A can of worms

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

Conspiracy and cover-up in Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the Bread & Circuses website, vol 3 issue 11. It reads in part:]

In Libya, there were mass celebrations to honor the homecoming of their national hero, while in the Western press, there were repeated protests over the premature release of a convicted terrorist, but the whole sordid affair died within a short time, even if Megrahi hasn’t yet, and it has all been pretty much long forgotten.

If you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. It’s just the beginning. And it’s a story that’s all too familiar, involving international intrigue, the CIA tampering with evidence, lies and cover-ups by disreputable prosecutors, and two world powers anxious to bring about a conviction at all costs, which included a $2 million payoff to buy fabricated witness accounting. As a result, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who may be one of the most hated men in the world, whose deteriorating health was considered too mild a punishment to many people around the world, and who has been incarcerated for perpetrating the attack on Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland since 1991, may also be innocent.

This won’t be the first time our Government has been involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, to cover up a crime, or to frame an innocent person to protect someone or something it considers more important in the big picture. In this case, the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Scotland were driven by a powerful need to attach this terrorist attack to a face as soon as possible. Under the circumstances, it served all of their purposes to pin it on a Libyan, without having to go to war with Libya itself. At that point, it didn’t matter all that much which Libyan, since to us Westerners, they all look alike anyway.

Between the eagerness of Scottish prosecutors and Government officials to circumvent the procedures of law to make their story fit the facts, and the $2 million dollars the United States Government put up as a bribe to anyone believable enough sell a phony story to a panel of judges hearing this case, it wasn’t all that difficult to make up a scenario that fit the crime. From beginning to end, there were inconsistencies and problems with the gathering of evidence and procedural misconduct on the part of investigators from the police department and the attorneys building this case. Using every manipulative trick and fraud they could come up with, they managed to hammer the square pegs into the round holes and Megrehi was convicted, in spite of protests not only from him and his attorneys who were denied fair access to police evidence and adequate appeals, but to people around the world who looked at the case against Megrahi and called foul. Those included private investigators from around the world who have taken an unbiased look at the evidence, to Nelson Mandela who pleaded with the Church of Scotland to independently investigate the case against Megrahi on their own.

In 2009, under mounting pressure, the Scottish Government had no choice but to allow the appeal to reopen the case. At this point, the British, American, and Scottish Governments were in a quandary. The latest appeal process and the world attention it was bringing, was going to open more than a can of worms for those closest to the conspiracy. It was going to open all the evidence, including formerly withheld and altered evidence, much of which was clearly tampered with by the authorities pressing for a conviction, to public scrutiny that they were previously able to keep a lid on.

So instead of taking that chance on having to explain the obvious framing and conspiracy to defraud the Courts, a deal was struck and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was set free. While President Obama and Prime Minister Tony Blair were displaying their public outrage over Megrahi’s early release, behind the scenes they were wiping the sweat from each other’s brows, knowing that a serious political crisis had been averted. Unfortunately, the victims and their surviving families of the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, must live with the frustration of believing that the murderer of their loved ones was freed on humanitarian grounds, when in fact, they should be more outraged than anyone else that the truth of what really happened will remain buried with the dead.

This is one of those stories that you will not see in the mainstream news media run by multi-national corporations in this country. This story was reported in a documentary film released on Al Jazeera English, the Arab news network. Before you judge the reliability of the source based on prejudices and opinions formulated for you by the American news networks with a strong motive in not wanting us to listen to this news forum with an opened mind, please watch this video and judge for yourself. 

Effort to limit scope of Lockerbie appeal

[What follows is the text of a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2008:]

Prosecutors have launched a legal bid to limit the scope of the Lockerbie bomber's appeal against conviction.

Lawyers for Abdelbasset al Megrahi have lodged full grounds of appeal with the Appeal Court in Edinburgh.

But the Crown said it should be limited to the issues raised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

It referred Megrahi's case back to the appeal court last year. Megrahi is serving life for killing 270 people in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

It came down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

Megrahi, 56, is currently in Greenock prison serving a life sentence after being found guilty of mass murder after a trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001.

He lost his first appeal the following year.

Last June his case was referred back to the appeal court for a second time by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) on a number of specific terms, which have never been fully published.

Advocate depute Ronald Clancy QC told five judges, at the Court of Criminal, that the SCCRC carried out an exhaustive investigation and rejected 90 allegations.

These included numerous conspiracy theories about planting and tampering with evidence, he said.

He said Megrahi's team wanted to be able to return to these but that would be tantamount to allowing a second appeal on the same point as the first.

The hearing to decide on the ultimate scope of Megrahi's appeal is being heard by a panel of five judges and is scheduled to last four days.

[RB: In 2008 the Crown’s attempt to limit the scope of the appeal failed ignominiously. Regrettably, however, the law on this matter has now been altered by the Scottish Parliament. In any new appeal allowed by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (eg in an application by Megrahi’s family) the appeal court would be limited to the specific grounds of referral allowed by the SCCRC unless the court was prepared, in the interests of justice, to permit additional grounds of appeal to be added: Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, section 194(D) (4A) and (4B), as inserted by Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 (asp 13), ss 83, 206(1).]

Swiss firm did business with Lockerbie accused

[On this date in 2000, Erwin Meister, co-owner with Edwin Bollier of the Swiss company MEBO, gave evidence at the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist. What follows is taken from a report on that date on the BBC News website:]

The owner of the firm which made the timer allegedly used in the Lockerbie bomb says he did business with one of the men accused of the atrocity.

At the Scottish court in the Netherlands, [Erwin] Meister said he recognised Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from business dealings which took place in Libya and Zurich prior to the bombing.

He alleged that his Swiss-based company, MEBO, received an "urgent" order for timers from the Libyan army just a few weeks before the explosion of Pan Am 103 which saw the death of all on board.

At that time the firm had been doing regular business with the Libyans, supplying radio and communications equipment and a batch of 20 of its own design "MST-13" electronic timers in 1985.

But Mr Meister told the court that when the urgent order came, MEBO did not have the right materials to produce its own type in time.

Instead the company purchased Olympus timers for delivery to Libya by Mr Meister's business partner Edwin Bollier.

Mr Bollier returned from his trip - via Malta - on the eve of the Lockerbie bombing - still with the timers which the Libyans had returned as unsuitable. [RB: This is not correct. Although he had expected to fly back to Zurich via Malta, Bollier was able to get a direct flight from Tripoli to Zurich: see From Zurich to Malta to Tripoli to Malta to… .]

But then in the first fortnight of January 1989, Mr Bollier looked again at the batch of Olympus timers which had been left on a shelf in the MEBO offices in Zurich since his return the night before the Lockerbie bombing.

Mr Meister explained: "Mr Bollier called me and said: 'Look what I've discovered'. He had in his hand one of the Olympus timers. He asked me to look at it. It was programmed for 7.30pm and the day of the week was a Wednesday."

The Lockerbie explosion in fact occurred shortly after 1900 GMT on Wednesday 21 December, 1988. (...)

The court has already heard that a radio-cassette recorder packed with Semtex attached to an "MST-13" was placed in a suitcase on a Frankfurt-bound flight from Luqa Airport, Malta.

From Frankfurt it was placed aboard Pan Am Flight 103 to Heathrow, exploding on the plane's next leg, from Heathrow to New York, above Lockerbie.

Mr Meister, 62, had told Alan Turnbull QC, prosecuting, that MEBO first established commercial contacts with the Libyan army in about 1980.

He was asked how business was conducted with the Libyans: "It was not like the army purchasing offices in the west," he replied. "We moved from one contact to another." (...)

Mr Meister named his contacts as a communications expert called Ezzadin Hinshiri and another man named Said Rashid - both identified in the Lockerbie indictment as a link between MEBO and the two accused men in obtaining electronic timers.

And he said that on several occasions, in Tripoli and once in Zurich, he met a man called Abdelbaset - and he is one of the men in dock. (...)

Mr Meister said he recalled hearing about the Lockerbie bombing from television reports and he had discussed the tragedy with Mr Bollier.

Then in 1990, Mr Meister told the court, Scottish police first visited MEBO headquarters in the Novapark Hotel in Zurich, requesting an interview about the production of "MST-13" timers and the Pan Am tragedy. 

Lockerbie bomb 'in suitcase'

[This is the headline over a report that appeared on the BBC News website on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

A forensic expert has told the Lockerbie trial that he located the plane's bomb inside a radio cassette recorder placed in a suitcase.

Alan Feraday said the explosion, which destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 and killed 270 people, exploded 25 inches inside the fuselage.

He explained he had pinpointed the precise location of the blast after a detailed study of damage suffered by all 24 cases in the same hold as the bomb.

Mr Feraday said during the trial of the two accused Libyans that he found that at least 13 items of clothing and an umbrella were inside the Samsonite case at the time of detonation.

It was on the second layer of luggage, resting in the angled container overhang - roughly parallel to the fuselage - or leaning upright, propped against another luggage stack.

The 400 grams of "high performance" Semtex plastic explosive inside the Toshiba radio cassette recorder was attached to a long-delay electronic timer.

The timer was made by the MEBO company of Switzerland, Mr Feraday - former head of the forensics explosives laboratory at the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in Kent - told the trial at Camp Zeist in Holland.

Mr Feraday, now retired, said that such a long-delay timer would not require any other attachment in order to act as "a viable improvised explosive device capable of repeated flights before detonating at a pre-set time".

Asked by defence lawyer Richard Keen QC whether the bomb could have been in any other position than set out in his forensic conclusions, Mr Feraday replied: "I can't think of any other position.

"I am not saying there isn't any other position, I just can't find it myself." (...)

Mr Keen asked Mr Feraday if he was aware that the Lockerbie inquiry had centred for a time on a possible connection between the bomb and a Palestinian terror group.

At the start of the trial last month the court heard that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command quickly became the "focus of attention" for the inquiry team because of arrests of some of its members in Germany just two months before the Pan AM 103 explosion.

The forensics expert agreed today that there had been a strong belief that the PFLP-GC was behind the bomb, but he added: "It played no part in my thoughts at all."

Mr Feraday acknowledged that early in the inquiry he had produced a report stating that the Lockerbie bomb had been contained inside a white Toshiba RT 8016 or 8026 radio-cassette player, and not, as he now testifies, inside a black Toshiba RT SF 16 model.

Doubts over new Lockerbie trial

[This is the headline over a report published on the website of The Independent on this date in 2011:]

Experts cast doubt on claims yesterday that the Libyan airline employee cleared of the Lockerbie bombing could stand trial under double jeopardy laws.

Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah was found not guilty of assisting his friend and colleague Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in planting the bomb on board Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 that claimed 270 lives.

Families of those who died had said they hoped that a new prosecution could shine fresh light on the case following the original trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in 2001.

But Professor Robert Black QC, the architect of the legal process which led to the conviction of Megrahi, said it was highly unlikely that a new unit set up to examine unsolved cases under Scottish Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, would go ahead with a prosecution.

[RB: Almost six months later speculation was still rife about the possibility of the Crown’s seeking to re-indict Fhimah. I commented at the time:]

I would be astounded if prosecutors sought to re-indict Lamin Fhimah.  The Crown Office is just as aware as the rest of us are that the astonishing thing about the Zeist trial was not the acquittal of Fhimah but the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi.  Any "new evidence" that has emerged since 2001 points clearly towards the innocence of the accused Libyans rather than their guilt, as the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst others has pointed out. 

Police came to a conclusion and then looked for evidence

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

Scottish Sunday Express on the Aljazeera documentary

[What follows is the text of a report by Ben Borland that appeared in yesterday's Scottish edition of the Sunday Express:]

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted on the basis that he bought clothes from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, including a grey men’s Slalom shirt. The clothing was then packed in a suitcase with the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103, killing 270 on December 21, 1988.

The charred remains of the shirt were crucial to the prosecution, as a forensic scientist found a piece of circuit board from the bomb embedded in the collar which first led investigators to Libya, and ultimately Megrahi.

However, it has now emerged that clothing manufacturers in Malta told Scottish police in January 1990 that the shirt recovered from the crash site was in fact a boy’s size.

Campaigners have stepped up calls for an inquiry after the claims surfaced in a documentary broadcast on Thursday by Arab TV network Al Jazeera but seen by only a handful of Scottish viewers. [RB: The programme can be watched on You Tube here.]

In it, Scotland’s former Lord Advocate also accepted that Gauci, the main prosecution witness, was paid $2million to give evidence against Megrahi. Scottish private investigator George Thomson tracked down shirt manufacturers Tonio Caruana and Godwin Navarro in Malta. They recalled being shown a fragment of shirt by DC John Crawford and telling him, independently of each other, that it was a boy’s shirt

Speaking to the Sunday Express yesterday, Mr Navarro, 76, said: “I stand by my statement. I believe it is a boy’s shirt because of the size of the pocket and the width of the placket, where the button holes are.”

Retired Strathclyde Police superintendent Iain McKie, now a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, said: “The fact that the witnesses say it was a boy’s shirt and not an adult shirt seems to me quite critical.”

He said that if it was a boy’s shirt, then it cannot be the same one purchased from Gauci by the man he later identified as Megrahi – destroying the “evidence chain”.

Supt McKie said the latest claims added weight to calls for the Scottish Government to set up an independent inquiry into Megrahi’s conviction.

He added: “The whole chain of evidence has been totally and utterly shattered. It is looking more and more like the police came to a conclusion and then looked for evidence.”

The programme, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber, also alleged that a piece of the shirt had been altered, as it is clearly a different shape in two police photographs.

However a spokesman for the Crown Office said yesterday that the matter was easily explained. He said: “The fragment of cloth alleged to have been removed from the shirt was examined by the scientists and is referred to in the forensic science report. It is clearly a separate fragment.”

But Fife-based Mr Thomson stood by his claims. He said: “In January 1990 they realise that what they have is a fragment of a boy’s shirt, while Gauci is saying he sold a gents’ shirt.

“The reason for people saying this is mainly down to the size of the pocket and lo and behold the next thing a fragment of the pocket has been removed.”

The documentary is the latest foreign TV show to expose doubts in Scotland’s handling of the case.

Dutch filmmaker Gideon Levy won the Prix Europa for the best current affairs programme of 2009 for Lockerbie Revisited, which has never been broadcast in Britain.

Donald Macaulay QC and Lockerbie

Lord Macaulay of Bragar QC died on this date in 2014.

After charges were brought in November 1991 against Abdelbaset Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah their Libyan lawyer, Dr Ibrahim Legwell, formed a team of lawyers from countries with an interest in the Lockerbie case, including Scotland and the United States, to advise and assist him. One of the Scottish lawyers on that team was Donald Macaulay QC. At a meeting held in Tripoli in October 1993 (referred to in the media as a "legal summit") this legal team advised Megrahi and Fhimah not to surrender themselves for trial in Scotland. It was in response to this decision (which came as a considerable shock to the Libyan Government) that I formulated a scheme for a non-jury Scottish court to sit in the Netherlands. The story is told in more detail here.

I remain of the view that the advice given by the international legal team to Megrahi and Fhimah was unfortunate.  I am convinced that if the pair had been tried by an ordinary Scottish jury conscientiously following the standard instructions that juries are given about how to approach their decision-making and the assessment of the evidence led before them (including burden and standard of proof), both accused would have been acquitted.

Donald Macaulay was not a brilliant lawyer, but he was a quite magnificent jury advocate. Had I ever been charged with a serious crime, I would have wanted him to defend me. Head and shoulders above all of today's High Court "stars".

Hillary Clinton, Lockerbie and Gaddafi

What follows is the text of an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2014.

Clinton: Gaddafi responsible for Lockerbie bombing

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

Hillary Clinton thought that former Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi was a “terrorist who could never be trusted” because he was behind the Lockerbie bombing.

Writing in her memoir, which was published yesterday, the former US secretary of state said the Libyan leader was a “criminal” and she did not believe a thing he said.

Mrs Clinton also says that she felt a personal connection to the Lockerbie tragedy because 35 of the victims were from New York, where she was a senator at the time.

The disclosure is in her new book called Hard Choices which was released yesterday after being highly anticipated in Washington. The book’s release is being seen as the first step on a potential run for the presidency in 2016 by Mrs Clinton, 66. (...)

She ... writes how in 1988 “Libyan agents” planted the bomb that caused Pan Am Flight 103 to explode whilst flying over Scotland. Some 189 Americans died in the terrorist attack, along with 43 Britons.

Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was the only man convicted of the atrocity and served eight years of his sentence in Scotland before being freed on compassionate grounds in 2009 because doctors said he had cancer and would be dead within three months. Yet in an embarrassment to the Scottish Government and Kenny MacAskill, the justice secretary, Megrahi went on to live for nearly three more years in Tripoli. The row strained relations between the UK and the US with senior senators and relatives of those who died [RB: US relatives] branding it “outrageous”.

In her memoir, Mrs Clinton makes clear that she was under no illusions about the regime she was dealing with. She writes: “In my eyes Quaddafi (sic) was a criminal and a terrorist who could never be trusted…” (...)

Of the victims of Lockerbie, 35 were students from Syracuse University in New York. She writes: “I knew some of their families when I represented them in the US senate.”

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “Mr Al-Megrahi was convicted in a court of law and his conviction was upheld on appeal. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service have made clear that the Lockerbie case remains a live investigation and that Scotland’s criminal justice authorities will rigorously pursue any new lines of inquiry.”

[It is interesting that the Scottish Government spokesman does not punt the usual Crown Office line (or should that be “lie”?): "The evidence upon which the conviction was based was rigorously scrutinised by the trial court and two appeal courts, after which Megrahi stands convicted of the terrorist murder of 270 people.”  Is it just possible that my efforts in pointing out this particular instance of Crown Office dishonesty have borne fruit?

Another article in today's edition of The Scotsman can be read here: United quest for Lockerbie justice.] 

Mandela calls for fresh Megrahi appeal

[What follows is the rext of a report published on the website of The Guardian on this date in 2002:]

Former South African president Nelson Mandela today called for a fresh appeal in the case of the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, and asked that the prisoner be transferred to serve out his sentence nearer his native Libya.

Mr Mandela met with al-Megrahi for more than an hour at Glasgow's Barlinnie prison, where he is serving a life sentence for murder. Megrahi was convicted last year of smuggling a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie on December 21 1988. The bombing killed 270 people.

Mr Mandela today called for Scottish authorities to consider Megrahi serving his term in a Muslim country closer to his family.

"Megrahi is all alone," Mr Mandela told a packed press conference in the prison's visitors' room. "He has nobody he can talk to. It is a psychological persecution that a man must stay for the length of his long sentence all alone."

Mr Mandela added: "It would be fair if he were transferred to a Muslim country - and there are Muslim countries which are trusted by the west. It will make it easier for his family to visit him if he is in a place like the kingdom of Morocco, Tunisia or Egypt."

Mr Mandela also hopes to meet the prime minister, Tony Blair, and the US president, George Bush, to discuss the case.

Mr Mandela, who spent more than 20 years as a prisoner of South Africa's apartheid regime, said Megrahi was being "harassed" by other inmates at Barlinnie.

"He says he is being treated well by the officials but when he takes exercise he has been harassed by a number of prisoners. He cannot identify them because they shout at him from their cells through the windows and sometimes it is difficult even for the officials to know from which quarter the shouting occurs," he said.

During the 30-minute press conference, Mr Mandela described in detail how a four-judge commission from the Organisation for African Unity had criticised the basis by which Megrahi came to be convicted.

"They have criticised it fiercely, and it will be a pity if no court reviews the case itself," said Mr Mandela. "From the point of view of fundamental principles of natural law, it would be fair if he is given a chance to appeal either to the privy council or the European court of human rights."

Mr Mandela played a crucial role in persuading Libya to hand over the two men suspected of the bombing to be tried in a Scottish court in the Netherlands. He has been in touch with the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, about Megrahi's case.

Today the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, the father of the House of Commons, welcomed confirmation of Mr Mandela's visit and reiterated his belief that Megrahi was a political prisoner who had been guilty only of sanctions busting.

He told BBC Radio Scotland: "I asked him [Megrahi] what he was doing in Malta. He told me in detail how he had been a sanctions buster - getting components for Libyan Arab Airlines because of the sanctions, going to Nigeria, Brazil, above all to Ethiopia, having contacts with Boeing, in order to get much needed parts for aircraft."

Mr Dalyell said he had evidence, never presented at the trial, that may prove Megrahi's innocence. He claimed Iran had made a payment of $11m (£7.5m) to a militant Palestinian group two days after the bombing.