Pan Am 103: Lockerbie verdict politically motivated

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James and Chris Marsden that was published on the World Socialist Web Site on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

The guilty verdict issued on January 31 by three Scottish judges at the conclusion of the Pan Am 103/Lockerbie trial is unsound by all normal legal criteria.

The trial of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 began on May 3 last year. It was held under Scottish law at a specially constructed court in the Netherlands. With the agreement of the defence and prosecution, the case was heard without a jury before a bench of three Scottish judges. On January 31, after 84 days of evidence and controversy, and many weeks of adjournments, Abdelbaset Ali Muhammad Al-Megrahi was found guilty of planting a Semtex-packed cassette player on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane, killing its 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents. However, his sole alleged accomplice, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted on all charges.

The Pan Am 103/Lockerbie bombing was an indiscriminate terrorist attack upon innocent air travellers, many of whom were US students returning home for the Christmas holiday. But the horrific nature of the crime must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the prosecution case against the two Libyans was an extremely weak one, which under normal circumstances would have been thrown out of court. Robert Black, the Scottish law professor who devised the format of the Netherlands-based trial, has said he was "absolutely astounded" that Al Megrahi had been found guilty. Black said he believed the prosecution had "a very, very weak circumstantial case" and he was reluctant to believe that Scottish judges would "convict anyone, even a Libyan" on such evidence. This view is supported by some of the families of UK victims of the bombing, who are calling for a public inquiry to find "the truth of who was responsible and what the motive was".

In their 82-page verdict, the Scottish judges—Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and Maclean—expose the weakness of the prosecution case and how they ignored, or simply dismissed, a mass of contradictory forensic and circumstantial evidence in order to bring a guilty verdict against Al Megrahi.

Significantly they rejected in its entirety the defence argument that other individuals and groups—namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC)—were responsible for the bomb, on the grounds that the evidence against them was circumstantial and inconclusive.

This raises the question, why was there such a discrepancy between the standards applied to the defence's arguments seeking to implicate others for the bombing and those employed by the prosecution against Al Megrahi? The case against the two Libyans was no less circumstantial and flimsy, a fact acknowledged in part by the acquittal of Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. Under Scottish law, moreover, it was possible to return a verdict of “not proven” that would free but not completely exonerate Al Megrahi on the basis that the court could not accept his guilt "beyond reasonable doubt".

An explanation as to why a guilty verdict was delivered must be sought in the political rather than the judicial arena. The demonisation of the “rogue state” Libya has long played an important part of US policy in the Middle East. Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi's anti-imperialist rhetoric, his regime's support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel all drew the ire of the US, which designated Libya a "terrorist" nation in 1979. In 1986 the US bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, in an action launched from British bases that killed Gadhaffi's daughter. The US imposed unilateral economic sanctions the same year, and led the calls for UN-approved sanctions to be imposed in 1992.

It is against this political background that the Lockerbie investigation and eventual trial must be evaluated. Initial police investigations focused on the claim that it was a reprisal attack for the unprovoked US shooting down of an Iranian Airbus six months before the Pan Am bombing, in which all 290 people on board were killed. This possible reprisal was alleged to have been financed by the Iranian regime, which had hired the Syrian backed PFLP-GC to carry out the Pan Am bombing. In 1990, however, the Republican administration in the US, led by President George Bush, placed maximum pressure on the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain to drop this line of inquiry. According to relatives of those killed in the disaster, Thatcher refused a public inquiry at this time, on the grounds that it was against the "national interest".

Accusations of Libyan responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing first emerged during US preparations for the assault on Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. In their efforts to assemble support for military aggression against Iraq by NATO, US officials shuttled frantically around the various Arab regimes in the Middle East. Secretary of State James Baker visited Syria on numerous occasions in 1990 and Bush himself pronounced that Syria had taken a "bum rap" over the bombing (i.e. that it was not responsible).

Libya, which stood out in opposition to the US attack on Iraq, became the focus of political and media blame for the Lockerbie bombing. In 1992 a UN resolution imposed economic sanctions against Libya after it refused to hand over Al Megrahi and Fhimah for trial in Britain or America, and demanded compensation payment be made, should the Libyans be found guilty.

Washington and London never expected Libya to hand over its own citizens, including at least one of its intelligence officers, Al Megrahi. But this became possible through the efforts of Gadhaffi's regime to initiate a rapprochement with the West, and the major European powers in particular. From 1994 onwards, Tripoli repeatedly offered its citizens up for trial, provided only this was on "neutral" territory.

Over the next few years, Gadhaffi sought to cultivate the support of the European powers. He acted as mediator in conflicts such as the Eritrean-Ethiopian war, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Sudanese civil war and the war in Sierra Leone—while signing numerous oil and other commercial deals with Italian and French companies.

Resolving the outstanding issue of Lockerbie became essential for the US and Britain if they were not to be left out of the rich pickings now being made available in Libya, a country whose oil reserves are equivalent to those of the US. Negotiations commenced in earnest in 1999, culminating in the suspension of UN sanctions against Libya on April 5, after the US, Britain and Libya agreed on the hand-over and conditions for the trial of the two men in the Netherlands.

The US continued to take a harder stance against Libya than Europe. It did not agree to the lifting of UN sanctions, and opposed the efforts of Britain and others to restore diplomatic relations—demanding that Libya "end and renounce all forms of terrorism" and "acknowledge responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials" with regards to the Pan Am bombing. But it nevertheless did offer the prospect of a normalisation of relations in future. In a 1999 speech to the Middle East Institute, a US foreign policy think-tank, for example, Ronald Neumann proclaimed that "Libya's surrender of the Pan Am 103 suspects for trial and the ensuing suspension of international sanctions have changed the political landscape of the last ten years... Libya is not Iraq. We do not seek to maintain sanctions until there is a change of regime in Tripoli. We have seen definite changes in Libya's behavior, specifically declining support for terrorism and increasing support for peace processes in the Middle East and Africa."

A rapprochement with Libya had to take place on US terms, however. This meant accepting the validity of US assertions of Libya's guilt for the bombing, even seeking to solicit a public acknowledgement of this from Gadhaffi. In order to justify more than a decade of US-led hostilities against Libya, therefore, it was essential that at least one of the defendants was found guilty, despite the threadbare character of the case against them.

It is impossible, on the basis of the evidence presented in the Netherlands, to ascertain who was truly responsible for the Pan Am 103/Lockerbie bombing. Al Megrahi's guilt was not proven beyond reasonable doubt, but nor was his innocence. Nothing presented definitively ruled out Libyan involvement in the bombing, but nor did the trial exclude the possible involvement of Syria, Iran or several Palestinian groups. Of all the possible scenarios, the one, which received least scrutiny, was the possibility raised by some interested parties that the bombing was the inadvertent product of a CIA operation that badly backfired. But the purpose of the trial was never the search to expose the truth about this terrible attack. Instead the verdict provides the US with the necessary propaganda vehicle through which it can continue to exert maximum pressure on Libya to accede to its demands, and thereby strengthen America's grip on the entire Middle East region.

Gadhaffi has so far refused to accept American calls to acknowledge Libya's guilt regarding Pan Am 103 and has even promised to release new information proving Al Megrahi's innocence. But he has not done so yet, however. Given that it was Gadhaffi who agreed to hand over the two accused in 1999, his outrage seems largely designed for domestic consumption. It is also directed against what he no doubt sees as the failure of the US and Britain to honour their tacit agreement to limit the matter to a criminal trial of the two individuals accused, and not to use it to continue attacking his government. Given the bellicose stance of the newly installed Bush administration regarding Middle East policy, such fears appear well founded.

"Frankly speaking I am not convinced"

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James published on this date in 2002 on the World Socialist Web Site:]

Five senior Scottish judges at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, have thrown out the appeal by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi against his conviction, January 2001 for the mass murder of 270 people killed at Lockerbie on December 21, 1988. Al-Megrahi has now been transported to Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie prison, where a special wing has been built for him to serve his 20-year sentence.

Scotland’s leading legal officials have fully defended a conviction based on flimsy and contested circumstantial evidence that has been criticised by several observers as a miscarriage of justice. One of five United Nations observers to the Lockerbie trial, Hans Koechler has previously criticised the initial verdict. Having sat through the entire trial and the appeal, he told BBC Radio Scotland, “I am sorry to admit that my impression is that justice was not done and that we are dealing here with a rather spectacular case of a miscarriage of justice... Frankly speaking I am not convinced. I was not convinced when I read the opinion of the court after the trial last year and I was not convinced when I went through the text presented today. I am not convinced at all that the sequence of events that led to this explosion of the plane over Scotland was as described by the court. Everything that is presented is only circumstantial evidence.” Koechler said he believed other members of the UN team shared his concerns.

Speaking later, Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, was killed in the explosion said, “We think there has been miscarriage of justice. Thank God that Britain does not have the death penalty.” Swire reiterated the long-standing call of several relatives of Lockerbie victims for a public inquiry “that has real authority” to be convened.

Professor Robert Black, the lawyer who has worked closely with the relatives for many years and the architect of the trial process itself, also described the trial as a miscarriage of justice. He told The Scotsman, “We have not seen the end of this case... There is a hell of lot of more evidence that appeared neither at the trial or the appeal.”

In contrast to the alarm felt by close observers of the trial, many of Scotland’s leading politicians showed an indecent haste to support an appeal decision they can hardly have had the time to read.

Scottish Justice Minister Jim Wallace claimed, “Everyone will have breathed a collective sigh of relief at the decision of the appeal judges.” Scottish National Party justice spokesman Roseanna Cunningham announced, “This unique trial has shown the Scottish justice system to be robust and effective in the eyes of the world—right from the actions of the police officers investigating the immediate aftermath of this terrible crime up to today’s verdict.”

Based on the evidence presented at the Lockerbie trial and the subsequent appeal, it is impossible to say with certainty which persons, movements or governments were responsible for the destruction of Pan Am flight 103. Libya could have been responsible for the bombing, but a number of alternative scenarios have been presented—from the involvement of Palestinian groups to direct allegations of CIA involvement. What has become clear is that the assertion that al-Megrahi planted the bomb in Luqa airport in Malta that blew up PA103 is based on deeply problematic circumstantial evidence. Moreover, the case against him is contradicted by somewhat stronger circumstantial evidence pointing to the bomb’s insertion into the plane at Frankfurt or Heathrow airports.

Despite this, in a 200-page verdict, the five judges, led by Lord Cullen, rejected all but the most minor of the appeal team’s questioning of the numerous holes in the prosecution case. Explaining their decision, the appeal judges’ claimed they had no right to comment on the initial verdict. Where some comment became unavoidable, they always defended the trial judges’ line of reasoning, on the basis it was not for an appeal to re-evaluate the original evidence. In only a small number of instances they accepted there might have been mistakes, but insisted that these errors had no impact on the final outcome.

The appeal court concluded that new evidence, highlighted in the press, that there had been a break-in at Heathrow airport, near the luggage area, the night before PA103 took off for New York, had no bearing on the verdict. While the court accepted there had been a break-in, there was a significant degree of confusion over the movement and positioning of cases that answered the description of the Samsonite suitcase supposedly containing the bomb, and that there was evidence suggesting that it had arrived in a luggage container by unknown means, it concluded that this did not constitute circumstantial evidence strong enough to overcome the assertion that the bomb case was loaded at Luqa.

The appeal court accepted that the judges misdirected themselves when they stated that the records showing 13.10 as the time when luggage destined for PA103 (a feeder flight from Frankfurt to London) was processed. The appeal judges agreed that they had no basis to prefer this to the 13.16 suggested as an alternative time by the defence—the record itself is difficult to read. Flights from several aircraft were being processed at Frankfurt at the time, and a six-minute difference significantly increases the window through which luggage from flights other than KM180 from Luqa in Malta could have been processed for transfer to PA103A. The judges found that in the end, nothing could be concluded from this and “the misdirection... had no material consequences to the appellant’s interest.”

The judges considered the evidence of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who provided the only visual identification of al-Megrahi as having been associated with clothes that were found, charred, at the crash site, and were thought to be in the same suitcase as the bomb. Gauci’s evidence was upheld despite numerous discrepancies over the date, time, weather, which football matches were on the television and even whether or not Christmas decorations were up. No significance was attached to the fact that Gauci had previously identified a member of a Palestinian group, Abu Talb, currently serving a sentence for bomb attacks for which he does not deny responsibility.

What is undeniable is that there were significant political pressures on the court to uphold the initial trial verdict, whatever evidence was presented in al-Megrahi’s defence.

Libya has been the focus of US-inspired sanctions and sustained aggression for 16 years. In 1990, blame for the Lockerbie attack was shifted by the Scottish investigating authorities and the US government to Libya and away from the countries initially targeted for suspicion such as Iran and Syria. At the time, Iranian and Syrian acquiescence in the first US attack on Iraq in 1991 was considered imperative. Indeed, US Secretary of State James Baker had been shuttling around the region prior to the sudden discovery of evidence supposedly linking the attack to Libya.

In the intervening years, Lockerbie has been continually utilised to justify US and UN sanctions against Libyan “state terrorism”. As a result successive administrations have invested a great deal of political capital in their insistence that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

However, relations with Libya have improved in recent years as Colonel Gaddafi has made repeated overtures to the Western powers. In Britain, the election victory of Tony Blair in 1997 was seen as a chance to remove the main political obstacle to renewed friendly relations with a country whose oil reserves its European rivals were exploiting.

A limited trial of the two defendants—al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah—was offered, provided that more general attacks on Libya were downplayed. The US government was reluctant to agree to such a compromise, but was eventually persuaded. American business was also anxious to exploit Libyan oil, and was caught in the contradiction created by years of anti-Libya propaganda and the lust for oil profit. There was also concern that some of the secret activities of the CIA and FBI would be exposed to public scrutiny and US intelligence operatives sat on the prosecution benches through much of the trial proceedings in order to offset this danger. Even so, the CIA’s “star witness” in the case, Abdul Majid Giacka, was exposed as a fraud and the case against the two accused Libyans suffered repeated setbacks.

The verdict against al-Megrahi—his alleged sole accomplice Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted—was the minimum requirement for the US. Libyan guilt and compensation payments to victims, already agreed by Gaddaffi, provided retrospective justification for years of punitive sanctions. At the same time the relatively low-key conclusion—with just one person deemed to be directly responsible—would allow Conoco, Marathon, Amerada Hess, and Occidental to develop a lucrative relationship with the Libyan National Oil Corporation.

Lockerbie appeal raises new questions

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James published on this date in 2002 on the WSWS.org website. It reads as follows:]

Judges have retired in the appeal by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi against his conviction last year for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 22, 1988. The judges’ verdict is due in March.

On January 31, 2001, three judges sitting in a specially constructed court in the Netherlands found Al-Megrahi guilty of planting a Semtex-packed cassette player on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane, killing its 259 passengers and crew as well as 11 Lockerbie residents. Al-Megrahi’s co-accused and alleged co-conspirator Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted of the charges in that trial.

The appeal hearing, which began on January 23 this year, was held in Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, the same former US base that hosted the original trial. Under normal legal precedents, the appeal would undoubtedly result in the release of al-Megrahi. Fresh evidence presented during the hearing further undermined the already flimsy circumstantial basis for al-Megrahi’s original conviction in what was a politically motivated verdict primarily designed to retrospectively justify more than a decade of US and UN sanctions against Libya.

In the original verdict, the trial judges ignored the numerous contradictions, and speculative leaps in the case against al-Megrahi and rejected circumstantial evidence pointing to other groups and individuals as having prepared the attack. Such was the political pressure to convict at least one Libyan that the judges rejected the “not proven” verdict, available to them in Scottish law, under which the trial was heard.

During the appeal, defence lawyer William Taylor set about methodically undermining the judges’ published verdict, arguing that it constituted a miscarriage of justice. In particular, Taylor concentrated on the claim made in the original trial that the suitcase containing the bomb was loaded by al-Megrahi onto a feeder flight, KM180, at Luqa airport in Malta and was subsequently transferred on to Pan Am 103.

In concurring with this claim, the judges had rejected any possibility that the bomb could have been loaded at either Frankfurt in Germany, where the feeder flight would have passed on luggage to Pan Am 103, or at London, Heathrow, where the 747 stopped before making its onward transatlantic flight. In their published verdict, however, the judges admitted, “The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crown [prosecution] case, and one which has to be considered along with the rest of the circumstantial evidence in the case.”

In the appeal Taylor showed that records of luggage handling at Frankfurt were sufficiently vague for several flights to have contributed luggage to PA103A. Trial judges had also ignored evidence from an experienced worker scanning all luggage loaded into PA103A, who had insisted that no questionable radio items appeared—the bomb is alleged to have been in a Toshiba radio cassette—he said.

The defence focused on evidence of a bag comparable to the one that allegedly contained the bomb being loaded into a PA103 luggage container under confused circumstances at London’s Heathrow airport.

This aspect of the appeal was dramatically underscored by new evidence of security breaches at Heathrow. After hearing written statements, the judges agreed to hear from several Heathrow workers reporting on evidence of a break-in to the luggage storage area in the early morning of December 21, 1988, revealing a route through which a bomb-laden suitcase could be smuggled into the Pan Am luggage area.

Giving evidence, former Heathrow airport security guard, Ray Manly insisted that a padlock on the door between a Heathrow passenger terminal and a secure luggage area within a short walking distance of the building from where PA103 was loaded had been cut the night before the explosion. Manly stated that a senior police official had interviewed him about the broken padlock in January 1989. Police had taken possession of the padlock, but it had subsequently disappeared and was not produced during the original trial, the appeal heard. This had enabled the prosecution to successfully question Manly’s recollection of events, despite other witnesses corroborating his testimony of a break-in.

Evidence of a break-in at Heathrow seriously compromises the Crown’s case as it presents a much stronger, more internally coherent, circumstantial basis for the bomb being loaded in London rather than Malta. No suggestion was made of who might then have bombed PA103, or why.

Media coverage of the appeal has varied wildly. The British press are reporting the appeal relatively even-handedly. The entire proceedings have been viewable on line via the BBC’s website. Across the Atlantic, however, the appeal into the greatest mass killing of US citizens prior to September 11 has been met with near complete silence. Whilst the New York Times has not reported the appeal at all, a brief comment in the Washington Post —the paper’s only coverage of the recent hearing—attacked even the distorted legal processes at Camp Zeit for being unnecessarily lenient in its observance of certain democratic norms.

Even though no jury had sat in on the original trial, the Post complained that the observance of certain features of due process—the right to a public hearing, centred on the weighing up of evidence and including the defendant’s right to appeal—represented an obstacle to the “war against terror”. In a politically loaded comment aimed at justifying the draconian measures introduced by the Bush administration in the wake of the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the Post argued, “Megrahi’s trial and the acquittal of a fellow defendant illustrate the expense and time of securing convictions in terrorism cases where defendants receive full access to Western courts. In the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism, the United States has said it intends to try some foreign suspects before military tribunals.”

For its part, the US government is treating the initial guilty verdict as a platform from which to extract a full admission of guilt from Libya, and is treating the appeal with complete contempt. Simultaneous with the first hearings, on January 23, an unnamed State Department official toldAssociated Press that the US would not consider removing Libya from its list of “terrorist” nations unless it paid compensation and accepted guilt for Lockerbie. The official, describing talks by US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs William Burns, said that even accepting guilt would not remove Libya from the list. “They can’t get off the terrorism list without doing it, but they won’t necessarily get off the list if they do do it...” the same official commented. USA Today suggested that the price for Libya’s removal might be $6 billion.

This ultimatist stand is despite the appeal hearing raising further questions about the original verdict. Shortly before the appeal commenced, presiding judge Lord Cullen rejected a call from Marina de Larracoechea, whose sister was an airhostess on PA103, for the appeal to consider widening the scope of its investigation. Miss de Larracoechea wanted the court to hear further evidence examining why the original trial did not consider evidence on the failure of the intelligence services to prevent the bomb being loaded. She told the judges, “key and central aspects of the case were repeatedly shielded.”

Over the years there have been numerous reports raising allegations that the preparations for the Lockerbie attack were known to the intelligence services of several Western governments or even that the US played a direct part in the explosion. There are a number of alternative scenarios as to who carried out the bombing that have never been fully explored, including the defence’s insistence that the bombing was authored by a Palestinian group.

In May 2001, Hans Koechler, a United Nations observer to the Camp Zeit trial, made a devastating assault on the original verdict, describing it as politically motivated, irrational, and subject to international power politics. Koechler, appointed by Kofi Annan, is a philosophy lecturer and a founder member of the International Progress Organisation think tank. He attacked the failure of the court, including the defence team, to seriously investigate the special defence of incrimination i.e. that other individuals and groups, particularly the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), were responsible for the bombing. He noted the reports which emerged late in the trial, from the leading prosecution official that “an unnamed foreign government” had information relating to the defence case, and that this information was never revealed or investigated, nor followed up by the defence itself. Rather, in Koechler’s view, “the strategy of the defence team by suddenly dropping its ‘special defence’ and cancelling the appearance of almost all defence witnesses...is totally incomprehensible; it puts into question the credibility of the defence’s actions and motives.”

The unearthing by Al-Megrahi’s legal team of the Heathrow evidence blows further holes in his original conviction and when judged by the legal norm of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt, renders it unsound.

Lockerbie-Pan Am 103: Prosecution case evaporates

In the wilds of the Roggeveld Karoo we have been without internet access for the past three days. Here is what I would have posted on Monday, 17 October had it been possible.

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James that was published on the WSWS.org website on this date in 2000:]

After six months, the prosecution case in the trial of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am 103 on December 21 1988 has all but evaporated. The defendants, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, are being tried at a special court in Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, which was designated as Scottish territory for the purpose of the proceedings.

At the time of writing, the trial has again been interrupted after Scottish Lord Advocate Colin Boyd informed the three trial judges that new and unspecified information relating to the defence case had been made available to the prosecution by "a government”, but not that of the USA. The adjournment came on the day before Mohamed Abu Talb, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) was due to give evidence for the prosecution. Talb, who is already serving a life sentence in Sweden for planting bombs, is one of those cited by the defence in their special defence of incrimination. This states that the PFLP-GC was, with others, responsible for the atrocity that killed 270 people. Talb denies any involvement and is now scheduled to give evidence on October 17. He has apparently been offered remission of his present sentence and immunity from further prosecution if he testifies.

A report in the October 15 Scotland on Sunday newspaper suggested that the government in question referred to by Boyd was Syria, and that a "confession" by Talb had been handed over to the prosecution. The Lord Advocate has also arranged an explanatory meeting with angry relatives of those who died in the explosion, who fear the trial may now disintegrate.

The present adjournment is the latest in a series that have preceded the appearance of particularly controversial witnesses or pieces of evidence.

Shortly before the trial commenced, the Swiss manufacturer of the timing device implicated in the explosion announced that from their own research, they concluded the bomb had not been located in the luggage container in a Samsonite suitcase, as the prosecution team claimed, but was jammed against the aircraft wall. Such public announcements from a leading witness threw the prosecution into crisis, triggered a round of legal threats to newspapers such as the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald who had printed the claims made by Edwin Bollier, CEO of MEBO, which made the MST-13 electronic timers alleged to have triggered the explosion.

When he eventually took the stand in June, both prosecution and defence questioning of Bollier revealed the extent of MEBO's relations both with the Libyan government and the former East German security police, the Stasi. He sold prototype timers, and millions of pounds worth of electronic equipment, including exploding mobile pagers and encryption manuals to the Stasi, who are known to have supplied the PFLP-GC with equipment. Bollier supplied Libya with radio antennae, bomb timers, and had observed explosives' trials in the Libyan desert. He rented a Swiss office to one of the accused, who it is likely had some role in the Libyan intelligence service. Bollier also had unspecified relations with other Middle Eastern governments and with the CIA.

Bollier's was followed by a series of witnesses—CIA and ex-Stasi spies, other MEBO staff, airport staff, a clothes shop owner—whose testimony reveals a prosecution case that is characterised by its extreme flimsiness, resting almost exclusively on tenuous circumstantial evidence, for which alternative explanations can easily be found.

The prosecutions most heralded witness was Abdul Majid Giacka, who has been living in the US under a witness protection programme since 1991. Long presented to the family members of the US victims as a crucial eyewitness, Giacka's evidence proved disastrous for the prosecution case.

Giacka, it finally emerged, offered to provide the CIA with information after he joined Libyan intelligence to avoid military service in 1988. Such was the low level of the information that he presented to the CIA that by 1991 his handlers considered halting all payments to their dubious asset, who was costing them $1,000 a month. Despite a period working alongside both the accused at Malta airport, Giacka never mentioned Lockerbie or suitcase bombs to his CIA handlers at the time.

In July 1991 Giacka attended a meeting with the CIA, at which his continued employment on Langley's payroll was to be discussed. The next day, more than two years after the Pan Am bombing, Giacka presented the CIA with an account according to which Fhimah and Megrahi had carried a "Samsonite" suitcase through Maltese customs.

The defence also cited censored CIA cables to illuminate some of Giacka's other extravagant accusations. He claimed at one point that Libyan leader Moammar Qhaddaffi was a freemason, and that he (Giacka) was related to the former Libyan monarch, King Idris. It also became clear from the cables that at the time of the bombing the CIA did not consider Fhimah to be a member of the Libyan intelligence services.

According to Clare Connolly from the Glasgow University's Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit, "The defence cross-examination made it clear that Giaka's actions in providing this information to investigators could have been motivated by a desire for money and a wish to secure his future as a US citizen."

On other occasions, Giaka's reliance on US officials sitting on the prosecution bench was so blatant that UN observers attending the trial told the Sunday Times, "We could not see how Mr Giaka conducted himself, but the defence raised objections repeatedly to the looks that passed between him and the Americans... With other witnesses introduced at the American end of the investigation, through the CIA or the FBI, we have witnessed those types of exchanges."

The prosecution are so short of serious evidence that, despite the numerous delays, the trial is expected to last much less than the full year initially anticipated.

The PFLP-GC were the original suspects, and for two years after the crash most of the investigating authorities operated on the basis that the evidence against the PFLP-GC was overwhelming. The US intelligence services have played a dubious role from before the crash right through to the trial. It is a fact that several US Special Forces members died on Pan Am 103, and that their luggage recovered from the crash site was interfered with.

No trial in legal history has been so bound up with shifts in world politics, a study of which is very revealing. Initial accusations directed against the PFLP-GC regarded the Lockerbie bombing as a reprisal, organised by Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC, for the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus on July 3, 1988 by the US. The December 21 1988 bombing came little more than a month after the Palestinian National Council meeting which effectively sanctioned the existence of Israel. On December 13 PLO leader Yassir Arafat expounded on this in his historic speech to the United Nations. The pro-Syrian PFLP-GC opposed the PLO's line, and, along with other Palestinian groups advocating the continuation of a military strategy against Israel, launched a series of raids designed to derail the PLO's developing relations with the US. The PFLP-GC had on numerous occasions been involved in fire-fights in Beirut with the PLO and had been implicated in a series of attacks on aircraft.

The change in focus to Libya was, at the time, widely interpreted as a political response by the US in line with its preparation for the Gulf War, with both Syria and Iran acting as crucial US allies in the attack on Iraq. Subsequently, the US used Lockerbie and other attributed bombings as a justification for imposing sanctions against Libya. The present case only emerged in the context of the Libyan regime's developing international relations, particularly with Europe, and after months of negotiations by Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan.

If the Scotland on Sunday reports are confirmed, it would not be the first time that the Syrian government has dumped its erstwhile allies, in pursuing closer relations with the US. Following Syria's support for the Gulf War, Syria's then leader, Hafez al-Assad, handed over information on planned terrorist attacks, evicted Carlos "the Jackal" from Damascus, and latterly expelled Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan, allowing his capture by the CIA and subsequent trial in Turkey.

[RB: Regrettably, the Zeist judges did not agree that the prosecution case had evaporated, but swallowed it hook, line and sinker.]

Destruction of Lockerbie evidence challenged

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James published on this date in 2002 on the website WSWS.org:]

Tam Dalyell, the Labour MP for the Scottish constituency of Linlithgow, used his parliamentary privileges to effectively accuse the British government of destroying evidence relating to the criminal investigation of the 1988 attack on PanAm flight 103, which killed 270 people.

Dalyell is the longest serving MP in Westminster—the so-called “father of the house”. Something of a maverick figure, he has a long record of raising awkward questions for successive British administrations. Dalyell harried Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for years over the circumstances surrounding the sinking of an elderly Argentine warship,General Belgrano, off the Malvinas/Falklands Islands, by a British nuclear submarine during the 1982 war with Argentina.

Speaking on March 26, in an adjournment debate in which MPs can raise whatever they like, Dalyell insisted that Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, currently jailed for life in Barlinnie prison in Glasgow for the Lockerbie attack, was innocent. Dalyell, who has long followed developments around the Lockerbie disaster, asked what was being done to preserve evidence collected during police enquiries. He went on to ask, “Can an assurance be given that they will not be destroyed in the same way as certain police notebooks have apparently been destroyed?”

Dalyell quoted a statement given by a retired policewoman, Mary Boylan, who had been based at Lockerbie in 1988. In 1999 Boylan was asked to give a statement at Livingston Police Station, presumably relating to the upcoming trial of al-Megrahi and his then co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. She asked for her notebooks from 1988 to refresh her memory. She was told they could not be found and later read in the Scottish press that Lothian and Borders Police had destroyed the notebooks.

Dalyell asked, “Who gave the instruction for the destruction of notebooks? After all, this was the biggest unresolved murder trial in Scottish legal history. The answer to that question is likely to be found not in Edinburgh, but in London.”

Dalyell said he had worked closely with five heads of the police’s “F Division” which covers West Lothian, as well as successive chief constables of Lothian and Borders Police: “I simply do not believe that any one of them, off their own bat, would have allowed, for reasons of routine and storage space, the destruction of notebooks relating to the biggest murder trial in Scottish history.”

Dalyell quoted a subsequent statement from Boylan in which she described how, in 1999, she attended Dumfries police station and was asked to describe a suitcase rim, with a handle attached. Boylan asked the Procurator Fiscal, a local Scottish legal official, about the significance of the case. He would not say, but, “What he did say was that the owner of said suitcase was a Joseph Patrick Curry and that I would be hearing and reading a lot about him at the time of the trial.” Boylan later found out that Curry was a US Army Special Forces Captain.

According to Dalyell, Boylan claims a colleague informed her that Curry’s suitcase contained the bomb that blew up the aircraft. Dalyell said, “I want to know who will verify the statement and show whether it is true or false. If the bomb was in Curry’s suitcase, Mr. Megrahi is hardly likely to be guilty.”

He concluded by asking for “these extremely serious matters [to] be taken on board by the government in London”.

Speaking after the debate Dalyell reiterated his suggestion that “something highly irregular has taken place, apparently with consent.”

Joseph Patrick Curry was one of several members of a US Special Forces team on PanAm 103, whose luggage, and remains at the crash site were the subject of a great deal of well documented US CIA and FBI activity in the hours and days after the disaster. A special forces major, Charles McKee, and the CIA’s Beirut station deputy chief, Matthew Gannon, also died on the plane.

At the start of the trial

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James which was published on this date in 2000:]

On May 3, the trial began of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.

Abdelbaset Ali Muhammad Al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah are charged with planting a Semtex-packed cassette recorder on board the Boeing 747, which destroyed the plane killing its 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents.

For years it was assumed that no legal proceedings into the Lockerbie tragedy would ever be held, as Libya would be unlikely to give up the accused individuals. That the case has come to court is the outcome of a significant shift in political and economic relations internationally. The European Union (EU) has led efforts to normalise relations with Libya in order to gain access to the country's considerable oil resources.

The accession of Blair's Labour government to office in 1997 provided a means for Britain—concerned that French and Italian oil companies were reaping the benefits of the USA-UK embargo on Libya—to develop its interests in the country. After protracted negotiations with South Africa's Nelson Mandela and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, Libyan leader Colonel Gadhaffi agreed to hand over Al-Megrahi and Fhimah last year—provided they would not be tried on US or British soil. They have been held in the Netherlands ever since.

Once the suspects were handed over, the EU lifted its sanctions against Libya, and a considerable trade in oil, natural gas, and machinery has opened up, from which the US remains largely excluded. A steady stream of EU ministers have also visited the Libyan capital Tripoli. Only the awkward business of Flight 103 remained to be resolved for business as usual to be resumed.

For the purposes of the trial, Camp Zeist, a former US military base in the Netherlands, was designated as Scottish territory. The proceedings, expected to last many months, are being held in accordance with Scottish law and will involve hearing thousands of witnesses. It is the first time that a British court has sat outside British territory. This arrangement was agreed after protracted negotiations between the Libyan, British, US and Dutch governments, and also involved Scottish legal officials and the families and friends of those killed in the crash. Four Scottish judges, sitting without a jury, are hearing the case. The prosecutor is Scotland's Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd.

The trial began with the indictment against the two men being read out. They are charged with murder, conspiracy to murder, and a breach of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. The two pleaded not guilty and the clerk to the court read out a list of Arabic names of people he said the defence would allege were the real Lockerbie bombers. This included members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) — the two groups originally suspected of the bombing.

The Pan Am jumbo Maid of the Seas blew up on December 21, 1988, shortly after taking off from London's Heathrow airport. The plane disintegrated in mid-air, shedding debris over a wide area. The bulk of the wreckage impacted on and around the small Scottish town of Lockerbie, also killing 11 local residents.

Early investigations into the atrocity by Dumfries and Galloway police pointed to the bomb having been a reprisal for the US navy's shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in the Persian Gulf six months earlier. On July 3, 1988 the US warship the Vincennes was operating within Iranian waters, providing military support for Iraq in the ongoing Iran/Iraq war. During a one-sided battle against a small number of lightly armed Iranian gunboats, the Vincennes fired two missiles at the Airbus, which was on a routine civilian flight. All 290 civilians onboard were killed.

This act of mass murder by the US has never resulted in any court case. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were militarily decorated. Attempts by relatives of the victims to bring legal action against the American government were rejected by the US Supreme Court in 1993. Despite the fact that the vast majority of victims were Iranian, the US paid $2.9 million in compensation only to non-Iranian victims of the shooting.

The Iranian government promised revenge attacks at the time and it is alleged that it reached an agreement with the PFLP[-GC] to this end, which was led by ex-Syrian army captain, Ahmed Jibril and had links with the Syrian government.

Discussion between Dumfries and Galloway police and the West German police revealed that members of the PFLP had already been arrested in West Germany in possession of a bomb similar to the one blown up over Lockerbie. It was also discovered that four other bombs, disguised in cassette players, had been made but were unaccounted for. The suspicion grew that the PFLP had planted the bomb on Flight 103, or arranged for it to be planted, and that it was intended to blow up over Atlantic.

The suitcase containing the explosive device had been loaded at the Frankfurt airport. The bomb's timing mechanism was pressure activated and set to explode four hours after it first reached 8,000 feet. [RB: I have no idea where the author picked up this egregious error.] But Flight 103 was delayed at Heathrow before embarking on its transatlantic journey. As a result, the plane blew up over Lockerbie.

Several warnings were forwarded to American embassies and intelligence staff that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York would be attacked in December 1988. US intelligence staff based in Moscow and elsewhere scheduled to fly on Pan Am flights over that period cancelled their seats due to the warning. Many students took advantage of the cheap flights this made available. Flight 103 was only two-thirds full a mere four days before Christmas.

Crash investigators subsequently found more evidence indicating a possible link between the explosion and the PFLP. Clothing found in the case that had contained the bomb was identified as having been bought in Malta. A PFLP associate, Abu Talb, recently returned from Malta was later identified in the shop where the clothes were bought. By 1990, Dumfries and Galloway police announced they were on the brink of arrests. Talb is one of the individuals named by the Libyans' defence team.

Allegations have been made that what happened subsequently points to an attempt by the US government to divert police investigations away from Iran and Syria. According to the British journalist Paul Foot, in March 1989 US President George Bush rang the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask her to "cool it" on the Lockerbie case. Foot, in a 1994 review of the book Trail of the Octopus by Donald Goddard and ex-US intelligence agent Lester Coleman, noted that Paul Channon, the British Transport Minister, had briefed journalists that arrests were imminent just hours before Bush's call. Channon was sacked shortly after and no arrests were made. A US commission of inquiry into Lockerbie did not mention the PFLP.

In 1990, a timer fragment was belatedly recovered from the wreckage by US investigators. They identified this as coming from a batch of timers sold by the Swiss makers MEBO to Libya. MEBO subsequently insisted that the timer in question was part of a batch, which had never been electrically connected, sold to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Goddard and Coleman's book outlined a scenario in which the US government was not only politically responsible for the Lockerbie bomb, vis-à-vis the Vincennes incident and their long-standing domination of the region, but were practically responsible for it having been placed on Flight 103.

According to Coleman, America's Defence Intelligence Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Drug Enforcement Agency were all active around the region looking for information on Middle Eastern factions, drug trafficking, and spying on each other. Coleman suggests that the CIA, on the assumption that it contained heroin, identified the bag with the bomb as being safe for transit. Goddard and Coleman suggest that PFLP members, who switched some drugs for the bomb, had infiltrated the drug-running operation.

Coleman and others, including an investigator Juval Aviv employed by the now defunct Pan Am, have subsequently been vilified, framed for petty misdemeanours, and/or generally harassed by the US state.

Coleman's allegations were repeated in a 1994 British TV programme, The Maltese Double Cross, produced by Channel 4. In 1997, the Libyan government showed the Channel 4 film at a hearing it had won before the UN International Court of Justice to protest against the sanctions imposed by the US in 1992. The impact of sanctions on Libya between 1992 and 1995 had been drastic, causing many deaths through lack of medical supplies and costing the country $6 billion in lost agricultural exports alone.

It is alleged that blame for the bombing was pinned on Libya in order to turn attention away from the Iranian regime, which the US was now developing as its ally in the Middle East as a counterweight to Iraq. By the late 1980s, longstanding US plans for a major escalation of their military involvement in the Persian Gulf, the world's leading oil-producing area, were coming to fruition. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 gave the US the pretext it required. The US and NATO were able to assemble a broad coalition of support for the intervention—from the Soviet Union, Europe and most of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East.

Libya opposed the bombardment of Iraq and was defined by the US as a "pariah" state. The US had bombed Tripoli in 1986, killing Libyan leader Gadhaffi's daughter, and had severed diplomatic relations with the country, accusing it of sponsoring international terrorism.