Prevarications, obfuscations and plain lies

[What follows is the text of a report published in today’s edition of The National:]

There will never be closure in the Lockerbie bombing case until it returns to the appeal court, according to one of Scotland’s top lawyers.

Glasgow solicitor Aamer Anwar, who represents the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, was speaking to The National yesterday – the 28th anniversary of the atrocity in which 270 people died.

“Some of the British relatives, as well as the Megrahi family, do not believe that there has ever been closure,” said Anwar. “They remain determined to search for justice and the truth.

“At this stage it would be inappropriate to comment other than to say the legal process is certainly not at an end and my thoughts are with those families of the victims, but also the family of Al Megrahi. Until this case returns to the appeal court there will never be closure.”

Earlier, Megrahi’s family reiterated their belief that the Libyan was innocent of the bombing.

Writing on a social media page set up by the Friends of Justice for Megrahi (JfM), they said they were “on the right path” to finding out the truth.

They said there was new evidence and they were working “in Switzerland and Scotland” to finally prove that Megrahi was innocent.

Writing on the same page, John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, also expressed his belief that Megrahi, who died in 2012, was innocent.

“It is now beyond clarity that the Libyan man found guilty was falsely accused and convicted,” he said. “As one of the only two relatives who attended the whole trial and first appeal in Holland, I came away convinced that a gross miscarriage of justice had been carried out.”

Mosey said that former Sheriff Principal John Mowat has said Lockerbie was “a preventable disaster”, and the question was why it had been allowed to happen.

“This question has not even been permitted to be asked let alone answered,” he said. “Every effort to raise this question has been rebuffed. Mrs Thatcher made it very plain that there would be no independent inquiry into this, the largest mass killing in the UK outside wartime.

“Our efforts to get an answer to this primary question have been reinforced by the mass of evidence that it was known beforehand that a Pan Am flight out of the UK to the USA would have a bomb on board in a Toshiba cassette player in that week before Christmas.

“At least 10 warnings were logged by the FAA and other authorities. An anonymous phone call to the US embassy in Helsinki on December 5 gave accurate details of the bomb and the week it would be deployed.”

Mosey added that he and other families still wanted an answer to the big question: “Those who we pay to govern and protect us failed miserably even though the danger was known.

“Nothing was done to either prevent the disaster or to warn the public. We have been forced down the important but subsidiary road of questioning the verdict and attacking the Scottish legal system. We do not want to have anyone hung out to dry but simply to have some transparency and honesty from those who have strung us along for all of these years with prevarications, obfuscations and plain lies.”