A commentary on the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the Pan Am 103 disaster.
Sunday 28 December 2014
Questioning the probity of the Megrahi verdict
Tuesday 11 April 2023
The Lockerbie bombing - the ultimate qisas barbarism
[What follows is excerpted from an article by barrister David Wolchover headlined The obscene rationale of random retaliation published today on the Jewish News website:]
Last week mainstream lovers of Israel doubtless watched in horror as crazed Israeli police were televised beating Palestinians with batons as they lay on the ground outside the Al Aqsa mosque.
No “context” of security considerations could conceivably excuse such brutality, which sadly brought to mind similar footage of so-called “police” attacking demonstrators in that host of countries ruled over by oppressive regimes. The inflammatory effect it will have worked on the latest generation of Palestinian Arabs already poisoned by decades of the big naqba lie is not hard to imagine.
Yet as sickening as it was to observe the mishtara in action, it pales into insignificance compared with the random ambushing and murder of Anglo-Israeli sisters Rina and Maia Dee and their mother, who subsequently succumbed to her injuries.
It has been reported that Hamas “praised” the attack (and the Tel Aviv car attack) as “retaliation” for the Al Aqsa raids. If accurately reported it is noteworthy that Hamas did not cite Israel’s air attacks on Gaza as legitimating the Dee killings.
Presumably the air raids were accepted by Hamas as a response to the rockets launched from Gaza and Lebanon. Those followed the Al Aqsa raids and since the vast majority were neutralised by the Iron Dome shield, it may be deduced that the Dee murders and the Tel Aviv incident were deemed sanctionable as replacement retaliation.
Even according to the Islamic fundamentalist interpretation of Lex Talionis – the principle of tit-for-tat – the murders were of course utterly disproportionate. No one knows what might have been in the mind of the killer or killers but what is significant is that Hamas, as the official embodiment of would-be genocide, sought by praising them to draw an equivalence between non-fatal beating and homicide.
The episode demonstrates once again the haphazard and muddled rationale behind Islamic Fundamentalism, rooted as it is in the quasi-theocratic doctrine of qisas, the sacred duty to exact revenge in like measure. (...)
But qisas does not require vengeance to be directed personally at the supposedly deserving criminal. If you can’t kill that individual, any old soft target will do, provided they are loosely associated with the original perpetrator. It could be regimental colleagues, family members or friends, fellow citizens or members of the same community.
It might even stretch to people only tenuously connected. The ultimate barbarism here is the Lockerbie bombing. On July 4, 1988, an IranAir jet carrying 290 passengers and crew was shot down by the Vincennes, an American guided-missile cruiser patrolling in the Gulf of Iran, with the loss of all on board.
The Vincennes was engaged at the time in a skirmish with Iranian fast patrol boats and the relevant crew members incompetently mistook the jetliner for an Iranian F-14A Tomcat heading in to attack the ship. Yet no timely apology or offer of compensation was forthcoming; instead the Reagan administration’s lame attempts to excuse the disaster only added salt to the wound.
Incensed, Iran embarked on qisas by collaborating with a Palestinian terrorist faction in the detonating of a bomb on PanAm 103 over Lockerbie the following December 21 with the not quite equivalent loss of 270 lives on board.
Quite apart from the fact that the victims were presumptively innocent it mattered not to the Iranian government that among the passengers a great many were not even American citizens and the 11 killed by falling debris were Lockerbie residents.
Friday 21 December 2012
Pro-Megrahi backers flayed by new Lord Advocate
Scotland’s Lord Advocate has launched a powerful and stinging attack against “conspiracy theorists” who claim that the Lockerbie bomber was wrongly convicted.
In the most detailed rebuttal yet made to the case mounted by campaigners who argue that Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was innocent and that Libya was not involved in the terrorist bomb plot that brought Pan Am 103 down over Lockerbie 24 years ago today, Frank Mulholland, QC, calls the allegations “without foundation”.
He goes on to accuse those making them of uttering “defamatory” comments against High Court judges who are unable to respond. [RB: Justice for Megrahi has made no defamatory comments against any High Court judge. It is not defamatory of the Zeist judges to say that they were wrong in finding Megrahi guilty. Lawyers all the time say that judges got things wrong (and almost every time an appeal is allowed, other judges say so too). And in the Lockerbie case even the SCCRC concluded that, on an absolutely crucial point, no reasonable court could have reached the conclusion that the Zeist judges reached. JFM in its recent allegations of criminality was very careful not to say that then Lord Advocate (and now High Court judge) Colin Boyd had attempted to pervert the course of justice.]
Mr Mulholland, who has relaunched an investigation into what he calls an act of “state-sponsored terrorism” by the former Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi, says that he has been through all the evidence and is convinced that al-Megrahi’s conviction was “safe”.
An outside counsel invited by the Lord Advocate to conduct an independent review of the evidence has also concluded that the conviction was sound. [RB: It would be interesting to know the identity of this outside counsel. Here, by contrast, is a short list of eminent lawyers who have concluded that the conviction was not sound: Benedict Birnberg, Gareth Peirce, Michael Mansfield QC, David Wolchover, Len Murray, Ian Hamilton QC, Jock Thomson QC, John Scott QC. There are many more.]
“I am hugely frustrated that there is an unfounded attack on the integrity of the judges involved in the process,” Mr Mulholland said. “I saw a report on the BBC that [claimed] a high court judge — Colin Boyd, Lord Advocate at the time — perverted the course of justice. And it frustrates me that they’re not in a position to answer these allegations, these can be made without being challenged and without any real foundation.” [RB: At least Mr Mulholland does not here make the error of accusing JFM of responsibility for the BBC’s egregious misinterpretation of the English language.]
He compared the allegations to the uncontrolled media attempts to blacken the name of Lord MacAlpine, the former Conservative Party treasurer, over child abuse.
“I deplore any of that,” he said. “The appropriate place for voicing any concerns about the evidence is before a court of law, not in the court of public opinion, or the media. I haven’t spoken to the people who are affected by this, but I would imagine that they are frustrated that their reputations can be so easily attacked, and they can’t do anything about it.”
Mr Mulholland, who has been to Libya to make contact with the new regime, is hopeful that permission will be given soon to send Scottish police officials to Tripoli to gather evidence that would not only buttress the case against al-Megrahi, but reopen the wider plot to down the US airliner.
He believes that a criminal investigation rather than a public inquiry is the best way to resolve the 1988 Lockerbie case.
“I take the view that the calls for a public inquiry are essentially to set up a vehicle which would be a surrogate criminal court, he said. “I believe that the guilt or innocence of al-Megrahi is entirely a matter for the courts.”
He issued a challenge to the al-Megrahi apologists: “If you don’t like the set-up of the justice system, then what you do is you change it, through the democratic vehicle of parliament. You change the law.”
Mr Mulholland says he has studied all the claims advanced in the book Megrahi: You are my Jury by the writer John Ashton, and finds no evidence to support them. He urged those arguing that al-Megrahi was innocent to put any additional evidence to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.
“Mr Megrahi stood trial before a Scottish court and was convicted by three judges unanimously, then an appeal, where five judges unanimously upheld the conviction, hearing additional evidence about the Heathrow break-in [the claim that the bomb went aboard there],” he said. “Having heard all the arguments presented to them, they upheld the conviction. Part of our justice system is the [commission] for which I have the highest regard. Anyone who is concerned about a conviction can make an application to the commission.”
He added: “The commission had access to all the Crown’s papers, and they took the view that in relation to a very limited number of grounds, the case should be referred back to the appeal court, which they did. The defence were entitled to expand the appeal beyond the grounds of referral, and they included a number of grounds which had been rejected by the commission, and the court was in the process of hearing that appeal when al-Megrahi abandoned his appeal.
“Now, whatever you think, and everyone is entitled to their view as to whether he is guilty or not, the courts took the view that following a trial and an appeal and a subsequent appeal, which was abandoned, al-Megrahi’s conviction still stands and that is the application of the rule of law.”
Mr Mulholland believes the evidence shows that the previous Libyan regime under Colonel Gaddafi was involved in “an act of state-sponsored terrorism”.
He is working with the FBI, the US Attorney-General and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to pursue investigations. “We are applying the rule of law,” he said. “If you follow the evidence, it leads to Libya.”
Tuesday 7 January 2020
Has President Rouhani acknowledged Iran's responsibility for Lockerbie?
Donald Trump has been warned to expect another Lockerbie by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, as Iran continued to mourn the death of its top military leader Qassem Soleimani.
Mr Rouhani responded to the US President’s threat to strike 52 Iranian sites, by posting a cryptic tweet in which he told America to never threaten Iran and to “remember the number 290”. He wrote: “Those who refer to the number 52 should also remember the number 290.#IR655. Never threaten the Iranian nation.”
The figure 290 refers to the total number of passengers on Iranian Airways flight IR655 who died when their plane was accidentally shot down over the Persian Gulf by the US Navy in July 1988.
In December of the same year, Pan Am flight 103 crashed in Lockerbie after a bomb exploded on board, killing all 270 passengers.
Although Colonel Gaddafi and Libya were blamed for the terrorist attack, Western intelligence agencies believed that Iran ordered the bombing in retaliation for the downing of its plane in July.
Mr Rouhani’s post has been interpreted by some Middle East experts as a veiled reference to the Lockerbie tragedy and an implicit acknowledgement of their involvement in the affair.
Fatima Alasrar, a Middle East analyst from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, linked Rouhani's tweet with the Lockerbie disaster.
She wrote: “Rouhani is basically reminding @realDonaldTrump of the #Iranian Air Flight 655 carrying 290 passengers which was downed by a US navy warship the Vincennes in 1988.
“Though it was deemed a human error, Tehran worked covertly to exact its revenge. How? #Lockerbie.”
She added: 'Boeing 747 airline Pan Am exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 and was assumed to be an operation conducted by the Libyans when it was #Iran who orchestrated the downing of the plane and paid the Libyans to do it.
“After years of denying, Rouhani just admitted to it!”
[RB: A longer article along the same lines appears today in the Daily Mail. In February 2016 barrister David Wolchover wrote an article setting out the evidence for Iran and Rouhani's responsibility for Lockerbie.]
Thursday 21 November 2013
Some pertinent questions for the Scottish Government
- How many officers of the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary or any other Scottish police force or department are there currently assigned to work on the case and how many are actually working on it?
- Of what rank and speciality are they?
- Whether the officers are working on it full-time or in addition to other duties?
- What budget has been set aside for the investigation?
- What has been the expenditure on foreign travel in connection with their inquiries, or telephone calls over the last 12 months?
- Has there been any material progress in uncovering substantive new evidence?
- If there has been no recent relevant evidence uncovered, why are there officers still assigned to, and more importantly working on, the case?
- What is the current Crown Office budget vis a vis Lockerbie inquiries?
Monday 16 April 2012
"I accuse..."
[I am grateful to Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer, author of the encyclopaedic 174-part Lockerbie series Diary of a Vengeance Foretold, for drawing my attention to an article entitled The Dreyfus Affair: Enduring CI Lessons published in the March 2011 issue (vol 55, no 1) of the journal Studies in Intelligence.]
Friday 19 February 2016
Time to come clean on Rouhani and Lockerbie
Friday 14 April 2017
A completely circular argument
Masking justice with “mercy”
Friday 21 December 2012
Twenty-four years on: why Lockerbie does not simply go away
1. From me: Lockerbie: A satisfactory process but a flawed result and The fairy story of the Crown's independence
2. From Dr Morag Kerr: Lockerbie: Fact and Fiction
3. From Gareth Peirce: The framing of al-Megrahi
4. From David Wolchover: Exploding Lockerbie -- Part 1 and Part 2, and A postscript on Lockerbie
5. From James Robertson: The Lockerbie affair and Scottish society
Wednesday 16 April 2014
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
With the substitution of Megrahi for Dreyfus, Scotland for France, and the office of First Minister for that of President of the French Republic, every word can with equal justice be addressed to Alex Salmond. The magnitude of the Scottish miscarriage of justice and the flaws in the investigation, prosecution and adjudication that led to it have been exposed in the SCCRC’s Statement of Reasons published by The Herald; in John Ashton’s book Megrahi: You are my Jury; in David Wolchover’s monograph Culprits of Lockerbie; and in Dr M G Kerr’s article An overview of the Lockerbie case. There is now no shred of justification for continuing to maintain that all is for the best in the best of all criminal justice systems or -- the coward’s fallback position -- that, while there may have been a few technical, procedural defects in his trial and conviction, Megrahi was clearly guilty anyway, so what does it matter?
Zola’s letter was headed “J’accuse”. Although the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and conviction occurred under UK Conservative and Labour administrations, it is Mr Salmond and the Scottish Government that today have the power to put right the disgraceful miscarriage of justice that occurred on the watch of two of their political opponents; and it is accordingly the Scottish SNP Government that today stands accused. The only honourable course of action open to that government is to institute an independent inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 into the performance of the Scottish criminal justice system in the Megrahi case, as a matter which has caused grave public concern.
[I have today completed a significant Lockerbie-related piece of writing. The details cannot at present be disclosed, but I hope that it may lead to a major development in the quest to rectify the miscarriage of justice suffered by the late Abdelbaset Megrahi.]
*I am grateful to sfm for pointing out that the article does still appear on The Firm's website.