Phony forensics

[This is the headline over an article in the current issue of Private Eye.  As reproduced on John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury website, it reads as follows:]

The last Eye’s revelations that the Crown had kept secret a report which undermined prosecution claims about the circuit board fragment used to convict Abdelbasset al-Megrahi of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has prompted justice campaigner Jim Swire to raise further questions.  The fragment, said to be part of the bomb’s timing device, was said to have been found by scientists embedded in blasted shirt remains, and the evidence bag in which it was discovered had been altered by someone who was never identified.

Furthermore, the fragment had tested “negative” for explosive traces and there were discrepancies about how it was stored, tested and identified. It had been passed between UK scientists and the US investigators who came up with the “match” to timing devices supplied to Libya thus linking the country and Megrahi to the bombing, which killed 270 people, including Dr Swire’s daughter, Flora.

“Now that we know that it was always known that it could not have been part of a Libyan timer used in the bomb, where did it come from?” asked Swire. So far there is no indication that the Crown Office has chosen find out.

Nor, says Dr Swire, is it looking into the break-in at Heathrow 16 hours before the departure of Pan Am flight 103. This information was also withheld from Megrahi’s trial – although it had been disclosed by the time of his appeal. As he told the Eye: “I would like to know why this myth about the fragment and Libyan bombs from Malta is still being used to conceal the truth, and why the real perpetrators remain free from ever being brought before any court for this crime against humanity.”

Earlier this year the Scottish newspaper The Herald confidently reported that two of the leading lawyers involved in the Lockerbie case were about to become high court judges. It said that the judicial appointments board had recommended for the bench the former Lord Advocate Colin (now Lord) Boyd QC, who led the prosecution of Megrahi, and Maggie Scott QC, who led Megrahi’s abandoned appeal, along with Michael Jones and David Burns. 

Lord Boyd was recently criticised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for failing to disclose crucial information about a series of CIA cables referring to its Walter Mitty-like “star witness”, Abdul Majid Giaka, a so-called double agent, which completely undermined the witness’s credibility (Eyes passim). But guess who failed to make the judicial cut out of the four candidates? Only the troublesome Ms Scott. She declined to discuss the matter with the Eye.

[The full text of the statement made by Dr Swire to Private Eye reads as follows:]

As you say, we now know that the circuit board fragment simply could not have come from one of the Libyan owned timers. The metal coating on the copper tracks is profoundly different from that on the Libyan boards.

You might like to highlight the fact that the circuit board fragment was claimed to have been found by the British Forensics expert Allen Feraday inside a Scottish police evidence bag.

Now that we know it could not have been part of a Libyan timer used in the bomb, where else could it have originated? There was no scrap of evidence led at trial that anything found among the wreckage could have been an electronic device from which it might have come.

The evidence bag in which it turned up was the only evidence bag found to have had its label altered (by an unknown hand). The legend had been altered from the original 'charred cloth' to read instead 'charred debris'.

To speculate, it sounds as though whoever went to the considerable trouble and risk of altering the contents and the label, was anxious that debris other than just the cloth should be found by the forensics guys on searching the bag's contents.

To speculate again, had it been my shirt collar, I think I would have changed my shirt before so much debris had accumulated in the fold of its collar. Nor would I probably have been wearing a shirt easily traceable to the Gauci shop in Malta in the first place. The debris found within the collar's folds included the imitation Libyan timer fragment as well as some pieces of black plastic, conveniently traceable to the Toshiba radio/cassette machine in which the bomb was said to have been housed.

Returning from speculation to the real world, there is no evidence for any source for the fragment from the wreckage, other than allegedly from the bomb, and we now know that the fragment could not have originated from a Libyan timer anyway.

On top of that we also know from independent explosives testing of various sizes of Semtex bomb, that it is all but impossible that the fragment could have survived in any recognisable form from the proximity of a Semtex explosion big enough to destroy the 747.

So where might this much-travelled fragment really have come from? Was it not gross negligence on the part of the Scottish police to allow their evidence bag to be corrupted both as to content and labelling?

It has emerged that the Lord Advocate as head of the Crown Office prosecution service in Scotland can actually dictate to the police what aspects of a murder inquiry they should pursue. So far they have chosen not to investigate how the fragment got into their evidence bag, nor who changed their label

Another aspect of this case which 'the police decided not to pursue' was the break-in at Heathrow 16 hours before Lockerbie. If, as most now believe, an air pressure sensitive bomb from the PFPL-GC terror group in Syria really brought down the plane, then it would have been necessary for the perpetrator to have access to the hold of the target aircraft at the airport of origin since the bombs always exploded 35-45 minutes after take-off, and so could not have been flown in from say Frankfurt as the prosecution claimed.

The Lockerbie aircraft duly flew for 38 minutes, from Heathrow to Lockerbie.

What was the prosecution's input over the Heathrow break-in? Well according to the current chief constable of the Dumfries and Galloway police (copied below), they were told all about it by the Met. in January 1989, but suppressed it, and in conjunction with the Crown Office failed to pass any information about the break-in to the defence until after the verdict against Mr Megrahi had been reached.

What was the current Lord Advocate's reaction in February 2012 when I challenged him as to why the Heathrow evidence had not been available to the court?

1. His staff pointed out that the evidence was used in Megrahi's first (failed) appeal at Zeist.

2. A spokesperson for his office later publicly claimed that the Crown Office did not believe that the evidence would have altered the court's verdict.

I would like to know why my innocent daughter and all those others walked through the halls of Heathrow that night trusting in the security that would be given to them in those days of known heightened terrorist risk, when in fact the airport had made no effort to trace the intruder of the night before.

I would like to know why a totally spurious myth about Libyan bombs from Malta is being used to this day to conceal the truth, and in the process allow the real perpetrators to bask in the sun, free of the fear of being brought before any court for this crime against humanity.

How does this behaviour of concealing the truth about the largest terrorist slaughter ever to occur in the UK fit into the renowned 'war on terror', in whose name we still send our young men to risk their lives in Afghanistan?

Why does our Prime Minister continue to profess belief in the Megrahi verdict?

Why does Scotland's First Minister do the same?

I remember President Clinton's famous comment 'It's the economy stupid'.

Reprobate pre-Thatcherite that I am, I believe that human life and honesty are more important than the power conferred by wealth. There are such things as right and wrong, people know that and we ignore them at our peril. 


[Because of commitments at Gannaga Lodge -- an internet-free zone -- over the next few days, it is unlikely that I shall be able to service this blog until Monday, 18 June.]