Defence Legal Team rejects Lord Advocate’s claims over ‘Lockerbie Bomber’

[What follows is the text of a press release issued today by Aamer Anwar, head of the Lockerbie Defence Legal Team:]

We reject Lord Advocate’s claims over ‘Lockerbie Bomber’

On the eve of the anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Scotland’s Lord Advocate has once again rejected claims that Mr Megrahi could be innocent stating that:

“During the 26 year long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in this case. We remain committed to this investigation and our focus remains on the evidence and not speculation and supposition. Our prosecutors and police officers, working with UK government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the sole aim of bringing to justice those who acted along with al-Megrahi.”

When Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, 270 people from 21 countries perished. It remains the worst terrorist atrocity ever committed in the UK.

But the trial of the “Lockerbie Bomber” remains the UK’s worst miscarriage of justice, whose consequences are still being felt 26 years later whilst the truth remains elusive.

The Lord Advocate’s speech in Washington makes for great sound bites with an American audience but lacks analysis of the essential facts.

In June 2014 we lodged an application with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) seeking to overturn the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for murder. That has absolutely nothing to do with conspiracy theories but is based on a solid assessment of the ‘so called evidence’ against Mr Al-Megrahi.

It is claimed that the Crown Office and Police Scotland have carried out a review of the evidence used to convict Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi which ‘confirms beyond doubt that he was responsible for the killings.’

Such reviews repeat an ‘age old mantra’ of the Crown never doubting the safety of the conviction. It would be better to place such reviews in context, despite many miscarriages of justice over the years it is noticeable that prosecutors have never accepted that they have made mistakes, so why would it be any different now?

The application to the SCCRC was submitted on behalf of :-

i)      Six immediate family members of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

ii)     Dr Jim Swire, Rev’d John F Mosey and 24 other British relatives of passengers who died on board Pan Am Flight 103.

An essential fact missing from the Lord Advocate’s speech is that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) had already determined on the 28th June 2007 that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice in relation to his conviction and identified six grounds for referring the case to the High Court.

The Chairman of the SCCRC Graham Forbes at the time said:

“The Commission is of the view, based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

Following Mr Al-Megrahi’s death and our subsequent instructions for a posthumous appeal we have asked the Commission to reconfirm these six grounds.

We have also requested that the Commission consider referring the case:-

i)  On the ground of the Crown’s non-disclosure to the defence of evidence relating to the difference in metallurgical composition between the fragment of circuit board PT35b and the circuit boards in the timers supplied by MEBO to Libya. New evidence claims that the fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside could not have been responsible for the bombing.

ii)  On the ground of the evidence uncovered which demonstrates that the bomb suitcase was already in Pan Am 103 luggage container AVE4041 before the feeder flight from Frankfurt arrived at Heathrow with, as the Crown contended and the trial court accepted, a suitcase from Malta which contained the bomb. It was submitted that there is evidence which will show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft.

iii)    New evidence claims the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was ‘transferred’ through two airports undetected to Pan Am Flight 103.

iv)   There is a multitude of serious question marks over material evidence, and most worryingly, allegations of the Crown’s non-disclosure of evidence which could have been key to the defence.

v)     Mr Megrahi was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and failed to even recognise him in the courtroom.

Documents have claimed that Scottish police officers and FBI agents had discussed as early as September 1989 ‘an offer of unlimited money’ to the Maltese shop keeper Tony Gauci.

Gauci was central to Megrahi’s conviction because the clothes recovered from the suitcase that carried the bomb onto Pan Am 103 at Heathrow, bound for New York, were traced back to his shop.

Various reports have claimed that Tony Gauci received more than $2m and his brother more than $1m in reward money.

This completely contradicted guarantees given by Richard Marquise, of the FBI who led the US wing of the Lockerbie investigation- ‘no witness in this case was ever promised or paid any money in return for their testimony’.

I would submit that if it is unacceptable to offer bribes, inducements or rewards to any witness in a routine murder trial in Glasgow then it should have been unacceptable to have done it in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.

What is unusual about our application is that this is the first time in legal history in the UK that relatives of murdered victims have united with the relatives of a ‘convicted’ deceased to seek justice by means of a referral to the Appeal Court.

The case of Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi is described as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history for a reason. A reversal of the verdict would mean that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for 26 years, by imprisoning a man they knew to be innocent.

The Appeal was commenced but following the diagnosis of terminal cancer it was suddenly abandoned in 2009. The application we lodged with the SCCRC deals with the circumstances that led to Mr Megrahi abandoning his appeal.

To date both the British Government and Scottish Government have claimed that they played no role in pressuring Mr  Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release.

The Governments in England and Scotland stand accused of effectively blackmailing a dying man into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release, and the backdrop to all of this was ‘strategic oil interests’.

The reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system has suffered badly both at home and internationally because of widespread doubts about the justifiability of the conviction of Mr Al-Megrahi.

It is in the interests of justice and of restoring confidence in our criminal justice system and its administration that these doubts be addressed.

The Lord Advocate was right when he said that the only place to determine guilt or innocence was in a court of law, where the evidence could be subjected to “great scrutiny, cross examination and testing”.

That is exactly what we intend to do if the SCCRC as a result of our application refers the original conviction back to the Court of Appeal believing that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

END OF STATEMENT BY SOLICITOR AAMER ANWAR

STATEMENT BY DR JIM SWIRE FATHER OF FLORA SWIRE

“It has always been and remains my intent to see those responsible for her death brought to justice.  So by 1990 I was appalled by what I already knew concerning what appeared to me to be the betrayal of the trust which we should be able to place in our Government to protect us.

For me this case is about two families, mine and Abdel Baset’s, but behind them now are seen to lie the needs of 25 other families in applying for a further appeal 26 years after the event itself.

We need the truth and Scotland’s management of this case produced a verdict perfectly tailored for use by those who would seek to ensure that the full truth remains hidden.”

The eight elements that destroy the Megrahi conviction

[What follows is an article headed Eight inconvenient truths about Lockerbie, which the media and authorities are ignoring posted by John Ashton today on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website:]

Today, the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the media is full of articles about the case. All report the claims of Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, that a review of the case has confirmed the guilt of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man so far convicted of the bombing. However, Mr Mulholland and – with the exception of a couple of Scottish newspapers – the media have barely touched upon key facts that suggest Mr Megrahi was not guilty.

Before I list these, a bit of background for those unfamiliar with the story. The prosecution case, which was accepted by the Scottish judges who convicted Mr Megrahi, was that on the morning of 21 December 1988, while travelling under a false name, he managed to smuggle a brown Samsonite suitcase containing a bomb onto an Air Malta flight from Malta to Frankfurt. An expert in airline security and alleged senior intelligence officer, Megrahi was said to have labelled the case for onward transfer to Pan Am flight 103A from Frankfurt to London Heathrow and Pan Am 103 from Heathrow to New York.

He supposedly bought clothes for the suitcase at a small Maltese shop called Mary’s House on an earlier visit to the island on 7 December. The shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, who was the prosecution’s star witness, told the court that Mr Megrahi resembled the man who had bought the clothes. The Malta link was confirmed by baggage records from Frankfurt airport, which appeared to show that a suitcase from the Air Malta flight had been forwarded to Pan Am 103.

Another key plank of the case was a fragment of electronic circuit board, found embedded within part of a blast damaged, Maltese shirt. A British forensic investigator told the court that the fragment matched boards in timers supplied to Libya by Swiss company Mebo, which shared its offices with a Libyan company called ABH, in which Megrahi was a shareholder.

Surely open and shut case? Er, no. Here are just a few of the reasons why.

1. The guilty verdict was “incomprehensible”

Not my description, but that of Professor Hans Köchler, a UN trial observer. He came to this conclusion because, according to the prosecution, Mr Megrahi coud only have carried out the bombing with the help of another Libyan, Lamin Fhimah, who stood trial with him. However, the judges acquitted Fhimah, which begged the question – as yet unanswered – how could Mr Megrahi acted alone?

2. The clothes buyer was clearly not Megrahi
In his statements to the police, the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, consistently described the clothes buyer as around 50 years old, six feet tall, dark skinned and with a full head of hair. Mr Megrahi was around 5ft 8 inches tall, light-skinned, had thinning hair and, at the time of the incident, was just 36.

3. It’s official – the court judgment was unreasonable
In 2007, following a four-year review of the case, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (the official body responsible for examining alleged miscarriages of justice) referred Mr Megrahi’s conviction to the appeal court on no fewer than six grounds. He abandoned the appeal in 2009 when terminally ill with cancer in the belief that it would help smooth the way for his release from prison on compassionate grounds.

Crucially, one of the SCCRC’s six grounds was that there was no “reasonable foundation” for the crucial finding that he bought the clothes on 7 December 1988, which was his only window of opportunity. Why did the commission reach this conclusion? Because Mr Gauci was clear that, as he was leaving the shop, the clothes purchaser bought an umbrella because it had started to rain. Yet meteorological evidence heard by the court demonstrated that there was no rain on 7 December. If Mr Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes on 7 December, the prosecution case collapses, so the SCCRC had come as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict itself was unreasonable.

4. The prosecution withheld a stack of evidence that was helpful to Megrahi
During their review, the SCCRC found that the prosecution had withheld important documents that cast doubt on their own case. Four out of the commission’s six appeal referral grounds concerned such non-disclosure.

Among the documents were secret police memos noting that Tony Gauci had expressed an interest in receiving a substantial reward, and that he was under the strong influence of his brother Paul, who regularly nagged the police about being rewarded. The SCCRC discovered that Tony was later secretly paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice and Paul $1 million. Among the documents uncovered by the commission was a begging letter from the police’s senior investigating officer to the DoJ, in which in which he acknowledged that the Crown Office was prevented by its own rules from seeking a reward for the brothers, but saw no problem in the police doing so.

5. The circuit board fragment was not from one of the timers supplied to Libya
Evidence uncovered in 2009 demonstrated that the circuit board fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timer boards. The evidence concerned the metallic coating on the fragment’s copper circuitry. Back in 1990, two independent scientists consulted by the police established that the coating was pure tin, but when, two years later, they examined a board from the same batch that was used to make the timers supplied to Libya, they discovered that it was coated with a tin-lead alloy. As neither scientist was an electronics expert, they were unaware of the potential significance of the difference. However, in 2009 Mr Megrahi’s lawyers spoke to the prosecution witness who had made the boards used in the Libyan timers, who was certain that all of them were coated with tin-lead alloy and therefore equally certain that he could not have made the board from which the fragment originated. The lawyers also discovered notes by the prosecution forensic expert who had claimed in court that the fragment matched the boards in the Libyan timers. These demonstrated that he too was aware of the metallurgical disparity, which, as an electronics expert, he should have recognised the significance of.

6. The luggage evidence points to Heathrow rather than Malta
It was not disputed at Mr Megrahi’s trial that the Lockerbie bomb was packed within a brown Samsonite suitcase. Of all the witnesses who were involved in the loading of the three flights on which, according to the prosecution, the bomb was carried were interviewed by the police. Only one of them could recall seeing such a case – a Heathrow baggage handler called John Bedford. Significantly, it was positioned within the luggage container within which the explosion later occurred, very close to the centre of the blast. Crucially, Mr Bedford went off duty BEFORE Pan Am flight 103A arrived from Frankfurt, which means that the suitcase he saw could not have originated on the Air Malta flight

Researcher Dr Morag Kerr, who has exhaustively studied the luggage evidence, has made an extremely compelling case that the Bedford suitcase contained the bomb. Furthermore, records from the Maltese airport suggest that no rogue baggage made it on to the flight to Frankfurt. (For further details see her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?)

7. There is no reliable evidence that Megrahi was a senior intelligence agent
The claim that Mr Megrahi was a senior intelligent agent originated from a junior colleague in the state-owned Libyan Arab Airlines. At Mr Megrahi’s trial, this witness, Magid Giaka, was revealed to be a CIA informant. Not only that, but the CIA considered him so unreliable that it was on the verge of sacking him before he became useful in the Lockerbie case. Declassified CIA cables examined by the court showed him to be a money-grabbing fantasist. As well as alleging that Mr Megrahi was an intelligence agent, he claimed that colonel Gaddafi was a freemason. The judges rejected most of his evidence, yet chose to believe his unsupported claim about Mr Megrahi.

Mr Megrahi does not deny that travelling on a false passport, which he says was issued to him because he was involved a US sanctions-busting efforts to source spare parts for the airline. Crucially, he kept the passport for eleven years after the bombing and was happy for it to be passed to the prosecution at trial – hardly the actions of a guilty man.

8. No evidence has emerged from Libya since the fall of Gaddafi
A few days after the start of the Libyan revolution, in February 2011, Colonel Gaddafi’s ex-justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was soon to become head of Libya’s National Transitional Council, told the Swedish newspaper Expressen that he had proof that Gaddafi had ordered the bombing. A few days later, he told the Sunday Times that Mr Megrahi had blackmailed Gaddafi into securing his release from prison by threatening to expose Gaddafi’s role in the bombing, and had ‘vowed to exact revenge’ unless Gaddafi complied. However, when, a few weeks later, he was pushed to reveal his proof, the best he could offer was that the Gaddafi regime had funded Megrahi’s legal case. He later claimed that Expressen had misquoted him. The Scottish police and prosecutors hoped that the regime change would yield more evidence about Mr Megrahi’s and Gaddafi’s role in the bombing, but, nearly four years on, no such evidence has surfaced publicly. The only significant document to emerge was a letter from Megrahi to his relative Abdullah Sennousi, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal. In it he stated: “I am an innocent man”. He wasn’t lying.

"If you open your eyes you cannot fail to see that there is a problem"

[What follows is an excerpt from an article in today’s edition of the Sunday Post:]

Earlier this year, Megrahi's relatives embarked on a legal bid to clear his name amid claims that his case is the "worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history".

Six immediate members of his family joined forces with 24 British relatives of those who died in the atrocity to seek, ultimately, a third appeal against his conviction in the Scottish courts.

They united to submit an application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for a review of the conviction, a move which could see the case referred back to the High Court.

One of those British relatives, Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the bombing, has expressed his disappointment at Mr Mulholland's latest comments.

Dr Swire told Sky News: "For the Lord Advocate to say there isn't a shred of evidence to suggest that the trial was anything other than what it should have been is analogous with the late Mandy Rice-Davies when she says 'he would say that, wouldn't he'."

He added that Mr Mulholland "wasn't around at the time of Lockerbie, whereas I was, unfortunately".

"Twenty-six years ago is a long time and I suppose he means people currently in his Crown Office don't believe there is anything wrong with the evidence.

"But I think if you open your eyes and look you cannot fail to see that there is a problem.

"More importantly than that, Scotland's own Criminal Cases Review Commission years ago found six reasons why this case should be revisited and reviewed.

"So for the Lord Advocate now to say there isn't a shred of evidence flies in the face of what the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission actually told the world years ago."

The four elephants in the room which suggest the Lord Advocate is wrong

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

The Crown Office has used the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing to proclaim the safety of the conviction of Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the only man so far convicted of the bombing.

The department briefed yesterday that a review of the case had "confirmed beyond doubt" the Libyan's guilt, while today its head, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC, has personally reaffirmed that guilt.

Mulholland has been unusually vigorous in denouncing Megrahi's supporters, who include relatives of the Lockerbie dead, branding them "conspiracy theorists" two years ago. It is hard to imagine his opposite number in England and Wales, the director of public prosecutions, taking to the media to defend a conviction and take on critics. But while this strident tone has raised eyebrows, Mulholland's statements are more notable for ignoring four large elephants in the middle of his legal chambers.

The first is the ongoing review of the case by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), the statutory body that has the power to refer convictions to the appeal court. As Mulholland well knows, a previous review by the commission referred the case on no fewer than six grounds. The terminally ill Megrahi abandoned the resulting appeal to improve his chances of being granted compassionate release, but was confident that his name would one day be cleared. Remarkably, one of the six grounds was that the three Scottish law lords who convicted him had made a fundamental error of judgment when they found that the clothes incriminating Megrahi had been bought on December 7. In doing so, the commission, in the eyes of some, came as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict was itself wrong.

More seriously for the Crown Office, four of the other grounds concerned its failure to disclose important evidence to Megrahi's defence team. This included evidence that the Crown's star witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, had expressed an interest in receiving a substantial reward and was under the strong influence of his brother Paul, who regularly nagged the police about being rewarded. The SCCRC discovered Gauci was later secretly paid $2 million by the US Department of Justice, and his brother Paul $1m.

When, in 2012, this ­newspaper published a leaked copy of the SCCRC's 800-page review, the Crown Office went into panic mode, anonymously briefing a Scottish tabloid that Megrahi's case had "more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese" then issuing a press statement that significantly downplayed the commission's findings.

The second elephant is the two-year-old police investigation, led by Police Scotland's Deputy Chief Constable Iain Livingstone, into criminal allegations made against some of those originally involved in the inquiry by the committee of the Justice for Megrahi group.

When the allegations were first made to the then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, the Crown Office immediately denounced them as groundless, despite not having seen the detailed dossier of evidence assembled by the committee. Many were shocked by the intervention, believing it might compromise the police inquiry and that it raised serious questions about Mulholland's independence as the chief public prosecutor. Unfortunately for the Crown Office, the police clearly do not share its contempt for the allegations. If the investigation concludes there was no criminal misconduct, the Crown Office still has to explain why it failed to disclose so much important evidence. In the view of its critics, notably Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the bombing, the matter must be addressed in a public inquiry - something successive Scottish governments have been reluctant to grant.

The third elephant is forensic evidence concerning a small fragment of electronic circuit board, recovered from an item of clothing that was supposedly in the same suitcase as the bomb. According to the prosecution, it matched boards in timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss firm called Mebo, which shared offices with a Libyan company part-owned by Megrahi.

Evidence uncovered prior to Megrahi's abandoned appeal demonstrated that the fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timer boards. The discovery has fuelled claims the fragment was a plant, which has in turn encouraged the Crown Office to call its opponents conspiracy theorists. However, as Mulholland must be aware, the breaking of the link between the fragment and the Libyan timers leaves the prosecution case in shreds, regardless of whether it was planted.

The fourth elephant is the lack of evidence from Libya to implicate either Megrahi or the Gaddafi regime in the bombing. During the country's 2011 revolution, senior officials, keen to curry favour with the West, lined up to accuse the regime of sponsoring the attack.

The best known of them, the head of the National Transitional Council and former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Jalil, claimed to have proof that Gaddafi ordered the bombing.

All this must have been music to the Crown Office's ears, but, when pushed to reveal his proof of the regime's guilt, the best Jalil could offer was that it had funded ­Megrahi's legal case.

Sadly, Libya has become too dangerous for the Scottish police to conduct investigations there. Even if it were not, they would likely find the cupboard was bare. In the four years since the revolution, ­nothing has emerged publicly from the ruins of the old regime to affirm Megrahi's guilt, let alone Libya's.

No doubt Mulholland's public declarations will continue to ignore the four elephants in his legal chambers, but he must knows that their ever-fiercer stamping may one day bring Megrahi's conviction crashing around his ears.

John Ashton is the author of the authorised ­biography of Abdelbaset al Megrahi, Megrahi: You are my Jury, (Birlinn, 2012) and Scotland's Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters (Birlinn, 2014). From 2006-09, he worked as a researcher with Megrahi's legal team. 

[Here are links to some other reports in the media:

Megrahi was innocent of Lockerbie bombing, insists victim's father
Lockerbie victim's father criticises prosecutor's comments
Lockerbie bombing: Prosecutor's comments about al-Megrahi 'unfortunate'
Remember Lockerbie as crimes of intelligence services are exposed
Lockerbie: Lord Advocate to track down accomplices

And here is a moving reminiscence from someone engaged in the rescue operations on 21 December 1988:
Lockerbie -- 26 years on.]

We got it right, says Lord Advocate

[Today’s edition of The Times contains a report by Magnus Linklater headed Lockerbie conviction is upheld by review. It reads as follows:]

A review of the Lockerbie bombing case by Scottish investigators has concluded that there is “not a shred of evidence” to support claims that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was wrongly convicted.

Not only have investigators confirmed beyond doubt that the Libyan was the man responsible for the deaths of 270 people on December 21, 1988, they believe his fellow accused, Lamin Fhimah, who was acquitted, was almost certainly involved as well.

The findings will come as a blow to those, such as Jim Swire, whose daughter was one of those killed, and Robert Black, QC, who maintain that prosecutors advanced a flawed case and that judges presided over a miscarriage of justice. Ever since Megrahi was convicted in 2001 there have been allegations that evidence was manipulated to implicate Libya, steering suspicion away from Middle Eastern states.

Scottish prosecutors have been accused of deliberately ignoring evidence that the bomb was put aboard Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow rather than at Malta, and that the timer fragment, the principal piece of forensic evidence against Libya, was planted or altered.

The claims have been examined in detail in the course of the investigation by the Crown Office and Police Scotland, which have been working on the case with the FBI to identify others who were involved in the bombing.

Sources close to the investigation said there was “not a shred of evidence” to suggest the prosecution got it wrong.

Active pursuit of the case in Libya, they added, has served to confirm rather than undermine the evidence against both Megrahi and Fhimah.

Last night Frank Mulholland, QC, the Lord Advocate, said: “During the 26-year-long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in this case . . . our focus remains on the evidence, and not on speculation and supposition.”

Evidence on the bomb itself, and the crucial timer fragment that linked the attack to Libya, found three weeks after Pan Am 103 exploded, have undermined the conspiracy theory.

Critics say the fragment was either planted at the site, exchanged later for another, or was tampered with to show a link to Libya that was never there.

Police are adamant, however, that the fragment was under supervision. They point out that the evidence would have to have been planted within 23 days, requiring knowledge of all the evidence to come — including Megrahi, whose existence was then unknown.

Set against the speculation are facts that have never been disproved: the presence of Megrahi in Malta, carrying a false passport, on the day the prosecution says the bomb went on board flight KM180 to Frankfurt; Fhimah arriving with him; and their subsequent telephone conversations.

[RB: The police investigation here referred to is not that which is currently being conducted by Police Scotland (under the supervision of an independent QC) into Justice for Megrahi’s allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial. Progress reports on that investigation can be accessed here. Furthermore, an application (at the joint instance of the Megrahi family and a group of victims’ relatives) for Megrahi’s conviction to be referred back to the High Court for a further appeal is currently under consideration by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. In these circumstances and in the light of the evidence disclosed by John Ashton and Dr Morag Kerr in their respective recent books it seems somewhat rash and premature for the Lord Advocate to be trumpeting his confidence that they got the right man after all. But Mr Mulholland, of course, is not noted for circumspection: he characterised Justice for Megrahi’s criminality allegations as “defamatory and without foundation” before they had even been investigated.

Today’s edition of The Times also contains a long comment piece by Magnus Linklater headlined Lockerbie review kills conspiracy theories. Mr Linklater has long been convinced that concerns about the Megrahi conviction are the province of conspiracy theorists (all too often, of course, a lazy slur). In view of his confident certainty, it does seem a pity that he has never responded to John Ashton’s two open letters to him, having indicated that he would do so.]

Lockerbie evidence planted or "improved"? "I don't know" said Lord Advocate Fraser.

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

Peter Fraser pins colours to the mast

In an article in The Times, the Lord Advocate at the time that charges were brought against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah for the destruction of Pan Am 103, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC, expresses his confidence in the evidence that led to the conviction of Megrahi. Here are excerpts:

'Lord Fraser does not discount the involvement of other states, but he points out that no definitive evidence has been produced to link them to the attack. The Libyans, on the other hand, were traced through the diligence of Scottish detectives, who managed to identify the manufacturers of clothing found in the suspect suitcase that had held the bomb. By proving that the clothing had been bought in Malta, and then establishing that the purchaser was al-Megrahi, they laid the foundations of the Crown case. “For me that was the most significant breakthrough,” Lord Fraser says now.'

'Tam Dalyell, the former MP, has argued that the CIA may have known about the attack beforehand. Lord Fraser rejects that. “I told Tam Dalyell: if there was a conspiracy, then I am in it up to the neck. I have to be involved. The only other possibility is that I have been so naive that bits of evidence have been planted, and I have swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But four other Lord Advocates have also examined the evidence and they have all concurred with it.”'

On the issue of the provenance of the MST-13 circuit board fragment which was crucial to the establishment of a link between Libya and the destruction of the aircraft, Lord Fraser hedges his bets somewhat:

'The discovery of a fragment of circuit board from a timer made by a Swiss company with links to Libya was critical to the prosecution. But accounts of how, where and by whom it was found varied. The original fragment was found several miles from the wreckage, and some weeks after the disaster.

'It was not until very much later that the CIA claimed to have identified it and matched it with a circuit board manufactured by Mebo of Zurich, a company run by Edwin Bollier, who had supplied timers to the Libyan Government. Some experts have argued that the find was just a bit too convenient to the US investigators, since, by targeting the Libyans, they could avoid falling out with Iran and Syria, important allies at the time of the Gulf War. So could the CIA have planted the evidence? “I don’t know,” says Lord Fraser. “No one ever came to me and said, ‘Now we can go for the Libyans’, it was never as straightforward as that. The CIA was extremely subtle. For me the significant evidence came when the Scottish police made the connection with Malta.” Pressed for his own view, he cites a Scottish murder case, that of Patrick Meehan, in which, it was alleged, the prosecution case had been “improved” by the planting of evidence. Was there a similarity? “I don’t know,” he said again, “but if there was one witness I was not happy about, it was Mr Bollier, who was deeply unreliable.”'

The botched and bungled Lockerbie bombing farce

[I am grateful to Sharyn Bovat for drawing my attention to an article by Andrew McKillop headed Torture, Terror And Elite Schizophrenia In The UK published on 16 December on The Market Oracle website. The following is a brief extract:]

The BBC excelled itself in the bizarre quest of justifying torture (even revelling in its use), while stoutly telling viewers and listeners that "we don't do that here". BBC News TV's first response and reaction to the Senate report included a 30-minute special report in peak viewing time "with data compiled by the BBC itself" on its claimed tally of Islamic terror deaths around the world in the month of November. The total was a suspiciously exact 5042 and Iraq and Nigeria topped the "goal average' of dead the BBC registered in, or concocted for, third-place Afghanistan. But curiously enough, Syria wasn't even mentioned.  Not a single terror war death happened in Syria in the whole of the month of November 2014 - despite all the terror war funding by the football-loving and hotel-buying Arab Gulf petro-states which are "moving towards democracy"! My oh my.

Scarcely 3 days later however, by Sunday 14 December the British mainstream media's tone had dramatically changed. The previous propaganda blitz cracked asunder. Suddenly the UK's elite-serving mainstream press was asking in a stern way: "How much did the UK government know?", and what bits of the Senate report were "redacted" to censor details of active British participation in CIA torture since the years 2001-2004? It was now urgent to know. Three days before, there was no such thing as UK complicity in American torture!

One likely or probable reason for this "sea change" includes the fact that the bulk of UK complicity and aid to CIA torture and "extraordinary rendition" or kidnapping followed by torture, was decided under a Labout government headed by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Jack Straw, in which Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's brother was Foreign Secretary for a while. The true blue press and media, like the BBC can therefore rally to support the clean-fingernailed English Conservative party by suddenly trumpeting the horrors of UK complicity in US torture. You can trust the media!

Extraordinary rendition, as its tastefully called, was firstly described as "not in any way really concerning the UK", give or take a few isolated cases, such as the botched and bungled Abdul al-Megrahi Lockerbie bombing farce, in which al-Megrahi was released early on "compassionate grounds" to prevent his appeal being heard, where his Scottish lawyers would have produced devastating proof that the prosecution had used completely tainted and false testimonies, including purchased testimonies, and completely false material evidence invented by "you guess who".  

[RB: Extraordinary rendition was not involved in he cases of Megrahi and Fhimah. Nor was extradition. They voluntarily surrendered themselves for trial. But I have no quibble with the rest of the account.]