Lockerbie: what really happened?

Aljazeera’s delayed Lockerbie documentary (the third in the series) is to be broadcast soon. A promotional video can be viewed here.

Aljazeera's third Lockerbie documentary

A little bird tells me that Aljazeera’s new Lockerbie documentary, provisionally entitled If not Megrahi, then who? which was originally expected to be shown on or about the 25th anniversary in December 2013, will be broadcast worldwide on a series of dates commencing on either 25 February or 5 March 2014.   

RIP Chris Jeans, Lockerbie documentary producer

[What follows is a short excerpt from The Guardian’s obituary of Chris Jeans, published on Monday:]

Christopher Jeans abandoned the constraints of a BBC suit for the riskier freedom of an independent television producer. He has died of cancer aged 68, two weeks after finishing his final programme, the third part in a trilogy for Al Jazeera about the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie 25 years ago. Chris worked until days before his death, showing his customary exuberance and unyielding persistence, chasing down facts and negotiating his way though complex challenges with a combination of shrewd guile and disarming laughter.

[Two of Chris Jeans’s Aljazeera documentaries have aready been broadcast, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber  and Lockerbie: Case Closed.  The third, provisionally entitled If not Megrahi, then who?, has yet to be shown. 

I am grateful to George Thomson, who was associated with Chris Jeans in all three of Aljazeera’s Lockerbie documentaries, for allowing me to publish this tribute:]

I only met Chris for the first time three years ago when he and Bill Cran approached me to ask for my assistance in producing what was to be one documentary film on Lockerbie.  We went on to make three and I can assure anyone waiting to view the third film that, it will be broadcast.

I agree with Morag [Kerr] it should be broadcast if for nothing else, in honour of one of the kindest, most jovial men I have ever met.

Chris could act the clown, he was great fun to work with but he got the best out of all the people he interviewed.  I was there during the filming of Morag's piece and I can vouch for everything she has so kindly said.

Jim Swire has described him as perhaps the best informed interviewer to have interviewed him on the case.

Bill and Chris were a great double act and I christened them "The Last of the Summer Wine", but they were brilliant and prolific documentary makers who made hard work fun.

When we were on location in Malta Chris would have us up and in the sea before 7am every morning, he loved swimming.  I got my own back by getting him arrested by the local police for hunting down Tony Gauci.

I was with him the day before he died at his home in London, he was very, very ill, but miraculously he managed a smile and squeezed my hand. He could not have been better looked after, his son and new daughter-in-law are both doctors and they assisted his lovely Wife Jessica to care for him right to the very end.  

The world of television documentaries has lost a star, I have lost a very good pal.

Who was really behind the Lockerbie bombing?

[This is the headline over an item on the Aljazeera website about its current Inside Story programme. It reads as follows:] 

As the world marks the 25th Lockerbie attack anniversary, we ask why there is no clarity on who was the perpetrator.

Commemorations have been held in the US, UK and Scotland to mark 25 years since Pan Am flight 103 crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. But after all these years, there are still questions about who was responsible for one the most infamous attacks in modern times.

The UK, US and Libyan governments have promised to work together to reveal the full facts of the bombing.

On December 21, 1988, the quaint Scottish town of Lockerbie was about to become the scene of one of the world's most infamous attacks.

The airliner had just left London's Heathrow airport – on its way to New York.

Less than half an hour after takeoff a bomb detonated, triggering an explosion and killing all 259 people on board. Most of the passengers were American while 11 others on the ground were also killed.

Three years later, a joint indictment by the US and Scotland implicated two Libyans for the bombing.

One of them was Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who was accused of 270 counts of murder, conspiracy to murder and breach of aviation security.

In April 1999, the suspects, including al-Megrahi, surrendered and were flown from the Libyan capital, to the Netherlands, where the case was heard.

When the trial began in 2000, al-Megrahi pleaded not guilty but he was later convicted. In 2002, he re-launched an appeal which was unsuccessful and al-Megrahi started his life sentence behind bars in a Scottish prison.

The Libyan authorities formally accepted responsibility for the attack, and even paid out $2.7bn in compensation to the relatives of those killed. That move prompted the United Nations to lift its sanctions.

Six years into his prison sentence, it was revealed that al-Megrahi suffered from advanced prostate cancer. He was given just a short time to live, and on those grounds, a Scottish judge decided to free him. [RB: It was not a judge, but a Scottish Government minister.]

He arrived home to Libya to a hero's welcome, which upset people around the world and triggered international condemnation.

The last interview al-Megrahi gave, was while he was on his death bed in 2011.

He spoke about the man whose testimony helped convict him - Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper in Malta - who said Megrahi bought clothes in his store that were found wrapped around the bomb on the plane.

"If I have a chance to see him [Gauci] I am forgiving him. I would tell him that never in my entire life have I been in his shop. I never bought any clothing from him. And ... I would tell him ... that he dealt with me very wrongly," Megrahi said in his last interview.

Last year, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber died. Al-Megrahi has always said he is innocent, and his family, to this day, say they want an appeal against his sentence and demand the truth be revealed.

As the world remembers Lockerbie 25 years on, divisions remain between those who believe he was really guilty of the crime and those who do not.

So do we know who was really behind the bombing? Have investigators failed to nail the perpetrator? Was al-Megrahi a scapegoat? And how strong were the evidences that convicted al-Megrahi?

To discuss this, Inside Story presenter Folly Bah Thibault is joined by guests: Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing and led a high-profile campaign for justice on behalf of the UK victims' relatives; Richard Marquise, then head of FBI's task force on the Lockerbie investigation; Morag Kerr, the author of Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies; and Anas el-Gomati, the director general of Libya's first public policy think-tank Sadeq Institute.

[Today’s Aljazeera GMT schedule can be found here. The programme can be watched here on You Tube.]

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."

Aljazeera documentary "If not Megrahi, then who?" postponed

Reliable sources inform me that the Aljazeera documentary If not Megrahi, then who? will not now be broadcast on Sunday, 15 December and the following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Amongst other reasons for postponement, are (a) the fact that important new material has come to light which must be incorporated into the film and (b) Aljazeera’s decision that the programme should be made available in more geographical areas than was originally planned, including the USA and the Middle East. It is hoped that the documentary can still be shown on or before the 25th anniversary of the Pan Am 103 disaster on 21 December.

Lockerbie anniversary TV programmes

A reminder that various television programmes about Lockerbie are being broadcast in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the disaster on 21 December. Among them are:

Aljazeera’s If Not Megrahi, Then Who? which features, among others, Justice for Megrahi’s Dr Morag Kerr, to be shown on Sunday 15 December and then on Monday 16, Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 [The showings of this documentary have now been postponed.];

BBC’s Living with Lockerbie, to be shown on BBC One Scotland on Monday 16 December at 22.35, then on the BBC News Channel at various times on 21, 22 and 27 December;

STV’s The Lockerbie Bombing, to be shown on STV on Tuesday 17 December at 21.30 and on other ITV channels at 23.00 and on the US Smithsonian Channel on 21 December at 20.00 Eastern Time and Pacific Time.

Aljazeera's "Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber"

The first of Aljazeera’s three Lockerbie documentaries Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber (which has been previously broadcast) can be viewed on the Aljazeera English TV channel tonight at 20.00hrs GMT.  It is also to be shown during the coming week on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at various times. The second, Lockerbie: Case Closed, (also previously broadcast) is to be shown on Sunday, 8 December and the following days. The third programme, If Not Megrahi, Then Who? (which is completely new) will be shown on Sunday, 15 December and the following days.

Aljazeera's Lockerbie inaccuracy

[An item on the Aljazeera website accompanying a programme entitled Flight 1103 and subtitled “Is there a connection between Libya's worst-ever aviation disaster and the Lockerbie bombing?” contains the following:]

On December 22, 1992, Libya witnessed the worst aviation disaster in its history when, six minutes before landing, Flight 1103 from Benghazi to Tripoli plummeted 1,000 metres in just 13 seconds. All 157 people aboard were killed.

It was exactly four years and one day after the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland.

But while a Libyan national was convicted for the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people, and Muammar Gaddafi, the country's then leader, eventually conceded Libya's responsibility for the crime, the two disasters, officially at least, appeared to have little in common.

One was regarded as a state-sponsored act of terrorism; the other as an accident attributed by the Libyan government to a mechanical fault.

[Aljazeera really should know better, particularly in the light of its own films Lockerbie: The Pan Am bomber and Lockerbie: Case closed. It simply is not the case that Colonel Gaddafi “eventually conceded Libya's responsibility for the crime”. Libya accepted “responsibility for the actions of its officials”.  The full text of the relevant document can be read here.]

Awards for Lockerbie-related productions

The Aljazeera English documentary Lockerbie: Case closed has won a silver world medal in the Best Investigative Report category at the 2013 New York Festivals: World’s Best TV & Films. The documentary can be viewed here on You Tube.

Tryst Theatre’s production of Kenneth N Ross’s play The Lockerbie Bomber at the Hertford Theatre Week 2013 won both the Ted Harden Rose Bowl as runner-up in the adjudication and also the Freston Salver awarded by audience votes for the play they had enjoyed the most.  The play has a two-week run on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August and there is to be a performance in Malta in November.

Libyan Prime Minister on status of Lockerbie case

[I am most grateful to Mohamed Eljarh who has supplied this account of Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan’s remarks about the Lockerbie case at a press conference on 17 March:]

The Prime Minister made only very brief remarks when he was asked about the re-opening of the Lockerbie case and the fact that Scottish police and Scotland Yard are set to continue investigations in Libya.  The Prime Minister said the following:

- Libya is very committed and interested in knowing exactly what happened. We'll collaborate fully with any investigation that would help determine the truth of what happened and who was really behind the Lockerbie bombing.

- Libya made it clear that the country would never pay any more compensations or damages to victims or countries with regard to the Lockerbie case.

The Prime Minister was asked if the investigations proved Libya to not be responsible, especially after new evidence that has emerged, would Libya ask for compensation for suffering at the hands of the international community and especially the UK and the US?  He was very diplomatic in giving his answer and said: If the investigations conclude that Libya wasn't responsible and we were wrongfully convicted, we will deal with that situation there and then.

[An Aljazeera English Inside Story programme on Lockerbie in which Mohamed Eljarh took part can be viewed here.]

David Miliband on Megrahi

"Al-Megrahi was the man behind the bombing," and "Al-Megrahi's release [in the Lockerbie bombing case] was obviously wrong," says former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband in an interview on Aljazeera English.

Mr Miliband has clearly not read John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury or Dr Morag Kerr’s Lockerbie: Fact and Fiction or watched Aljazeera’s documentary Lockerbie: Case Closed.

Until now David Miliband’s best-known contribution to the Lockerbie case was his signing of a public interest immunity (PII) certificate in the context of Abdelbaset Megrahi’s second appeal in an attempt to prevent disclosure of a document (relating to timers) that had been in the hands of the Crown since 1996 (before the Lockerbie trial) but which was never divulged to the defence (as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission believes it should have been). His conduct in this matter was the subject of an editorial in the Sunday Herald headlined Miliband has made Lockerbie appeal a mockery of justice.

Lockerbie: Case Closed – Injustice Served

This is the headline over a review of the Aljazeera documentary Lockerbie: Case Closed on the Top Documentary Stream website. The documentary can be viewed online on the same web page.  Here are a few sentences from the review:

“The documentary is focused around a report issued by the SCCRC relating to the inquiry of the Lockerbie bombing. As the documentary proves from both eye witness accounts, from officially written police statements and from scientific evidence, it becomes quite evident that Al-Megrahi was not the perpetrator in the Lockerbie case. The documentary explains how Tony Gauci changed his statements almost 3 times over the course of the investigation, it also shows how the initial artistic impression of the perpetrator of the Lockerbie disaster bore absolutely no resemblance to Al-Megrahi and the documentary also shows how scientifically it is proven that the alloy used to create the circuitry of the timer used in the terrorist attack was different from the one’s supplied to Libyan Intelligence and the one thought to have been used by Al-Megrahi in the attack.

“The documentary almost completely seals the case and proves that Al-Megrahi was innocent; it also however brings to light that injustice was indeed carried out but the most devastating part is that even when it was discovered it was kept hidden from the general public.”

US channel broadcasts Aljazeera Lockerbie film

Aljazeera's 2011 documentary Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber? is being broadcast this week by Cambridge, Massachusetts, television station Cambridge Community Television (channel 8). The next showing is on Tuesday 10 July at 1pm EDT (5 hours behind BST).  Please note that this is not the latest February 2012 Aljazeera documentary Lockerbie: Case Closed.

Megrahi doubts

[Two of the letters that appear in The Scotsman today under this heading read as follows:]

Bearing in mind Tony Gauci’s insistence that the man who purchased clothing in his shop was about 50 years old, over 6ft tall, heavily built and dark-skinned (Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was 36, 5ft 8in tall, of medium build and light-skinned), Clive Fairweather’s doubts over his identification of Megrahi (your report, 21 May) are well founded.

The “evidence” linking Megrahi to the bombing was sparse, none of it stands up to close scrutiny and without Gauci’s testimony there would surely be no case to answer.

I find it incomprehensible that anyone who has studied the Lockerbie case in any detail can swallow the guilty verdict.

Robert Woodcock

Bob MacDougall (Letters, 22 May) refers to Mr Megrahi getting a hero’s welcome on his return to Libya.

My impression was that it was mainly a family welcome, with little state participation apart from the presence of Colonel Gaddafi’s son. Clans and extended families seem less important now in Scotland than they once were, but remain significant in Libya. Mention is made of Saltire flags at that welcome but not of how they got there. There was a suggestion at the time that they were provided by the British Embassy.

We may never know the truth of that, or the motive if true. There is much which we may never know about this case, but we may hope that Mr Megrahi’s appeal may be re-opened, for the sake of his family and friends but also for the sake of the reputation of Scotland’s legal system.

David Stevenson


[Interesting commentaries following the death of Megrahi are to be found on the Business Insider website (Burying the “Lockerbie bomber”—and the truth) and on the Aljazeera website (Megrahi's death - An end to a century of mistrust?)]

Aljazeera's "Lockerbie: Case closed"

The final broadcast of this documentary is on Aljazeera English tomorrow (Thursday, 1 March) at 0600 GMT. However, it can now also be seen here on You Tube.

Lockerbie: Case closed

[The description of the Lockerbie: Case closed documentary on the Aljazeera website reads as follows:]

Wednesday, December 21, 1988 was the longest night of the year, the night of the winter solstice. At 6.30pm that evening Pan Am Flight 103 took off from London Heathrow airport en route to JFK New York. On board Clipper Maid of the Skies, as it was called, were 16 crew members and 243 passengers, many of whom were carrying Christmas gifts in their luggage for family and friends.

But also in the baggage hold was a brown Samsonite suitcase, packed with new clothes and a Toshiba radio cassette player. Investigators later determined that hidden in the Toshiba were some 450 grammes of high explosive and an electronic timer. At 7.03pm as the plane was 31,000 feet over Scotland, the device exploded. A little under a minute later, 200,000 pounds of Kerosene ignited as the wings and part of the fuselage fell onto the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. All on board were killed, so too were 11 residents of Lockerbie - 270 innocent people murdered by a terrorist bomb.

Twenty-three years later, the scene changes to a small house on the outskirts of Tripoli in Libya, where the only man found guilty of causing those events lies helpless in bed. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, whom the world knows as the Lockerbie bomber, is dying of prostate cancer. For the first, last and only time he is about to give a television interview about his case - and he is to tell Al Jazeera that new evidence will prove that he was wrongly convicted. 

The Lockerbie disaster was Europe's worst terrorist outrage - more civilians died than in any other attack before 9/11. It has also become the most infamous. The events of that night, the painstaking police forensic investigation that followed, the identification of al-Megrahi and Libya as the likely culprits, his eventual trial and conviction in Holland, the overwhelming sense of relief that justice had been done felt by many relatives of the victims, and the controversy surrounding his subsequent return to Libya on compassionate grounds - all of these things have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the years.

As has been the growing concern, felt by some, that al-Megrahi may have been wrongly accused. 

This film, Lockerbie: Case Closed, will give hope to all those who believe that the Libyan is an innocent man and not the mass murderer that the prosecution claimed at his trial.

It reveals the hitherto secret assessment of the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC) - a quasi-public body in Scotland that is independent from the courts and the government - which has examined the case against al-Megrahi in detail. Its report, which has never been published, raises numerous reasons for concern about a possible miscarriage of justice - especially the status of the testimony given by one Tony Gauci, a Maltese shop owner and the prosecution's main witness. He identified al-Megrahi as a man who had bought clothing and an umbrella from him on December 7, 1988 - remnants of which were later recovered from among debris from the disaster scene and which, according to investigators, had been in the same suitcase as the bomb.

As the film shows, the SCCRC found a number of reasons to seriously question this identification and Gauci's account about events on December 7 - the only date that al-Megrahi could have been in Malta to make such purchases. The report also raises concerns about the legitimacy of the formal identification process, in which Gauci picked al-Megrahi out from a line-up. The commission found that Gauci had seen al-Megrahi's photo in a magazine article identifying him as a possible suspect before the parade took place. The SCCRC also found that Scottish police knew that Gauci was interested in financial rewards, despite maintaining that Gauci had shown no such interest. Gauci reportedly picked up a $2m US government reward for his role in the case. Under Scottish law, witnesses cannot be paid for their testimony.

Prior to his return home, al-Megrahi had been seeking an appeal against his conviction. Had that hearing ever taken place then the SCCRC's conclusions and their evidence would have come to light. 

On that basis alone, the Libyan would have almost certainly walked from court a free man. However, the film also reveals the results of new scientific tests that comprehensively undermine the validity of the most crucial piece of forensic evidence linking the bombing to Libya - a fragment of electronic timer found embedded in the shredded remains of a shirt that was supposedly bought from Gauci's shop by al-Megrahi. The timer, said the prosecution, was identical to ones sold to Libyan intelligence by Swiss manufacturers. But as the new tests show, it was not identical and it now seems that British government scientists knew this all along.

John Ashton, who has been investigating the case for nearly 20 years, including time spent as part of al-Megrahi's defence team, has written a book on the affair with al-Megrahi. In the Al Jazeera film he says: "The Lockerbie disaster was Europe's worst terrorist attack. More Americans died in that attack than in any other terrorist event before 9/11. It's also Britain's worst miscarriage of justice, the wrong man was convicted and the real killers are still out there."

Lockerbie: Case Closed was produced and directed by William Cran and Christopher Jeans and is a Network Features production for Al Jazeera. It is narrated by Sean Barrett.

[The Sydney Morning Herald today publishes a report headlined Lockerbie evidence is in doubt; and on the website of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism there appears a long article entitled Lockerbie: was Megrahi innocent?]