"Embarrassing" Crown Office Pan Am 103 request rebuffed by Libya’s NTC

[This is the heading over a news item published today on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm.  It reads as follows:]

A request from the Crown Office to the newly changed regime in Libya for documents and testimony to assist in an investigation into the Pan Am 103 airliner incident has been rebuffed.

Libya's interim justice minister Mohammed al-Alagi rejected the overture and said last night: “The case is closed."

The Crown Office asked for “any documentary evidence and witnesses, which could assist in the ongoing inquiries.”

Robert Forrester, Secretary of the Justice For Megrahi group, whose petition for an inquiry into the affair will be deliberated by the Parliament’s Justice Committee, said the Lord Advocate’s request was “highly embarrassing.”

“Firstly, we were treated to his proclamation that he was out to get Mr Fhimah under the new facility availed the Crown to persecute an individual to the grave with the lifting of the prohibition on double jeopardy. Now, we have him pleading with the NTC to cobble together some evidence for him since he clearly doesn't have any of his own to support his objective,” he said.

“Such behaviour, whilst highly embarrassing to the Scottish criminal justice system of course, also lends considerable credence to the view that the much trumpeted delegation representing the Crown and Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary which met with Mr Koussa earlier in the year in the hope that he would provide the necessary goods with which to defend the indefensible, namely, a conviction supported by thin air, gleaned absolutely nothing from Colonel Gaddafi's former security services chief.” 

[For further consideration of this issue, see the blog post immediately below this one.]