Well-qualified commentators have pulled Megrahi's conviction apart

What follows is excerpted from an article by Marcello Mega in The Sunday Times today. The published version may vary slightly from the text below.

With a Libyan agent convicted in January 2001 of the Lockerbie bombing and another soon to be tried in the US, you might wonder why many relatives of the dead remain so fixated on seeking truth.

Dr Jim Swire has led the campaign, unconvinced by the evidence he heard at the Scottish Court in the Netherlands against two Libyans that saw one of them convicted of mass murder, and increasingly aware over the many years since of the hidden evidence that might have cleared both.

In the year ahead, two television dramas and the trial in Washington of Abu Agila Masud, accused of making the bomb that took 270 lives on 21 December 1988, will remind us that the full story is still unknown.

Sky’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, with Colin Firth playing Swire, will be first to reach the public, from 2 January.

The series is based on Swire’s book Lockerbie: A Father's Search for Justice, which points to many holes in the story accepted by the trial and highlights contradictory evidence that has emerged since.

Early on in the project, Firth requested a briefing because he sensed it could have a similar impact on the public as Mr Bates and the Post Office, which transformed understanding of the Post Office scandal.

Firth wanted to be certain any similar impact on understanding of Lockerbie would be justified. The briefing was arranged with experts who understood the case and Firth was happy to proceed.

Now 88 and having devoted 36 years to the quest for truth after his daughter Flora was murdered on the flight, Swire is weary and has signalled it might be time to put down his sword.

Having been promised and denied a full public inquiry by the Tory Government of the day and by the Labour Government that followed, he believes all documents held on the case should now be made public.

He holds out little hope, but believes the drama might animate the public, making the demand for truth harder to resist.

The 82-page judgment of Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield (now deceased) and Maclean is available online, double-spaced and not a difficult read.

Well-qualified commentators such as Gareth Peirce, who overturned the convictions of the Guildford Four, and Professor Robert Black, who devised the scheme for the Lockerbie trial in a neutral country, have pulled it apart.

The prosecution’s case started with an unaccompanied suitcase carrying a bomb being placed on Air Malta Flight KM180 from Luqa Airport to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988.

It was supposedly tagged to go on to Pan Am 103A to Heathrow and then to New York-bound Pan Am 103.

Swire, in common with many others, believes that a security breach not disclosed during the trial allowed the bomb to start its path at Heathrow where the plane was loaded from empty.

The judges, however, decided that an unaccompanied suitcase did travel on the Air Malta flight while recognising that not a shred of evidence supported it.

It might have been even harder to make that leap of faith had baggage handlers from Luqa been called as witnesses.

In their statements, they explained that not only did an unaccompanied bag not travel on the flight, it could not have happened because of the simple system they used.

They never knew how many passengers were booked on a flight, but physically counted the bags going on, then called the check-in desk to see if their counts matched. If not, the bags came off and the count restarted.

One or two of these witnesses could potentially have killed the Crown’s case at its inception, but they were never called.

In a highly complex case involving thousands of witness statements and tens of thousands of productions, Megrahi’s conviction came down to two essential matters: the testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci and the identification of a fragment of circuit board said to have detonated the bomb as coming from a batch sold only to Libya.

The judges did not know until after the trial that Gauci’s evidence was tainted by the promise of reward money from the US.

Gauci, now dead, received $2m, and his brother Paul, who didn’t even testify, a further $1m.

The Scottish justice system has largely ignored the relevance of these rewards. The late Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, a Scottish clan chief who became one of England’s most senior judges, said if he had ever become aware of witnesses receiving rewards for evidence, he would have ordered the jury to discount it entirely.

Instead, the trial judges attached inexplicable weight to Gauci’s testimony. He never stated unequivocally that Megrahi bought the clothes from his shop that were placed in the case alongside the bomb.

Even in court, asked to make a simple dock identification, he qualified it by saying Megrahi resembled the man, as he had in all his statements, although his first description was of a man many years younger and several inches taller.

The judgment acknowledged his lack of certainty several times, but at the final mention the judges turned it into a virtue, suggesting it underlined his honesty. This measure of reliability cannot be found elsewhere in Scottish criminal law.

In addition, the judges stated without obvious reason that Gauci was “100% reliable”, on the list of clothing bought from his shop and the prices paid.

Yet in 1999, Gauci had produced an entirely different list from the first one while making a fresh statement in advance of the trial.

Like other evidence that did not suit the prosecution case it was not passed to the defence.

The judges also had to decide whether the clothing had been bought on 23 November, when Megrahi was not on the island, or 7 December, when he was.

They accepted that meteorological and other evidence suggested 23 November was more likely, but stated that they preferred 7 December, offering nothing of substance to support the decision.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said later that no reasonable court could have concluded the clothing was purchased on 7 December, a particularly damning view when no jury was involved.

Remarkably, the evidence around the circuit board is still unfolding. Of all the thousands of productions in the case, only one evidence bag, the one containing the fragment, had its label overwritten, fuelling a belief it had been planted.

Forensic tests after the trial showed no trace of explosives’ residue, so the fragment was unlikely to have been at the heart of a bomb. Later, metallurgical tests showed it actually came from a type of board put into production in 1989, adding to the suspicion of a plant.  

All three key forensic ‘experts’ in the case who testified on the fragment, two British and one American, have been completely discredited for malpractice in other murder cases.

Jim Swire has been my friend for more than 30 years. We once undertook an investigation to Sweden together to try to challenge Abu Talb, a man we believed was involved in the bombing.

His age is now against him taking similar bold steps to establish the truth, but the signature obstinance of this admirable man has never seemed perverse to me.

RB: The present post differs somewhat in format from the norm in this blog. This is because the hardware and software on which I am having to rely in Ajman is not what I am accustomed to.