RIP Ambassador Andrew I Killgore

I am saddened to learn of the death on 20 December 2016 of Ambassador Andrew I Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and a longtime seeker after Lockerbie truth. Links to his many writings on the Lockerbie case can be found here. In an email to Dr Jim Swire, Robert Forrester and me, the managing editor of WRMEA, Janet McMahon, wrote:

“I'm sorry to have to tell you the sad news that Andy Killgore died yesterday. He had gotten increasingly frail over the last year or so, and was developing a second round of pneumonia after a fall last Wednesday and did not want to go to a hospital. We visited him Friday afternoon, and he was alert, comfortable and in good spirits. We had planned to visit him again yesterday, but his daughters called us to say he had died. It is definitely a shock, but we are grateful that he did not suffer or have to endure a long painful death. His beloved family was with him.

“As you know, he was very passionate about Lockerbie. I printed out all your communications to him and he read them avidly. He had his own idea about who was responsible, of course, but certainly agreed that there has been a most grievous cover-up. We often talked about going to London or Edinburgh if there were any major development. He felt close to you all, and was glad to have you as comrades-in-arms!”

In his reply Dr Swire wrote:

“The truth is that after 28 years all of us who like Andrew still feel passionately about the deception laid upon this tragedy are ageing now and others also among us have died.

“In their memory as well as for the memory of all those who died at Lockerbie, we cannot let the matter rest, and lately I have come to believe that within the next couple of years the truth will burst out.

“When it does that will be a good time to remember people like Andrew who gave so much sincerity to the search.”

WRMEA’s obituary of Ambassador Killgore can be read here.

Lockerbie trial sabre-rattling

[What follows is the text of an article that appeared in The New York Times on this date in 1998:]

On the 10th anniversary of the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Scotland, the United States told Libya today that it will face more sanctions if two Libyan suspects are not turned over for trial by a Scottish judge in the Netherlands by February.

''Ten years is much too long to wait for justice,'' said Peter Burleigh, the American representative on the Security Council, which discussed the issue today.

In Libya, however, Col Muammar el-Qaddafi only widened the breach today, apparently rejecting the compromise plan for a trial in the Netherlands by saying that he wanted an international tribunal to hear the case. Earlier this month, Libya's National Assembly seemed to endorse the plan for a Scottish trial after a personal appeal to Colonel Qaddafi from Secretary General Kofi Annan.

''An international court is the solution,'' Colonel Qaddafi told a Dutch television interviewer in a program taped last week and broadcast in the Netherlands today, ''with judges from America, Libya, England and other countries.''

Today, however, at a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery marking the bombing, President Clinton said the plan to hold the trial in the Netherlands was a ''take it or leave it'' deal. ''We will not negotiate its terms,'' he added.

For years Libya refused to allow American or British courts to try the suspects in the bombing, which killed 270 people, including 11 on the ground in Lockerbie, the Scottish town where the plane came down. In August Britain and the United States offered the compromise of a trial in a third country, and the Netherlands agreed to allow a Scottish court to be set up for that purpose in Utrecht.

But Libya, under United Nations sanctions since 1992, continued to stall, raising questions about the treatment of the suspects and where they would be imprisoned if convicted. British officials and the Secretary General's legal counsel, Under Secretary General Hans Corell, replied exhaustively to the Libyans.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's representative at the United Nations, said today that all the questions raised by Libya had been answered.

Arab diplomats say Libya is concerned that the two suspects, Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, could be pressed by Western intelligence agencies or trial prosecutors to talk about more than Lockerbie.

Mr. Annan said again today that he remains optimistic that Libya will eventually comply with the request to send the suspects to the Netherlands. But the signs from Libya seem to be pointing in another direction.

In February the Security Council will review the sanctions, which would be suspended immediately if the suspects were handed over.

By February, Mr Burleigh said today, ''the Libyan Government will have had six months to accept the offer it long said it would accept.''

[RB: My neutral venue trial proposal, accepted by Libya, was on the table for four years and seven months before the United Kingdom and United States reluctantly put forward a scheme along the same lines. US criticism of Libya for taking six months to consider the ramifications of that scheme seems somewhat petty.]

Lockerbie: The 28 year lie.

[This is the headline over an item posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s Lockerbie Truth blog. It reads as follows:]

On this day in 1988, 21st of December, a terrorist bomb destroyed flight Pan Am 103 during its journey from Heathrow Airport in the UK to New York.

Sections of the dismembered plane and 259 passengers [and crew] fell across the Scottish town of Lockerbie and surrounding farms and fields.

In 1991 two Libyan security officers were indicted for the crime. Their trial began in May 2000.

The key prosecution claims were:

1.  Several weeks before the attack, one of the accused, Baset al-Megrahi, purchased a selection of clothes from a Maltese clothing shop.

2. Pieces of the clothing were found at the crash site.

3.  Embedded within one of the pieces was a 4mm square fragment - PT35(b) - of an electronic timer board.

4.  The FBI had proved that the fragment came from a batch of 20 such boards delivered in 1985 to Libya by Swiss electronics supplier MEBO.

5.  Two witnesses would identify the suspects and prove the case beyond doubt. The first, a CIA informant Majid Giaka; the second, a Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci.

The trial judges decided that Giaka  was untrustworthy, leaving Gauci as the sole identification witness.

On 31st January 2001 al-Megrahi was found guilty. The second accused, Khalifa Fhimah, was freed with "No case to answer". [RB: The court ruled that there was a case to answer, but at the end of the trial returned a verdict of Not Guilty.]

In the years since the verdict it has become clear that the world has been cynically misled by the FBI, the CIA, and British and Scottish governments.

1. In 1989 Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher was advised by the Americans not to enquire into the attack.

2.  Even though she and her entourage had walked across the devastated town one day after the attack, she could not - in her 1993 memoir "The Downing Street Years" - recall the existence of Lockerbie. When asked by Father of the House MP Tam Dalyell why, she said: "I know nothing of Lockerbie, and do not write about something I do not know about."

3.  Seven years after the verdict the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) discovered significant new evidence that had been concealed from the trial judges and defence team.

4.  The SCCRC discovered a secret letter written by the King of Jordan to British prime minister John Major indicating that the Libyans were innocent of the crime.

The King's letter claimed that the attack had been Iranian-funded in revenge for the 1988 destruction by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca.

5. Unknown to most journalists and public, the King had agreed to place in protective custody Marwan Khreesat, expert bomb-maker for a Palestinian group, the PFLP-GC. Khreesat had made bombs for the group in Germany, to be used to bring down American passenger planes heading for the US.

6.  US and German intelligence knew that Iran had funded the attack. They had assembled a full dossier of intelligence proving that Khreesat and the Palestinian group were guilty.

7.  On the sudden discovery of PT35(b), however, US intelligence reversed direction and accused Libya of the crime.

8. The British government tried on two occasions to prevent the king's letter becoming public. The first, a Public Interest Immunity Certificate signed by Foreign Secretary David Miliband; the second, an unsuccessful attempt by Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt to close down a Scottish newspaper to prevent publication of the story.

9.  The SCCRC re-examined evidence given in the trial and discovered that al-Megrahi was not on the island of Malta on the day that the clothing was purchased.

10.  The SCCRC also discovered that police diaries of chief police investigator Harry Bell contained a record of multi-million dollar offers of payment to the Maltese shopkeeper Gauci "provided" - in the words of a letter to Harry Bell from the US Department of Justice - "he gives evidence."

11.  The SCCRC also re-examined all the evidence given by Gauci. They concluded that his so-called "identification" was founded on numerous viewings of photographs of al-Megrahi in the media and magazines, all linking him to the bombing. Gauci's evidence was therefore not credible, and the trial judges had been mistaken.

****

Was the Lockerbie fragment PT35(b) a fake? During the trial in 2000 there were suspicions about how it had been discovered and reported on by government scientists. The trial judges had discounted these suspicions.

Then in 2009 the al-Megrahi defence team made a startling discovery. In the years since the trial and first appeal they had managed to obtain a huge set of documents from police and Scottish Crown archives. Among the documents was the forensic notebook of scientific witness Allen Feraday.

Feraday had compared PT35(b) with control samples from MST13 timer circuit boards similar to those supplied to Libya in 1985 by MEBO.

He told the trial judges: "the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects" to that of the MST13 timer.

But nine years prior to the trial, on 1st August 1991, when examining both the fragment and a MEBO MST13 timer circuit board, he had made two hand-written entries in his notebook which contradicted this.

The first recorded that tracks on fragment PT35(b) were protected by a layer of "Pure tin". The second said that tracks on the circuit of a control sample MST13 board were covered by an alloy of "70% tin and 30% lead".

Feraday and the police were fully aware of the difference. Two police scientific advisers suggested that the heat of the explosion might have evaporated the lead content of the alloy, leaving pure tin.

Another police adviser working for Ferranti International noted that fragment PT35(b) had indications of being "home made".

Neither the scientist's reports nor the Ferranti letter were followed up. All remained hidden in police files. The judges and defence team were unaware of their contents.

In the light of this new information the defence team consulted two prominent independent experts in the field. The experts repeatedly heat tested the evaporation theory with temperatures exceeding that of the bomb explosion. But the alloy of 70/30 tin/lead remained just that.

Thuring, the company which manufactured the circuit boards used in MST13 timers , confirmed in an affidavit that they had always used a 70/30 tin/lead combination.  Fragment PT35(b) did not, therefore, come from one of their circuit boards. How it was made and by whom remains a mystery.

Feraday either perjured himself or was grossly negligent. It was upon his statement and the identification evidence by Gauci that the case against Baset al-Megrahi would turn.

All this information has been put repeatedly to the Scottish and British governments and police. They have totally ignored it. Instead, for almost two years they have claimed to be "pursuing other suspects" in the chaos that is today Libya.

The Lockerbie campaign will continue. We intend to ensure - with the help of prominent friends from around the world - that the Lockerbie verdict will prove to be a disastrous miscarriage of justice.

Jumbo jet crashes onto Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a report from this date in 1988 on the BBC News website. It reads as follows:]

A Pan Am jumbo jet with 258 passengers on board has crashed on to the town of Lockerbie near the Scottish borders.

Initial reports indicate it crashed into a petrol station in the centre of the town, between Carlisle and Dumfries, and burst into a 300-foot fireball.

Hundreds are feared dead as airline officials said flight 103 was about two-thirds full with 255 adults and three children on board.

Rescue teams have confirmed there are many casualties at the scene including townspeople who were on the ground.

The Boeing 747 left London Heathrow at 1800 GMT bound for New York's JFK airport.

Shortly after 1900 the flight disappeared from radar screens at Prestwick Air Traffic Control Centre.

At 1908 there were reports by the Civil Air Traffic Control Authorities of an explosion on the ground 15 miles north of the Scottish border.

Details of the accident are still unclear but there are unconfirmed reports the plane has ploughed into cars and houses.

An eyewitness said the aircraft has hit a central part of the town in a residential area.

"There was just a terrible explosion, you just couldn't describe it," he told the BBC.

"It is just impossible to approach the town but at the time it went up there was a terrible explosion and the whole sky lit up.

"It was virtually raining fire - it was just liquid fire."

Parts of the town are being evacuated and a hall has been converted into a refuge centre.

Dumfries and Galloway Hospital, about 20 miles away, is on emergency alert.

Ambulances from southern Scotland and Cumbria have been sent to the scene.

The RAF has sent personnel and helicopters from Scotland and Northern England, along with mountain rescue teams to help police.

The A74 has been cordoned off after police reported several parked cars on fire.

It is thought the plane would have been flying at about 31,000 ft over Lockerbie when it exploded.

CIA held Syrian militants responsible for Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Jon Swaine that was published on The Telegraph website on this date in 2013. It reads as follows:]

The CIA secretly held Syrian militants, rather than Libya, responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, according to newly unearthed testimony from a former US spy in the Middle East.

Dr Richard Fuisz said in a sworn deposition in 2001 that he was told by up to 15 senior Syrian officials that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) had carried out the attack.

He also testified that CIA bosses told him the PFLP-GC was responsible, according to a lawyer's note of a second deposition. Ahmed Jibril, the group's founder leader, who is still alive at 75, was singled out as being to blame for the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988, killing 270 people.

"Numerous high officials in the Syrian government were quite affirmative on Jibril's involvement in Pan Am 103," Dr Fuisz told lawyers, during his deposition in Virginia in 2001.

Dr Fuisz gave his depositions in 2000 and 2001 at the request of Megrahi's defence lawyers. However, the evidence came too late to be used in the trial. They were first published by Channel 4 News. The CIA declined to comment.

Muammar Gaddafi's Libyan regime was publicly blamed by the US for the attack, and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing in 2001. He was later released and died last year in Libya.

But serious doubts about the conviction have been raised by investigative journalists for several years, centring on forensic evidence, and Libya has strenuously denied involvement.

The PFLP-GC were in fact the first prime suspects in the investigation.

Experts suggested it may have been ordered by the Iranian government as revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet by a US battleship months earlier, killing 290.

They added that blame may have been diverted from Iran in order to protect secret and delicate negotiations by George Bush's US administration over western hostages.

Dr Fuisz, a businessman who is said to have been a senior US intelligence asset in the Middle East in the 1980s and 90s, said that the Syrian officials he spoke to interacted with Jibril "on a constant basis" and that he was widely regarded to be the mastermind behind the bombing.

Asked who the Syrian officials cited as their source for the information, he said: "My recollection is they were direct. They were not hearsay sources on their part." Asked if that he understood that to mean that he was "being told by members of the Syrian government that Jibril, and or members of the PFLGC were taking credit for the bombing," he replied: "Yes".

A sacrificial lamb

[What follows is the text of an article by Richard Kerbaj that was published in The Times on this date in 2008:]

The wife of the Lockerbie bomber claims that her husband became a sacrificial lamb for the whole of Libya when he agreed to be tried for a crime that he says he did not commit.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi surrendered his freedom so that his country could free itself from United Nations sanctions and improve its global image, his wife Aisha said.

Mrs al-Megrahi gave a rare interview at the family home near Glasgow, close to the prison where her husband is serving a life sentence for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that claimed the lives of 270 people in 1988.

“He sacrificed himself for the sake of an entire nation,” she told The Times, in an interview conducted in Arabic.

“They’ll never make up for the absence and they cannot make up for the sadness that has been created,” Mrs al-Megrahi said of the Libyan Government, which supports her family financially. “If they give me all the money in the world that would not make up for his absence.” She said, however, that she and her five children were still thankful for the support provided by Libya.

Mrs al-Megrahi said that she would not have let her husband leave Libya for the Netherlands in 1999 – where the Lockerbie trial took place a year later - if she had known that he would be convicted.

“I didn’t try and advise him against going because I was confident he would return,” she said. “But if I’d known we’d be here ten years later I would have told him not to go.”

Asked if she ever wished that Libya had not extradited her husband, a faint smile emerges on her face before she lowers her gaze. Her silence spoke volumes. It is the silence of a woman torn between her feelings for a man whom she fell in love with at 18 and the country that continues to put food on his family table and pay for their travel home to Libya for religious holidays.

Al-Megrahi, 56, had stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosed in September but was refused bail even though his defence team argued that he did not have long to live. The court ruled that he did not meet the requirement of having less than three months to live.

Can Crown Office vested interests be overcome?

[What follows is excerpted from a report in today’s edition of The National:]

Scottish politicians have a duty to find out the truth about the Lockerbie bombing, according to a member of Justice for Megrahi (JfM), the group that believes Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the only man convicted of the atrocity, was innocent.

Iain McKie’s comments came two days ahead of the 28th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in which 270 people died, and as JfM wrote to the new Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC, urging him to ensure the Crown Office gives “independent and objective consideration” to a Police Scotland report into the group’s criminal allegations.

McKie told The National the report – Operation Sandwood – which is more than a year late, was unlikely to be released until next year.

He said: “It won’t be this year and we’re looking at the early part of next year, which gives us breathing space to some extent to get the matter looked at properly.

“James Wolffe is a new man on the block and has no previous associations with Lockerbie. You’ve got to trust the man’s integrity until you find out otherwise, but there’s no doubt the previous incumbent Frank Mulholland was totally prejudiced and biased against the inquiry and made this publicly clear.

“Wolfe is not – he’s not been previously tainted with Lockerbie and therefore we’ve got to trust him. The issue is whether he can overcome the vested interests within the Crown Office that might want to brush this under the carpet.”

The basis of JfM’s case is the belief that the conviction of Megrahi in 2001 was a miscarriage of justice, and they have pressed for an independent inquiry into it.

[RB: The full text of JfM’s press release can be read here.]

Legal & political concern grows as Crown Office prepares to consider new Lockerbie report

[This is the heading over a press release issued today by Justice for Megrahi. It reads as follows:]

INTRODUCTION

As the 28th Anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing approaches on 21st December Justice for Megrahi, the single issue justice campaign group which believes that the 2001 conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was a miscarriage of justice, and which has petitioned the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into this conviction, has issued the following statement.

STATEMENT

‘Justice for Megrahi looks forward to the completion of the three year Operation Sandwood major police enquiry into our 9 criminal allegations against police, Crown Office officials and forensic scientists involved in the initial Lockerbie investigation and Camp Zeist trial, early in 2017.

Although the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission report in 2007 found that the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice, this is the first major reinvestigation of all the facts since that conviction. We continue to have confidence in the Police Scotland investigation team to carry out a thorough and objective enquiry.

As we move towards 2017 however we have concerns in two areas.

Given the previous Lord Advocate’s public rejection of our allegations, before any enquiry had even taken place, we have written to the new Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC and asked him to ensure that Crown Office gives the Operation Sandwood report independent and objective consideration.

The previous support of the Justice Committee, in maintaining a watching brief over developments related to the ongoing police enquiry, has been of great value given that the Scottish Parliament has a constitutional duty to oversee the administration of justice in Scotland.  This political scrutiny is critical and we are concerned that the current committee might decide to end that oversight as soon as the police report is submitted to Crown Office. It is essential that our political representatives continue scrutiny until Crown Office has considered the Police report and has published its findings, in order to ensure that the Scottish public and the broader worldwide audience are fully aware of these findings.’  

Lockerbie sentence “too lenient”

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in the Daily Mail on this date in 2003. It reads as follows:]

The sentence handed down to the Lockerbie bomber last month is to be challenged on the grounds that it was unduly lenient, prosecutors said.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohammed Al Megrahi was told by three Scottish judges he must spend at least 27 years in jail before he was considered for parole.

The hearing at the High Court in Glasgow took place to determine the "punishment part" of Megrahi's mandatory life sentence as required under European Human Rights legislation.

Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, Scotland's senior legal figure, has lodged an appeal against that length of term.

American relatives, who said the sentence passed in November was too little for the crime, welcomed the move, while British reaction was critical.

Megrahi's legal team said they were concerned they had not been informed of the move by the Crown Office and said they were considering their own appeal against sentence.

The Libyan's solicitor Eddie MacKechnie said the length of the punishment was irrelevant because his actual term in jail may be longer.

"The period of 27 years is that which he has to serve before he is even considered for release and it does not follow that he will be released."

He added: "Mr Megrahi is currently considering an appeal himself on technical grounds, but it has not yet been decided whether to proceed."

He said it would not be appropriate to comment further without studying grounds on which the Lord Advocate's appeal had been lodged.

The former Libyan intelligence agent was convicted at a special trial in the Netherlands in 2001 of killing 270 people in the 1988 atrocity and is serving a life sentence at Barlinnie prison in Glasgow.

At the High Court in the city on November 24, Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean ruled he must spend at least 27 years in jail before a parole board could review whether he should be released. The sentence was backdated to April 1999 when he was extradited from Libya for the trial at Camp Zeist in Holland.

[RB: The Lord Advocate dropped this appeal on 21 August 2009, one day after Abdelbaset Megrahi was released from prison on compassionate grounds.]

Police close in on Lockerbie killers

On this date in 1989 an article by David Leppard and Nick Rufford headlined 'Police close in on Lockerbie killers' was published in The Sunday Times. It asserted that police officers leading the investigation had informed foreign counterparts that under Scottish law ‘charges are now possible against certain persons’. Who were these chargeable suspects? The persons named, and whose photographs appeared in the article, included not one single Libyan.

The article does not now appear to be available online. However, a brief account of its contents can be found here.

Recent Richard Marquise interview about Lockerbie

A lengthy podcast interview with the FBI chief Lockerbie investigator, Richard Marquise, has just been made available. It can be accessed here. The text accompanying the podcast reads as follows:]

Retired agent Richard “Dick” Marquise served with the FBI for 31 years. He is an expert in the fields of counter terrorism and crisis management, both as an investigator and as a manager. Marquise is interviewed about Pan Am Flight 103, blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, four days before Christmas. Two hundred and seventy people were killed. Marquise was involved with the investigation from its inception and, after being named to lead the US Task Force which included the FBI, Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency, he managed the investigation through the return of indictments in 1991. He also played an active role through the court proceedings and in August 2001, with the successful resolution of the trial, he received the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service. Following the case, which had been code-named Scotbom, his Bureau career included the role of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Oklahoma City Division.  He has provided training to law enforcement officials all over the United States and internationally and has appeared on television and radio talk shows and has given hundreds of speeches all over the world on the topic of terrorism. In order to document the facts of the investigation, Marquise wrote Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation a non-fiction account of the international terrorism case.

Lockerbie is a stain on the Scottish legal system

[What follows is the text of an article by James Cusick that was published in The Independent on this date in 2013:]

After 25 years of denials and diplomatic games, we're yet to learn the truth about the Lockerbie bombing

It's sometimes said in Scotland that you can't escape from the past and, like sand clinging to wet feet, it's carried around as a burden. Just how uncomfortable the burden can be will be evident in important rooms in Edinburgh, London and Washington during the next week or so as governing politicians, distinguished lawyers, high-ranking police officers, intelligence officials and interconnected diplomats continue nearly a quarter of a century of denial and obfuscation. The conversations may be similar because the inconsistent official explanation of how and why a Boeing 747 was blown out of the sky above the Dumfries town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 remains a truth too far.

Some 38 minutes after Pan-Am Flight 103 Maid of the Seas left Heathrow en route to New York, a bomb built into a Toshiba radio-cassette player, placed inside a Samsonite suitcase, went off. The brief horror inside the aircraft's cabin and flight deck is unimaginable. All on board the disintegrating jet were killed – 243 passengers and 16 crew – and 11 people died on the ground in Lockerbie. It remains the deadliest single terror attack on European soil.

In the fantasy world of Hollywood CSI science, Lockerbie would be a closed case. Meticulous factual analysis would be unchallengeable. Justice would be seen to be done. Reputations would be forged by its success. Feature films would celebrate dogged heroes determined to find the truth. The reality? Despite a mountain of evidence and a supposedly ground-breaking Scottish trial on "neutral" territory in the Netherlands before learned judges, Lockerbie remains a byword for state silence on evidential inconsistencies, surrounded by dark, covert diplomatic games.

A Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted of mass murder in 2001 and sentenced to 27 years in jail. In 2009, supposedly on compassionate grounds, he returned home to die of prostate cancer, which he did in 2012. He remains the official answer to the question: who did this? However, the evidence against Megrahi now wouldn't stand up in any court – unless that court were one where verdicts are determined ahead of what's heard, and any duty to disclose evidence which doesn't suit the prosecuting authorities is seen as an unnecessary luxury.

Lockerbie, then, is a stain on the Scottish legal system; dirty judicial laundry that Alex Salmond and his nationalist administration would rather remained bagged up until well after next year's independence vote. This is one reputation which, if tarnished, would have immediate political implications.

In the months after the mid-air explosion, debris was recovered from hundreds of square miles of Scottish and Northumberland countryside. Pieces from an aluminium cargo hold container – marked AVE4041PA – were pieced back together. Official evidence by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch identified this container as the location of the blast.

For the Semtex hidden inside the radio to have had the effect it did, breaking through the fuselage and creating a small hole that led to the "skin" of the aircraft peeling off at 31,000ft, the suitcase must have occupied a precise bottom-row location inside AVE4041, close to the edge of the plane's hull.

Seven aluminium containers had been filled with the luggage of Pan-Am passengers who had checked in at Heathrow's Terminal 3. The eighth container, AVE4041, was for baggage from a transfer flight from Frankfurt. No security screening of the Frankfurt luggage took place. It was assumed that this had been done in Germany. The feeder flight was due at 17.20. Pan-Am 103 was timed to push off at 18.00.

One of the staff in the loading area where AVE4041 was being filled was John Bedford. He told police in a statement given in January 1989 that he noticed a hard-shell Samonsite suitcase had already been loaded into the bottom of the "tin" container before the feeder flight had even landed.

If an inquiry is ever allowed to re-examine the Heathrow luggage procedures, security in the baggage area at Terminal 3 and the timing and chances of a bag from a late-arriving feeder flight being accidentally placed exactly where needed to blow a hole in a 747's fuselage, the currently accepted account will be made to look ridiculous. Adequately Explained by Stupidity, a new book by Dr Morag Kerr, from the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) team, focuses largely on Heathrow.

Bedford's account has altered over time, but what he said first remains crucial. If correct, what happened before Heathrow – in Frankfurt and Malta, where Megrahi was supposed to have placed the unaccompanied suitcase bomb on flight KM108 from Luqa, which later transferred to Pan-Am 103 – is all irrelevant.

Take Malta out of the equation, and Libya's alleged role in the bombing fades dramatically. But how did Libya figure in the first place? If Flight 103 had been delayed, which is common enough at busy Heathrow, the bomb, if on a simple timer set in Malta, could have exploded with the plane yet to take off. A small hole at ground level would have killed no one. But if the device used was barometric, triggered by atmospheric pressure levels, why did it not detonate on the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow flights?

Terrorist groups in the frame in the early weeks and months of Lockerbie had links to the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians and Iranians. Libya would have been in the mix. The motives were varied – anything from state-sponsored revenge against the US, to murkier aspects of covert bilateral deals that backfired. The initial suspects were from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PLFP-GC), a Syrian-based terror group headed by Ahmed Jibril. A Maltese chapter of the group was on international intelligence radar. Frankfurt, as the location where the bomb was apparently loaded, had not been discounted.

Another early suspect was Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian member of the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF). When Talb was arrested in Sweden on suspicion of being involved in the bombing of a train in Denmark, items of clothing found at his house were traced to a Maltese manufacturer.

According to informed media reports in 1989, Talb had links to the PLFP-GC and had been in Malta with a known terrorist bomb expert. This information was regarded as sound enough for Scottish police to plan a trip to Sweden to interview Talb in prison. The case against him never progressed. However, a report by Megrahi's team in 2002 suggested that Talb was still in the frame at precisely the time that attention switched to Megrahi.

In January 1989, a scrap of shirt collar was found in the area of debris where most of AVE4041 was recovered, The singed material held fragments of the Toshiba radio casing, some speaker mesh and a fragment of a printed circuit board. That fingernail-sized bit of board was to gain prominence in the summer of 1990.

The Scottish police failed to source the origin of this evidence, labelled PT/35b. But a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI in June 1990 matched the circuit board to a timer held in a Langley archive that had been part of a coup attempt in Togo, West Africa. At any future inquiry, the FBI should be asked, why they visited the Zurich offices of Mebo, the timer company, a month before the Scottish police were told of the timer's ID.

The link to Libya was now advanced. It was claimed that the PT/35 fragment was part of an MST-13 timer unit – a specific Mebo order from the Libyan armed forces. By January the following year, Megrahi, a Tripoli airport control manager briefly assigned to Libyan intelligence for bureaucratic rather than specialist tradecraft reasons, was on the investigation's radar.

For a journalist who has observed 25 years of the changing importance of key Lockerbie evidence, examined allegations of deliberate non-disclosure, new whodunnit theories and material reinterpreted for the appeals launched by Megrahi's lawyers, there's an overwhelming sense of one thing – a lack of certainty. What is certain is that the Mebo fragment, a principal piece of evidence against Megrahi, holds none of the hallmarks claimed for it by the prosecution at the Camp Zeist trial in the Netherlands. Mebo gave the investigation control samples from the original batch that had been produced in an outsourced deal with a company called Thuring. Expert technical witnesses claimed that there was no material difference between the Thuring sample and the fragment recovered from the debris. That wasn't true.

During preparations for Megrahi's second appeal, tests showed that the PT/35 fragment was manufactured with a pure tin coating, and the Thuring sample was covered with a standard alloy of tin and lead. The pure tin manufacturing method had never been used by Thuring and all the circuit boards supplied to the Libyan armed forces involved the Thuring process. So whatever PT/35b was, it did not match the timers ordered by and supplied to Libya.

The Mebo-Libya link was crucial to Megrahi's conviction. This is still regarded as key evidence. But without the Malta flight connection and without the timer fragment's Libyan origins, the case against him falls apart. If these developments had been openly scrutinised in court at a second Megrahi appeal, the Scottish police and judiciary risked being made to look, at best, like a collection of amateur investigators.

Details of a second appeal in 2007 were examined by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The commission's report granted leave for the Megrahi conviction to be challenged. Six grounds were cited as cause for serious concern, including undisclosed payments of around £2m by the US Justice department to Tony and Paul Gauci, the owners of a clothes shop in Sliema, near Malta's airport. Like the Samsonite case's journey from Luqa to Heathrow, and PT/35's link to Libya, the case against Megrahi required someone to link him to the suitcase. Tony Gauci provided the link.

Among the recovered debris from AVE4041 were the remains of a pair of trousers which had been close to the bomb. The label was intact. The manufacturer was traced to Malta and a clothing company called Yorkie, with a unique order supplied to Mary's House, Gauci's shop. Whatever the inconsistencies in Gauci's account, the clothes packed into the suitcase that sat alongside the bomb were bought at Mary's House. But the Crown's certainty that it was Megrahi who bought them is far from clear. Gauci's statements as to the dates when Malta's Christmas lights were on, and whether or not the purchases had been made when it was raining are key factors that placed Megrahi on the island at specific times. Again, this evidence has been shown to be inconsistent.

His identification of Megrahi was crucial to the verdict. However, the SCCRC acknowledged that if the payments to Gauci had been revealed, then this "was capable of affecting the course of the evidence and the eventual outcome of the trial". The review commission also found that three days before Gauci picked out the Libyan in a formal identification parade, he had held a magazine featuring an article on the Lockerbie bombing, complete with a picture of Megrahi as the culprit. In December 1988, Megrahi had indeed been in Malta. But it is hard to avoid the impression that Gauci's account of the man who bought the clothes that ended up inside the Samsonite suitcase was influenced by the prospect of a sizeable US reward.

The negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi that brought Megrahi and his co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, to the Netherlands in 1999 involved Libya offering £8m in compensation to the victims' families. In return, the United Nations lifted sanctions that were crippling Libya's economy. Reward, blackmail or diplomatic and tribal trading? Whatever the true background, there is still a whiff of West and Middle East deal-making surrounding Lockerbie.

"If not Megrahi then who?" should be the question troubling Scotland's criminal justice system 25 years on, because those who brought down Pan-Am Flight 103 have still not been brought to justice. This anniversary, supposed to remember the innocent dead, is also marked by an ongoing shame – the pretence that a Scottish court got it right. It didn't. And as Martin Luther King said: "An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."