Justice remains elusive 25 years after Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Alasdair Soussi published yesterday on the website of The National, an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates.  It reads as follows:]

If an individual is found guilty in a court of law, does that always render it case closed? In cases where murder is involved, developed legal systems across the world pride themselves on their ability to deliver justice, to bring closure, to bring at least a modicum of comfort to grieving relatives. Yet, no matter how established the judicial system, how respected its legal canons, miscarriages of justice are sadly not without precedent.

This month marked 25 years since Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in the skies above Lockerbie, Scotland – a terrorist atrocity that claimed the lives of all 259 passengers and crew and 11 others on the ground. For the victim’s families, the anniversary is a chance to remember loved ones who lost their lives on that terrible winter’s night of December 21, 1988, when one small Scottish border town – previously shrouded in sleepy obscurity – made international headlines. For others, it will be a chance to reflect on what many consider to be one of the gravest miscarriages of justice of the modern age.

Abdel Basset Ali Al Megrahi remains the only person to be convicted in the attack on the US-bound flight – but doubts about his conviction remain widespread. The Libyan himself proclaimed his innocence up until his last breath when, nearly three years after his compassionate release from a Scottish jail, he died from prostate cancer at his Tripoli home in May last year.

Scotland suffered a political backlash when its nationalist government decided to release Megrahi on the grounds that he only had three months to live. I had sympathy with the Scottish government’s decision.

The idea that Scotland could demonstrate its compassion in such a public manner to a dying man made me proud of my nation – but my doubts about the safety of his conviction led me, on balance, to believe that his release was warranted.

To be sure, my belief in his innocence is not without some reservations – the tangle of intrigues surrounding the Lockerbie affair are murky at best – but my own reading of the evidence has given me great pause to consider that the 2001 verdict was fatally flawed. In all likelihood it delivered that most serious of judicial errors: the condemnation of an innocent man.

The eyewitness testimony from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci who said he sold Megrahi the clothes that were said to have been wrapped around the bomb, is highly suspect.

Eyewitness accounts are crucial to any case – but Gauci’s testimony was riddled with flaws. For a start, Gauci consistently told police that the clothes buyer was around 50 years old, 1.83m tall, heavily built and dark-skinned. At the time, Megrahi was 36 years old, 1.75m, relatively slender and light-skinned.

And, then there was his exposure to press reports about the case featuring Megrahi’s photo – particularly a magazine piece, which contained an image of the Libyan under the heading “Who planted the bomb?”

This magazine was given to Gauci by a neighbour and kept in his possession for several months, crucially only handing it over to police just days before he picked out Megrahi at an identity parade in the Netherlands in 1999.

And, what of the fragment of circuit board found at the crash site? Known as PT/35b, the fragment was linked to the bombing because it was identified as originating from an MST-13 timer manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo. Megrahi had associations with the firm. Yet, the plating of PT/35b was pure tin, the Mebo timer’s circuit boards a tin-lead alloy. Experts consulted by the police had put forward the theory that the heat from the explosion could have vaporised the lead – sadly, Megrahi’s defence never did dispute the connection between the two items at trial – but this has since been disproved by experiments conducted by independent experts.

Doubts about Megrahi’s conviction are not just confined to laypersons like me.

In 2007, six grounds for believing that Megrahi’s conviction could have constituted a miscarriage of justice were published by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). Among them was the SCCRC’s contention that the trial court’s judgement was unreasonable – specifically that there were no reasonable grounds to conclude that the clothes were purchased from Gauci’s shop in Malta on December 7, 1988, which was the only date that fitted with Megrahi’s presence on the island.

The other grounds for referral included undisclosed evidence to the defence about the Gauci identification (concerning his exposure to press articles on Megrahi before his picking him out at the identity parade), and, quite sensationally, other undisclosed evidence to the defence about Gauci’s interest in reward money.

I have very little interest in conspiracy theories surrounding Lockerbie, and my main interest has always been on the safety of Megrahi’s guilty verdict, and the strong desire to see a proper inquiry into a conviction that has done little to inspire public confidence.

For many who firmly believe in Megrahi’s guilt, the above points are nothing new – just a simple rehashing of old ground. But, for this writer, and more importantly those who have campaigned long and hard for justice, they are worthy, now more than ever, of reiteration.

Indeed, and perhaps just as tragically as the lives that were lost that cold December night, they only bolster the widespread belief that the wrong man was tried and convicted for a crime that was perpetrated over Scottish soil but that shook the entire world.

Alasdair Soussi is a freelance journalist, covering the Middle East and Scottish politics.

[Two further Lockerbie articles by Alasdair Soussi can be accessed here.]

Pan Am Flight 103: Was Lockerbie bomber really guilty?

[This is the headline over an article by Alasdair Soussi published today on the Aljazeera website. It reads in part:]

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the deadly bombing, but many believe his conviction was a miscarriage of justice.

To this day, Megrahi, who died in May 2012 protesting his innocence, remains the only person convicted of bringing down the American-bound airliner with a smuggled bomb, which, detonating 38 minutes into its flight from London, flung victims and debris over an 81-mile corridor covering 845 square miles.

Yet, Megrahi's January 31, 2001, conviction, his controversial release by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds due to illness in August 2009, and even his death in Libya from cancer three years later, have all failed to put to rest a murder case that remains one of the most contentious in modern criminal history.

Indeed, as the debate between those who maintain that Megrahi was guilty as charged and those who contend that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice rages on, for many the case has not limited itself to a battle of evidence alone. It has also seen Scotland and its justice system put through years of unwarranted hardship - which has taken its toll.

"I think we should finally put to bed all the conspiracy theories about Lockerbie, which have occupied a great deal of time and space over the last 20 years maybe," said Magnus Linklater, a prominent Scottish political commentator who has become a noted critic of those advocating Megrahi's innocence.

Linklater told Al Jazeera that those who promote the notion of the Libyan's innocence - and the innocence of Libya itself in the Lockerbie bombing - are "misguided". (...)

The main focus of Linklater's wrath - and that of others who share his views - is Scottish-based Justice for Megrahi (JFM), an organisation that has called into question Megrahi's guilt - and is calling for a public inquiry into the bombing.

It makes no apology for pushing its line that Megrahi's conviction may constitute one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in modern legal history.

Len Murray, a retired Scottish criminal court solicitor and committee member of the group, told Al Jazeera that any notion that the case against Megrahi was "overwhelming", "could not be further from the truth".

"It is worth bearing in mind that while the three [Scottish] judges [who tried the case] were experienced judges, judges in our High Court have never ever had to determine guilt or innocence - that's always left to the jury," he added. "But, when for the first time in modern legal history, it's left to three judges, they get it appallingly wrong.

Many observers share this view. (...)

JFM (...) contends that, far from being conspiracy theories, the weight of evidence casting doubt on the Libyan's guilt has been arrived at convincingly.

Retired police officer Iain McKie, who is also a JFM committee member, told Al Jazeera that his two JFM colleagues, signatory John Ashton and committee member Morag Kerr, authors of Megrahi: You Are My Jury and Adequately Explained by Stupidity? - Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies respectively, had backed up their various assertions - which have become central to the group's miscarriage of justice case - with hard evidence.

"Scotland's shame is quite clearly the way the whole affair has been conducted from the beginning - from the investigation, the prosecution, the judicial process and the aftermath. That's Scotland's shame," added McKie.

Supporting Linklater's position is the continuing work of Police Scotland.

It told Al Jazeera that Lockerbie "remains a live investigation" - and that, "along with the Crown Office", it was "committed to working with our colleagues at the FBI, the Department of Justice and the US Attorney's Office in Washington DC to gather any information or evidence that identifies those who acted along with al-Megrahi to commit this despicable act of terrorism".

Yet JFM is itself awaiting the final report of Operation Sandwood - Police Scotland's investigation of nine allegations of criminality levelled by the group at Crown, police and forensic officials who worked on the Lockerbie case. JFM is publicly calling for the inquiry’s final report to be assessed by an independent prosecutor.

As Lockerbie itself remains a live case, JFM awaits the results of Operation Sandwood and continues to campaign against the findings of the 15-year-old verdict, the events of December 21, 1988, will continue to cast a very long shadow.

Lockerbie bombing: the search for the truth

[This is the headline over a long article by Alasdair Soussi published today on the website of The National, an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates.  It reads as follows:]

In the early afternoon of May 20, the only person ever convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie died at home in Libya. Abdelbaset Al Megrahi had been released from a UK prison on compassionate grounds in August 2009 after being found guilty of the December 21, 1988 terrorist atrocity, which killed all 259 passengers and crew on board and 11 others on the ground.

Megrahi, who had been suffering from prostate cancer and was given only three months to live, was released by Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, under controversial circumstances.

He arrived home to a hero's welcome at Tripoli airport after serving just eight years of a minimum 27-year sentence.

The Libyan, whose co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted at trial, went on to live for two years and nine months, leading many to question the true extent of his illness. But, while seven months may have elapsed since Megrahi's death, and 24 years since the attack itself, many individuals are now convinced of the late Libyan's innocence.

Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died on Flight 103, Robert Forrester, secretary of the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) campaign and John Ashton, author of Megrahi: You Are My Jury, all believe that the Lockerbie dead were not the only casualties that cold December evening when, 38 minutes into its transatlantic flight from London Heathrow, the Clipper Maid of the Seas passenger jet exploded. Swire, Forrester and Ashton are all pushing for Megrahi's conviction to be quashed in the belief that the evidence used to try the Libyan in 2001 can be disproved.

The timer fragment used to detonate the bomb, said to have been found at the Lockerbie crash site and which the prosecution argued had been planted in a suitcase by Megrahi at Malta airport, is one such questionable item of evidence.

According to Ashton, the fragment, made of pure tin, could not have come from any product sold by the Swiss company Mebo in Libya, because it used tin-lead alloy at that time.

He bases his claims on two assertions: a sworn affidavit from the production manager of the firm that made the Mebo timer's circuit boards and expert opinion that refuted remarks made by two prosecution witnesses that the heat from the explosion could have burnt away the lead from the Lockerbie fragment, leaving just tin residue.

"The experts we spoke to did experiments, which disproved this supposition," says Ashton, who worked alongside Megrahi's legal team for three years as a researcher and claims that notes by a prosecution forensics expert, during his original examination of the circuit board fragment in 1991, reveal he was aware of a difference in the composition of the circuit board, but that his notes, which were handed to police on November 8, 1999, were not disclosed to Megrahi's defence until 10 years later.

"So, we then had a very, very startling conclusion which was that the fragment was not from one of the circuit boards sold to Libya. That really destroys the case. The fragment was what tied Megrahi in as he had an association with Mebo, and which was the golden thread that tied [him] to Lockerbie. When you removed that you really had no case."

Swire believes that Ashton's evidence "blows the Malta-Megrahi story … out of the water" and has always harboured deep reservations that a device of this kind "would have been used in such a way that it would only clear Heathrow by 38 minutes".

This, contends Swire, is because such a detonation time fitted perfectly with the pressure-trigger bombing devices used by the Syrian and Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Indeed, not only were the PFLP-GC the original prime suspects, but they were also incriminated by group member Mobdi Goben, in a lengthy deathbed confession.

For Swire, the evidence of the so-called "Heathrow break-in" - which took place just 16 hours before the bombing at a padlocked rubber door that gave access from landside to airside and down towards the airport's baggage area - was also mishandled.

It is his contention that Scottish police, who were in possession of the full facts surrounding the incident at Heathrow by February 1989 but didn't pass on details to the Crown Office in their case against Megrahi in 1991 - doing so only eight years later when they merely submitted unreferenced details of the break-in along with 14,000 other witness statements - "decided off their own bat that there was no evidence for anyone else being involved in the bombing and to suppress the Heathrow evidence in its entirety".

"The Crown Office, before the case started in court, knew perfectly well that the defence were going to lead [on] incrimination and were going to allege that the PFLP-GC had done this with one of their devices," says Swire, who claims that the appearance of the Lockerbie timer fragment was the result of "a major, major conspiracy of some unknown party to pervert the course of justice".

"In order to use a PFLP-GC device it would have to have been introduced at Heathrow or had to be treated by the terrorists in some way at Heathrow in order to activate it. Why? Because if you flew it in from Frankfurt it would have blown up on the way - on the feeder flight, Pan Am 103A. In that scenario, the evidence of the break-in ought to have been a crucial defence plank, but it wasn't because the defence didn't know about it."

With such assertions in mind, Forrester, on behalf of the JFM committee - which includes a Queen's Counsel, the parish priest in Lockerbie at the time of the disaster and a retired police superintendent, as well as Swire - wrote to Scotland's justice secretary on September 13, 2012, alleging six counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice pertaining to members of the Scottish police, the Crown and other involved parties. [RB: the original six counts have now been increased to eight.]

But, as Forrester admits, "major obstacles" exist in reaching JFM's goal of seeking justice for the 270 victims. This, despite a report from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) - a non-departmental public body funded by the Scottish government - which upheld six grounds on which Megrahi could have suffered a miscarriage of justice.

Indeed, viable avenues to expose Megrahi's conviction to the above claims - and others that have surfaced - appear doom-laden. An appeal from the Megrahi family, which seems unlikely due to the present political climate in Libya, or, potentially, an appeal from the Lockerbie bereaved, could both be scuppered by a Scottish Parliament ruling, which, says Forrester, "allows the judiciary to reject applications for appeal that are submitted to it by the SCCRC".

A Scottish government- launched independent inquiry, for which JFM has petitioned hard since 2010, provides another potential opening, but Salmond has, thus far, remained steadfastly opposed to such a move. Even so, JFM remains undeterred and focused on what Ashton contends as the biggest miscarriage of justice in the modern age.

"This was the biggest criminal investigation in British history - and the biggest mass murder - but the real hidden thing in this and the real scandal was that not only was the wrong man convicted, but so too was the nation of Libya, because as a result of these indictments Libya was subjected to 12 years of sanctions … So, here you have an entire nation punished on the basis of evidence that was at best shaky and at worst fabricated."

Controversy remains 25 years after Lockerbie

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

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

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

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

'Red herring'?

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

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

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

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

Strong 'circumstantial evidence'

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megrahi: A scapegoat?

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

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

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

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

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

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