Tainting evidence -- the FBI crime laboratory

[On this date in 1995 the FBI crime laboratory was the subject of a highly critical television programme broadcast on the ABC network. It followed disclosures by one of the laboratory’s scientists, Dr Frederic Whitehurst, about the methods adopted by some of his colleagues, including Tom Thurman. The scandal later became the subject of a book, Tainting Evidence, by John Kelly and Phillip Wearne. The relevance of this to the Lockerbie case is outlined in the following excerpt from Gareth Peirce’s article The Framing of al-Megrahi in the London Review of Books:]

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’.

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya.

Thurman and the circuit board fragment

[On this date in 1991, Tom Thurman of the FBI appeared on television claiming to have been the person who identified the fragment of circuit board that linked Libya to the bombing of Pan Am 103. What follows is excerpted from Gareth Peirce’s article The framing of al-Megrahi:]

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in ... therefore fabricating evidence’.

[Also on this date in 1991, Libya delivered to the United Nations Security Council a letter “categorically denying that Libya had any association” with the Lockerbie bombing.]

...the media and the Scottish Parliament totally miss the point...

[What follows is from an item headed The Transatlantic relationship posted today on the website Lockerbietruth.com maintained by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

 

With the launch of John Ashton's book Megrahi: You are my Jury, once again we see a furor about what Kenny McKaskill said  to whom about the compassionate release of Al-Megrahi.  And once again the media and the entire Scottish Parliament totally miss the point.

In a closely argued section, Ashton highlights a serious discrepancy in the evidence of British forensic scientist Alan Feraday.  Feraday's own hand-written notes prove that the electronic print on the alleged fragment of timer board found by Dr Thomas Hayes is not the same metal printed on the control MST-13 timer board supplied by Swiss manufacturers MEBO. 

Feraday wrote that the Hayes fragment printing was 100% pure tin, but that the MEBO control sample printing was an alloy composed of 70% tin and 30% lead.  He explained the difference by saying that the heat of the explosion had evaporated all - yes, 100% - of the lead content.  A highly doubtful theory indeed.  No tests were carried out at any stage to back up his theory.

In other words, Feraday's own notes provide strong evidence that the Hayes fragment might be a manufactured plant, designed to point the finger at Libya, and divert attention from Iran in America's strategic interests during the mid and late 1980's. 

This information was supplied to Al-Megrahi's defence team in 2009 only during the course of the second appeal, abandoned at an early stage to enable Al-Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds.  It should, under rules of natural Scottish justice, have been available prior to the trial which took place in 2000. But it was concealed by the police, forensic services and the Crown Office for more than ten years. 

If Iran - who paid $11m to the Jibril terrorist group only two days after the attack - was responsible, then the bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 was constructed by Marwan Khreesat, career master bomb maker for the PFLP-GC. Khreesat was a double agent working for Jordanian security, and rumoured to be a CIA asset. 

In a set of hearsay notes recorded by the FBI and repeated during the Lockerbie trial, Khreesat claimed "He did not think he made the Lockerbie bomb". As a career mass-murderer and double and possibly triple agent, can we trust his word?  We doubt it. 

But the Lockerbie trial judges did trust his word.  Then let us ask for a moment what would have happened if they had not. If they had expressed doubt concerning the timer fragment, their verdict would have suggested that the bomb which killed 270 people at Lockerbie was made by an asset working for America.  

Could the relationship between Britain and America have survived the shock?  And is this question not of far more import than a ministerial statement in a Scottish parliament?

The latest from Private Eye

The police “review” of the Lockerbie case appears to be little more than a sop to head off demands for a full public inquiry.

Any meaningful reinvestigation would involve another force being brought in to carry out the review – not an officer involved in the original investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103. It would also surely include a thorough review of the evidence upon which the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) decided that Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice… But this is not to be.

Another new key area of concern is the forensic evidence underpinning the entire case: notably a small fragment of a circuit board for a bomb timer found in and among fragments of a man’s shirt recovered from the site. The shirt and other clothing recovered were said to have been traced back to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who said he had sold them to a man who resembled Megrahi.

The prosecution has always claimed that these tiny fragments were identified by Dr Thomas Hayes at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (Rarde) on 12 May 1989. There was concern at the time of the trial that the label on this crucial piece of evidence had been altered. Further, the pages in Hayes’ notes relating to this evidence had been curiously renumbered. Eye readers may recall that the work of Hayes and other Rarde scientists has subsequently been criticised in a series of high-profile miscarriage-of-justice cases involving IRA terrorism – in particular the inquiry by Sir John May into the wrongful conviction of the Maguire family, where scientific notebooks were found to have been altered.

Lawyers for Megrahi have now uncovered a similar pattern of inconsistencies, alterations, discrepancies and undisclosed material that again calls into question the integrity of the Rarde scientists. It comes from new scientific tests as well as a meticulous examination of evidence that was not disclosed or available at the time. Here are some examples …

* Photographs and evidence suggest that the circuit board and debris from the shirt had not been discovered until January 1990 – seven months later than Rarde claimed.

* Further evidence that scientific notes had been altered.

* Details of simulated explosions carried out in the US in July 1989 were not revealed, but debris from those blasts [was] taken both to Rarde and to Lockerbie for comparison.

* Exhibit labels were being written and attached by police more than a year after the debris was found.

* One man who was asked to put his name to the discovery of pieces of the charred shirt says he does not recall recovering the material. He also says the cloth shown to him by police was not the same grey colour as that identified in court as the shirt bought by Megrahi.

* Evidence to suggest the charred “bomb” shirt was in fact a child’s shirt.

* A wealth of conflicting evidence surrounding the discovery of charred pieces of a Babygro – also said to have been packed in the bomb suitcase and sold to Megrahi. One Babygro collected by investigators for comparison purposes was not accounted for.

The SCCRC which had some but not all of this material, rejected suggestions that the evidence had been deliberately fabricated. But it fell short of conducting its own forensic tests.

If this is a cock-up or incompetence, it is on such a scale that it recalls the verdict of Sir John May in the Maguire inquiry that the scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded should not be relied upon. Taken with Gauci’s highly dubious identification evidence …, the case for a public inquiry remains overwhelming.

[The above is the text of an article that appears on page 28 of the current edition (1249) of Private Eye. It does not feature on the magazine's website.]

Alan Feraday and Wikipedia

[I am grateful to Patrick Haseldine for supplying me with this copy of his Wikipedia article on Alan Feraday. The article has now, for some reason, been removed from the Wikipedia website.]

Alan Feraday is the retired former head of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) forensic explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent.

After RARDE was subsumed into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in 1995, the laboratory came under media and scientific scrutiny in 1996 amid allegations that contaminated equipment had been used in the testing of forensic evidence.[1]

Contents
• 1 Expert witness
• 2 Danny McNamee
• 3 John Berry
• 4 Hassan Assali
• 5 Lockerbie trial
• 6 References
• 7 External links


Expert witness
Alan Feraday has appeared as an expert witness at criminal trials leading to convictions in at least four high-profile cases, three of which were subsequently overturned on appeal.[2] The appeal in the fourth case is ongoing.

Feraday's involvement in a number of other criminal cases was the subject of a parliamentary question in 1996.[3]

Danny McNamee
Feraday was the Crown's main scientific witness in the McNamee case which concerned a terrorist bomb explosion in London's Hyde Park in 1982. McNamee's fingerprint was alleged to have been on a printed circuit board that had been discovered in an IRA arms cache. Feraday testified that a PCB fragment said to have been found at the scene of the Hyde Park bombing, but which had not been forensically tested for explosive residues, came from the same type of circuit board in the arms cache. McNamee, who was convicted in 1987 largely as a result of Feraday's evidence, successfully appealed against his conviction in December 1998.[4]

John Berry
Another case in which Feraday appeared as an expert witness was the 1983 prosecution of businessman John Berry, who was convicted of terrorism conspiracy charges. At the trial, Feraday testified that the timers Berry had sold in the Middle East had been designed specifically for terrorist purposes. Berry spent ten years in jail before his conviction was overturned in September 1993, when four highly qualified witnesses ridiculed the evidence that Feraday had given at the trial.

Commenting on the case, Lord Justice Taylor declared that the nature of Feraday's evidence was "dogmatic in the extreme" and that in future he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics. In a recent development the Home Office has agreed to pay compensation from the public purse to Berry because he was jailed on the erroneous evidence of Feraday.[5]

Hassan Assali
Libyan national, Hassan Assali, came to Britain in 1965. In 1985, Assali was convicted of constructing electronic timers in contravention of the 1883 Explosives Substances Act on the basis of Feraday's testimony that the timing devices were designed specifically for the triggering of IEDs. Assali's appeal against conviction was rejected in 1986. He applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission in 1998 to review his case and, following a second appeal when other electronics experts disputed the trial evidence given by Feraday, Assali's conviction was quashed in 2005.[6]

Lockerbie trial
Both Alan Feraday and his RARDE colleague, Dr Thomas Hayes, gave expert witness evidence at the Lockerbie trial in 2000. Feraday testified that Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down on 21 December 1988 by a suitcase bomb triggered by an electronic timer made by the Swiss firm Mebo.[7] From a piece of charred clothing allegedly found at the scene of the crash in January 1989, Hayes teased out a tiny piece of timer circuit board in May 1989. The timer fragment was photographed at RARDE but was not tested for explosive residues. Feraday took the timer fragment to the FBI laboratory in the United States where Thomas Thurman was able to confirm that it had come from the Mebo MST-13 timer, twenty of which had been supplied to Libya. The clothing and the timer fragment led to the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi at the trial, and to his sentence of 27 years' imprisonment in Scotland. Megrahi's appeal against conviction was rejected in 2002 but he applied in 2003 to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to review the case.[8]

On 28 June 2007, the SCCRC referred Megrahi's case back for another appeal on the basis that he may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.[9]

The second appeal started at the High Court of Justiciary on 28 April 2009.[10] A documentary film "Lockerbie revisited", which was broadcast on Dutch television on 27 April 2009, focused on the Mebo timer fragment evidence and Feraday's role in its identification.

References
1. ^ Robert Verkaik (1996-05-22). "Innocent beyond doubt". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/innocent-beyond-doubt-1348637.html.
2. ^ "'Doubts' over Lockerbie evidence". BBC News. 2005-08-19. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4164422.stm. Retrieved on 2009-05-14.
3. ^ "PQ on the Caddy Inquiry". 1996-12-09. http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1996/dec/09/caddy-inquiry.
4. ^ "The Case of Danny McNamee". http://www.scandals.org/mcnamee/index.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.
5. ^ Ludwig de Braekeleer. "Alan Feraday and the evidence of the Lockerbie trial". Canada Free Press. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5542. Retrieved on 2009-05-14.
6. ^ "Commission refers conviction of Mr Hassan Assali to Court of Appeal". 2003-04-19. http://www.ccrc.gov.uk/news/news_233.htm. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.
7. ^ "Lockerbie bomb 'in suitcase'". BBC News. 2000-06-15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/792623.stm. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.
8. ^ Lucy Christie (2005-08-19). "Lockerbie terror bomber's conviction thrown into doubt". Edinburgh Evening News. http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/lockerbie/Lockerbie-terror-bombers-conviction-thrown.2653683.jp. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.
9. ^ Laura Blue. "Re-Opening the Lockerbie Tragedy". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1639065,00.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.
10. ^ Jason Allardyce; Mark Macaskill (2009-05-10). "Lockerbie bomber Megrahi may be allowed home". timesonline. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6256846.ece. Retrieved on 2009-05-13.

External links
• "Police investigations of 'politically sensitive' or high profile crimes", Report on the Lockerbie investigation by former Lord Advocate Colin Boyd
• "Lockerbie revisited", Dutch television documentary by Gideon Levy

Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the title of a long article by Dr J U Cameron published yesterday on John Cameron's Blog. It reads in part:]

One of the UK’s foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said “Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to believe that its practioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading.” There is, in fact, a kind of “canteen culture” in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than investigators seeking the truth.

At first this did not seem to matter in the aftermath of the destruction Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. It was quickly established by air accident investigators that there had been an explosion in the forward cargo hold in the baggage container AVE 4041. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase which appeared to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with parts of a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder in which the bomb had been concealed. There were also items of clothing which looked as if they had also been in the case. At this stage the forensic evidence appeared robust and no credible doubt has been raised in the years since the event that this was the method by which the plane was destroyed.

The police discovered that the baggage container AVE 4041 had been loaded with interline baggage at Heathrow. The baggage had been x-rayed by Sulkash Kamboj of Alert Security, an affiliate company of Pan Am. John Bedford, a loader-driver employed by Pan Am told police that he had placed a number of cases in the container before leaving for a tea break. When he returned he found an additional two cases had been added, one of which was a distinctive brown Samsonite case. Bedford said that Kamboj had told him he had added the two cases. When questioned by the police, Kamboj denied he had added the cases or told Bedford he had done so. This matter was only resolved at the trial when under cross examination Kamboj admitted that Bedford was telling the truth.

All the evidence at this stage pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command (PFLP-GC). Five weeks before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was apprehended in Germany. Haffez Dalkamoni, right-hand man to the group’s leader Ahmad Jibril, and the bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, were arrested while visiting electrical shops in Frankfurt. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Under German police interrogation, Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also admitted that Khreesat had built other bombs including a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches but he claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts.

The involvement of the PFLP-GC was consistent with what was assumed at the time to be the motive for the Pan Am atrocity. In July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet containing some 300 Iranian pilgrims, had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by the renegade US battlecruiser Vincennes. Not only did America refuse to apologize, the captain of the ship and his gunnery officer were decorated for their actions. This crass behaviour caused outrage within Iran and throughout the Middle East. Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered skies’.

Soon the US Air Force Command was issuing warnings to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion with mass casualties.’ Later warnings were more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’

Within weeks the CIA reported that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC had met government officials in Iran and offered his services. Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs to all European airports. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was ‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff remain extra vigilant’. After the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell Heathrow received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities.

In the aftermath of Lockerbie, all the Toshiba cassette bombs seized by the Germans were tested and found to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of the barometric timer employed is that it is not activated until the plane is airborne so the bomb will not go off on the ground if the flight is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes will elapse as the aircraft gains height and the air pressure drops enough to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie.

The clothing thought to have been in the suitcase with the bomb contained labels which allowed the items to be traced to a shop in Malta. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, was known to have visited Malta shortly before the atrocity. When first questioned the owner of the shop, Tony Gauci, described the purchaser of the clothes as a dark-skinned, 50 year old man over six feet in height – which fitted Abu Talb – and identified him from a photograph.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a memo on September 24th, 1989 which stated, “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command leader, for a sum of $1m. $100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hussan Akhari for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”

A DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled “Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation” confirmed the American belief that Iran was the state sponsor of the bombing. It claimed that the PFLP-GC was “fast becoming an Iranian proxy” and that the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 airbus was the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation. It specifically discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was “no current credible intelligence” implicating her. It stated: “Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya in 1986, Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks.”

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait thereby putting at risk the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary. If Iraq was to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated with kid gloves and the Syrian regime must be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam’s invading army and the increasingly isolated Colonel Gadaffi gradually became the chief suspect on the Lockerbie bombing.

As a result of the change in overall narrative and the fact that there had been absolutely no Libyan activity in London, interest in Heathrow as the scene of the bomb planting suddenly ceased. Now the Maltese connection became crucial. Heretofore it had simply been assumed the clothes were purchased at a Maltese tourist shop in preference to the more regulated shops of Frankfurt or London.

But there was a long standing connection between Malta and Libya which survived all the twists and turns of international diplomacy. In particular, it was one of the key conduits through which essential supplies could be transferred to Tripoli when Gaddafi’s behaviour had provoked yet another set of sanctions being imposed on his country.

The purchaser of the clothes in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta now magically morphed from a non-Libyan giant in late middle age to a youthful, 5’ 7” tall Libyan in his mid-thirties. His name, it appeared was Abdelbaset al Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines. Educated in the USA and Britain, he was also director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A cosmopolitan figure with a wide range of international contacts it was rumoured that he was used by Libya to import essentials during periods of sanctions. The claim that he had suddenly changed into a terrorist bomber was met with derision at home and abroad. The idea that he and his colleague Khalifah Fhimah, the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta, had somehow secreted an unaccompanied suit case onto flight KM180 was thought to be absurd.

The Maltese police also protested that this was a most unlikely scenario. They had questioned the senior airport baggage loader who was adamant that he always double-counted his luggage: once when it was finally gathered and again as it was physically loaded onto the plane. This extremely reliable official was absolutely certain that there were no unaccompanied cases in the luggage that he counted on to the flight. In fact, not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!

The theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as a piece of unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe before finding its way onto Pan Am 103 in London was widely ridiculed. The excellent screening at Frankfurt would have surely picked it up or, if not, it could well have been lost on the twilight zone of European baggage handling. But the greatest problem lay with the barometric trigger which would have caused flight KM180 to explode 38 minutes into the first leg to Frankfurt. This was the moment when the forensic scientists stepped up to the plate.

The two British scientists involved in the Lockerbie case were the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment’s Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes. Charred material found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie in mysterious circumstances had been sent for analysis to explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. According to his later testimony Hayes teased out the cloth of one piece of the material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt. Within it he found fragments of white paper, fragments of black plastic, a fragment of metal and a fragment of wire mesh—all subsequently found to be parts of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual. Hayes testified that he also found embedded a half-inch fragment of circuit board.

The next reference to this famous circuit board fragment occurred when Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification. In June 1990, Feraday and DCI Williamson visited FBI headquarters in Washington and together with Thomas Thurman, an FBI explosives expert, finally identified the fragment as being part of a timer circuit board.

Thurman’s involvement in identifying the fragment later proved highly controversial because in spite of his claim to be an “explosives forensic expert” he had no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever. He read politics at university and had somehow drifted into the FBI Labs. Worse was to follow when in 1997 the US Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, issued a report stating that in other trials Thurman had “circumvented procedures and protocols, testified to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications and fabricated evidence”. Numerous defendants had to be released and Thurman was fortunate not to be prosecuted himself. He was fired from the FBI labs and banned from acting as an expert witness in any other court case.

Thurman could not therefore give evidence at the Lockerbie trial and the Crown’s case would be further damaged when the testimony of his UK counterpart, Alan Feraday, was called into question. In three separate cases — where Feraday had been the expert witness — men against whom he gave evidence have had their convictions overturned. Like Thurman, Feraday was not actually a professional scientist and in 2005, after yet another successful appeal, the Chief Lord Justice said that “under no circumstances should Feraday be allowed to present himself as an expert witness in electronics”.

By the time of the trial the career of Thomas Hayes was also over because a British Parliamentary inquiry had found he had conspired to withhold evidence in the notorious trial of the Maguire Seven. Sir John May had said, “The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the conviction should be set aside.” Hayes jumped before he was pushed and by the time of the trial was working as a chiropodist.

As the argument for a Maltese connection and Libyan involvement progressed the tiny fragment of circuit board became increasingly important. Thurman now “indentified” it as part of a batch made by the Swiss manufacturer Mebo for the Libyan military. This was not the simple design thought to have been used in the Pan Am 103 bombing but a complex type of long timer. Edwin Bollier later revealed that he declined an offer of $4 million by the FBI to testify that the fragment was indeed part of the Mebo MST-13 timer. Fortunately one of his employees, Ulrich Lumpert, was prevailed upon to do so at the trial though later, in a sworn affidavit, he would admit he had lied. The other co-owner of Mebo, Erwin Meister, confirmed that MST–13 timers had been sold to Libya and helpfully identified Megrahi as a “former business contact”.

All the ducks were finally in a line and the Anglo-American authorities indicted the two Libyan suspects in November 1991. Gaddafi was then ordered to extradite them for trial in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Since no bilateral extradition treaty was in force between any of the three countries, he refused to hand the men over but did offer to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.

In November 1994, President Nelson Mandela offered South Africaas a neutral venue for the trial but this was rejected by John Major. A further three years elapsed until Mandela’s offer was repeated to Major’s successor, Tony Blair, when the president visited London in July 1997 and again at the 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh in October 1997. At the latter meeting, Mandela warned that “no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge” in the Lockerbie case.

A compromise solution was eventually engineered by the legal academic Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University of a trial in the Netherlands governed by Scots law. Since this was in accordance with the New Labour government’s promotion of an “ethical” foreign policy, it was given political impetus by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. A special High Court of Justiciary was set up in a disused United States Air Force base called Camp Zeist in Utrecht.

In recent years no forensic-based case has caused greater concern than the Lockerbie trial and the prosecution has been widely accused of using the tactics of disinformation. The lead prosecutor was the highly controversial Lord Advocate, Colin (later Baron) Boyd who three years before had prosecuted DC McKie in another forensic disaster. The policewoman denied an accusation by Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) fingerprint officers that she left her thumb print at a murder scene in January 1997. She was arrested in March 1998, charged with perjury but at her trial in May 1999 the SCRO fingerprint evidence was rejected out of hand and she was acquitted.

A senior Scottish police officer, James Mackay QPM, was appointed by the Crown Office to investigate the matter and he submitted his report to Boyd in October 2000. It found that the actions of the SCRO personnel amounted to 'collective manipulation and collusion' and four of them were immediately suspended by the SCRO. With the Lockerbie trial in full swing Boyd was obviously reluctant to prosecute the officers involved and to great public indignation he allowed them to be reinstated. It would clearly have damaged his fragile case in the Lockerbie trial to have four of Scotland’s forensic scientists prosecuted for covering up acts of criminality. The finger-print scandal was only resolved in 2006 when the policewoman was awarded £750,000 compensation and Boyd was rightly forced to resign as Lord Advocate.

There were profound inconsistencies in much of the evidence presented to the trial. For instance, the entry of the discovery of the timer fragment was recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. The German police files indicate that fragments of the bomb timer were found on the shirt in January 1990. So the shirt collar could hardly have been examined nor the items of evidence extracted on 12 May 1989 as was claimed by Hayes at the trial. German documents also contain photographs showing a piece of the shirt with most of the breast pocket undamaged but the images presented to the trial were different.

It is also disconcerting that an additional page was inserted into the evidence log detailing the discovery of the Slalom shirt with particles of the bomb timer on it. The record of the discovery was inserted into a loose-leaf folder with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand – a procedure for which the scientist could offer no explanation at the trial. The prosecution’s evidence looked at times like a co-coordinated effort to mislead the court. Yet the Judges helpfully concluded that the compromised evidence log did not matter because “each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”

During the trial, MeBo engineer Ulrich Lumpert – whose evidence was crucial in connecting the famous fragment to the Libyan batch – caused consternation by adding that the fragment on display belonged to a timer that had never been connected to a relay, ie had not triggered a bomb. This claim could not be countered by the prosecution because Hayes had inexplicably not thought it necessary to test the tiny timer fragment for explosive residue. However, given their conduct of the trial it came as no surprise that the three Scottish judges were untroubled by what should have been a disaster for the prosecution.

The lead judge was the veteran Lord Sutherland accompanied by an inveterate tribunal chairman, Lord Coulsfield, and the sentencing and parole expert Lord MacLean. They admitted the uncertainties in the testimony and the dangers inherent in “selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which do not fit”. They also admitted it was possible they were “reading into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern and conclusion which was not really justified” but ploughed on regardless.

In the end, the judges accepted that the absence of a credible explanation of how the suitcase was placed into the system at Luqa airport was “a major difficulty for the Crown case”. However they still managed to convince themselves that this was indeed what had happened. “When the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible.” This statement was met with derision in Scotland and rightly dismissed as “inference piled upon inference”.

The judges further accepted that the PFLP-GC were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period but found “no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime.”

If most observers found this a very odd way of looking at the evidence, the final decisions of the judges provoked utter consternation. It appeared beyond any shadow of a doubt that the two accused were either both guilty or both not guilty but the Law Lords managed to find clear blue water between them. The judges were unanimous in finding the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. He was freed and he returned to Libya on 1 February 2001.

As for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi the judges said: “There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment.” Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.

Huge doubts remain about the prosecution’s case and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in 2007 found prima facie evidence of a miscarriage of justice. It is clear from their report that the unreliability of the prosecution’s key witness Tony Gauci was one of the main reasons for the referral of Megrahi’s case back to the Appeal Court. Gauci had been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police during which he gave a series of inconclusive statements and there was evidence that leading questions had been put to him. Gauci was clearly not the “full shilling” as Lord Fraser, Scotland’s senior law officer during the investigation, had admitted. And yet he was not entirely stupid. The Americans paid him $2 million for his revised identification and he now resides in comfortable obscurity in Malta.

The review commission also discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose a document from a foreign power which confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya. This document, passed to the commission by the foreign power in question, contained considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb and linked it to the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the investigation. Moreover, the Iranian defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, who provided intelligence for the Germans, had already told the prosecutors in 1996 that the bombing been ordered by Tehran, not Tripoli.

Scientists generally recommend selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions. Known as Occam’s razor, we use it to cut out crazy, complicated constructions and to keep theories grounded in the laws of science. The Maltese evidence linking Megrahi to the atrocity is so fragile, so complex and so full of unsupported assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the forensic scientists. It is therefore unfortunate that it would be difficult to find three more disreputable practioners than Thurman, Hayes and Feraday. It should be a matter of deep concern that Megrahi is the only man convicted on the evidence of these three individuals whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.

There is also no credible evidence that the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop found among the Lockerbie wreckage were really bought on the day stated in the trial. The sale seemed much more likely to have happened on a day when Abu Talb was on Malta and Megrahi definitely was not. It is also known that when the Swedish police arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they found some of the same batch of clothing in his flat in Uppsala. No explanation for that was forthcoming at the trial.

Finally, the behaviour of the chief prosecutor Colin Boyd, both in concealing the nefarious activity of his forensic scientists and withholding essential evidence from the defence, is utterly reprehensible. Together with lack of moral fiber shown by Lord Cullen and the Court of Criminal Appeal [at Megrahi's first appeal] it has left a permanent stain on the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

A most perceptive analysis

The following article appears on the Ohmynews English language website at http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=380264&rel_no=1

Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury

'I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time'

Ludwig De Braeckeleer

Published 2007-09-06 07:04 (KST)

[They] have eyes to see but do not see, ears to hear but do not hear …--Ezekiel 12:2

The Lockerbie Affair has taken yet another extraordinary twist. Last Friday I received from Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based company MeBo AG, a copy of a German original of an affidavit.

The document is dated July 18, 2007, and signed by Ulrich Lumpert, who worked as an electronic engineer at MeBo from 1978 to 1994. I have scrutinized the document carefully and concluded that I have no reason to doubt its authenticity or the truthfulness of its content.

Lumpert was a key witness (No. 550) at the Camp Zeist trial, where a three-judge panel convicted a Libyan citizen of murdering the 270 people who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

In his testimony, Lumpert stated that "of the three pieces of hand-made prototypes MST-13 timer PC-boards, the third MST-13 PC-board was broken and [he] had thrown it away."

In his affidavit, certified by Officer Walter Wieland, Lumpert admits having committed perjury.

"I confirm today on July 18, 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 timer PC-board consisting of eight layers of fiber-glass from MEBO Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22, 1989, to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case," Lumpert wrote. (The identity of the official is known.)

"It did not escape me that the MST-13 fragment shown [at the Lockerbie trial] on the police photograph No. PT/35(b) came from the nonoperational MST-13 prototype PC-board that I had stolen," Lumpert added.

"I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time, for the innocent Libyan Mr. Abdelbaset Al Megrahi sentenced to life imprisonment, and for the country of Libya."

In just seven paragraphs, the Lumpert affidavit elucidates the longstanding mysteries surrounding the infamous MST-13 timer, which allegedly triggered the bomb that exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988.

The Discovery of the MST-13 Timer Fragment

In the months following the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, someone discovered a piece of a gray Slalom-brand shirt in a wooded area about 25 miles away from the town. According to a forensics expert, the cloth contained a tiny fragment -- 4 millimeters square -- of a circuit board. The testimony of three expert witnesses allowed the prosecutors to link this circuit board, described as part of the bomb trigger, to Megrahi.

There have been different accounts concerning the discovery of the timer fragment. A police source close to the investigation reported that it had been discovered by lovers. Some have said that it was picked up by a man walking his dog. Others have claimed that it was found by a policeman "combing the ground on his hands and knees."

At the trial, the third explanation became official. "On 13 January 1989, DC Gilchrist and DC McColm were engaged together in line searches in an area near Newcastleton. A piece of charred material was found by them, which was given the police number PI/995 and which subsequently became label 168."

The Alteration of the Label

The officer had initially labeled the bag "cloth (charred)" but had later overwritten the word "cloth" with "debris."

The bag contained pieces of a shirt collar and fragments of materials said to have been extracted from it, including the tiny piece of circuit board identified as coming from an MST-13 timer made by the Swiss firm MeBo.

"The original inscription on the label, which we are satisfied, was written by DC Gilchrist, was 'cloth (charred).' The word 'cloth' has been overwritten by the word 'debris.' There was no satisfactory explanation as to why this was done."

The judges said in their judgment that Gilchrist's evidence had been "at worst evasive and at best confusing."

Yet the judges went on to admit the evidence. "We are, however, satisfied that this item was indeed found in the area described, and DC McColm, who corroborated DC Gilchrist on the finding of the item, was not cross-examined about the detail of the finding of this item."

It has long been rumored that a senior former Scottish officer who worked at the highest level of the Lockerbie inquiry had signed a statement in which he claimed that evidence had been planted. U.K. media have confirmed the story. Thus, the Scottish officer has confirmed an allegation previously made by a former CIA agent. The identity of the officer remains secret and he is only known as "Golfer."

"Golfer" has told Megrahi's legal team that Gilchrist had told him that he had not been responsible for changing the label.

The New Page 51

According to documents obtained by the Scotland on Sunday, the entry of the discovery is recorded at widely different times by U.K. and German investigators. Moreover, a new page 51 has been inserted in the record of evidence.

During the Lockerbie investigation Thomas Hayes and Allan Feraday were working at the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) forensic laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent.

Hayes was employed at the Royal Armament Research Development Establishment (RARDE). In 1995, RARDE was subsumed into the DERA. In 2001, part of DERA became the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).

Hayes testified that he collected the tiny fragment of the circuit board on May 12, 1989. He testified that the fragment was green. (Keep in mind that the board stolen from Lumpert is brown.) His colleague, Alan Feraday, confirmed his story at the Zeist trial.

The record is inserted on a loose-leaf page with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand. Hayes could not provide a reasonable explanation for this rather strange entry, and yet the judges concluded that: "Pagination was of no materiality because each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes."

The argument of the court is illogical as the index number Hayes gave to the piece is higher than some entry he made three months later.

And there is more. In September 1989 Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of the piece and wrote in the attached memorandum that it was "the best he could do in such short time." So, are we supposed to believe that it takes forensic experts several months to take a Polaroid picture?

Hayes could not explain this. He merely suggested that the person to ask about it would be the author of the memorandum, Feraday.

This, however, was not done. At the young age of 43, Hayes resigned just a few months after the discovery of the timer fragment.

Based on the forensic evidence Hayes had supplied, an entire family (the Maguire Seven) was sent to jail in 1976. They were acquitted in appeal in 1992. Sir John May was appointed to review Hayes' forensic evidence.

"The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution in … [the trial of the alleged IRA Maguire Seven] was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone, the Court of Appeal should be invited to set aside the conviction," said May.

In Megrahi's case, Hayes did not even perform the basic test that would have established the presence of explosive residue on the sample. During the trial, he maintained that the fragment was too small, while it is factually established that his laboratory has performed such tests on smaller samples.

Had he performed such a test, no residue would have been found. As noted by Lumpert, the fragment shown at the Zeist trial belongs to a timer that was never connected to a relay. In other words, that timer never triggered a bomb.

Feraday's reputation is hardly better. In three separate cases where men were convicted on the basis of his forensic evidence, the initial ruling was overturned in appeal.

After one of these cases in 2005, a lord of justice said that Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics.

According to forensic scientist Michael Scott, who was interviewed in the documentary "The Maltese Double Cross -- Lockerbie," Feraday has no formal qualifications as a scientist.

The Identification of the MeBo Timer

Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late '80s and most of the '90s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying the 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 U.S. 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 of the FBI forensic laboratory.

"He's very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management," said 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," Whitehurst concluded.

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."

And the legal experts were just as fake as their scientific counterparts. In late 1998 Glasgow University set up the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit (LTBU) to provide impartial advice to the world media on the legal aspects of the complex and unique trial.

Andrew Fulton, a British diplomat, was appointed as a visiting law professor to head the Unit. Fulton has no legal experience whatsoever. Prior to his appointment as head of LTBU, Fulton was MI6 station chief in Washington, D.C.

The Modification of the MST-13 Timer Fragment

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 have acted as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police.

The two batches are very different but as early as 1991 Bollier told the Scottish investigators that he could not identify the timer from a photograph alone. Yet, the Libyans were indicted in November 1991 -- without Bollier ever having been allowed to see the actual fragment -- on the ground that the integrity of the evidence had to be protected.

But in 1998 Bollier obtained a copy of a blown-up photograph that Thurman had shown on ABC in 1991. Bollier could tell from certain characteristics that the fragment was part of a board of the timers made for East Germany and definitely not one of the timers delivered by him to Libya.

In September 1999 Bollier was finally allowed to see the fragment. Unlike the one shown by Thurman on ABC, this one was machine-made, like the one sold to Libya. But it was obvious from the absence of traces of solder that the timer had never been used to trigger a bomb.

"As far as I'm concerned, and I told this to … [Scottish prosecutor Miriam Watson], this is a manufactured fragment," Bollier says. "A fabricated fragment, never from a complete, functional timer."

The next day Bollier was shown the fragment once more. You may have already guessed that it now had the soldering traces. "It was different. I'm not crazy. It was different!" says Bollier.

Finally, at the trial Bollier was presented a fragment of a circuit board completely burnt down. Thus, it was no longer possible to identify to which country that timer had been delivered. When he requested to explain the significance of the issue, Lord Shuterland told him that his request was denied.

How did the judges account for all the mysterious changes in the appearance of the fragment? They simply dismissed Bollier as an unreliable witness.

"We have assessed carefully the evidence of these three witnesses about the activities of MeBo and in particular their evidence relating to the MST-13 timers, which the company made. All three, and notably Mr. Bollier, were shown to be unreliable witnesses. Earlier statements which they made to the police and judicial authorities were at times in conflict with each other and with the evidence they gave in court. On some occasions, particularly in the case of Mr. Bollier, their evidence was self contradictory." (§ 45)

A Scenario Implausible on Its Face

"The evidence which we have considered up to this stage satisfies us beyond reasonable doubt that the cause of the disaster was the explosion of an improvised explosive device … and that the initiation of the explosion was triggered by the use of an MST-13 timer," wrote the three fudges. (§ 15)

Lockerbie experts, such as former CIA employee Robert Baer, have suspected that the MST-13 timer could have been given by the Stasi to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command [PFLP-GL], a terrorist group based in Syria, funded by Iran and led by the terrorist Ahmed Jibril.

The allegation deserves attention as it is well known that the two organizations had strong ties. Moreover, the archives of the Stasi reveal that the agency had infiltrated the Swedish government, and it is well documented that Jibril's close collaborators were operating from Sweden. Yet I never believed for a moment that the Lockerbie bomb had been triggered by a timer.

No terrorist would ever attempt to bomb an airliner with a timer-triggered bomb, and definitely not during the winter season, let alone at Christmas time, where the timetables are absolutely useless as delays are the norm rather than the exception.

Don't take my word for it. Terrorists such as Jibril and counter-terrorists such Noel Koch have stated that much.

"Explosives linked to an air pressure gauge, which would have detonated when the plane reached a certain altitude or to a timer would have been ineffective," Jibril said.

"I know all about the science of explosives. I am an engineer of explosives. I will argue this with any expert that the bomb went on board in London. I do not think the Libyans had anything to do with this."

Noel Koch headed the U.S. Defense Department's anti-terrorism office from 1981 to 1986. Koch ridiculed the idea that terrorists would gamble on the likelihood that unaccompanied luggage would be successfully transferred twice, first from Malta to Frankfurt, and then from Frankfurt to London.

"I can tell you this much that I know about terrorism: it's simple," Koch says. "You don't complicate life. Life's complicated enough as it is. If you've got a target you want to get as close as you can to it and you don't go through a series of permutations that provide opportunities for failure and that provide opportunities for discovery. It doesn't work that way."

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission

On Nov. 13, 1991, two Libyans were indicted for the murder of 270 people who died in the Lockerbie bombing. The indictment was the outcome of a three-year U.S.-U.K. joint investigation.

Although Libya never acknowledged responsibility in the matter, decade-long U.N. sanctions forced Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi to handover the two men accused of the worst act of terrorism in the U.K. On April 5, 1999, they were transferred to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, where they were judged under Scottish Law.

On Jan. 31, 2001, a panel of three Scottish Judges acquitted one of them. They convicted the other for murder and sentenced him to life. Megrahi is serving his sentence in a prison near Glasgow.

Megrahi's appeal was rejected on March 14, 2002. The European Court of Human Rights declared his application inadmissible in July 2003.

In September 2003, he applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission [SCCRC] for a legal review of his conviction. His request was based on the legal test contained in section 106(3)(b) of Scotland's Criminal Procedure Act of 1995.
The provision states that an appeal may be made against "any alleged miscarriage of justice, which may include such a miscarriage based on … the jury's having returned a verdict which no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned."

On June 28, 2007, the SCCRC decided to grant Megrahi a second appeal and to refer his case to the High Court. An impressive 800-page long document stating the reasons for the decision has been sent to the High Court, the applicant, his solicitor and the Crown Office. Although the document is not available to the public, the commission has decided "to provide a fuller news release than normal."

Is it too much to ask why the "fuller news release than normal" lists only four of the six grounds that justify the commission's conclusion that a miscarriage of justice might have occurred?

As recently pointed out by Hans Koechler, who was an international observer appointed by the United Nations at the Lockerbie trial, we may also wonder "why a supposedly independent judicial review body [the SCCRC] would try to exonerate 'preventively' officials in a case which is being returned to the High Court for a second appeal because of suspicions of a miscarriage of justice."

Indeed, the SCCRC's statement that "the commission undertook extensive enquiries in this area but found nothing to support that allegation or to undermine the trial court's conclusions in respect of the fragment [of the MST-13 MeBo timer]" is rather difficult to justify.

Toward a Criminal Investigation?

Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the tragedy, describes the ruling on Megrahi as one of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history, blaming both the Scottish legal system and U.S. intelligence.

"The Americans played their role in the investigation and influenced the prosecution," Swire told The Scotsman.

Top-level U.K. diplomats tend to agree with him, such as Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya.

"No court is likely get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence," Miles told the BBC.

The spectacular decision of the SCCRC is certain to give a second life to the dozen of alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Nearly two decades later, the case is back to square one.

Back to Square One

Let us give Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean some credit. After hearing 230 witnesses and studying 621 exhibits during 84 days of evidence, spread over eight months, the three judges of the Lockerbie trial almost got the date of the worst act of terror in the U.K. correct.

In the first line of the first paragraph of the most expensive verdict in history (￡80 million), they wrote: "At 1903 hours on 22 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky." As a matter of fact, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded on Dec. 21.

Michael Scharf is an international law expert at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Scharf joined the State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence in April 1989. He was also responsible for drawing up the U.N. Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992.

"It was a trial where everybody agreed ahead of time that they were just going to focus on these two guys, and they were the fall guys," Scharf wrote.

"The CIA and the FBI kept the State Department in the dark. It worked for them for us to be fully committed to the theory that Libya was responsible. I helped the counter-terrorism bureau draft documents that described why we thought Libya was responsible, but these were not based on seeing a lot of evidence, but rather on representations from the CIA and FBI and the Department of Justice about what the case would prove and did prove."

"It was largely based on this inside guy [Libyan defector Abdul Majid Giaka]. It wasn't until the trial that I learned this guy was a nut-job and that the CIA had absolutely no confidence in him and that they knew he was a liar."

The Magic Luggage

According to the Lockerbie verdict, the bomb was hidden in a Toshiba radio, wrapped in clothes and located in luggage that was mysteriously boarded in Malta.

The court has examined this allegation in depth and the matter occupies 24 paragraphs of the final verdict (§ 16 to § 34). After reviewing all the evidence and testimonies, the three judges came to the following conclusions:

"Luqa airport had a relatively elaborate security system. All items of baggage checked in were entered into the airport computer as well as being noted on the passenger's ticket. After the baggage had passed the sniffer check, it was placed on a trolley in the baggage area to wait until the flight was ready for loading.

"When the flight was ready, the baggage was taken out and loaded, and the head loader was required to count the items placed on board. The ramp dispatcher, the airport official on the tarmac responsible for the departure of the flight, was in touch by radiotelephone with the load control office. The load control had access to the computer and, after the flight was closed, would notify the ramp dispatcher of the number of items checked in. The ramp dispatcher would also be told by the head loader how many items had been loaded; and if there were a discrepancy, the ramp dispatcher would take steps to resolve it.

"In addition to the baggage reconciliation procedure, there was a triple count of the number of passengers boarding a departing flight, that is there was a count of the boarding cards, a count by immigration officers of the number of immigration cards handed in, and a head count by the crew.

"The records relating to KM180 on 21 December 1988 show no discrepancy in respect of baggage. The flight log (production 930) shows that 55 items of baggage were loaded, corresponding to 55 on the load plan.

"On the face of them, these arrangements seem to make it extremely difficult for an unaccompanied and unidentified bag to be shipped on a flight out of Luqa.

"If therefore the unaccompanied bag was launched from Luqa, the method by which that was done is not established, and the Crown accepted that they could not point to any specific route by which the primary suitcase could have been loaded.

"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 case."

An internal 1989 FBI memo indicates that there is no indication that unaccompanied luggage was transferred from Air Malta to Pan Am. Law authorities from Malta and Germany came to the same conclusion.

And yet, without any explanation, the judges wrote in the conclusion of the verdict that: "the absence of an explanation as to how the suitcase was taken into the system at Luqa is a major difficulty for the Crown case, but after taking full account of that difficulty, we remain of the view that the primary suitcase began its journey at Luqa." (§ 82)

The Maltese Storekeeper

According to the verdict, Megrahi bought the clothes in which the bomb was wrapped in Sliema, a small town of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea, including the "cloth" in which the fragment was "discovered" by Hayes. At first sight, the "cloth" appears to be part of a Slalom shirt sold in a little shop -- Mary's House -- located on the island.

However, upon closer examination, the "cloth" raises a series of issues. Firstly, the color of the label is incorrect. A blue Slalom shirt label should have blue writing, not brown.

Secondly, the breast pocket size corresponds to a child shirt, not the 16-and-a-half-sized shirt allegedly bought by Megrahi, for the pocket would have been 2 centimeters wider.

Thirdly, German records show the shirt had most of the breast pocket intact, while the evidence shown at Zeist had a deep triangular tear extending inside the pocket.

Lastly, the storekeeper initially told the investigators he never sold such shirts to whoever visited him a few weeks before the Lockerbie tragedy.

Storekeeper Tony Gauci's testimony was pivotal in the case against Megrahi. Gauci gave a series of 19 statements to the police that are fully inconsistent. Yet, the judges found him trustworthy. Allow me to disagree.

On Jan. 30, 1990, Gauci stated, "That time when the man came, I am sure I did not sell him a shirt." Then, on Sept. 10, 1990, he told the investigators, "I now remember that the man who bought the clothing also bought a Slalom shirt." And to make things worse, two of his testimonies have disappeared.

When Were the Clothes Bought?

According to the verdict, Megrahi bought the clothes on Dec. 7, 1989. Gauci remembered that his brother had gone home earlier to watch an evening football game (Rome vs. Dresden), that the man came just before closing time (7 p.m.), that it was raining (the man bought an umbrella) and that the Christmas lights were on.

The game allows for only two dates: Nov. 23 or Dec. 7. The issue is critical for there is no indication that Megrahi was in Malta on Nov. 23, but he is known to have been on the island on Dec. 7.

The chief meteorologist of Malta airport testified that it was raining on Nov. 23 but not on Dec. 7. Yet the judges determined the date as Dec. 7. This rather absurd conclusion from the judges raises two other issues.

The Dec. 7 Rome-Dresden game was played at 1 p.m., not in the evening. What is more, Gauci had previously testified that the Christmas lights were not up, meaning that the date had to be Nov. 7.

On Sept. 19, 1989, Gauci stated, "The [Christmas] decorations were not up when the man bought the clothing." Then, at the Lockerbie trial, Gauci told the judges that the Christmas lights were on. "Yes, they were … up."

Who Was the Mysterious Buyer?

"We are nevertheless satisfied that his identification, so far as it went, of the first accused as the purchaser was reliable and should be treated as a highly important element in this case," wrote the judges.

In fact, Gauci never identified Megrahi. He merely stated that Megrahi resembles the man to whom he had sold the clothes, but only if he were much older and two inches taller. Gauci, however, had identified another man: Abu Talb.

Talb was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GL), the terrorist group led by Jibril.

In late October 1988 the senior bomb maker of the PFLP-GC, Marwan Khreesat, was arrested in Frankfurt in the company of Hafez Dalkamoni, the leader of the organization's German cell.

Dalkamoni had met Talb in Cyprus and Malta the week before. In the car the two men used, police found a bomb hidden in a Toshiba radio. Khreesat told the police that he had manufactured five similar improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Each device Khreesat had built was triggered by a pressure gauge that activated a timer -- range 0 to 45 minutes -- when the plane reached a cruising altitude of 11,000 meters. The timers of all recovered bombs were set on 30 minutes. It takes about 7 minutes for a 747 to reach cruising altitude. Pan Am 103 exploded 38 minutes after take-off from London.

German police eventually recovered four of the IEDs Khreesat had built. No one seems to know what happened to the fifth one, which was never recovered. When police raided Talb's apartment in Sweden, they found his appointment notebook. Talb had circled one date: Dec. 21.

Contrary to Jibril's statement, and surely he must know better, a bomb triggered by a pressure gauge set at 11,000 meters would not have detonated during the Frankfurt to London flight as the airliner does not reach cruising altitude on such a short flight.

Then again, such a device would not have detonated at all if it had been located in the luggage area, as the hold is at the pressure of the passengers' zone and never drops below the pressure equivalent of 2,400 meters.

This is why when the judges were presented with the undisputable and undisputed evidence that a proper simulation of the explosion -- taking proper account of the Mach stem effect -- would locate the explosion outside the luggage hold they simply decided to dismiss the existence of a scientifically well-established fact.

"We do not consider it necessary to go into any detail about Mach stem formation," the judges wrote.

Had the judges deemed it "necessary to go into the details regarding Mach stem formation," they would have been forced to acknowledge that the position of the bomb was fully incompatible with the indictment. That magic unaccompanied luggage went mysteriously through airport security was "plausible." That it jumped on its own out of the luggage hold at London airport was a little too much to believe.

In truth, a proper simulation of the explosion locates the bomb just a few inches away from the skin of the plane, a position fully consistent with the very specific damages left by the explosion.

The truth was inconvenient. The three judges had to dismiss it in order to justify a verdict that had been decided more than a decade before the first day of the Zeist trial.

Shame on those who committed this horrific act of terror. Shame on those who have ordered the cover-up. Shame on those who provided false testimony and those who suppressed and fabricated the evidence needed to frame Libya. And shame on the media, whose silence made it an accomplice.

And to those who seek the truth, I advise them to follow the drug trail on the road to Damascus.


Ludwig De Braeckeleer has a Ph.D. in nuclear sciences. He teaches physics and international humanitarian law. He blogs on The GaiaPost.


The following is a comment about this article posted on the Ohmynews website by Dr Hans Koechler:

Hans Koechler, 2007/09/07 00:40
This is a well researched analysis which precisely reveals the serious mistakes and omissions by the official Scottish investigators as well as the carelessness and lack of professionalism of the judges in the Lockerbie case. The Scottish judicial authorities are under the obligation to investigate possible criminal misconduct in the investigation and prosecution of the Lockerbie case.

Dr. Hans Koechler
University Professor
International observer, appointed by the United Nations, at the Lockerbie Trial in the Netherlands