The Palestinian connection

[This is the headline over an article by Martin Asser published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

The Lockerbie trial has resurrected the names of players in Palestinian radical politics that have long since ceased to be relevant in the armed struggle for an independent Palestinian state, a cause which itself has been consigned to the margins.

It was a world veiled in secrecy, where the abundance of splinter groups reflected the fact that internecine rivalry often took the place of liberation as the major occupation of those involved.

Lawyers for the two Libyans on trial for the 1988 airline bombing fingered 11 alleged members of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), a little-known organisation which is now allied to Palestinian self-rule leader Yasser Arafat in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The more prominent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a prime suspect in the immediate aftermath of the Lockerbie atrocity, also had an unspecified number of its members accused in the trial indictment.

Both groups have denied involvement, with protestations that, when they were involved in the armed struggle, their operations were directed exclusively against Israel.

Before the emergence in the late 1980s and 1990s of Hamas and Hezbollah as the major vehicles of militant (Islamic) resistance against Israel, the PFLP-GC, founded by Ahmad Jibril in 1968, took the lead in anti-Israeli attacks. (...)

Ahmad Jibril was born in the Palestinian city of Jaffa, now in Israel, in 1928, but his family moved to Syria and he became an officer in the Syrian army, reportedly attending the British military academy at Sandhurst.

He set up the small Palestinian Liberation Front in 1959, joining forces in 1967 with fellow radical George Habash to found the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

His breakaway PFLP-GC was founded after tensions arose between Syria and Mr Habash. Mr Jibril has remained consistently pro-Syrian ever since.

This orientation caused splits with other Palestinian organisations, such as the pro-Iraqi Fatah Revolutionary Council (the Abu Nidal group) in 1978, and the umbrella PLO in the mid-1980s, when Yasser Arafat broke with Damascus over negotiating with Israel for territory.

Mr Jibril's "revolutionary nihilism" - as one rival leader put it - apparently also led him into the arms of similarly inclined states such as Libya and Iran.

Hardly present in Israel and the occupied territories themselves, his group was to be found wherever there were the most hardline opponents of Israel. (...)

West Germany was the main centre for alleged PFLP-GC cells, in association with PPSF cells in Scandinavia.

These are alleged to have been engaged in bomb making and planning attacks on behalf of Iran and Syria, including the Lockerbie bombing. Tehran's motive, with Syrian backing, could have been revenge for the July 1988 shooting down of an Iranian airliner with the loss of all 270 people on board by a US warship in the Gulf.

The possibility of Libyan sponsorship, to avenge the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, was also mooted in the aftermath of Lockerbie. The PFLP-GC had been linked to Col Gaddafi, who reportedly arranged training for Mr Jibril's fighters and even recruited them in his war against Chad in the 1980s.

However, there remain many sceptics who believe Washington's identification of Libya as the sole perpetrator of the Lockerbie bombing has much more to do with politics than evidence.

The first US theories put Syria and Iran firmly in the frame, but that changed after Syria joined the alliance to oust Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, and shortly thereafter Damascus became a key player in the US-sponsored Arab-Israeli peace process.

But it is in the nature of groups like PFLP-GC, and their relationship with the states which support them, that the whole truth may never come out.

[RB: Dr Kevin Bannon’s rather different perspective on the PFLP-GC can be read here and here.]

UK Court quest for Lockerbie facts

[This is the heading over an item dated 14 May 1998 on The Pan Am 103 Crash Website. The subheading reads “Ian Black on a mother's search for truth behind PanAm tragedy” which is a strong indication that the article was published in The Guardian, though I can find no trace of it on the newspaper’s website. It reads as follows:]

The mother of a British victim of the Lockerbie disaster is going to the High Court after failing to force an inquest to reveal more about the case.

Nearly 10 years after PanAm flight 103 exploded, killing 270 people, Elizabeth Wright, a London psychiatrist, is seeking judicial review of the decision of a Sussex coroner that he could not conduct an inquest on her son Andrew.

Andrew Gillies-Wright, then 24, was flying to New York for Christmas when he died on December 21, 1988. He was cremated and his ashes interred in South Lancing, West Sussex. Dr Wright, like other Lockerbie relatives seeking movement after years of impasse, agreed to act as a test case, but was told "the lawfully cremated remains of a person (that is that person's ashes) do not constitute 'a body' for the purpose of... jurisdiction."

The British families want an inquest to raise questions which were not answered in the Scottish fatal accident inquiry in Dumfries.Those include events on the ground after the incident, whether intelligence agencies had warned of an attack, and how it was that initial suspicions that Iran, Syria or Palestinians were responsible gave way to charges against Libya.

Gareth Peirce, Dr Wright's solicitor, said: "There is potentially clear and compelling evidence setting out a scenario so different from the one that has been officially presented that it's a continuing national and international disgrace that it remains hidden, and that it falls to the families of the victims to unravel it."

Behind the legal arguments being prepared by Ms Peirce and Michael Mansfield, QC, lies the pain of bereaved families whose hope of seeing justice is diminishing almost a decade after the crime. "It shows what sort of position we find ourselves in when we have to discuss whether a cremated human being is a body," said Pam Dix, spokesperson for UK Families Flight 103.

She added: "We were not satisfied with the fatal accident inquiry, and we see the inquest as one way to further our quest to find out exactly what happened... We want information, not blame.

"We know intelligence won't be openly discussed in any court, but we would like to see how far we could go in getting these matters aired."

Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died in the bombing, returned from Libya last month with "strong assurances" that the suspects would be handed over for trial in a neutral country. He accused the Government of "following slavishly in America's slipstream", despite the comment by Nelson Mandela that no nation should be "complainant, prosecutor and judge".

Roger Stone, the West Sussex coroner, wrote after refusing an inquest on Mr Gillies-Wright: "I hope, given time, that Dr Wright and other members of the family will find it possible to come to terms with their son's tragic death and take comfort from the loving memories they no doubt hold of him."

[RB: If a judicial review was in fact applied for (on which I can find no information) it clearly did not succeed.]

Extracts from MacAskill book to appear in Sunday Times

[On page 37 of today’s Scottish edition of The Times there appears an advertisement in the following terms:]

THE SUNDAY TIMES

SCOTLAND

The Lockerbie Bombing:

The search for justice

In exclusive extracts from his

powerful new book, Kenny

MacAskill, the man who freed

the Lockerbie bomber, lays bare

the commercial interests that

led UK ministers to push for his

return to Libya. And who he

believes was really responsible

for Britain’s worst terrorist

attack.

Starting this weekend, only in

The Sunday Times

[RB: It may perhaps be worth recalling that on 3 May 2016 there appeared in The Times an article headlined MacAskill accused of cashing in on Lockerbie.]

US normalization of relations with Libya

[What follows is excerpted from an item on the ITN Source website:]

A flag raising ceremony on Wednesday May 13 [2009] has symbolically marked the return of the US to Libya after a 30 year absence.

The ceremony, held before foreign diplomats, officials and media, took place in the new US Embassy compound, still being completed, in Tripoli.

The new US ambassador to Libya, Gene A Cretz, said that he was continuing the daily work of normalising relations with the Libyan government, and creating new ties with the Libyan people. An American visa section opened in Tripoli in April.

The return of the US to Libya and of improving diplomatic relations between Washington and Tripoli comes three decades after ties were severed. In November 1972, the US withdrew its ambassador from Tripoli after it accused Libya of supporting international terrorism. US-Libyan relations have dramatically improved since December 2003 after Tripoli's decision to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs.

"I've been here over four months and I have found nothing but courtesy on the part of the Libyan officials with whom I have dealt with. I have found nothing but warmth and welcoming spirit from the Libyans who I have met on the street or visiting or whatever. I think we have come a long way even just since the time I have been here in terms of establishing a working relationship with the Libyan government," Cretz said to waiting media.

He said in the short time he had been in Tripoli, he thought the two countries had made much progress in building a new relationship.

"I would say on an official level we have made progress in several different areas and we look forward to even more progress and I think that today's ceremony in which we raised our flag here is just another building block on the way to what we consider to be a normalisation of relationships with the Libyan government and the Libyan people."

Since relations between the two have improved, the United States has ended its major economic sanctions on Libya and has dropped it from a State Department blacklist for "state sponsors of terrorism".

[RB: Less than two-and-a-half years later the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was saying “We came, we saw, he died” on hearing that Muammar Gaddafi had been brutally killed.]

The discovery of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[It was on this date in 1989 that the fragment of circuit board that was used to link the Lockerbie bomb to a MST-13 timer and hence to Libya was discovered among material that had been collected in January. Here is what Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer says on his PT35B website:]

Fragment of circuit board is found in PI/995 by Dr Hayes on 12 May 89, according to page 51 of Dr Hayes notes. The police production logs for PT/35 record it as having been found by Dr Hayes at RARDE on 12 May 1989. In his evidence (p2608) Hayes said he had no memory of finding the timer fragment independent of his notes. In his chapter 8 Crown precognition (“CP”), Hayes said his recollection was that he worked alone when carrying out examination of debris, but that he occasionally called Allen Feraday in when something of interest was found. Feraday in his chapter 8 CP referred to the discovery of PT/35 and PT/2 and said that he remembered when this was done. He stated that although Hayes was carrying out the examination, he thought Hayes invited him in to see the pieces embedded in PI/995 before Hayes removed them. He stated that Hayes knew he would be interested in what Hayes found, and he therefore remembered that PT/2 and PT/35 were extracted from PI/995. In his chapter 10 CP Feraday does not specifically mention his memory of PT/35’s extraction. He states that initially the main concern was with the pieces of cassette recorder manual that were found in PI/995, as they appeared to support the identification of fragments discovered earlier, and it was only at a later stage that the potential significance of PT/35(b) became clear.

Frank Mulholland to become judge

[A Scottish Government press release announces today that the Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC is amongst five new judges of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary. It reads as follows:]

Her Majesty the Queen has appointed five new Senators to the College of Justice on the recommendation of the First Minister.

Sheriff John Beckett QC, Ailsa Carmichael QC, Alistair Clark QC, the Rt Hon Frank Mulholland QC and Andrew Stewart QC will sit as judges in the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary.

The judges will deal with Scotland’s most important criminal and civil cases.

Their appointments take effect on dates to be agreed by the Lord President. Four of the appointments are to fill existing vacancies. The fifth appointment, to be taken up by Frank Mulholland QC, will take effect following the retirement of a senator later in the year.

Campaigners’ Lockerbie plea to government over Lord Advocate's comments

[This is the headline over a report in today’s edition of The National. It reads in part:]

A campaign group whose members believe Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent of the Lockerbie bombing has urged “political intervention” from the Scottish Government.

The call from Justice for Megrahi (JfM) comes after the outgoing Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland speculated about a possible new trial for the bombing – which JfM said showed he had “gone rogue”.

Investigators from Scotland and the US said last year that they had identified two Libyans as suspects over the 1988 atrocity.

Mulholland had previously indicated he would stand down after the Holyrood elections and, in an interview to mark the occasion he told STV there was a “realistic possibility” of a second trial over bombing, which killed 270 people.

JfM told The National: “The time has come for political intervention by the Scottish Government as the Lord Advocate appears to have gone rogue in relation to his speculation about Lockerbie. It is particularly difficult to understand his statements given that we are awaiting the result of a three-year Police Scotland investigation into criminal allegations related to Lockerbie which, if proved, will cast severe doubt not only on Mr Megrahi’s original conviction but by implication on the guilt of the other ‘suspects’ Mr Mulholland claims to be pursuing.

“It was only in March this year that leading legal commentators criticised Mr Mulholland in relation to this report and yet he continues to publicly undermine the police inquiry.

“This makes it quite clear that he has made his mind up and will not be diverted from making his views public at every opportunity.

“Given this unprecedented stance it is a constitutional disgrace that the Crown Office will have the final say in relation to any prosecutions resulting from the police inquiry.

“The time is long overdue for the Scottish Government to intervene on behalf of the Scottish people.”

In his interview, Mulholland said he had been to the Libyan capital Tripoli twice, and had established “good relations” with the country’s attorney general.

“We’re currently at a stage where there are a number of outstanding international letters of request, one of which is seeking the permission of the Libyan authorities to interview two named individuals as suspects,” he said. “I hope that the Libyans will grant permission for that to be done. I obviously can’t say too much publicly but a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to make that happen.”

Mulholland and the US Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced in October that there was “a proper basis in law” to treat the two Libyans as suspects. Authorities did not name the men, but they are known to be Colonel Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi, and Abouajela Masud.

Both are being held in Libyan jails, where Senussi is appealing against a death sentence and Masud is serving 10 years for bomb making.

Malta is long overdue for an apology

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in Malta Today on this date in 2009:]

Dr [Jim] Swire, known for his involvement in the aftermath of the 1988 Pan-Am airline bombing in which his daughter Flora was killed, has spoken to MaltaToday and reiterated his belief that the bomb that exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie killing 270, did not leave from Malta.

Reacting to (...)  the doubts concerning key witness Tony Gauci’s testimony against Libyan convict Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, Swire said Malta was “long overdue for exoneration and an apology… I do not believe the bomb that killed my daughter started from there, nor do many others.”

Swire is also a founder member of the Justice for Megrahi campaign which seeks interim release from jail for Megrahi, who has been diagnosed with metastasized prostatic cancer and is terminally ill, so that he can return to his family in Scotland pending his second appeal against conviction.

Swire told MaltaToday that at the trial in the Netherlands, which found Megrahi guilty and convicted him to 27 years’ imprisonment for placing the bomb in the luggage that was found in Pan-Am Flight 103, “there was simply no evidence as to how Megrahi might have penetrated security at Luqa to put the bomb aboard.”

Megrahi, a former Libyan Arab Airlines security official in Malta, was claimed to have bought clothes from Mary’s Shop in Sliema, which were later found wrapped around the bomb. Shopkeeper Tony Gauci was crucial in identifying Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes from him just before Christmas 1988.

But Swire told MaltaToday that Air Malta had kept “exemplary records” of their flight KM180 which showed that all the bags carried belonged to the passengers and that all were returned to their owners, with none left over, at Frankfurt – where the bomb was loaded onto the Pan Am flight.

“Although Air Malta did force a British TV company to withdraw its allegations that they carried the bomb, I am surprised that neither they nor your government seem to have demanded an explanation for the concealment of evidence from Heathrow, until after the verdict implicating Luqa had been reached. The information only surfaced in Holland in 2000 thanks to the perseverance of the Heathrow security guard who had discovered the break-in,” Swire says.

“The judges were reduced to saying of how Megrahi was supposed to have penetrated security at Luqa and that the absence of evidence was ‘a major problem for the prosecution case’.

“They could surely never have achieved this extraordinary verdict, had they known all the facts.”

On the hand, Swire says the bomb was placed inside the luggage at Heathrow airport.

“In the early hours of the day of the disaster at Heathrow airport, London, there was a break-in allowing access for an unidentified person to the ‘secure’ airside portion of the airport, close to the Iran Air facility and to the baggage assembly shed. In that shed, inside the container in which the explosion was later shown to have occurred, was seen an unauthorised suitcase, which was not removed. It was seen well before the flight from Frankfurt had even landed.

“The most sinister aspect of this information about the break-in at Heathrow is that it was concealed for 12 years, until after the verdict had been reached, yet it was known to our anti-terrorist special branch, and fully recorded in the Heathrow security logbooks.

“A verdict has been brought in, dependent upon activities at Luqa for which there is no evidence, while the information about a probably highly relevant criminal act at Heathrow has been deliberately suppressed. What we need to know now is on whose orders the concealment was carried out and why they ordered it,” Swire said.

Lockerbie appeal

A three-year investigation by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission into whether Megrahi suffered a miscarriage of justice has sent his case back into appeal, with the Libyan’s lawyers claiming there is now substantial evidence undermining the credibility of Tony Gauci’s testimony.

Last week, Megrahi’s lawyers announced that their new evidence showed Gauci had been “coached and steered by Scottish detectives” into wrongly identifying the Libyan, claiming Gauci was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before giving the evidence that finally led to the conviction for the bombing.

Megrahi’s lawyers will claim that in nearly two dozen formal police interviews, Gauci gave contradictory dates of purchase, changed his account of the sale, and on one occasion appeared to identify the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Talb as the purchaser.

The Toshiba instruction manual evidence

[On this date in 2000, Mrs Gwendoline Horton gave evidence at the Lockerbie trial. A report on the South African IOL website, based on news agency reports from Camp Zeist, contains the following:]

An elderly resident of an English farming village told on Wednesday how she found among Pan Am Flight 103 debris strewn outside her home a document that became essential to the Lockerbie investigation - a cassette recorder manual. (...)

Gwendoline Horton, of Morpeth, 100km east of Lockerbie, described the scene around the town the day after the explosion. Air currents had carried a considerable amount of light debris into northern England and deposited it in the Morpeth area.

"All the local farmers were collecting it in the fields," Horton said. "We went out to collect what we could. I remember coming upon a document of some sort that made reference to a radio cassette player."

Police constable Brian Walton confirmed that he accepted Horton's find, which he described as an instruction handbook for a cassette player.

"It had tiny bits of cinder on the edges," he told the court. "At that time, it didn't have significance that it obviously might have now."

But when Horton was handed a plastic bag with fragments of the manual, she did not recognise it.

"I'm sure when I handed it in it was in one piece," she testified.

[RB: The best analysis of the evidence about the Toshiba instruction manual is to be found here and here on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide.]

'Realistic possibility' of second Lockerbie bombing trial

[This is the headline over a report published this evening on the STV News website. It reads in part:]

Scotland's chief law officer believes there is a "realistic possibility" of a second trial over the murder of 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing.

Scottish and American investigators announced last year that they had identified two Libyans as suspects over the 1988 atrocity but since then very little has been said publicly about the case.

In an interview with STV News to mark his departure from the post after five years, lord advocate Frank Mulholland QC discussed the prospect of fresh prosecutions over Britain's biggest mass murder.

"I've been to Tripoli twice," said. "I've established good relations with the law enforcement attorney general in Libya.

"We're currently at a stage where there are a number of outstanding international letters of request, one of which is seeking the permission of the Libyan authorities to interview two named individuals as suspects.

"Following all the work that's been going on, and it's been painstaking, it's taken some time, it does take time.

"I hope that the Libyans will grant permission for that to be done. I obviously can't say too much publicly but a lot of work is going on behind the scenes to make that happen.

"What I hope is that this will bear fruit and we can take it to the next stage of seeking the extradition of the two named individuals."

Last October, it was announced the lord advocate and the US attorney general had agreed there was "a proper basis in law" to treat the two Libyans as suspects.

The two men were not named by the Scottish or US authorities but they are Abdullah Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, and Abouajela Masud.

Both are being held in jails in Libya - Senussi is appealing against a death sentence while Masud is serving ten years for bomb making. (...)

Asked if there was any realistic possibility of Senussi being surrendered for trial, Frank Mulholland replied: "Before I embarked on this work I was told that there was no possibility, absolutely none, of the Libyans cooperating with law enforcement in Scotland or the United States. That happened.

"In 2011, I attended a ceremony in Arlington where the Libyan ambassador to the US made a public commitment on behalf of the Libyan government to help. They have kept their word. They have helped.

"I said it takes time, and it will take time, and that's certainly something which we are used to in relation to the Lockerbie inquiry.

"If we get to the stage of seeking the extradition of two named individuals or indeed more persons, I think there's a realistic possibility that there could be a further trial."

The two men are suspected of bringing down Pan Am 103 while acting along with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who remains the only person convicted of the bombing.

He died protesting his innocence after being released on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government. A high-profile campaign to clear his name continues.

The lord advocate acknowledged any new Lockerbie trial would involve a public re-examination of the disputed evidence from Megrahi's.

"I don't fear that," he said. "I think that's a good thing. Without seeking to comment on what the outcome would be, I think the evidence would stand up to a further test.

"We wouldn't be doing this unless we thought that the evidence was sufficiently credible and reliable to have them interviewed as suspects, I think that's the best way to put it."

For many years after the bombing it seemed extremely unlikely there would ever be prosecutions over Lockerbie.

Eventually a diplomatic deal paved the way for the first trial to go ahead in a specially-convened Scottish court sitting at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

Frank Mulholland first raised the hope that the collapse of Gaddafi's regime could allow Scottish police to visit Libya back in 2011.

He is the first British or American official to publicly express the belief that a second trial could happen, albeit with carefully chosen words.

[RB: In my view the chances of either Senussi or Masud being extradited to stand trial for the Lockerbie bombing are precisely zero. I would, however, be delighted to be proved wrong since, as Frank Mulholland concedes, that would inevitably subject to further scrutiny the evidence that led to the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi -- a scrutiny that that evidence could not survive.]