The end game came down to damage limitation

[What follows is the text of a report published on the Socialist Worker website on this date in 2012:]  

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the man who didn’t commit the Lockerbie bombing, has died.

He was convicted in 2001 of murdering 270 people when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded above the Scottish town of Lockerbie 13 years earlier.

Grubby imperialist power politics overshadow the case. The shifting sands of who the US and Britain wanted as allies in the Middle East shaped the framing of Megrahi.

As political allegiances changed, so did official investigations into the Lockerbie disaster.

In the run-up to the 1990 Gulf War, original suspects Syria and Iran were dropped and Libya was blamed.

In the years since the sands shifted again. For instance, Libya handed over Megrahi to face trial in order to get sanctions on the country lifted. The trial, held specially in the Netherlands, was a farce.

When Britain wanted Libya as an ally, mostly because of its oil reserves, Megrahi again became a bargaining chip.

No one among the establishment has real concern for the victims of the bombing. They don’t want the truth of the Lockerbie bombing revealed.

Megrahi was released from prison in 2009 after serving eight years in jail.

Both the Scottish and Westminster governments were involved in the blackmailing of Megrahi into unnecessarily dropping his appeal as a condition of his release.

Megrahi said that he did so because Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, suggested it would be easier to send him home if the appeal was stopped.

Dropping the appeal meant that important new evidence wasn’t heard in court.

Former CIA officer Robert Baer was part of the initial investigation into the case. He said, “Your [Scottish] justice secretary had two choices—sneak into Megrahi’s cell and smother him with his pillow or release him.

“The end game came down to damage limitation because the evidence amassed by his appeal team is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.”

The case was sent back to court after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission concluded that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

The bombing was most likely retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner.

David Ben-Ayreah, a spokesperson for the victims of Lockerbie families, said, “As someone who attended the trial I have never taken the view that Megrahi was guilty. Megrahi is the 271st victim of Lockerbie.”

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, said, “I met him face to face in Tripoli in December last year, when he was very sick and in a lot of pain.

“But he still wanted to talk to me about how information which he and his defence team have accumulated could be passed to me after his death.”

Swire added, “Right up to the end he was determined—for his family’s sake, he knew it was too late for him—how the verdict against him should be overturned”.

Can you believe it?

[What follows is Dr Jim Swire’s account of the showing of Gideon Levy’s Lockerbie Revisited in the Scottish Parliament the previous evening:]

I saw the film last night in the Scottish Parliament. Lord Fraser, Stuart Henderson, Richard Marquise, Fred Whitehurst, Tom Thurman, Prof Hans Koechler and Robert Baer all made contributions in it.

The subject was the famous 'timer circuit board fragment', called PT35B in the court records.

There was evidence of widespread confusion over what was supposed to have been the way in which PT35B was handled, some claimed it had been to the USA others that it had not. The impression was that at least some of these were trying to contribute to a story the truth of which they did not want us to know.

Their stories could not all be true, for they differ widely.

'Oh what a complex web we weave when first we practice to deceive'

For me Robert Baer of the CIA was the most significant. His view was basically that of course it was a Iranian/Syrian job, but that even the USA (and therefore the UK) could not confront Iran militarily over it. That would, without question, have been to strangle the straits of Hormuz and therefore US oil supplies for a start. That sounds common sense to me.

The interviewer of these men was Gideon Levy himself [the film-maker], who showed great skill in extracting a maximum of information from them.

There was one criticism and that was that the film did show the famous picture of a tiny piece of circuit board on someone's finger tip. This is a picture of a shattered piece from a domestic cct board such as a tape recorder. It carried the codes of the former components printed in white on the fragment which appeared to have been of 'Paxolin' (mid brown) and bore no resemblance to a piece of fibre-glass board.

Use of this image will cause some confusion and allow the critics to get their knives in.

Otherwise it gave excellent support to the idea that the PT35B fragment has a very suspicious history, lacking the confirmed freedom from interference required of any significant item of 'evidence' for use in a murder trial.

I was able to point out at the end that PT35B also appeared to be something that could hardly have survived such close proximity to the Semtex charge, and that at least two independent explosives firms have confirmed this. Also that its police evidence bag had had its label interfered with, while its entry into the UK forensic report appeared to have been a hasty afterthought, requiring renumbering of the subsequent pages.

There is also said to be evidence that PT35B was never tested prior to the trial, for explosives residues, but that this has now been done and shown no trace of such residues.

Incredibly one contributor to the film claimed that the failure to do this was 'for reasons of economy'. Can you believe it? PT35B was only the most important forensic item in the entire 'evidence' armoury.

FBI Special Agent Thomas Thurman

A whole day power outage here in the Roggeveld Karoo made it impossible to post to this blog yesterday (30 October). Here is what I had intended to post:

[This is the heading over an article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer that appeared on the Canada Free Press website on this date in 2008. It reads in part:]

“No court is likely get to the truth [regarding the bombing of Pan Am 103], now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence.” - Oliver Miles, Former British Ambassador to Libya

Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late 80s and most of the 90s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying a tiny fragment as part of a MST-13 timer produced by the Swiss company Mebo.

“When that identification was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it,” Thurman told ABC in 1991. “Absolute, positively euphoria! I was on cloud nine.”

Again, his record is far from pristine. The US attorney general has accused him of having altered lab reports in a way that rendered subsequent prosecutions all but impossible. He has been transferred out the FBI forensic laboratory. Thurman has since left the FBI and joined the faculty at the School of Criminal Justice, Eastern Kentucky University.

The story shed some light on his formation. The report says “Williams and Thurman merit special censure for their work. It recommends that Thurman, who has a degree in political science, be reassigned outside the lab and that only scientists work in its explosives section.”

“For what it’s worth the best information on Lockerbie came long after Zeist, when the investigation was closed. I’ve always been curious about this case and never stopped looking into it, until the day I left the CIA in December 1997,” Robert Baer told me.

“The appeals commission posed the question to me about someone planting or manipulating evidence only to cover all the bases. I told them I did not think there was an organized attempt to misdirect the investigation, although I was aware that once it was decided to go after Libya, leads on Iran and the PFLP-GC were dismissed. Often in many investigations of this sort, the best intelligence comes out long after the event,” Baer added.

“I’m fascinated to know precisely why the Scots referred the case back to the court, although they did tell me the FBI and Scotland Yard have manipulated the evidence for the prosecution,” Baer told me.

Forensic analysis of the circuit board fragment allowed the investigators to identify its origin. The timer, known as MST-13, is fabricated by a Swiss Company named MeBo, which stands for Meister and Bollier.

The company has indeed sold about 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military (machine-made nine-ply green boards), as well as a few units (hand-made eight-ply brown boards) to a Research Institute in Bernau, known to act as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police. (...)

The CIA’s Vincent Cannistraro is on the record stating that no one has ever questioned the Thurman credentials. Allow me.

“He’s very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management,” says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who filed the complaints that led to the inspector general’s report.

“We’re not necessarily going to get the truth out of what we’re doing here,” concluded Whitehurst who now works as an attorney at law and forensic consultant.

Dr Whitehurst has authored something like 257 memos to the FBI and Justice Department with various complaints of incompetence, “fabrication of evidence” and perjury of various examiners in the FBI Laboratory (primarily Explosives Unit examiners).

“What I had to say about Tom Thurman and the computer chip was reported to the US attorney general’s inspector general during the investigation of wrongdoing in the FBI lab in the 1990s. I acquired all that information and the inspector general’s report from a law suit under the Freedom of Information Act and therefore the information provided under that FOIA request is in the public sector,” Whitehurst told me.

“I reported to my superiors up to and including the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US attorney general, members of the US Congress and US Senate as well as the Office of the President of the United States that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Thomas Thurman altered my reports for five years without my authorization or knowledge. This is public information. Thurman holds an undergraduate degree in political science and I hold a PhD in chemistry.”

“Thurman was not recognized by the FBI or anyone else as having expertise in complex chemical analysis and I was. When confronted with this information Thurman did not deny it but argued that my reports could and/or would hurt prosecutors’ cases. I was very concerned about the fact that wrong information in the final reports could hurt individuals and deny citizens of this country right to a fair trial. When I raised my concerns with my managers at the FBI laboratory, all except for one of them reminded me that Thurman was the “hero” behind determining the perpetrators of the Pan Am 103 disaster.”

“I understood from that that the FBI would not expose these issues for fear that the investigation into the Pan Am 103 bombing would be seen as possibly flawed and this would open the FBI up to criticism and outside review.”

No government body has found that Mr. Thurman has done anything illegal. However he was relieved from his post in the FBI’s Explosives Unit and placed in charge of the FBI’s Bomb Data Center.

“Did Mr Thurman find the integrated circuit chip about which you have referred? After leaving the FBI, I was interviewed by Scottish defense attorneys for one of the individuals accused of bombing Pan Am 103. At that interview were two of my attorneys, two FBI attorneys and two Scottish attorneys and me. I was asked what I knew about the circuit chip. I can say that I was not interviewed because I agreed with the official version of the discovery of that integrated circuit chip,” Whitehurst wrote to me. (...)

In the world of Forensic Sciences, former FBI [special agent] William Tobin is a legend. To name but a few of his achievements, Tobin demonstrated, along with his NTSB colleagues, that TWA 800 had been destroyed by mechanical failure at the time when virtually the rest of the world strongly believed a terror act. Both the NTSB and the CIA subsequently presented compelling evidence demonstrating the scientific validity of Tobin’s conclusion.

After retiring, Tobin demonstrated that the Lead content bullet identification technique, used by the FBI for more than four decades, was flawed. Tobin was not allowed to work on this matter while at the FBI.

Tobin knows a few things about superhero Thomas Thurman. Tobin told me that, in his opinion, Thurman and other Explosives Unit examiners were prone to confirmation bias, an observer bias whereby an examiner is inclined to see what he is expected to see. Tobin’s opinion is based on “numerous interactions whereby Thurman and other examiners rendered conclusions supporting the prevailing investigative or prosecutorial theory but which were unsupported by scientific fact.

It was not uncommon to determine that items characterized as ‘chrome-plated’ were nickel-plated, ‘extrusions’ turned out to be drawn products, ‘castings’ turned out to be forgings, white residues characterized as explosive residue turned out to be corrosion products (generally Al2O3 or a non-stoichiometric form), bent nails claimed to be indicative of an explosion, and a truck axle was characterized as having fractured from an explosion (a conclusion rendered solely from an 8-1/2” x 11” photograph where the axle was a small fraction of the field of view and the fracture surface itself was not observable).

“I put no credence into any scientific or technical conclusions rendered by anyone without a suitable scientific background for that matter, until I can make an independent evaluation. Thurman was a history or political science major to my recollection,” Tobin added

“His habit, as with most Explosives Unit examiners with whom I interacted and based on numerous court transcript reviews and ‘bailout’ requests I received on several occasions (to ‘bail out’ an examiner who not only misrepresented an item of evidence but also was confronted with more accurate representations of the evidence in trial), was to seek someone else’s expertise and then present it as his own in a courtroom without attribution.”

“He would frequently come into my office, ask for a ‘quick’ assessment of something (but I would always indicate that my opinion was only a preliminary evaluation and that I would need to conduct proper scientific testing of the item(s)), then weeks later I would see the assessment in a formal FBI Laboratory report to the contributor (of the evidence) as his own ‘scientific’ conclusion,” Tobin remembers.

“I cannot imagine that he was acting alone. He was a mid-level manager without a great deal of authority and with severely limited credentials of which the FBI was fully aware,” Whitehurst answered when I asked him if he thought that Thurman had acted alone.

“The problem with having a scientific laboratory within an intelligence gathering organization is that scientists traditionally are seeking truth and at times their data is in direct contradiction to the wishes of a government that is not seeking truth but victory on battle fields.”

“The problem with the scientific data is that when one wishes to really determine what the government scientists or pseudo scientists could have known, one need only look at the data. So few citizens ever ask for or review that data. So few scientists wish to question the government that feeds them and gives security to their families.”

“Was Thurman ordered to do what he did? No one acts alone without orders in the FBI. We had clear goals which were clearly given to us in every document we received from anyone. If a police organization wished for us to provide them “proof” of guilt then they told us in many ways of their absolute belief that the perpetrators were those individuals they had already arrested. If the president of the United States tells the country in the national news that Dandeny Munoz Mosquera is one of the most fear assassins in the history of the world then every agent knows that he must provide information to support that statement. If leaders decide without concern for foundation of truth then most people will follow them,” Whitehurst said.

“Thurman did not act alone. The culture at the FBI was one of group think, don’t go against the flow, stay in line, ignore that data that does not fit the group think,” Whitehurst added.

His former colleague agrees. “I’ve seen so often where an individual who was at one time an independent thinker and had good powers of reasoning acquires the ‘us vs them,’ circle-the-wagons, public-relations at all costs mentality at the FBI,” Tobin says.

“As much as I loved the institution, I have never seen a worse case of spin-doctoring of any image-tarnishing facts or developments as I had at the FBI. Never! It seemed the guiding principle was ‘image before reality’ or ‘image before all else’ (including fact). Whatever you do, ‘don’t embarrass the Bureau’ and ‘the Bureau can do no wrong.’”

Lockerbie – the cover-up

[This is the headline over an article that was published in the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

The wrong man was jailed for the Lockerbie bombing and the real suspect allowed to escape justice to satisfy political motives, a damning investigation can reveal.

The Scottish Mail on Sunday can today publish remarkable details from a report by two leading investigators which throws major doubt on the conviction of Libyan agent Abdel-baset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi. He is expected to be freed from a Scottish prison this week after serving eight years of a life sentence for the bombing. The report would have formed the basis of Megrahi's appeal against his conviction, a case which will never be heard after he dropped his legal challenge in return for his early release.

The investigation finds that the man almost certain to have conducted the attack was Mohammed Abu Talb, a convicted Palestinian terrorist with the backing, finance, equipment and contacts to have carried out the atrocity. It also places Talb at the scene where parts of the suitcase bomb were bought – and in Britain when it exploded over Lockerbie. But instead of pursuing Talb and his Iranian backers, the report claims the American and British manhunt was ordered to find a link to Libya and its leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

In a damning verdict on the case, the investigators conclude:'We are convinced Mr … Megrahi's conviction was based on flawed evidence … Megrahi's conviction was based on fundamentally flawed evidence. We have never seen a criminal investigation in which there has been such a persistent disregard of an alternative and far more persuasive theory of the case.This leads us to believe the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing was directed off-course as a result of government interference.'

Talb, serving a life sentence in Sweden for a fatal bombing campaign in the Eighties, was a key witness in the prosecution case against Megrahi in the Scottish courts, for which he received immunity from prosecution. However, the investigation on behalf of Megrahi's defence team by a former UK terror chief and a former US prosecutor who has worked for the British government provides compelling evidence that Talb was the bomber. The report reveals that:

· Talb had clothing from the same Maltese shop as that packed in the suitcase that carried the bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103;

· Talb's alibi that he was in Sweden at the time of the bombing was false, he was in London meeting other terrorists with an unprimed bomb;

· Talb had bribed a corrupt employee at Heathrow to get a suit case through security unchecked;

· Talb was paid $500,000 only four months after the bombing.

Megrahi is expected to fly to Libya after being granted his freedom on compassionate grounds. Officials insist the move followed assurances he has terminal cancer and has only three months to live. However, it is also understood that a condition of Megrahi's release was that he dropped his appeal, because the UK Government and the Scottish justice system were keen to prevent embarrassing details about the case emerging.

At the centre of the alleged cover-up is evidence that Libya, then a pariah state to the US and Britain, was singled out for responsibility to suit political motives, when in fact the bombing was carried out by Talb on the orders and funding of Iran in revenge for the shooting down of its airliner by a US warship.

The Scottish Mail on Sunday has uncovered much of the evidence that would be a source of embarrassment. In recent years, we have revealed that critical evidence was manipulated and even planted, that the key witness was coached by detectives and rewarded for his ever-changing statements and that recent forensic tests conducted on crucial items of evidence shattered the Crown's case.

Now we have obtained documents which outline evidence that the leading player responsible for taking 270 lives in Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, was not Megrahi but Talb. The report carries weight because of the calibre of those who amassed the evidence - Jessica de Grazia, a former senior New York prosecutor who led an investigation for the UK Attorney General's office into the Serious Fraud Office, and Philip Corbett, a former deputy head of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch. Their access to informed sources in Middle East intelligence gives their report particular authority.

Instructed by Megrahi's defence team after his conviction in January 2001, de Grazia and Corbett placed Talb in key locations in Europe with terrorist leaders in the months prior to the Lockerbie bombing. Much of the evidence implicating Talb was known to the Crown and defence prior to the trial of Megrahi. Talb had links to at least two terror groups, in particular the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) and was a strong suspect. The PFLP-GC, funded by Iran and led by the Syrian Ahmed Jibril, was the first suspect in the Lockerbie case. A cell based in Europe in 1988 was led by Jibril's deputy, Hafez Dalkamoni, with Talb one of their most trusted lieutenants.

However, despite the belief that Iran was responsible, the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1990 caused a major political shift in the investigation. A secret deal for Allied war-planes to use Iranian airspace to attack Iraq required the US and British governments to stop its pursuit of the Lockerbie bombers and their Iranian connections. Libya was instead chosen as the prime suspect.

When the focus of the investigation switched, the evidence gathered against Talb and the PFLP-GC was effectively discarded by Scottish and US investigators. However, de Grazia and Corbett say evidence almost certainly proved an Iranian-backed plot.

Five months before Lockerbie, the American vessel USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board perished. Iran vowed vengeance and promised that the skies would run with the blood of Americans. Three months later, in October 1988, German secret police raided a flat in Germany where Dalkamoni's cell was making Semtex bombs contained in Toshiba radio-cassettes designed to bring down aircraft, identical to the device used in the Lockerbie attack two months later. Although the Germans seized five devices, the bombmaker Marwan Khreesat told them a sixth had been removed by Dalkamoni.

De Grazia and Corbett's investigation reveals that Dalkamoni and Talb had been friends since 1980 and met, including in Malta, in the weeks before the bombing. De Grazia was also told by intelligence sources that 'because of his abilities, Talb was given Lockerbie to carry out'. The investigation says the missing bomb from Germany was probably taken to Malta for safe-keeping before being packed, unprimed, by Talb before its journey to London.

A Maltese connection had also been a focal point of the prosecution's case during Megrahi's trial. They argued that shopkeeper Tony Gauci identified Megrahi as the buyer of clothes later packed in the bomb case. However, de Grazia and Corbett say that Gauci also identified Talb as the man who 'most resembled' the buyer. Although Gauci's evidence about Megrahi provided key eyewitness evidence to the prosecution's case, it emerged that the store owner had been given paid holidays to Scotland as well as being coached by investigators in his evidence. De Grazia and Corbett say Gauci's evidence against Talb would have been just as strong if it had been pursued. Their report says the most conclusive link between Talb and the clothing bought from Gauci's shop was the discovery of a cardigan in his flat in Sweden. The cardigan was traced to a manufacturer on the Maltese island of Gozo, a firm that supplied Gauci.

The investigation says, based on their evidence, the plan was to launch the attack from Malta but this was dropped because of security at the island's airport. Talb and his colleagues decided Heathrow's security would be easier to crack. It emerged after the bombing there had been a security breach at Heathrow when a lock was forced near Pan Am's airside berths. Corbett describes the probe into the breach as 'inadequate'. Their inquiries uncovered evidence that on an earlier visit to London, Talb bribed an employee to get an unchecked case airside.

Crucially, the report exposes Talb's alibi for December 21. He was not, as he claimed, caring for the children of a relative who was giving birth in a Swedish hospital. They found that on December 19 he sailed from Sweden to Britain, arriving in London on December 21, the day of the bombing. There he met other terrorists, including bomber Abu Elias and Martin Imandi, who are thought to have been in possession of the device left on Flight 103.

After the bombing, De Grazia and Corbett say more evidence emerges linking Talb and his terror cell to the atrocity. They highlight evidence obtained via ex-CIA agent Robert Baer that the Iranian government paid $11 million into a European bank account held by the PFLP-GC two days later. An account held by Talb in Frankfurt was later credited with $500,000. In their conclusions, De Grazia and Corbett recommend forensic scrutiny of the timer fragment that was the only physical evidence in the case that pointed to Libya. That work showed the fragment had never been near an explosion, shattering the case against Megrahi.

The evidence gathered by De Grazia and Corbett would have been the cornerstone of Megrahi's appeal which was expected to have posed a serious challenge to his conviction. However, on Tuesday, as part of the private understanding between the dying Megrahi and the Scottish Executive, his lawyers will drop his appeal. The move will effectively close the chapter on Lockerbie, denying the public the opportunity to hear the full story behind the horror of December 21,1988.

[RB: John Ashton has advised circumspection about accepting the De Grazia and Corbett findings.]

FBI and CIA rôles in Lockerbie investigation

[On this date in 2014 the Russian news agency RIA Novosti (now Sputnik International) published an article by Mark Hirst headlined FBI Chief Investigator Dismisses CIA Officer’s Claims Over 1988 Plane Bombing Intel. It reads as follows:]

An agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who led the US probe into the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988 has denied claims made by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s former officer who told RIA Novosti that FBI investigators did not read vital US intelligence material related to the attack.

Earlier Robert Baer, a retired CIA officer who was based in the Middle East, told RIA Novosti, “I’ve been having exchanges with the FBI investigators and they came right out and said they didn't read the intelligence."

“I just find that extraordinary and then later for them to comment on the intelligence and say it's no good; it’s amazing,” Baer said.

But Richard Marquise, who led the US investigation into the attack, dismissed Baer’s claim.

“Mr. Baer had no role in the investigation and anything he knows or claims to know is either hearsay or speculation,” Marquise told RIA Novosti.

“I find [Baer’s claims] interesting because he has previously said that the CIA did not pass us all the information, something I doubt he would be in a position to know,” Marquise argued.

“I agree that there were a handful of FBI personnel (agents and analysts) who had access to all the intelligence that was passed and it may have been possible that some FBI agents who played a minor role in the case may not have seen it,” he added.

For years controversy has surrounded the case following the 2001 conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer. Campaigners, including some relatives of victims of Pan Am 103, believe Megrahi was wrongly convicted and are continuing to call for a public inquiry into the events leading to the bombing.

Baer has previously claimed US intelligence pointed to Iran – not Libya – as the source of the attack that allegedly retaliated for the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the American warship, USS Vincennes, five months before the attack on Pan Am 103. Baer told RIA Novosti that a convincing case implicating Libya was still to be made.

“Richard Marquise has taken a moral position on the case,” Baer told RIA Novosti. “I can still be convinced the Libyans did it, but I still need to be convinced of that.”

Robert Black, Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, has spent more than two decades studying the case.

“I'd be absolutely amazed if the FBI didn't consider the intelligence material, if only to reject it as unreliable or unusable as evidence in judicial proceedings,” Black told RIA Novosti.

“Indeed, there's clear evidence that they did make use of it. A key prosecution witness, Majid Giaka, was a CIA asset and was in a Department of Justice witness protection program,” Black added.

“The FBI falls under the Department of Justice. And Giaka was a crucial witness in the Washington DC grand jury hearing that led to the US indictment against Megrahi and Fhimah,” Black said.

Pan Am Flight 103 was flying from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York City when it was blown out of the sky over Scotland by a terrorist bomb that killed 270 people, including 11 on the ground. A three-year-long investigation yielded two Libyan suspects who were handed over to the United [Kingdom] (...) in 1999. In 2003, Gaddafi (...) paid compensation, but said he had never given the order for the attack.

Terrorists involved in Lockerbie bombing are now fighting with ISIS

[This is the headline over a report by Ben Borland in today’s edition of the Sunday Express. It reads in part:]

Some of the terrorists involved in the Lockerbie bombing are now fighting with Islamic State, according to a former CIA agent who worked on the original investigation.

Robert Baer said it was even possible that the failure to bring all of those responsible for the December 1988 atrocity to justice had contributed to the rise of IS.

The former Middle East case officer was speaking after Kenny MacAskill accused Iran, Syria and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) of plotting Lockerbie.

In his new book, the ex-SNP Justice Secretary says the bombing was ordered by Iran and that Libya "picked up the pieces" after German police raids broke up a PFLP-GC cell.

Two Libyans, Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lameen Fhima, were eventually put on trial and Megrahi was convicted, before being released with terminal cancer almost seven years ago.

Mr Baer, who worked for US intelligence from 1976 to 1997, said MacAskill had shown "enormous courage" in "pointing out the truth" about Lockerbie.

He backed calls for Scottish and US prosecutors to pursue PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril, who the Sunday Express recently traced to the Syrian capital Damascus.

However, he added: "If they handed over Jibril and he talked he would implicate the Iranians and Syria is effectively run by Iran so it would just never happen."

Although Jibril and the PFLP-GC are now fighting with the Syrian regime against IS, Mr Baer said many former members had converted to Islamic extremism.

"Some of the earlier bombers have washed up with the Islamic State," he said. (...)

"Abu Ibrahim [the leader of the May 15 group, another offshoot of the PFLP and an initial Lockerbie suspect] has ended up with IS. He was in a safe house Baghdad in 2003 but he escaped just before we got to him."

Just weeks before Lockerbie, a German anti-terror operation codenamed Autumn Leaves raided a PFLP-GC cell led by Hafez Dalkamoni and including bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat and second-in-command Abdel Fattah Ghadanfar.

Fourteen members, including Khreesat, were released almost immediately, while Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar were jailed for several years before being deported to Syria.

The whereabouts of Dalkamoni and Ghadanfar is currently unknown, although Khreesat - who has been described as a double or even a triple agent - is living in Jordan.

Mr Baer said it was "almost certain" that terrorist bomb-makers from the 1980s had gone on to train IS fighters or become fully-fledged members of the group.

He said: "Ibrahim, Khreesat, Dalkamoni. A bunch of them have their signatures in the IS bombings in Fallujah and Baghdad." (...)

Asked if the failure to look beyond Libya in the Lockerbie investigation had contributed to the rise of IS, he replied: "That's possible but more than that we would have a better sense of justice in the world."

Mr Baer, who recently visited Syria to research a book about Islamic fundamentalism, said Jibril - who is said to have received $10million from Iran after Lockerbie - would be living in luxury.

The truth behind Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Dr Issaka Souaré that was published on Al Arabiya News website on this date in 2008, having been published earlier that week in Al-Ahram Weekly. It reads in part:]

Libya has always maintained its innocence amid the allegation that it is responsible for the bombing of the American Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. It however accepted, about a decade later -- after many diplomatic manoeuvres -- to hand over two of its citizens to Scottish authorities to be tried for the alleged crime. Three Scottish judges, representing the Scottish High Court of Judiciary (HCJ), sat at a special court in a third country, as Libya had demanded (the Netherlands). Whilst they acquitted and subsequently released one of the two Libyan nationals, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima, the other one, Abdul-Basit Ali Mohamed Al-Meghrahi was convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing and was imprisoned for life.

Al-Meghrahi, as his country, has consistently maintained his innocence. He thus appealed against his conviction, but the Scottish High Court rejected this application in March 2002, just over a year after his trial concluded on 31 January 2001. However, in September 2003, he applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to review his conviction in light of this body referring his case to the HCJ. The SCCRC is described in its mandate as an independent public body established in 1999 by Scottish authorities with responsibility for reviewing alleged miscarriages of justice in Scotland. As such, it has the power to refer to the HCJ any conviction or sentence passed on a person, whether or not an appeal against the conviction or sentence has been heard and determined previously. In this instance, the HCJ must hear an appeal in the case referred.

But to refer a case to the HCJ, the SCCRC must be convinced that the evidence presented to it establishes that; a miscarriage of justice may have occurred; and it is in the interests of justice that a referral should be made.

Understanding this background is important in understanding the case at hand. Al-Meghrahi's defence team lodged an application to the SCCRC in September 2003. About six months later, in February 2004, the SCCRC allocated the case to an investigative team of three legal officers on a full time basis. In May 2007, the SCCRC accepted the request of the defendant's legal team to appeal Al-Meghrahi's imprisonment, justifying this by the fact that the defence team had enough ground for the appeal.

In an official press release of 28 June 2007, in which it announced the referral of Al-Meghrahi's case to the HCJ, the SCCRC declared that it had identified six grounds -- some of which resulted from the SCCRC's own investigation -- where it believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred against Al-Meghrahi and that, "it is in the interests of justice to refer the matter to the court of appeal."

One of the grounds on which the SCCRC referred Al-Meghrahi's case to appeal is that there are new facts that challenge some of the "core" evidence that the trial court relied upon to convict Al-Meghrahi.  (...)

Further to all this, it seems that Al-Meghrahi's defence team is still being denied a critical and highly sensitive document for their appeal. In a report of the 23 February 2008 issue of the Scottish Sunday Herald, Al-Meghrahi's lawyer is said to have criticised the Scottish authority's silence over allegations that the British government, through Foreign Secretary David Miliband, is the one behind this, and that this constitutes an undue interference by Westminster in the Scottish judicial system. The document is thought to contain sensitive information about the electronic device used to explode the airliner that may clear Al-Meghrahi of the crime. Al-Meghrahi's defence team argue that the document was deliberately withheld from them at trial.

On the basis of the above, a number of questions are opened. If Libya was not behind the crime -- as it has always maintained -- then who was? Ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, who worked on the Lockerbie investigation, claims Iran was responsible. Why wouldn't the Americans seize on this allegation? Why the exclusive focus on Libya? Why would the British government zealously protect a document that supposedly incriminates Iran, or Syria for that matter? Iran could not be responsible for this; so who might be? (...)

Why did Libya agree to pay compensation to the families of Lockerbie victims when it claims it is innocent? Could it be that Qaddafi was that desperate to have Western sanctions against Libya lifted that he accepted to pay an amount that was little compared to what his country stood to gain from restoring relations with the West? One senior Libyan diplomat told me so. If so, was this a wise decision on the part of Tripoli? Could the ruling of an American court in mid-January ordering Libya to pay more than $6 billion in damages over the bombing of a French aircraft over Niger in September 1989 be seen as possible only because of Tripoli's decision? Will Libya refuse to pay, or will it conclude again that the amount is little compared to the benefits it gets from its relations with the West?

The release of Al-Meghrahi, should the Scottish appeals court acquit him, would surely open the door to many unanswered questions.