Walking past a mountain of evidence "a howling scandal"

[For those who enjoyed Dr Morag Kerr’s piece posted yesterday, there is more from her that is just as good in the comments following Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow". And here is a comment from Dr Kerr on yesterday’s article:]

Two different states investigating the bombing, with different agendas. Not necessarily conflicting, but separate. The Brits don't want their favourite airport to be blamed - far better if the security lapse was somewhere else. The Yanks don't want it to have been Iran, because if it was that means that their mishandling of the IR655 disaster has caused the loss of another 270 lives. Far better if it was the catch-all blame-taker, Gaddafi.

At first it looks as if the Yanks are on a loser, but the British machinations prevent the case being solved the easy way, and in the end the Americans get the chance to put their agenda back on the rails.

That's kind of the easy bit.

There's also the positive misdirection. It looks very much as if someone was laying a trail of sweeties to Malta, which was only picked up on because there was a police force happy to look anywhere but where the real evidence pointed. It also looks as if someone might have been laying a trail pointing to Libya. PT/35b and so on. The catch-letter too, possibly.

Is this again confusion caused by two separate agencies pursuing different agendas? Perhaps the real culprits laying the trail to Malta, and the CIA slipping in evidence to point to Libya? Could the latter even have prepared one or two things, just in case the Ayatollah somehow succeeded in doing what he was threatening to do?

But Malta is very close to Libya, ain't that convenient. And somehow the clothes purchaser managed to leave the impression he was Libyan, as he was acquiring the eminently traceable clothes pointing to Malta. So were the two exercises entirely separate? Bearing in mind that the PFLP-GC appeared to have been infiltrated and Khreesat was a Jordanian asset?

And then again, was Megrahi's presence at the airport at just the right time yet another convenient coincidence, or was that somehow factored in? What was Abu Talb doing with all these Maltese clothes, in his flat in Sweden?

All moonshine, probably. But the bomb being introduced at Heathrow and the Scottish police and English authorities walking straight past a mountain of evidence to that effect isn't moonshine. It's a howling scandal.

Steering the Lockerbie investigation away from Heathrow

[What follows is a lightly-edited amalgamation of two comments posted today by Dr Morag Kerr (Rolfe) on the thread Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow".]

It is my belief that John Orr deliberately steered the investigation away from Heathrow from the very earliest days of the inquiry. That Times article [Disaster bomb was ‘placed on board Jumbo at Frankfurt’ The Times, 31 December 1988] which must have been written on 30 December didn't come out of nowhere. It has a startling amount of detail on the methodologies of the PFLP-GC as well as the headline that the bomb came from Frankfurt and not Heathrow.

It takes a very special sort of stupid to receive Bedford's 9th January statement describing a brown Samsonite hardshell in the container in the interline shed at Heathrow, and reports (the same month) from the forensic scientists that the bomb had been in a brown Samsonite hardshell, and do NOTHING to connect the two. I mean, Bedford described two suitcases which appeared while he was on his break, and then concentrated on "one of them", which he described in detail. The one on the left was in the correct position to have been the bomb, the one on the right wasn't. Nobody even asked him which of the two cases he was referring to as a brown Samsonite hardshell. (Only at the FAI [Fatal Accident Inquiry], in October 1990, did he answer that he was talking about the one on the left.)

On 2 February 1989 Ray Manly's statement was received at Lockerbie. It was entered into HOLMES and filed away as being of no interest whatsoever to the inquiry. In other words, Heathrow had already been discounted as early as that.

The "nonsense on stilts" at the March meeting about most of the damaged luggage being from Frankfurt so probably the bomb suitcase was too, has more than a whiff of deliberate obfuscation about it. Are we really supposed to believe that a senior detective heading an inquiry of this magnitude is that stupid? But who would dare contradict him?

It wasn't just Orr, though. Parallel with his ignoring of the Heathrow baggage evidence, we see the forensics officers unite as one to declare that the explosion had not been in the suitcase on the floor of the container. This wasn't just the RARDE experts (principally Feraday, but also Cullis and Hayes), but also the AAIB inspectors, principally Claiden and Protheroe. The first report containing this opinion was written by Peter Claiden and is dated April 1989.

Now, the explosion WAS in the suitcase on the floor of the container. That's incontrovertible, once you realise where PK/139 was positioned within the container. (Nobody even mentions PK/139 in any of the reports. It's just sitting there in a composite photo, mutely screaming "look at me", and nobody paid the slightest attention to it.) And PK/139 is just the single most blindingly obvious piece of evidence - multiple strands of evidence reinforce each other to show that there was no suitcase below the bomb suitcase.

So how come we have about six investigators from two different institutes, who were officially working separately on the case, lining up to ignore the bleedin' obvious, and declare a mystic knowledge that the recovered floor of the container would have looked different if the bomb had been in the bottom suitcase?

Not once in any of their reports is there any acknowledgement that the case on the bottom was from Heathrow, while the case on the second layer was from Frankfurt. All that vehemence to exclude the bottom case, and they don't even seem to know that by doing this they are absolving Heathrow. And yet, why bother making the distinction in the first place unless you know that the two cases have different provenances?

So, at the same time Orr was ignoring Bedford, Feraday and assorted hangers-on were insisting that the case in the position of the one Bedford saw wasn't the bomb. Quite independently, of course. And equally in defiance of the evidence in front of them. 

I think Orr probably used this forensic opinion later to justify ignoring the Bedford case, but that's retrospective, as he was ignoring it well before the opinion was reported.

So, if Orr was acting on instructions from on high, it seems quite plausible that someone in the forensics team (probably Feraday) was also receiving instructions to interpret the evidence in a way that would deflect from Heathrow. (I suspect Claiden's April 1989 report might have had a wee nudge from Feraday, although at the FAI he was at some pains to declare that the two teams who were examining the wreckage together - and probably eating lunch together and so on - didn't communicate at all.)

So, was one agency directing both Orr and Feraday in this? Seems likely. All to prevent BAA and Heathrow from being culpable in the loss of 270 lives, and to hell with whether the actual bombers were caught or not. So who?

Who privatised BAA in 1986? Who wrote stuff in her memoirs which pretty clearly indicated she knew full well that Gaddafi had not been behind the Lockerbie bombing? [RB: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 1993, page 449.]

Well, I'm speculating as to motive. However, I have an extremely strong sense of both arms of the investigation (police and forensics) being separately pressurised to deliver opinions that absolved the Bedford case. And it seems only logical that the same person or body was pressurising both groups.

I very much doubt if there was any US influence in this area at all. I think the Americans were frying entirely different fish. It smells home-grown to me. So, I go figure.

I think the Americans wanted to blame Libya and Gaddafi, but if it had been proved to have been the PFLP-GC they'd have had to accept that. At first the evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC appeared overwhelming, and they seem to have conceded the point. However, nobody could find any connection between the PFLP-GC and KM180 at Malta.

If you're looking for the right culprit in the wrong place, you're doomed to fail. The police failed, but never considered that was because they were looking in the wrong place. They ran into the sand. Which was a convenient moment for the US authorities to step in and resurrect the idea that maybe they should all have been looking for Libyans not Palestinians, and maybe if they investigated this Libyan guy they'd find something.

Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow"

[What follows is an article by Ian Ferguson headed Confidential memo discloses reason police suspected PFLP-GC published in August 2000 on TheLockerbieTrial.com, a website that he and I edited:]

It is not expected that Heathrow Airport will take up much time in the presentation of the Crown case.

Police investigations in this case moved very quickly away from Heathrow and focused on Frankfurt instead.

As early as twelve weeks after it was established that a bomb had brought down Pan Am 103, Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr, the senior investigating officer was briefing his colleagues in the FBI and the German BKA and told them on 28 March 1989: "To date 14 pieces of explosive damaged baggage have been recovered and enquiries to date suggest that on the balance of probability the explosive device was likely to be amongst the Frankfurt passengers baggage items. Of all the currently identified explosive damaged baggage, all but one item originated from Frankfurt."

This extract is from a "confidential" report of the Lockerbie Incident Investigation: International Co-ordination Meeting held on 28 March 1989 and obtained by us.

The report is illuminating and describes in detail how John Orr told the meeting of the "evidential connection between the murder of 270 persons at Lockerbie and activities of the PFLP-GC in Germany."

He went on, "There were a number of important factors to be considered including: the history of this organisation (PFLP-GC); the fact that a Toshiba make radio cassette recorder packed with 300 gramms of Semtex Explosive was found in West Germany; at least one hard-shell suitcase, possibly Samsonite, was traced to a member of the PFLP-GC in West Germany in October 1988; previous conduct of this organisation which makes clear that the group is prepared to make repeated attacks on similar targets with identical Modus Operandi."

Despite the very early stages of the investigation it is clear from these extracts that Heathrow had taken second place to Frankfurt and at this stage Malta was nowhere in the picture.

It is interesting though that then Detective Chief Superintendent Orr, now Chief Constable Orr, chose to describe the modus operandi of the PFLP-GC as being "identical" to that which blew up Pan Am 103.

A number of police officers, including some who worked at Heathrow, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us that they felt the investigation at Heathrow was not an in-depth investigation and one even described it as being "cursory".

Whatever the depth of the Heathrow investigation the extracts of the confidential report above show that the investigators were heavily leaning towards the PFLP-GC and Frankfurt airport.

At the time of the bombing, the terminal for Iran Air, the national airline of Iran was situated next to Pan Am's terminal at Heathrow. Iran is alleged to have been one of the financial sponsors of the PFLP-GC in the 80s.

It is also very surprising that the Crown have not called Chief Constable John Orr to testify at Camp Zeist considering that, at the time, he was the senior detective and effectively in charge of the Lockerbie investigation.

Call to Alex Salmond to show same resolution and confidence over Gaza as over Megrahi release

[What follow are excerpts from an article by Derek Bateman headed Take a stand published today on his Derek Bateman Broadcaster website:]

Israel is still responding to acts of terror – that’s what firing rockets into their territory amounts to – but the reaction this time has awakened a hurricane of popular fury that goes beyond the committed Left and western critics. (...)

But public opinion even among the normally staunch US Jewish community is saying enough is enough as we witness the scale of devastation and the images of death and horrific injuries. The realisation that the all-powerful and heavily-armed Israeli Defence Force is prepared to smash anything near a potential target in defiance of world opinion is hardening opposition in Hamas’ favour. Yesterday’s strike on a UN school occurred because they were aiming at militants on a passing motorbike. That sounds cavalier and certainly uncaring of potential innocent death. It isn’t just that this prolonged attack is enough, it is that the situation which permits it is also now too much to bear. Instead of just the Americans, who help arm the Israelis, who hold the ring, it is the world community which needs to find a new resolution, a determination to force a change in attitude that decrees a settlement must now be formulated. (...)

But here’s the thing…for all that we protest and complain our voices need the loudspeaker of the government. Tomorrow Alex Salmond has an opportunity to put Scotland on the map in the Gaza disaster by making a statement during the televised debate condemning Israeli aggression. He can take a lead, following the offer of treating the injured, that would be bold and echo the feelings of the Scots by speaking out on behalf of the Scottish government and demanding not just an end to the bombardment and immediate reparations but urging a UN peace conference. And offering to host it. (...)

Isn’t independence about taking our place in the world and playing a full role? What better sign could we give than to put into official words the message that is resounding around the world…

The SNP showed itself resolute and confident when it freed Megrahi – in the teeth of world and Washington opinion. This would be much less controversial and be hailed abroad if not at home where Salmond’s opponents would display the customary  national self-loathing by jeering him for saying what they themselves believe and what their own party leadership is saying. That can be laughed off.

It isn’t an easy decision. No administration seeking approval for cutting against the grain to win its independence wants to alienate neighbours and international power bases unnecessarily but has there ever been a moment of such disgust coinciding with a mass audience when the voice of the Scottish people can be heard so clearly? There are times, and this one, when it is plain humanity, not politics that is to the fore. Whichever side you are on, whatever doubts about Hamas and its policies you hold, you can put up a hand and say Enough.

A scapegoat wrongly convicted in the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history

[The same issue of Perspectives magazine as carries Dr Jim Swire’s essay contains an article by James Robertson on the links (and differences) between the Lockerbie disaster and his novel The Professor of Truth.  The article reads as follows:]

One of the functions of a novel is to ask what it is to be human, exploring this question more subtly than is sometimes possible through, for example, the hard facts or loaded opinions of journalism. This is what I have attempted in The Professor of Truth, a work of fiction populated by imagined, invented characters.

It would be absurd, however, to pretend that the book is not also influenced and inspired by a real event, namely the Lockerbie bombing of 21 December 1988 and the long trail of events that followed that horrific night. Even as the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Khalifa Fhimah was in progress, and at a growing volume after the acquittal of Fhimah and conviction of Megrahi in January 2001, concerns were being raised that Megrahi, who always maintained his innocence, might be the victim of a gross injustice: in short, that he was a scapegoat and had been wrongly convicted in the biggest criminal case in Scottish legal history. People with far greater expertise and knowledge than I had found the prosecution’s evidence and the reasoning of the published judgment far from persuasive.  Since then, more and more information has come into the public domain which leaves the case against Megrahi in shreds: some evidence was withheld from the defence or suppressed by the prosecution or by the police; new evidence has emerged which further undermines the Crown’s case; and key witnesses, without whose testimony he could not have been found guilty, have been largely discredited.

I had become increasingly fascinated, disturbed and angered by this long drawn-out saga, not least because, if Megrahi was innocent, then the real murderers of 270 people remained unidentified and unpunished. Furthermore, if the trial had indeed reached the wrong conclusion, then a massive stain was disfiguring the Scottish justice system. This has important political implications. A fair, open and properly functioning justice system is a prerequisite for a fair, open and properly functioning modern democracy. Whatever the outcome of the coming referendum on independence, this proposition is still valid: the prospect of opening a new chapter in our history – whether as an independent country or as a continuing part of the UK – with questions over the Lockerbie case unresolved is not a good one.

These were some of the motivations behind writing The Professor of Truth. Why, though, use fiction to explore this complex territory? First, because it is my craft. Second, an enormous amount of non-fiction material already exists on Lockerbie – in the form of books, journalism, legal and other expert opinion, documentary film and official records both on paper and on-line – to which I could add little of any value. Third, when real events resist full explanation it is sometimes possible for fiction to cast a fresh and useful light on those events. Fiction, as Julian Barnes has written, is a way of telling the truth through telling lies. However, you won’t find the names Lockerbie, Libya, Malta or Megrahi anywhere in The Professor of Truth. Obviously I have researched the real history very deeply, but the fiction I’ve created is not an attempt to explain what really happened in 1988 and thereafter. If I knew that I wouldn’t have written a novel.

What I have tried to do is explore some of the issues at the heart of the case: what is truth, what is justice, and how can we recognise them? How are narratives constructed and shaped to serve the interests of those in power, and how do other narratives emerge to challenge them? One of the characteristics of fiction is that it can ask questions without necessarily supplying all the answers. And a novel is a two-way process: it is the reader as well as the writer who must grapple with such questions.

I also wanted to imagine what happens to a man who has to contend not only with terrible loss through an act of terrorism but also with a growing belief that the truth of what happened has been denied to him. This is the situation of my main character, the story’s narrator, a lecturer in English literature called Alan Tealing. Alan has been on an emotional, psychological and philosophical journey – one littered with obstacles – for 21 years when the book opens. He is visited, in the depths of winter, by a retired American intelligence officer, who brings him a piece of information about a witness in the trial. This information will send Alan on a physical journey from a landscape of ice to one of fire: from snowbound Scotland to Australia in the middle of a heatwave.  He goes hoping to find those elusive things, truth and justice, but – as a lawyer colleague warns him – they may not look the way he expects them to if he does.

I was conscious as I wrote the book that I was treading on sensitive ground, because to many of the families of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing the idea that Megrahi might not have been guilty is deeply upsetting. I also saw that the assumption would inevitably be made that Alan Tealing is a thinly disguised version of Dr Jim Swire. This is not the case, even though Tealing undergoes some of the experiences that Dr Swire has undergone in his long quest for truth. I deliberately made no contact with Jim Swire during the writing of the book. I wanted free rein to look at the issues discussed above, and was writing a novel, not a thinly disguised biography. After I had completed the book, I contacted him to ask if he would like to read it before publication – not to seek his approval or endorsement, but as a courtesy. He responded to the novel with the intelligence, integrity and humanity that anyone who has seen him making his case over the years will have recognised.

Quite independently, and for totally different reasons, we have come to the same conclusion: that the Lockerbie trial resulted in a miscarriage of justice which only compounds the injustice done to Jim’s daughter Flora and the other 269 victims, and also to the people of Libya, who for many years suffered appallingly as a result of the UN sanctions imposed upon their country at the behest of the American and British governments.

Mandela's strategic moral diplomacy over Lockerbie a lesson for Gaza

[It is interesting that Lockerbie is now being referred to not only in relation to Malaysia Airlines flight 17, but also in the context of events in Gaza. What follows is a brief excerpt from an article headed Gaza ceasefire crumbles while West embarks on a new round of hand-wringing by Professor Michelle Pace published yesterday on The Conversation website:] 

Israel, for one, needs a thorough soul-searching exercise on what its oft-invoked idea of “security” actually means in practice, and whether its chosen definition really has anything to do with “defending itself”. Hamas, by the same token, must reflect on the wisdom of indiscriminately firing rockets into the territory of one of the mightiest military forces in the world.

But the international community, too, has to improve on its woeful diplomatic performance throughout this catastrophe. There are plenty of examples from which to draw inspiration.

Think of how Nelson Mandela, for example, used strategic moral diplomacy to resolve the seemingly intractable stalemate between Libya, the US and the UK in the handling of two suspects accused of the Lockerbie bombing.

The point of this example is that moving away from the idea that our enemies are simply evil, and towards a more pragmatic moral position, is often the only hope in intractable, unstable negotiations between warring factions.

[The tale of Nelson Mandela’s part in shaming the United Kingdom and the United States into accepting a Lockerbie solution that had for years been accepted by Libya has been told often on this blog.  Here is one instance.]

Tony Gauci’s Lockerbie testimony

[This essay is based largely on research by its author, Kevin Bannon, for a thesis submitted in 2013 at Swansea University and later successfully defended for the award of the degree of PhD.  It is to be hoped that the thesis itself will soon be more widely available.]

The conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was based primarily on the police statements and court testimony of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who identified him as the man who bought a number of items from his clothing shop two weeks before the bombing. Identical items were found at the Lockerbie crash site and by their condition, forensic investigators established that they were packed in the same suitcase as the bomb when it exploded.

Police detectives first met Gauci in Malta in September 1989, nearly nine months after the bombing and in his initial statements he firmly recollected and reiterated that the purchaser of the clothes was 50 years old and six feet tall. He said that it was raining at the time of the purchase, prompting the man to buy an umbrella, and in interviews one year apart or more, he asserted that the purchase had taken place in late November 1988 and that the local Christmas decorations were not yet up.

Al-Megrahi was 36 at the time of the purchase and was measured at 5’8” at trial – though both his passports noted him as 170 cm tall – slightly under 5’7”. Records showed that the hanging of illuminated Christmas decorations outside Gauci’s shop was completed on 6 December when they were switched on. It is accepted that Al-Megrahi was not in Malta until 7 December, a day when local meteorological records revealed that it was almost certainly not raining. On the basis of this testimony - Gauci’s freshest recollections - the purchaser was evidently not al-Megrahi. In any event, Gauci was quite certain that the man had not purchased any ‘Slalom’ style shirts, one of which was to prove the most crucial item accompanying the explosive device.

However, during intermittent interviews over the following year and beyond, Tony Gauci modified his recollections and these modifications proved to be entirely in favour of the Crown narrative. Indeed, by the end of his court testimony in July 2000, virtually every aspect of his evidence had changed, and in several instances it had changed drastically. Now the rainfall had been reduced to a brief, light shower – hardly wetting the ground and falling just as the man was leaving the shop. Now Gauci was “sure” the Christmas decorations were up and lit when the Libyan buyer visited his shop. The purchaser visited “about a fortnight” before Christmas – eliminating a November purchase - and Gauci now stated that the man had bought two ‘Slalom’ shirts. In court Gauci said, cryptically, that the purchaser was “...below six feet...he wasn’t small. He was a normal stature.” The descriptions of other items purchased were revised, becoming more similar to those in the suspect suitcase: the colour of the Slalom shirt, the pattern on pyjamas, the motif on a baby’s romper suit, the colour and quantity of cardigans.

Police investigators sought Gauci’s help in identifying the purchaser from photographs. After several previous photo-identification sessions, on 15 February 1991 Gauci inspected a card with 12 photos. This session took place in the company of four police investigators, all of whom knew which picture was of the suspect and the pictures were placed far enough apart for them to be aware which one was being examined by the witness – improper conditions for such a photo-session. At first Gauci had said ‘they are all too young’ but he was advised to allow for the age discrepancy and told that the man he saw ‘could be 10-15 years older’ – a blatantly illicit prompt. Gauci stopped at al-Megrahi’s picture (‘no. 8’ middle row right) and declared “This is similar but is maybe 10-15 years younger” confirming the age discrepancy of Gauci’s early recollections of the purchaser. Police investigators and Camp Zeist judges alike regarded this vague statement as the clinching identification of al-Megrahi. In fact Gauci had twice identified a newspaper picture of Abu Talb as looking like the purchaser. Abu Talb was 15 years junior to al-Megrahi, is more slightly built and has a pronounced limp – obviously quite different to any of Gauci's other descriptions of the purchaser.

As the picture of al-Megrahi was said to be dull and grainy, DCI Harry Bell had the other pictures dulled-down so that the ‘suspect’ photo would not unduly stand out; but al-Megrahi’s picture remains of singularly poor quality by comparison. The thickness of the hair styles on some of the photos appear to have also been graphically enhanced with something like a felt pen. The middle pictures in the bottom row for example make their subjects look ridiculous as if they are wearing theatrical wigs. Presumably the purpose of this exercise was also to equalise the photographs but it gives away that these pictures are the ‘fillers’ and not the image of the suspect.

By the time Tony Gauci picked out al-Megrahi at an identification parade at Camp Zeist in April 1999, he had been exposed to pictures of him in the international media. A Maltese police officer present at the parade admitted in defence precognition that he himself would have been able to pick out al-Megrahi though never having met him - such had been the media coverage. Therefore neither this parade nor the photo-session had been properly controlled identification processes – quite the opposite.

In 1990 police investigators described Gauci as confused and ‘difficult to believe’ but this was not disclosed in court. Nor was it revealed that they had become concerned at the apparent suggestibility of Gauci, noting that he had been ‘trying to please’ them. The US Department of Justice fell over themselves to please Gauci, eventually paying him ‘in excess of $2m’ as a reward for his assistance with the investigation.

In court the details of a six feet tall, 50 year old purchaser in Gauci’s freshest recollections, were skipped over by Defence counsel and brushed aside in the judges’ deliberations. In their 80 page explanation of their verdict, the judges admitted to having a ‘major difficulty’ with the introduction of the bomb at Malta’s Luqa airport, which remains unexplained – as was its subsequent, automatic transit through Frankfurt airport and Heathrow. Nevertheless the judges cited Tony Gauci’s evidence as ‘accurate’ and ‘entirely reliable’ - one of the many absurdities to emanate from Camp Zeist.

"What is it that our states know but still hide from us, the relatives?"

[The recently published  issue of Perspectives magazine contains an article by Dr Jim Swire, written some months ago.  The text submitted for publication reads as follows:]

On a huge hill cragged and steep TRUTH stands, and he that would reach her about must, and about must go.

John Donne 1572–1631

The shock of the recent helicopter crash in Glasgow must have reminded many of the horror that descended upon the little town of Lockerbie way back in late December 1988, and there is a strong link between them. In Glasgow passers by and those involved but surviving gave us a vivid picture of the willingness of ordinary people in Scotland to help each other. Likewise the people of Lockerbie, in spite of the shock and loss in their own community showed us relatives the tenderness and love of those drawn together by a common tragedy.

Yet in the case of Lockerbie it was our Scottish investigating police, later compounded by our Scottish Crown Office, who kept concealed in their files till 2001*, after the court verdict had been reached, that before the loading of the plane that fell upon Lockerbie that night, Heathrow had been broken into close by to where the bags were to be loaded for the flight 16 hours later, and that despite warnings of increased risk to American aircraft, no effort had been made to discover the intruder nor his motive.

But greater powers than Scotland’s were also involved. We did not listen carefully enough to what some were warning us about in the wider world.

Nelson Mandela had warned us that in a trial “No one country should be complainant prosecutor and judge”, yet Scotland was handed all three roles.

The trial started in May 2000, but long before that we had received disquieting information that there might be improper political pressures to undermine our search for truth. Early in 1990 our group had been called to the US embassy in London to hear the findings of a US Presidential inquiry into Lockerbie. In a gap in the proceedings in a quiet aside to one of us a US official said “Your Government and ours know exactly what happened but they’re never going to tell”.

Another blow was added in 1993, two years after the issue of indictments against the two Libyans, through the memoirs of the late Lady Thatcher who had supported the USAF bombing of Libya in 1986. She wrote of it: “It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined.... the much vaunted Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place”. Which nation then was responsible for Lockerbie?

Any nation wielding great power such as our American cousins do, will sometimes attract revenge as it carves its way among other nations. Lockerbie like so many other outrages was a revenge attack, upon an American aircraft.

Two possible origins for revenge are particularly relevant:-

1.) The bombing of Tripoli by the USAF in 1986 with the active support of our Prime Minister, the late Lady Thatcher.

2.) The destruction of Iran Air flight 655 in the Gulf five months before Lockerbie, by a rocket fired from the USS Vincennes. This tragedy was coupled to spectacular mismanagement by America of Iran’s ensuing lust for revenge.

So close has been the ‘special relationship’ between America and our country that hatreds elicited by one may be seen as the responsibility of both.

Yet it is always the prime responsibility of a sovereign State to protect its own citizens from harm.

Evidence assembled for and only partly used in the court case, has leaked out into the public domain, and been seized upon by amateur but truth-hungry relatives. It looks to us now as though the prosecution of the Libyan Megrahi should never have been undertaken.

Worse, far worse, the revenge attack that ended 270 innocent lives in the skies above Lockerbie and on the ground below had been predicted and was preventable.

I think of my daughter Flora pressing eagerly down those long Heathrow corridors that evening on her way to see her American boyfriend for Christmas, and submitting readily to the routine security checks, when as we now know, despite advance warnings of increased terrorist risks to American flights, the airport had decided to take no action to investigate the break-in. I conjure up a lurking terrorist resting and unmolested on airside and listening to the eager footsteps and chatter of his unsuspecting victims. This remains a source of fury and fuels our campaign 25 years later. Surely under these circumstances the suspension of outgoing flights until the break-in had been fully investigated was as elementary as it was mandatory? Heathrow’s night watch man who had found the break-in, had worked at the airport for 17 years and called it the worst security breach he had seen. Yet no public inquiry was called nor sanctions placed upon the airport for its lethargy. Flora too sought truth; she hated hypocrisy.

A brief summary of the trial indicates the importance of the break-in.

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The trial

Lockerbie was clearly a revenge attack, the court had to decide who was getting revenge for what.

The prosecution case was that Megrahi of Libya had sent the bomb unaccompanied on a circuitous route via Frankfurt to Heathrow. There was no proof as to how the bomb might have been smuggled aboard in Malta, but obviously such a route required the use of a long running timer in the bomb if it was to survive the long journey and explode after leaving Heathrow. According to the prosecution a small fragment of timer circuit board labelled PT35b was found in the bombed wreckage and ‘in all respects’ matched one corner of timer circuit boards in possession of the Libyan regime. These timers would have enabled the bomb to be set, even from Malta. to explode over mid Atlantic. The origin of the bomb from Malta was also supported by the remains of Maltese originated clothing allegedly bought in Malta by Megrahi. and found in the same police evidence bag as PT35b.

The defence wanted to show that a Syrian group – the PFLP-GC – acting as mercenaries for Iran had made and supplied a very different type of bomb. This type of bomb had been used ‘successfully’ by the group several times before Lockerbie, to destroy or damage aircraft in flight. They contained an air pressure sensitive switch which kept them inactive at ground level, but if put aboard an aircraft, they would sense the ear-popping drop in pressure after the plane had been climbing for about 7 minutes, and then start a simple non-adjustable timer running of a type unique to the PFLP-GC in Damascus but incapable of running for more than roughly half an hour before exploding the charge. These bombs were therefore unalterably locked following take-off to 7 plus about 30 minutes before they would explode, but by the same token such a bomb could only have been put aboard at the airport of origin of the flight (Heathrow), since if put aboard an incoming flight when fully armed, they would have exploded before reaching Heathrow.

The Lockerbie flight had lasted 38 minutes after leaving Heathrow.

The case revolved round which type of bomb had been used, and the significance of the Maltese clothing.

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The court did hear that the baggage handler at Heathrow (John Bedford) when he returned from a tea break to the container he had been loading for the Pan Am Lockerbie flight, saw a suitcase which he had not loaded and which was now on the floor of the container close to the very corner of that container which would fit against the fuselage skin of the aircraft. The court was kept unaware of the break-in, nor did it learn where the extra suitcase might have come from. Had the information about the break-in been shared with the defence before the trial, this surely would have aroused reasonable doubt about the device having arrived from Frankfurt, particularly since Bedford saw that mysterious case well before the Frankfurt flight had even landed. He did not remove nor reposition it and the container was then filled up with the bags from Frankfurt on top of the bags which Bedford had seen.

Both sides accepted that the bomb they favoured had contained approximately 400 - 450 grams of Semtex, just capable of being crammed into a tape recorder, but very puny for the task of destroying a robust 747. To be certain of total destruction a terrorist would have needed to ensure that his device was close to the vulnerable fuselage skin of the aircraft, that could only be achieved at Heathrow. Analysis of baggage surrounding the actual point of explosion showed how abruptly the force of such an explosion was damped down by neighbouring bags and their mostly soft contents. The position of the bomb relative to the fuselage skin was crucial.

The man from whom the clothing had been bought in Malta was called Tony Gauci. He and his brother Paul were in line to receive substantial payments from the US Justice Department through their ‘Rewards for Justice’ programme provided their evidence led to the conviction of Megrahi/Fhimah. The Zeist court had failed to review the contents of a Scottish policeman’s diary showing the extent to which the Gauci brothers were aware of this potential reward before giving evidence in the court: this also denied the court full knowledge of whether the identification by Mr Gauci of Mr Megrahi as the buyer of the clothing, conformed to the standards of Scottish criminal law. Serious distortion of evidence of the dates of the clothes being bought was necessary to avoid concluding that it had in fact been bought on a day when Megrahi was known not to have been in Malta.

Sometimes I think that we relatives have been incredibly slow to realise that there might be real world reasons for reaching a verdict which was convenient to the political needs of a country rather than to the needs of truth and justice. Within four days of the issue of the Libyan indictments Iranian backed groups started to release American hostages: President Bush had campaigned for office on getting those hostages back.

But there have also been rich rewards for us since the trial in meeting those who have also realised the deception.

The first person I met afterwards was Professor Robert Black QC, emeritus professor of Scots law at Edinburgh. Not only was he one of Scotland’s leading legal brains, but he had also taken a central role in the devising and setting up of the special neutral country trial at Zeist, It was clear at once that he did not believe that the proceedings had justified the verdict. His own concept had been subverted to become a monumental miscarriage of justice. A disgrace to the very system to which his life had been devoted. It seemed we were not after all the only people to find the verdict incomprehensible. He cannot know the relief that the knowledge that far more erudite people than us, the lay and  obsessed relatives, felt excluded from the truth by that verdict .

Soon to follow were the findings of the UN special observer to the trial, Professor Hans Koechler of Vienna who also found the proceedings fatally flawed. So many others, have studied the evidence since and their ranks continually expand, bless them all. Two of the most significant have been women, solicitor Gareth Peirce at once drew our attention to the disastrous series of miscarriages of justice following events in Northern Ireland, and the similarities with the forensic provision for Zeist, she also injected us with the unshakeable knowledge that we do indeed have an absolute right to the truth over these dreadful murders. Her early article about Lockerbie was eye opening**.

Then came an academic from Bradford, Davina Miller. She had been researching America’s ‘choice of enemies’ in the Middle East, but came across the Lockerbie material. The title to her article*** ‘Who knows about this?’ reflects her astonishment that the trial had blamed Megrahi and his country. By 2011 she was also able to reference an amazing series of mainly US intelligence documents which showed an inexplicable sudden switch from probing Iran’s known  role, to acceptance that it was to be laid at Colonel Gaddafi’s door.

No one yet knows how the above mentioned circuit board fragment (PT35b) came to be found in that Scottish police evidence bag. Astonishingly it has now emerged that the metallic plating on the fragment simply does not match that on the Libyan owned timers. It was plated by a process which the makers of the Swiss timers Libya owned had not even installed in their factory before 1988. The forensic expert advising the prosecution had written in a note to his examination of that fragment that he had realised the discrepancy in the plating, yet he told the court in evidence that the fragment and the Libyan boards were “similar in all respects”

The trials relating to the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six were similarly bedevilled by distortion or suppression of forensic evidence and convicted the innocent. Similarly at Hillsborough, distortion and suppression of truth by the police blamed the innocent bystanders.

Early on the morning of the day in 2012 when the book Megrahi: You are my Jury was published revealing as it did that the fragment PT35b simply could never have been part of one of the Libyan owned timers because of the plating anomaly, Downing Street released a claim that the book was “an insult to the relatives”. The author of the book tells me that there was no legitimate way that Downing Street could have had access to the file of the book in advance – indeed I had only been allowed to read it myself through the night before launch, in a personally handed-over copy. What is the secret that still drives our state to seek to protect the now clearly false story told in the court?

What if our state were to acquiesce in the perversion of our justice systems to suit the needs of the aspiring President of another State? What was the real origin of the fragment PT35b? How did it enter that Scottish police evidence bag?

From Lady Thatcher’s day, when Lord Parkinson went to ask her cabinet on our behalf for an inquiry, and returned with a metaphorical black eye from a blow from a hand bag, we have been repeatedly refused any inquiry in either England or Scotland always under the rubric of the wonderful criminal investigation and trial. What is it that our states know but still hide from us, the relatives? No recent catastrophe of such proportions has ever been denied an inquiry for twenty five years.

The opacity of Governments and the adherence to falsehood are deeply worrying. What sort of society have we become that we host gigantic intelligence systems spying even on our own innocent citizens, and yet when prevention fails, and some of those innocent citizens are murdered, deny transparency and objective re-examination of the facts to those of their citizens most devastated by that failure?

* Ex Chief Constable Patrick Shearer: letter to Dr Jim Swire 2/4/12.

** Gareth Peirce, London review of Books ‘The framing of Al Megrahi.’

*** Davina Miller Taylor & Francis Online Defense & Security Analysis Volume 27, Issue 4, 2011