Magnus Linklater: There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of an article by Magnus Linklater in yesterday’s edition of The Times:]

There may be a case for staging a fresh inquiry into Lockerbie. This film does nothing to advance it. For all the sensational headlines it has provoked, it contributes no new evidence, merely a recycling of familiar allegations.

Those allegations are, of course, far more enticing than the evidence that originally convicted the Libyan, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi — conspiracy theories always are. The al-Jazeera documentary suggests not only that the guilty verdict passed on him by a Scottish court was a miscarriage of justice, but that an “executive decision” to redirect the evidence and implicate Libya rather than Iran was taken early on.

Asked after the film was shown in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, how high up this decision went, the producer suggested that it was taken in the White House. That is some claim. In order to believe it, however, one has to accept the kind of evidence that would be described in a court of law as hearsay.

For all the talk about CIA documents, incriminating cables and terrorist cabals meeting in secret to plan the bombing, no new written evidence is produced to back it up.

Suspects are approached for confirmation about their roles, and shy away from the confrontation; lines of inquiry are left hanging in the air; worse, the main source of the allegations — a defecting Iranian — has been touting his information around for at least 15 years.

There may well be grounds for appeal. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission reported that the identification of al-Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes in which the bomb was wrapped was based on unreliable evidence, which it thought should be tested again. However, it is a long road from that to a claim that the entire Lockerbie case was a miscarriage of justice.

Just one section of the film serves to illustrate the point. A former CIA agent, Robert Baer, is interviewed at length. He claims that the bombing was carried out by a terrorist suspect called Abu Talb, who was rewarded after its success with large amounts of Iranian money.

The commission examined this in great detail, interviewing Baer three times in all. In the end, however, the Commission concluded that nothing he said would have stood up in court.

“As with all intelligence,” it reported, “the validity of [his] information was very much dependent upon the reliability of its source, for which in many cases Mr Baer was unable to vouch.”

It would, of course, be good to have the Lockerbie evidence tested again in a court of law. However, the one opportunity to do that was forfeited by al-Megrahi himself, when he chose to return to Libya rather than pursue his appeal. If he remains a convicted terrorist in the eyes of history, he only has himself to blame. 

[More about Magnus Linklater’s views on Lockerbie and the Megrahi conviction can be found here.]

An untested appeal is a disservice to justice

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater in today’s edition of The Times (behind the paywall). It reads as follows:]

Families of the 7/7 victims at least have resolution but in the case of Lockerbie the truth may now be buried for ever

For the victims of the 7/7 attacks in London, the memorials yesterday may have helped to draw a line under an atrocity that robbed families of those they loved and tore apart their lives. By now they have gathered most of the detail of what happened on that day. They know who did it; they have pieced together the last moments of those who died; the gaps in their knowledge have been steadily filled.

For the families of the Lockerbie victims, 26 years have passed without the same resolution. For some, such as Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, there is the visceral conviction that the wrong man was targeted and that the trail to Libya was a false one. Others, like the redoubtable Tam Dalyell, share that belief. It will stay with them for ever; nothing will convince them otherwise. For others — equally certain that the right man was convicted — there is the frustration of not knowing who ordered the attack. Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, found guilty on the evidence of placing the bomb on board a feeder flight from Luqa airport in Malta, could not, they believe, have acted alone. Who gave the orders remains an unanswered question.

Last week, three appeal judges rejected the final route open to those who wished to bring the Lockerbie case back before the courts. Only the family of a dead man can appeal his conviction, they ruled; campaigners for relatives of the victims have no such legal standing. Since al-Megrahi’s family in Libya were unwilling or unable to back the appeal, that marked the end of a long narrative of rumour, doubts, suspicions and accusations that reach back almost as far as the attack itself.

The story will not, of course, end here. Already campaigners have announced that they intend to pursue their quest “for justice”. Within hours of the decision, Robert Black, QC, a Lockerbie man who was partly responsible for the original trial being held in the Netherlands, criticised the Scottish legal system for being “too rigid” in refusing the appeal and said it was predictable that the judges had rejected it. They “bristled with discomfort”, he wrote, at the prospect of the case being brought back, in case the conviction fell apart. [RB: I have said or written no such thing. What I did do is post on this blog a letter from Thomas Crooks in The Scotsman where such comments are made.]

Actually, the reverse is true. Most lawyers, up to and including several lord advocates who have been involved in the prosecution case or have studied it in detail, would relish seeing it back in court — if only to subject the conspiracy theories to forensic cross-examination and to see them fall apart. Investigators have been labelled corrupt, stupid or simply blinkered for failing to challenge the prosecution case. They would welcome the chance to contest that view.

For all the heated controversy that has surrounded police and lawyers involved in putting together the case against al-Megrahi, none of the counter-theories have stood up to scrutiny. They have been paraded in books, TV programmes and articles, but they have always foundered on an absence of hard evidence. Suggestions, for instance, that the bomb was loaded at Heathrow rather than in Malta remain in the domain of speculation rather than of sustainable proof. The idea that the critical fragment of a timer linking the bomb to the Libyans was planted, altered, or swapped requires a leap that would be thrown out in any serious court of law. The explanations offered as to what al-Megrahi was doing in Malta at precisely the time that the bomb was loaded, and how it came to be wrapped in clothes bought in a local shop, have been as unconvincing as they have been varied.

The case that exonerates the Libyans, while at the same time attempting to explain away the hard forensic and circumstantial evidence that links them to the bombing, is almost as tortuous as the negotiations that persuaded Colonel Gaddafi to surrender the two men accused of the bombing to face a Scottish trial.

The Justice for Megrahi campaign relies ultimately on the lengthy report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which spent three years on the most detailed examination of the evidence ever carried out; which had the right — and exercised it — to summon every witness cited by those who argued that the conviction was unsafe; and which dismissed each and every counter-theory that came before it.

It did, however, produce six grounds for appeal, and it is on those that al-Megrahi’s defenders rely in arguing that the case was a miscarriage of justice. They centre, largely, on delays by the Crown in producing key pieces of evidence and on details of how the evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothes used to wrap the bomb, was handled. The campaigners claim that this evidence would have blown the prosecution case out of the water. That is unlikely. Most independent experts who have examined all, rather than part, of the evidence, say that none of the six grounds for appeal would have been sufficient to overturn the prosecution case.

The sad fact is that we will never know. The gulf that separates the sides in the story is too wide to be bridged. The proof may be out there in the turmoil that is Libya today. But even were it now to emerge, who would believe it? Time, in a case like this, does little to heal — it merely cements deep-seated suspicions. If nature abhors a vacuum, then an untested appeal is a disservice to justice. Without that final process, the truth is buried for ever.

[RB: Yet more misrepresentation by Magnus Linklater of the evidential flaws in the Megrahi conviction. His blinkered stance has been exposed time and again by John Ashton, amongst others.  Here is a link to one of Mr Ashton’s pieces demolishing the Linklater arguments: Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater.]

More Lockerbie errors by Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over an article posted today by John Ashton on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website.  It reads as follows:]

The following article by Magnus Linklater appears in the Scottish edition of The Times under the headline Lockerbie evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Mr Linklater’s writing on Lockerbie, it contains numerous distortions and factual errors.

The article follows in italics, interspersed with my comments.

It is time to extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long. For more than two decades critics have argued that Scottish police got the wrong man and that the prosecution of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was — perhaps deliberately — a botched job.

Yet last week, after a long and dogged investigation, the Crown Office announced that it had identified two further suspects, and was asking the government in Tripoli to allow it access to them in prison.

The investigation of the two new suspects was done primarily by Ken Dornstein. The key fact that Ken uncovered (the fact that Megrahi’s alleged associate Abu Agila Mas’ud was a suspect in the La Belle Disco bombing) was missed by the Crown Office for 18 years.

It may not succeed — Libya is in chaos at the moment — but it is clear that enough prima facie evidence has now emerged to perhaps home in on those who planned and helped execute a terrorist attack that killed 270 innocent people 27 years ago.

I agree that there is a prima facie case against Mas’ud, just as there was against Megrahi, and I hope he can be brought to trial. However, the case against him will rely on much of the discredited evidence that convicted Megrahi.

Those who have argued down the years that this line of inquiry is misguided, and that Libya was not responsible, have some hard questions to answer.

No one that I know of has argued that the Crown should not pursue lines of inquiry that point to Libya. Our criticism of the Crown is that it has failed to pursue exculpatory evidence.

Why would the Crown Office still be spending public money and using scarce resources to shore up a case that is — as its critics claim — fundamentally flawed?

One reason might be that, it is a way of keeping at bay the tide of scandal that surrounds Megrahi’s prosecution. Another question, which Mr Linklater fails to ask, is: why is the Crown not using its resources to consider the evidence that points away from Libya, such as the forensic evidence, that shows that the fragment of circuit board PT/35b did not, as the Crown alleged at trial, originate from a timer supplied to Libya by the Swiss company Mebo?

The central accusations that have sustained the conspiracy theorists is that evidence was manipulated by the CIA to accuse Libya rather than Syria or Iran; that information was withheld from defence lawyers representing al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing; and that Scottish judges presided over what they call “the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history”.

Wrong. The central allegation, which is in the realm of fact, not conspiracy, is that the Crown withheld exculpatory evidence. We also believe that it was a terrible miscarriage of justice, for which the judges must share the blame. On this point, Mr Linklater fails to report that the SCCRC ruled that the trial court judgment was unreasonable.

Ever since, they argue, the Scottish judicial system has connived in an attempt to prevent the truth coming out. Allowing al-Megrahi back to Libya on condition that he dropped his appeal was part of the strategy.

Wrong. It has never been seriously suggested by Megrahi’s mainstream supporters that the Scottish judicial system pressured Megrahi to drop his appeal. The pressure was purely political and came from the Scottish Government and/or the Libyan government.

Why, then, should that same legal process be obstinately nurturing a case that it must, by now, have conceded is wrong-headed? Perhaps, as one of its accusers has alleged, the explanation is sheer stupidity. Or, as another claims, it is desperately trying to cover its tracks by pursuing an empty investigation.

But perhaps it is simply following the evidence, and doing what every family of every Lockerbie victim wants it to, which is trying to get at the truth. The hard facts are that every countertheory, and every alternative thread of evidence, has been examined to distraction, and has led nowhere.

Wrong. The counter evidence relating to PT/35b (and much else) has not been pursued.

The time has come for those who cling to them to accept that the evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya rather than the myriad of misty theories and unsupported allegations on which their case has rested.

Wrong. The primary claims of Megrahi’s supporters are supported by a wealth of hard evidence, the great majority of which was gathered by the Scottish police.

Very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case

[What follows is the text of a contribution by John Ashton in The Café section of today’s edition of the Scottish Review:]

Does Magnus Linklater run his Lockerbie articles through reverse fact-checking software before submitting them? How else I wonder could almost every one he writes contain so many basic errors?

His latest piece accuses me of failing to address new evidence concerning Mr Megrahi's relationship with alleged bomber Abouagela Masud. No one reading my recent articles could have failed to miss the fact that I acknowledged the evidence's potential significance and expressed my wish that it be put before the court. I also set out the reasons to treat it with scepticism, which I suspect is Mr Linklater’s real beef. Being sceptical is not the same as failing to address, but maybe his software conflates the two.

Mr Linklater acknowledges that he hasn't looked in detail at the evidence assembled by Dr Morag Kerr, which demonstrates that the bomb originated from Heathrow, rather than Malta (the latter being where Megrahi and Masud flew from to Tripoli on the morning of the bombing). He doesn't need to, he says, because the evidence was considered and dismissed by the appeal court and Megrahi’s trial lawyers. Except it wasn’t. Dr Kerr has in fact gone far further than anyone else in considering the bomb’s origin. If Mr Linklater doesn’t believe me, I’ll be happy to send him the defence paperwork and copies of the appeal court transcripts. I challenge Mr Linklater to read Dr Kerr's book and tell us why it doesn't stand up.

Mr Linklater also asserts that '[for] a long time those who argued for the Heathrow theory placed a lot of weight on the evidence that there had been a break-in: a padlock had been cut, allowing access to a potential bomb-carrier. That theory, I believe, has now been abandoned, because the timing is not right'. Wrong again. The break-in may or may not be significant, but the evidence of Heathrow ingestion stands separately to it and has never been considered as reliant upon it. Furthermore, Dr Kerr, who is the most prominent proponent of Heathrow, has always said that the break-in was likely irrelevant.

Mr Linklater goes on to tell us: 'When you have a large and complex circumstantial case, everything has to to fit into a coherent picture. Picking one part and analysing it in detail is unconvincing if what you come up with ignores other contradictory evidence'. The trouble is, very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case that he is so keen to defend. Mr Megrahi allegedly bought the clothes from a Maltese shop that were placed in the bomb suitcase, yet the evidence shows that he looked nothing like the purchaser and that the clothes were bought when he was not on the island. The Crown claimed that a fragment of circuit board found among the clothes matched ones in timers supplied exclusively to Libya, but we now know that it did not. Most importantly, the Crown’s central claim that the bomb originated from Malta has been destroyed by Dr Kerr. Take Malta out of the equation and Megrahi's presence there, his lies and his shady associations are irrelevant.

None of this has been properly addressed by Mr Linklater in any of his numerous articles on Lockerbie. Apparently it's okay to ignore contradictory evidence when it's the Crown case that is contradicted.

Has Scotland really swallowed this crazy conspiracy?

[This is the headline over an article (behind the paywall) in today's edition of The Times by the newspaper's Scotland Editor, Magnus Linklater.  It reads as follows:]

A remarkable thing happened at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday. Eight senior Scottish judges were accused of presiding over a major miscarriage of justice in the Lockerbie affair — and a packed Scottish audience applauded.

That trust in the judiciary should have descended to this level says much about the way that the long saga of this terrorist atrocity has evolved. A determined campaign to absolve the convicted bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, of guilt, has succeeded to the extent that not only does it appear to have swayed public opinion in his favour, it has also undermined confidence in the most important legal process Scotland has been involved in since the Second World War.

The man who lodged the accusation was Hans Köchler, the UN observer at the Lockerbie trial. He believes that the judges, both at the original trial, and the appeal, were prepared to overlook flawed evidence to ensure a conviction. His fellow panel members, Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the bombing, and the writer John Ashton, who has ghosted al-Megrahi’s own account of the affair, agreed.

They believe not only that the evidence was deliberately manipulated at the trial, but that, from the outset, there was a conspiracy to point the finger at Libya and divert attention from the real instigator, Iran.

Yet that contention has never been challenged in any detail. Because the trial judges and the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service, are bound by convention to remain silent, the counter-argument has gone by default so that we have only heard one side of the case. The opportunity of a second appeal, which might have tested the allegations, was abandoned by al-Megrahi himself when he was released on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya.

But the case mounted by the pro-Megrahi campaigners is every bit as flawed as the one it seeks to dismantle. To demonstrate that Libya was framed, they have to prove that there was a calculated decision to do so. That decision would have had to lead to the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that.

This last contention is perhaps the most controversial. As Brian McConnachie, a senior Scottish QC, puts it: “The idea that eight Scottish judges took part in a deliberate manipulation of evidence for political reasons is simply preposterous.”

But for the conspiracy theorists, who have excluded reason and logic, the preposterous is all that remains.

[Mr Linklater made the same points at the EIBF session.  The audience was rightly unimpressed.  As Rolfe commented on this blog:

“Today, I wanted to tell Magnus Linklater he was an idiot. Miscarriages of justice happen all the time, and they don't need a huge conspiracy of eminent people who know the defendant is innocent but conspire to convict him anyway. They just need the cops to latch on to the wrong person and then see guilt in everything they say and everything they do. Then confirmation bias and groupthink do the rest. Although there was a lot of politicking surrounding Lockerbie which added to the pressure, especially the determination of the authorities that SOMEONE had to be fingered for the atrocity, there's nothing fundamentally different about it.

“Ask the Maguire Seven.”

Mr Linklater is also well aware, but chooses not to mention, that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, an independent and expert body, in 2007 (well after the eight judges mentioned by him had made their respective rulings) reported that on a factual issue absolutely central to Megrahi’s conviction the trial judges had reached a conclusion that, on the evidence, no reasonable court could have reached.]

Lockerbie evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater in today’s edition of The Times (subscription). It reads as follows:]

Every countertheory has been examined and has led nowhere

It is time to extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long. For more than two decades critics have argued that Scottish police got the wrong man and that the prosecution of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was — perhaps deliberately — a botched job.

Yet last week, after a long and dogged investigation, the Crown Office announced that it had identified two further suspects, and was asking the government in Tripoli to allow it access to them in prison. It may not succeed — Libya is in chaos at the moment — but it is clear that enough prima facie evidence has now emerged to perhaps home in on those who planned and helped execute a terrorist attack that killed 270 innocent people 27 years ago.

Those who have argued down the years that this line of inquiry is misguided, and that Libya was not responsible, have some hard questions to answer. Why would the Crown Office still be spending public money and using scarce resources to shore up a case that is — as its critics claim — fundamentally flawed?

The central accusations that have sustained the conspiracy theorists is that evidence was manipulated by the CIA to accuse Libya rather than Syria or Iran; that information was withheld from defence lawyers representing al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing; and that Scottish judges presided over what they call “the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history”.

Ever since, they argue, the Scottish judicial system has connived in an attempt to prevent the truth coming out. Allowing al-Megrahi back to Libya on condition that he dropped his appeal was part of the strategy.

Why, then, should that same legal process be obstinately nurturing a case that it must, by now, have conceded is wrong-headed? Perhaps, as one of its accusers has alleged, the explanation is sheer stupidity. Or, as another claims, it is desperately trying to cover its tracks by pursuing an empty investigation.

But perhaps it is simply following the evidence, and doing what every family of every Lockerbie victim wants it to, which is trying to get at the truth. The hard facts are that every countertheory, and every alternative thread of evidence, has been examined to distraction, and has led nowhere. The time has come for those who cling to them to accept that the evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya rather than the myriad of misty theories and unsupported allegations on which their case has rested.

[RB: Magnus Linklater is profoundly mistaken. The Justice for Megrahi campaign is not advancing “countertheories”. It is drawing attention to grave flaws in the evidence that resulted in the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi and to credible scientific and other evidence that further undermines the case against him. This evidence has been pointed out to Mr Linklater by John Ashton amongst others and he has been challenged to respond. Although promising to do so, he has not. All that he contributes is the assertion that the conviction was correct (because Scottish judges do not make mistakes, perhaps?) and that those who fail to swallow it hook, line and sinker are purblind conspiracy theorists. For Mr Linklater, as far as the Megrahi conviction is concerned all is for the best in the best of all possible legal systems. When the house of cards crumbles, as it assuredly will, Scotland’s Dr Pangloss will be deservedly left hanging his head in shame at his part in defending the indefensible.]

Questions that demand an answer

[What follows is the text of an item posted on this blog on this date in 2008:]

Lockerbie questions demand an answer

This is the headline over an article in today's issue of The Times by Magnus Linklater, the newspaper's Scotland Editor (and the editor of The Scotsman in the bygone days when that title was still a serious and responsible journal).

The article reads in part:

'You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise that nagging questions have gnawed away at the Lockerbie case since the first investigations began. The veteran campaigner, Tam Dalyell, who describes himself as a “professor of Lockerbie studies”, is convinced that neither al-Megrahi nor the Libyan Government had any involvement. He, along with the Rev John Mosey and Dr Jim Swire, who both lost daughters in the atrocity, believe that there has been a spectacular miscarriage of justice.

'They have raised questions about basic evidence in the original case. They have challenged eyewitness accounts offered by the chief prosecution witness, the Maltese shopowner who originally identified Megrahi as a suspect. They have raised doubts about the forensic evidence, and have pointed out that al-Megrahi, a civilised and intelligent man, is a most unlikely terrorist.

'Last weekend, their campaign was given fresh impetus when Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, reported that Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist responsible for some of the worst attacks of the 1970s and 1980s, may have been working for the Americans before the invasion of Iraq. Secret documents - the very phrase is a conspiracy idiom - written by Saddam Hussein's security services state that he had been colluding with the Americans trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qaeda. Abu Nidal's alleged suicide in 2002 may have been an execution by the Iraqis for his betrayal.

'From this tenuous connection stems the idea that the US security services may have had previous contacts within Abu Nidal's terrorist organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which many experts have long believed was the real perpetrator of Lockerbie.

'Mr Dalyell, who thinks there may be some weight to this theory, points to incidents such as notices that went up in the US Embassy in Moscow in the days before the bombing, warning diplomats not to travel on PanAm flights, and how senior South African figures were hauled off the plane before the flight, almost as if there had been advance warning.

'For me, this kind of evidence strays into the territory of “the second gunman theory” that bedevilled the Kennedy assassination. But there is one aspect of the case that I have never understood: why was it that, for the first 18 months of the investigation, Scottish police, US investigators and European security agents were convinced that the perpetrators were Abu Nidal's PFLP? And why was it that, in the run-up to the Gulf War, when good relations with Syria and Iran were important to Western interests, attention switched abruptly from Abu Nidal's terrorists, and on to Libya?

'These matters have never satisfactorily been explained, and in the interests of common justice they should be addressed. For the sake of the Flight 103 victims, for the wider interests of Western security, and for the man now dying in a Scottish prison, there is a need for a proper inquiry. It does not have to be as wideranging as the Warren Commission that examined the Kennedy case, but it does need to be international, and to have US backing. The appeal in Edinburgh next year will examine legal aspects of the case, but it cannot extend to the wider issues that demand resolution.

'Just possibly a new president taking office next January will find in his in-tray persuasive evidence pointing to a reopening of the case. There are powerful moral reasons for dusting it off and asking a basic question: who was responsible for Britain's worst terrorist outrage?'

[RB: Although this article is mentioned on Mr Linklater’s page on journalisted, it no longer appears on the website of The Times. The most recent article by Magnus Linklater in The Times can be read here. A very different stance is adopted. What has changed over the past seven years? Certainly no new evidence has emerged supporting Megrahi’s guilt. And much evidence has surfaced that further undermines the conviction. What is it, then, that has changed Mr Linklater’s mind? It’s a mystery.]

Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton in today’s edition of the Scottish Review.  It reads as follows:]

Earlier this month, together with other supporters of the 'Lockerbie bomber', Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, I found myself accused in the Scottish Review of being an obsessive conspiracy theorist, impervious to fact or reason. The article's author, The Times' columnist Magnus Linklater, believes that, far from being a stain on Scottish justice, Mr Megrahi's case 'triumphantly vindicates' it.

He argues that we prefer innuendo, myth, and half-truths to straight evidence and independent judgement, yet he displays exactly that preference. For good measure, he misrepresents his opponents, mangles logic and contradicts himself.

He ascribes to us two related conspiracy theories: firstly that the bombing was commissioned by Iran and carried out by the Syrian-based anti-PLO, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; and, secondly, that there was a grand conspiracy to shift blame to Megrahi and Libya, to which the police, the Crown Office, witnesses, judges, senior politicians and the intelligence services were all willing parties.

A word about that term 'conspiracy theory'. It's a cheap and nasty little put-down that herds honest truth-seekers into the same pen as the Elvis-was-abducted-by-aliens crowd, while relieving the user of the obligation to properly address the facts.

If the Iran/PFLP-GC scenario is a conspiracy theory, then so too is what the Crown posited at Megrahi's trial. That theory went as follows. On 21 December 1988 he placed a suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt. It contained a bomb concealed within a Toshiba BomBeat radio-cassette player and was labelled for New York on PA103. From Frankfurt it was transferred to a Heathrow then loaded onto PA103.

The suitcase was packed with clothes that Megrahi had bought in Malta on 7 December, from a shopkeeper called Tony Gauci. He took the case to Malta on 20 December and the following morning flew home on a flight whose check-in time overlapped with KM180's. Before leaving, he managed to place the suitcase on KM180 with the help of his former LAA colleague Lamin Fhimah, with whom he stood trial.

The two men fronted companies for the Libyan intelligence service, the JSO. One of them, ABH, co-owned by Megrahi, shared Zurich offices with electronics company Mebo, which, three years before Lockerbie, had supplied 20 unique electronic timers to Libya, one of which was used in the bomb.

As conspiracy theories go, it was pretty lousy. Mr Linklater acknowledges that the case was entirely circumstantial. What he ignores is that, towards the end of the trial, the Crown amended the indictment, quietly dropping many of the conspiracy claims, a tacit admission that much of its theory was unsupported.

What of the evidence? Mr Linklater's summary thoroughly exaggerates its strength: 'It placed al-Megrahi in Malta on the relevant date, travelling in the company of another intelligence operative, holding a false passport, and identified as the purchaser of clothing, later found in the case which held the explosives. Forensic evidence, in the form of a fragment of timer used to detonate the bomb, had been supplied to the Libyans by its Swiss manufacturer. Subsequent evidence also turned up some $1.8 million in al-Megrahi's personal bank account, calling into question the Libyan government's description of him as a low-ranking airline worker'.

To summarise more accurately: the evidence suggested that Megrahi was not in Malta on the clothes purchase date; there is no evidence that his travel companion was an intelligence operative and the evidence suggests that he only worked for the service in 1986 (the claim that he was a senior intelligence agent was made by discredited Libyan CIA informant Magid Giaka, who also alleged that Colonel Gaddafi was a freemason); he kept the false passport and handed it over at trial – hardly the actions of a terrorist; forensic evidence proves that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 Libyan timers; Megrahi never described himself as a low-ranking airline worker, rather he admitted that he used his connections to senior Libyan officials to make a nice living importing goods through ABH; had he testified at trial, the court would have been shown bank and company records that support his claim that all the bank transactions were legitimate. (...)

Many aspects of the Crown's theory were incredible. For example, Megrahi chose to buy clothes in a small shop and did so in a random manner, which seemed designed to bring attention to himself. Rather than compartmentalising the operation, as any sensible terrorist would, he returned to the island a fortnight later to plant the bomb. Furthermore, he chose to launch it on a three-stage journey from Malta's Luqa airport, where Mr Fhimah was well known, and which had unusually strict baggage procedures.

Libya's supposed motive was revenge for the US air raids of 1986. This element of the theory was contradicted by none other than Margaret Thatcher, who wrote in her autobiography that the 'Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place…There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years'.

Since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, no evidence has emerged publicly to suggest that Libya was involved in the bombing – this despite the fact that the opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil claimed to have proof of Gaddafi's involvement. (When pressed on the claim by the BBC, the best he could offer was that the government had paid for Megrahi's legal case.) Inconveniently for the Crown, some senior anti-Gaddafi figures have challenged claims of Libyan involvement.

In defending the official narrative, Mr Linklater offers the following king-sized non-sequitur: 'Even the Libyan government appears to accept that the origins of the plot lie in their country – it has appointed prosecutors to liaise with Scottish investigators in their search for further proof'. The appointment of prosecutors does not connote an acceptance of Libyan involvement.

Mr Linklater points out that my books barely touch upon another alleged case of Libyan aviation terrorism, the bombing of UTA flight 772 in 1989. The reason is simple: I am not an expert on it and am therefore happy to accept that Libya might have been to blame. (French journalist Pierre Péan, who is an expert, has, I am told, destroyed the official case.) The UTA bombers' use of a Samsonite suitcase and a timer, according to Mr Linklater, makes the attack 'strikingly similar' to Lockerbie, yet the Sikhs who blew up Air India flight 182 in 1985 also used a Samsonite case and a timer.

A more startling parallel, in my view, is the fact that the forensic cases both rested on tiny fragments of the alleged timers recovered from a vast crash site, which were analysed by the same discredited FBI expert, and traced to a shady European supplier. And, as with Lockerbie, the prosecution rested upon the erratic testimony of a single witness.

What, then, of the Iran/PFLP-GC conspiracy theory? Mr Linklater ascribes it to Megrahi's supporters, yet the Justice for Megrahi campaign, to which most of the supporters are signatories, is deliberately neutral on the matter. For reasons I am about to explain, however, as I cautioned in my book Megrahi: You are my Jury, the case against these alternative suspects may turn out to be as flawed as the one against Megrahi – a statement that undermines Mr Linklater's characterisation of me as wholly wedded to this counter theory.

Iran had a powerful motive: revenge for the US Navy's shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655, which killed 290 six months before Lockerbie. Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that Iran hired the PFLP-GC. Another, written months after the investigation had switched to Libya, stated that Iran's interior minister had paid the bombers $10 million. In October 1988 a PFLP-GC cell in West Germany was caught by the police planning an attack on western airlines. Its bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, confessed that he had made five barometrically triggered bombs, two of which he had concealed within a mono Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players. The Lockerbie Toshiba BomBeat was stereo.

According to Khreesat, a senior group member and airline security expert known as Abu Elias evaded arrest. Less than three weeks before the bombing, without naming the PFLP-GC, a US State Department security bulletin warned of an imminent attack by anti-PLO Palestinian terrorists based in Europe. It added: '[Targets] specified are Pan Am airlines and US mil[itary] bases'.

Apologists for the official line have claimed that the intelligence documents merely recycled old and unreliable intelligence, yet a deep-cover CIA asset called Richard Fuisz was told by numerous high ranking Syrian officials as late as 1995 (four years after the two Libyans were indicted) that the PFLP-GC's leader, Ahmed Jibril, was taking credit for the bombing. These sources, said Fuisz in a 2001 court hearing, the scope of which was severely limited by the CIA, interacted with Jibril on a constant basis.

Mr Linklater wrote in an email to me: 'I am amazed that you should be touting shadowy CIA agents like Fuisz…whose evidence would never stand up in court'. He stopped short of calling Fuisz a liar, because there is nothing to suggest that he is, but the pejorative verb and adjective carried the innuendo that neither of us were to be trusted. How does Mr Linklater know that Fuisz's evidence would not stand up? If the CIA had loosened its leash on Fuisz, he could have named names, and provide leads and evidence that would have been accepted in court.

On to that second conspiracy theory. According to Mr Linklater's Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: 'the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that'.

The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Megrahi's supporters, have ever made such a claim.

To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful.

In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: 'I've been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof'. Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Megrahi's supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee has formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.

The US government was motivated to exonerate Iran, I believe, because the Iranians knew where the Iran-Contra skeletons lay and also held sway over the US hostages held in Lebanon – whose safe return was an obsession of the Reagan-Bush White House. Another obsession was Libya. As Watergate journalist Bob Woodward revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency's history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation – that is, lying and fakery – was at its core.

The Lockerbie investigation was supposedly driven by old-fashioned detective work, but, as we have learned over the years, behind the scenes the CIA played a key role. We now know that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 timers to Libya. Is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted it in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing?

I have done many months of my own old-fashioned detective work among the hundreds of people who searched the crash site. They witnessed American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, CIA agents searching the site without police supervision, and substantial drug and cash finds – all things that have been officially denied. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should reveal them. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should do some door knocking of his own.

The core of his argument is that we have dismissed hard evidence in favour of speculation, yet our chief concern is not the suspicion that blame was shifted. Rather, it is that the evidence that convicted Megrahi was anything but hard, and that the hard evidence that should have acquitted him was withheld.

Our case is built on facts, not speculation – these facts in particular:

1. The trial court judgement, delivered by three of Scotland's most senior judges, was deemed unreasonable by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, indeed the commission came as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict itself was unreasonable.

2. The SCCRC discovered that the Crown had withheld numerous items of evidence that, in its view, would have been important to Megrahi's defence. No fewer than four of the SCCRC's six appeal referral grounds concerned such undisclosed evidence.

3. During the trial, two senior prosecutors viewed the previously redacted extracts of CIA cables concerning the key Crown witness and CIA informant Magid Giaka. They reported back to their boss, the Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, that there was nothing within them that might assist the defence, and he relayed the assurance to the court. However, when that material was later disclosed to the defence, it was found to contain numerous damaging details, including the fact that his CIA handlers had grown so dissatisfied with him that they had been on the verge of sacking him. The revelations prompted Fhimah's leading counsel, Richard Keen QC, to comment that he found it 'inconceivable' that the Crown could have considered the material had no bearing on the case. The SCCRC noted that Mr Boyd's assurance to the court was 'difficult to understand'. (...)

4. The Crown Office allowed the police to obtain a $2m reward for the most important prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, despite the payment of such rewards being against its own rules (a subject on which I have also written for the Scottish Review). The Crown withheld the results of forensic tests, which had been supervised by the chief prosecution forensic scientist, that directly contradicted his crucial assertion that the timer fragment was 'similar in all respects' to the boards used in the timers supplied to Libya.

5. Despite being under a legal obligation to investigate all leads, not only those that point to Libya, the police and Crown Office have failed to interview witnesses who can attest to the fact that the fragment could not have originated from the Libyan timers.

6. When, in 2012, the committee of Justice for Megrahi submitted a summary of their allegations of criminal misconduct in confidence to the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, and invited him to appoint an independent investigator to consider them, MacAskill instead passed them to the Crown Office and told them to take the allegations to the police, even though Crown Office officials and police officers were named in the allegations. Despite having seen neither the detailed allegations, nor the supporting evidence, the Crown Office immediately declared publicly that they were 'without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded' and that the committee had been 'deliberately misleading', i.e. were liars.

These are all facts, not opinions or theories. Mr Linklater fails to acknowledge most of them and the rest he brushes over lightly. I believe that they add up to the greatest scandal in Scotland's post-devolution era. The Crown Office's response to the Justice for Megrahi committee's allegations is especially disturbing. The allegations remain unproven and their subjects are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but they were made in good faith by people of intelligence and integrity, among them a former police superintendent, the former parish priest of Lockerbie and the father of one of the Lockerbie victims. However, the Crown Office's petulant and partisan response excluded from the outset any prospect of prosecutions.

Rather than engaging with the SCCRC report's awkward contents, Mr Linklater has used it to mow down his straw men of conspiracy nuts. In a Times article he claimed that the report 'triumphantly vindicates' the justice system. This is like suggesting that the emergency services who save lives at a train crash are a triumphant vindication of rail safety.

He asserts that the SCCRC disposes of most of our 'cherished theories' in particular claims that evidence had been manipulated by the police. These allegations emanated not from Megrahi's supporters, but from a former police officer known as the Golfer. I have also been critical of the Golfer. Strange, then, that Mr Linklater should have inferred that I cherish the Golfer's claims.

He accuses us of rejecting parts of the report that don't suit us, when we in fact accept most of them. But if, as we believe, the report is a curate's egg, are we not entitled to say so? Parts of it are demonstrably poor; for example, the commission conducted a lengthy review of the evidence concerning the timer fragment, yet failed to uncover the crucially important fact – based upon the evidence of Crown witnesses – that it could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers. Its investigation of events at the crash site was very limited and it failed to interview any of the civilian and military witnesses who attest to the events and finds that I have described above.

It is not only Mr Linklater's conspiracy theorists who don't accept all the SCCRC's findings: neither did the lawyers who led Megrahi's second appeal (which, sadly, he felt compelled to abandon in order to secure compassionate release). They also contended that there were serious failings in the conduct of his defence and that the defence team was mistaken in not leading certain evidence in relation to, inter alia, the PFLP-GC, Heathrow airport and Tony Gauci.

I am not a lawyer and therefore make no judgement on the defence team, who have vigorously contested these claims. But to imply, as Mr Linklater does, that it is a matter of uncontested fact that they properly evaluated all the evidence is simply misleading.

Mr Linklater is apparently oblivious to the contradictions in his own arguments, with occasionally hilarious consequences. For example, having dismissed my summary of the police investigation as 'little more than a caricature', he delivers this cartoon-like portrait of his antagonists: 'Once seized with the virus of suspicion, nothing in the way of fact or reason will deter those who are determined to prove their case'.

He berates me for using the phrase 'we may never know', declaring that he has always distrusted it as 'it is a means of dropping a hint without ever revealing whether there is any truth in it'. How marvellous that he later writes: 'The SCCRC raised questions about the identification, which, it determined, were grounds for appeal. Whether that would have overturned the verdict we may never know'.

The hint dropped by this particular 'we may never' is that the verdict would have stood. To drive home the point he claims that Megrahi might have been convicted, even if he had not been correctly identified as the clothes purchaser. If he has properly read the court's judgement, he should know that the 'identification' – not an identification at all, of course – was central to the conviction. But maybe he hasn't properly read it, because, as he acknowledges, he is not a Lockerbie specialist. This is especially apparent in his account of the Heathrow evidence, which has come under fresh scrutiny thanks to the publication of the book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by another of his targets, Dr Morag Kerr.

Mr Linklater's Times article of 21 December highlighted an assertion by Mr Megrahi's trial counsel, Bill Taylor QC, that the Heathrow evidence was 'tested to destruction'. An unnamed member of the defence team added the suggestion that the bomber had bought clothes in Malta then planted the bomb at Heathrow: 'just doesn’t stack up'. Again, this was odd, because during his final submissions to the court Mr Taylor argued, quite rightly, that Maltese clothing did not prove the bomb's origin. Clothes bought weeks earlier had plenty of time to leave the island prior to the bombing.

Mr Linklater says that the implication that the bomber bought clothes in Malta and planted the bomb at Heathrow 'requires a heavy suspension of disbelief'. The idea that the same person bought the clothes and planted the bomb is, I agree, far fetched (although this is what the Crown posited at trial), but is not the suggestion that the bombers used the clothes to lay a false trail to Malta. As Mr Taylor asked during his final submissions: 'If the clothes buyer had intended to place the bomb bag on to a plane at Luqa, having regard to the high level of risk of detection, wouldn't one have expected him to remove the clothing labels?'.

Mr Linklater claims that the SCCRC found the evidence of a Heathrow bomb 'so thin' that it did not bother to examine it. What the SCCRC actually said was that it did not examine the Heathrow evidence because it received no submissions on the matter, and because it received substantial attention at trial. The evidence we found when preparing Megrahi's second appeal was, in the view of senior counsel, significant and should have been before the trial court. It is clear, both from Dr Kerr's analysis and the second appeal team's, that the trial court was not given a clear view of the Heathrow evidence. (I wrote more about this in an open letter to Mr Linklater, to which he has so far failed to respond.)

Mr Linklater's biggest howler is his assertion that Dr Kerr and I claim that the bombing was linked to a break-in that occurred at Heathrow 15 hours earlier. We do no such thing, indeed we both accept that the break-in may well be wholly irrelevant. Mr Linklater points out, as I have previously, that the matter was considered and rejected at Mr Megrahi's first appeal, but this does not excuse the Crown's failure to disclose it.

For all that he insults me as an irrational conspiracy theorist, we should be grateful to Mr Linklater for his contributions. The Megrahi case deserves public debate and, until he emerged as the voice of the 'it-couldn't-happen-here' tendency, that debate was very one-sided. When boiled down, his defence of the conviction is that the Crown case 'has been tested and re-tested under the strict conditions imposed by a court of law', whereas the counter evidence has not. Yet he knows that court scrutiny is no guarantee of a conviction's safety.

The most notorious miscarriage of justice cases, like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, were only resolved when the courts accepted the evidence and arguments of the victims' supporters. Which begs a big question: when those convictions still stood, but their weakness were widely known, would Mr Linklater have defended them with the equivalent vigour? As he might say, we may never know.

John Ashton is a writer, researcher and TV producer. He has studied the Lockerbie case for 18 years and from 2006 to 2009 was a researcher with Megrahi's legal team. His book 'Megrahi: You Are My Jury', is published by Birlinn  

[An expanded version of this article can be found on Mr Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury website.]