Father of victim says nothing reliable will come out of Lockerbie probe

[This is the headline over a report published in today’s edition of The National. The Rev’d John Mosey, as ever, speaks sound sense on Lockerbie. The article reads as follows:]

The father of a teenage Lockerbie victim yesterday said the new probe will not help “find the truth” after Libyan authorities offered prosecutors the chance to interview suspects.

Musician Helga Mosey was just 19 when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town, killing her and 269 other people in 1988. Now Scottish prosecutors have been invited to Libya to interview two new suspects in the case.

Although the pair have not been officially named, it is understood that they are Mohammed Abouajela Masud and Abdullah al-Senussi.

Both are serving prison terms in Libya, with Masud thought to be serving 10 years for bomb-making and Senussi – the brother-in-law and intelligence chief of former dictator Colonel Gaddafi – on death row.

Jamal Zubair, spokesman for the self-declared National Salvation government which controls much of the country, said authorities would facilitate interviews with the men, telling the BBC: “They can send some investigators, they come here to see those guys and see what they can do.

“Always we are very helpful, we want to talk to people and we want to show what we have.

“We might have more evidence about other people or maybe those guys have more information about something else.”

However, Mosey’s father John has expressed doubt about the development, telling broadcaster West Sound: “I’m not quite sure whether I would accept as genuine or real anything that came out of troubled Libya just at the moment.

“I think that if you spread enough dollars around and make enough promises you could get almost anybody to say almost anything.

“I know that if I was on death row like Senussi is there, I would offer to make any confession they wanted in exchange for a centrally heated cell in Glasgow with Sky TV.”

Though Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who died in 2012, is the only person ever convicted of the atrocity, it was always believed that he did not work alone and Scottish and US investigators announced that two new suspects had been identified last week.

The development follows the screening of a three-part documentary series by American Ken Dornstein, whose brother David died in the atrocity.

He said: “We went in with a list of names that had come from the original investigation, pulled out of the tens of thousands of pages of documents. I established many were dead or missing. “Ultimately, I concluded there may be three people left.”

Speaking about Masud, he added: “Figuring out simply that he existed would solve many of the unanswered questions to the bombing because he was attached to Megrahi according to the best information there was, including at the airport in Malta on the day that the bomb was said to have been infiltrated into the baggage system and ultimately on to Flight 103.”

However, Mosey, from Lancaster, who believes Megrahi was innocent, said: “I don’t think it’s a step forward, I think it’s an effort to delay forward movement.

“The Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission, an independent body, came up with six grounds on which there could have been a miscarriage of justice against Megrahi, who personally I don’t believe was involved at all.

“These are the things that need looking at really, not remote interviews with people that might or might not be involved.

“They need to look at the serious, serious questionings there are about the outcome of the trial, which I attended the whole of.

“I have no confidence that any good will come out of this. I think it’s a blind of some sort to delay facing the real facts.

“There’s certainly no closure for us. We think of our daughter every day and it’s something we carry til the day we die.

“If you mean closure in finding the truth, no I don’t think this is going to bring us any closure at all.”