“At the meeting on 9 April, I proposed that US $2m should be paid to Anthony Gauci"

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in the the Maltese newspaper The Sunday Times on 24 November 2013:]

The lead investigator in the Lockerbie bombing personally lobbied US authorities to pay two Maltese witnesses at least $3 million for their part in securing the conviction of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, documents published today in The Sunday Times of Malta reveal. (...)

In one of the documents, Detective Superintendent Tom McCulloch, from the Scottish Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, wrote to the US Department of Justice on April 19, 2002, making the case for Maltese witness Tony Gauci and his brother Paul to be compensated for their role in the trial from the US Rewards for Justice programme.

McCulloch wrote: “At the meeting on 9 April, I proposed that US 2 million dollars should be paid to Anthony Gauci and US 1 million dollars to his brother Paul. However, following further informal discussions I was encouraged to learn that those responsible for making the final decision retain a large degree of flexibility to increase this figure.”

The letter followed on from a meeting with the Justice Department and the FBI and another letter sent a year earlier in which Mr McCulloch first made his plea on behalf of the Gaucis.

In this first letter, he wrote: “There is little doubt that (Tony Gauci’s) evidence was the key to the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi. I therefore feel that he is a worthy of nominee for the reward...”

Mr McCulloch said he had discussed the reward with the Crown Office (the prosecution) but they would not offer an opinion on whether the Gaucis should be paid as this was deemed “improper”.

“The prosecution in Scotland cannot become involved in such an application,” Mr McCulloch wrote. (...)

Mr Gauci himself gave evidence before the commission and stressed that he had never shown any interest in receiving payment. To sustain his point, he underlined the fact that he had turned down various offers for payment by journalists, who had been hounding him and his brother for an exclusive, over the years.

He had also turned down an offer made by an unidentified Libyan man for compensation from the Libyan regime.

However, extracts from a diary kept by Dumfries and Galloway Inspector Harry Bell give a different picture. In a note dated September 29, 1989, early into the investigation, Mr Bell noted that FBI Agent Chris Murray had told him he had “the authority to arrange unlimited money for Tony Gauci” and that he could arrange for “$10,000 immediately”.

Moreover, there are also various entries in the classified documents in which Scottish police describe Paul Gauci as being very forceful about seeking some sort of financial gain and also that he influenced his brother greatly.

“It is apparent from speaking to him for any length of time that he has a desire to gain financial benefit from the position he and his brother are in relative to the case. As a consequence he exaggerates his own importance as a witness and clearly inflates the fears that he and his brother have...” (...)

Robert Black, an emeritus professor of Scots law, who is widely credited as having been the architect of the non-jury trial at the neutral location of Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, said he found one of the documents shocking.

In this document, dated January 12, 2001, the officer, whose name was redacted, writes: “(the Gauci brothers) will maintain their current position and not seek to make adverse comment regarding any perceived lack of recognition of their position. Nor is it anticipated would they ever seek to highlight any remuneration perceived”.

Reacting to this passage, Prof Black said: “It is no part of an investigator’s or prosecutor’s function to seek to secure that a witness maintains his current position.

“To try to influence a witness, or secure benefits for him, to achieve this result is grossly improper. The passage also recognises that it is important that the remuneration arrangement should not be ‘highlighted’. This manifests a clear, and correct, understanding that the arrangement is not one that would meet with legal or public approbation.”

The act itself of paying out money to a witness is no longer illegal under Scottish law, although it once was. However, Prof Black insisted, it is something that should always be disclosed to the defence.

“In this case, the authorities did everything in their power to conceal it, including ‘mislaying’ Harry Bell’s diary until it was eventually unearthed by the SCCRC in the course of their investigation of the Megrahi conviction.”

"Unfair, incomprehensible, irrational and arbitrary"

[This is the headline over an article by William Paul published in Scotland on Sunday on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

There was always an undercurrent of disquiet when the Lockerbie trial ended in Holland earlier this year. The unanimous guilty verdict on Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi unexpected, the not guilty verdict on Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah apparently inconsistent, the loose logic adopted in the written judgement seemingly open to challenge.

Yet criticism was largely muted, even among some relatives of the 270 victims of Pan Am Flight 103 who had fought so hard and for so long to have the case brought to court and were mostly convinced that if the Libyans were involved at all they were, at best, minor players in a greater conspiracy that would only be exposed with the trial over.

Once the shock of the court's findings had sunk in, a consensus quickly arose among those with reservations about the verdicts. After all, due process of law had been followed and evidence had been heard in open court as promised. This had the effect of more or less suppressing the widespread sense of dissatisfaction.

Into this comparative vacuum stepped the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, with a series of "roadshows" for relatives in Britain and America which were said to have a distinctly triumphalist tone. The reputation of Robert Black, the Edinburgh University law professor who had been a constant critic of the way the case was handled, was subjected to "vicious and acidic" attack, according to one relative present at the briefings. It was also suggested that had Megrahi given evidence Fhimah would have been convicted too.

Trial judge Lord Sutherland agreed that such personal briefings were unusual but added in reference to Black who was adamant there was insufficient evidence for a guilty verdict: "If the Crown were getting their own back I'm not entirely surprised ... I suppose pointing out that he wasn't necessarily right might be a useful counterblast."

Now the authorities are facing a different kind of counterblast, this time from an independent observer who cannot be easily ignored. Dr Hans Koechler, president of the Vienna-based International Progress Organisation and a world -renowned expert on law and human rights, was personally appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to ensure fair play and high standards. Koechler, who sat through every day of the trial at Camp Zeist, not only supports Black's argument that there was insufficient evidence to convict Megrahi, but goes much further in condemning what went on in the special court as hopelessly contaminated by political considerations to the detriment of the rule of law. The conduct of the judges, previously regarded as beyond reproach, is also criticised for allowing a political dimension to be present in the courtroom and therefore to influence the final outcome.

This is a monumental embarrassment to the judges, the Crown prosecution team, and to the UN, an organisation that was pivotal in brokering the diplomatic understanding that allowed the Lockerbie trial to go ahead in a neutral venue after so many years of the British and American governments refusing to compromise.

On the day, January 31, Fhimah was set free and Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, Annan said: "Justice has taken its course and the authority and legitimacy of the legal process must be respected."

Within days, Annan had received a report from Koechler telling him exactly what he didn't want to hear; the trial had been tainted by political interference and the verdicts were contradictory and irrational.

Yesterday a spokesman for Annan attempted to distance the UN from Koechler's report, saying it amounted to one person's personal opinion and could not be regarded as an official UN document. And the Crown Office pointed out that Koechler seemed not to understand the adversarial nature of criminal procedures in Scots law, nor how it was for the prosecution and defence to decide what evidence was presented in court, not the judges.

Koechler's report, does not pull any punches in its forthright condemnation of the way politics was allowed to dictate the course of the Lockerbie trial.

The problems began on the first day with two representatives of the US Justice Department sitting with the Crown prosecution team and seemingly acting as "supervisors" of strategy and presentation of evidence.

Soon after the start of the trial in May last year, Scotland on Sunday revealed concern over the presence of American lawyers Dana Biehl and Brian Murtaugh, members of the Office for the Victims of Crime, an offshoot of the Department of Justice. It was said their presence gave the court "an unfortunate US v Libya flavour".

Koechler writes: "This serious problem of due process became evident in the matter of the CIA cables concerning one of the Crown's key witnesses, Mr Giaka. Those cables were initially dismissed by the prosecution as not relevant but proved to be highly relevant when finally (but only partially) released."

The cables eventually showed that Abdul Majid Giaka, a Libyan defector, had been paid by the CIA for information which was regarded as of minimal worth. He had not mentioned any knowledge of Lockerbie until months after the bombing and only after being threatened with having his payments stopped. Then he implicated the accused by claiming to have seen them at Luqa airport in Malta with a suspicious suitcase.

"It has become obvious that the presence of foreign governments in a Scottish courtroom (in any courtroom for that matter) jeopardises the independence and integrity of legal procedures and is not in conformity with the general standards of fairness," Koechler wrote.

Relatives of the victims also complained about the two, sometimes three, Americans who sat with the prosecution team. In response, the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, said it was up to him who was invited to join him in the court.

Koechler's criticism extended to the defence, and the presence of Kamal Maghour, a former foreign affairs minister in the Libyan government . Again, Maghour was not listed in any official records as being present. The two Libyan accused lodged a special defence blaming named Palestinian terrorists for the bombing.

"It was a consistent pattern during the whole trial that - as an apparent result of political interests and considerations - efforts were undertaken to withhold substantial information from the court. It may never be fully known to which extent relevant information was hidden from the court. The most serious case... is related to the special defence. The alternative theory of the defence - leading to conclusions contradictory to those of the prosecution - was never seriously investigated... although it was officially declared as being of major importance to the defence. By not having pursued... an alternative theory, the court seems to have accepted that the whole legal process was seriously flawed in regard to the requirements of objectivity and due process. As a result the undersigned (Koechler) has reached the conclusion that foreign governments or governmental agencies may have been allowed, albeit indirectly, to determine to a considerable extent, which evidence was made available to the court."

Koechler says it was "highly arbitrary and irrational" to take witnesses like Giaka and Edwin Bollier, whose electronics firm supplied the fatal timing device, and rely on parts of their evidence when other parts were dismissed as riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.

"In spite of the reservations explaining the verdict itself, the guilty verdict in the case of Megrahi is particularly incomprehensible in view of the admission by the judges themselves that identification was 'not absolute' and that there was a mass of conflicting evidence," the report says. Furthermore, the Opinion of the Court seems to be inconsistent in a basic respect: while the first accused was found guilty, the second accused was found not guilty. This is totally incomprehensible when one considers that the indictment in its very essence was based on the joint action of the two accused in Malta."

Koechler asserts, "The guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational. This leads the undersigned to the suspicion that political considerations may have been over-riding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case thus may have adversely affected the outcome of the trial. This may have a profound impact on the evaluation of the professional reputation and integrity of the panel of three Scottish judges. Seen from the final outcome, a certain co-ordination of the strategies of prosecution, of defence, and of the judges' considerations during the later period of the trial is not totally unlikely. This, however, when actually proven, would have a devastating effect on the whole legal process of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands and on the legal quality of its findings.

"In the above context, the undersigned has reached the general conclusion that the outcome of the trial may well have been determined by political considerations and may to a considerable extent have been the result of more or less openly exercised influence from the part of actors outside the judicial framework - facts which are not compatible with the basic principle of the division of powers and with the independence of the judiciary, and which put in jeopardy the very rule of law and the confidence citizens must have in the legitimacy of state power and the functioning of the state's organs - whether on the traditional national level or in the framework of international justice."

Koechler's ultimate conclusion is that the Lockerbie trial had done a disservice to the cause of international criminal justice. It was neither fair, nor conducted in an objective manner.

Koechler's final message to Kofi Annan is to express the hope that Megrahi's appeal will "correct the deficiencies" of the trial and that will depend on the integrity and independence of the five judges who will hear it.

The appeal against conviction is likely to be heard in September.

[A further article by William Paul in the same newspaper contains the following:]

The Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga, 19, was killed at Lockerbie, said Koechler’s report touched on many of the issues he had raised with the Lord Advocate during the trial without receiving satisfactory answers. “It expresses more eloquently than I managed to do all of the major concerns that many of the relatives had identified,” he said.

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.