ELIZABETH JACKSON: The death of the Lockerbie Bomber, Abdel
Basset Megrahi last Sunday from cancer could result in the truth finally coming
out about the terrorist attack that killed 270 people in the skies over
Scotland.
The judge who set up special court that convicted Megrahi back in 2001 has told AM the case was deeply flawed and he wants an immediate retrial.
British prime minister, David Cameron, has rejected the push, saying the original court case was properly conducted.
But momentum is building for a new trial or a public inquiry.
Matthew Carney reports.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Abdel Basset Megrahi returned home to Libya in 2009 to a hero's welcome.
Many in the west were outraged that he was released early only serving eight years of a 27 year sentence for mass murder.
Megrahi had always insisted he was innocent.
And now Robert Black, the judge that set up the special court in The Netherlands that convicted him in 2001, agrees. [RB: I was only a part-time judge in the sheriff court. I did not set up the court: after the Libyan defence team refused to contemplate a trial under normal Scottish procedure, I suggested a non-jury court sitting in the Netherlands. Megrahi and Fhimah’s Libyan lawyers immediately agreed, as did the then Libyan Government, in a letter signed by Moussa Koussa. It was another four years and seven months before the UK and US governments, under strong international pressure, also agreed.]
ROBERT BLACK: It's an absolute and utter disgrace that Megrahi was convicted on the evidence that was laid against him.
The main planks of the Megrahi conviction have now crumbled.
MATTHEW CARNEY: The key witness to Megrahi's conviction was the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci.
He identified Megrahi as the man that bought a shirt that was later found wrapped around fragments of the bomb at the crash site.
ROBERT BLACK: Megrahi did not fit the description that Gauci had given to the police of the purchaser. That description was of a man over six feet tall, over 50 years of age and with dark skin. Now Megrahi is light skinned, he is five feet-eight inches tall, or was before he died [and he was at the time 36 years old].
MATTHEW CARNEY: Black says new evidence shows Tony Gauci gave 19 wildly conflicting police statements, and that the prosecution's star witness had to be coached.
ROBERT BLACK: Before the court appearance at Zeist when (...) he pointed to Megrahi and said he looks a lot like the person who bought the clothes, he had been shown photographs of Megrahi by the prosecution.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Black believes the other critical piece of evidence to the prosecution's case has also been discredited. It's a fragment of the bomb's timer found at the crash site that had been tracked to a Swiss manufacturer that sold the device to Libya.
ROBERT BLACK: It has now become clear, in the past few days that that [sliver] of circuit board that formed virtually the only link between the bomb and Libya, does not in fact come from one of these Swiss circuit boards. It is metallurgical[ly] different from the circuit boards used in the Mebo, the Swiss company's, timers.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Momentum is building for an appeal to go ahead or an independent inquiry to held.
Many victims' families are supporting the move, like Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, in the disaster.
JIM SWIRE: What the current maintained fiction is doing is to protect those monsters who actually did carry out the attack; who I believed to have been originally people in Iran using a particular terrorist group in Syria.
ELIZABETH JACKSON: That's Dr Jim Swire ending that report from Matthew Carney.
The judge who set up special court that convicted Megrahi back in 2001 has told AM the case was deeply flawed and he wants an immediate retrial.
British prime minister, David Cameron, has rejected the push, saying the original court case was properly conducted.
But momentum is building for a new trial or a public inquiry.
Matthew Carney reports.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Abdel Basset Megrahi returned home to Libya in 2009 to a hero's welcome.
Many in the west were outraged that he was released early only serving eight years of a 27 year sentence for mass murder.
Megrahi had always insisted he was innocent.
And now Robert Black, the judge that set up the special court in The Netherlands that convicted him in 2001, agrees. [RB: I was only a part-time judge in the sheriff court. I did not set up the court: after the Libyan defence team refused to contemplate a trial under normal Scottish procedure, I suggested a non-jury court sitting in the Netherlands. Megrahi and Fhimah’s Libyan lawyers immediately agreed, as did the then Libyan Government, in a letter signed by Moussa Koussa. It was another four years and seven months before the UK and US governments, under strong international pressure, also agreed.]
ROBERT BLACK: It's an absolute and utter disgrace that Megrahi was convicted on the evidence that was laid against him.
The main planks of the Megrahi conviction have now crumbled.
MATTHEW CARNEY: The key witness to Megrahi's conviction was the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci.
He identified Megrahi as the man that bought a shirt that was later found wrapped around fragments of the bomb at the crash site.
ROBERT BLACK: Megrahi did not fit the description that Gauci had given to the police of the purchaser. That description was of a man over six feet tall, over 50 years of age and with dark skin. Now Megrahi is light skinned, he is five feet-eight inches tall, or was before he died [and he was at the time 36 years old].
MATTHEW CARNEY: Black says new evidence shows Tony Gauci gave 19 wildly conflicting police statements, and that the prosecution's star witness had to be coached.
ROBERT BLACK: Before the court appearance at Zeist when (...) he pointed to Megrahi and said he looks a lot like the person who bought the clothes, he had been shown photographs of Megrahi by the prosecution.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Black believes the other critical piece of evidence to the prosecution's case has also been discredited. It's a fragment of the bomb's timer found at the crash site that had been tracked to a Swiss manufacturer that sold the device to Libya.
ROBERT BLACK: It has now become clear, in the past few days that that [sliver] of circuit board that formed virtually the only link between the bomb and Libya, does not in fact come from one of these Swiss circuit boards. It is metallurgical[ly] different from the circuit boards used in the Mebo, the Swiss company's, timers.
MATTHEW CARNEY: Momentum is building for an appeal to go ahead or an independent inquiry to held.
Many victims' families are supporting the move, like Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, in the disaster.
JIM SWIRE: What the current maintained fiction is doing is to protect those monsters who actually did carry out the attack; who I believed to have been originally people in Iran using a particular terrorist group in Syria.
ELIZABETH JACKSON: That's Dr Jim Swire ending that report from Matthew Carney.
MISSION LOCKERBIE, 2012. (google translation, german/english):
ReplyDeleteScottish judges in the Netherlands (Kamp van Zeist) acted in the circumstantial evidence "Lockerbie Process" on manipulated crucial evidences, including the (MST-13 timefragment "PT/35") and without knowledge that a crucial 'Document Under National Security' (PII) was embezzling after the 13th September 1996, including the break-in into the suitcase stockroom K3 in Heathrow...
by Edwin and Mahnaz Bollier, MEBO Ltd. Switzerland. URL: www.lockerbie.ch