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.]

Tom Thurman "identifies" the dodgy timer fragment

[It was on this date twenty-five years ago that the FBI’s James ‘Tom’ Thurman, so he says, identified the fragment of circuit board PT/35b as coming from a MST-13 timer manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO. The circumstances are narrated in chapter 4 of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, especially at pages 62 to 66. The account that follows is taken from a long article entitled Thurman’s Photo Quest on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide:]

What we have in Thurman's case, with or without the actual piece of evidence, was the crucial identification. And one point that's consistent throughout is that he held a photo only when he found the match. The question at hand is how long it took him to find it and to determine its meaning vis-a-vis who carried out the bombing.

Tom Gets a Green Light

On the 10th of January 1990 new Senior Investigating Officer Stuart Henderson (who replaced John Orr) presented at a meeting of investigators in the UK. He did not openly mention the circuit board fragment PT/35(b), an amazing find UK investigators had been puzzling over for four months. But off to the side, he told FBI chief investigator Richard Marquise about it, Marquise says in his 2006 book SCOTBOM.  [p58] He expressed interest in helping find a match, but Henderson insisted on going it alone. “This decision cost us six months,” writes Marquise.

It was at a later conference in Virginia, on 11 June, when Marquise relates how the Scots finally made their puzzlement known to all, having blindly checked 55 companies to no avail. Given the opening, special Agent Thurman “approached Henderson and asked if he could take photographs of PT-35 and attempt to identify it. Henderson, who believed the Scots had done all they could do, agreed.” [p60] This passage is (...) rather ambiguous. It seems to read that Thurman, in Arlington, was allowed to snap a pic of evidence SIO Henderson had there with him. Then perhaps it means he took some of the prints they had brought.

Either way, he walked away with a picture or pictures of this crucial and curious evidence, a half-inch square, perfectly readable, mammoth of implausibility. The "forensic explosives expert" didn't balk at it, just ran with it. Or crawled, as he suggests.

"Months, Literally" or 2-4 Days?

A 1991 Miami Herald article, based on interview with Thurman, reported that he had “meticulously compared the picture of the fragment to hundreds of other devices,” a lengthy-sounding process. Affirming this, Thurman himself told the adoring program Air Crash Investigation in 2008:

“I spent, uh, months, literally, looking through all about the files of the FBI on other examinations that we had, uh, conducted over many many many years. […] After a period I just ran out of leads. And at that point I said, okay now we need to go outside the physical FBI laboratory.”

And it was there, in a CIA facility, that he found the long-sought answer.

But Marquise said “what Thurman did yielded fruit within two days.[…] Henderson and his colleagues were on an airplane headed back to Scotland” when Thurman set to work. They had barely settled back in at home before his efforts “would turn Henderson around quicker than he ever imagined,” putting him back stateside, along with electronics fiend Alan Feraday, within 24 hours of the discovery. [p60]

Further evidence against Thurman’s "months" claim is his own well-memorized “day that I made the identification,” recalling it as one would a wedding anniversary: June 15 1990. He had four days tops to get this grueling season of cross-checking out of the way after the 11 June conference (perhaps a multi-day event) where Marquise has him first learning of the thing.

Who He Ran To

What Thurman did, Marquise sums up, is know where to look. He took the photo to a CIA explosives and timers expert code-named John Scott Orkin (real name unknown - he testified under this name at Camp Zeist). [p60] Thurman mentions him only as an unnamed "contact" in the 2008 ACI interview.  From the vast photo files on hand, "Orkin" helped locate an obvious fit with the blow-up of PT/35(b). If you were Tom Thurman and knew about John Orkin, would you waste even one afternoon scrounging in the FBI's files, or go right to him?

Nothing I've seen specifies this match-up was achieved in only one visit on a single day, but that makes the most sense, as does starting right there. That would give us no more than "hours, literally" to describe the search duration. And either way we're at the point of days at most.

The matching circuit board was found in a timer confiscated in the African nation Togo in 1986. This device, assembled in a small plastic case, was physically available for Thurman to look at. He was given permission to take it apart and examine the main board inside. Upon confirming again the obvious similarities, “within a few minutes, literally, I started getting cold chills,” he told Air Crash Investigation.  He's also described as declaring "I have you now!" [p60] and other variations. In a 2010 interview, he said "I could not believe it under any circumstances, and it was there."

That he got these chills only after getting access to the CIA’s special stores is noteworthy, and the Agency is right to claim much of the credit, as they have in places. An AFIO newsletter from just after the Zeist verdict purred that “the CIA’s most important contribution in helping secure the conviction” was “when a CIA engineer was able to identify the timer […] shifting the focus of the probe from a Palestinian terrorist group to Libya.”  (This report's oblique reference to the CIA's less brilliant offering, Giaka, is also worth a read.)

As the overall story tells it, this was clearly a collaborative CIA-FBI effort, via Thurman and "Orkin", that neither side can claim sole credit for. And without this coming together, we're to infer, the naming of this planted piece of Libyan black magic would be delayed or impossible for both Scottish and American investigators. The power of cooperation, between intelligence and law enforcement, and across the Atlantic - a running theme of the 103 investigation - is nicely illustrated here.

[Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer is currently engaged on his PT35B blog in a meticulous exploration of all the evidence about the identification of this fragment.]

Slalom shirt as dodgy as the timer fragment?

[What follows is taken from an article published on this date in 2011 in the Scottish edition of the Sunday Express:]

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted on the basis that he bought clothes from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, including a grey men’s Slalom shirt. The clothing was then packed in a suitcase with the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103, killing 270 on December 21, 1988.

The charred remains of the shirt were crucial to the prosecution, as a forensic scientist found a piece of circuit board from the bomb embedded in the collar which first led investigators to Libya, and ultimately Megrahi.

However, it has now emerged that clothing manufacturers in Malta told Scottish police in January 1990 that the shirt recovered from the crash site was in fact a boy’s size.

Campaigners have stepped up calls for an inquiry after the claims surfaced in a documentary broadcast on Thursday by Arab TV network Al Jazeera but seen by only a handful of Scottish viewers.

In it, Scotland’s former Lord Advocate also accepted that Gauci, the main prosecution witness, was paid $2million to give evidence against Megrahi.

Scottish private investigator George Thomson tracked down shirt manufacturers Tonio Caruana and Godwin Navarro in Malta. They recalled being shown a fragment of shirt by DC John Crawford and telling him, independently of each other, that it was a boy’s shirt.

Speaking to the Sunday Express yesterday, Mr Navarro, 76, said: “I stand by my statement. I believe it is a boy’s shirt because of the size of the pocket and the width of the placket, where the button holes are.”

Retired Strathclyde Police superintendent Iain McKie, now a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, said: “The fact that the witnesses say it was a boy’s shirt and not an adult shirt seems to me quite critical.”

He said that if it was a boy’s shirt, then it cannot be the same one purchased from Gauci by the man he later identified as Megrahi – destroying the “evidence chain”.

Supt McKie said the latest claims added weight to calls for the Scottish Government to set up an independent inquiry into Megrahi’s conviction.

He added: “The whole chain of evidence has been totally and utterly shattered. It is looking more and more like the police came to a conclusion and then looked for evidence.”

The programme, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber, also alleged that a piece of the shirt had been altered, as it is clearly a different shape in two police photographs. (...)

[George Thomson] said: “In January 1990 they realise that what they have is a fragment of a boy’s shirt, while Gauci is saying he sold a gents’ shirt.

“The reason for people saying this is mainly down to the size of the pocket and lo and behold the next thing a fragment of the pocket has been removed.”

The dodgy timer fragment sees the light of day

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.

Dodgy circuit board fragment makes first appearance at trial

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Pan Am 103 Crash Website on the proceedings of this date in 2000 at the trial at Camp Zeist:]

The Lockerbie trial heard references Monday to a circuit board, part of a suitcase and charred clothing found among debris after a bomb destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988. A spokesman for the prosecution declined to say if the items were the same pieces of key evidence expected to be introduced later as alleged remnants of the timer, case and clothes used to pack and detonate a bomb.

A Scottish police officer testifying in the trial of two Libyans said today that he raised concerns about the possibility of missing evidence early on in the bombing investigation of Pan Am Flight 103. Douglas Roxburgh testified about evidence-tracking procedures during the fourth day of the proceedings against alleged Libyan intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah.

Roxburgh, 63, was the acting deputy chief ... of a police unit that catalogued debris brought in from around Lockerbie and identified pieces that might be of interest to investigators. He told prosecutor Alan Turnbull that “tens of thousands” of items were brought to a collection point near Lockerbie, where they were catalogued and stored.

Mr Roxburgh said he set up the storage centre at Dexstar. It was guarded 24 hours a day and split into sectors which corresponded to the sectors of Lockerbie and the surrounding areas being searched by teams of officers. Any suitcases brought in would be examined by sniffer dogs for explosives as police feared there could be secondary devices.  He told the court: “It would be put through an x-ray machine like at an airport for the detection of explosives. It would then be booked in and given priority examination in case it was going to be required for further forensic examination.”

If there were any explosive marks, for example, the item would be logged and taken to a special area where AAIB staff or explosive experts could examine it, he said. Mr Roxburgh said: “We started off by ensuring that items were not required in the legal process and we started releasing stuff back to the relatives sometimes via consulates but it was mainly personal possessions like rings, jewellery and wallets.” He told how a laundry was set up at Dexstar to clean clothing before it was returned to the victims' families. (...)

Under cross-examination, Fhimah lawyer Richard Keen talked about worries that agencies other than police were dealing with items and that some property was removed by those agencies.

Roxburgh admitted he raised such concerns at a meeting with superiors in the days following the tragedy after “someone had taken off property where there had been traces of explosion.”  But he later said he had ascertained that the “someone” had been from a legitimate investigating authority in Britain, suggesting it did not constitute a security breach. He also refused to answer Keen's question about whether British and foreign intelligence agencies were involved in the collection of evidence.

Taylor also questioned the identity of one American, who was said to wear hearing aids in both ears and told police at the scene he was an explosives expert working for the Pan Am airline. (...)

Two police officers were asked to describe the discovery of a piece of charred circuit board and a mangled remnant of an aluminum baggage container. The special attention given these two pieces of evidence suggested they would figure as significant items later in the trial, when prosecutors seek to link the two suspects to the bombing.

The prosecution also introduced as evidence part of a brown suitcase and referred to pieces of charred clothing, but again did not specify whether these were the Samsonsite case and tweed jacket allegedly used by the accused to pack the bomb. The evidence was wrapped in plastic and not clearly visible to reporters watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television. Some items were referred to only by coded numbers or the labels police gave them at the time. (...)

Alexander Arnott, 57, a former detective constable, said he had been part of a team given a remit to check metal debris for signs of damage by an explosion. He had been assisted by an American, Walter Cosguard, an expert in explosive substances. “He said he was from Pan Am’s investigation branch and had been involved with explosives all his life, so much so he had to wear two hearing aids because he was almost deaf,” said Mr Arnott.

The expert had indicated that a piece of container frame found in the countryside around Lockerbie appeared to have been marked and pitted by an explosion.

New blog devoted to dodgy timer fragment PT35(b)

[I am delighted to report the appearance of a new blog by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer. It is entitled PT35B and will be devoted to material about the dodgy timer fragment. Dr De Braeckeleer is the author of (amongst other Lockerbie-related pieces) the magisterial 174-part series on OhmyNews entitled Diary of a Vengeance Foretold. The first item on his new blog reads as follows (illustrations and references omitted):]

On 21 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky. All 259 passengers and crew members died. Eleven residents of Lockerbie were killed.

A strong westerly wind spread the debris over two trails stretching from the south of Scotland through the north of England and out into the North Sea.

On 28 December 1988, Michael Charles, Inspector of Accidents for the AAIB, announced that traces of high explosive had been found on two pieces of metal. On that date, a criminal investigation was officially launched. The crime scene covered about 845 square miles.

On 13 January 1989, Detective Constables Thomas Gilchrist and Thomas McColm found a fragment of charred clothing in search sector I, near Newcastleton. This piece of charred grey cloth was bagged, labelled “Charred Debris” and given a reference number: PI/995.

On 17 January 1989, it was registered in the Dexstar log.

On 6 February 1989, PI/995 was sent to the Forensic Explosives Laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent for forensic examination.

On 12 May 1989, Dr Thomas Hayes examined PI/995. Inside the cloth, Dr Hayes found fragments of paper, fragments of black plastic and a tiny piece of circuitry. Dr Hayes gave to these items the reference number PT/35 as well as an alphabetical suffix to each one of them. The fragment of the circuit board was named PT/35(b).

In June 1990, with some help from the FBI, Allen Feraday of the Explosives Laboratory was able to match PT/35 (b) to the board of  a Swiss timer known as a MST-13 timer.

Two MST-13 timers had been seized in Togo in September 1986. BATF agent Richard Sherrow had brought one of these back to the US. Two Libyan citizens were caught in possession of an other MST-13 timer in Senegal in 1988.

An analysis of the Togo timer led the investigators to a small business named MEBO in Zurich. The owners of MEBO told the investigators that these timers had been manufactured to the order of two Libyans: Ezzadin Hinshiri, the director of the Central Security Organisation of the Libyan External Security Organisation and Said Rashid, the head of the Operations Administration of the ESO.

On 14 November 1991, the Lord Advocate and the acting United States Attorney General jointly announced that they had obtained warrants for the arrest of Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

On 27 November 1991, the British and United States Governments issued a joint statement calling on the Libyan government to surrender the two men for trial.

On 21 January 1992, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 731 calling on Libya to surrender Megrahi and Fhimah for trial either in the United States or in the United Kingdom.

On 31 March 1992, the Security Council passed resolution 748 imposing mandatory sanctions on Libya for failing to hand over Megrahi and Fhimah. On 11 November 1993, the Security Council passed resolution 883 that imposed further international sanctions on Libya.

On 31 January 2001, a Court found Megrahi guilty and Fhimah not guilty.

On 28 June 2007, the SCCRC announced that Megrahi may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Accordingly, the SCCRC decided to refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

On 25 July 2009, Megrahi applied to be released from jail on compassionate grounds. On 12 August 2009, Megrahi applied to have his second appeal dropped. Megrahi was granted compassionate release for his terminal prostate cancer. On 20 August 2009, Megrahi was released from prison and returned to Libya.

Today we know that PT/35(b) is a forgery. We also know that at least one witness was well aware that PT/35(b) could not have been part of the MST-13 timers delivered to Libya and that this witness deliberately withheld  this information from the court. At this point, one can reasonably infer that this so-called evidence was planted.

How do we know that PT/35(b) is a forgery? Who could possibly have committed such a crime and for what possible motives? Where, when and by whom was this forgery fabricated? These are some of the questions that this blog intends to discuss and will hopefully answer.

Lockerbie forensics

Two years ago today I reproduced on this blog a substantial part of a long article by physicist and former Church of Scotland minister Dr John Cameron entitled Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing. 

Although it came before the devastating disclosures about the dodgy timer fragment (PT35b) in John Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury, the article is still well worth reading, as are the comments that it generated from Rolfe, Vronsky and Richard Marquise amongst others.

Thurman: forensics ensuring that right people, not wrong people, are charged

[The following are excerpts from an article headlined FBI unit zeroing in on design of devices published today on the website of The Boston Globe:]

FBI bomb technicians poring over hundreds of scraps of metal, nails, wires, and other debris — some surgically removed from bomb victims’ flesh — were closing in Thursday on the design of the explosive devices used in the Boston Marathon attacks, according to officials and forensics experts.

In an effort to trace the source of the components, the Explosives Unit at the agency’s state-of-the-art crime laboratory in Quantico, Va, outside of Washington, was comparing the materials collected from sidewalks, rooftops, gutters, overhangs, and even the soles of victims’ shoes against lab reports generated from thousands of previous blasts around the world, looking for a “bomber signature.” (...)

The methodical work at Quantico is seen as critical in helping investigators identify the perpetrators and secure a conviction in the worst terrorist attack on US soil since Sept 11, 2001.

“Most bombing investigations like this are forensically driven,” said former supervisory special agent James T Thurman, who served as chief of the Explosives Unit in the FBI Laboratory’s Bomb Data Center. “Whatever is found that ultimately goes to the laboratory is what drives the investigation and connects a possible subject with the components.” (...)

[T]hose familiar with the inquiry and the FBI’s lab said the Explosives Unit is relying on specialized tools to conduct what amounts to an autopsy on the pair of so-called IEDs — improvised explosive devices — that were apparently detonated by battery-powered timers near the Copley Square finish line.

One is a database known as the Explosive Reference Tool, a searchable computer archive containing investigation reports from bombings dating back decades, along with so-called underground bomb-making handbooks and manufacturing data for key bomb-making components and explosives. (...)

Potential evidence that was identified, bagged, and tagged — including by agents who spread out to hospitals to secure bomb material and residue removed from wounds — began arriving in the Quantico lab even before the bombing sites were fully swept for evidence.

“It is a two-way street,” said Thurman, who investigated the bombings of the US Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983, Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, and World Trade Center in 1993. He explained that as the lab uncovers clues and materials it may send orders back to the bombing scene to look for specific things.

“They will continue that as long as it takes,” he added. “It can take less than a day. It can take a week. It can take two weeks.”

Thurman, who teaches at Eastern Kentucky University, also cautioned that it could take longer, citing the bombing of a judge in Alabama in 1988, when the forensics analysis took two years.

“This is not an overnight thing,” he said. “The issue at the end of the day is to find the guilty party who is responsible for constructing and setting off these devices,” he said. “You are ensuring that the right people and not the wrong people are being charged.”

[Tom Thurman’s part in identifying the dodgy timer circuit board fragment in the Lockerbie investigation is dealt with here and here.]

Credibility and Thurman, Gauci, Feraday

Posted on Oh No! Not another Lockerbie Blog... today is an item headed The Credible Witnesses of the Lockerbie Trial. It considers the evidence of Thomas Thurman [RB: Thurman was not, of course, a witness at Zeist but he it was who “identified” the dodgy circuit board fragment PT/35(b) as supposedly coming from a MST-13 timer]; Tony Gauci; and Alan Feraday. Further witnesses are to be dealt with in subsequent posts.

Note for those of impaired judgment: the description of these witnesses as “credible” in the post’s title is ironical.

More on the dodgy timer fragment

A further item has been posted on Oh No! Not another Lockerbie Blog…  It is headed A tale of contradiction Part 2 and deals with some of the problems surrounding trial production PT/35(b), the circuit board fragment allegedly from a MST13 timer manufactured by MEBO.  The article does not deal with the recently uncovered evidence that the metallurgical composition of the tracks on PT/35(b) was entirely different from the metallurgical composition of the tracks on the circuit boards of the MEBO timers supplied to Libya; and that this was known to the Crown before the Lockerbie trial but was concealed from the defence team and the court.

Re-open appeal hearing and deal with Lockerbie in a legal manner

[This is the headline over four letters published in today's edition of The Herald. They read as follows:]

I welcome advocate Brian Fitzpatrick’s support for a public inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing and the Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi conviction (Letters, April 8).

I have also called for such an inquiry, although my personal preference would be for the second appeal hearing to be re-opened so that the Scottish justice system could deal with the matter in the proper legal sequence.

At least this would allow the concerns of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to be tested in court, but the Scottish political and legal establishments seem determined not to allow this to happen.

I am sure that if they wanted they could find some way to reconstitute this court procedure, perhaps on the grounds that Megrahi may not have understood that withdrawing his appeal was not a pre-condition of his being granted compassionate release.

Mr Fitzpatrick strongly defends the police officers, the judges and those of his colleagues involved in the original investigation and he is right to do so. It is a pity that he should then demean himself and weaken his argument by describing honourable people uneasy with the verdict, such as the bereaved parent Jim Swire, the UN observer Dr Hans Kochler and many others as “conspiracy theorists weaving a tale of deceit and intrigue to blacken the names of better men”. Such comments are objectionable and uncalled for.

The fact remains that the guilty verdict at Camp Zeist was largely influenced by two pieces of very dodgy evidence – the Malta shopkeeper’s identification of a customer he saw only once several months earlier until he was shown photographs of Megrahi by US agents and prompted by $2 million dollars of State Department cash – and the miraculous find of a fingernail-size piece of a timing device in a Lockerbie field by US security men six months after every other fragment of the plane and its contents had been collected in the most extensive search ever carried out by Scottish police officers.

The trial and subsequent investigations were also compromised by the withholding of certain information from the defence team and the refusal of both British and American governments to release relevant documents to the court. The weakness of the evidence resulted in a not proven verdict for one of the accused, and Megrahi’s guilty verdict must have been at best very marginal. No other evidence has yet been produced to prove any Libyan involvement in the atrocity.

Surely Mr Fitzpatrick’s legal experience, if not his political activities, must convince him that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done, especially in such a contentious case with the eyes of the world upon our Scottish justice system.
Iain AD Mann

Brian Fitzpatrick defends his fellow advocates who worked at the Camp Zeist trial for their efforts, yet heaps criticism on the Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill and First Minister Alex Salmond when he knows full well that Mr MacAskill followed due process of Scots law when taking the decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds.

I admit to having no legal training, but during the trial I could not help but feel an uneasiness, which has steadily increased the more I have studied the available evidence on the Lockerbie tragedy. From the very beginning I thought it strange that two Libyan intelligence officers should be charged but only one found guilty; surely these intelligence officers would have been working together.

I don’t have sufficient knowledge to say whether Megrahi is innocent or guilty, but the SCCRC believes that there may have been a miscarriage of justice and some of the bereaved families who attended the trial also believe that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Mistakes have been made before, and it seems to me that there are enough questions requiring answers to justify the holding of a full independent public inquiry to establish the truth, which need be feared only by the guilty.
Ruth Marr

I was incensed by Brian Fitzpatrick’s views, ostensibly in reply to Iain AD Mann but covering all those who have appealed for a proper investigation into the circumstances of the Lockerbie tragedy (Letters, April 8).

Does he think that the estimable Jim Swire, whose daughter was one of the victims “would rather secure a headline than undertake any study of the evidence”? How dare he assert that.

Or what about Dr Hans Kochler who was the international observer at Camp Zeist appointed by the United Nations who wrote, amongst other things: “The trial, seen in its entirety, was not fair and was not conducted in an objective manner.”

If Mr Fitzpatrick, as a defence lawyer, found out that the main prosecuting witness was being paid a large sum of money for his “evidence”, would he not wonder if this compromised proceedings? No, what I and all the others who have queried this long-running saga want is simply the truth. Only then will the relatives of the victims at least have their doubts and suspicions cleared up.

I do, however, agree with his final paragraph in which he says that our country has been diminished by those who have weaved a tale of deceit and intrigue.

The sooner these people are asked to answer for that deception, the better. This can only be achieved once the truth comes out.
Raymond Hendry

Why on earth does everyone appear to assume that Moussa Koussa will tell the truth when questioned about Lockerbie?
David Clark