Lockerbie bombing conviction ‘crumbling’

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

The official case against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, is crumbling, according to the father of one of the victims.

Dr Jim Swire’s comments came as the fallout continued from the first extracts published of former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill’s book The Lockerbie Bombing: The Search for Justice.

MacAskill wrote that clothes in the suitcase used to carry the bomb “were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved”.

The verdict reached at Megrahi’s trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, hinged on evidence from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci that he had bought the clothes in his shop.

Swire told The National: “I think what we’re seeing is the official case is falling to pieces. There will have to be a legally powerful review of all the evidence, the way the trial was conducted and it’s more than justified whatever the decisions reached by Operation Sandwood.”

Sandwood is a Police Scotland investigation into allegations of criminal misconduct in the Lockerbie investigation, prosecution and trial by the campaign group Justice for Megrahi (JfM) of which Swire is a founder member.

“If Sandwood confirms any of the criminal acts that are alleged then it’s absolutely inevitable that there should be such an inquiry. The evidence has to be reviewed in a way that would have the power to overturn the verdict if it so decided.

“If Megrahi didn’t buy the clothing there’s no case against him.”

Megrahi was released by MacAskill on compassionate grounds in August 2009 suffering from terminal prostate cancer, and died three years later in Libya.

Lawyer Aamer Anwar, meanwhile, has claimed that pressure is mounting for a further appeal against the conviction. He had previously applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) to have it overturned – an application made on behalf of Swire, the Rev John Mosey and 22 other British relatives of passengers who died on Pan Am Flight 103, as well as immediate Megrahi family members.

“This is not the end of the matter and the fact that a former Justice Secretary and First Minister are raising concerns about the conviction of Megrahi adds to the pressure for a further appeal, because they’re privy to information that none of us are privy to,” Anwar told The National.

“At the end of the day … Megrahi was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopkeeper who claimed to have sold him clothes, gave a description of him in multiple statements and failed to recognise him in a courtroom.

“It’s now accepted by an ex-Justice Secretary that Megrahi might not have bought those clothes. It’s all very well for Mr MacAskill to say he’s got no doubt that he was involved in the bombing in some way, but that’s not how it works in criminal law.

“If Megrahi did not buy those clothes that were found in the wreckage of Pan Am flight 103 then that casts doubt on his conviction.”

Anwar added that the Scottish and UK governments had always denied playing any role in pressuring Megrahi into dropping his appeal.

MacAskill was unavailable for comment last night.

[A letter from Iain A D Mann published in The Herald today reads as follows:]

It comes as no great surprise to learn from the new book by former Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, analysed by Iain Macwhirter, that the release of the convicted prisoner Abdul baset al Megrahi from a Scottish jail was the result of a cynical undercover deal between Gordon Brown’s UK government and Libya’s President Gadaffi. It was all about undercover oil deals and defence contracts, and had little to do with Megrahi’s state of terminal illness (“Macaskill, Megrahi and a host of questions”, The Herald, May 17).

But the question must then be asked: why on earth did the Scottish Government agree to take all the blame and then be subject to years of abuse from the British and American governments and media? What benefit was that to Scotland? Does Mr MacAskill’s book explain this, and also why the Scottish Government insisted on taking sole responsibility for Megrahi’s early release?

It seems that the new book also confirms that the attack on [Pan Am] 103 “was in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian passenger aircraft by a US naval ship”. Most rational people have believed this for years, but again the question arises: why did Libya agree to carry out the retaliation on behalf of Iran? I am sure the Iranian secret service was just as capable of doing its own dirty work, rather than sub-contracting the job to another country which had no good reason to become involved.

Questions also still remain about the reliability of some of the evidence given at the Camp Zeist trial, despite Mr MacAskill’s lengthy review of the case in his book. He also confirms that “other states and terrorist organisations also played their part”. Again many of us have believed that for years, but it was never mentioned at the trial. Sadly this case remains a stain on the reputation of our much revered Scottish justice system, and Mr MacAskill has not helped this situation by these latest revelations.

Why MI6 disastrously spurned Mossad’s Heathrow alert

[This is the headline over an article by barrister David Wolchover that was published on the Jewish News website on 16 May 2016. It reads as follows:]

In my recent article on the part played by President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, I stated that Israeli intelligence had warned MI6 that Heathrow was the likely target for planting a bomb on a passenger aircraft but the warning was ignored because of a major rift between British and Israeli intelligence services. A number of readers have expressed curiosity about the episode.

During tensions in the Gulf earlier that year the US Navy had negligently shot down a packed Iranian Airbus. Israel and American intelligence soon learnt that for a multi-million dollar bounty Ahmed Jibril’s Syrian-based “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command” – experts in planting bombs on passenger planes – had been contracted by Iran to destroy an American airliner in revenge. Infiltrated Israeli agents also learnt that Heathrow was the prime target for the planting of a bomb on a US plane and British intelligence was duly alerted.

The significance of that warning was its prescience. Detailed scrutiny of the totality of the Lockerbie evidence proves conclusively that, contrary to the official story, the suitcase containing the bomb was placed by a terrorist in a portable luggage bin in Heathrow’s “interline” shed before the bin was taken out to the doomed Jumbo Jet. But Iran was not merely the paymaster. As reported in my earlier article, an Israeli intelligence source has confirmed that Iran in fact provided key logistical support. The bomb was flown into Heathrow on board an IranAir cargo jet which docked 200 yards from the Interline shed and was taken across to the shed by a PFLP-GC terrorist, named by my source as Jibril’s nephew, Marwad Bushnaq.

To learn why MI6 spurned the warning we must go back to the summer of 1988 when MI5 and Special Branch officers arrested a suspected member of the Palestinian Fatah Force 17 faction. But their captive turned out to be a Mossad double agent and in the light of other intelligence about Mossad’s activities in the UK the British Government concluded that the Israelis had been running an extensive network of operatives throughout the realm, engaging in the infiltration of various Fatah and PFLP cells. Since it was accepted that a number of Palestinian activist groups were cultivating close links with Irish republican terrorist bands it might have been supposed that British intelligence would have relished the chance to pool resources with their Israel counterparts. But other considerations prevailed. Whitehall was bound to show its outrage that Mossad had unilaterally made the UK Israel’s own private intelligence fiefdom.

Older readers may recall the dramatic outcome. On 17 June 1988 Mossad’s London station chief Arieh Regev and four other agents with diplomatic cover were sensationally expelled.

According to the late Samuel Katz’s 1993 book Israel Versus Jibril (Paragon, p205) Mossad alerted MI6 in late November 1988 that a Middle Eastern terrorist gang, probably one of the Syrian-sponsored anti-Arafat groups, would try to sabotage an airliner departing from Europe in the run-up to the Christmas holidays. Katz noted that the British dismissed the warning as no “hot tip” but a purely self-serving sham by which Mossad supposed they could worm their way back into MI6’s good books. He gave no further details of the warning and simply referenced an article by Yisrael Rosenblat in Ma’ariv Sofshavu’a (the Israeli newspaper’s weekend magazine) for November 22, 1991.

In fact my source confirmed that the warning was much more specific than that described in Rosenblat’s report. MI6 were very definitely told that because of the appalling shambles in Heathrow’s security (with airside passes easily obtained under the counter, hundreds having gone missing during the rebuilding of Terminal 3) the airport was Number One target to get a bomb into the hold of a wide-bodied plane operated by one of the premier American carriers.

Whitehall’s hostile attitude was conveyed back to Israel by an exasperated British intermediary and Mossad washed its hands of the whole business. The catastrophic aftermath may explain the desperate efforts to show that the bomb was not infiltrated at Heathrow. Doubtless the response of the joint intelligence chiefs to this revelation will be silence rather than denial but it is enough to hope that these days our security services are more pragmatic and less Israel-averse.

Statement by Aamer Anwar on MacAskill revelations

[What follows is the text of a statement issued today by Aamer Anwar:]

Statement issued by Aamer Anwar - lawyer instructed on behalf of the family of the late Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Dr Jim Swire and other British relatives.

LOCKERBIE REVELATIONS BY EX-JUSTICE SECRETARY KENNY MACKASKILL

In 2014 I submitted an application with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) seeking to overturn the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for murder. That application was submitted on behalf of Dr Jim Swire, Rev’d John F Mosey and 22 other British relatives of passengers who died on board Pan Am Flight 103 and also the six immediate family members of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The Commission determined on the 28th June 2007 that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice in relation to his conviction and identified six grounds for referring the case to the High Court. We asked the Commission to reconfirm these six grounds and address the issue of whether it was in the interests of justice to refer the case to the High Court for a further appeal. Sadly last November the SCCRC refused the application for referral. Today family members of the victims were angered and shocked by Kenny MacKaskill’s claims that Mr al-Megrahi’s release was part of a larger scheme to secure £13billion oil deals and £350 million worth of defence contracts for British firms. If true that is a shocking abuse of our justice system. An Appeal was commenced but following the diagnosis of terminal cancer it was suddenly abandoned in 2009. At the time the British Government and Scottish Government denied they played any role in pressurising Mr al-Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release but also denied that squalid deals for oil or weapons were behind his release. Of course a prisoner transfer was never open if the appeal was ongoing, but it was claimed that al-Megrahi had no way of knowing that Kenny MacAskill would ultimately opt for compassionate release rather than prisoner transfer, but it is also alleged that al-Megrahi was led to believe that he would not be released unless he dropped his appeal. Mr Megrahi was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner Gauci who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in multiple statements. Yet it is now accepted by the ex-Justice Secretary, that Megrahi might not have bought those clothes found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft. Yet Gauci was central to al-Megrahi’s conviction because the clothes recovered from the suitcase that carried the bomb onto Pan Am 103 were traced back to his shop. The case of al-Megrahi has been described as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history. A reversal of the verdict would have meant that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom stood exposed as having lived a monumental lie for 25 years and having imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for ten years. Sadly once again the reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system has been damaged both at home and internationally. The truth will only ever be exposed by allowing the Appeal Court to consider a fresh appeal challenging the original verdict. Background Notes   http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/lockerbie-exclusive-we-publish-the-report-that-could-have-cleared-megrahi.2012036248 http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/oct/12/lockerbie-bombing-abdelbaset-al-megrahi http://www.thenational.scot/news/kenny-macaskill-reported-to-police-over-claims-about-lockerbie-bombing-trial.17646 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/lockerbie-bomber-appeal-case-dropped-6775520 http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13198408.Court_to_rule_on_Lockerbie_appeal/

Lawyer calls for fresh appeal over Lockerbie bombing

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

Revelations by former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill about the decision to release the only man ever tried over the Lockerbie bombing, should trigger a fresh appeal challenging his conviction, according to lawyer Aamer Anwar.

Mr Anwar, who applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a review of the case in 2014, acting on behalf of some of the relatives of those killed in the terrorist attack, said only an appeal could restore the credibility of Scottish justice.

A previous attempted appeal was abandoned in 2009 after Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi was diagnosed with cancer, and the Libyan was subsequently released on compassionate grounds.

However Mr Anwar claimed that a forthcoming book on the case by Mr MacAskill had revealed that prior plans for a prisoner transfer agreement between the UK and Libya had been part of a larger scheme to secure £13 billion in oil deals and £350m of defence contracts.

Mr MacAskill says the Scottish Government opposed any prisoner transfer agreement that involved Mr Al-Megrahi, despite pressure from then Home Secretary Jack Straw.

Mr Anwar claimed Mr Al-Megrahi had also faced pressure, leading him to believe he would not be released if he went ahead with his appeal.

He said:"The case of Al-Megrahi has been described as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history. A reversal of the verdict would have meant that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom ... imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for ten years.

"Sadly once again the reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system has been damaged both at home and internationally. The truth will only ever be exposed by allowing the Appeal Court to consider a fresh appeal challenging the original verdicts."

Mr MacAskill was not available for comment.

[RB: I suspect that this report omits a reference by Mr Anwar to the MacAskill revelation that, above all others, points to the need for a fresh appeal: namely, the concession that the items from Malta that surrounded the bomb were not purchased by Abdelbaset Megrahi. If the trial court had not found (wrongly) that he was the purchaser, it could not and would not have convicted him.

Aamer Anwar has confirmed on Twitter that my suspicion was correct:]

Aamer Anwar ‏@AamerAnwar  2m2 minutes agoGlasgow, Scotland

@rblackqc spot on Robert I mentioned that MacKaskill said he didn't believe Megrahi purchased the clothes!

CIA officer aboard Pan Am 103

[The website Libya: News and Views contains an item (sourced to The Washington Post) dated 17 May 2000 that reads as follows:]

A new book published this week reveals that CIA officer Matt Gannon died aboard Pan Am Flight 103, a jumbo jet that was blown out of the sky in 1988 by, US officials believe, Libyan operatives in retaliation for US attacks on Libya in 1986. By coincidence, Gannon was the son-in-law of Thomas A Twetten, a top CIA official who helped plan the air strikes on Tripoli. Throughout the book, its author Ted Gup, a former Washington Post investigative reporter, describes how agency officials lied to family members about how their loved ones died to maintain "plausible deniability" and keep the CIA from being linked to controversial overseas missions.

[RB: I cannot find the article in question on The Washington Post’s website. But an article dated 15 May 2000 on the CBS News website contains the following:]

One of the 189 Americans killed when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas 1988 was a CIA officer, reports CBS News Correspondent Dan Raviv.

A new book, by former Time correspondent Ted Gup, says 34-year-old Matthew Gannon, an Arabic-speaking CIA officer, was returning from an undercover mission in Beirut "to gather intelligence on a number of terrorist cells."

The Book Of Honor also reveals that Gannon's father-in-law, Tom Twetten, was director of covert operations at the CIA at the time who helped plan the airstrikes on Tripoli. It's believed the Pan Am bombing was in retaliation for those raids.

Now retired in Vermont, Twetten told CBS News he has assured himself the two Libyans on trial are the bombers — "the right guys" — but they probably didn't know a CIA operative was aboard the doomed jet.

And, until now, neither did Americans.

"The agency maintains that identifying its casualties, even decades later, would endanger foreign nationals who may have provided the CIA with intelligence," writes Gup, a former Washington Post investigative reporter who now teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "But the oft-invoked argument wears thinner and thinner as the years wear on and bereaved families are asked to bear their losses in continued silence."

Gup reports agency officials often lie to family members about how their loved ones died to maintain "plausible deniability" and keep the CIA from being linked to controversial overseas missions.

[RB: A version of the well-known Pan Am 103 explanation involving Matthew Gannon and Charles McKee can be read here.]

MacAskill concession destroys foundation of Megrahi conviction

[Today’s Scottish newspapers have at last latched on to the most important revelation in the extract from Kenny MacAskill’s Lockerbie book that was published in The Sunday Times this week:]

The National:  Campaigners who believe Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent of the Lockerbie bombing have reported former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to Police Scotland over his new book on the atrocity and the compassionate release of the only man ever convicted of it.

Justice for Megrahi had previously made a series of criminal allegations concerning the investigation and trial which they said would throw serious doubt on Megrahi’s conviction and “point to possible malpractice by Crown Office personnel, police and other prosecution witnesses”.

A spokesman for the group told The National yesterday: “We have made a formal report to Police Scotland in respect of Mr MacAskill’s book as we believe that some of the contents relate directly to our nine criminal allegations which are currently being investigated by the police.”

In a statement, a Police Scotland spokesman said: “We are aware of the imminent publication of the book and will assess any new information should it come to light.”

MacAskill’s book The Lockerbie Bombing: The Search for Justice is being serialised by a Sunday newspaper but has already come under fire from the architect of the Camp Zeist trial of Megrahi, the only man to be convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. Professor Robert Black QC said the book casts further doubt on the conviction.

MacAskill took the decision to release Megrahi in August 2009 on compassionate grounds. He was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and died three years later in Libya.

Black, emeritus professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, told The National the most important thing to emerge from the book’s early extracts concerned the clothes that linked Megrahi to the bombing of PanAm flight 103.

He said MacAskill had written that “clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved”.

However, Black said: “This is huge. If the trial court hadn’t concluded that Megrahi bought the clothes in Gauci’s shop, he couldn’t have been convicted. This finding was absolutely crucial to the verdict.

“So Kenny is saying that the court was wrong on a matter absolutely essential to its verdict.”

Black also said MacAskill had cited among the reasons for his belief that Libya and Megrahi had been involved in the bombing “an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003”.

But he said: “There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran.”

Black added there had been no mention of findings from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that the conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice on six grounds. He said they included evidence in Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.

This, he said, established beyond reasonable doubt “that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived”. (...)

Controversial identification was key to Megrahi's conviction

Central to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction was his identification by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shop-owner, who testified that the Libyan had bought clothes that were later deemed to have been packed in the lethal suitcase bomb that brought down the PanAm flight.

In 19 separate statements made to police before the trial, Gauci had failed to positively identify Megrahi as the purchaser. During the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, the shopkeeper was asked several times if he recognised anyone in the courtroom, but could only answer when a prosecutor pointed to Megrahi sitting in the left of the dock.

Gauci had also told police that the man who bought the clothes on either November 23 or December 7 was 6ft tall and more than 50 years of age. Megrahi was 5ft 8in tall, and in 1988 he was 36.

The shopkeeper said the buyer also purchased an umbrella because it was raining heavily outside. Yet Maltese meteorological records introduced by the defence team showed that while it did rain all day on November 23, there was almost certainly no rain on December 7.

If it did rain on the later date, the shower would have been barely enough to wet the pavement.

The Herald:  Campaigners claim a former Scottish minister has called into question the conviction of the only man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing.

Former Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill controversially released Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds after he was diagnosed with cancer.

But in a new book Mr MacAskill appears to dismiss crucial evidence that helped to convict Mr Megrahi.

He writes that he does not believe the claim he bought clothes in a store in Malta that were packed around the bomb.

He maintains, however. that Mr Megrahi played a role.

All 259 people on board and 11 on the ground where killed when a Pan-Am airliner exploded over Lockerbie in 1988.

James Robertson, of the Justice for Megrahi campaign group, said that MacAskill’s comments raised serious questions.

He said: “The most interesting thing in all this is that Kenny MacAskill has said that he does not believe that Megrahi was the man who bought those clothes.

"But this calls into account the whole Camp Zeist judgement and it would mean that Megrahi could not have possibly been behind the bombing.

“As Justice minister Kenny MacAskill repeatedly stuck to the line that he had no doubt Megrahi was guilty, but now appears to be saying the opposite.

“Alex Salmond also stuck to this line, and the Justice for Megrahi campaign will be asking if what was said in public was the same as was said in private.”

Press reaction to first extract from MacAskill book

There is quite extensive media coverage this morning of the extract from Kenny MacAskill’s book that was published yesterday in The Sunday Times. The issue that the media concentrate on -- to the exclusion of virtually all else -- is Kenny’s disclosure that, once the Scottish Government knew that the UK Government was absolutely adamant that Megrahi could not be excluded from the prisoner transfer agreement being negotiated with Libya, the Scottish Government sought political concessions from the UK Government as the price for its participation in the prisoner transfer process once the PTA was in force. The concessions sought were not in fact obtained.

Examples of such press coverage can be found here: The Scotsman; The Herald; The Times; the Daily Record; and the Daily Mail.

The National by contrast emphasises fear of reprisals if Megrahi died in a Scottish jail as a major factor motivating the decision to repatriate.

New Scottish Parliament post for Christine Grahame MSP

Christine Grahame MSP has been elected as one of the Scottish Parliament’s two Deputy Presiding Officers. Unlike the Presiding Officer him/herself, deputies do not relinquish their political party affiliations. It is also possible for them to serve as committee members and conveners (see Guidance on Committees, para 2.13) Ms Grahame was, of course, convener of the Justice Committee in the last parliament and is a signatory member of Justice for Megrahi. Committee memberships and convenerships in the newly elected parliament have yet to be arranged.

John Ashton excoriates Kenny MacAskill

John Ashton has posted on his Megrahi: You are my Jury website this evening a detailed critique of the extract from Kenny MacAskill’s Lockerbie book that was published in The Sunday Times today. Mr Ashton’s article is headed Kenny MacAskill’s bungled Lockerbie book and it consists of the relevant portions of the MacAskill extract followed by corrections and commentary. This serves to demonstrate serious inaccuracies, flaws and omissions. John Ashton’s article is a must read.