[1. This is the headline over a report published on The Scotsman website on this date in 2007. It reads as follows:]
A witness in the Lockerbie case has claimed he was offered $4 million (£2 million) by American investigators to lie to the trial judges.
Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company MEBO that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, claims he was offered the money by the FBI at its Washington HQ in exchange for making a statement that supported the main line of inquiry - that Libya was responsible for the bombing.
He has told Dr Hans Koechler, who was a UN observer during the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in the Netherlands, that he was offered a "new life" in the United States if he testified that the timer found in the plane wreckage had been supplied to Libya.
"I rejected this and said this could not possibly be the case," he said. He added that there was a "loud dispute" after he rejected the offer.
The claim follows news that the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, whose evidence led to Megrahi's conviction, was offered $2 million by the CIA.
[2. On this date in 2012 a letter from the late Jock Thomson QC headed Career prosecutors as law officers have destroyed criminal justice system was published in The Herald. It reads in part:]
History will show that the genesis of the destruction of our criminal justice system was the appointment of career prosecutors as law officers: beginning with (now) Dame Elish Angiolini QC as Solicitor General and continuing with a succession of senior members of Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) since who have become and will remain Lord Advocate and Solicitor General for the foreseeable future.
This has led to the unholy, unhealthy alliance of law officers and law makers: Kenny MacAskill and Frank Mulholland, in the same bed. There is no separation of powers. Constitutionally the system now is morally and mortally flawed.
The fall-out from Cadder led to the knee-jerk Cadder Reforms. Ms Angiolini's furore about lack of convictions in rape cases, many of which should never have been raised in the first place, led Mr MacAskill to appoint Lord Carloway to consider whether the law should be amended to abolish the need for corroboration. The current Lord Advocate wants to do away with the accused's right to silence and the logical follow-on from that will be to make the accused a compellable witness. Will the next inexorable draconian step be the replacement of the presumption of innocence with that of a presumption of guilt? It's beginning to look that way. And by that time there may be little or no Criminal Legal Aid.
Bollier is a known liar and fabricator, as you must know. Why do you keep publicizing him, this one from 2007? Do you not believe anything that Ken Dornstien has uncovered?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/my-brothers-bomber/uncovering-a-new-clue-in-the-decades-long-lockerbie-mystery/
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.co.za/2015/10/linking-megrahi-to-new-lockerbie.html
DeleteExactly what has Ken Dornstein uncovered that links Megrahi with the planting of a bomb in a baggage contained at Heathrow airport at about 4.30 pm GMT on 21st December 1988 (when Megrahi himself was in Tripoli, a thousand miles away), packed in a suitcase with clothes Megrahi certainly didn't buy?
DeleteGo on, Frank, you can explain this! Just try!
Baggage container, even.
DeleteDear Mr. Duggan,
ReplyDeleteif you have problems with evidence from 'known liars and fabricators' I understand you very well.
Can I assume that you then also feel the same about the Lockerbie evidence provided by FBI?
Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who joined the FBI in 1982 and served as a Supervisory Special Agent at the Lab from 1986 to 1998, blew the whistle on scientific misconduct at the Lab. In a subsequent investigation, it was found that evidence had been falsified, altered, or suppressed, or that FBI agents had testified falsely, in as many as 10,000 cases, resulting in many false convictions. More than a decade later, cases were still being overturned because of this massive fraud. As a result of Whitehurst's whistleblowing, the FBI Lab implemented forty major reforms, including undergoing an accreditation process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory
Frank always dismisses factual and reasoned evidence he doesn't like by attacking the people presenting the evidence. Edwin Bollier may be entirely untrustworthy, but if he warned you not to go outside because it was raining heavily, would you step out in your shirt without even bothering to check first?
ReplyDeleteFrank can't play the balls he's being lobbed, so he tried to play the man. Invariably. That's all.