Magnus at it again

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Magnus Linklater headlined A chance to challenge Lockerbie conspiracy theories published in today's edition of The Times:]

Suspect’s extradition to the US represents a pivotal moment in a case that has long been dogged by doubt

For those who have followed the tortuous Lockerbie trail, this is a key moment, the first chance to test not just Masud’s involvement but to challenge the long list of conspiracy theories that have dogged the case since the outset. It is almost conventional wisdom to argue that the one man convicted of the bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was innocent; that Libya had nothing to do with the attack and that agencies on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to fix the evidence so as to shift blame away from the most likely perpetrators, a Palestinian terrorist group sponsored by Iran.

Many thousands of words have been devoted to sustaining a sequence of events that has US intelligence agents planting or altering a bomb fragment to implicate Libya, then coaching a Maltese witness into identifying Megrahi as the man who came into his shop in December 1988 to buy clothing later used to wrap the bomb. So dodgy was the witness and so conflicting his evidence, say Megrahi’s defenders, that the charge against him is unsustainable and the Scottish judges and lawyers who convicted him are guilty of a miscarriage of justice.

As with all conspiracy theories, this one requires a massive suspension of disbelief. Not just the falsifying of evidence, or the manipulation of a witness, but the number of people who would have to know about it yet have remained silent — intelligence agents and detectives on both sides of the Atlantic, Scottish lawyers and judges, bomb specialists and other technicians — a rogue’s gallery of experts, all subscribing to a lie.

There is one fact, however, that no conspiracy theory can quite explain. Present in Malta the day when, prosecutors say, the bomb was loaded on to a connecting flight from Luqa airport, was not only the Libyan intelligence officer Megrahi, but a shadowy figure who, like Megrahi, left the island later that day to return to Libya.

A long and detailed investigation to find out who was behind the attack was embarked upon by Ken Dornstein, an American film-maker whose brother died on Pan Am 103. His inquiries began with a bomb exploding in a Berlin nightclub in 1986, killing two US servicemen. Dornstein succeeded in identifying the man who made the bomb and was sent a picture from Libya that confirmed it. That man was Masud. His presence in Malta with Megrahi is confirmed by passport records. Later he appears as a blurred figure behind bars in a Libyan court, facing charges on a separate bombing offence. He is seen again, in the back of a car, among the welcoming party when Megrahi returns to Libya after release from a Scottish jail in 2009.

Those who claim Megrahi was wrongly convicted have a lot of explaining to do. Why, if he was innocent, was he in Malta with a known bomb-maker? And how did all those clever US agents manage to ensure the men they would later frame were in the right place at the right time? I am sure the conspiracy theorists will come up with an answer. It had better be good.

[Magnus Linklater has a long history of branding as conspiracy theorists those of us who remain unconvinced of the legal justification for the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The manifold replies to this repeated Linklater slur can be found here. His silence in response to challenges to answer the points raised in them is eloquent. Examples of such rebuttals by John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr are to be found in Lockerbie and the claims of Magnus Linklater.]

Areas of criminality in the Lockerbie disaster

[I am indebted to the Rev'd John Mosey for allowing me to post these reflections prompted by the thirty-third anniversary of the death of his daughter in the Lockerbie tragedy:]

Having just passed the thirty third anniversary of the murder of our nineteen year old daughter, Helga, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky by a terrorist bomb, I cannot but help consider the complex and muddy pond of events which have dominated such a large portion of our lives.

Along with Dr Jim Swire, I was the only victim’s relative who attended the whole of the trial and both of the appeals. I also attended numerous debates at the Scottish parliament and was partly responsible for presenting the case to the SCCRC. Looking back, it seems clear to me that three serious crimes were committed and possibly several subsidiary criminal acts. The only one that has been dealt with is the making and planting of the bomb which destroyed PA 103 with 270 people on board for which the Libyan, Megrahi, was charged and found, wrongly in the opinion of many, guilty.

As I sat in that court in Holland it became quite clear that two other equally, if not morally worse, serious crimes had been committed for which the perpetrators had not been arraigned. Subsequent revelations and discoveries have massively strengthened that opinion.

The first of the two became clear very early on. Our UK government and the agencies which are set up for the protection of the people had a huge amount of information telling them clearly that this attack was going to happen in the very near future. This included phone calls, intelligence, information from the German government and police (including a photograph). However, they did neither of the two things which they were obliged to do. They made no serious attempt to prevent it or to warn the people (except, perhaps, Pik Botha’s South African delegation?). This amounted to either gross negligence or evil complicity and, certainly, a dereliction of duty. In my opinion they are just as guilty of my daughter’s murder as the bombers; and they were supposed to be on my side!

The second involves the same body, our UK government. By their and the US government’s interference in the availability of evidence in the trial and the appeals they became, in my untutored opinion, guilty of perverting the course of justice. Again, this crime showed itself during the trial but has been more clearly defined by subsequent events. Important documents which could have thrown enormous light on the case were withheld; important information was redacted and the appeals were so set up that they were banned from considering vital new evidence because it had not been led in the trial: the break-in at Heathrow on the night before, the make-up of the timer fragment, the possible bribery of witnesses for example. For this huge crime no-one has been charged.

All of this furtiveness and secrecy clearly indicates that these people have something very dodgy that they wish to hide. This world’s courts may yield to their influences but there is coming a higher court and the truth will be out.

Summary  There are a number of aspects of the “Lockerbie Disaster” which could be regarded as containing, at the very least, morally criminal elements which ought to be looked into.

1. - The “who, how and why’s” of the placing of the bomb on the aircraft.

2. - The total lack of serious security provided by Pan Am.

3. - The failure of the political and intelligence people to heed the many warnings and protect the public. Either gross negligence or complicity.

4. - The decisions to warn some but not others. (South African delegation?)

5. - The switching of blame from Iran/PFLP-GC to Libya.

6. - The constant refusal by the political and legal people to allow any transparency and to manipulate the Scottish legal system to attain this end sometimes by banning certain documents and other evidence.

PT/35(b) — The most expensive forgery in history [Lockerbie]

This is the headline over a long article published yesterday on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s website Intel Today. It sets out Dr De Braeckeleer’s conclusions about the dodgy timer fragment and the evidence on which these conclusions are based. This is an important article which should be read by anyone with a serious interest in this aspect of the Lockerbie case.

Discovery of circuit board fragment PT35B

It was (apparently) on this date in 1989 that Dr Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) discovered amongst Lockerbie debris a fragment of circuit board embedded in a shirt collar. This became PT35(b) -- the notorious dodgy timer fragment. The story of the discovery and how it was recorded is narrated an article headed Page 51 and its Environs on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide. The dialogue between Caustic Logic and Rolfe in the comments following the blogpost is also a mine of information. Another useful source of enlightenment is Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website.

Discovery of dodgy timer fragment

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in 2007 by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer:]

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."

The dodgy timer fragment

22 June 1989:

“In his affidavit Mr [Ulrich] Lumpert implicitly admits having committed perjury as witness No. 550 before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. He states (para 2) that he has stolen a handmade (by him) sample of an ‘MST-13 Timer PC-board’ from MEBO company in Zurich and handed it over, on 22 June 1989, to an ‘official person investigating the Lockerbie case.’ He further states (in para 5) that the fragment of the MST-13 timer, cut into two pieces for ‘supposedly forensic reasons,’ which was presented in Court as vital part of evidence, stemmed from the piece which he had stolen and handed over to an investigator in 1989.”

From The Lumpert Affidavit, posted on this blog on 29 August 2007.

22 June 1990:

“When interviewed for a Dutch TV documentary in 2009 [Richard Marquise] insisted that PT35b had never been taken to the US. This claim was echoed by the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, and by [Scottish Senior Investigating Officer Stuart] Henderson. Henderson then amended his position, saying that the fragment had never been in ‘the control’ of the US investigators. He had chosen his words carefully, because the truth, as he must have known, was that PT35b was taken to the FBI forensic lab in Washington DC on 22 June 1990, in order to compare it with the MST-13 timer held by the FBI’s Tom Thurman; indeed, Henderson was one of the officers who took it there. It was strange that this fact could have slipped the minds of both the head of the FBI investigation and the chief prosecutor responsible for the Lockerbie indictments.

“The Washington visit was crucial, as it enabled Allen Feraday and the Scottish police to confirm that PT35b matched the MST-13 timer…”

From John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, pp 165,66.

Further details can be found on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website, particularly The Chronology of PT/35(b): 22 June 1990.

Trade deal link to Lockerbie bomber release

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The Sunday Times. It reads in part:]

The politician who freed the Lockerbie bomber today reveals the full story of how the Westminster government made him eligible for return to Libya, including the role of trade deals potentially worth £13bn to British companies.

In a dramatic new book, serialised exclusively in The Sunday Times, former justice minister Kenny MacAskill also admits his decision to free one of the world’s most notorious terrorists was partly motivated by a fear of violent reprisals against Scots if the killer died in Scottish custody.

His account divulges:

•Ministers refused to travel with MacAskill amid threats to his life;

•The SNP sought concessions from Westminster in exchange for Megrahi’s possible return;

•His view on who was really responsible for Britain’s worst terrorist attack.

MacAskill claims the UK government made Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi eligible for return to his Libyan home under a “trade for terrorist plan” to try to secure a massive oil and gas deal for BP which was in doubt. He says Jack Straw, then UK justice secretary, shared the details in a “highly confidential” telephone call which casts new light on a controversy that has dogged Tony Blair since his 2007 “deal in the desert” with the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

That deal was to give British industry access to Libyan oil reserves worth up to £13bn and £350m of defence contracts as the former rogue state was rehabilitated, and involved a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) allowing offenders to be moved between the countries.

Six months after that desert summit, MacAskill claims Straw warned him Gadaffi was threatening to cancel the energy contact and award it to a US firm unless Megrahi was covered by the PTA, after learning the new SNP regime was trying to exempt him.

Sensing that the British government, which had previously been prepared to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, was going to give in to Libya’s demands, MacAskill reveals that he and Salmond then tried to extract concessions in exchange for the agreement.

Although the Scottish government denied this five years ago, MacAskill says the concessions sought were changes to the law to give Holyrood power to regulate firearms and to curb lawsuits from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had been forced to use slop-out buckets in their cells instead of toilets.

Straw rejected MacAskill’s claims as a “highly embroidered version of what happened” while Salmond said his administration “played the whole thing with a straight bat from start to finish”. (...)

Within weeks of the UK government agreeing not to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, Gadaffi ratified the BP deal with Libya’s national oil corporation.

Negotiations for Megrahi’s return were interrupted after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and the Scottish government opted to free him on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in Libya three years later.

A spokesman for BP said the company had no comment on the UK government’s actions or discussions.

In The Lockerbie Bombing, to be published on May 26, MacAskill reveals he feared the potential for a violent backlash in the Arab or wider Muslim world if Megrahi had been allowed to die while in Scottish custody.

Just a few weeks before MacAskill’s announcement to free him, UK hostages taken prisoner in Iraq had been murdered, which followed the execution of other Western nationals captured in the area.

He writes: “There was hostility to the West and ordinary citizens were becoming targets. Most in North Africa or the wider Arab world neither knew of Scotland nor cared about it. I was aware of the deaths of prison officers that had occurred in Northern Ireland where some had died through terrorist attack.

“The last thing I wanted was to have Scotland become a place that was demonised and its citizens targeted. I would not allow Scottish oil workers or others, wherever they might be, to face retribution as a consequence of my decision.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, MacAskill, whose own safety was thought to be at risk as he considered whether to free Megrahi, added: “I think, looking at events in Brussels and Paris, I stand by that. We would have kept him in if we had decided that was necessary but he would never have been allowed to die here.”

In a book extract in this newspaper today, the former minister argues that a coalition involving Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestinian terrorists were behind the Lockerbie bombing, in revenge for the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US naval ship in July 1988.

[RB: In the extract published in The Sunday Times today, Mr MacAskill cites three reasons for his belief in Libyan (and Abdelbaset Megrahi’s) involvement in the atrocity. They are (1) an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003; (2) Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s statement reported in the Swedish newspaper Expressen; and (3) Scottish investigators’ and prosecutors’ belief in the accuracy of the information disclosed in Ken Dornstein’s recent films. It is interesting, however, that Mr MacAskill explicitly states "Clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved." If the Zeist court had not made the finding-in-fact that Megrahi purchased the clothes, it would not, and could not, have convicted him.

As regards (1): There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to, as is clear from the “quote” from Col Gaddafi that he provides, is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran. De Borchgrave’s account of this conversation can be read on this blog here. My comment at the time was as follows:

“On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.”

As regards (2): An account of the statement by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil can be read here. Evidence that he promised to supply never materialised. The best he could come up with was the assertion that the Gaddafi regime paid Megrahi’s legal expenses -- something that had never been hidden or denied. A response to Abdel-Jalil by John Ashton can be read here. Blistering commentaries by the late Ian Bell can be read here and here.

As regards (3): A lengthy response by John Ashton to the disclosures in the Dornstein films can be read here. Another long and detailed commentary by Dr Kevin Bannon can be read here. Dr Neil Berry makes critical comments on the films here.

Nowhere in The Sunday Times coverage is there mention of (a) the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s findings that, on six grounds, the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of Justice; (b) the evidence disclosed in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury and, in particular, the metallurgical discrepancy between the dodgy circuit board fragment PT35b and circuit boards used in the MST-13 timers supplied to Libya; and (c) the evidence supplied in Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived. Perhaps these issues are dealt with elsewhere in Mr MacAskill’s book. But I won’t be holding my breath.

The discovery of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[It was on this date in 1989 that the fragment of circuit board that was used to link the Lockerbie bomb to a MST-13 timer and hence to Libya was discovered among material that had been collected in January. Here is what Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer says on his PT35B website:]

Fragment of circuit board is found in PI/995 by Dr Hayes on 12 May 89, according to page 51 of Dr Hayes notes. The police production logs for PT/35 record it as having been found by Dr Hayes at RARDE on 12 May 1989. In his evidence (p2608) Hayes said he had no memory of finding the timer fragment independent of his notes. In his chapter 8 Crown precognition (“CP”), Hayes said his recollection was that he worked alone when carrying out examination of debris, but that he occasionally called Allen Feraday in when something of interest was found. Feraday in his chapter 8 CP referred to the discovery of PT/35 and PT/2 and said that he remembered when this was done. He stated that although Hayes was carrying out the examination, he thought Hayes invited him in to see the pieces embedded in PI/995 before Hayes removed them. He stated that Hayes knew he would be interested in what Hayes found, and he therefore remembered that PT/2 and PT/35 were extracted from PI/995. In his chapter 10 CP Feraday does not specifically mention his memory of PT/35’s extraction. He states that initially the main concern was with the pieces of cassette recorder manual that were found in PI/995, as they appeared to support the identification of fragments discovered earlier, and it was only at a later stage that the potential significance of PT/35(b) became clear.

Lockerbie: Bomb trigger or clever fake?

[This is the headline over part three of Dr Morag Kerr’s series of Lockerbie articles. It appears at pages 15 to 19 of the February 2016 edition of iScot magazine. The previous two instalments are referred to on this blog here and here. The February instalment reads in part:]

(...) Once the first pieces of blast-damaged baggage container were brought in on Christmas Eve, the police knew they were dealing with mass murder.  Every piece of debris recovered, down to the smallest rag or scrap of suitcase, was logged with the precise location where it had been found.

The item designated PI/995, which became a crucial clue and a nexus for numerous conspiracy theories, was logged as being picked up near Newcastleton, twenty miles east of Lockerbie, on 13th January 1989.  It proved to be a scrap of shirt collar, burned by close proximity to the explosion.  Much has been written about the provenance of this item, and in particular the scanty and problematic documentation of its most significant feature – a 1 cm square fragment of fibreglass printed circuit board found embedded in the cloth and dubbed PT/35b.

This fragment is at the centre of a confused and confusing mess of renumbered pages, inconsistent dates and general muddle which have led many people to speculate that it was actually a retrospective plant.  These suspicions are heightened by the absence of any record during 1989 of a serious forensic investigation of the item, although the RARDE scientists were obsessing over other pieces of circuit board at that time.  PT/35b apparently sat in a side-room, unremarked, despite a photograph dated May 1989 in which it seems to sit there shouting “look at me, I’m a freaking great CLUE!”

However, detailed examination of the suspect documentation doesn’t categorically prove that any of it was inserted retrospectively.  The examination notes in question, written by forensic scientist Dr Thomas Hayes, are so scrappy, disorganised and unprofessional that it’s impossible to prove anything either way.  While pages 50 and 51 look very much like interpolations (PI/995 is described on page 51), there are many other equally obvious interpolations – it seems to have been the way he worked.  Not only that, the nature of the documentation is such that if he had wanted to add the reference to PT/35b retrospectively he could simply have substituted a single re-written page and nobody would have been any the wiser.

One thing seems reasonably certain.  The scrap of collar really did fall out of the sky, with the shirt it was part of being extremely close to the explosion.  The careful logging of the recovered debris shows four separate parts of that same shirt recovered from widely separated locations which form an almost perfect straight-line continuation of the “southern debris trail”.  While PI/995 itself was found in a field, PK/339 was recovered high on a steep hillside in the depths of the Kielder Forest.  One piece was found fifty miles from Lockerbie, near Otterburn in Northumberland.  This all fits perfectly with the known distribution of the falling, wind-swept debris, and the effort that would have been required to fake it is mind-boggling.

Was PT/35b, the infamous printed circuit board fragment, actually lodged in the cloth at that time?  It’s impossible to say, but at the moment it has not been proved that it wasn’t.  What has been proved is something altogether different, something entirely unsuspected during the years when the defence teams were poring over the forensic notes and wondering if certain pages might have been added at a later date.

The serious attempt to find out what the fragment was began in earnest after it was finally handed over to the Scottish detectives in January 1990.  Physical and chemical analysis was carried out at the University of Strathclyde.  Policemen patiently telephoned and visited manufacturers of electronic components and suppliers of raw materials.  Nothing earth-shattering transpired.  The raw materials were unremarkable, used in millions of gadgets and gizmos worldwide.  A detailed report dated September 1990 catalogues the effort, and notes one particular feature that seemed anomalous.  Printed circuit boards have a coating on the circuitry, known as ‘tinning’, applied to make the components easier to solder.  In mass manufacturing this coating is almost always a tin/lead alloy, however PT/35b had a coating of pure tin, applied in such a way as to suggest this had been done by a method known as electroless plating, used by amateurs making only a few boards as a hobby.

This didn’t help though, and PT/35b’s origins remained elusive.  Finally, in June 1990, the Scottish police allowed the FBI to become involved.  Success was almost immediate, with no need for further analysis.  With the help of a CIA agent, the fragment was matched visually to a circuit board from an electronic timer known as an MST-13 made by a Swiss firm called MEBO.  Inquiries in Switzerland revealed that only twenty of these timers had been produced, as a special order for the Libyan armed forces.

This was the main breakthrough of the investigation, the cause of the switch in direction from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Gaddafi’s Libya as the prime suspects.  It also provided the perfect answer to a conundrum that had plagued the investigators since early 1989.  How had one of the PFLP-GC’s devices travelled on three flights before blowing up, when the triggers used by that group were altitude-sensitive?  The MEBO devices were count-down timers capable of being set to go off days in advance, irrespective of altitude.

The Lockerbie investigators set off to hunt Libyans, and apparently never looked back.

Belatedly, the forensic scientists at RARDE did what they should have done in 1989, and carried out their own physical and chemical analysis of the fragment.  These tests were overseen by Allen Feraday, and his notes dated 1st August 1991 record the same findings as the tests done in Scotland the previous year.  The coating on the circuitry was pure tin.

There was a complication, though.  The investigators by now had samples of the MEBO-produced boards for comparison, and Mr. Feraday analysed these too.  They were different.  They had the usual alloy coating seen on mass-manufactured products.  His notes reveal some puzzlement.  He recorded some tentative suggestions, but the conundrum was never resolved.  The visual match with the MEBO boards was perfect, right down to an oddity in the tracking caused by the Letraset of the template not having been cut quite flush.  The metallurgy discrepancy was put to one side.

The matching of PT/35b to the unique batch of timers supplied to Libya was central to the prosecution of Megrahi and Fhimah in 2000-01.  With the timer off the table, proof that Lockerbie was a Libyan operation would have been absent, and the prosecution would have been in all sorts of trouble.  So how was the metallurgy discrepancy dealt with in court?

It wasn’t.  Mr. Feraday’s original notes weren’t disclosed to the defence, and the matter was covered by having him read out the relevant section of his fair-copy report written some months later.  In that, there was no mention of any discrepancy.  The report read “... it has been conclusively established that the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the ‘MST-13' timer.”

Similar in all respects?  No, it wasn’t.

None of the independent scientists who had carried out testing on the fragment were called to give evidence.  The matter wasn’t brought up with the production manager from the company which had made the boards for the MST-13 timers.  The fact that the composition of the coating showed that PT/35b had been made by a completely different process from the MEBO instruments was never highlighted.

Further investigation carried out by Megrahi’s defence team in preparation for his second appeal revealed that the company which made the PCBs for the MST-13 timers had never used an electroless plating technique.  All the instruments supplied to Libya by MEBO had the usual lead-alloy coating on the circuitry.

PT/35b did not come from a timer sold to the Libyan armed forces, as claimed by the prosecution.

In that case, what was it?  Nobody knows.  The visual match between the fragment and the boards from the MEBO timers is striking, indicating that they all originated from the same template. (...)

Who made it, and why?  Did it fall out of the sky that December night, or was it somehow added to the rest of the debris recovered from the shirt collar at a later date, its dodgy provenance concealed behind the smokescreen of the disorganised forensics notes?  If we knew any of that, we might be a lot closer to solving the mystery of the Lockerbie bombing, still impenetrable after more than a quarter of a century.

The genesis of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[According to the official version of events, the debris that contained the fragment of circuit board that became PT35b and which linked the bomb to Libya was retrieved from the Pan Am 103 crash site on this date in 1989. What follows is taken from paragraph 13 of the Opinion that accompanied the Lockerbie trial court’s verdict:]

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 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, and DC Gilchrist's attempts to explain it were at worst evasive and at best confusing. 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. This item was logged into the property store at Dextar on 17 January 1989. It was suggested by the defence that there was some sinister connotation both in the alteration of the original label and in the delay between the finding of the item and its being logged in to Dextar. As we have indicated, there does not appear to be any particular reason for the alteration of the label, but we are satisfied that there was no sinister reason for it and that it was not tampered with by the finders. As far as the late logging is concerned, at that period there was a vast amount of debris being recovered, and the log shows that many other items were only logged in some days after they had been picked up. Again therefore we see no sinister connotation in this. Because it was a piece of charred material, it was sent for forensic examination. According to his notes, this item was examined, initially on 12 May 1989, by Dr Hayes. His notes show that it was found to be part of the neckband of a grey shirt, and when the control sample was obtained it appeared similar in all respects to the neckband of a Slalom shirt. It was severely explosion damaged with localised penetration holes and blackening consistent with explosive involvement. Embedded within some of the penetration holes there were found nine fragments of black plastic, a small fragment of metal, a small fragment of wire, and a multi-layered fragment of white paper (subsequently ascertained to be fragments from a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual). There was also found embedded a fragment of green coloured circuit board. The next reference to that last fragment occurs in a memorandum sent by Mr Feraday to CI Williamson on 15 September 1989 enclosing a Polaroid photograph of it and asking for assistance in trying to identify it. Again the defence sought to cast doubt on the provenance of this fragment of circuit board, for three reasons. In the first place, Dr Hayes' note of his examination was numbered as page 51. The subsequent pages had originally been numbered 51 to 55, but these numbers had been overwritten to read 52 to 56. The suggestion was put to Dr Hayes that the original pages 51 to 55 had been renumbered, the original page 56 had been removed, and that thus space was made for the insertion of a new page 51. Dr Hayes' explanation was that originally his notes had not been paginated at all. When he came to prepare his report based on his original notes, he put his notes into more or less chronological order and added page numbers at the top. He assumed that he had inadvertently numbered two consecutive pages as page 51, and after numbering a few more pages had noticed his error and had overwritten with the correct numbers. Pagination was of no materiality, because each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes. The second reason for doubt was said to be that in most cases when a fragment of something like a circuit board was found in a piece of clothing, Dr Hayes' practice was to make a drawing of that fragment and give it a separate reference number. There was no drawing of this fragment on page 51, and the designation of the fragment as PT/35(b) was not done until a later date. Finally it was said that it was inexplicable that if this fragment had been found in May 1989 and presumably photographed at the time, his colleague Mr Feraday should be sending a memorandum in September 1989 enclosing a Polaroid photograph as being "the best I can do in such a short time". Dr Hayes could not explain this, and suggested that the person to ask about it would be the author of the memorandum, Mr Feraday, but this was not done. While it is unfortunate that this particular item which turned out to be of major significance to this enquiry despite its miniscule size may not initially have been given the same meticulous treatment as most other items, we are nevertheless satisfied that the fragment was extracted by Dr Hayes in May l989 from the remnant of the Slalom shirt found by DC Gilchrist and DC McColm.

[RB: Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s website devoted to PT35b can be accessed here.]