How long, O Lord, how long?

Sixteen years ago today the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of the murder of 270 people in the Lockerbie disaster (and acquitted Lamin Fhimah). The unjustness of the Megrahi conviction was demonstrated in two of the earliest postings on this blog: see Lockerbie: A satisfactory process but a flawed result and The SCCRC Decision. The conviction has also since then been fatally undermined by John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury and Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Just how much longer are we going to have to wait until this shameful blot on the Scottish criminal justice system is expunged?

Fresh look at Lockerbie report 'would honour memory of Tam Dalyell’

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

The Crown Office has been urged to honour the memory of Tam Dalyell by ensuring that a police report into criminal allegations against those involved with the Lockerbie investigation and subsequent trial is given an “objective analysis”.

Iain McKie, a leading member of Justice for Megrahi (JfM), whose members believe Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was innocent of the bombing, was speaking to The National after our sister paper the Sunday Herald published details of Dalyell’s last interview.

In it, the former Labour MP said he would go to his grave believing Megrahi’s conviction was a “massive injustice”. (...)

Dalyell, who formerly represented Linlithgow, died last week, and was convinced Megrahi was innocent.

“I had great admiration for Tam Dalyell,” said McKie. “I really respected the way he stood up for his principles, and Lockerbie of course was one of the biggest he stood up for.

“It’s a major loss when you lose someone of the integrity and standing of Tam Dalyell.”

McKie said that while the MP’s death was a loss for JfM, it would also keep Lockerbie in the public eye, although he did not think it would affect the Operation Sandwood report on the group’s nine criminal allegations against police, Crown Office officials and forensic scientists involved in the Lockerbie investigation and trial.

He said: “It’s an awful thing to say in the tragedy of someone dying, but when something like this happens it keeps whole Lockerbie case open. It says that even in death he is speaking out to people and saying he believed in the innocence of Megrahi and he continued to believe in that until his dying day.

“It won’t directly affect the police report, but I think it affects the atmosphere in which it will be received and one would hope it would make the Crown Office open their eyes for once and realise that this is an issue which does matter to people; and when they receive the Operation Sandwood report that they give it an objective and fair look, because certainly the previous Lord Advocate had made up his mind that wasn’t going to happen.”

McKie said JfM hoped that Lord Advocate James Wolffe, QC, who replaced Frank Mulholland last summer, would ensure Sandwood was considered “objectively”.

“People like Tam Dalyell have held it close to their heart for many years – and there are others like him – and the Crown Office could honour him by ensuring that the police report gets an objective analysis,” said McKie.

Meanwhile, The National understands that Megrahi’s wife Aisha is likely to lead a new appeal by the family to clear his name, and is preparing to lodge a dossier of documents with the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

The commission had ruled in 2007 that there were several grounds that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

The Megrahis will be backed by British relatives of those who died in the bombing.

However, Glasgow lawyer Aamer Anwar, who has represented the Megrahi family, yesterday would not comment on the move.

He said: “I can only say that things are at a highly critical and sensitive stage and it would be inappropriate to comment at the moment.”`

Scottish media on 'new Megrahi appeal' story

The Scottish editions of two UK newspapers have today picked up yesterday’s Mail on Sunday story about steps being taken for a further appeal by the Megrahi family. The headline over the article in The Times reads Son of Lockerbie bomber to present new evidence to clear father’s name; and that over the article in The Sun reads ‘New evidence’ in secret files on Lockerbie bomber case could clear Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, his son claims.

Appeal court asked to hear Heathrow break-in evidence

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2002:]

The lawyer acting for the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has asked a special appeal court in the Netherlands to consider new evidence. (...)

[O]n Wednesday - the fifth day of the appeal - Bill Taylor QC said the new evidence concerned the forcing of a padlock at the secure baggage area at Heathrow Airport.

He told the five appeal court judges at Camp Zeist that if the evidence had been available at the original trial it would have supported defence claims that the bomb could have got on to the doomed Pan-Am jumbo jet in London.

The conviction was crucially based on arguments that the device had been planted at Malta before passengers, destined for New York, flew on to their next stop in London.

The court also heard that at least 14 unaccompanied bags travelled on a feeder flight for the Pan Am plane which exploded over Lockerbie.

Mr Taylor said his Libyan client had suffered a miscarriage of justice as a result of the judges' failure to deal with the issue of the 14 bags.

The bags were carried on board Pan Am flight 103A to Heathrow, where passengers were transferred to the New York-bound flight 103, Mr Taylor said.

The three judges who heard the original Lockerbie trial decided that Al Megrahi placed an unaccompanied bag containing a bomb on board a flight from Malta to Frankfurt.

The bag then travelled on flight 103A to London where it was loaded onto flight 103.

[RB: The court, over the objections of the Crown, allowed the evidence to be heard, but ultimately concluded that it could not be regarded as possessing such importance as to have been likely to have had a material bearing on the trial court’s determination of the critical issue of whether the suitcase containing the bomb was launched on its progress from Luqa Airport in Malta (an essential plank in the prosecution case) or from Heathrow. This ground of appeal was accordingly unsuccessful.]

Tam Dalyell’s last interview: Megrahi conviction “massive injustice”

[What follows is excerpted from an article by John Ashton (wrongly attributed originally to Neil Mackay) in today’s edition of the Sunday Herald:]

Tam Dalyell, the former campaigning MP who died on Thursday, said in a poignant final interview he would go to his grave believing that the conviction of the alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was a “massive injustice.”

He recalled that after visiting Megrahi in prison, “I was absolutely convinced that he was not involved in Lockerbie.” (...)

The ex-Linlithgow MP, who inherited the Baronetcy of the Binns in 1972, spurned his title and was never known as Sir Tam. His interest in the Lockerbie case began 10 days after the bombing when he was approached by a police whistleblower who complained that American agents were wandering the crash site without police supervision.

The officer, a constituent, was among hundreds of Lothian and Borders police sent to Lockerbie the day after the crash to help the local Dumfries and Galloway force.

In his last interview Dalyell recalled, “[The officer] said he was very uncomfortable because Americans were allowed to go around where they liked in a way that would not be acceptable in any Scottish murder investigation and the normal police rules were absolutely being thrown to the wind.”

He said the officer had never wavered from his claims and had last repeated them only two years ago, but did not wish to go public. “I think this is partly about pensions and police etiquette, but he sticks absolutely to his story,” Dalyell said.

There are longstanding claims that large quantities of drugs and cash were removed by Americans agents from the crash site. The agents were also said to be concerned about items belonging to a US intelligence team who died on Pan Am 103 while returning from an aborted hostage rescue mission in Lebanon.

Some of Megrahi’s supporters suspect that American intelligence agents manipulated evidence in order to frame Megrahi and conceal the truth about the bombing. Initial indications suggested that the bombing had been commissioned by the Iranian government and carried out by a Syrian-based group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Two months before Lockerbie the German police caught members of the group with a bomb designed to detonate at altitude, built in to a Toshiba radio-cassette player. Forensic evidence suggested that the Lockerbie bomb was also contained within a Toshiba radio-cassette player, although a different model.

Three months after the bombing the UK government’s transport secretary Paul Channon privately briefed lobby journalists that the PFLP-GC was behind the attack He later lost his job after being named as the source of the story. Dalyell, who was a close friend, revealed that Channon was angry at his treatment by the government.

Many were surprised when, in 1991, the then Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, and US Department of justice announced charges against Megrahi and another Libyan, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah. The UK and US governments both made clear that Iran and the PFLP-GC had been exonerated.

Dalyell condemned Fraser as being a “quite unsatisfactory Lord Advocate [who] just went along with the Crown Office line.” He added, “[He] was absolutely beholden to Mrs Thatcher because he had lost a blue chip seat in Angus so had no job and was made a law officer by the generosity of the Prime Minister.”

During the nineties Dalyell frequently urged the Conservative government to agree to Libyan proposals to try the two suspects before a Scottish court in a neutral venue. He also tabled numerous parliamentary questions about events at the crash site and other facts that challenged the official narrative. He initiated sixteen adjournment debates on Lockerbie, which he said was four times as many as anyone had ever had on a single subject.

In 1997 the new Labour government signaled that it was prepared to accept a neutral venue trial and in 2000 Megrahi and Fhimah were tried before three law lords at a specially-convened Scottish court at Kamp Zeist in The Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted and Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum 20-year tariff, later increased to 27 years.

Dalyell believed the guilty verdict was built on unreliable evidence and flawed reasoning. The judges accepted the prosecution claim that two weeks before the bombing Megrahi bought the clothes that were later packed in a suitcase with the bomb from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci. However, evidence suggested that the clothes were bought when Megrahi was not in Malta and Gauci described the purchaser as being considerable older and larger than Megrahi.

Visits to Megrahi in Barlinnie and Greenock prisons convinced him that the Libyan was innocent. “With 43 years in the House of Commons one develops an instinct as to whether one is being told the truth or spun a yarn,” he recalled, “My whole body reacted to the fact that I was being told the truth.”

Following a failed first appeal, in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted Megrahi a second appeal on six grounds including flawed reasoning by the trial court judges. In 2009, following a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Megrahi abandoned the second appeal in the belief that it would aid an application to Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill for compassionate release. MacAskill controversially granted the application a few days later and Megrahi was allowed to return to Libya, where he died three years later.

'The world will know he's innocent'

[This is part of the headline over an article (with pictures) by Marcello Mega in today’s Scottish edition of The Mail on Sunday. It reads in part:]

The son of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is launching a fresh appeal to clear his father's name and has declared: 'The world will know he is innocent.'

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was found guilty in 2001 of planting the bomb which destroyed a Pan-Am jumbo jet over southern Scotland in 1988 – killing 270 people in the worst act of mass murder ever carried out on British soil.

Now his son Ali, backed by his family and the British relatives of those who died in the atrocity, is to ask Scottish authorities to declare his father's conviction a miscarriage of justice.

Within weeks, the son of the man who came to be known as the Lockerbie Bomber, will present a dossier of documents and new evidence to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC).

He said: 'We believe as a family that my father is innocent. My father knew he would die one day, so he gave us all the evidence for his case and it is with me right now.

'Injustice is there to see, because there is new evidence that has never been handed to the court of Scotland or any other place.

'I want the opening of the case again, and we are ready to give all the new evidence from start to finish and the world will know that my father is innocent.

I want to tell the victims of the massacre and the people living in Lockerbie: 'I want you to give him a chance so that you will know the truth.'

‘The evidence that will be put forward to the court will show the innocence of my father.”

Megrahi's son added that the case would be re-opened 'pretty soon'.

After being found guilty of the bombing, Megrahi served his sentence in a Scottish jail.

From prison he referred his case to the SCCRC – which ruled in 2007 that there were several grounds for considering there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

But despite the apparent vindication he had received from the SCCRC, Megrahi – who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer – dropped his appeal. Soon afterwards he was controversially freed from jail on compassionate grounds and flown back to his native Libya, where he died in May 2012.

Campaigners including Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was among the passengers killed when the Pan-Am flight was blown out of the sky, tried to persuade the SCCRC to re-open the case in a bid to overturn Megrahi's conviction posthumously.

But the SCCRC ruled it could only look at the case again if Megrahi's family formally became part of the appeal process – which is now happening, the Scottish Mail on Sunday can reveal.

In November, Scottish lawyer Aamer Anwar flew to Zurich with Dr Swire to meet Megrahi's son Ali and widow Aisha to collect documents relating to the appeal and to Megrahi's estate.

Last night Mr Anwar declined to discuss the case, saying only that it was at 'a sensitive stage'.

But Dr Swire confirmed the case is progressing. He said: 'I'm starting to believe that by the 30th anniversary in December 2018, we must have progress. With Baset's family now able to prove it is on board, I really believe the justice system has nowhere to hide.

'The commission cannot go back on its findings of a decade ago that there may have been a miscarriage of justice, and there is an absolute avalanche of fresh forensic information that will destroy a case already picked apart ten years ago.'

Megrahi's oldest son, Khaled, said: 'I know that one day the truth must go out. The last words my dad said were that one day God will show the truth.' (...)

For the past three years Police Scotland has also been running an Operation Sandwood investigation into claims that Crown officials, police officers and expert witnesses acted illegally to secure Megrahi's conviction.

Yesterday the SCCRC said: 'We do not currently have an application in this case.' The Crown Office said that as papers had not yet been lodged it had nothing to say.

CIA put psychics to the test to ‘replicate the Lockerbie bomb’

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Scotsman. It reads as follows:]

Newly available declassified documents appear to reveal US Central Intelligence Agency tests to see if a psychic could replicate key aspects of the Lockerbie bombing.

The Scotsman reported last week how some 13 million pages of files were released online for the first time – including CIA interest in Edinburgh paranormal research.

Now it has emerged the 930,000 files also include asking a subject to describe a photo of the reconstructed baggage carrier which held the plane’s bomb.

Filed under “special access required”, the notes are headed: “Warning notice: Intelligence sources and methods involved.”

Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by the device on 21 December, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board and a further 11 on the ground. The CIA’s psychic tests relating to Lockerbie were carried out on 7 June, 1990 at an unknown location and filed under Project Sun Streak, successor to the controversial Stargate project.

Another released CIA document outlines Sun Streak’s mission as “dealing with the use of psychoenergetics in the collection of intelligence information”.

It describes “Psychoenergetics” as psychokinesis – physical actions performed by mental powers – and perceptions which cannot be explained by non-sensory means, such as telepathy. Parameters of the Lockerbie test outline using “tangibles and intangibles of more than one word”, as well as “probing sketches”.

What follows is 22 pages of photocopied scrawled notes and drawings together with a typed account of the session.

The subject first describes the “target” as a “cylindrical shape that is clear and see-through” with “something inside it that seems to be moving through it and out the other end”.

Included in the test papers is a newspaper article with a photo of the reconstructed baggage container. The article refers to the cassette player in which Semtex explosive was hidden. “The stuff inside it is light, smooth, stringy, air, and it is moving down, making a ‘whoosh’ sound,” continue the typed notes from the session kept by the CIA. “It is speeding up as it goes down and out. It makes me want to throw up.” Describing the cylindrical shape in a box, the account goes on: “There is a bomb in the box and it explodes. It makes me think of a bomb blowing up a person. I can see red, fire and jagged flames. “Something about the target makes my eyes burn.”

[RB: This is not a new story: the documents have been in the public domain since 2003 and were referred to on this blog in  July 2015.]

On the side of the angels

[What follows is the text of a letter from the Rev Dr John Cameron published in today’s edition of The Herald:]

For a dyed-in-the-wool old Tory like me, Tam Dalyell represented the Labour Party at its very best and he was an asset not only to his own party but to the nation as a whole. His importance as a voice crying in the wilderness of Westminster was beyond measure for so often he was spot on – Scottish devolution, Suez, Iraq, Porton Down, Diego Garcia, etc.

I treasured his phone call when I was being rubbished for having produced a highly critical report for the Kirk on the forensic evidence presented at the Lockerbie trial. He told me to "hang in there"; that he too believed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was innocent and that I was “on the side of such angels as Nelson Mandela, Jim Swire and the UN observer”.

Treats for Crown witnesses interfere with course of justice

[What follows is the text of a report that was published in The Guardian on this date in 2002:]

An investigation has been demanded following a claim that a witness in the Lockerbie trial enjoyed police hospitality in Scotland.

Evidence given by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopowner, helped to convict the Lockerbie bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. It is alleged that Mr Gauci was brought to Scotland five or six times, taken salmon fishing and hill walking, and put up in an expensive hotel.

He is also said to have been taken to Lockerbie, to see where the wreckage of the bombed Pan Am airliner landed in 1988, before last year's trial got under way.

Yesterday the Labour MP Tam Dalyell said he would raise the issue as a matter of urgency with the prime minister and foreign secretary.

The claim comes days after the start of al-Megrahi's appeal. Last January the Libyan former intelligence officer was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the bombing, which killed 259 on flight 103 and 11 on the ground.

Last week his legal team said a rebuttal of Mr Gauci's evidence would form a plank of its case.

Mr Gauci was the sole witness to link al-Megrahi directly to the bombing of Pan Am 103. He told the trial that al-Megrahi "resembled a lot" a man who bought clothes from Mr Gauci's shop that were later discovered to have been packed around the bomb.

Yesterday the Scottish Mail on Sunday reported that an undercover investigator had travelled to Malta and secretly taped conversations with Mr Gauci, owner of Mary's House clothes shop in Sliema.

Mr Gauci claimed that police had flown him to Scotland on five or six occasions, and taken him to Lockerbie to be shown the damage. He also claimed that the hospitality of the Scottish police had been extended to four others in his family.

He talked in the tape of being taken into the mountains, visiting Aviemore ski resort, fly-fishing for salmon, and bird-watching. On at least one occasion he stayed at the Hilton in Glasgow.

Dumfries and Galloway police and Strathclyde police refused to discuss the claim yesterday, saying only they could not comment on issues concerning witness protection.

Mr Dalyell said that the reports, if true, would have profound implications for al-Megrahi's appeal. "If Gauci was brought to Scotland before the trial at Zeist, why were the defence and the judges not told? If Gauci came after the trial, what is the purpose of the ongoing relationship?"

Robert Black, professor of law at Edinburgh University, said that Mr Gauci's trips needed to be investigated during al-Megrahi's appeal, adding that he knew of no other Scottish murder trial witness being taken on fishing trips by police.

[RB: The previous day a long article on the subject had been published in The Mail on Sunday. It contained the following:]

Robert Black, Professor of Scots Law at Edinburgh University, said the matter of Gauci’s trips had to be fully investigated during the course of Megrahi’s appeal.

Prof Black added: “As far as I am aware, this is not normal practice. I do not know of any other witness in a Scottish murder trial to have been taken on holidays and fishing trips by the police.”

He said that if a witness in a trial had been offered “treats” by one side, the other side ought to have the opportunity to cross-examine him to establish whether he might have been motivated to “improve” his evidence in favour of those giving the “treats”.

He added: “If it transpires that Gauci was being treated in this way before or during the trial, or indeed understood that he would be given trips after the trial, it would require his credibility as a witness to be re-examined and could alter the outcome of the case.

“Senior police officers and prosecutors worked very closely on this case.  If the prosecution was aware of the arrangement, it ought to have alerted the defence.”

One of Britain's most senior retired judges said he regarded the matter as “wholly improper”.

The judge, who refused to be named because he feared it would seem “impudent” to criticise the conduct of a Scottish trial, said: “If I learned that a crown witness had been treated and spoiled by the police or prosecution, I would be very concerned that it might have interfered with the course of justice.

“The defence would be entitled to know and to question the credibility of the witness. If such a matter emerged after a guilty verdict, it would be a valid point of appeal. Whether it succeeded would be determined by the weight of other evidence.”

[RB: I can now at last reveal that the retired judge in question was the Rt Hon Lord Murray (amongst other things a former Lord Advocate and lecturer in Evidence Honours at the University of Edinburgh). Lord Murray died on 27 September 2016 at the age of 94. The Herald’s obituary can be read here.]

Politics and justice: the Lockerbie trial

[On this date in 2008, a transcript was published on the website of ABC Australia of a radio programme broadcast in September the previous year. The transcript reads as follows:]

Keri Phillips: This is ABC Radio National. Keri Phillips here with Rear Vision.

Newsreader: In what could be one of the world's worst air disasters, a Pan Am jumbo jet has crashed into a small village in Southern Scotland.

Reporter: It hit a petrol station in the centre of the town of Lockerbie. Police say there are many casualties.

Man: We initially heard a rumbling over the hotel. We thought the roof was falling in, and then we heard a tremendous shudder on the ground, as though it was an earthquake.

Keri Phillips: Two hundred and seventy people died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, a few nights before Christmas in 1988. Although sabotage was not immediately assumed, once the cause was identified as a bomb planted inside a cassette player, suspicions fell initially on a Syrian-backed group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command - the PFLP-GC, possibly acting for Iran, which had threatened revenge for the mistaken American downing of an Iran Air passenger plane a few months earlier. But by the time anyone was charged over Lockerbie, it was two Libyan men who were indicted in 1991. Negotiations between Libya and the US and the UK over how the trial would proceed took years, but finally in 2001, one of the men, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of placing the suitcase containing the bomb on the plane and he is now serving a life sentence in a prison near Glasgow. Recently however, after mounting disquiet over the original finding, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission has decided to refer Megrahi's case to the High Court, a step it takes in cases where it believes there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Today on Rear Vision, we'll look at what happened at the original trial and hear from three men who are relieved that Megrahi will finally have a chance for a proper appeal against his conviction.

Robert Black, QC, is the former Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. It was he who proposed that a non-jury trial under Scottish law be held at a neutral venue in the Netherlands.

Robert Black: Normally, trial for a major crime in Scotland like murder, would be before a single judge, sitting with a jury of 15 people. Now the Libyan defence team were not convinced that their clients could get a fair trial before an ordinary Scottish jury of 15 people. There had been so much advance publicity about the Lockerbie affair and much of that advance publicity simply assumed as true the government contentions about who was responsible for the atrocity, namely these two Libyan men, and it was in that context that I came up with the idea of having a trial under Scottish procedure, but without a jury. And also because they were worried about the physical safety of their citizens if they were tried in Scotland, I also suggested that perhaps the trial should be held in a neutral country, like the Netherlands. And so that was the basis upon which I put forward the original proposal, and the Libyan government and the Libyan defence team accepted that proposal within hours of my formally submitting it to them in writing.

But then there was a delay of about four and a half years until the government of Britain and indeed the government of the United States consented to it, largely because they didn't want to be seen for public relations purposes, to be making any concessions to Libya. Libya was a rogue state, a pariah State, and the attitude of Britain and America that there had to be an ordinary trial either in Scotland or in the United States, simply meant that there never would be a trial at all. And eventually after a long time, I think Britain and America realised that.

Reporter: In Tripoli there was much ceremony when in front of 40 Libyan and Arab and South African diplomats, the two men were handed over to the UN's Chief Legal officer, Hans Korel. Wearing business suits and flashing victory signs, Megrahi and Fahima looked confident as they boarded the special UN flight to Holland.

Keri Phillips: Attention had switched to Libya after the first Gulf War, when, some suggest, Iran became an important Western ally. For those who'd lost loved ones, the beginning of the trial in 2000 was a relief, although some were mystified that the responsibility had been shifted from Iran to Libya. Jim Swire lost his 24-year-old daughter, Flora, on Pan Am 103.

Jim Swire: We had had meetings with politicians in all sorts of different countries in Cairo and in Britain and Libya, including three visits to see Colonel Gaddafi himself, and once the indictments were issued, it was an extraordinary event, because we knew that up until that point the criminal investigation had been presuming that Iran was behind it, because she had the strong motive of having had her airbus shot down two months before by the Americans, and that the Syrian terrorist group had been the executives because they were known to have the technology that fitted perfectly for what had happened.

That was the basis behind my thinking at the time. But we had been told also by a chap called Douglas Hogg who was No.2 to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hird in Britain at the time, that there was no evidence against any nation other than Libya, and we knew that that statement simply wasn't true, and we couldn't find ourselves believing what we were told. So my position was that I needed the court case to confirm to me that what the politicians were telling me, which was that of course it was a Libyan job from beginning to end, what are you worrying about? I hoped that the court would confirm that. In fact, the court had exactly the opposite effect. I went into the court thinking these just be the guilty guys who blew up my poor daughter, and I came out of thinking Well these clearly were not the guys, so who the heck was it who did do it and why am I being mistakenly led to believe that these two were responsible when clearly they weren't.

Robert Black: Many outside observers, including myself, couldn't actually understand the reason for this shift in attitude, because I have seen the official minutes of the investigation into Lockerbie, and it is perfectly plain from those official minutes that the investigators at that time were convinced that they had the solution to Lockerbie, and it had nothing to do with Libya and it had everything to do with the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian group. But suddenly, and for no good reason that I can see, the focus of attention changed.

Keri Phillips: Robert Black, who'd continued to take a close interest in the case, says that during the trial the weakness of the evidence against Libya was revealed.

Robert Black: The evidence that was led by the prosecution was much as I think followers of the affair had anticipated. So there were no, I think, real surprises in the prosecution case. But what I think did come as a surprise to some people was how weak some of that evidence turned out to be, particularly the evidence linking Mr Megrahi with Malta, and with the purchase of the clothes which surrounded the bomb. Now these clothes were purchased, so the Crown contended, in a particular shop in Malta. And one of the main planks of the prosecution case against Megrahi was to establish that he was the person who had bought those clothes in that shop in Malta. I think it was partly the problem of the witness, the shopkeeper who actually sold the clothes. He never actually came out and positively said 'I identify Abdel Bassett Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes in my shop.' The most that he would say and the most that he ever said in the run-up to the trial, and in the trial itself, was that Megrahi resembled a lot the person who bought the clothes.

But he had also, in the past, given descriptions of the person who came into the shop and bought these clothes. And that description did not in any way tie up with the physical appearance of Megrahi. For example, in his first statement to the police, the shopkeeper said, 'The person who came into my shop and bought the clothes was over 6-feet tall and was more than 50 years of age'. Now Abdel Basset Megrahi at the relevant time was 36 years old, and was 5-feet 8-inches tall. This came out at the trial. The judges accepted that the shopkeeper effectively had identified Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes, which he never did. And as I say, most neutral, unbiased observers thought that that was an absolutely perverse decision by the judges on the evidence which had been led in court. If it had not been that the court wrongly, in my view, accepted that it had been established that Megrahi was the person who bought the clothes in Malta, there would have been no justification whatever for convicting him. There really wasn't any other significant evidence at all against Megrahi.

Keri Phillips: Today's program is revisiting the conviction of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, after a Scottish Judicial Commission has decided that there may have been a miscarriage of justice.

Reporter: After such an exhaustive trial the verdict in the case against the two Libyan men charged with blowing up Pan Am flight 103, was something of a surprise. Hopes were high but few people really expected a conviction. In the end though, the three Scottish judges agreed that the prosecution had proved beyond reasonable doubt that one of them, Abdel Basset ali-Mohamed al-Megrahi was the man who planted the bomb.

Keri Phillips: Professor Black says that one of the other mysterious aspects of the case is that only one of the Libyans was found guilty.

Robert Black: This is very, very surprising, isn't it, because the basis of the Crown's case against the Libyans was that Megrahi was the brains behind the plot. The bag-carrier if you like was Fahima, the other accused. But the importance of Fahima in the Crown scenario, the Crown explanation of Lockerbie was that Fahima was the one who had the ability to get the case containing the bomb into the airline baggage handling system, because Fahima was the station chief of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, and he was the one, according to the Crown, who could arrange for the suitcase containing the bomb, to be transported as unaccompanied baggage from Malta to Frankfurt, then from Frankfurt to Heathrow and at Heathrow then to be laden on to Pan Am 103. So that was Fahima's role. He wasn't the brains, but he was a necessary instrument in getting this bomb into the airline baggage handling system as unaccompanied baggage.

Now when the trial court held that there was not actually sufficient evidence to show that Fahima had done any of these things, that left an enormous gap in the Crown case, because they now could not provide an explanation of how this suitcase containing the bomb actually got into the interline baggage transfer system at all, because if Fahima wasn't responsible for it, there was no other explanation. So many people thought it's absolutely amazing that the person who supposedly was the one who actually sent this piece of baggage on its fatal journey, once he's out of the picture, how on earth are you still able to convict the other man?

Keri Phillips: Professor Hans Köchler is a specialist in political and legal philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. He was appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to attend the trial as an observer for the United Nations.

Hans Köchler: In brief, the trial was in both phases, the trial itself, plus the first appeal from 2001 to 2002, both of the proceedings were not fair, there was a lot of political interference, and as I said, at the end of the appeal, I suspected a miscarriage of justice. That means specifically I was of the view that the person who was declared guilty may be the wrong person, that this man who was now sitting in a Scottish jail, may not be guilty as charged.

Keri Phillips: You said that there was political interference; can you spell out for us what kind of political interference there was?

Hans Köchler: To some extent one can spell it out. Of course most of this goes on behind the scenes, but as an observer who is alert to some extent, I noticed and I was the first to make it public, the presence of representatives of foreign governments in the court room interacting during court sessions with the Prosecution team and the Defence team respectively. The one country I refer to is the United States, the other country is Libya. It is totally irregular because that was a Scottish court, and there were two officials of the United States Department of Justice who interacted with the Prosecution team and there was one Libyan lawyer who officially was a kind of adviser of the Defence team, but in fact was a Libyan official. He's deceased by now and he of course interacted with the Defence team. There was absolutely no point if this is a Scottish court, why there should be people representing a foreign governmental interest, first of all sitting next to either Defence or Prosecution in the court room while the court is on session. And secondly, why during the session they should interact with the official actors of the trial. Both of these groups of people should have been placed together with us, the international observers, behind the bulletproof glass wall. That was the place where the observers of the United States Embassy and of the Libyan Embassy were also seated.

Jim Swire: What I do know is that were circumstances surrounding the trial which one can just credibly say may have misled the judges. And those are things like the fact that the body of the evidence was essentially obtained and offered up by intelligence services in the West, particularly of course the CIA and the FBI. And intelligence services are not known as seekers after truth. If they're doing their job properly they will be doing what they believe is in the interests of the country for which they work, and that may or may not coincide with the truth. I think that's fairly self-evident. So that's the first thing. The real powers behind the assembly of evidence were not uninvolved, objective-minded people, they were people who had a job to do, and I think that at Zeist we saw them doing it.

Another thing was that I felt very uncomfortable; there were members of the US State Department in court who appeared to me during the actual hearings to be coaching one or two of the witnesses, by giving the very slightest of nods to indicate that he should answer yes to that question during the proceedings. And to have powerful representatives of the accusing power present in full view of the witnesses and apparently acting in that way, was totally and utterly unacceptable I think. And I think in this context we should remember what the great Nelson Mandela said to us and had published just before President Clinton gave the go-ahead for the trial in the first place, Nelson Mandela went public and told everyone No one country should be complainant, prosecutor, and judge. But if you take the UK and the USA as acting as one entity in this issue, the UK and the USA were the complainants, the prosecutor and really they were the judges.

Robert Black: I think that consciously or subconsciously, these judges appreciated that if neither of the two Libyan accused were convicted in this trial, this would be an enormous embarrassment to the Prosecution system in Scotland. And the person in charge of the Prosecution system in Scotland is an officer called the Lord Advocate.

Now the Lord Advocate is roughly like the Attorney-General in English and English-based legal systems, but in Scotland the Lord Advocate actually was a much more important figure in the legal system, even than Attorneys-General are in English and English-based legal systems, because he was actually at the very head of the criminal justice system. Not only was he the Prosecutor, he was also the person who nominated judges for appointment to the bench.

Every judge in Scotland at the time of the Lockerbie trial had achieved his or her position on the bench through being nominated for appointment by the Lord Advocate. There are those and some of these people are in high positions in Libya, who think that there was overt political pressure placed upon the judges to reach a conclusion that was satisfactory to the British and American governments over Lockerbie.

I myself don't actually believe that the British government or the American government in any way tried to influence the judges to reach a politically acceptable decision. I really do believe that the reason for Lockerbie and what I am convinced was a perverse decision to convict Megrahi is to do with internal Scottish legal politics. It distresses me because I've been a part of the Scottish justice system now for 35 years as an advocate, as a part-time judge, as a teacher of law and procedure, and it actually came as a shock to me that something within the Scottish criminal justice system could go so badly wrong. I mean even the best-regulated system can make mistakes and we accept that, and that's why you've got appeal courts, to put these mistakes right. But Lockerbie was more than that.

Lockerbie brought home to me as I don't think any other case could have done, that actually there is something wrong in the system. It's not just a one-off mistake, there was actually something (I hesitate to use the word, but I think it's justified) there was actually something rotten about the system. And as I say, as somebody who's been involved in that system in one capacity or another for 35 years, I found that personally very distressing.

Keri Phillips: Some, like Daniel Cohen, an American who lost his 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, in the explosion, remain convinced that Libya was responsible, but for Jim Swire:

Jim Swire: What I would like to come out of this is first and foremost no more delays; I think Megrahi should be sent home and his verdict should quashed. I as an individual think that he as an individual deserves that, a profuse apology and compensation and so on for what happened to him as a result of what I believe to have been a deeply flawed trial. But the other thing is, that will leave of course the world saying OK, well if those guys didn't do it, then who did? And trying to divine what the vibes are telling me that I pick up, I mean there are some very professional people involved in the run-up to the next appeal who quite rightly won't tell me things that professionally they shouldn't tell me.

But I divine that there is now new evidence concerning the Lockerbie case, which will point us strongly in the correct direction, whatever that may be. I think it'll be Iran and Syria, but whatever that direction may turn out to be, I think incidentally it could also be Egypt, but that's another issue. But wherever it does point us, I think it will give us a helping hand towards discovering the truth, and all we've asked for over the past 18 years in this context is truth and justice, and so far I think we've had neither and I think that we will be asking very serious question about why we have been kept at arm's length and denied the truth for 18 years.

Robert Black: I know that people like Dr Jim Swire who have never been convinced of Megrahi's guilt, even after sitting through the whole of the trial and listening to all of the evidence, their view has been all right, we think an innocent man was convicted and we will fight to get him released. But I think their motivation was largely to the effect that until we get this miscarriage of justice rectified, there will always be a blockage in our path towards finding out the truth about Lockerbie, because every time we say to governments Hold an inquiry into what happened at Lockerbie, the government says we don't need to. We've had a trial and a man's been convicted. We know what happened at Lockerbie. Why are you asking for an inquiry?

So to people like Jim Swire you've got to get the blockage caused by Megrahi's conviction removed, and then you can go back to government and say OK, now what reason can you come up with for not holding an inquiry into Lockerbie? And so I think that's part of Jim Swire's motivation, and I support him in that, but I honestly don't think that even if we have an inquiry, that will lead with any certainty to a conclusion as to who was responsible. It may point in certain directions but I personally now think too much time has passed and that we will never actually get an answer that beyond reasonable doubt convinces everyone this is what happened at Lockerbie.

Keri Phillips: And it may take a year before Megrahi's case will be heard in a Scottish appeal court.

If you'd like to find out more about this story, do go to the Rear Vision website. I've put a link to Professor Kochler's Lockerbie website there and you can find his reports to the UN, the court judgments and a lot of other articles on the trial.

Technical producer for today's Rear Vision is Jenny Parsonage. I'm Keri Phillips. 'Bye till next time.