Inconvenient Truths

[This is the headline over a long article by Hugh Miles that was published in the London Review of Books on this date in 2007.  The following are excerpts:]

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. (...)

Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the [official] who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi. (...)

Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding … which documents … were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USSVincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. In exchange for his testimony, he received lifelong immunity from prosecution.

Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.

Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.

At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases). If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:

It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty.

Timer fragments had been "modified"

[On this date in 2000, Edwin Bollier, co-owner of the Swiss company MEBO, testified at the Lockerbie trial. The following account of his evidence is taken from the website TheLockerbieTrial.com, edited by Ian Ferguson and me:]

Giving evidence today, Edwin Bollier, a partner in the Zurich based company MEBO, told the court that the timer fragments he was shown had been modified.

The Crown alleges that the timer, which was used in the detonation of the bomb which blew up Pan Am 103, was manufactured by MEBO and supplied to Libya.

After studying the fragments with a magnifying glass, Bollier said "They have been modified, I swear they have been modified."

He identified the two fragments as appearing to come from a MST-13 circuit board.

He went on to say though, that the pieces seemed to have been burnt since he first saw them at a Scottish police office last year and one fragment was slightly smaller than a photo taken a short time after it was discovered.

Alan Turnbull for the Crown, said small pieces were shaved off from the fragments so forensic scientists could perform tests, but Bollier claimed that several versions of the fragments might be floating about.

Bollier then claimed the fragments he viewed could have come from timers he sold to Libya or to East Germany or might even be counterfeit copies since the blueprints Mebo used to make the circuit boards had mysteriously disappeared.

When asked where the fragment could have come from Bollier said, "It could be counterfeit."

According to Bollier, Libya in 1985 ordered 20 timers with MST-13 circuit boards. These he claimed were samples produced by his company in hopes of getting further and bigger orders from Libya.

But Mebo was also hoping to sell the same type of timer to the Stasi in East Germany and delivered two prototype versions to them in 1985.

Bollier then claimed that the prototypes were different colours with the green circuit boards going to Libya and the brownish gray boards going to the East Germans.

Bollier then announced that a man who had a company in Florida claimed to have made replicas of Mebo's MST-13 timers and supplied them to the US Central Intelligence Agency.

He did not name the firm or the man, but said he had a letter from the man, who had also published the information on the Internet.

Earlier in his testimony Bollier said he witnessed tests, at a special forces training area near Tripoli, of timers he had sold to members of the Libyan Army in 1985.

Bollier said he was present when two of the timers were used on bomb cylinders, and he went to say that they were to be used in aircraft.

Bollier said that the Libyan Army would also use them in their war with Chad, blowing up camps to stop them falling into enemy hands.

Bollier had earlier identified Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, one of the accused, as a man he did business with on several occasions before the bombing. He pointed him out in the courtroom.

Bollier was not sure what position Megrahi held, but he thought that he was a fairly high official and well connected. Bollier described meeting Megrahi several times at the MEBO office in Zurich and in Tripoli.

Foreign Office assumed Libyans would be acquitted

[This is the headline over an article by Richard Norton-Taylor published in The Guardian on this date in 2001. It reads as follows:]

On January 31, after an eight-month trial, three Scottish judges, sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, found a Libyan intelligence officer, Ali Al-Megrahi, guilty of the Lockerbie bombing - Britain's biggest mass murder - acquitting his colleague, Khalifa Fhimah.

Two days earlier, senior Foreign Office officials briefed a group of journalists in London. They painted a picture of a bright new chapter in Britain's relations with Colonel Gadafy's regime. They made it quite clear they assumed both the Libyans in the dock would be acquitted.

The FO officials were not alone. Most independent observers believed it was impossible for the court to find the prosecution had proved its case against Megrahi beyond reasonable doubt.

It was not only the lack of hard evidence - something the judges admitted in their lengthy judgment. The case was entwined, if the judges were right, in a sequence of remarkable coincidences.

Doubts about the prosecution's case and the judges' verdict are spelled out in Cover-Up of Convenience, published this week. Two journalists, John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, examine in detail what Paul Foot has already succinctly written in Private Eye's special report, Lockerbie, The Flight from Justice.

For more than a year, western intelligence agencies pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril. It is not hard to see why. Two months before the Lockerbie disaster, German police arrested members of the PFLP-GC near Frankfurt where, according to the prosecution, the bag containing the bomb was placed on the Pan Am airliner.

Among those arrested was Marwan Khreesat, who was found with explosives and a Toshiba cassette player similar to the one said to have contained the bomb. Khreesat was released. It was later revealed he was a Jordanian double agent.

The Jordanians did not allow him to appear as a witness at the trial. Instead, he was interviewed by an FBI agent, Edward Marshman. Marshman described how Khreesat told him how he infiltrated the PFLP-GC, how a second Toshiba bomb had gone missing, and about his contacts with another member of Jibril's group, Abu Elias, said to be an expert in airline security.

Elias is mentioned in a report written by Mobdi Goben, another member of the PFLP-GC, shortly before he died. The Goben memorandum claims Elias planted the bomb in the luggage of Khalid Jaafar, a Lebanese American passenger allegedly involved in a CIA-approved heroin-smuggling operation. The luggage used for these operations, it is claimed, bypassed normal security screening.

The prosecution asked a "foreign government", believed to be Syria, to hand over information about Goben's allegations. Syria refused. Syria was central to the original explanation. This was that the bombing was funded by Iran in retaliation for the mistaken shooting down of an Iranian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes, over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.

There is a widespread view that the US and Britain changed their tack when they badly needed Syria's support, and Iran's quiescence, for the Gulf war after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They thus fingered the two Libyans, insisting they placed the bomb in an unaccompanied bag at Malta's Luqa airport, where it was transferred to the Pan Am plane at Frankfurt. An earlier Palestinian suspect, Abu Talb, had also visited Malta. He was later held in Sweden on terrorist charges and identified by the British as a prime suspect.

You don't have to look for conspiracies - maybe Jaafar's presence on the plane has an entirely innocent explanation - to question the prosecution's version of events. US authorities issued a series of specific warnings about a bomb threat before Lockerbie. These, and intelligence reports implicating Iran, were dismissed as speculative or hoaxes.

The evidence of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shop owner was extremely shaky. He was uncertain about dates and the weather that day. He told the police the purchaser was "six foot or more" and over 50. Megrahi was five foot eight inches and 37 at the time.

According to Ashton and Ferguson, replica MST-13 timers - implicating Megrahi but only presented as evidence after a long delay - were manufactured by the CIA but that information was not passed to the defence. The evidence of Abdul Giaka, a Libyan who defected to the CIA and star prosecution witness, was described by the judges as "at best exaggerated, at worst simply untrue".

The judgment is littered with assumptions and criticisms of prosecution witnesses. They refer to a "mass of conflicting evidence". Megrahi has lodged an appeal. The Scottish appeal judges surely owe it to the victims' families to explain the string of unanswered questions.

Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies

A video of Dr Morag Kerr’s recent talk Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies on the "suitcase jigsaw" aspect of the Lockerbie evidence can now be viewed online. Click here.

Writer Alexander Cockburn infuriates US Lockerbie relatives

[In the 7 May 2001 edition of The Nation an article by Alexander Cockburn appeared entitled Justice Scotched in Lockerbie Trial. It is well worth reading. However, it infuriated certain American Lockerbie relatives. What follows are their letters of complaint and Alexander Cockburn’s response, as published in the edition of The Nation published on 18 June 2001:]

Alexander Cockburn should show respect for, and knowledge of, the facts. In his May 7 "Beat the Devil" column, "Justice Scotched in Lockerbie Trial," he shows neither.

He starts by praising a report critical of the trial presented to a conference of the Arab League by Hans Koechler, whom he describes as "a distinguished Austrian philosopher." Distinguished for what? Certainly not for his knowledge of Scottish law. Koechler's report is bizarre. He doesn't even seem to know that in a Scottish court the judges do not introduce evidence. Koechler proposes that there was a conspiracy to convict Libyans, which included the United States, Britain, the Scottish court and even the Libyans' defense lawyers. Koechler has wandered out onto the grassy knoll, and Cockburn is trotting right along behind him.

Koechler was "one of five international observers at the trial" appointed by Kofi Annan. He was a representative of something called the International Progress Organization. A second observer appointed from the same organization was Robert Thabit. Koechler acknowledges that he worked with Thabit. Shortly before his appointment as trial observer Thabit had been a lawyer for Libya's UN mission. Cockburn was either unaware of this or just forgot to mention it.

Cockburn characterizes the testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci--who was supposed to identify one of the accused Libyans as the man who bought clothes found in the bomb bag in his shop--as so confused he could barely recognize the accused when he was pointed out in court. We would bet a considerable sum that Cockburn didn't see the Gauci testimony. We did. He was an excellent witness, clearly a man trying his best to accurately describe an event that had taken place over a decade earlier. Not only did he point out the accused Libyan in court, he picked him out of a lineup ("parade," the Scots call it) shortly before the trial opened. In 1991 Gauci picked out a photo of the accused as the man resembling the purchaser of the clothes from twelve photos shown him. Earlier, in 1989, Gauci assisted a police artist in preparing a sketch and in compiling an image of the purchaser. Both images looked strikingly like the accused Libyan looked at the time. This also seems to have escaped Cockburn's notice.

Cockburn says that prosecutors produced "a document" indicating that a bag from Air Malta was loaded onto Pan Am 103 at Frankfurt. Actually, there were two documents: They were the baggage-loading records from Frankfurt. Cockburn counters that there was "firm evidence from the defense" that all bags from the Air Malta flight had been accounted for. The defense presented no evidence at all on that point. It just said that all the bags had been accounted for, and even Cockburn must be aware that evidence is not what comes out of a lawyer's mouth.

That's an impressive number of errors for a short column. The Lockerbie trial was long and complicated, and there was a ton of evidence. Cockburn may know this, but he doesn't care. He appears to believe that if there is evil in the world, the United States is behind it. He can truly paraphrase "the terrible Lord Braxfield": "Let them bring me Americans, and I'll fiddle the facts."

DANIEL COHEN SUSAN COHEN

Parents of Theodora Cohen, murdered in the terrorist bombing of Pam Am 103

I don't expect to agree with every Nation article, but I do expect meticulously accurate facts. I can address only some of Alexander Cockburn's most flagrant falsifications here. He thinks "the prosecution's case absolutely depended on proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Megrahi was the man who bought the clothes" used in the lethal suitcase from a Maltese shop owner. He also claims that "in nineteen separate statements to police prior to the trial the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, had failed to make a positive identification of Megrahi" and that "Gauci was asked five times if he recognized anyone in the courtroom. No answer. Finally, the exasperated prosecutor pointed [out the accused].... 'the best that Gauci could do was to mumble that 'he resembled him.'"

Gauci did not mumble when he identified Megrahi--the first time he was asked to do so in court. The only number five that can reliably be associated with Megrahi is the number 5 he wore in the police lineup in April 1999 when Gauci pointed him out as the man who came into his shop in December 1988. The number nineteen is the number of photographs Gauci was initially asked to look at on September 14, 1999, in police headquarters in Floriana, Malta. As for the correct number of times Gauci actually met with police and looked at photographs, according to the Opinion of the Court, it seems to be six.

What is Cockburn's source? My sources for the facts are: the transcript of the testimony Gauci gave on July 11, 2000; the Opinion of the Court delivered by Lord Sutherland on January 31, 2001; my transcribed remarks of a speech Alistair Campbell, QC, gave when he spoke to the US families in Baltimore on March 5, 2001, during the posttrial briefings of the crown team; and the recollections of other family members who heard that testimony.

Cockburn seems unaware that the prosecution's case against Megrahi was also based on the coded passport issued to him by the Libyan Security Service, the ESO, for which Megrahi worked; the tickets for every flight he took; the records of every hotel he stayed at in Malta in December 1988. Nor does he seem aware that the prosecution team was able to use Megrahi's own words against him by playing the film interview he gave to Pierre Salinger in 1991, in which he lied about his ESO membership and denied staying in the Holiday Inn, Malta, December 20, 1988. Megrahi used his false passport five times in 1987. The next time he used it was December 20-21, 1988, to travel to and from Malta and Tripoli. He never used it again.

I have a passionate need to see justice done in the murder of my husband, Tony Hawkins, and 269 other souls. The evidence as revealed in the Lockerbie trial has convinced me that: 1. The debris trail from Lockerbie leads to Libya; 2. These two men are guilty of assembling the bomb and starting it on its journey; 3. They were not mere soldiers taking the rap for the higher-ups; 4. That of the two, Megrahi was clearly in charge of this operation, Fhimah providing the necessary assistance and access to Air Malta; 5. They clearly did not act on their own without the complete assistance and approval of the Libyan government, i.e., Qaddafi.

What was incomprehensible was not the guilty verdict but the not guilty verdict. It should have been not proven. The case against Fhimah was not as strong as that against Megrahi. I don't know who Cockburn believes to be responsible for this act of terrorism, but he shouldn't use his column to create confusion about this case or to increase the suffering of the families who are still fighting for justice for the people they love.

HELEN ENGELHARDT

Editor, Truth Quest (newsletter published by The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103)

COCKBURN REPLIES

For years the Cohens described the Scottish media in extremely unflattering terms, sending multiple faxes to editors if they even suspected a publication was going to challenge "the official version." Thus, in July 1991, they protested the possible inclusion of the Syrian flag among those of other Gulf War coalition members at a Washington victory parade, on the grounds that the Syrian government had murdered their daughter (the favored line of official US leakers at that time). When Washington decided to shift the blame to Libya they became no less clamant in their denunciations of Qaddafi and indeed of anyone, like distinguished Scottish law professor Robert Black, who attempted to negotiate an agreement under which the two Libyans could stand trial in a neutral country. Certainly, the group of US relatives suing Libya for some $4 billion as responsible for the bombing has every reason to dislike any questioning of the verdict.

Hans Koechler is indeed a distinguished Austrian philosopher who by now probably knows a lot more about Scottish law than the Cohens. Those sitting through the entire trial in Zeist, Holland (which the Cohens, contrary to their misleading insinuation, attended a relatively sparse number of times), recall that Koechler was present for almost the entire proceedings. Thus Koechler may know, as the Cohens do not, that while Scottish judges cannot introduce evidence, they can rule on what evidence is or is not admitted.

Less prejudiced critics might pause to reflect that, since they had brought the indictments, there obviously was a conspiracy by the US and British governments to convict the Libyans. Collusion in such an agreement by the judges and the defense, William Taylor QC (counsel for Megrahi), can only be inferred, but it is not absurd for Koechler to make that inference. The judges found Megrahi guilty solely on the basis of some very shaky circumstantial evidence, and the normally tigerish Taylor, in the opinion of many legal observers, put up an astonishingly feeble performance in his crucial cross-examination of Tony Gauci, the only witness who could link Megrahi to the suitcase bomb. Nevertheless, Gauci was hardly "an excellent witness." Engelhardt has no basis in claiming only six meetings between police and Gauci, who was interviewed by innumerable Scottish, US and Maltese law enforcement groups, as well as prosecution and defense lawyers. On a reasonable count, the number of such interviews goes well into the double digits. The judges themselves admitted in their verdict, "On the matter of identification of the first accused, there are undoubtedly problems," and "We accept of course that he never made what could be described as an absolutely positive identification."

In fact, when Gauci gave evidence on July 11 last year, he was asked several times by the crown counsel if he could identify anyone in the court as the man who had bought the clothes from his shop that were later found in the suitcase containing the bomb. He failed to do so, and only when asked if the person sitting next to the policeman in the dock was the man in question did he grudgingly reply: "He resembles him a lot." On an earlier occasion, when shown a photograph of Mohammed Abu Talb, a Palestinian terrorist whom the defense contended was the real bomber, Gauci used almost the same words, declaring, according to his brother, that Talb "resembles" the clothes buyer "a lot." Gauci's identification of Megrahi at the identity parade just before the opening of the trial was with the words "not exactly the man I saw in the shop. Ten years ago I saw him, but the man who look [sic] a little bit like is the number 5" (Megrahi).

It is highly likely that the evidence of identification of Megrahi, its unsatisfactory nature and the comments by the trial judges will bulk large in the appeal this coming fall. However Gauci's testimony may have later appeared in a transcript or on a video recording, two relatives who were physically present at the courtroom testimony have confided that they found Gauci far from confident in his identification.

Whether Megrahi had a false passport, or stayed in Maltese hotels, or was there on December 20-21, 1988, is irrelevant--grassy knoll territory, if you will. Is there evidence that links him to the bomb? That's the sole pertinent issue. That's why Gauci's testimony is crucial. As I noted above, even the judges admitted that identification was squishy. As for Fhimah, the judges would doubtless have preferred to opt for a "not proven" verdict, but there was no evidence of any sort against him, apart from testimony of the prosecution's supergrass Giaka, who was on the CIA's payroll before, during and after the bombing, but who failed to mention the alleged role of Megrahi and Fhimah in the bombing to his paymasters until 1991. Even the judges called him a liar. The prosecution described Fhimah in indictments and thereafter, up until almost the end of the trial, as a Libyan intelligence agent, then dropped the accusation.

As far as the baggage is concerned, the prosecution's sole achievement was to demonstrate that it was theoretically possible for a bag from the Air Malta flight to have found its way onto the Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to London that connected to Flight 103. The fact remains that there is no conclusive evidence that this transfer occurred. When Granada TV broadcast a documentary asserting such a transfer as a fact, Air Malta sued and extracted damages.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Fragments of truth

[The Forensic Institute in Glasgow is hosting this year’s FORREST conference. On the Institute’s website it is described as follows:]

FORensic RESearch and Teaching (FORREST) is an annual international academic conference now in its eleventh year, of interest to academics, lawyers, law enforcement, and forensic practitioners, organised by The Forensic Institute Research Network (FIRN) in the UK.

FORREST 2015 will be held in Glasgow, UK, from 30th June to 2nd July 2015.

The purpose of FORREST is to present the latest and most relevant work in forensic research and teaching. It is the only conference to deal specifically with the ever-increasing topic of forensic education. Reviews, case studies, applications, and research programmes are delivered by lectures and workshops that allow every delegate to find and explore something of interest and value to them. The conference also provides excellent opportunities for informal networking and sharing of ideas with a social programme and conference dinner.

[Details of speakers and booking information are set out here. The paper that I shall be delivering on 2 July is described as follows:]

The Lockerbie bombing: fragments of truth

The conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of the murder of the 270 people who died aboard Pan Am flight 103 was based entirely upon circumstantial evidence. This paper considers that evidence, how it was obtained, how it has been undermined and how other available evidence was withheld.

The case was flaky

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in The Observer on this date in 2007:]

The case of the only man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, Britain's biggest terrorist outrage that killed 270 people, could be reopened after fresh evidence that his conviction was based on unreliable evidence.

If the appeal is successful, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi could walk free.

Senior legal and intelligence officials have told The Observer that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission will conclude that the conviction of al-Megrahi is unsafe and that he may have been a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The commission's verdict follows a three-year inquiry that examined new evidence submitted by Megrahi's legal team. They registered concern over the testimony of expert witnesses, contradictory forensic evidence and vital material not aired at the trial.

They say in their 500-page report that the new evidence casts reasonable doubt on the verdict that Megrahi was responsible for the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 four days before Christmas 1988.

Sources close to the commission, an independent body made up of senior police and legal figures set up to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice, said 'hundreds' of inconsistencies have been uncovered in the crown's case. Megrahi, 54, received a life sentence in 2001 for plotting and carrying out what was then the world's worst terrorist atrocity following a trial costing £80m at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Megrahi has always insisted he was innocent. The development suggests that the perpetrators responsible for blowing up the airliner over Lockerbie might remain free almost 20 years after the attack.

The commission will refer the case to the High Court in Edinburgh on appeal in 10 days' time, where it is expected that the conviction will either be quashed or that Megrahi could face a retrial. Although the court has the power to uphold Megrahi's conviction, sources believe the weight of evidence examined by the commission suggest this is unlikely.

Major concerns with the crown's case include:

· Credibility of the key forensic scientists used by the prosecution during Megrahi's trial.

· Inconsistencies of statements made by the Maltese shopkeeper who allegedly sold Megrahi clothes found scattered around Lockerbie.

· New evidence not presented at the trial pointed away from Libyan involvement and towards Palestinian terrorists as those responsible for the atrocity.

Megrahi has served seven years in British custody. During sentencing he was told he must serve at least 27 years before being considered for release.

Politically the ramifications of the commission's decision are enormous, posing questions for both British investigators and the Scottish judicial system. In addition, the decision will add succour to the theories that Megrahi was framed for a crime he never committed.

Named in a 400-page report of evidence collated by Megrahi's seven-strong legal team are those suspected of carrying out the attack. Among them is Mohammed Abu Talb, a convicted Palestinian terrorist and initial suspect for the Lockerbie bombing. He was a member of the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, a terrorist group backed by Iranian funding. The claims will raise the political stakes at a sensitive time in relations between the West and Iran.

Following Megrahi's trial, a number of legal observers expressed unease over the 'circumstantial' nature of the case against the Libyan intelligence officer.

A legal source who has seen the evidence collated by Megrahi's team said: 'The case was flaky and you only had to shake it a bit for it to start falling apart. A steamroller has been taken to it'.

[An accompanying article in The Observer can be read here; and a somewhat similar one in the same day’s Mail on Sunday can be read here.]