Then, just eight weeks after the SNP came to power, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted al-Megrahi leave to appeal, identifying six grounds for believing that a “miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.
The prospect of an appeal
heaped pressure on the Scottish Government. By November 2007, Cabinet Office
papers appear to show that Mr MacAskill was ready to include al-Megrahi in a
prisoner transfer agreement between the UK Government and Libya, in exchange
for concessions from Westminster over firearms legislation and slopping out in
prison, where prisoners use pots in their cells for human waste.
According to minuted
discussions, Mr MacAskill talked to Jack Straw, then Secretary of State for
Justice, about the possibility of a deal. “There was then a conversation when
(MacAskill) asked for a deal. He obviously spoke to Salmond,” Mr Straw told The Times last year.
The Scottish Government has
angrily denied that it was ready to trade al-Megrahi in late 2007, but has been
unable to produce its own minute of the crucial discussions that took place on
December 19.
In 2009, al-Megrahi’s decision
to drop his appeal spared the Scottish Government the potential embarrassment
of an acquittal. With a grim irony, it is the British relatives of the victims
of the bombing, such as Dr Swire, who are likely to campaign for a public
inquiry into al-Megrahi’s conviction, after his death.
Yesterday, Mr Ashton said that
the case of al-Megrahi showed Scottish justice in “a very bad light”, and
warned the Scottish Government that it risked being dragged “into a huge
scandal”. He added: “They (the SNP) has now to stand up and distance themselves
from the Crown Office because there is so much that the Crown Office has
withheld in this case.”
Mr Ashton said the most
compelling piece of new evidence related to a tiny fragment of circuit board,
believed to have been from the bomb’s timer. The Crown argued that the circuit
board was one of many sold to the Libyan Government by Mebo, a Swiss company.
It was found in the remains of a shirt collar, which in turn led to a shop in
Malta, owned by Tony Gauci. Though his evidence too is contested, Mr Gauci
identified al-Megrahi as the man who bought the clothing contained in the bag
that held the bomb.
According to Mr Ashton, the
timer was the “golden thread” in the prosecution case, but it was broken. He
said that forensic analysis showed that the circuit board was coated in pure
tin, and not in a tin-lead alloy, the only kind supplied by Mebo.
Independent scientists,
consulted by the Crown, had noticed the difference but maintained that the tin
fragment and the tin-lead amalgam were “similar in all respects”.
Worse, said Mr Ashton, the
scientists conducted tests that proved that a tin-lead coating would not have
been changed to pure tin by the force of a bomb’s explosion.
It was a “mighty scandal”, said
Mr Ashton, that the results of the tests were not disclosed by the Crown before
the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands and were only passed to alMegrahi’s
lawyers a month before he left prison.
In December last year, Frank
Mulholland, the Lord Advocate, said: “The trial court held that . . . Megrahi
did not act alone. This is a live enquiry and Scottish police and prosecutors
will continue to pursue the evidence.”
A Crown Office spokesman said
that the evidence against al-Megrahi had been rigorously tested at his trial.
“In light of his abandonment of
his appeal, the conviction for the murder of 270 people and the judicial
determination of his guilt stand,” he added. “The only appropriate forum for
the determination of guilt or innocence is the criminal court.”
Detectives are expected to
visit Libya soon as part of the continuing Crown Office investigation into the
bombing.
[An opinion piece by The Times’s Scotland editor, Magnus
Linklater, contains the following:]
If
al-Megrahi was so seriously ill, why was he not given the treatment in a
Scottish hospital that he immediately received on his return to Libya? Why has
the Scottish Government never published the medical advice they were given? Why
did they incur the wrath of world opinion in order to allow a convicted
terrorist to go home? And was al-Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal one of
the conditions under which he was granted release?
It is this last question that is now under scrutiny. The
conspiracy theory says that the Government was anxious to avoid an appeal
because it might have revealed the unthinkable: that the highest-profile prosecution
ever mounted in a Scottish court was based on unsafe evidence, and that a
succession of judges and Lords Advocate connived in covering it up.
Like all conspiracy theories, that takes some believing. But now
that it has been put forward, a denial from the Scottish Government is not, in
itself, enough. There are too many unanswered questions. We now know that, long
before his final illness, in December 2007, Mr MacAskill was exploring, with
Foreign Office officials, ways of releasing al-Megrahi under the Prisoner
Transfer Treaty.
So, release was in the air then, and speculation is rife now.
Three things are needed to dispel it: first, Mr MacAskill must publish the
medical evidence; second, he must disclose the full extent of his contacts with
Libyan and UK officials; and finally he must deliver on the promised
legislation which would enable full disclosure of the Scottish Criminal Cases
Review Commission, on which al-Megrahi’s appeal was allowed to go forward.
Only openness will dispel the accusations. By allowing them to
fester, Mr MacAskill is damaging his government and his reputation.
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