US and UK were ‘double-dealing’ on Megrahi release

[This is part of the headline over a report in today’s edition of The National. The following are excerpts:]

It was one of the most controversial decisions taken during Alex Salmond’s time as First Minister – now he is to revisit the 2009 release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi with the man who made that call, former justice secretary Kenny MacAskill.

In a special St Andrew’s Day edition of the Alex Salmond Show on RT today, MacAskill makes the explosive claim that Scotland was “slapped about mercilessly” by the British and American governments, who he accuses of “double dealing”.

Salmond himself says the identification evidence which helped convict Megrahi is “open to question” and berates the “total cynicism” of those who attacked the Scottish Government over the decision to send the Libyan home on compassionate grounds because he had terminal prostate cancer. He says the UK Government wanted Megrahi sent home to secure an oil deal. (...)

Salmond and MacAskill were colleagues in the Scottish Government when both came under huge pressure not to release Megrahi.

After they did so, his life was prolonged by American-made cancer drugs not available in Scotland before he died in 2012.

MacAskill tells Salmond: “A month after I was being criticised for releasing Megrahi, it was coming to light that the British [Government] through the Police Service of Northern Ireland, were training Gaddafi’s elite battalion.

“It’s also since become clear that Britain, through and with assistance of the United States, was rendering prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi.

“So this was about building a relationship between the West and Gaddafi and Scotland was slapped about mercilessly. I believe we did the right thing and yet Britain and America were conniving to achieve what we delivered, but blaming us for doing what we did for the right reasons.”

Asked by Salmond if the full truth about Lockerbie would ever be known, MacAskill replies: “I think it is going to be a bit like the grassy knoll at Dallas. I think there will always be doubts because there will always be people that don’t accept it and there still is that million-dollar question of how did they get the suitcase on board at Malta? But it’s got to be remembered that as a consequence of getting it on board at Malta, Pan Am went into administration.

“So, I think it went on at Malta we don’t quite know how. I have a theory in my book about how I think it went on, but I think there is no doubt that Libya did it, but they were aided and abetted by others. Megrahi had a role, but it was a relatively minor role.”

[Kenny MacAskill’s “theory” and his conviction that Libya “did it” and that “Megrahi had a role” are convincingly demolished in this review of the MacAskill book by James Robertson and this review by John Ashton.]

Lord Advocate Peter Fraser ennobled

[On this date in 1989 Peter Fraser QC was elevated to the peerage as Lord Fraser of Carmyllie. What follows is excerpted from his entry in Wikipedia:]

Fraser first stood for Parliament for Aberdeen North in October 1974, but was beaten by Labour's Robert Hughes.

He was elected as a Conservative & Unionist Member of Parliament for South Angus in 1979, where he remained in the House of Commons until June 1987 (from 1983 representing East Angus). He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to George Younger, Secretary of State for Scotland. In 1982 he was appointed Solicitor General for Scotland by Margaret Thatcher and became Lord Advocate in 1989. He was created a life peer as Baron Fraser of Carmyllie, of Carmyllie in the District of Angus on 10 February 1989 and was appointed a member of the Privy Council the same year.

During his time as Scotland's senior law officer, he was directly responsible for the conduct of the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Lord Fraser drew up the 1991 indictment against the two accused Libyans and issued warrants for their arrest. But five years after the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial, when Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder, he cast doubt upon the reliability of the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci. According to The Sunday Times of 23 October 2005, Lord Fraser criticised the Maltese shopkeeper, who sold Megrahi the clothing that was used to pack the bomb suitcase, for inter alia being "not quite the full shilling" and "an apple short of a picnic".

Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, who was chief prosecutor at the Lockerbie trial, reacted by saying: "It was Lord Fraser who, as Lord Advocate, initiated the Lockerbie prosecution. At no stage, then or since, has he conveyed any reservation about any aspect of the prosecution to those who worked on the case, or to anyone in the prosecution service." Boyd asked Lord Fraser to clarify his apparent attack on Gauci by issuing a public statement of explanation.

William Taylor QC, who defended Megrahi at the trial and the appeal, said Lord Fraser should never have presented Gauci as a crown witness: "A man who has a public office, who is prosecuting in the criminal courts in Scotland, has got a duty to put forward evidence based upon people he considers to be reliable. He was prepared to advance Gauci as a witness of truth in terms of identification and, if he had these misgivings about him, they should have surfaced at the time. The fact that he is coming out many years later after my former client has been in prison for nearly four and a half years is nothing short of disgraceful. Gauci's evidence was absolutely central to the conviction and for Peter Fraser not to realise that is scandalous," Taylor said.

Tam Dalyell, former Labour MP who played a crucial role in organising the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, described Lord Fraser's comments as an 'extraordinary development': "I think there is an obligation for the chairman and members of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to ask Lord Fraser to see them and testify under oath - it's that serious. Fraser should have said this at the time and, if not then, he was under a moral obligation to do so before the trial at Zeist. I think there will be all sorts of consequences," Dalyell declared.

[RB: Readers may also care to be reminded of James Robertson's magnificent jeu d'esprit Oh, come on, it's all over now.]

A wafer-thin pretext for inaction

[What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2011:]

Government is criticised over delay in reply to Megrahi queries

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

Campaigners calling for an inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing have criticised the Scottish Government for a delay in responding to a request for information from one of Holyrood’s own committees.

The Scottish Parliament’s Public Petitions Committee wrote to the Government in November after hearing evidence from the Justice for Megrahi group, which submitted a petition bearing the signatures of 1646 people backing an independent inquiry.

Ministers were asked to respond by December 10, but the committee only received a response to its questions last night, a month after the deadline.

In it, the Government restates its position that any inquiry would be beyond the jurisdiction of Scots law and its own remit.

Robert Forrester, secretary of Justice for Megrahi, who stressed that he was speaking personally because the committee had yet to convene to discuss the response, said it was “inadequate.”

He said: “Clearly it has taken an extremely long time for them to put together, so far as I can see, a rather inadequate response. The Government has been saying repeatedly that they don’t have the power to open an inqury by saying it is beyond the power and remit of the Scottish Parliament.

“I personally don’t see why an inquiry cannot be opened.” (...)

The committee, led by convener Rhona Brankin, asked the Government whether it would open an independent inquiry or if it would provide detailed reasons for not doing so, including citing any legislation that prevents the Scottish Government from holding an inquiry.

The Petitions Committee has also received submissions from Professor Robert Black QC, the architect of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, which suggest there are previous examples of inquiries into judicial decisions. (...)

AL Kennedy, James Robertson, Len Murray and Ian Hamilton QC signed the petition calling for an inquiry into the conviction of Megrahi, who was found guilty of causing the deaths of 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988. A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Following the announcement last month that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has been unable to secure the necessary consents to release its statement of reasons in the Megrahi case due to the constraints of the current legislation, we are now considering legislation to overcome the problems presented by the current consent provisions.”

[The Scottish Government does not and cannot contend that it lacks the powers to set up an inquiry into the Lockerbie invesigation and prosecution and Abdelbaset Megrahi's conviction. These are all matters within devolved jurisdiction. What it says is this:

"The Inquiries Act 2005 provides that, to the extent that the matters dealt with are devolved, and criminal justice is devolved, the Scottish Government would have the power to conduct an inquiry. However, the wide ranging and international nature of the issues involved (even if the inquiry is confined to the trial and does not concern itself with wider matters) means that there is every likelihood of issues arising which are not devolved, which would require either a joint inquiry with or a separate inquiry by the UK government."

This is nothing more that a wafer-thin pretext for inaction. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has no jurisdiction and powers outwith Scotland. Yet it managed to conduct an investigation into the Megrahi conviction that enabled it to reach the conclusion that, on six separate grounds, that conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice. There is no conceivable reason why a Scottish inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 should have less success in obtaining and uncovering evidence.]

Stand up for justice, not just for the Scottish legal system

[This is the headline over a group of three letters published in today’s edition of The Herald. They read as follows:]

Kenny MacAskill, not for the first time, has demonstrated his ignorance of some of the basic facts of the Lockerbie case (“Gauci and the benefit of doubt on Lockerbie”, The Herald, November 2). His article starts by getting Tony Gauci’s age wrong and goes downhill from there.

He claims that Mr Gauci was not aware that he might be rewarded for his evidence until after he made a partial identification of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi as the man who bought from him the clothes that were used in the bomb suitcase. In fact, declassified police documents show that when he made the identification he was not only aware that reward money was offer, but had also expressed an interest in receiving it.

Like Mr MacAskill, I don’t believe that Mr Gauci lied for money, nevertheless, as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission noted (but Mr MacAskill fails to), his trial testimony was significantly more helpful to the prosecution than his earlier police statements.

Nowhere does Mr MacAskill mention his own reluctant admission that the holes in Mr Gauci’s evidence meant that Megrahi’s conviction was “probably unsafe”. Nor does he express concern that the Crown withheld numerous items of significant evidence from the defence.

Mr MacAskill asserts that the Scottish prosecutors “acted diligently and honourably”. Yet, as he knows full well, key aspects of their conduct have drawn international [criticism].

Standing up for the Scottish criminal justice system is not the same as standing up for justice. If Mr MacAskill is truly concerned for justice, he should temper his patriotism with a recognition that Megrahi, like Mr Gauci, was also entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

John Ashton (biographer of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi)


Kenny MacAskill reiterates one of the main themes of his book, The Lockerbie Bombing, published earlier this year: that the performance of the Scottish criminal justice system, during the investigation into the destruction of Pan Am 103 and the subsequent trial of two Libyans for the crime, was “outstanding”, but was itself overshadowed and undermined by international “commercial and security deals involving the UK, the United States and Libya.

If ever there were an example of somebody crying “It wisnae us” this is it. Innumerable authoritative observers have concluded that the Camp Zeist trial was a travesty of justice. Mr MacAskill himself, in his book, states unequivocally that Megrahi was not the purchaser of clothes, later found to have been packed in the bomb suitcase, from the late Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta. Yet this completely contradicts not only the verdict of the court but also the position Mr MacAskill maintained while Cabinet Secretary for Justice, that he “did not doubt the safety of the conviction”.

In his article Mr MacAskill refers to Tony Gauci both as “a crucial witness for the prosecution” and yet as being only “a small part of the Lockerbie trial”. How can he have been both? Mr MacAskill knows (and concedes in his book) that without Megrahi having been identified by Mr Gauci as the purchaser of the clothes the case against him would have collapsed. He writes that the issues with Gauci’s evidence were less with the actual content of that evidence than that “it was the interpretation put upon it by the court that was critical”.’ How on earth does this square with the idea that the Scottish justice system performed well, and that those of us who think otherwise are somehow traducing it?

James Robertson


I’m afraid I find former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill’s comments on some aspects of the Megrahi case far from convincing. The one person who certainly did not get the benefit of all the doubts that surrounded the trial is Megrahi.

Mr MacAskill does not even comment on how Mr Gauci was able to identify a casual customer to his shop for a few minutes several years earlier. Could that be because he has an incredible memory for faces and details of every sale, or perhaps it was because he was shown a photograph of Megrahi in advance of the trial, by a person or persons unknown (and perhaps with an American accent)?

After the trial, did it come as a complete surprise to Mr Gauci when he found himself in possession of two million US dollars and a supported move to a new home and comfortable life in Australia? Mr MacAskill’s only comment is that “it appears he wasn’t aware of that or any potential personal gain until considerably later”. Aye, that’ll be right.

Mr MacAskill also says that “the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Board was right to home in on both of these aspects”. Yet for various reasons a formal appeal and re-trial was constantly denied or delayed, until Megrahi’s fatal illness provided the welcome excuse to ship him off home.

Mr MacAskill’s article also goes into much detail about subsequent relationships between the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi and the United States and UK over trade deals and military support. But he doesn’t even address the question of why Libya should have wanted to destroy an American private airliner in mid-flight. The most obvious reason for such action might have been the shooting down several months earlier of an Iranian civil plane carrying more than 200 passengers by the reckless action of a US warship commander. But strangely that never seemed to occur to anyone in the political or legal hierarchies on either side of the Atlantic.

Much easier to blame a minor Libyan official than risk a major conflict with a real power in the Middle East, and then put pressure on a Scottish court to produce a politically acceptable answer, just because Flight 103 happened to explode just over the Scottish Border instead of in mid-Atlantic. I think Mr MacAskill secretly suspects just that.

Iain AD Mann

Gauci and the benefit of doubt on Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article by Kenny MacAskill that appears in today’s edition of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

Next month brings the 28th anniversary of the Lockerbie atrocity. Last weekend saw the death of a key witness in the trial that followed. Tony Gauci died at home in Malta at the age of 75, apparently from natural causes.

He had been a crucial witness for the prosecution at the trial in Camp Zeist that saw Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi become the only man convicted of the bombing. Gauci’s evidence has been criticised by many who dispute that outcome. Some accused him of lying for personal gain.

I’ve met many involved in the Lockerbie bombing, though I didn’t encounter Gauci. However, I know many who did. He ran a shop along with his brother and was,by all accounts, a relatively simple man. Like the Scottish justice system itself, Gauci didn’t choose to become involved but, in many ways, found himself on trial.

Diligent detective work by the Scottish police had traced clothing located near the seat of the bomb to sales from his shop. Officers initially came across his brother who had no knowledge of it.

Overhearing the conversation from the back of the store, Gauci was able to confirm that a large order had been made, and by a Libyan man. Malta was a haven in many ways for the North African state and being able to identify someone as from there seemed perfectly normal. The issues with Gauci’s evidence did not come in many ways from what he said or did both then and at subsequent interviews. He was always far from certain in identification of the man who bought the clothing. It was the interpretation put upon it by the court that was critical.

Yet his trying to assist in the identification of a mass murderer is perfectly understandable. Moreover, he did subsequently receive significant sums from the American authorities. However, it appears he wasn’t aware of that or of any potential personal gain until considerably later in the case. [RB: This is a somewhat sanitised account of Tony Gauci’s interest in obtaining “monetary compensation”. A more accurate version can be found here.]

That said, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission was right to home in on both of those aspects. The first was rather construed and there was doubt about the date. With the second, there had been extensive criticism by the Scottish court of another witness who had received significant sums from the CIA. His evidence was damned. Having done so for a testimony payment became a factor when it was subsequently realised Gauci had been rewarded.

Notwithstanding that, there’s no reason to believe that he lied or did so for gain. In death, as in a court of law, Gauci is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. [RB: Witnesses in a court of law are not entitled to “the benefit of the doubt”. It is the accused who enjoys the right to benefit from any doubt that arises out of a witness’s testimony. In treating Gauci’s evidence as amounting to a positive identification of Megrahi, the Lockerbie judges abjectly failed to accord that right to Megrahi.]

The issue with the continued trial of the Scottish justice system is that it lets the major security and commercial interests off the hook. The Scottish police did outstanding work both at the crash scene and in the subsequent investigation, along with law enforcement colleagues globally. Prosecution and judicial authorities acted diligently and honourably. Yet they have been traduced by some, which is a calumny upon them.

The criminal investigation into Lockerbie was overshadowed by commercial and security deals that were ongoing for decades and in which Scotland had no involvement: an agreement brokered by the UN involving the UK, the United States and Libya which saw Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah stand trial. It gave an assurance of no regime change and a get-out-of-jail card for Muammar Gaddafi and senior henchmen. The deal in the desert between Tony Blair and Gaddafi saw a multi-million pound commercial deal signed the following day and, the day after, MI6 rendering of a Libyan dissident to the CIA for transfer to Gaddafi’s clutches. As Human Rights Watch reported, it was the first of many renditions.

The West got access to Libya’s resources and a bulwark against Islamic terrorism: not just oil but minerals. Libya got dissidents back and military support, as Amnesty International detailed when, in 2009, the Police Service of Northern Ireland was training Gaddafi’s elite brigade. The same year, Hillary Clinton met the Gaddafi family to discuss boosting trade links and Barack Obama publicly shook his hand; deals that continued until the West decided Gaddafi was unstable and overthrew him.

There are doubts about some of the evidence in the Lockerbie investigations and the precise role of Megrahi, understandable given how and where it occurred. But a foot soldier he was, as Lockerbie was state-sponsored terrorism; and he was a Libyan agent in an odious regime. As Gauci was a small part of the Lockerbie trial, Scottish court proceedings were but a minor part of international dealings. Any future investigation must consider the international and security aspects, as much as the criminal investigation.

[RB: In his recent book and in interviews following its publication, Kenny MacAskill concedes that Megrahi was not the purchaser of the clothes and other items from Gauci’s shop. That concession utterly destroys the foundation upon which the Lockerbie court convicted Megrahi. Without that finding the judges would not and could not have convicted him. See John Ashton here and James Robertson here.]

MacAskill is saying that at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice

[What follows is the complete text of James Robertson’s review of Kenny MacAskill’s The Lockerbie Bombing. The shorter version published in The Herald can be read here.]

In May 2000, two Libyan citizens, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, went on trial before a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. They were accused of acting in concert to place a bomb contained in a suitcase on a plane flying from Malta to Frankfurt; the suitcase was then transferred as unaccompanied luggage to another flight going to London Heathrow, and there transferred again to Pan Am flight 103, the target, which was blown up, en route to New York, over the town of Lockerbie on the evening of 21 December 1988. All 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people on the ground, were killed.

In January 2001, the court acquitted Fhimah, but found Megrahi guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He remains the only person convicted of involvement in the bombing. To many people, the verdict did not make sense then, and subsequent revelations have only reinforced a widespread belief that Megrahi was the victim of a shocking miscarriage of justice.

This book is former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill’s account of the atrocity, of the subsequent investigation and trial, and of his own part in what followed. In 2009, it fell to him, in his ministerial role, to decide whether to grant Megrahi, who was by then suffering from terminal prostate cancer, compassionate release from prison. That decision – to allow Megrahi to go home to Libya to die – forms the centrepiece of Mr MacAskill’s narrative, but it is not the most revealing part.

The book suffers from Mr MacAskill’s inflated and syntactically-challenged writing style: ‘The investigation, meanwhile, marched meticulously on. The dynamics of both tension and camaraderie between various agencies continued, though in the main all worked well with each other.’ The narrative is scattered with words like ‘literally’ (bodies were ‘literally destroyed, smashed to smithereens’), and ‘doubtless’ (a prop for assertions unsupported by any evidence). Mr MacAskill deprives many of his sentences of verbs, and fattens others with clichés. Readers who might reasonably expect a full set of references to back up his account of this long, controversial and unfinished story, will be disappointed: there is no index, no bibliography and, of the 93 footnotes, 67 come from just four sources, one of these being the Scottish Government’s own website. A cover quotation from Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer, credits Mr MacAskill with a ‘forensic attention to detail’. I beg to differ.

None of this would matter if Mr MacAskill were writing about UFOs or his favourite movies. His subject, however, is the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history – an event he chooses to describe on page 1 as ‘one of the greatest whodunnits of all time’. It matters greatly that a trained lawyer should use imprecise and careless language to discuss complicated questions of evidence. It matters, for example, that, in referring to the timer which the court at Camp Zeist accepted was used to detonate the bomb, Mr MacAskill calls it ‘the MST-13 model, known as an ice-cube timer’. In fact, MST-13 timers and ‘ice-cube’ timers were completely different, and that difference – as the court’s judgement made clear – was crucial to the prosecution’s case. If the bomb was triggered by an ‘ice-cube’ timer – as many critics of the investigation believe it was – then had it been loaded in Malta it would have exploded between there and Frankfurt, rather than 38 minutes after takeoff from Heathrow. Such a basic mistake does not inspire confidence that Mr MacAskill has a full grasp of his subject.

His publishers, Biteback Publishing – owned by Lord ‘Call Me Dave’ Ashcroft and former blogger and Conservative candidate Iain Dale – do not seem unduly bothered by these shortcomings. Could it be that they don’t mind if the book damages the reputations of the author and the SNP administrations in which he served?

The most astonishing passages occur when Mr MacAskill offers his opinion as to who planted the bomb. Syntax purists, look away now: ‘Megrahi had been to Malta the month before, which was probably preparatory for the scheme and involved discussions on the logistics of clothes, the suitcase and the bomb equipment. He may even have brought the timers in with him.’ At this point Mr MacAskill ratchets up his use of the conditional tense – always a handy tool when indulging in pure speculation: ‘He [Megrahi] would meet with others in the [Libyan] embassy…he would not be the bomb maker. That would have been prepared in the Libyan People’s Bureau…’ Again, there is no attempt to substantiate these wild surmises.

Mr MacAskill proceeds to demolish the findings of the Camp Zeist court. Of the items bought in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta which were packed in the bomb suitcase, he writes: ‘The clothes were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi.’ Correctly describing as ‘rather implausible’ the evidence produced by the prosecution that Megrahi was the purchaser, MacAskill continues, ‘But, if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved.’ Really? How?

Megrahi’s role, it seems, was to fly from Tripoli into Luqa Airport in Malta on 20 December 1988 ‘with the suitcase that was to transport the bomb’. ‘The suitcase,’ we are informed, ‘was a Samsonite model, sold heavily in the Middle East market’ – as if this proves anything. These statements not only disregard the fact that Megrahi and his co-accused Fhimah (the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa) arrived in Malta on that date with no check-in luggage, they also rely solely on the testimony of a CIA-paid informer Abdul Majid Giaka, whom the judges dismissed as an utterly unreliable witness, concluding, ‘We cannot accept the evidence of Abdul Majid that he saw the two accused arriving with a suitcase. It follows that there is no evidence that either of them had any luggage, let alone a brown Samsonite suitcase.’

Mr MacAskill wades deeper into the mire. Further undermining the Camp Zeist judgement, he writes that, on the morning of 21 December, Megrahi took the suitcase (now apparently loaded with the bomb) to the airport, ‘but it was Fhimah who would get it airside and beyond security.…Placing a bag behind and into the system was a relatively simple task given the accreditation and access Fhimah had.’ At the trial the Crown argued that just such a sequence of events had occurred. The judges, however, concluded that ‘there is no evidence in our opinion which can be used to justify this proposition and therefore at best it must be in the realm of speculation. Furthermore, there is the formidable objection that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the second accused was even at Luqa airport on 21 December.’ Fhimah was consequently acquitted.

The judges also observed that ‘the absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [at Luqa] is a major difficulty for the Crown case.’ In just a few bold sentences, Mr MacAskill has completely overcome this difficulty.

Mr MacAskill finds it ‘hard to imagine how there could have been any other verdict in the circumstances.’ This is strange, as neither prosecution, defence teams, the families of the victims nor most independent observers expected one of the accused to walk free and the other to be found guilty. Mr MacAskill continues: ‘In many ways, as with Megrahi and Fhimah, Scots law and its judges were simply actors in the theatre that had been created to circumvent and solve both a diplomatic impasse and political problem. Scots law convened the trial, and yet found itself on trial.’

Read those sentences carefully: a former Justice Secretary is effectively saying that, at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice. For how many years have critics of the proceedings been saying this, while Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Government and the Crown Office have maintained that justice prevailed?

Mr MacAskill’s solving of the problem of how the bomb was placed on flight KM180 relieves him of the need to address with any seriousness the accumulated mass of other evidence pointing in other directions. He pays no attention to the post-trial discrediting of the infamous timer circuit-board fragment linking Libya to the bomb, nor to Morag Kerr’s  convincing explanation, in her 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, of the much more likely scenario that the bomb was loaded directly onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow. He skims lightly over the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s 2007 report which indicated at least six grounds on which Megrahi’s conviction might be unsafe. Of John Ashton’s 2012 book Megrahi: You Are My Jury, the most comprehensive analysis of the entire Lockerbie saga, he writes, ‘There was little new that came out in the book or media other than a rehash of what had gone before and the same lines from all parties involved.’ Mr MacAskill, it seems, is not impressed by arguments that really are based on a forensic attention to detail.

To summarise: Mr MacAskill asserts that Fhimah, acquitted by the court, planted the bomb, and that Megrahi, found guilty by the court, did not buy the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop. He also acknowledges that without Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the purchaser, the case against him would have collapsed. This, then, is the new position of the Cabinet Secretary for Justice who, while in office, repeatedly articulated the Scottish Government’s view that it ‘did not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction’. So, too, did the then First Minister Alex Salmond, who nevertheless endorses Mr MacAskill’s book as ‘the most credible explanation yet published of who was really responsible for the downing of Pan Am flight 103’. They cannot have it both ways: either they think the judges got it right, or they think they got it wrong.

Mr MacAskill admits that, had Megrahi’s second appeal reached court, his conviction might well have been overturned. He then makes this shameful comment: ‘But, this account of how the bombing was carried out and by whom is based on information gathered meticulously by police and prosecutors from the US, Scotland and elsewhere. It’s also founded on intelligence and sources not available for a court or that have only come to light thereafter.’

Well, that’s all right then. Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, the grounds of his conviction were shaky at best, but we know from other sources that he was involved and anyway he’s dead now, so that’s good enough for the Scottish justice system.

If Mr MacAskill does have information pertinent to this still ‘live’ case, he is duty-bound to share it with the police. Police Scotland are currently concluding a major, three-year investigation, ‘Operation Sandwood’, into nine allegations of possible criminality on the part of police officers and Crown representatives during the original investigation and trial. These allegations were made by the organisation Justice for Megrahi (of which I am a member) and six of them were first drawn directly to Mr MacAskill’s attention, in strict confidence, on 13 September 2012. They were passed from his office to the Crown Office, which immediately, before the police had even begun to investigate them, made a public statement declaring the allegations to be ‘without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded’. Some of the allegations relate to the very aspects of the case that Mr MacAskill now says the court got wrong.

For more than a quarter of a century the Lockerbie case has been a dark stain on the Scottish justice system. Kenny MacAskill rubs and rubs at that stain. Whatever his intent, the effect is not to make it vanish but to make it look far worse.

MacAskill demolishes findings of Zeist court

[What follows is the text of a review by James Robertson of Kenny MacAskill’s The Lockerbie Bombing: The Search for Justice that appears in today’s edition of The Herald:]

In May 2000, two Libyan citizens, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, went on trial before a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. They were accused of acting in concert to place a suitcase containing a bomb on a plane flying from Malta to Frankfurt; it was transferred as unaccompanied luggage to another flight going to London Heathrow, and there transferred again to Pan Am flight 103, the target, which was blown up, en route to New York, over Lockerbie on the evening of 21 December 1988. All 259 passengers and crew, and 11 people on the ground, were killed.

In January 2001, Fhimah was acquitted, but Megrahi found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. To many people, the verdict made no sense. Subsequent revelations have only reinforced a widespread belief that Megrahi was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

This book is former Cabinet Secretary for Justice (and Herald columnist) Kenny MacAskill’s account of the crime, investigation and trial, and his own part in what followed. In 2009, it was his decision to grant Megrahi, by then suffering from terminal prostate cancer, compassionate release from prison. That decision forms the centrepiece, but not the most revealing part, of Mr MacAskill’s narrative.

The book suffers from Mr MacAskill’s inflated and syntactically-challenged writing style: "The investigation, meanwhile, marched meticulously on. The dynamics of both tension and camaraderie between various agencies continued, though in the main all well worked with each other." The narrative is scattered with words like "literally" (bodies were "literally destroyed, smashed to smithereens"), and "doubtless"’ (a prop for assertions unsupported by any evidence). Mr MacAskill deprives many of his sentences of verbs, and fattens others with clichés. Readers who might reasonably expect a full set of references to back up his account will be disappointed: there is no index, no bibliography and, of the 93 footnotes, 67 come from just four sources.

None of this would matter if Mr MacAskill were writing about UFOs or his favourite movies. His subject, however, is the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history. It matters greatly that a trained lawyer should use imprecise and careless language to discuss complicated questions of evidence.

The most astonishing passages occur when Mr MacAskill offers his opinion as to who planted the bomb. Syntax purists, look away now: "Megrahi had been to Malta the month before, which was probably preparatory for the scheme and involved discussions on the logistics of clothes, the suitcase and the bomb equipment. He may even have brought the timers in with him." Here Mr MacAskill ratchets up his use of the conditional tense – always a handy tool when indulging in pure speculation: "He [Megrahi] would meet with others in the [Libyan] embassy…he would not be the bomb maker. That would have been prepared in the Libyan People’s Bureau…" There is no attempt to substantiate these wild surmises.

Mr MacAskill proceeds to demolish the findings of the Camp Zeist court. Of the items bought in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta which were packed in the bomb suitcase, he writes: "The clothes were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi." Correctly describing as "rather implausible" the evidence produced by the prosecution that Megrahi was the purchaser, MacAskill continues, "But, if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved." Really? How?

Megrahi’s role, it seems, was to fly from Tripoli into Luqa Airport in Malta on 20 December 1988 bringing with him the brown Samsonite suitcase that was to transport the bomb. This claim relies solely on the testimony of a CIA-paid informer, whom the judges dismissed as an utterly unreliable witness. "There is no evidence," they concluded, ‘that either [Megrahi or Fhimah] had any luggage, let alone a brown Samsonite suitcase.’

Further undermining the Camp Zeist judgement, Mr MacAskill writes that, on the morning of 21 December, Megrahi took the suitcase (now apparently loaded with the bomb) to the airport, but it was Fhimah, as station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines, who would "get it airside and beyond security.…Placing a bag behind and into the system was a relatively simple task given the accreditation and access Fhimah had." The trial judges determined that this proposition was, at best, in the realm of speculation. "Furthermore," they said, "there is the formidable objection that there is no evidence at all to suggest that the second accused was even at Luqa airport on 21 December." Fhimah was consequently acquitted.

The judges also observed that "the absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 [at Luqa] is a major difficulty for the Crown case." In just a few bold sentences, Mr MacAskill has completely overcome this difficulty.

Mr MacAskill finds it "hard to imagine how there could have been any other verdict in the circumstances", and continues: "In many ways, as with Megrahi and Fhimah, Scots law and its judges were simply actors in the theatre that had been created to circumvent and solve both a diplomatic impasse and political problem. Scots law convened the trial, and yet found itself on trial."

Read those sentences carefully: the former Justice Secretary is effectively saying that, at Camp Zeist, diplomacy and politics trumped justice. For how many years have critics of the proceedings been saying this, while Mr MacAskill, the Scottish Government and the Crown Office have maintained that justice prevailed?

By ‘solving’ the problem of how the bomb was placed on flight KM180 Mr MacAskill relieves himself of the need to address with any seriousness the post-trial discrediting of the infamous timer circuit-board fragment linking Libya to the bomb; the accumulated mass of evidence pointing to the more convincing explanation that the bomb was loaded directly onto Pan Am flight 103 at Heathrow; or the most comprehensive analysis of the Lockerbie saga to date, John Ashton’s 2012 book Megrahi: You Are My Jury. He skims so lightly over the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s 2007 report, which indicated six grounds on which Megrahi’s conviction might be unsafe, that one suspects he sees the thin ice beneath him.

To summarise: Mr MacAskill asserts that Fhimah, acquitted by the court, planted the bomb, and that Megrahi, found guilty by the court, did not buy the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop. Yet, as he also acknowledges, without Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the purchaser, the case would have collapsed. This, then, is the new position of the Cabinet Secretary for Justice who, while in office, repeatedly articulated the Scottish Government’s view that it "did not doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction"’. So, too, did the then First Minister Alex Salmond, who nevertheless endorses Mr MacAskill’s book as "the most credible explanation yet published of who was really responsible for the downing of Pan Am flight 103". They cannot have it both ways: either they think the judges got it right, or they think they got it wrong.

Mr MacAskill admits that, had Megrahi’s second appeal reached court, his conviction might well have been overturned. He then makes this shameful comment: "But, this account of how the bombing was carried out and by whom is based on information gathered meticulously by police and prosecutors from the US, Scotland and elsewhere. It’s also founded on intelligence and sources not available for a court or that have only come to light thereafter."

So, Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, the grounds of his conviction were shaky at best, but we know from other sources that he was involved and anyway he’s dead now, and that’s good enough for Scottish justice.

If Mr MacAskill does have information pertinent to the case, he should share it with Police Scotland, who are currently concluding a major investigation, Operation Sandwood, into allegations of possible criminality on the part of police officers and Crown representatives during the original investigation and trial. These allegations were made by the organisation Justice for Megrahi (of which I am a member) and were first drawn directly to Mr MacAskill’s attention, in strict confidence, on September 13, 2012. Some of them relate to the very aspects of the case that Mr MacAskill now says the court got wrong.

The Lockerbie case has long been a stain on the Scottish justice system. Kenny MacAskill rubs and rubs at that stain. Whatever his intent, the effect is not to make it vanish but to make it look far worse.