"Utterly impossible" to reconstruct where, when and by whom items found

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megrahi “does want matters to proceed”

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Herald on this date in 2009:]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judges’ Lockerbie opinion “legally threadbare”

[On this date in 2001 an article by Alexander Cockburn headed Justice Scotched in Lockerbie Trial was published in The Nation. It reads as follows:]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The people of Scotland have a right to know the truth

[The following are two letters originally published in The Herald that were reproduced on the Deep Journal website on this date in 2012:]

I went into the Zeist trial court convinced that I would see two of the murderers of my daughter convicted.

I was but a layman. Having heard the evidence, I emerged believing they had been framed.

It seemed obvious that the prosecution's story of a man (Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi) using a fully adjustable and long-running digital timer and setting it so that, after two changes of aircraft, it still only cleared Heathrow by 38 minutes, was a little unlikely.

During the trial it seemed more likely to me that an air-pressure-sensitive improvised explosive device (IED) perfected by the PFLP-GC terrorist group centred in Damascus and allied to Iran, might have brought the plane down.

We heard the details of these devices in the Zeist courtroom from Crown witness Herr Gobel, a West German forensics expert, how these IEDs were available in the terrorist world in December 1988, and that they had a non-adjustable interval of 35-45 minutes from take-off to explosion if put on an airplane.

The Lockerbie aircraft managed just 38 minutes before the explosion. Herr Gobel's evidence made it plain that such a device could not have been flown from Frankfurt to Heathrow let alone from Malta, unless it was armed at Heathrow airport. Otherwise, it would have had to be introduced at Heathrow to avoid explosion en route. Yet there was no known evidence to support introduction or arming of such a device at Heathrow.

We now know that there was precisely this evidence available but that the police/Crown Office had failed to pass it to the defence team or the court ("Vital evidence on Lockerbie was withheld", The Herald, May 3).

The point at issue is simple: why was this evidence not available to the trial court? The UN's special observer to the trial, Professor Hans Koechler, described the trial as not representing justice because of failures of the prosecution to share information with the defence.

Sooner or later the truth will out, but I fear that the longer it takes, the greater will be the damage to our legal system's reputation. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission was correct in eventually deciding that "there may have been a miscarriage of justice". The appeal which followed, held in the knowledge of the plaintiff's progressive illness, seemed to some also to be subject to unwarranted delaying tactics by the Crown Office, though combined with the illness of a judge.

The Scottish Government does have the powers to order an inquiry. The relatives and the people of Scotland have a right to know the truth.

Dr Jim Swire,

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire.

Your revelations regarding the failure of the Crown Office to provide the defence with the material pertaining to the Heathrow break-in just hours before the Lockerbie bombing seriously undermines the integrity of the prosecution's case and, therefore, the integrity of the Scottish legal system.

The Crown Office dismissed the pre-trial significance of the break-in thus: "Even if this evidence had been heard by the trial court, it would not have reached a different verdict." This appears to derive from the wisdom of a Crown Office spokesman who said: "The Appeal Court was satisfied that, having heard direct evidence about the break-in at Heathrow, the verdict of the trial court was not a miscarriage of justice."

Arguably, that conclusion was influenced by the same kind of insular and complacent mindset that persuaded the Crown Office to withhold the Heathrow information from the defence.

The legal establishment in Scotland does not always react with optimum objectivity when confronted with challenges to its authority. When the Supreme Court overturned the unanimous decision of the High Court of Justiciary to dismiss Peter Cadder's appeal against his conviction (the appeal derived from human rights law regarding access to legal representation subsequent to arrest) the reaction of the legal establishment in Scotland was almost hysterical.

An informed bystander might be concerned that the Heathrow break-in should have been the subject of more robust and objective appraisal during Megrahi's first appeal.

Thomas Crooks,

Edinburgh.

Libyan Government requests transfer of Megrahi

[On this date in 2009 the Libyan Government submitted an application to the Scottish Government for Abdelbaset Megrahi to be transferred to Libya to serve the remainder of his sentence. The relevant post on this blog reads as follows:]

The Libyan authorities have applied for the transfer of the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, the Scottish government said today.

The move, which could see Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi sent home to Libya to serve out his sentence, follows last week's ratification of a prisoner transfer agreement between the British and Libyan governments.

A Scottish government spokesman said: "The application will be considered by officials who will provide information and advice to Scottish ministers for decision on this matter.

"Under the terms of the agreement this process may take 90 days although it could be longer if further information is required in relation to the application, or for another reason."

[From The Herald's website. The BBC News website's report can be read here. The report on The Scotsman's website can be accessed here. The following are excerpts:]

'[Megrahi's] second appeal against conviction began at the Appeal Court in Edinburgh last week, but this must be dropped if his transfer to a Libyan jail is to take place.

'Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was on board the Pan Am flight 103, welcomed the development.

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

'He said it was only "right" Megrahi, who is dying from cancer, should be allowed home.

'But Dr Swire added: "He has to renounce his appeal before he can go home. Just because the authorities have applied doesn't mean it is going to happen immediately."

'The application to the Scottish Government was made late yesterday, officials said.

'Under terms of Britain's agreement with Libya, a decision on transferring a prisoner cannot be made if there are any outstanding legal proceedings.

'But the fact that legal proceedings are still outstanding does not prevent an application being lodged.

'The prisoner transfer deal was ratified last Wednesday – the day after Megrahi's second appeal began in Edinburgh.

'For a prisoner like Megrahi, who has prostate cancer, the requirement that there can be no legal proceedings outstanding poses an agonising choice.

'He can either drop his appeal – and with it his bid to clear his name – and seek a return to Libya. Or he can persist with an appeal – and possibly die before it is completed.

'Labour's Scottish justice spokesman Richard Baker said: "It is absolutely right that it is Scottish ministers that will be responsible for any decision to transfer Mr Megrahi.

'"The Scottish Justice Minister has responsibility for Scottish prisoners and so it follows that Kenny MacAskill should decide on the issue."

'Barrie Berkley, who lost his son Alistair, said he hoped the appeal would continue.

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

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

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

'"Or of course if he was found not guilty that would mean the inquiry would have to reopen and the various agencies of the US and UK would need to find who was behind it if it wasn't Megrahi.

'"Our main motive is to find out whether Megrahi did do it or not."

'He added: "If he is found guilty then the Government has to decide where he serves the remainder of his term. It shouldn't be up to him or the Libyan authorities."'

[RB: The relevant legal provisions governing prisoner transfer are set out here. A prisoner may be transferred only if the judgment against him is final and no other criminal proceedings are pending in the transferring state. This means that Abdelbaset Megrahi's current appeal would have to be abandoned before transfer takes place. But it would seem on the face of it that there is no reason why the appeal should not continue while the Scottish Government is considering the application. Transfer cannot be effected without the consent of the prisoner concerned since it is he alone who can instruct the appeal to be abandoned to allow transfer to take place.]

Lockerbie residents testify at Camp Zeist

[What follows is excerpted from the account of the proceedings at the Lockerbie trial on this date in 2000 that appeared in a section of Safia Aoude’s Pan Am 103 Crash Website:]

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

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

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

Mrs Bell, from Dumfries, told the court: "I looked up and saw what I imagined was a small plane just going over my head. I ducked down and covered my head.  "There was fire all around me, there were burning objects and the fire was falling down from the sky and as it landed on the ground I was stepping backwards to avoid the fire and I stepped back and back until my back was against the wall of the house and I couldn't go any further." Then her brother, who had entered his home through the garage, pulled her into the house, Mrs Bell said.

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

William Pattie, who watched as one of the aircraft's engines landed 20ft from him, lost his 56-year old sister-in-law Dora Henry and her husband, Maurice.  They were in their house in Sherwood Crescent and their bodies were never found.

Businessman Steven Teagle, 51, told how he was driving on an upland road in Cumbria on the night of 21 December, 1988, with clear views towards southern Scotland. To one side, he saw a white and orange flash in the sky and a short time later an orange, glowing object fell, creating an arc in the sky before it hit the ground, sending up two prongs of flame in a V shape.

Stewart Kilpatrick, who found the body of a young girl a few feet from his front door, said it took years for the town to return to normal. "I do my best just not think about it. It's the easiest way to get through," he said.

Robert Peacock, a 63-year-old lorry driver from Hightae, near Lockerbie, told how his son's girlfriend came into their house and said: "Listen to that thunder."  He told the court: "I said `That's not thunder' - the noise was continuous. I went outside and saw an aircraft."  The plane was flying at between 8,000 and 12,000ft. "I knew it was quite a large aircraft and one engine was on fire, with burning fuel spewing out. He added: "It went straight for Lockerbie. I heard an explosion, you could see the flames, the sky was lit up."

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

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

Car mechanic William Wilson said his colleague left work half an hour before tragedy struck and was never seen again.  When Wilson went to check the next day, he found only the man's  car next to a hole where the house once stood.

Roland Stevenson described the "thunderous black mass" which fell from the sky. The retired Dumfries  maintenance engineer said he shouted to people to run for cover as debris - including an entire wing - rained down as he collected his daughter from Lockerbie railway station. Mr Stevenson, 65, said: "The whole of the wing was descending vertically straight down. I could see it wing tip to wing tip, a clean wing, silhouetted against the clouds from the town lights." He went on: "A rolling ball of fire was descending rapidly from the sky." (...)

The most senior police officer in Lockerbie on the night of the Pan Am 103 disaster has said he fears the town may never get back to normal.

Retired superintendent Geoffrey Carpenter was giving evidence after the recess. He was among the first officers to reach the scene and became a key figure in organising the rescue services and coping with the aftermath of the disaster. Mr Carpenter told the trial he hoped the case would mark the last chapter in the tragedy. (...)

He said: "My first impression was that it was a low-flying military aircraft, but as the house shook I realised it was something more. Then there was an almighty explosion." He rushed outside and saw a glow in the sky and debris falling. Mr Carpenter said: "I saw a metal object in the sky. It appeared suspended. I believe it was one of the engines." The former police officer tried the telephone but it was dead, so he drove towards the scene.

He said: "I was faced with debris, pools of flames in the roadway and in gardens. There was a stench of fuel and acrid smoke. "I utilised off-duty police officers to evacuate the areas in case of another explosion," he said. He described how the Rosebank area of Lockerbie was in complete darkness with debris everywhere. "At Tundergarth the nose cone was sitting on a hill. There was evidence of bodies among the debris," he said.

Cross-examined by defence lawyer William Taylor QC, Mr Carpenter agreed it was "extremely difficult" in the aftermath of what Mr Taylor called the "cataclysm" to secure the disaster area for the purposes of evidence gathering, particularly as the debris area ran east from Lockerbie to the North Sea.

Political oversight of Lockerbie “really important”

[What follows is the text of a report published in today’s edition of The National:]

Campaigners who believe that the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is innocent say they’re encouraged that a Holyrood committee is to “watch with interest” a planned bid by his family to clear his name.

The case is expected to go to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) which investigates possible miscarriages of justice, and could refer it to the appeal court.

MSPs on Holyrood’s Justice Committee agreed to keep open a petition from Justice for Megrahi (JfM) calling for an independent inquiry into his 2001 conviction for the 1988 bombing which killed 270 people.

Committee convener Margaret Mitchell said: “Recently publicity suggests that the family of Mr Megrahi will launch a bid to appeal against his conviction in the coming weeks so we will watch that with interest and see if that affects where we go from here.”

JfM member and former police officer Iain McKie told The National: “Lockerbie was under the radar with no politicians involved, but now we’ve got it in the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee and they are keeping it on the table.

“It’s really important that we keep political oversight of this in Scotland and we welcome news that the committee is to maintain a watching brief on Operation Sandwood and on the possible appeal.”

Vital evidence on Lockerbie was withheld

[This is the headline over a report by Lucy Adams that was published in The Herald on this date in 2012. The following are excerpts:]

Evidence which could have undermined the prosecution's case in the Lockerbie trial was withheld by police for a decade, a chief constable has revealed.

Statements about a break-in at Heathrow airport just hours before the December 1988 bombing were kept by Dumfries and Galloway Police until 1999.

A letter from Pat Shearer, the current chief constable of the force, has finally admitted the police delay.

Mr Shearer also reveals the Crown Office knew about the break-in before the trial, but failed to tell the defence team.

Since 1991, police and prosecutors team had maintained the bomb which exploded on board Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie – killing 270 people – was placed on a flight from Malta, rather than at the London airport. This underpinned the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing in 2001.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the atrocity, believes the revelations would have undermined the trial. If the bomb was taken on at Heathrow, and had this information been shared, Dr Swire believes the investigation would have pointed elsewhere. (...)

Dr Swire said: "The evidence of barometric devices from Syria was rejected because they would have to have been put on the flight at Heathrow. We did not know then about the break-in.

"If it had been known about before the trial there would have been no prospect of getting a conviction. It has relevance to the foundations on which Mr Mulholland bases his approach to the interim Government in Libya, since the intention of his investigation still seems to be to link the conviction of Megrahi to the survivors of the Gaddafi regime. What about looking elsewhere?"

Mr Shearer's letter states no "suppression of evidence took place" but points out Dumfries and Galloway investigated the break-in in January 1989 and did not pass statements – including those from Ray Manly, then head of security at Heathrow's operators BAA – to the Crown until 1999.

The letter also reveals the Crown did not share this information until after Mr Manly himself approached the defence team in 2001.

MSPs to watch Megrahi family’s appeal ‘with interest’

[What follows is excerpted from a report published today on the website of The Scotsman:]

MSPs will “watch with interest” a planned bid by the family of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to appeal against his conviction.

The case is expected to be handed to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) which investigates possible miscarriages of justice and will decide whether there are grounds for referral to the appeal court.

MSPs on Holyrood’s Justice Committee agreed to keep open a long-running petition from Justice for Megrahi campaigners calling for an independent inquiry into Megrahi’s conviction in 2001 for the 1988 bombing which killed 270 people.

In a written submission, the campaigners said reports of the planned appeal bid indicate “a significant development for those pursuing the truth about Lockerbie”.

Committee convener Margaret Mitchell said: “Recently publicity suggests that the family of Mr Megrahi will launch a bid to appeal against his conviction in the coming weeks so we will watch that with interest and see if that affects where we go from here.” (...)

His widow Aisha and son Ali are expected to present concerns over the evidence which convicted Megrahi, including that given by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who died last year.

Megrahi lost an appeal against his conviction in 2002, with the SCCRC recommending in 2007 that he should be granted a second appeal.

He dropped the second attempt to overturn his conviction in 2009, ahead of his return to Libya.

Lockerbie relatives in dispute over film

[This is the headline over a report that appeared in The Independent on this date in 1994. It reads as follows:]

British and American families whose relatives died in the Lockerbie bombing are involved in an acrimonious dispute over a controversial new documentary about the atrocity.

Friends and relatives of American victims, who have waged a bitter campaign against the documentary and its producer, Allan Francovich, have severed ties with British relatives, who have expressed support for the project. Angered by the Americans' campaign, Mr Francovich is seeking damages from one New Jersey family after they described him as 'a journeyman film-maker ... for (the Libyan leader) Muammar Gadaffi'.

American relatives argue that the documentary project is 'hopelessly compromised' because part of its intitial pounds 650,000 funding came from Libya, through the Lafico investment company. Two alleged Libyan agents have been charged with the terrorist attack in December 1988 which killed 270 people.

But UK relatives, who have met Mr Francovich, insist he should be allowed to investigate doubts that Libya alone carried out the attack. Dr Jim Swire, spokesman for UK families, said: 'We are not apologists for Francovich but we believe he should be able to present his findings and be judged.'

Susan and Daniel Cohen, from New Jersey, whose 20-year-old daughter Theodora died in the bombing, have waged a determined campaign against Mr Francovich, writing to broadcasters who expressed interest in the project. In letters to senior editors at Channel 4, which began negotiating to screen the documentary, they condemned him as a 'Los Angeles wannabe' who used 'fugitives and felons' for research and relied upon 'dubious' intelligence sources.

After Channel 4 announced late last month that it had abandoned plans to screen the film, Mr Francovich wrote to Mr and Mrs Cohen demanding an apology and seeking damages for their 'deliberate attempts to damage my reputation and interfere with my legitimate business interests'.

He said yesterday he was disappointed Channel 4 had abandoned plans to screen the film, but the project was continuing.