Expert guesswork sometimes used to locate evidence

[The following are excerpts from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

Tiny fragments of the suitcase suspected by police to have contained the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 were still being found months after the aircraft was blown up.

The fifth day of the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands has heard that thousands of items were sifted through for signs of blast damage.

In the spring and summer of 1989, officers returned to specific search areas and turned up more evidence. (...)

Teams of officers sorted and examined 40,000 pieces for signs of unusual damage. They were labelled and stored according to the search sector in which they were found.

DC [Duncan] McInnes identified items he had discovered from his work inside the hanger in March 1989.

They included blast-damaged fragments of a brown suitcase and burnt pieces of material about an inch square.

He then identified other items he found when further outdoor searches were conducted in Newcastleton forest in the April and May of that year.

They included more tiny pieces of a brown suitcase, possibly Samsonite.

He had labelled one find as "rubber trim, copper-coloured, possibly from the bomb case". (...)

Cross-examined, DC McInnes acknowledged that the sheer volume of wreckage, plus erratic police labelling, meant expert guesswork was sometimes used to locate evidence and date its discovery retroactively.

He told defence counsel Bill Taylor that in the weeks following the disaster, trucks filled with wreckage arrived at a warehouse where an initial reconstruction of the plane was made.

Not every individual piece was labelled by waves of police conducting fingertip "line searches" over vast stretches of open country, forest and farmland, and some paper labels were washed out or dissolved by rain.

The detective agreed that it was now "utterly impossible" to reconstruct where, when and by whom individual pieces were found and admitted a description of another piece was written over type-correcting fluid covering words no longer legible.

Another officer, Thomas Gilchrist, admitted under cross-examination by defence advocate Richard Keen, that a description on one label which was shown magnified on a courtroom imager might possibly have been changed from "clothes" to "debris".

Desperate to see his family - so ... that's the priority

[The following are extracts from media reports published on this date in 2009:]

From The Herald: The Lockerbie appeal continued yesterday despite the Libyan Government's request to transfer the man convicted of the bombing back to Tripoli.

Legal experts warned that the deal has not yet been agreed and that, although the Libyan Government has made the application, it cannot go ahead without the agreement of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi.

Maggie Scott, QC, told the court that Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, would be undergoing tests today and next week and that he will not be able to watch but "he wants the matter to proceed".

In order for the transfer to take place, there can be no proceedings active, so Megrahi would have to drop the appeal.

The Crown Office appeal against the length of the 27-year sentence imposed on the Libyan would also have to be dropped. It, too, is currently still live.

Professor Robert Black, one of the architects of the original trial at Camp Zeist, said: "The application is a government-to-government application. The only indication of what Mr Megrahi's attitude towards it is from the mouths of other people. For the transfer to go through, it is Megrahi who would have to agree to drop the appeal."

Megrahi, 57, whose condition is said to have deteriorated considerably, could also re-apply for bail on the basis of his health.

Last year, when three appeal court judges turned down his request for interim liberation, they left it open for him to apply again.

"He is in considerable discomfort," Ms Scott told the court yesterday. "It is anticipated he will be undergoing tests tomorrow and in the course of next week, so it is not anticipated he will be able to witness proceedings over the next series of days. He does, however, want matters to proceed. It is appropriate I point that out to the court."

Dumfries Labour MSP Elaine Murray yesterday expressed concerns that past and current comments made by First Minister Alex Salmond may be considered by the Libyan Government as Scottish ministers having predetermined their application for the transfer of Megrahi to a Libyan jail. She also provided the Libyans with grounds for judicial review should the application be rejected by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.

From STV News:  First Minister Alex Salmond has cast doubt on whether Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill will be able to rule on the prisoner transfer request from Libya of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi.

Libyan authorities have applied for Megrahi to be moved to Libya under a treaty between that country and the UK. The process should be completed within 90 days.

However, Mr Salmond has said it may be a problem to fulfil the agreement in that time frame.

Mr Salmond said: "In the prisoner transfer agreement, it says this process would normally take 90 days but of course there are unknowns, including the judicial process in Scotland which is not completely under our control."

Meanwhile, a MSP has said Megrahi is in deteriorating health and "absolutely desperate" to see his family.

Christine Grahame, who met the Libyan in Greenock Prison on Friday, refused to say if he intends to abandon his appeal which is now underway in Edinburgh.

Ms Grahame, SNP MSP for South of Scotland, paid an hour-long visit to Megrahi in Greenock, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1988 bombing which killed 270 people.

She said: "I found it quite upsetting. The man is obviously very ill and he is desperate to see his family - absolutely desperate to see his family - so, whatever it takes, that's the priority."

She went on: "I am absolutely more convinced than ever that there has been a miscarriage of justice."

Asked if Megrahi plans to press on with his appeal, she said: "I can't say that - that is for him to say through his lawyers."

Justice Scotched in Lockerbie Trial

[This is the headline over an article by Alexander Cockburn that was published in the 7 May 2001 edition of The Nation. It reads as follows:]

There’s a famous passage in Lord Cockburn’s Memorials of His Time where the great Scotch judge and leading Whig stigmatizes some of his Tory predecessors on the bench, including the terrible Lord Braxfield, who presided over what Cockburn called “the indelible iniquity” of the sedition trials of 1793 and 1794. “Let them bring me prisoners, and I’ll find them law,” Cockburn quotes Braxfield as saying privately, also whispering from the bench to a juror he knew, “Come awa, Maister Horner, come awa, and help us to hang ane o’ thae daamned scoondrels.”

Braxfield most certainly has his political disciples on the Scottish bench today, in the persons of the three judges who traveled to the Netherlands to preside over the recent trial of the two Libyans charged with planting the device that prompted the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. In the first criticism of the verdict, Hans Koechler, a distinguished Austrian philosopher appointed as one of five international observers at the trial in Zeist, Holland, by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, has issued a well-merited denunciation of the judges’ bizarre conclusion. “In my opinion,” Koechler said, “there seemed to be considerable political influence on the judges and the verdict.”

Koechler’s recently released analysis of the proceedings, in which the judges found one of the two accused Libyans, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, guilty while exonerating his alleged co-conspirator, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, is by no means an exercise in legal esoterica. Basically, he points out that the judges found Megrahi guilty even though they themselves admitted that his identification by a Maltese shop owner (summoned by the prosecution to testify that Megrahi bought clothes later deemed to have been packed in the lethal suitcase bomb) was “not absolute” and that there was a “mass of conflicting evidence.”

Furthermore, Koechler queries the active involvement of senior US Justice Department officials as part of the Scotch prosecution team “in a supervisory role.”

Assuming a requisite degree of judicial impartiality, the prosecution’s case absolutely depended on proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Megrahi was the man who bought the clothes, traced by police to a Maltese clothes shop. In nineteen separate statements to police prior to the trial the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, had failed to make a positive identification of Megrahi. In the witness box Gauci was asked five times if he recognized anyone in the courtroom. No answer. Finally, the exasperated prosecutor pointed to the dock and asked if the man sitting on the left was the customer in question. Even so, the best that Gauci could do was to mumble that “he resembled him.”

Gauci had also told the police that the man who bought the clothes was 6 feet tall and over 50 years of age. Megrahi is 5 feet 8 inches tall, and in late 1988 he was 36. The clothes were bought either on November 23 or December 7, 1988. Megrahi was in Malta on December 7 but not on the November date. The shopkeeper recalled that the man who bought the clothes also bought an umbrella because it was raining heavily outside. Maltese meteorological records introduced by the defense showed clearly that while it did rain all day on November 23, there was almost certainly no rain on December 7. If it did rain on that date, the shower would have been barely enough to wet the pavement. Nevertheless, the judges held it proven that Megrahi had bought the clothes on December 7.

No less vital to the prosecution’s case was its contention that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 had been loaded as unaccompanied baggage onto an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, flown on to London, and thence onto the ill-fated flight to New York. In support of this, prosecutors produced a document from Frankfurt airport indicating that a bag had gone from the baggage-handling station at which the Air Malta bags (along with those from other flights) had been unloaded and had been been sent to the handling station for the relevant flight to London. But there was firm evidence from the defense that all the bags on the Air Malta flight were accompanied and were collected at the other end. Nevertheless, the judges held it proven that the lethal suitcase had indeed come from Malta.

The most likely explanation of the judges’ decision to convict Megrahi despite the evidence, or lack of it, must be that either (a) they panicked at the thought of the uproar that would ensue on the US end if they let both the Libyans off, or (b) they were simply given their marching orders by high authority in London. English judges are used to doing their duty in this manner–see, for example, the results of various “impartial” judicial inquiries into British atrocities in Northern Ireland over the years.

In closing arguments, the prosecution stressed the point that Megrahi could not have planted the bomb without the assistance of Fhimah – that both defendants were equally guilty, and should stand or fall together. Nevertheless, the judges elected to find one of the two conspirators guilty and the other one innocent, a split verdict that Koechler finds “incomprehensible.” It is however entirely comprehensible if we accept that the judges knew there was no evidence to convict either man but that it was politically imperative for them to send one of them down for twenty years and thereby pass the buck to the appeals court. Given the legally threadbare nature of the judges’ eighty-two-page “opinion” justifying their actions, many observers are assuming that the five-man panel of judges who will eventually hear Megrahi’s appeal will have to do the right thing. But that is what many of us said about the original trial.

Libyan government applies for Megrahi prisoner transfer

[What follows is the text of a report that was published on the BBC News website on this date in 2009:]

The Libyan authorities have requested that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing be transferred from Scotland.

The application for the transfer of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was received by the Scottish Government.

The move came after a prisoner transfer agreement was ratified by the UK and Libyan governments last week.

Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of carrying out the 1988 atrocity, which claimed 270 lives when Pan-Am flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town.

The Scottish Government, which has the final say on the transfer request, said the application would be considered by officials who would advise ministers.

Under the terms of the prisoner transfer agreement, it is thought the process could take about 90 days - although it could take longer if further information is required.

Al-Megrahi, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, is currently being held in Greenock Prison.

The 57-year-old, who has already lost one appeal, has been conducting a second appeal against his conviction. It is being heard by five judges in Edinburgh.

Although the appeal can continue while Scottish ministers consider the application from the Libyan authorities, a transfer would not be possible while criminal proceedings are taking place.

That means it would not be possible for al-Megrahi to return to Libya unless he dropped his appeal.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was on board the Pan Am flight, said it was only right Megrahi should be allowed home.

"I am not opposed to this, simply because I don't believe the man is guilty as charged and I don't think Megrahi should be in prison," he said.

But Barrie Berkley, who lost his son Alistair in what was the worst terrorist attack in UK history, said he hoped the appeal would continue.

"I would rather the appeal be completed first and I hope the courts would facilitate it going through without any further delay," said Mr Berkley, of Hexham, Northumberland.

"We want the appeal to go through because it's the main means of us getting further information about how our family members died or why they died.

"We really want to know whether the Libyans were behind this and Megrahi was behind it."

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond previously raised concern that his government was not consulted by UK ministers before a memorandum of understanding on prisoner transfer was signed with Libya.

A spokesman for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, insisted at the time that no deal had been signed over the future of Megrahi, who was tried under Scottish law at a specially convened court at Camp Zeist, in the Netherlands.

Police followed Palestine link, Lockerbie trial told

[This is the headline over a report in The Guardian on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

Scottish police investigating the Lockerbie disaster flew to Rome and Germany within days of the bombing to study similar atrocities involving a Palestinian group, the Lockerbie trial in Holland was told today.

Retired detective chief inspector Gordon Ferrie said that the tragedy was treated as a murder inquiry from the day after it happened. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) quickly became the "focus of attention" because of arrests of some of its members in Germany only two months before Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

They included a man known as Marwan Kreeshat [or Khreesat] a technical expert who had been jailed for 18 years in his absence for his part in placing a bomb in a record player on an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972. He had been arrested by the Germans in October 1988, the court was told, but released in December, before the Lockerbie bombing later the same month.

About ten senior officers from the Lockerbie inquiry spent weeks at the German headquarters of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI, the court heard.

The two Libyans accused of the bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, deny charges of murder and conspiracy to murder, and they have lodged special defences in which they incriminate, among others, members of the PFLP-GC.

Under cross-examination Mr Ferrie confirmed he had been sent to Rome twice to study the El Al incident, in which two British women had been befriended by three men - including Marwan Kreeshat - and persuaded to take a record player on board the plane. They did not know it contained a bomb.

El Al security measures ensured the record player went into the bomb-proof luggage hold, instead of in the passenger cabin. Fortunately, although the device exploded at about 13,000ft and blew a hole in the passenger floor, the plane landed back at Rome safely.

Mr Ferrie brought back to Lockerbie some of the Italian evidence in the case, including part of an altimeter which had been used in the bomb's trigger. Questioned by Richard Keen QC, representing Fhimah, Mr Ferrie confirmed that in Rome he had discovered that Kreeshat had been involved in other incidents "using improvised explosive devices", including the bombing of a plane using a Toshiba radio cassette recorder modified to act as a bomb.

The Lockerbie trial indictment accuses Megrahi and Fhimah of placing an "improvised explosive device" concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette recorder on board an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt labelled for onward connection to New-York bound Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow. (...)

Re-examined by Alan Turnbull QC, prosecuting, Mr Ferrie was asked: "There came a stage when the inquiry led officers in a direction other than the PFLP, weren't there?" Mr Ferrie agreed.

However, when he then asked Mr Ferrie what the eventual result of the police inquiry was, defence lawyers objected that it was hearsay evidence, because Mr Ferrie had later been moved to other work.

Questioned by Mr Keen for Fhimah, Mr McLean insisted that, although FBI and CIA agents from America were swiftly on the scene of the disaster, all evidence found was "religiously and meticulously" logged, including items recovered by the CIA.

“It just looked like everything was burning”

[What follows is excerpted from Safia Aoude’s coverage of Day 2 of the Lockerbie trial (4 May 2000) on The Pan Am 103 Crash Website:]

Graphic accounts of the carnage inflicted when a terrorist bomb ripped apart a jumbo jet and sent it plunging into a Scottish town dominated the second day of the Lockerbie trial on Thursday. relatives of the victims attending the trial held hands as witnesses recounted the grisly scene of flaming houses and screaming. Defense lawyers did not question the five eye-witnesses who testified on the second morning of the trial to a grim court. (...)

Witnesses to the Lockerbie bombing have relived the horror of the night Pan Am flight 103 was blown up.  They described how they fled for their lives as flames and debris fell over the tiny Scottish town and of the stricken plane falling from the sky in a burning arc towards the ground.

Social worker Jasmine Bell, 53, relived how she had evaded flames and burning objects as she arrived in the Scottish town to deliver Christmas food parcels. She told the specially convened court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands how she called at her brother's home in Sherwood Park - close to Sherwood Crescent where the Lockerbie residents lost their lives. She looked up into the sky as her brother yelled: "It's a plane, get down."

Mrs Bell, from Dumfries, told the court: "I looked up and saw what I imagined was a small plane just going over my head. I ducked down and covered my head.

"There was fire all around me, there were burning objects and the fire was falling down from the sky and as it landed on the ground I was stepping backwards to avoid the fire and I stepped back and back until my back was against the wall of the house and I couldn't go any further." Then her brother, who had entered his home through the garage, pulled her into the house, Mrs Bell said.

"Everything was burning, the driveway, the lawn, the hedges, the rooftops, it just looked like everything was burning." (...)

Kevin Anderson, 35, a plasterer from Tundergarth, three miles from Lockerbie, saw the cockpit of the plane, one of the few recognisable sections to fall to earth. He said: "It was like an atomic bomb that you see on the telly. It was up in the air and then came down."  Then, he said, debris began falling and the cockpit landed in the field, about 100 yards away from him.  "I fetched the wife and we went up to look. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"There were bodies lying around the cockpit. I went to get my father-in-law from his house about 100 yards up the road. We went over to the cockpit to see if anyone was alive. I had a torch. We looked inside the cockpit. I could see the pilot." (...)

The most senior police officer in Lockerbie on the night of the Pan Am 103 disaster has said he fears the town may never get back to normal.  Retired superintendent Geoffrey Carpenter was giving evidence after the recess. He was among the first officers to reach the scene and became a key figure in organising the rescue services and coping with the aftermath of the disaster. Mr Carpenter told the trial he hoped the case would mark the last chapter in the tragedy.

Mr Carpenter, who retired seven years ago and still lives in Lockerbie, was asked by prosecuting counsel Colin Boyd QC whether the community would ever get over what happened. He said: "It's difficult to say. It affects people in different ways. You get people who don't want to know, and people who want to talk about it.  "It's unfortunate that you've got this court sitting now which brings it all home.

"I would like to think that, at the end of this, we get back to normality, if we ever do.   "It is something we have to live with for the rest of our lives."

Mr Carpenter praised the way in which the people of Lockerbie reacted to the disaster. He told the court: "They baked, made food for search teams and many volunteered help in the enquiry centre. They did a tremendous job." (...)

Also among the spectators today was New York lawyer James Kreindler, who is preparing a civil suit against Libya on behalf of 105 victims' families. "We probably have 90 percent of the evidence we need," he told The Associated Press, though said he lacked testimony that the bomb was planted at the behest of the government. Kreindler said: "There is evidence we need to show that Libya was responsible for the bombing and that evidence has been kept confidential until it is brought forward in the criminal trial.

“Whether the two men are criminally convicted is not essential for us. We do not need criminal convictions to move forward against the Libyans.”

Suspect Fhimah's cousin Ali Fhimah said to the press today: “We met him yesterday and his spirits are very high and he is confident he (will be proved) innocent.”  The Saudi-owned daily Asharq al-Awsat also quoted al-Megrahi's brother, Mohammad, as saying: “He is in high spirits.”

"This is the first time I've seen my dad in the courtroom.  I feel sad but hopeful he will prove his innocence," Megrahi's  daughter Ghada Megrahi told reporters at the court. Wearing a kerchief on her head in keeping with Muslim tradition, she said, “It hurts, but I know my father is innocent,” before a burly Libyan man, who would not identify himself, shepherded them away.

MacAskill accused of cashing in on Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a report published in today’s edition of The Times. It adds nothing whatever to the story in yesterday’s edition of the Daily Mail and, once again, contains comments exclusively from US, not UK, Lockerbie relatives. It reads in part:]

Relatives of the Lockerbie bomb victims are angry that Kenny MacAskill, the former Scottish justice secretary, is to profit from a book about his decision to release the man convicted of the atrocity.

In The Lockerbie Bombing: the Search for Justice Mr MacAskill explains his decision in 2009 to release Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.

His publisher will not reveal whether Mr MacAskill received an advance or what he would do with any royalties.

Relatives of some of the 270 people who died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down over Lockerbie in 1988 criticised his decision to make a profit.

Rosemary Mild, 74, whose stepdaughter Miriam Wolfe, 20, died, told the Daily Mail: “It is blood money when this man is profiting in this way — it is disgusting. Kenny MacAskill should have been forced to resign at the time of al-Megrahi’s release because what he did changed the way Scotland was regarded in the US and around the world. It was an abomination of justice.”

It is understood that Mr MacAskill’s book will be published in hardback on May 26 and will retail for £20.

Susan Cohen, an American who lost her daughter, Theodora, in the bombing, said: “It is totally self-serving of Kenny MacAskill to write this book. It is loathsome and disgusting.

“He is profiting from a decision which caused absolute outrage around the world, profiting from other people’s pain. If he is so convinced he made the right decision, why does he feel the need to attempt to justify it?”

Mr MacAskill, the former SNP member for Edinburgh Eastern at Holyrood, said recently that he wrote the book to “set the record straight” and added: “What I can say, without disclosing the full contents of the book, is that I knew we were a cog in a wheel.

“What I didn’t realise was how small a cog and how big a wheel. I think what comes out of this is that others should hang their head in shame and none of them is in Scotland.” (...)

A spokesman for Biteback Publishing said: “I can’t comment on the question of [whether he received] an advance, or what Kenny intends to do with any proceeds, as these arrangements are strictly between author and publisher.”

Mr MacAskill was not available for comment last night.

“This is the trial of the people who murdered our son”

[On this date in 2000 the Lockerbie trial began at Camp Zeist. The fullest account in the media of the day’s proceedings is to be found on Safia Aoude’s The Pan Am 103 Crash Website, from which the following excerpts are taken:]

Members of the court rose when the judges, wearing white wigs and dressed in flowing ivory robes with embroidered red crosses, were led into the chamber by a sentry bearing a silver mace. They took their seats on the bench underneath a Scottish royal crest bearing the Latin words: "Nemo me impune lacessit," which means "None dare meddle with me". The accused have waited almost a decade to have their day in court.

Flanked by Scottish police officers, the two suspects put on headphones to hear an Arabic interpretation of the English-speaking proceedings. Their facial expressions gave little away. Mr Fhimah sat virtually motionless, Mr Megrahi fiddled with his headphones and adjusted his glasses knowing that these new surroundings would become a kind of home over the next 12 months.

The suspects, clad in Libyan national dress of black cap, white robe and waistcoat, then pleaded not guilty to carrying out the bombing of New York-bound Pan Am flight 103 on the night of December 21, 1988. The clerk to the specially-convened Scottish court read a list of Arabic names of people he said the defence would allege were the real Lockerbie bombers.

It included members of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General and members of another group called the PPSF. The indictment against the accused - who sat impassively throughout - took 20 minutes to read, after which the clerk of the court announced that both men were pleading not guilty to all charges. (...)

More than 30 American victims' relatives were getting front-row seats in the public gallery, separated from the court by bulletproof glass. Relatives of the defendants sat on the other side, dressed in white robes like the accused, among them their daughters and Mr Fhimah's 15-year-old son, uncle and father. The two groups made obvious efforts to avoid each. Megrahi's 15-year-old son Khalid, dressed in a black bomber jacket and beige canvas trousers, sat just a couple of meters away from his father -- separated by bullet-proof glass and a Scottish police officer.

Victims' relatives shifted from seat to seat to find the best vantage point. “I like aisles. Aisles are good if I want to get away,” said one American woman. “We believe in faith. Whatever is written cannot be changed. We are not upset because we know they will get a fair trial and we know they are innocent,” said Ali Fahima, Fahima's cousin, speaking to reporters with the Libyan journalist interpreting.

Al-Megrahi's brother, Mohammed Ali Megrahi, said he is convinced his brother is innocent. "We are looking for the truth and we believe he didn't do it," he said outside the courtroom. "If we believed he did it, we wouldn't be here, and he wouldn't have come voluntarily." (...)

"I feel sick," said Susan Cohen, of Cape May Courthouse, NJ, whose daughter Theodora died in the crash. "I saw the Libyans come in, and I'm trying not to look at them." Her husband Daniel Cohen shares a sentiment common to many victims’ family members.  “I’m angry and you know I have absolutely no trouble with the word ‘revenge.’ None. I am just that angry.” (...)

“The people who are really responsible are who we are after,” said Kathleen Flynn of Montville, NJ, whose son, John Patrick Flynn, was among the victims. "We will attend every day, either here or in New York," said Kathleen Flynn. "This is the trial of the people who murdered our son, John Patrick Flynn. It will be terrible to sit in a courtroom with the murderers, but a parent has to do that."  “I don’t think Fhimah and Megrahi were sitting around a cafe in Malta and deciding, ‘Let’s blow up an American plane today.’ So I think obviously the culpability has to go up the chain of command and we want to know who did it and why.” (...)

No relatives turn up at Dumfries tv-link room in Scotland

It was business as usual at Dumfries Sheriff Court on Wednesday morning, with little evidence that the venue was electronically linked to Scotland's biggest ever murder trial. The legal proceedings at Camp Zeist, where two Libyan men stand accused of the murder of 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing, were relayed live to two screens in a small courtroom. The court was one of a number of venues in Britain and the United States chosen to televise the proceedings for the benefit of relatives and those directly affected by the disaster.

However, no-one had turned up at Courtroom Number Four by 1600 BST on Wednesday. Accredited relatives had been invited to use the facility but so far no-one has asked to do so. This could change, as the trial progresses though, according to Bert Houston, who was one of the first journalists on the scene of the disaster in the nearby town of Lockerbie on the night of 21 December 1988.

He said: "The point is that relatives do visit Lockerbie constantly throughout the summer and they may want to see some of the proceedings.  "The idea is that they come across here, spend a couple of hours or spend all day if they want, watching the proceedings.  "It's only 12 miles form Lockerbie and I'm quite sure relatives will take advantage of the situation later in the year."

Because it was recognised that not all of the victims' relatives would be able to attend the trial in the Netherlands, it was agreed that special centres should be set up where they could watch a television feed of the proceedings.

Ex-minister's "blood money" book insult

This is the headline over a long article in the Scottish edition of today’s Daily Mail. It can be read here. It deals, of course, with Kenny MacAskill’s forthcoming Lockerbie book. As the headline suggests, most of the article consists of outraged comments by relatives of US victims (and also by Frank Duggan -- president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc -- who is not a victim’s relative). Some UK relatives of Lockerbie victims were also approached by the Daily Mail, but none of their comments is published, presumably because they did not fit in with Mail’s preferred slant on the story.

Hillsborough and Lockerbie

[What follows is the text of a letter dated 28 April 2016 sent to the editor of The Guardian by Peter Biddulph, but not (as yet) published:]

Twenty seven years is indeed a damning indictment. (Owen Jones: Think Hillsborough couldn't happen today? Think again). And not only in the case of Hillsborough.

It is now almost thirty years since the Lockerbie bombing of December 21st 1988, in which 270 people were murdered by a terrorist bomb. Two Libyans were accused and tried at a specially located court at Kamp Zeist in Holland. One - Baset al-Megrahi - was convicted, the other acquitted with no case to answer.

Only eight years after the trial and two appeals did it emerge that the top police investigator had concealed his diary of his investigations from the defence team and the trial court. When examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and members of the defence team, it was found to contain a chronological record of discussions with the US department of Justice and the sole identification witness concerning massive rewards, in the words of the US Department of Justice, of "unlimited monies" and "only if he gives evidence". The witness received $2m, and his brother $1m. This discovery was one of six areas of concern which led the SCCRC to conclude that "there may have been a miscarriage of justice".

Similarly, only after eight years was the forensic notebook of the prosecution's leading forensic scientist available for scrutiny by the defence team. This contained proof of either gross negligence or perjury when he told the trial judges that a fragment of timer circuit board found at the crash site was materially and structurally identical with timer boards delivered in 1985 to the Libyan government. In fact, his hand-written annotations revealed that the metallurgy of the fragment and the control samples were quite different. The fragment was protectively coated with 100% tin, whereas the sample was coated with an alloy of 70/30% tin/lead.

These issues, and several others with serious implications concerning both police and Crown officers, have been repeatedly brought to the attention of the Scottish government, the Scottish Crown Office, and the police. At all stages, those who have helped to expose them to public scrutiny have been pilloried as "conspiracy theorists".

Campaigners for justice in the Lockerbie case now await the results of Operation Sandwood, a police investigation into allegations of criminality by the Scottish Crown and certain Scottish police officers and government scientists. There is concern that campaigners for the truth have been forced to await an investigation of the police, by the police.  Whatever Sandwood contains, however, those areas of alleged criminality will still stand, and the fight for truth will continue.

Hillsborough has given truth and justice to the people of Liverpool. Let us hope that in time the same will be said for the bereaved of Lockerbie.

[RB: Further posts on this blog drawing analogies between Hillsborough and Lockerbie can be read here.]