heathrow, distributed to many nationalities and construction workers. The head of Heathrow security believed any country could have planted a bomb. There was no screening of staff, no restrictions on people walking through with bags. A rogue bag could be easily inserted into the baggage chain. [This information would be revealed to journalists in March 2012 by the Head of Heathrow Security following his retirement].

But...  

Important as they were, none of the above were recorded in Cabinet minutes or released under the thirty year rule.

 

Instead, all that is recorded and available to the public is that Thatcher and her ministers agreed that it was "not clear whether any further public inquiry would serve a useful purpose". An independent investigation would "serve no useful purpose". In general "it was important to avoid a plethora of inquiries that caused distress to individuals while unearthing no new facts."

On the contrary, Jim Swire and many bereaved relatives will be happy to undergo further distress caused by an independent inquiry. But will the Americans ever allow it?

Margaret Thatcher sleeps soundly in her grave knowing that her 1993 memoirs The Downing Street Years have consigned 270 murdered Lockerbie souls to the dustbin of history.  In 914 pages of closely remembered events and text she does not mention the word "Lockerbie".

The renowned journalist John Pilger has an appropriate saying for Thatcher's chicanery. When an event is inconvenient a government - aided by its intelligence services - will ensure that it "never happened".