Bomb-maker Khreesat posts Lockerbie photos on Facebook

[A report headlined ‘Bomb-maker’ brags about El Al blast, posts Lockerbie photos has been published today on the website of The Times of Israel.  It reads as follows:]

The man investigators initially believed built the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie 25 years ago maintains a Facebook page on which he recently posted pictures of the Lockerbie bombing and promised to write about the circumstances of the attack.

Marwan Khreesat, who now lives in Jordan, was arrested but bizarrely released by German police two months before the Lockerbie bombing as part of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command cell found in possession of bombs designed to blow up airliners.

He writes frequent posts condemning Israel, the Palestinian Authority for dealing with Israel, the Assad regime and others. Late last year, he also castigated PFLP-GC leader Ahmad Jibril, for whom he allegedly built several bombs used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s, accusing Jibril of abandoning the Palestinian cause in siding with the Assad regime.

Last week, Khreesat posted an entry boasting about the PFLP-GC’s bombing of an El Al plane from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972, describing the attack as “a challenge to the Israeli intelligence agents who are responsible for searching luggage and everything that goes on a plane.”

It was subsequently established that the 1972 El Al bomb — designed to explode when the plane reached a certain altitude — had been hidden in a record player which two British women had been duped into carrying by two Arab men who were later arrested. Although the bomb exploded, the pilot was able to make an emergency landing. ”It was a successful blow against the Israeli enemy,” Khreesat wrote in a March 14 Facebook post, in which he also described spending time with Jibril in Rome as they waited for the attack to unfold.

In several posts relating to Lockerbie in recent weeks, Khreesat recalled his arrest two months before the December 21, 1988, bombing and posted pictures of the destroyed cockpit of the 747 after the explosion, the painstakingly reconstructed parts of the plane wreckage, and a radio-recorder like the one that held the bomb. He also asked a series of unanswered questions about the attack. “Who did the operation?” he asked in a post on the 25th anniversary of the blast. “Israel? Iran? Libya? Who carried the Toshiba explosive device [in which the bomb was hidden]? … Did the explosive device come from Malta airport like the American intelligence agencies say?… When will these riddles be solved.”

Last October, Khreesat posted that he intended to “write about Pan Am 103,” including “who was on the flight and the circumstances of the incident.”

British and American investigators initially believed that the PFLP-GC had blown up the plane, in which all 259 people on board and 11 more on the ground were killed, and suggested the attack had been ordered by Iran to avenge the mistaken downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf six months earlier in which 290 people were killed.

Later, however, suspicion switched to Libya, and to a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. Megrahi was convicted and jailed in 2001 after a trial in which his fellow alleged Libyan conspirator, Lamin Fhima, was acquitted. He died in 2012 still insisting on his innocence.

In 2007, a Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found a series of grounds to justify concerns that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The process by which Megrahi was identified has been widely criticized, and the authenticity of a timer fragment central to the implication of Libya in the plot has been increasingly questioned.

An Al Jazeera documentary last week implicated the PFLP-GC in the bombing, and a former Iranian intelligence officer, Abolghasem Mesbahi, who defected to Germany in the 1990s, alleged that Iran had commissioned it, stating that “Iran decided to retaliate [for the downing of its own Flight 655] as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Khreesat originally agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, the program-makers said, but later refused to do so, and was quoted in the film saying, “All my problems are because of Lockerbie.”

Release of Megrahi "the only uplifting chapter in the whole wretched story"

[What follows is taken from an article by novelist and journalist Paul Thomas published on 15 March in The New Zealand Herald:]

It was grimly coincidental that, as the world's media embarked on a frenzy of speculation over the fate of MH370, drawing parallels with previous out of the ordinary disasters, the 1988 Lockerbie bombing was back in the headlines.

The only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am 103 in which 270 people died was Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Now an Iranian intelligence agent who defected to Germany is claiming that the bombing was conceived and financed by Iran and contracted out to a Syrian-backed terrorist group as revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner with 290 people on board by the US guided missile carrier Vincennes. (Journalist Robert Fisk, an old and expert Middle East hand, put forward this very scenario some years ago.)

The facts of the matter are profoundly depressing. The US has never admitted wrongdoing or issued an apology; when the captain of the Vincennes retired, he was awarded the Legion of Merit. The conduct and outcome of al-Megrahi's trial were deplored by independent observers and criticised by a review panel.

The CIA apparently knew early on who'd masterminded and carried out the Lockerbie bombing, but for obscure geopolitical reasons, the US and Britain chose to blame Libya.

And the only uplifting chapter in the whole wretched story - the Scottish government's decision to release the terminally ill al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds - was greeted with widespread condemnation.

Dr Jim Swire invites US Lockerbie relatives to join in new appeal application

[Here is a comment sent by Dr Jim Swire to the Bangor Daily News in response to yesterday’s article by Gwynne Dyer:]

Congratulations on a realistic article straddling the truth. My daughter Flora was murdered at Lockerbie, and since the Megrahi trial I have known that justice had been perverted by politics.

It is not however true that the case is closed. Within weeks I and certain other relatives will be requesting the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission for a further appeal against the verdict. Why? Partly because knowing him innocent, Megrahi became my friend, so I owe him that. Partly because routine Western subversion of justice by politics must be stopped; besides the verdict is the weapon of choice for those obstructing our access to the truth. My daughter Flora would have wanted the truth known.

Any US relatives interested in joining in are welcome to get in touch.

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over an article by Gwynne Dyer published today on the website of the Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine, USA). It reads as follows:]

They lied, they’re still lying, and they’ll go on lying until Libya calms down enough to allow a thorough search of its archives. That’s what intelligence agencies do, and being angry at them for lying is like being angry at a scorpion for stinging. But we now KNOW that they lied about the Libyans planting the bomb on Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan airline official who was convicted of placing the bomb aboard the plane and sentenced to 27 years in prison by a special international court in 2001, was freed from jail in 2009 and sent home, allegedly dying from cancer and with only three months to live. He eventually did die three YEARS later, but it was a very peculiar thing for the Scottish government to do.

Megrahi was in a Scottish jail because Pan Am 103, en route from London to Detroit, had blown up over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven in the village below. But he clearly wasn’t dying when he was freed, and he had served less than a third of his sentence.

And there was something even more disturbing about the case. As a condition of his release, Megrahi was required to drop an appeal against his conviction that had been granted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007. [RB: Abandonment was not a condition of compassionate release. But it was a condition of prisoner transfer, which had also been applied for and which the Scottish authorities insisted must be dealt with contemporaneously with the compassionate release application even though lodged before it.  So perhaps it boils down to the same thing.]

The SCCRC listed no fewer than six grounds for serious concern about Megrahi’s conviction, including the fact that the US Justice Department made an undisclosed payment of $3 million to two Maltese citizens whose evidence had linked Megrahi with the suitcase that contained the bomb. If the appeal had gone ahead, Megrahi’s conviction would probably have been quashed.

That would have been deeply embarrassing for the Scottish authorities, especially since the evidence suggested there had been a deliberate attempt to frame the Libyan. But they did have the power to delay the hearing of his appeal for a very long time, and al-Megrahi was not a well man. So one can imagine a bargain being struck: his freedom for his silence.

Megrahi never stopped protesting his innocence, but he did withdraw his appeal, so the new evidence was never heard in court, his conviction was never canceled, and nobody was embarrassed. But why did the intelligence agencies pick on him in the first place.

Because they had to abandon their first working hypothesis, which was that Pan Am 103 was destroyed in late 1988 as tit-for-tat Iranian revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iran Air plane with 290 people aboard by the US warship Vincennes earlier that year.

Since the Iranians didn’t have people in the right places with the right skills to do this job, US intelligence calculated, they paid some Palestinian terrorists to do it. The US even fingered the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, headed by Ahmed Jibril, as the ones who took the contract.

Nevertheless, somebody had to be punished or the intelligence services would look incompetent. The people who carried out the bombing for Iran had made some rudimentary attempts to put the blame on Libya, and the security services now started using that evidence to frame Megrahi. The evidence was full of holes, but the Libyan’s defense team did a poor job of exposing them, and he was convicted anyway.

The reason his defense team did so badly may have been that the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, had made a deal: in order to be released from a crippling trade embargo, he would admit the blame for the Pan Am bombing and pay compensation to the families of the victims. For that deal to stand, Megrahi had to go down. A few threats to his family back in Libya would have persuaded him to sabotage his own defense. [RB: I regard this scenario as straining credulity well beyond breaking point.]

So the original hypothesis was correct, and the Western security services probably always knew it was correct. They don’t care; the case is closed, and with Megrahi’s appeal canceled it will never be re-opened. But it is worth noting that he was an innocent man, not a mass murderer, and that his life was cynically destroyed by the same people who brought us the invasion of Iraq, mass surveillance, and so much more.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose commentary is published in 45 countries.

Why the focus on Libya as the perpetrator of Lockerbie?

[An article headed Chaos: the complete disarray of the now “free” Libya published yesterday on the website of American magazine The Source contains the following:]

Libya finds itself in a state of complete disarray increasing day by day in the three years following the coup of its notorious leader, Mu’ammar Al-Gaddafi.  Just last week the former prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was voted out of office by parliament and has fled the country.

Currently, the common place rule of law is scattered, finding itself in the hands of violent and fiercely independent militias based in Misrata, in western Libya, who have launched an offensive against eastern rebels that could very well spark an all out civil war very soon.

This picture reflects an uncanny resemblance to Iraq, but without the major US or NATO oversight, since the US largely sat behind the scenes as a rebel-led overthrow of the former Libyan government took place.  Nonetheless, it still paints a valid picture of the current status of several countries in the Middle East today, following the 2011 Arab Spring.  Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria – all countries either currently or successfully having attempted to overthrow leaders – all have one common factor or potential possibility:  complete and utter chaos playing out in all out civil war due to the lack of central government.

It was also last week, that Al-Jazeera had broadcast the final piece of a 3 year investigation of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing that killed 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland, which revealed information disproving the long believed fact that Libya – more specifically Al-Gaddafi – was responsible for the crime.  This information was revealed by former Iranian intelligence officer Abolghasem Mesbahi, who later defected from the country, and has now confirmed that it was not Libya who committed the bombing, but Iran.  For decades the only official conviction in the plot was Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was sent to prison in Scotland, and famously released in 2009 under compassionate grounds due to terminal prostate cancer.  He died in 2012, still denouncing his conviction, and his family is appealing the conviction to this day. [RB: There is no current appeal. It has, however, been announced that a group of UK Lockerbie relatives intends to apply to the SCCRC for a further appeal.]

This new information proves incredibly strongly beyond any reasonable doubt that al-Megrahi was indeed innocent, and that Iran, working through the Palestinian Front for The Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), ordered the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the US navy earlier in 1988.  US Naval reports claimed they had mistook the plane for a belligerent F-14 fighter jet.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Mesbahi states, “Iran decided to retaliate as soon as possible. The decision was made by the whole system in Iran and confirmed by Ayatollah Khomeini.  The target of the Iranian decision makers was to copy exactly what’s happened to the Iranian Airbus. Everything exactly same, minimum 290 people dead. This was the target of the Iranian decision makers.”

The Crown Office, the prosecution service for Scotland, had even previously noted that the PFLP-GC was allegedly involved at the original Lockerbie trial. [RB: It was the defence, not the prosecution, that sought to incriminate the PFLP-GC at the Zeist trial. But it is certainly the case that, until the focus shifted in 1990, the evidence amassed by the Lockerbie investigators led them to the conclusion that the PFLP-GC was responsible.] US Defense Intelligence Agency reports at the time also confirmed the leader of the PFLP-GC was paid to carry out the attacks.  So, with high ranking and politically esteemed individuals in both the US and Scotland reaching the conclusion that it was in fact Iran and not Libya who carried out the attacks, why would officials fail to accuse the real perpetrator?

Looking much deeper into the Libyan coup, and the overall dissatisfaction of Gaddafi for decades leading up to it, it becomes clear that the reason the trigger was pulled on Gaddafi was not only his many tyrannical policies, unjust rule, and the supposed responsibility of the Pan Am 103 attacks – those were just surface reasons fueling a more in depth cause.  It was really much simpler… Oil.

Politicians and officials knew truth about Lockerbie but still happily lied about it

[An article by Patrick Cockburn in today’s Independent on Sunday contains the following:]

The Libyan former prime minister Ali Zeidan fled last week after parliament voted him out of office. (...)

Militias based in Misrata, western Libya, notorious for their violence and independence, have launched an offensive against the eastern rebels in what could be the opening shots in a civil war between western and eastern Libya.

Without a central government with any real power, Libya is falling apart. And this is happening almost three years after 19 March 2011 when the French air force stopped Mu'ammer Gaddafi's counter-offensive to crush the uprising in Benghazi. (...)

A striking feature of events in Libya in the past week is how little interest is being shown by leaders and countries which enthusiastically went to war in 2011 in the supposed interests of the Libyan people. President Obama has since spoken proudly of his role in preventing a "massacre" in Benghazi at that time. But when the militiamen, whose victory Nato had assured, opened fire on a demonstration against their presence in Tripoli in November last year, killing at least 42 protesters and firing at children with anti-aircraft machine guns, there was scarcely a squeak of protest from Washington, London or Paris.

Coincidentally, it was last week that Al-Jazeera broadcast the final episode in a three-year investigation of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988. For years this was deemed to be Gaddafi's greatest and certainly best-publicised crime, but the documentary proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of carrying out the bombing, was innocent. Iran, working through the Palestinian Front for The Liberation of Palestine – General Command, ordered the blowing up of Pan Am 103 in revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane by the US navy earlier in 1988.

Much of this had been strongly suspected for years. The new evidence comes primarily from Abolghasem Mesbahi, an Iranian intelligence officer who later defected and confirmed the Iranian link. The US Defense Intelligence Agency had long ago reached the same conclusion. The documentary emphasises the sheer number of important politicians and senior officials over the years who must have looked at intelligence reports revealing the truth about Lockerbie, but still happily lied about it.

It is an old journalistic saying that if you want to find out government policy, imagine the worst thing they can do and then assume they are doing it. Such cynicism is not deserved in all cases, but it does seem to be a sure guide to western policy towards Libya.

Why politicians will ignore Lockerbie truth

[This is the headline over an editorial in today’s edition of the Maltese newspaper The Times.  It reads as follows:]

When Jim Swire, father of one of the Lockerbie victims, visited Malta last November he told this newspaper the truth about the 1988 terrorist attack will one day come out. “The question is whether I will be in a box by then,” the indefatigable campaigner said.

While the truth over the atrocity that killed Dr Swire’s daughter and 269 others in 1988 might never be fully admitted by the powers that be, an Al Jazeera documentary, aired last Wednesday, made a strong case for the increasing number of those who believe Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

The documentary squarely pointed fingers at Iran, which wanted to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US navy ship in July 1988.

The Al Jazeera investigation also debunked the official story, on the basis of which the late Mr Al Megrahi had been jailed, that the bomb was loaded at Malta before being transferred to the ill-fated aircraft at Heathrow.

The theory is that the Lockerbie bombing was commissioned to a Palestinian terrorist group, the PFLP-GC, which had a cell in Malta at the time. The terrorist attack could have been plotted from a St Julian’s flat but the bomb was loaded at Heathrow, not Malta, as the court concluded, according to the documentary.

It might be 25 long years since the bombing occurred but the questions are now more pertinent than ever.

Did high-level involvement put obstacles to the truth by shifting the blame onto Libya? Was the CIA aware of who the guilty party was but then decided to go for a small pariah State for its geo-political motives?

Did it work the case in reverse so that the wrong man would be convicted? Did it merely coerce a Maltese witness with money to point at Mr Al Megrahi?

The American and British governments will undoubtedly dismiss the new findings as conspiracy theories and stick to the Camp Zeist trial conclusions. Despite the source of these claims, Scotland’s Crown Office said it was unmoved.

But unless the Western world wants to make a mockery of justice, then the case should be reopened. The question is: who will instigate it?

The world cannot seriously expect the US or Britain to push to reopen the case. With the US and Europe desperate to reach a new nuclear deal with a seemingly more open Teheran regime, discussions about Iran’s role in the Lockerbie tragedy at this stage will not be politically welcome.

Why would the US government want to admit it helped put the wrong man behind bars for Europe’s worst terrorist attack? And what about the money Muammar Gaddafi was forced to pay to the victims’ families to work his way out through tough sanctions?

Even the Maltese government, whose foreign minister declared in no uncertain terms that Mr Al Megrahi was a scapegoat, said it would not push to reopen the case.

In reality, there are so many potentially embarrassing banana skins.

But the pieces which were unravelled this week fit too well to allow us to merely shrug and move on.

This means it is down to the victims’ families to take the case forward and file the appeal Mr Al Megrahi wanted to start before he was released from a Scottish prison and sent home to die.

While it is understandable that our government does not want to ruffle any allied country’s feathers, it should collaborate in any way possible to facilitate any information our police and security services might still be privy to.

I do know for certain Megrahi never got a fair trial

[A letter from Tom Minogue headed Rough justice is published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

Thomas Crooks (Letters, 14 March) says the Scottish legal system is blind to justice and the Crown Office Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is acting out of a desperate distraction by searching in the rubble of Libya for evidence of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi’s accomplices.

Given the lawless situation in Libya, which deteriorates by the day, I doubt the COPFS will have any further photo opportunities in that regard.

So I don’t expect we will see our Lord Advocate in the media again posing in front of that enormous bookcase, full of weighty, leather-bound, legal text books, announcing his latest initiative to bolster the Megrahi conviction by visiting Libya on the trail of his supposed accomplices. I don’t pretend to know if Megrahi is innocent of the crime or not, but I do know for certain he never got a fair trial by the Scottish Court in the Hague. [sic]

My certainty in this regard was confirmed when the UN-appointed observer to the trial reported that there were unidentified US Justice Department people in the dock of the court apparently supervising the COPFS prosecution team.

Independence gone.

Any lingering doubts I may have had were allayed when our then Lord Advocate stated that the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, was “an apple short of a picnic; not quite the full shilling”.

We now know Gauci was every penny in the shilling, because he received a reward for his testimony reported to be $2million (ex-diplomat Craig Murray says this was only the first instalment of $7m reward) and his brother got $1m too, making the prosecution totally flawed.

If the COPFS travels to Libya with promises of rewards in the region of those doled out at to the Gaucis, it may just manage to get a host of further witnesses to testify regarding Megrahi’s accomplices.

Just a thought: it couldn’t add to the damage already inflicted on the reputation of our legal system, could it?

Flight 370 families deserve the truth, just as Lockerbie families do

[This is the headline over an article by Niall Fraser in today’s edition of the South China Morning Post.  It reads as follows:]

Barring dramatic overnight news, by the time you read this, more than a week will have passed since a Boeing 777 jetliner vanished over the South China Sea.

Our hearts go out those directly involved, the 239 souls on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and their loved ones waiting for news, who must be in a living nightmare.

The wait for facts and an explanation of what has happened must be as unbearable as it is heartbreaking.

It will come as no comfort to them, but they are not alone. And - at the risk of sounding insensitive - not even time might tell.

More than 25 years ago, on the evening of December, 21, 1988, a terrorist bomb blew apart Detroit-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, killing 259 passengers and crew instantly. A further 11 people perished on the ground as burning wreckage and aviation fuel rained down on the tiny town of Lockerbie.

The man many - but by no means all - believe carried out the atrocity, Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, has already been jailed, released and died of cancer.

Yesterday, a documentary on the Al-Jazeera news network cast credible doubt over Megrahi's conviction, reporting that the bombing was carried out by Palestinian terrorists on the orders of Tehran as an act of revenge for the downing of a passenger jet full of Iranian civilians by the United States months earlier.

This theory is not new. Less than two weeks after Lockerbie, the newspaper I then worked for in Scotland reported the same story. In fact, it was a widely believed to be a credible turn of events, until, that is, it fell victim to the geopolitical machinations of the United States and United Kingdom, who "discovered" evidence that Libya - a much smaller and convenient suspect - did it.

Almost three decades have passed since Lockerbie and grieving families still ache for the truth. The nearest they came was not long after the Iranian theory was ditched in favour of Libya.

At a meeting in London, Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora, at Lockerbie was told [RB: It was actually Martin Cadman who was told] by a senior UK official: "Our government knows who did it, the US government knows who did it, but they're never going to tell you."

The families of flight MH370 must be given the truth - whatever it is.

Was the wrong man convicted for the Lockerbie bombing?

This is the headline over a long review (three pages, nine columns) by Jennifer May in Ireland's Big Issue of Dr Morag Kerr's Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. Unlike most of the journalistic outpourings following the recent Aljazeera documentary, this review appreciates just how completely and comprehensively Dr Kerr has destroyed the foundation of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi, namely that the bomb suitcase was ingested at Luqa Airport in Malta. Through a rigorous analysis of the luggage loaded on container AVE4041, Morag Kerr conclusively demonstrates that the Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb was already in that container before the feeder flight from Frankfurt (which supposedly contained an unaccompanied suitcase from Malta) arrived at Heathrow. It was not Luqa's security that was subverted, but Heathrow's. And whoever subverted it, it was not Abdelbaset Megrahi. 

The review can be read here.

Crown Office defence of a crumbling conviction

[Blind to justice is the headline over a letter from Thomas Crooks in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

In response to the detailed revelations in the Al-Jazeera documentary attributing responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing to Iran and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), the Crown Office said: “There is nothing new in these claims and some of the accounts of the evidence are inaccurate” (your report, 12 March).

The claims included US intelligence cables which read: “The execution of the operation was contracted out to Ahmad Jabril, the PFLP-GC leader. Money was given up front in Damascus for initial expense. The mission was to blow up a Pan Am flight.”

They also included the views of Robert Baer, a CIA agent who said an “executive decision was taken, coming from the White House, to focus on Libya”. These claims, in the context of the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes, support the view that Iranian retaliation was the motive for the bombing. Despite the source of these claims, the Crown Office said they were worthy of being ignored.

That response was amplified by a further statement: “The only appropriate forum for the determination of guilt or innocence is the criminal court, and Mr Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior judges. His conviction was upheld unanimously by five judges, presided over by the Lord Justice General, Scotland’s most senior judge.”

Here we have the definitive deployment of the philosophy of arithmetic and judicial status in defence of a crumbling conviction: if eight of Scotland’s senior judges hum in harmony, their deliberations and decisions are effectively infallible and therefore too robust to be undermined by evidence to the contrary – “old” or “new”.

The consequences of that mindset and its infatuation with the merits of Megrahi’s conviction are alive, well and thriving in the rubble of Libya, where delegations of the Scottish legal establishment continue, periodically, the search for Megrahi’s “accomplices”.

As an example of the art of desperate distraction, the Libyan expeditions are impeccable.

As an exercise in the pursuit of truth and justice, they are arguably deplorable, distasteful and disgraceful.