[This is the headline over an article by Jon Snow on the Channel 4 News website on this date in 2011. It reads as follows:]
While Libya continues to burn, an eerie silence has descended over the British media’s interest in reopening the uncertainties surrounding the Lockerbie bombing. The occasional defecting Libyan minister has pretended to hold previously untold secrets, but nothing has come of them.
It was left to Al Jazeera English to try to lance the boil last Thursday when the channel broadcast an explosive documentary on the subject. The programme makers had gained access to the unpublished report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission into the case.
Even more importantly, they managed to see the notebooks and diaries of the Scottish and American investigators written at the time. These were also in the possession of the Review Commission.
In short, the diaries make a blistering allegation – that the central Maltese witness whose testimony was key to convicting Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – had been bribed. The diaries record the apparent “offer of inducements made to Tony Gauci”, the Maltese shopkeeper who identified clothes that were found in the suitcase that carried the bomb on the plane, as having been bought at his shop by al-Megrahi.
Tony Gauci’s brother, Paul, it is claimed, in the same diaries as having “a clear desire to gain financial benefit”. The Review Commissions’ own report states that after the trial Tony Gauci was paid $2 million, and that brother Paul got $1 million reward money.
If true, these would be completely dynamite revelations. Of course, they would have come out in the appeal that Megrahi’s release prevented happening. It is inconceivable that this Scottish Review Commission’s report would not have surfaced at such an appeal. Does this perhaps explain why he was eventually bundled so speedily out of the country?
But the other question remains… why was it left to Al Jazeera to make these allegations?
The UK is so controlled by "Secercy" legislation that its virtually impossinle to bring out the truth about any criminal activity. As Davic Shaylor said "In Britain its a crime to report a crime" Thts why AJE had to do it.
ReplyDeleteJFM has not survived for nigh on eight years by being idiots. Our aim has always been open and simplictity itself: analyse the evidence; put it under the microscope; find the shortcomings and forensically destroy them. The only reason that the COPFS has decided to pursue an opposing case in pursuit of attempting to incriminate other Libyans now, along with the FBI, is because we have put the cat amongst the pigeons. Otherwise the case would have been dismissed as having been solved at Zeist in 2001. Well, it hasn't. Our challenge is, and has always been, to prove that the evidence accepted at Kamp van Zeist was fundamentally flawed. Once it is established that our case is one to be answered, the authorities will require some damned tough pick axes.
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