The MEBO and Bollier saga continues

[A number of Swiss news websites are running a report about the refusal of a special federal prosecutor to pursue the complaint made by Edwin Bollier and MEBO against a former Swiss federal police officer. A translation of the report on the Blick website (by me, with help from Google Translate) reads as follows:]

The special Federal Prosecutor, Felix Bänziger, has declined to open a criminal investigation against a former federal police officer in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. The complaint had been filed by the Zurich businessman Edwin Bollier.

The timer for the bomb allegedly came from Bollier’s company. According to Bollier’s statement, an employee of his company, Mebo AG, illegally handed over a prototype of the relevant timer to an official of the federal police six months after the attack.

This prototype was then used to construct a "fabricated" production which was used in the Lockerbie trial process against Libya. A Scottish court convicted a Libyan intelligence officer in 2001 and sentenced him to life imprisonment. 270 people were killed in the attack in 1988.

In 2011 Bollier lodged a complaint against the former federal police officer. In March this year the Department of Justice (FOJ) issued an authorization to prosecute the officer who now works for the Federal Intelligence Service. Special prosecutor Felix Bänziger was commissioned to pursue the complaint.

Bänziger has now come to the conclusion that the alleged offences were already time-barred before receipt of Bollier’s complaint in 2011, the federal prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday.

"At the very latest, all the alleged facts could have been known during the trial before the Scottish High Court in 2000," it said in the release. All possible actions were therefore time-barred in 2010. Up to the year 2002 there was a limitation period of ten years for the prosecution of crimes.

Under the current law the prosecution of crimes is barred only after 15 years. However, the 10 year limitation period was the governing law at the time of the act, the federal prosecutor’s office notes. Bänziger’s decision not to pursue the complaint is not yet final. Edwin Bollier is still on the way to the Federal Criminal Court. [RB: And from there, if necessary, to the European Court of Human Rights, Mr Bollier has indicated.]

In May this year, the Federal Civil Court rejected a government liability claim made by Bollier. The claim in which Bollier sought from the state six million dollars plus interest, was held to have been made too late.

According to Bollier, because of the media reports on the alleged involvement of his company in the Lockerbie attack, he lost major clients and was driven to the brink of ruin.

Alex Salmond and the release of Abdelbaset Megrahi

[A number of media organisations in their reflections on Alex Salmond’s tenure of office as First Minister on his last full day, refer to the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Megrahi. Here is an example from today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph:]

The Scottish Government’s decision to release the man convicted of Britain’s worst mass murder prompted revulsion and criticism from around the world, especially when he was given a hero’s welcome in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, complete with a crowd waving Scottish flags.

Although the decision was ostensibly made by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Minister, Salmond’s involvement was shown later by a series of letters in which he lobbied figures such as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Donald Trump to publicly support it.

The bomber was released on compassionate grounds as he supposedly had less than three months to live but ended up living nearly three years, prompting further fury from some of the families of his victims.

[If the release decision was overwhelmingly unpopular overseas (by which is meant the United States) the same cannot be said of domestic public opinion. What follows is from an item posted on this blog on 4 September 2009:]

Almost half of all Scots now support Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill's controversial decision to release the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in a dramatic shift in public opinion.

The YouGov poll of 1556 people found 45% thought Mr MacAskill made the right call to free Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi last month on compassionate grounds. The same percentage said he was wrong.

[And the following poll results from Scottish local newspapers is taken from an item posted on this blog on 31 August 2009:]

Those For first number, those Against second number

Dumfries & Galloway Standard 88.4% 11.6%

Annandale Observer 73% 27% (Lockerbie paper)

Perthshire Advertiser 90.6% 8.4%

Ross-shire Journal 87% 13%

Scotsman 58% 42%

Lennox Herald 80.5% 19.5%

Oban Times 89% 11%

Kilmarnock Standard 72.5% 28.5%

East Kilbride News 71% 29%

West Lothian Courier 75.2% 24.8%

Hamilton Advertiser 60.3% 39.7%

Airdrie Advertiser 56.1% 43.9%

Wishaw Press 83% 17%

Paisley Daily Express 62.23% 37.7%

Lockerbie and international perception of Scotland's justice system

[The following are excerpts from an article by John Sturrock in today’s edition of The Scotsman about the prospects for Scotland as a centre for international mediation:]

Singapore is a small island which packs a disproportionate punch in South East Asia. I recently took part in the launch of the Singapore International Mediation Centre. (...)

Are there similar opportunities for Scotland? Our location and positioning at the north western edge of Europe is in some respects not dissimilar to that of Singapore in the south east of Asia. However, we are not the international commercial “hub” which has been Singapore’s raison d’être since its establishment as a trading post by Stamford Raffles nearly 200 years ago. Location is one aspect. Another is our close proximity to another major hub, namely London. Realistically, we are unlikely to see a significant shift of commercial focus from there.

That said, what might Scotland offer? Well, a reputation for honesty, fair-dealing, hospitality and good manners should be a good start. (...)

Finally, the international perception of our domestic justice system could matter. It is still not clear, for example, just how profoundly the continuing uncertainty over the Lockerbie verdict affects international confidence in Scotland’s capability to hold itself out as a reputable centre for solving international problems. An interesting issue to wrestle with.

His faith in Scottish justice was understandably low

What follows is an item first posted on this blog on this date five years ago:

Fragments of truth

[This is the heading over an article in the current issue of the magazine Scottish Left Review by Mark Hirst (...) The full article can (and should) be read here. The following are excerpts.]

Earlier this year I met with the man convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity in British history. Now back in Libya to await a verdict from a ‘higher court’, terminally ill Abdelbaset al Megrahi steadfastly maintains his innocence in the murder of 270 people over Lockerbie in December 1988. Many professionals involved in the case including US intelligence officers, legal experts and police investigators also share his view, in spite of the concerted propaganda efforts by vested interests in the Crown Office, FBI and US Justice and State Departments. Yet for reasons still to be fully explained by Megrahi, his defence or the Scottish Government, in August this year he dropped his second appeal and a week later Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill released him on compassionate grounds. That decision resulted in a hysterical reaction from representatives of some of the US relatives and somewhat half-hearted condemnatory slogans from the Obama led US Government.

Megrahi was not required to drop his appeal in order to qualify for compassionate release. He subsequently claimed in a newspaper interview after his return to Libya that no pressure was placed on him to do so. So why did he? When I, along with MSP Christine Grahame, met with him his focus had been very much on the detail of the case and the new evidence that would be led during his second appeal. But he made it clear that his priorities had changed since discovering he was terminally ill last year. His over-riding objective was to return to Libya and to see his family before he died. He understood fully why some, mostly UK victim’s relatives, were keen to see the appeal continue, but told us it would not take them any closer to the truth and who was ultimately responsible for the deaths of their relatives.

Megrahi literally was running out of time and was deeply concerned that he would, as he put it very directly, return to Libya in a wooden box in the hold of a cargo plane. I believe he was genuinely supportive of the need of relatives of victims to get to the ‘truth’, but those efforts were not going to bring him any closer to his family in Libya before he died. His faith in Scottish justice and the legal process he had been subjected to was understandably low. “If they have a brave judge who looks and says ‘good or bad’, ‘yes or no’, but I doubt that the chair of the judges, who chairs all the other judges in Scotland, will turn around and say that all the other judges [at the trial and the first appeal] before got it wrong.” Megrahi said, before adding, “They will want to show, to keep the integrity of the system, that they don’t care if they have to keep an innocent man in prison to do that.”

The integrity in the Scottish legal system, whether it deserves it or not, is right at the heart of this issue, because that is what is at stake if the complete truth behind this case emerges and that is why very prominent vested interests are even now working hard to close the case down. The latest spurious police investigation being just one example that will ensure no independent inquiry takes place any time soon. (…)

The message to Megrahi, whether made explicitly or not, appears to have persuaded him to drop his 18-year fight to clear his name. That view was confirmed when his defence counsel Maggie Scott QC addressed the High Court in August to confirm Megrahi was indeed dropping his appeal. Scott stated that her client believed that this action would “assist in the early determination of those applications”. Applications, plural. The link was made explicitly. Ultimately Megrahi was led to believe by vested interests in our own legal establishment that his only chance of returning home was by dropping his second appeal and to leave his family name forever associated with the bombing of Pan Am 103. That outcome is a scandal that will haunt the Scottish legal system in particular, for decades to come.

So was there a conspiracy? Perhaps, but there certainly has been a cover-up which is very much ongoing. A cover-up of the weakness of the evidence, the weakness of the criminal investigation and a cover-up of the shameful conclusions reached by three Scottish judges at the trial. (…)

Earlier this year Dutch filmmaker Gideon Levy completed an award-winning documentary, still to be shown in the UK, that proves that the then-Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of [Carmyllie] was unaware that the crucial fragment used to link Libya to the attack went to the United States FBI lab for examination. It now transpires it also went to West Germany, although despite recent Crown Office claims that movement was not explicitly made during the trial. Levy’s film includes interviews with the chief prosecutor in the case, Lord Fraser, the FBI’s Senior Investigating Officer Richard Marquise and Robert Baer who for 30 years worked in the Middle East Directorate of the CIA and was a senior US intelligence operative. What emerges during the course of Levy’s film is the staggering revelation that this crucial evidence was not properly secured by Scottish police and should never have gone to the US. The importance of this piece of evidence cannot be [overstated]. Marquise states that without the fragment, known as PT-35, there would have been no indictment, let along conviction of Megrahi.

Lord Fraser, who brought the original indictments against Megrahi is then asked if he was aware that PT-35 had ever been to the US. “Not to my knowledge... I would not have permitted this as it was important evidence that could have been lost in transit, or tampered with or lost,” He is then shown the interview with Marquise, who confirms the fragment did go to the US before the trial. Fraser responds; “Well this is all news to me”. Later in the film Levy challenges Marquise to clarify whether PT-35 was taken to the US without the knowledge of the Lord Advocate. Standing next to him is retired Detective Chief Superintendent Stuart Henderson, the senior Scottish investigating officer in the case. Marquise initially seems confused over whether PT-35 was taken to Washington, contradicting his earlier on-camera interview, before Henderson interrupts and states categorically that the fragment was never in the US. “It was too important to be waved around”, Henderson states. “It was never in the US, it was never out of Scottish control. They [The FBI] came to the UK to see it, but it was never in the US.” After filming Marquise emailed Levy to “clarify” and confirm that PT-35 was indeed in the US and apologised for the earlier confusion. It is clear that if Marquise did not understand the significance of PT-35s foreign movements then Stuart Henderson clearly did.

What has not yet been made public, until now, is that Stuart Henderson states in his precognition statement that he gave to the Crown, ahead of Megrahi’s second appeal, that the fragment, PT-35 definitely did go the US. Henderson states that on the 22nd of June 1990 he travelled to the US with the fragment accompanied by Chief Inspector McLean, DI Williamson and Alan Feraday of RARDE, the forensic explosives laboratory in Kent. According to Henderson’s statement to the Crown they met with Metropolitan Field Officers of the FBI and Thomas Thurman, the FBI official who, it is claimed later ‘identified’ the origin of the fragment. Thurman has a degree in political science and has no relevant formal qualifications in electronics or any other scientific field.

I have also seen one of the crucial productions that was to be led during Megrahi’s second appeal which is the official log that accompanied PT-35 and is meant to record each movement of the evidence in order to protect the evidential chain. At each point it is signed for by the relevant police officer. This is an extremely important process and is meant to ensure the chain of evidence is not broken. There is no entry in this log recording that PT-35 ever went to the US, at any point. That has to cast serious doubts over its integrity in light of Henderson’s precognition statement and the confirmation from the FBI’s Dick Marquise that the fragment was in the US prior to the trial.

Establishing the truth transcends the mere fact of a verdict against one individual

What follows is taken from an item posted on this blog on this date in 2010:

What Justice for Megrahi seeks to achieve

[Following the appearance of Justice for Megrahi committee members before the Scottish Parliament's Public Petitions Committee last Tuesday, Dr Morag Kerr who had not been able to attend the hearing contacted me to express her congratulations on the team's performance. However, she felt that one point had not perhaps been adequately stressed. I agreed, and asked Dr Kerr to let me have a piece for posting on the blog. Here it is.]

The question has been asked, would it not be fair to say that Megrahi had his chance, he had his appeal ongoing, but he chose to drop it. Why should he be given another bite at the cherry?

To ask such a question is to misunderstand profoundly the point of the petition. Despite its name, “Justice for Megrahi” is not and never has been concerned with giving Mr al-Megrahi “another bite at the cherry”. It is concerned with establishing the truth, which transcends the mere fact of a verdict against one individual.

Over a million pounds of public money was spent by the SCCRC on their 3½-year investigation, and the outcome was an 800-page report with 13 volumes of appendices, and no less than six grounds on which a miscarriage of justice was suspected. What has been revealed of that report suggests that the original investigation quite simply got the wrong man, which means that the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie atrocity have never been identified.

Mr al-Megrahi stated that he dropped the appeal in order to improve his chances of returning home to Libya before he died. It appears he was mistaken in that belief, and how he came to be under that misapprehension might in itself be an interesting question. Be that as it may, the dropping of the appeal left the SCCRC findings untested in court. It is the contention of JFM that this unfortunate development should not be allowed to bury the truth, if the truth is indeed contained in these 800 pages.

Taking a wider view, it cannot be overemphasised that the conviction as it stands is acting as an insuperable barrier to any further investigation of the Lockerbie disaster. While JFM is not asking the Scottish government to investigate the identity of the real perpetrators, which would indeed be outwith its remit, it is clear that if indeed the wrong man was convicted, this is the first error that must be addressed before any further steps can be taken to hold a more wide-ranging enquiry, or indeed to re-open the criminal investigation.

[RB: The need for an independent inquiry is just as urgent today, notwithstanding the submission of a fresh application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission by Abdelbaset Megrahi’s family and relatives of Pan Am 103 victims jointly. A new appeal allowed by the SCCRC would, it is expected, overturn Megrahi’s conviction, but would not necessarily go very far towards uncovering what actually happened. That is why an inquiry remains necessary.]

"The White House took care of Lockerbie just as smoothly"

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Jack Cashill published on the WorldNetDaily website on this date in 2007 and referred to here on this blog:]

On the Sunday morning of July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser, the USS Vincennes, fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR655.

The first missile struck the tail and right wing and broke the aircraft in half. All 290 people aboard were killed. Misunderstanding America, the Iranians claimed that our Navy had intentionally destroyed the plane.

The Navy did no such thing. It does not destroy innocent commercial airliners intentionally. As retired Navy Capt David Carlson has well-documented, however, the shoot down was recklessly executed, relentlessly misreported, and dumped into the dustbin of history prematurely and all too consequentially.

Carlson was in a position to know. He commanded the USS Sides, a guided-missile frigate, just 20 miles from the Vincennes at the time of the incident and under its tactical control.

To this day he faults himself for not intervening in the Vincennes’ hasty command decision to launch the fatal missiles and for not speaking out sooner against “the corruption of professional ethics” that defined the incident’s assessment. (...)

As Carlson has reported, it served the career interests of the Vincennes’ command and the short-term national security interests of the White House to present the incident as an unfortunate result of an Iranian provocation.

In the waning days of the Reagan administration, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm William Crowe and Vice President George H W Bush took the lead in defending the Vincennes crew both against domestic critics and before the United Nations.

At the time, before the incident reports were complete, the two may have protested America’s innocence sincerely. Once voiced, however, these protests would prove difficult to rescind.

The Iranians were not pleased by the obfuscation. According to David Evans, former military affairs correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Carlson’s writing partner, the Iranians responded by placing $12 million in a Swiss bank account to fund the revenge bombing of an American airliner.

Reportedly, the Palestinian terrorist group Ahmed Jibril took the Iranians up on the offer. This plot culminated less than six months after the IR655 incident in the destruction of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The on-board bomb killed 270 people, including 188 Americans and 11 sleeping Scotsmen below.

As might be expected, the media and Congress had no enduring interest in protecting a Republican administration. In July 1992, in the heat of the presidential election, Newsweek ran a bold cover story, “Sea of Lies,” which detailed the “cover-up” of this “tragic blunder.”

Following the article’s publication, Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, held public hearings on the Vincennes incident and grilled Adm Crowe in the course of them.

“While it is not our policy to respond to every allegation that appears in print or goes out over the airwaves,” Aspin pontificated, “these charges go to heart of a very major historical event.”

On Sept. 19, 1992, a month after testifying before Aspin, the politically savvy Crowe made an unlikely pilgrimage to Little Rock, Ark. There, according to Carlson and Evans, Crowe “declared his fervent support for presidential candidate Bill Clinton.”

Upon being elected, Clinton appointed Aspin secretary of defense, and the probe into the Vincennes quietly died. Helping it stay dead was the newly appointed chairman of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, none other than Adm Crowe.

A lesson may have been learned here. To keep the TWA Flight 800 story dead and buried a decade later, the Clintons saw to it that the executioner of the TWA Flight 800 deception – then Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick – was appointed to the 9/11 Commission. (...)

The White House took care of Lockerbie just as smoothly. Wary of engaging either Iran or Iraq despite continued provocations from both, the Clinton White House put the squeeze on the defenseless Libya.

In 1999, Clinton convinced Libyan honcho Gadhafi to hand over a pair of his hapless subjects, one of whom was eventually acquitted and the other of whom continues to protest his innocence.

It seems likely that in turning the White House over to George W Bush in 2000, the Clintons had reason to believe that the state secrets they shared with the elder Bush would be protected by the son.

So far at least, they have been proved right.

The start of Megrahi's nightmare

[Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s nightmare began twenty-three years ago today. Here is what I have written elsewhere about how it started:]

It was on 14 November 1991 that the prosecution authorities in Scotland (the Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC) and the United States (acting US Attorney General, William P Barr) simultaneously announced that they had brought criminal charges -- principally murder and conspiracy to murder -- arising out of the destruction of Pan Am 103 against two Libyan nationals, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah, who were alleged to be members, and to have been acting throughout as agents, of the Libyan intelligence service.

According to the Scottish and American prosecutors, what had happened was this.  The two Libyans had manufactured, or caused to be manufactured, a bomb using a Toshiba cassette recorder, Semtex explosive and a digital electric timer (supplied and manufactured by a Swiss company based in Zurich, MeBo AG, the principals of which were Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier).  The device had been placed in a brown Samsonite suitcase in Malta, along with items of clothing purchased for the purpose from a particular shop (Mary's House) in Sliema owned by the Gauci family. Using stolen Air Malta luggage tags, the Libyans (one of whom -- Fhimah -- had occupied the post of station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta) introduced the suitcase at Luqa Airport into the interline baggage system as unaccompanied luggage on Air Malta Flight KM 180 from Malta to Frankfurt, with directions for its onward transmission (first) on to a feeder flight (PA 103A)  to Heathrow and (second) on to Pan Am flight 103 from Heathrow to J F Kennedy Airport in New York.

On 27 November 1991 the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States each issued a statement calling upon the Libyan government to hand over the two accused to either the Scottish or the American authorities for trial in Scotland or the United States.  Requests for their extradition were transmitted to the government of Libya through diplomatic channels.  No extradition treaties are in force between Libya on the one hand and United Kingdom and the United States on the other.

Libyan internal law, in common with the laws of many countries in the world, does not permit the extradition of its own nationals for trial overseas.  The government of Libya accordingly contended that the affair should be resolved through the application of the provisions of a 1971 civil aviation Convention concluded in Montreal to which all three relevant governments are signatories.  That Convention provides that a state in whose territory persons accused of terrorist offences against aircraft are resident has a choice aut dedere aut judicare, either to hand over the accused for trial in the courts of the state bringing the accusation or to take the necessary steps to have the accused brought to trial in its own domestic courts.  In purported compliance with the second of these options, the Libyan authorities arrested the two accused and appointed a Supreme Court judge as examining magistrate to consider the evidence and prepare the case against them.  Not surprisingly, perhaps, the UK and US governments refused to make available to the examining magistrate the evidence that they claimed to have amassed against the accused, who remained under house arrest in Libya until they were eventually handed over in April 1999 for trial at Camp Zeist.

The case for a public inquiry remains overwhelming

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on 13 November 2009:

The latest from Private Eye

The police “review” of the Lockerbie case appears to be little more than a sop to head off demands for a full public inquiry.

Any meaningful reinvestigation would involve another force being brought in to carry out the review – not an officer involved in the original investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103. It would also surely include a thorough review of the evidence upon which the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) decided that Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice… But this is not to be.

Another new key area of concern is the forensic evidence underpinning the entire case: notably a small fragment of a circuit board for a bomb timer found in and among fragments of a man’s shirt recovered from the site. The shirt and other clothing recovered were said to have been traced back to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who said he had sold them to a man who resembled Megrahi.

The prosecution has always claimed that these tiny fragments were identified by Dr Thomas Hayes at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (Rarde) on 12 May 1989. There was concern at the time of the trial that the label on this crucial piece of evidence had been altered. Further, the pages in Hayes’ notes relating to this evidence had been curiously renumbered. Eye readers may recall that the work of Hayes and other Rarde scientists has subsequently been criticised in a series of high-profile miscarriage-of-justice cases involving IRA terrorism – in particular the inquiry by Sir John May into the wrongful conviction of the Maguire family, where scientific notebooks were found to have been altered.

Lawyers for Megrahi have now uncovered a similar pattern of inconsistencies, alterations, discrepancies and undisclosed material that again calls into question the integrity of the Rarde scientists. It comes from new scientific tests as well as a meticulous examination of evidence that was not disclosed or available at the time. Here are some examples …

* Photographs and evidence suggest that the circuit board and debris from the shirt had not been discovered until January 1990 – seven months later than Rarde claimed.

* Further evidence that scientific notes had been altered.

* Details of simulated explosions carried out in the US in July 1989 were not revealed, but debris from those blasts [was] taken both to Rarde and to Lockerbie for comparison.

* Exhibit labels were being written and attached by police more than a year after the debris was found.

* One man who was asked to put his name to the discovery of pieces of the charred shirt says he does not recall recovering the material. He also says the cloth shown to him by police was not the same grey colour as that identified in court as the shirt bought by Megrahi.

* Evidence to suggest the charred “bomb” shirt was in fact a child’s shirt.

* A wealth of conflicting evidence surrounding the discovery of charred pieces of a Babygro – also said to have been packed in the bomb suitcase and sold to Megrahi. One Babygro collected by investigators for comparison purposes was not accounted for.

The SCCRC which had some but not all of this material, rejected suggestions that the evidence had been deliberately fabricated. But it fell short of conducting its own forensic tests.

If this is a cock-up or incompetence, it is on such a scale that it recalls the verdict of Sir John May in the Maguire inquiry that the scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded should not be relied upon. Taken with Gauci’s highly dubious identification evidence …, the case for a public inquiry remains overwhelming.

[The above is the text of an article that appears on page 28 of the current edition (1249) of Private Eye. It does not feature on the magazine's website.]

On the same date Rolfe posted the following comment on the blog:

It would be nice to know the sources for these assertions.

It seems that the author is alleging, or at least suggesting, that the entire shebang contained in that evidence bag was fabricated, probably using material generated during the test detonations carried out in the USA in the summer of 1989. However, as I've said before, the existence of the red-circle photo would seem to argue against that hypothesis.

New viewers may start here.

Thomas Hayes's notes dated 12th May 1989 describe his examination of the contents of the bag in question. In the course of that examination he teased out a five-sheet-thick fragment of compacted paper (from the Toshiba manual) also found within the shirt collar.

The red-circle photo of the contents of the bag shows the timer fragment quite clearly - indeed, so clearly that it's possible to identify it as the same item as was exhibited at the trial in 2000. It also shows the fragment of paper - still compacted. Thus, unless it has been falsified, that picture was taken on (or before) 12th May 1989. And it shows the timer fragment.

The photo is not a polaroid, and thus should have a negative, which should establish the provenance of the photo to the date in question.

Or not, as the case may be.

Has anybody checked this out? Does the negative show up in a roll of film shot at the right time? This is absolutely crucial to the entire case, and I'd dearly love to know the answer.

My main sticking point on this issue is my doubt as to whether a group of law enforcement who were up to no good around Christmas 1989 would dare try to introduce this picture into the evidence trail retrospectively, with all the problems of negative provenance. The picture was circulated to the press, I believe - are we really to believe nobody noticed the negative wasn't from the date it was supposed to have been taken?

Nevertheless, this article seems to be suggesting they have exactly that sort of evidence.

Photographs and evidence suggest that the circuit board and debris from the shirt had not been discovered until January 1990 – seven months later than Rarde claimed.

Is this for real? Do they know something we don't? Or is this just Chinese Whispers and speculation?

Many relatives convinced that man eventually convicted was innocent

[What follows is an excerpt from a news agency report headed Where are the bodies, MH17 families ask published yesterday evening by Reuters:]

[O]n July 17 … the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot out of the sky.

All 298 passengers and crew - two-thirds of them Dutch – were killed. (...)

The Dutch are conducting two parallel investigations: one into the cause of the crash, and a criminal inquiry - the single largest in Dutch history. There are now 100 Dutch law enforcement officials involved in that case, including 10 prosecutors, said spokesman Wim de Bruin.

But no forensic investigators have made it to the crash site. That makes the recovery of evidence nearly impossible. (...)

The challenges facing the Dutch investigators are extreme.

The closest comparison is the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, which killed 254 people. [RB: actually 270] The investigation, conducted in peacetime Scotland, took three years, during which 4 million pieces of evidence were recovered from a crash site spanning 2,000 sq km (770 sq miles). It took a decade to go to trial.

"We searched rivers, lochs and reservoirs and recovered many personal effects, pieces of aircraft and debris, as well as other much more difficult 'recoveries' I'd rather not go into here," said one police diver involved in the search.

Even then, the trial of two Libyan intelligence agents, at a specially constituted Scottish court in a disused Dutch military base, secured only one conviction. To this day, many relatives are convinced that the man eventually convicted was innocent.