US lobbied to have Megrahi imprisoned in Libya

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2011.

WikiLeaks Megrahi cables in The Scotsman

[The Scotsman newspaper today runs a series of stories based on WikiLeaks cables covering US anticipation of and reaction to the compassionate release of Abdelbaset Megrahi in August 2009. The principal report, headlined Wikileaks: Inside story of Megrahi's return home, contains the following:]

Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi's motive for giving a hero's welcome to freed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is revealed today in secret US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and seen by The Scotsman.

The cables reveal that the regime's handling of the homecoming was heavily influenced by Col Gaddafi's simmering resentment towards the West over the case of six Bulgarian nurses freed from a Libyan jail in 2007.

The nurses had been jailed for life for allegedly infecting 400 Libyan children with the HIV virus. European Union diplomats negotiated their release - but then reneged on a deal that the nurses should serve the rest of their sentences in jail in Bulgaria.

Col Gaddafi's lingering anger at this diplomatic "insult" is revealed in a cable, written by a diplomat, describing a meeting in Tripoli between the colonel and US senator John McCain, shortly before Megrahi's release. The Libyan leader refused to give any guarantees about the tenor of Megrahi's homecoming, the cable reports, despite Mr McCain's warning that a hero's welcome could severely damage Libya's new friendship with the United States.

Col Gaddafi cited the celebrations that met the nurses in Bulgaria after their release. (...)

The US government has criticised The Scotsman for its tie-up with WikiLeaks, saying: "Any unauthorised disclosure of classified material is regrettable as it has the potential to harm individuals as well as efforts to advance foreign policy goals."

But the cables provide valuable new insights into one of the most iconic moments in recent Scottish history. They reveal:

* The United States tried to add conditions to the Scottish terms of Megrahi's release, demanding he be imprisoned for the rest of his life in Libya following his compassionate release.

* Megrahi's homecoming and how to handle it became a tussle within the Libyan regime, between reformers who favoured friendlier ties with the West and hardliners who saw such moves as a weakening of Libya's strongman status.

* Western diplomats who urged a low-key return for Megrahi believed they had an ally in Moussa Koussa, the Libyan foreign minister who subsequently defected to the West shortly after Nato sided by the rebels in the Libyan uprising this spring.

* The triumphant return of Megrahi to Libya was in fact a much lower-key welcome than some hardliners planned, with a crowd of many thousands scaled down to a few hundred at the last minute.

[Further related reports in the same newspaper can be accessed here, as can the cables themselves, including one headed Demarche delivered, in which US diplomats in Tripoli are to be found urging Moussa Koussa to secure that Megrahi is imprisoned in Libya, notwithstanding the fact that his return was under compassionate release, not prisoner transfer. Moussa is reported to have "raised his eyebrows" at this point.] 

New claim overshadows Lockerbie trial

[What follows is the text of a Reuters news agency report that appeared on the South African IOL website on this date in 2000:]

Defence lawyers at the Lockerbie trial sniped at prosecution forensic witnesses on Monday in a bid to sow doubt over exactly how the Pan Am jumbo jet was blasted out of the air over Scotland in 1988.

But a US television report that the attack was masterminded by Iran, not Libya, overshadowed the highly technical in-court wrangling over explosives, baggage containers, suitcases and scraps of clothes that fell from the sky amid thousands of pieces of flaming debris.

CBS television reported on Sunday that a senior Iranian intelligence service defector, now being debriefed in Turkey by the CIA, had said he had documents to prove Iran trained a group of Libyans to stage the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Iran was initially blamed for the attack, which killed all 259 people on board and 11 residents of the town of Lockerbie.

It had vowed the skies would "rain blood" after a US warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane six months earlier.

Forensic evidence later shifted the focus to Libya. In 1999, after tortuous UN-brokered negotiations, Libya agreed to turn over suspects Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, to be tried under Scottish law in a specially built court in the Netherlands.

Briton Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing, said if the material contained in the CBS report were true, the CIA should submit it to Scottish police.

"It's very important. As far as we're concerned, as seekers after truth and justice, we welcome all new material," he said.

"This man has admitted being the man who selected terrorist targets. If so, he is a suspect in this case. We need to see what they (the prosecution) are going to do about it."

The defence need only create "reasonable doubt" in the minds of the panel of three judges hearing the case to win an acquittal.

It suggested on Monday that two key fragments of wreckage had been contaminated with several kinds of explosive residue during British laboratory tests and not just by one kind from a bomb in the plane's hold.

Defence lawyer Richard Keen grilled former Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) forensic scientist John Douse on possible sources of contamination, including storage procedures and equipment used to prepare samples.

Clearly riled, Douse dismissed Keen's arguments.

"That is unscientific...I have conclusive proof which I believe can refute this," he said from beside the reconstructed remains of the shattered aircraft luggage container said to have been torn apart by the bomb.

But Douse lamented the fact that his agency had not been able to test fragments of an electronic timer and the tape recorder thought to have hidden the bomb, citing cost savings at the laboratory.

"I would have given my right arm to examine them all," he said.

In his testimony on Friday, Douse said that his tests on metal fragments from the luggage container found minute traces of PETN and RDX, components used to make the plastic explosive Semtex.

Former DERA forensic explosives director Thomas Hayes, testifying on Monday after Douse, told the court he was certain a bomb in a brown Samsonite case had destroyed the jet.

"It was established without any doubt that this item had been subjected to a large internal explosion and therefore had originally contained an explosive device," he said.

Hayes said the nature of the damage indicated the suitcase had been either on the floor of the baggage container or on top of another case, corroborating blast pattern evidence from previous witnesses.

His testimony could hamper defence hopes to show that the bomb exploded outside the container and therefore could not have been planted in a suitcase by the accused.

The prosecution says the defendants were Libyan intelligence agents who used cover as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines to put a bomb in an unaccompanied suitcase in Malta, which was eventually loaded onto the doomed flight in London.

The defence is expected to blame Palestinian extremists operating in Frankfurt. 

We will know one day why it happened

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Spectator on this date in 2011:]

‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey. Helga was just 19 when she was killed in the bomb that destroyed PanAm flight 103 as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of 21 December 1988. Mrs Mosey was being interviewed the day after, doorstepped at her home in the Midlands by several news teams anxious for a story, a reaction, a headline.

This week’s Archive on 4 was the first in a series, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, which is not so much reliving history as looking back at the radio interviews, the TV reporting, the newspaper stories to examine the ways in which these very dramatic events impact on the people at their heart. How do they cope? How does it change them? And, especially, how damaging is the attention of the world’s media? It was almost like an episode of The Reunion in the way the producer, Geoff Bird, sought to analyse as well as recall the experience as he looked back through the tapes with the Mosey family and some of the journalists who had been the first on the scene in Lockerbie.

The Moseys discovered what had happened to their daughter as they were watching the BBC’s nine o’clock news, two hours after the bomb had exploded. At first they looked on as bystanders, aghast at the story of a plane falling out of the sky in a ball of fire and killing all those on board plus several people on the ground, murdered in their homes just a few days before Christmas. They had no inkling their daughter was on the plane, failing (or unwilling) to make the connection that earlier in the day John Mosey had driven Helga to Birmingham on the first leg of her journey to New York. Only at the end of the news report was the flight number flashed across the screen, PanAm 103. ‘That’s Helga’s plane,’ said her mother.

As Helga’s father relived the scene with such clarity and spareness of detail, it was one of those radio moments when everything beyond the radio set, the voice, the words being spoken, receded into the distance. His 15-year-old son screamed, ‘No, no, no, no.’ John Mosey was himself literally struck dumb by the shock, speechless. But the next night, by which time the reporters had tracked down Helga’s family in their home, he made a conscious decision to speak out. ‘This is where you prove whether what you’ve taught and preached and said “This is what we believe” is real or just a game.’ He wanted to test himself.

‘You’re a Christian minister,’ he was asked (Mosey is a Pentecostal priest). ‘Hasn’t this destroyed your faith?’ Just 24 hours after hearing the news, he replied, ‘So far the grace of God has been more real than we ever dared believe.’

You might have thought he would have resented being required to answer such a blunt and troubling question. But now he’s grateful. He believes it forced him to rationalise what he was feeling, and to find a form of words to express it. ‘The moment when you encapsulate what’s happened in words, it becomes more real.’

Mosey, along with Jim Swire, has been a key figure in the long battle by the families of those killed at Lockerbie to find out not just what happened, who planted the bomb, who was behind it, but also why the political establishment kept secret the fact that there had been very specific warnings about a bomb which would be hidden on a PanAm flight bound for New York from Frankfurt. Flight 103 was the only plane flying across the Atlantic not to be absolutely full in this week before Christmas. Helga was a student needing a cheap flight.

Since then, Mosey has given countless interviews, as many as 47 in a single day. Did this constant media attention begin to take over? Did he get a buzz out of it?

‘Yes,’ he admits. But having realised that he was becoming addicted to being on TV and radio and that his eagerness to be interviewed was unhealthy he still went on campaigning. ‘We’ve exploited the media shamelessly.’

It was a fascinating reversal of what I would have expected him to say. He felt that he could use the media to convey to the political world that the families of the victims were not going to go away. They wanted to know the truth. And with one or two exceptions (such as the reporter who picked up a seatbelt as a trophy to take back to the offices of his Scottish tabloid newspaper) most of the reporting was very sensitive, refusing to use photographs of the bodies scattered across the hillside.

Is Helga’s mother any closer to an answer to that question of why such a terrible thing had happened to her daughter? ‘The question is not why,’ she suggests, hesitating just slightly. ‘It’s what you do with it…How you react.’

“Tehran behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103”

[What follows is the text of a report that appeared on the CBS News website on this date in 2000:]

An Iranian defector who said he could prove Iran was responsible for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing has been exposed by the CIA and FBI as an impostor, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.

CBS News 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt said the allegations were not unexpected. "We expected the CIA and FBI to do this."

The man, who had given his name as Ahmad Behbahani and said he was a former Iranian intelligence officer, had told 60 Minutes associate producer Roya Hakakian that he had documents showing Tehran was behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

Two Libyans have been on trial for the bombing — which killed all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground — since May 3 at a special Scottish court in the Netherlands.

But following debriefing sessions in Turkey, where the man is in protective custody, the CIA and FBI have concluded the 32-year-old defector is not Behbahani, the Post quoted a senior US official as saying.

The man "lacks basic knowledge of Iran's intelligence apparatus" and "has been lying about lots of stuff," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

However, a British Iran expert said after the 60 Minutes broadcast but before the newspaper report that it was possible Iran rather than Libya planned the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, saying Behbahani had been involved in international terrorism.

The man's real identity had not been established, the newspaper said.

"He knows a few things, but nothing very much — stuff that could have possibly come from somebody else," the official was quoted as saying.

"But when it comes to serious stuff that he should know, he comes up empty. He still has not provided anything that has led CIA and FBI folks to believe his story."

The defector told producer Hakakian that he had documents to prove Iran trained a group of Libyans to carry out the Lockerbie bombing.

The United States had said that while it stood by Scottish prosecutors trying the two Libyans for the bombing, it would fully assess the defector's claims.

Tehran has dismissed the charges, with Iranian Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi saying that no one named Ahmad Behbahani had ever worked for the country's intelligence service.

On Friday, Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, slammed the Western media as a "mafia network" out to tarnish Iran's image with false claims that Tehran was behind the Lockerbie bombing.

Lord Avebury said in a telephone interview that a parliamentary report he wrote in 1996 named Behbahani as an Iranian official responsible for international terrorism.

"He was at that time an official in (Akbar Hashemi) Rafsanjani's office, when Rafsanjani was president, who was responsible for links with the Ministry of Intelligence in planning and carrying out (attacks)," he said.

Asked how he knew that, Avebury said: "The information came from Behbahani's brother, who left Iran and spilled the beans."

He said Iran had not actually denied employing Behbahani.

"I thought they'd been very careful in the phraseology of the denial. In fact he worked in Rafsanjani's office and not in the Ministry of Intelligence, so what they are saying is not technically a lie," he said.

Iran suggests Behbahani made false claims to gain asylum abroad. "Those Iranians who wish to be granted asylum in Western countries are usually trying to achieve their aims through libellous statements against the Islamic Republic of Iran," Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi said last week.

Avebury said fear of Iranian retribution may well have motivated Behbehani to flee, but that his claims seemed valid and might affect the Lockerbie trial.

"What he is (reported as) saying now tallies with what we said in the report," he said. "I'm sure what he's saying can be corroborated and that the CIA will be checking what he is saying against their records.

"It would be very interesting to have the complete transcript. The obvious thing is for the Scottish police to go (to Turkey) and conduct their own inquiries." 

Crown caught out misleading the court

[On this date in 2000, the procurator fiscal in charge of preparations for the Lockerbie trial wrote a highly significant memorandum to two of the senior advocate deputes prosecuting the case. A redacted copy of the memorandum can be read here. When the memorandum eventually came into the public domain more than a decade later John Ashton commented as follows:]

Welcoming the release of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's report on the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on 25 March [2012], Alex Salmond managed to add to the roll call of excuses for not ordering a public inquiry into the case.

    

The report, he said, 'in many ways is far more comprehensive than any inquiry could ever hope to be'. In fact, it's not: the SCCRC's job was to establish whether Megrahi may have been wrongly convicted, not to examine why the case went so badly wrong, although it undoubtedly shed some light on that matter.  

    

If a single document illustrates why we still need an inquiry, it is a confidential memo dated 2 June 2000 by the lead procurator fiscal on the case, Norman McFadyen. Published here for the first time, it reports on a meeting that McFadyen and advocate depute Alan Turnbull QC had had the previous day at the US embassy in The Hague. Large sections of it remain redacted.

    

The two prosecutors were there to inspect CIA cables relating to one of the Crown's star witnesses, an ex-colleague of Megrahi's called Majid Giaka, who was a member of the Libyan external intelligence service, the ESO. Giaka, it transpired, was also a CIA informant. Crucially, he claimed that, shortly before the bombing, Megrahi had arrived in Malta with a brown Samsonite suitcase and that his co-accused Lamin Fhimah had helped him carry it through airport customs. If true, this was highly significant, because the Lockerbie bomb was also contained within a brown Samsonite and, according to the Crown, began its journey in Malta.

    

Twenty-five heavily redacted cables had been disclosed to the defence. The purpose of the meeting, according to the memo, was to view almost entirely unredacted versions in order to determine 'whether there was any material which required to be disclosed to the defence'. Page two states that, at the CIA's insistence, the two men had to sign a confidentiality agreement, the terms of which McFadyen described as follows: 'If we found material which we wished to use in evidence we would require to raise that issue with the CIA and not make any use of the material without their agreement'. In effect, then, the Crown had secretly ceded to the CIA the right to determine what material might be used in court.          

    

But it's what followed a few paragraphs later that's key. MacFadyen reported that, having inspected the cables:

    

We were able to satisfy ourselves that there was nothing omitted which could assist the defence in itself. There were some references to matters which in isolation might be thought to assist the defence – eg details of payments or of efforts by Majid to secure sham surgery – but since evidence was being provided as to the total of payments made and of the request for sham surgery, the particular material did not appear to be disclosable. We were satisfied that the material which had been redacted was not relevant to the case or helpful to the defence.

    

MacFadyen was correct in stating that evidence had been disclosed of the total payments to Giaka and a request for sham surgery in order to enable him to resign from the ESO. The payments were detailed in two separate CIA documents (not cables) while his desire for sham surgery request was referred to in one of the disclosed cables.

    

When, almost three months later, the defence counsel learned of the Hague embassy meeting, they urged the court to ask the Crown to obtain the complete cables from the CIA. In response, the lord advocate, Colin Boyd QC, assured the court that MacFadyen's and Turnbull's review had established that 'there was nothing within the cables which bore on the defence case, either by undermining the Crown case or by advancing a positive case which was being made or may be made, having regard to the special [defence of incrimination]'. He added: 'there is nothing within these documents which relates to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid [Giaka] on these matters'.

The court nevertheless urged the Crown to seek fuller versions of the cables from the CIA. Three days later the Crown handed the defence copies with far fewer redactions. What, then, was contained in the previously concealed sections, which, in MacFadyen's view, was 'not relevant to the case or helpful to the defence'? Here's what.

    

There were repeated references not only to Giaka's desire for sham surgery, but also his repeated and successful pleas to the CIA to pay for it. One of the cables described him as 'something of a hypochondriac', while another noted his claim to be a distant relative of Libya's former leader King Idris. A further one revealed that he wanted the CIA to set him up in a car rental business in Malta and that he had saved $30,000 towards the venture. His handlers believed that much of the money had been acquired from illegal commissions and perhaps through low-level smuggling.

    

Crucially, there were references to other meetings with the CIA, for which no cables had disclosed. Eventually the CIA coughed up 36 more, about which MacFadyen and Turnbull were seemingly unaware.

    

The most telling fact concealed by the redactions was that the CIA had grown increasingly dissatisfied with Giaka. One noted that his information about the ESO's structure and administration 'may be somewhat skewed by his prolonged absence and lack of seniority'. Another revealed that he would be told: 'that he will only continue his $1,000 per month salary payment through the remainder of 1989. If [he] is not able to demonstrate sustained and defined access to information of intelligence value by January 1990, [the CIA] will cease all salary and financial support until such access can be proven again'.

    

A later section of the same cable noted: 'it is clear that [Giaka] will never be the penetration of the ESO that we had anticipated… [He] has never been a true staff member of the ESO and as he stated at this meeting, he was coopted with working with the ESO and he now wants nothing to do with them or their activities… We will want to ensure that [he] understands what is expected of him and what he can expect from us in return. [CIA] officer will therefore advise [him] at 4 Sept meeting that he is on "trial" status until 1 January 1990'.

    

Having analysed the unredacted sections, Richard Keen QC, respresenting Megrahi's co-accused, Lamin Fhimah, told the court it was 'abundantly clear' that much of the newly uncovered information was highly relevant to the defence, adding, 'I frankly find it inconceivable that it could have been thought otherwise... Some of the material which is now disclosed goes to the very heart of material aspects of this case, not just to issues of credibility and reliability, but beyond'.

    

In order words, the Crown had been caught out misleading the court. I do not suggest that Boyd did so deliberately, neither that MacFadyen and Turnbull deliberately concealed evidence that they knew would by helpful to the defence. Motive is not the issue: what really matters is the quality of the Crown's judgement.

    

Armed with the new information and the 36 additional cables, Keen and Megrahi's counsel, Bill Taylor QC, were able to demolish Giaka's credibility and with it the case against Fhimah, who was acquitted. Had the court taken Boyd at his word and the redactions not been lifted, Giaka might have left the witness stand with his credibility intact and Fhimah may well have been convicted along with Megrahi.

    

The big remaining question raised by the MacFadyen memo is: was it an isolated failure of judgement or the tip of the iceberg? The SCCRC found numerous items of significant evidence which the Crown had failed to disclose to Megrahi's lawyers. Did the prosecutors also satisfy themselves in each instance 'that there was nothing omitted which could assist the defence'? Only a full public inquiry can adequately answer such questions. It is high time that Salmond's government ordered one. 

How UK Government hid secret Lockerbie report

[This is the headline over a report published in The Herald on this date in 2012. It reads as follows:]

It has been hidden, blocked and kept secret by the UK Government for more than 20 years, but The Herald can reveal for the first time the contents of the top-secret Lockerbie document that the UK tried to prevent us from publishing.

The highly classified document, which has never even been aired in public or shared with the courts, originally came from Jordan and indicates that a Palestinian terrorist group was involved in the bombing that killed 270 people – something the UK Government has vehemently denied.

The UK Government has gone to considerable lengths to prevent details of the document – which casts further doubt on the safety of the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi – being published by The Herald.

It has threatened legal action to stop publication of the newspaper and asked the paper to sign up to a court-approved gagging order.

Our decision to publish details of the document, which was obtained by the Crown Office but never shown to the defence team, will prove highly embarrassing to the Crown, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Office of the Advocate General, whose lawyers have worked tirelessly to prevent it ever being even discussed in public.

The document incriminates the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) in the Lockerbie bombing.

The PFLP-GC were the original suspects in the investigation into the biggest terrorist atrocity ever to have been committed in mainland Britain. However, by 1991 police and prosecutors were entirely focused on Libya. Since then politicians and the investigating authorities have denied the possibility of their involvement, instead blaming the whole atrocity on Libya.

Repeated, high-level attempts to block the report indicate it is vital to unearthing the truth about the Lockerbie bombing. The UK Government arranged for the document to be covered by Public Interest Immunity on national security grounds. This prevented it from being shared with the defence but does not prevent publication by a newspaper.

A source said: "The document itself is historical and regimes have changed so it is hard to believe it presents any risk at all to national security. It originates from Jordan and incriminates the Palestinian terror group the PFLP-GC. The contents are very important but what makes them so much more significant is the lengths the UK Government and others have gone to in order to prevent anyone from seeing the document.

"This is the most remarkable piece of evidence. It does not rule out the Libyans but it does indicate that others were involved.

"It also shows the lengths the UK Government was prepared to go to in order to ensure that any evidence undermining their case against Libya would never see the light of day."

It is thought the document could fatally undermine the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. He died of cancer last month without knowing the contents of this report.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) team that investigated Megrahi's conviction discovered the existence of the document during their four-year investigation which concluded in 2007. Their 800-page report explains that their investigative team were allowed to access the document in Dumfries police station but they were prohibited from removing the notes they made on it and the document itself.

The commission was only able to access the document after signing up to a special agreement not to divulge the contents and was told by the Crown that "a conclusion was reached that the documents did not require to be disclosed in terms of the Crown's obligations".

The SCCRC then ruled that the contents were sufficiently disturbing for a court to have believed the conviction could have been a miscarriage of justice. The failure to disclose the document was one of the six grounds on which the case was referred back for a fresh appeal in 2007.

To date, only the Crown, UK Government and SCCRC team know the contents of this closely guarded document.

Megrahi's legal team pushed for disclosure of the document once it was revealed by the SCCRC. The Scottish courts were in the process of appointing special advocates and a special judge who would decide in secret whether the contents of the document could be disclosed when Megrahi dropped an appeal in 2009 in order to speed his return to Libya. He was released on compassionate grounds in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer.

This new evidence and the fact it points to the guilt of non-Libyans will also prove embarrassing for the prosecution who failed to share the document with the trial court and who have subsequently argued that the investigation should focus on Libya alone.

A spokesman for the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: "The UK Government provided all relevant information on the Lockerbie bombing to the Scottish authorities, who considered it as part of the investigation which led to Megrahi's conviction. Any suggestion of 'hiding' documents is simply incorrect.

"The Government entered into a dialogue with The Herald in line with its long-established practice, supported by successive governments, to seek to prevent publication of any material that could cause significant harm to the UK's international relations and national security. We have consistently made clear that we sought to do this through dialogue rather than legal action".

Chapter 25 of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's Statement of Reasons refers to material which the Crown had proactively disclosed to the Commission during its review of Megrahi's conviction. The Crown claim they wanted to provide this information to Megrahi's legal team during the second appeal and made this clear to the court, but this could not be done because of the UK Government's Public Interest Immunity Certificate.

A spokesman for the Crown Office said: "The suggestion that the PFLP-GC was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing was fully considered by the trial court following the incrimination of this terrorist group by Megrahi during his trial and does nothing to undermine the Crown's case that Megrahi acted with others in the bombing of flight Pan Am 103.

"All material which met the Crown's disclosure obligations in relation to the PFLP-GC was properly disclosed to the defence before the trial and this was confirmed by the SCCRC's investigation.

"The court concluded that the conception, planning and execution of the plot which led to the bombing was of Libyan origin. The court was, of course, only dealing with evidence, not matters of opinion or conjecture."

Location of bomb suitcase

[What follows is the text of Glasgow University’s Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit’s report of proceedings at Camp Zeist on 31 May 2000:]

The main evidence related to the location of the device said to have been located in the baggage container [AVE 4041]. Air accident investigators indicated that the container had been destroyed by a 'high energy event' - probably an explosion. The thrust of their evidence was that such a device could not have been on the container floor. The emphasis of defence cross-examination was that it was possible that any device could have been on the floor. The location of the device is crucial to the Crown case, as if the suitcase in which it was allegedly contained was on the floor, then it could not have been loaded in Malta.

The main Crown witness was Professor Christopher Peel, who had created a scientific model by which he claimed to be able to determine the exact size and location of the device. His evidence was challenged in two ways. First it was suggested that he had earlier espoused a different model and had changed his version of the facts to fit his new theory. His response was that he had not done so consciously, and that the model he ultimately applied was the most appropriate. Secondly, his calculations were the subject of a sustained assault with a view to suggesting he had fallen into error. He maintained that they were accurate.

It should be noted that it is quite common in criminal trials for counsel for the defence to attack the evidence of key experts for the Crown in terms of the soundness of the scientific basis for their theories, and/or the accuracy of the application of the scientific criteria to the facts.

Judges to view confidential Lockerbie papers

[This is the headline over a report published on this date in 2008 on the website of The Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. It reads as follows:]

The judges sitting in the latest stage of the Lockerbie bombing appeal are to read the documents that the UK Government wants kept from the defence.

The Lord Justice General, Lord Hamilton, Lords Kingarth and Eassie yesterday ordered the documents to be delivered to the court within the next week.

A decision on whether to conduct further hearings in relation to the documents in private, and whether to appoint a security-vetted special advocate to represent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Libyan appealing against conviction of planting the bomb, will be taken after the judges have seen the two sensitive papers.

Both documents are the subject of public interest immunity certificates by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who has stated that disclosure would cause real harm to national security. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, on whose reference the case is now before the appeal court, considered that failure to disclose one of the papers was a ground on which the court might consider that there had been a miscarriage of justice.

In court yesterday Advocate General Lord Davidson QC, for the UK Government, denied that he was prepared to agree to a suggestion by Crown counsel Ronald Clancy QC that summarised or redacted versions of the documents could be given to the defence.

Defence counsel Maggie Scott QC objected to the proposal for a special advocate to represent Megrahi, claiming it would deny him a fair hearing.