The truth died at Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a long article just published in English on the website of Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The original German language version was published on 14 June:]

Thirty-six years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, US prosecutors are pursuing a new case stemming from the terrorist attack. At the center of the investigation is a colorful entrepreneur from Zurich and his claims of conspiracy.

Edwin Bollier, now nearly 88 years old, sits in his office on Badenerstrasse in Zurich and says: "The book is written. All I have to do is pull it out of the drawer." In his book, Bollier finally wants to tell what he sees as the whole truth about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which more people were killed than in any terrorist attack in Europe since. (...)

Now, at last, US prosecutors are bringing their own case relating to what President Ronald Reagan called the "attack on America." Many years ago, a mid-level intelligence agent from Libya was convicted in Scotland of being involved in the attack. However, some observers never gave up their doubts about this guilty verdict. A figure accused of being an accomplice of the convicted man is currently in custody in the United States, and a new round of legal procedures is underway.

US prosecutors in Zurich

Last year, two prosecutors and a judge traveled to Zurich to question Bollier as a witness. He is confident that the American court will follow his lead when it ultimately makes its ruling. "I have provided all the information necessary to finally expose the conspiracy," he says.

Bollier argues that it was not in fact Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence service that was behind the bombing, but rather a Syrian-Palestinian commando group acting on behalf of Iran.

Bollier says he is waiting for the US court verdict to be issued before publishing his book. However, the court handling the case recently postponed the trial date originally set for May, citing, among other factors, the "complexity" of the case.

Bollier isn’t concerned. He says he is prepared to testify whenever the trial takes place.

No one knows PT/35 (b) as well

The Zurich entrepreneur is also one of the key figures in the US court proceedings. No one is as familiar with the piece of evidence with the file number PT/35 (b) as well as he is. This exhibit is no larger than a fingernail. It is only 1 millimeter thick, and weighs less than 1 gram.

For more than 30 years, the entire Lockerbie case has hinged on this tiny piece of evidence.

It comes from an electronic circuit board, the kind of technology found in every smartphone today. A circuit board is flat, made partially out of conductive metal, and serves as the foundation on which the components necessary for an electronic device are built. The circuit board to which the fragment in question belonged before being torn out by the explosion in the Boeing 747 was part of a timer-based detonator.

Out of the huge, several-ton pile of debris that was recovered in Lockerbie, PT/35 (b) is the only piece that points to Libya. Without this tiny fragment, the Libyan intelligence agent named Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi could not have been charged.

In his office on Badenerstrasse, Bollier is poring over files. He reads them without glasses, even the small print. When he talks about Lockerbie, which he usually does almost without pause for breath, he sometimes mixes up names or dates. Then his wife Mahnaz, a native Persian who came to Switzerland after the fall of the shah, comes to his aid.

It didn't take her long to became part of Team Bollier, and today she knows the Lockerbie case's ins and outs almost as well as her husband.

The film and TV industry has also been subjecting the crash of Pan Am 103 to a thorough reexamination. Several productions have called the Scottish court ruling into question, in some cases openly postulating a miscarriage of justice. The streaming platform Sky is showing an ambitious documentary on the subject, paired with a successful dramatization of the incident as a series starring Colin Firth in the lead role. Its rival Netflix will soon follow with a program produced in collaboration with the BBC.

Too sensitive for Al Jazeera

However, the most controversial production has proved to be a multipart series created by Arab television network Al Jazeera. One episode was withdrawn after broadcast, and the last episode was not broadcast at all. Apparently, it was too controversial for the network’s Qatari owners. The NZZ has viewed all episodes of this series. It reveals previously unknown information that adds weight to suspicions that Iran was behind the attack.

Sooner or later, every documentary filmmaker addressing this subject finds their way to Badenerstrasse 414 in Zurich – that is, to Bollier's office. The BBC has sent its film crews here, as have Sky and Al Jazeera. The multistory concrete building in Zurich's Nova Park gives the feeling of having been drawn from another era. Stepping into the third-floor office with the sign "MEBO LTD," a visitor might well feel that they had been transported back to the 1970s. (...)

Explosives in a cassette recorder

On the evening of Dec 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York, had just reached its cruising altitude of 9,000 meters when a bomb exploded in the cargo hold. A timer-based detonator built into a Toshiba cassette recorder had triggered the explosion. The plane crashed.

All 259 passengers and crew members, most of them US citizens on their way to their Christmas holidays, were killed. An additional 11 people at the crash site in Lockerbie also lost their lives.

The delivery to Libya

A few years previously, in 1985, Bollier's small electronics company Mebo had delivered 20 timer devices to Libya – of the same model that triggered the explosion. This delivery is a matter of record and is undisputed.

The name "Mebo" is drawn from the names of the two company founders, Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier. While Meister has long since withdrawn from public life, Bollier is still fighting on the front lines to defend his company's reputation.

Mebo Ltd. was a simple trading company with a focus on electrical appliances. It even developed a few devices itself. This included a timer with the model number MST-13. An engineer, Mebo’s sole employee, had developed the device in a small workshop. A third-party company manufactured the MST-13 timer according to his plans.

The Libyan army was almost the sole purchaser of these timers. A few additional units were sold to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police agency.

"But we didn't supply detonators to Libya. Just electronic timers," Bollier insists in an interview in his office.

This distinction is important to him – after all, a timer is not in itself a weapon. A timer becomes a weapon only if it is connected to a detonator. Mebo did not do that, Bollier says. Libya thus must have hooked up the detonator itself.

The business owner picks up a timer that is sitting on his desk in his office. The MST-13 is about the size of a fist. It is nothing more than a simple timer, he says. "Similar to an alarm clock or an egg timer, only a bit more robust, fireproof and waterproof."

Mebo had an export license for the delivery of the timer-based switches to Libya and the East German government. The Swiss agency in charge of overseeing such exports did not find that this contract violated the country’s Federal Act on War Materiel.

Because the issue is so important to him, we have agreed with Bollier to use the English word "timer" throughout this article, even in its German-language original – referring both to timers with and without detonators attached.

And what did the Libyan army use the timers from Switzerland for? Bollier insists that the army used them as defensive weapons. The sale came during the desert war against neighboring Chad. The timers were set in military camps where capture was deemed a possibility, he says. If a squad was able to retain its position, it would defuse the explosive. However, if a camp were to be captured by the enemy, the device would go off at some point.

Bollier has never been charged with any crime in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, either as an accomplice or an accessory, even though the Scottish authorities did consider doing so. In Switzerland, the Office of the Attorney General initiated criminal proceedings, but these were discontinued after four years.

Bollier has always appeared in court only as a witness. For more than 30 years, he has been saying the same thing: that the Lockerbie discovery, exhibit PT/35 (b), that tiny fragment of bomb-wrecked timer, differs in various details from the timers that Bollier’s firm delivered to Libya.

For example, he argues that the fragment exhibits characteristics that were introduced only in 1990, more than a year after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this, says Bollier: "Someone must have placed the find at the crash site after the fact, in order to lay a false trail pointing to Libya."

Brown instead of charred

When investigators from Scotland and the US first showed him a photo of the discovery, Bollier recognized it immediately. That was in 1990. "In the photo, the fragment was brown," he recalls. "But after the explosion, it should have been charred."

When he later saw the original of the PT/35 (b) fragment, it was no longer brown – it was charred, he says. From this, Bollier concludes that the alleged find is not only a forgery, but was also tampered with after the fact.

This is clearly an outrageous accusation. But Bollier stands by it. He refers to the alleged forgers and manipulators of the only piece of conclusive evidence from Lockerbie as "Group XXX." By this he means those within Scottish and American government agencies that he says were responsible for this falsification, in cooperation with the Swiss intelligence service, which was then a part of the Federal Office of Police.

However, as someone making such a serious accusation, Bollier has a problem: His credibility is in tatters.

Someone once said that Bollier was the worst witness imaginable, thanks to his dubious past. Anyone who did business during the Cold War with the secret police and intelligence services of Libya and East Germany, with Gaddafi’s «Jamahiriya» state and the Stasi, has inevitably seen their reputation permanently damaged.

Bollier's fight for the truth, as he calls it, is therefore also a fight for his own rehabilitation. Furthermore, if the trail to Libya does indeed turn out to be falsified and manipulated, this would do more than exonerate Bollier morally – he would also be entitled to the equivalent of millions of dollars in financial compensation.

However, Edwin Bollier is not alone in his assertion that exhibit PT/35 (b) was planted at the Lockerbie crash site after the fact. Jim Swire is convinced of this as well.

Bollier’s opposite

When it comes to credibility, Swire is the opposite of Bollier. The English doctor lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. With his clear independence and unimpugned integrity, he soon became a respected spokesman for the families of the British victims.

Bollier and Swire share the same view. But it is no coincidence that Colin Firth is playing the English country doctor rather than the Swiss wheeler-dealer in Sky’s dramatization of the events.

Since the crash of Pan Am 103, Swire has dedicated his life to finding his daughter’s murderers, as he consistently refers to them. At 89 years old, he still hasn't achieved his goal.

Swire once campaigned vigorously to bring Libyan defendant Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and his alleged accomplices to trial in Scotland. When, after much back and forth, that trial finally took place on neutral ground at the former Camp Zeist military base in the Netherlands, Swire did not miss a single one of the 85 days of proceedings.

Nothing would have made him happier than to know at last who had been responsible for his daughter's death. But at the end of the trial, he found himself convinced that al-Megrahi was innocent, and had nothing to do with the bombing.

Befriended the convicted attacker

On the day the verdict was announced, Swire was so distraught that he suffered a breakdown. He was shocked by al-Megrahi's conviction – along with the simultaneous acquittal of his alleged accomplice – and disappointed by the Scottish justice system.

Swire visited al-Megrahi several times in prison, and ultimately became friends with him. When the Libyan was diagnosed with cancer, Swire spoke out strongly in favor of his release. «The sooner he is released, the better,» he was quoted as saying in the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.

When al-Megrahi was dying in 2012, Swire traveled to Tripoli amid the unrest following Gaddafi’s fall. Even on his deathbed, al-Megrahi protested his innocence.

Swire fulfilled his last wish. In his book published in 2021, the key message is that fragment PT/35 (b) cannot have come from any of the 20 timers that Bollier's Mebo had once delivered to Libya – and that al-Megrahi's conviction was therefore a miscarriage of justice.

The FBI on board

The investigation into the bombing was led by the Scottish police. However, the United States' domestic intelligence service, the FBI, was also involved from the beginning – a concession made to the US by the Scottish authorities in view of the large number of victims from America.

The unusual collaboration made the enormous investigation – featuring a debris field alone that stretched over several dozen square kilometers – even more complicated. «We weren't used to not being in the lead,» says the self-assured FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise in one of the many documentaries about Lockerbie.

However, by tapping its global network, the FBI was able to open up various sources that would have remained closed to the Scottish police. "Even the CIA supported us," Marquise once said. Given the rivalry between the two major US intelligence services, this was unusual, he noted.

Yet despite years of investigation and a huge pile of files, the case ultimately led only to the disputed conviction of the single Libyan intelligence agent.

The trail to Iran

Initially, everything pointed in a different direction. Indeed, after just a few months, the Lockerbie case seemed to have been solved, with investigators regarding it as a probable act of retaliation by Iran.

On July 3, 1988, a few months before Lockerbie, a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf – accidentally, according to official statements. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, were killed.

Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly vowed revenge, saying that an American aircraft carrying many passengers would be shot down. There was subsequently much to suggest that the Iranian regime had commissioned a commando group from Syria known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, to carry out the retaliatory action.

The PFLP-GC operated from Syria under the command of Ahmed Jibril. In 1970, his agents had used a parcel bomb to bring down Swissair Flight 330 over Würenlingen, killing all 47 passengers. In that instance, the explosive was built into a radio and triggered by an altimeter.

Thanks to the investigations in the Würenlingen case, hardly anyone in the West was as familiar with the PFLP-GC as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General. Six months after Lockerbie, in late May 1989, three Scottish investigators thus traveled to Bern to exchange information with their Swiss colleagues.

The secret meeting lasted two days, turning up striking parallels. The plastic explosive used in the Lockerbie bombing had been Semtex, which was manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was the same material that had been used in Würenlingen. Even the bomb maker appeared to be the same individual, a Jordanian named Marwan Khreesat.

A few weeks before Lockerbie, in late October 1988, Khreesat had been arrested in Düsseldorf as part of a broad operation dubbed "Autumn Leaves." In total, German police arrested more than a dozen members of the PFLP-GC – dealing a serious blow to the terrorist group.

During the raid, police also seized four electronic devices, all of which had been rigged with explosives. One of these devices was a Toshiba portable radio.

It thus appeared that German police had foiled a planned series of attacks by the PFLP-GC. However, interviews with the detainees revealed that the terrorists had originally prepared five such devices, not just four.

The conclusion seemed obvious: The fifth electrical device must have been the Toshiba cassette recorder that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

When the Scottish delegation bid farewell to their Swiss colleagues on May 25, 1989, the case appeared to be solved. Investigators believed that the Toshiba cassette recorder containing the explosives had been loaded into the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 at Frankfurt Airport on the Pan Am 103 A feeder flight to London Heathrow.

This conclusion was stated in the minutes drawn up by the Swiss Office of the Attorney General following the meeting with their colleagues from Scotland. After a lengthy tug-of-war, the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine published these minutes a few years ago.

But then everything changed.

The shift to Libya

No arrest warrant was issued for Khreesat, the alleged bomb maker, or for any other member of the PFLP-GC initially suspected of involvement.

Instead, the Scottish police and the FBI, who had been focusing their part of the investigation on Iran, issued arrest warrants for two previously unknown Libyans: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and an alleged accomplice, the station manager of the Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

Exactly how these arrest warrants came to be issued remains unclear today. Apparently, they were based on secret information from the CIA and a somewhat shady agent in Malta.

In his office, Bollier rummages through one of the many piles that have accumulated in an adjoining room over the past decades.

He finds the newspaper article he is looking for, and offers a summary: The surprising turnaround in the investigation was the result of the geostrategic climate at the time, which was very different from today's. The United States and the United Kingdom, which at the time were at war with Iraq, did not want to spoil their relationship with Iran’s government as well.

Thus, the article argued, shifting blame for the Lockerbie bombing to Libyan leader Gaddafi and his intelligence agents proved a convenient alternative. After all, their April 1986 attack on a West Berlin discotheque frequented primarily by American soldiers had gone unpunished.

«It's that simple,» Bollier says, tossing the newspaper article back onto the pile.

It is possible that for the U.S. and the U.K., Libya was seen as a more convenient scapegoat than Iran at that point in history. However, like so much else in the Lockerbie case, this theory cannot be proven.

Gaddafi's photo on the side table

This difficulty doesn't impress Bollier. In his office on Badenerstrasse, the presence of long-deposed Libyan despot Gaddafi can still be felt everywhere. A framed photo of the young Gaddafi is placed on the side table next to the sofa, leaning against an iron palm tree.

During Gaddafi's more than 40 years in power, his regime systematically violated human rights. It engaged in countless arbitrary arrests, imprisoning and torturing opposition figures. Many of these individuals disappeared or were executed.

Bollier offers a kind of counterpoint, however. "Gaddafi may have blood on his hands," he says. But from the leader’s own point of view, he had been acting in the interests of the Libyan people, Bollier says. The entrepreneur counts off the gains: roads, housing, infrastructure – "everything in tiptop shape," he says.

It is jarring statements like this that undermine the image of Bollier as a fearless fighter for the truth.

An office for the alleged attacker

Another startling fact reveals just how close Bollier's relationship with Gaddafi's internationally ostracized regime was: Mebo temporarily rented an office at Badenerstrasse 414 to two employees of the Libyan intelligence services – one of whom was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Bollier plays this down. It was purely business, he says. And anyway, al-Megrahi visited Zurich only two or three times a year.

Bollier started doing business with Libya in the mid-1970s. Even before media pioneer Roger Schawinski shook up Switzerland's media landscape by founding his Radio 24 station – which broadcast as a pirate station from Pizzo Groppera in Italy before eventually becoming the country's first commercial radio station – the trained radio engineer Bollier had been operating his own pirate radio station in the North Sea. He had chugged around the international zone in a converted ship, competing in turn with the state broadcasters in England and the Netherlands.

"It was a lucrative business for a while," recalls Bollier – until the authorities shut the pirate station down.

$4.9 million from Gaddafi

That left Bollier sitting on an expensive ship crammed full of electronics that nobody wanted. Only one person showed any interest: Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan ruler paid Bollier $4.9 million for the former pirate radio craft.

Nor did this prove to be the only such deal. Although Bollier says he never met Gaddafi in person, the Libyan state became the Swiss entrepreneur’s most important customer. Contracts with the military and intelligence services soon followed. In the 1980s, Bollier installed Tripoli’s first fax machines, after purchasing them first from a distributor in Zurich. "For this, the Libyans, who had never seen a fax machine before, celebrated me like a hero," he says.

The fax machines were soon followed by the delivery of the MST-13 timers to Libya.

The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the fingernail-sized fragment PT/35 (b), which is supposed to have come from one of these timers from Zurich, are striking. Scottish police found it six months after the crash, in late May 1989, in a wooded area more than 30 kilometers from the crash site. The fragment was stuck inside the collar of a Salomon-brand shirt that had originally been purchased in Malta.

That shirt had wound up in a maroon Samsonite suitcase along with the Toshiba cassette recorder that was rigged with explosives.

No pieces belonging to the timer's significantly larger and more robust housing were ever found. In some official documents, the date of discovery is given not as May 1989, but rather as January 1990 – that is, more than a year after the crash. These dates are important for Bollier's argument.

The Scottish police initially had no idea what to make of their chance discovery. They searched unsuccessfully at 54 companies across 17 countries in hopes of tracking down the origin of the PT/35 (b) fragment.

Help from the FBI and CIA

In early 1990, the Scottish police asked their colleagues at the FBI for help. These investigators then quickly found what they were looking for: The fragment was an exact match with a timer-based detonator that the CIA had seized during a raid in Togo in 1985, they said. Through some convoluted means, a Mebo MST-13 timer had apparently found its way to the rebels in Togo.

However, over the years, investigative journalists have uncovered inconsistencies in this conclusion. One such reporter is Otto Hostettler from the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine. He has published several articles on the discrepancies in the Lockerbie case.

Like Bollier, Hostettler also concludes: "The item labeled PT/35 (b) cannot have come from the shipment to Libya that Edwin Bollier made in 1985." The fragment contains technical components that had not even been developed at that time, the reporter notes.

Moreover, in addition to Jim Swire, the representative of the victims' families, and investigative journalist Hostettler, there are still other unimpeachable figures who agree with Bollier that something is not right about PT/35 (b).

The odd role of Switzerland's intelligence service

The role played by one senior member of the Swiss Federal Office of Police, which was Switzerland's intelligence service at the time, is nothing less than striking. It is a matter of record that on June 22, 1989, six months after Lockerbie, this intelligence service agent appeared at the Badenerstrasse 414 building. On the third floor, rather than visiting the Mebo Ltd offices, he instead ended up in the workshop on the other side of the corridor. There he met with the engineer who had developed the MST-13 timer.

This is publicly known because Bollier later reported the intelligence service agent to the authorities. The entrepreneur accused this figure of stealing a timer from Mebo's inventory and passing it on to the FBI, all without a search warrant. Bollier demanded 6 million Swiss francs in damages from the intelligence service agent.

As part of the criminal proceedings, the Swiss Office of the Attorney General summarized the facts of the case in a written statement. That statement is dated July 30, 2012, and is signed by the head of the office's National Security division

According to this statement, the employee of the Federal Office of Police did indeed receive a timer from the Mebo engineer, "which he passed on to the American authorities."

"The evidence is said to have been subsequently tampered with," says the Office of the Attorney General’s written statement. Followed by: "This assertion by Bollier has not simply been pulled out of thin air."

The Attorney General’s Office explains why Bollier’s assertion could be correct as follows: "In any case, an expert opinion provided by the scientific service of the Canton of Zurich proves that the timer handed over to the Swiss federal police and the timer fragment presented as evidence by the Scottish authorities cannot be identical."

No other authority has adopted Bollier’s thesis that exhibit PT/35 (b) was falsified as clearly as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General, in this written statement.

However, the Zurich cantonal police report referred to in the Attorney General’s statement has never subsequently turned up. This is confirmed by respected Zurich lawyer Marcel Bosonnet, who represented Bollier in this case.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court never addressed the claim for damages – Bollier had submitted it too late.

"In my opinion, there was a lack of will to get at the truth," Bosonnet says. In so doing, Switzerland missed a unique opportunity to resolve the Lockerbie case, he adds.

Al Jazeera reports on secret meetings

This clue prompted the researchers at Al Jazeera's English-language service to work even harder. Their documentary series, which has since been withdrawn, describes how, over the course of 1988, a few months before the Lockerbie crash, several meetings took place involving representatives of the intelligence services of Iran, Syria and Libya, as well as of Hezbollah and the PFLP-GC. The common goal was reportedly a militant campaign financed by Iran against targets in the US and Israel, which was to include shooting down passenger aircraft.

According to Al Jazeera's reporting, these secret meetings took place between March and October 1988 in Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon.

In the documentary, Robert Baer is given considerable time to speak. This author, a former CIA agent, has long argued that Iran, not Libya, was behind the Lockerbie attack. He has been joined by other voices from within American intelligence circles.

Baer told Al Jazeera that he had evidence showing that a few days after the attack on Pan Am 103, in late 1988, $11 million had been transferred from Iran to a bank account in Lausanne. Some of this money was later transferred to the accounts of two leading members of the PFLP-GC, he contends.

Baer is no longer employed by the CIA. Nevertheless, he is bound by the principle that anything he makes public based on knowledge gained during his time in service must be approved in advance by the CIA.

In Al Jazeera’s withdrawn documentary series, he says that he had followed this process in order to divulge his information. He additionally says that there is consensus within CIA and FBI circles that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie crash.

So has Gaddafi's Libya been wrongly blamed, for more than 30 years, for one of Europe's most devastating terrorist attacks?

Despite the numerous proponents of this theory, the question is still not easy to answer. In fact, a new book published in early 2025 argues against this conclusion.

"Top secret" handwritten letters

In this book, the authors present previously unpublished archive material from the Gaddafi-era Libyan intelligence service. Handwritten letters marked "top secret" describe how, in October 1988, a division of the intelligence service in Tripoli carried out experiments with explosives, including detonating a suitcase.

At the time, the head of this division was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had protested his innocence on his deathbed.

Prosecutors in the US are aware of this archive discovery. The postponement of the ongoing trial is likely to be related to efforts to verify documents that were not previously part of the record.

Meanwhile, back in Zurich, Edwin Bollier is keeping his book in his drawer, ready to publish. Mr Lockerbie, as he calls himself in his email address, is at least willing to reveal his title: "The Truth Died at Lockerbie."

"Gaddafi and Megrahi both told me he was innocent"

[What follows is excerpted from a long article by Peter Oborne published today on the Middle East Eye website:]

In a wide-ranging interview with Middle East Eye following publication of her memoir, The Colonel and I: My Life with Gaddafi, [Daad] Sharab talked about how the Libyan leader sent her on secret missions around the globe, during which she dealt directly with US President George HW Bush and visited alleged Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in jail. (...)

Talking to MEE at her London home, Sharab excoriates former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who she says spoke highly of Gaddafi when the pair met privately over an intimate dinner in New York - only to publicly gloat later when the dictator was killed. (...)

She dismisses another western leader who embraced Gaddafi, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as “a vulture hovering over Libya”.

When asked by MEE to explain, she said that Blair “made a deal with Libya to make money for his country, and not to be fair” - an apparent reference to the so-called “deal in the desert”, agreed with a handshake between the leaders in a tent outside Tripoli in 2004.

The deal cemented security and intelligence ties between the countries, including the British-orchestrated rendition of Libyan dissidents by the CIA to Tripoli - and also secured trade and oil deals for British firms.

Sharab says she “never fully trusted” Blair’s motives, even though she says he had a warm relationship with Gaddafi. (...)

Blair’s relationship with Gaddafi had been made possible by Libya’s admission of responsibility in 1999 for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York in 1988, which exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and crew, along with 11 people on the ground.

With Libya identified as a possible culprit in the weeks after the bombing, Gaddafi sent Sharab as his envoy to then-US President George HW Bush, who told her to deal not with the United States but with the British.

Eventually a deal was struck, with Libya accepting responsibility and paying $10m to each of the families of the dead in return for the removal of sanctions.

Megrahi, an alleged former Libyan intelligence officer who had been made a suspect in the case since 1991, was handed over to stand trial at a special Scottish court convened in the Netherlands and jailed for life in 2001.

Sharab insists that the deal was “all about money, not justice,” adding that the West needed a “victim to blame”, while Gaddafi wanted “a way out of the mess of sanctions”.

She told MEE that Gaddafi told her “they framed Libya and he had done nothing. He said if he had done it, he would admit it, but he didn’t do it.”

Speculation over who was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing has continued in the decades since Libya admitted responsibility.

In 2014, an Al Jazeera investigation alleged that an Iranian-funded Syria-based Palestinian organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), had carried out the attack to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in the Gulf in 1988.

Sharab is deeply sympathetic to Megrahi, who she visited in prison in Scotland prior to his release on compassionate grounds in 2009 after a terminal cancer diagnosis. He died at home in Tripoli in 2012.

Today she says that the West framed an “innocent man” who resembled a “mild-mannered accountant”.

She attacks Gaddafi’s son Saif for publicly taking credit for Megrahi’s return to Libya. She says he was barely involved in his release and “never once bothered” to visit Megrahi in jail.

MEE put to Sharab the claim, made by Libya’s former justice minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil in 2011, that Gaddafi personally ordered the bombing.

She replied: “He knows nothing. He was minister when Gaddafi was president. Why would you work with the guy if you were sure he did that?”

“In my eyes,” states Sharab, “Al-Megrahi was the 271st Lockerbie victim.”

She accuses British intelligence of knowing the truth about Megrahi - but covering it up. Asked by MEE for evidence to support this assertion, she said it was “based on what Gaddafi told me and what Megrahi told me in prison. Both said he was innocent. And if Megrahi was guilty Britain would not have released him.”

"Independent" Lockerbie commentator "instructed and paid by Iran"

[What follows is excerpted from a report in today's edition of The Scotsman headlined Academic who defended Tehran against Lockerbie allegations accused of secretly working for Iranian government:]

Authorities in the US allege Kaveh Afrasiabi, a political scientist and veteran commentator on Iranian issues, of acting and conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Iranian state for more than a decade, during which time he made media appearances rejecting any suggestions that Iran was involved in the 1988 atrocity.

A complaint filed against Afrasiabi in a federal court in New York alleges that he was instructed over what to say to journalists by Iranian government officials assigned to the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations, before advocating positions and policies “favoured” by Iran.

The interviews included Afrasiabi’s views on a 2014 Al Jazeera documentary, entitled ‘Lockerbie: What Really Happened?’, which claimed the bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by the Syrian-based terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The documentary, which was subsequently screened in the Scottish Parliament, included testimony from Abolghasem Mesbahi, a former high-ranking Iranian intelligence agent, who said Iran had sanctioned the attack in revenge for the destruction in July 1988 of an Iranian airbus mistakenly shot down by USS Vincennes.

Afrasiabi, a former visiting scholar at Harvard University, went on to appear on an Al Jazeera interview, refuting the documentary’s premise. However, the complaint against him alleges he was advised on what to say by a press secretary at the Iranian mission, and told to state that he was giving his views as an “independent expert.”

During a phone call with the Iranian official on 11 March 2014, the complaint goes on, Afrasiabi was instructed “in sum and substance to explain that both the US and Britain completed their investigations” into the incident.

It also alleges that the day after the interview, Afrasiabi advised the Iranian government to threaten a $500 million lawsuit against Al Jazeera,” stating that it “would act as a brake on their current plan and might put a stop.” He added: “Soft diplomacy does not answer this specific situation.”

Afrasiabi also sent Al Jazeera an article prepared by his Iranian government contacts refuting the documentary’s claims, according to the complaint.

It adds that since 2007, Afrasiabi has “surreptitiously derived a significant portion of his income from compensation for services performed at the direction and under the control of the government of the Islamic republic of Iran,” claiming he received more than $265,000 over the period, as well as health insurance benefits.

The complaint also alleges Afrasiabi contacted an official in the US State Department, asking for its “latest thinking” on the Iran nuclear issue, without revealing the nature of his relationship with Iranian authorities.

Afrasiabi has described the allegations against him as “lies,” while Iran’s foreign ministry said the accusations were “baseless,” and accused the US of “a clear hostage-taking of Iranian nationals.”

The real perpetrators of Lockerbie bombing still to be brought to book

[This is the headline over a letter by Rev Dr John Cameron published on the website of the Belfast Telegraph on 1 December 2020. It reads as follows:]

In 1994 Nelson Mandela offered South Africa as a neutral venue for the Pan Am atrocity trial, but this was turned down by John Major.

His offer was also rejected by Tony Blair at the 1997 Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Edinburgh.

In words that still haunt our judiciary, Mandela warned “no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge” in the Lockerbie case.

A life-long friend, the late Graham Cox, was Sheriff Principal of South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway when Fhimah and Megrahi were arrested.

They appeared before him on April 6, 1999 at a makeshift Scottish court at Kamp Van Zeist in Holland.

In spite of his suspicion that the prosecution had arrested the wrong men, this court appearance starting off the subsequent legal proceedings.

Cox had no doubt the bombing resulted from the shooting down of Iran Air 655 by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, or that the Iranians recruited the PFLP-General Command.

Later, when Mandela asked the Kirk to intervene in a “serious miscarriage of justice”, Cox pointed me to the unsafe forensics, the unlikely use of a long-range timer and the fact that the bomb entered the system at Heathrow.

My report for the Kirk was used by Al Jazeera in a documentary which left no doubt of Megrahi’s innocence. [RB: Dr Cameron's report and the Al Jazeera documentary are referred to here, at the text accompanying footnote 46.]

Sadly, Cox warned against any hope that the verdict might be reversed.

Lord Fraser, then our senior law officer, had admitted the key witness Tony Gauci wasn’t “the full shilling”, had been paid $3m by the US and that the trial was a farce, but “nobody wants this can of worms opened”.

Shame on those who accused their country without understanding the facts of the case

[What follows is a translation by the distinguished Libyan journalist and analyst Mustafa Fetouri of a comment posted by him on his Facebook page after the announcement of the SCCRC's reference of the Megrahi conviction back to the High Court of Justiciary. I am grateful to Mr Fetouri for allowing me to reproduce it here.]

The SCCRC has decided to allow al-Megrahi’s appeal to go ahead three years after his family requested it and eight year after he passed away.

The SCCRC admitted the appeal on two grounds one of which is very critical: that al-Megrahi was the person who bought the clothes found in bag that was said to have carried the bomb from Frankfurt to London en route to JFK in New York.

The SCCRC said that the verdict was “unreasonable” since “no reasonable trial court could have accepted that Mr Megrahi was identified as the purchaser".

As we recall Tony Gauci, co-owner of Valetta clothes shop claimed that al-Megrahi was the one who bought the clothes but years after the conviction of al-Megrahi it turned out that Mr Gauci had received money from either the CIA or US department of justice as a witness and he then disappeared from Malta.

I have been following the Lockerbie case very closely from the beginning and I wrote about it many times. I was panelist in an episode of the BBC’s flagship show The Doha Debates in 2009 with Dr Jim Swire, on one side, and Juma Al-Gamatti and a British conservative MP on the opposing side. We defended the compassionate release of al-Megrahi against their accusations and falsified claims.

I have also discussed the case with many foreigner observers including the United Nations appointed court observer, the Austrian, Hans Köchler. He expressed his reservations about the court right after it ended. He repeated the same reservations to me over a phone call while I was studying for my masters degree in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

I have and will always be convinced that Libya and al-Megrahi are innocent of this terrible crime. After the SCCRC decision I would really like to hear from the Libyan scumbags like Juma and ask them where is your evidence that Libya was to blame for the tragedy? How could you accuse your country just because you hated Gaddafi?

I can imagine the late Moammer Gaddafi screaming at the face of those who accused him of being behind the Lockerbie tragedy. It is enough that the SCCRC raised suspicions about the verdict even if it is not overturned. The fact that SCCRC referred the case to the Scottish High Court is in itself an admission of miscarriage of justice and to me is a vindication of both Libya and its citizen al-Megrahi.

Great salute to Dr Swire and Mr Kenny MacAskill the former justice minister in Scotland,  who took the brave and legal decision to release al-Megrahi despite UK and US governments’ objections.

A bigger salute to al-Megrahi’s family who struggled to clear his name. I also salute to Al-Jazeera English team who produced that important documentary which made it easier for the wider public to understand the complicated judiciary process that should have led to different verdict. A great salute to the defense team who defended Libya despite all difficulties.

Shame on those who accused their country (particularly after 2011) without any proof and without actually understanding anything of the facts of the case.

Ghosts of Lockerbie stirred with prospect of posthumous appeal

[This is the headline over a report published this evening on the Al Jazeera website. It reads in part:]

On March 11, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) stirred the ghosts of a painful past when it announced that the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the bombing might have constituted a miscarriage of justice. (...)

Several relatives of victims have also celebrated the legal development.

Jim Swire collaborated with the al-Megrahi family on the SCCRC application. He lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora on the New York-bound flight that exploded over Scotland just 38 minutes after its takeoff from London.

Swire has long believed that al-Megrahi was innocent of the bombing - and is already looking ahead to the next phase of the judicial process which will see the case make its way to Scotland's High Court of Justiciary.

"I'm delighted that the case has been referred back to the Appeal Court - but I'm already concerned about how the case in the Appeal Court will be conducted," Swire, now in his 80s, tells Al Jazeera.

The Glasgow-based legal team highlighted six grounds why al-Megrahi's conviction constituted a grave miscarriage of justice - but the SCCRC upheld just two: "unreasonable verdict" and "non-disclosure" of evidence. (...)

John Mosey, whose 19-year-old daughter Helga was killed in the bombing, also threw his support behind the application.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from his home in England, Mosey, a reverend, said the commission's decision, which prompted him to exclaim "Hallelujah", was the "end of a first step of a long battle".

Like Swire, he remains concerned that the grounds for appeal, as selected by the SCCRC, "are limited".

But the commission's decision will likely reopen painful wounds, especially in the United States where many victims' families and involved law enforcement officials continue to view al-Megrahi as guilty.

However, Richard Marquise, who led the FBI's US Lockerbie taskforce, told Al Jazeera that the "the circumstantial evidence" that put al-Megrahi behind bars in a Scottish jail "was overwhelming".

"I have seen the evidence; know, personally, some of the witnesses and; have read the entire transcript," said the retired special agent of the SCCRC's claim that "no reasonable trial court, relying on the evidence led at trial, could have held the case against Mr Megrahi was proved beyond reasonable doubt".

"Those who passed judgment from an ivory tower were never involved in the investigation, nor did they attend one day of trial."

[RB: Dr Jim Swire and the Rev'd John Mosey attended every day of the trial at Camp Zeist. I did not (and I suspect I may be one of the inhabitants of an "ivory tower" that Richard Marquise is intending to refer to) but, like Mr Marquise I read every day's transcript as it appeared. From the day after the verdict was announced I have expressed the view that no reasonable court could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led at the trial. That is the unshakeable view that I continue to hold nineteen years later. And the independent and expert SCCRC, after two separate investigations conducted thirteen years apart by two quite separate and different teams, has twice now reached the same conclusion as me. Mr Marquise's protestations are starting to look rather desperate.]

The American people "have a right to the truth"

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Caroline Glick published today on the website of The Jerusalem Post:]

... in 1992 and 1993, the UN Security Council passed harsh economic sanctions against Libya to force then-Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to extradite two Libyan nationals suspected of carrying out the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 that killed 270 people. Due to the sanctions, in 1998, the Libyan government extradited the suspects to Britain for trial. Gaddafi later apologized for the bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims. [RB: There was no apology. What there was, was an acceptance by Libya of "responsibility for the actions of its officials".]

The Lockerbie model can be applied to the AMIA bombing as well. Security Council action against Iranian leaders can massively increase their international isolation. Depending on the structure and target of the sanctions, Iranian citizens can be subjected to significant restrictions on international travel and Iranian diplomatic missions can be shut down. The more powerful the sanctions, the more effective they will be in both deterring foreign governments from cooperating with the regime and causing Iranian nationals to be disgusted with the regime.

This brings us to the Lockerbie bombing itself. [Argentinian prosecutor Alberto] Nisman’s findings [regarding the AMIA bombing] relied in large part on information presented by Iranian defector and former intelligence officer Abolghassem Mesbahi who served in Germany until he defected in the 1990s. Mesbahi reported directly to then-Iranian president Rafsanjani. Four years ago, Mesbahi revealed in an Al Jazeera documentary that Iran, not Libya, was responsible for the bombing. The attack, he said, was carried out by terrorists from Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, headquartered in Damascus. Mesbahi’s allegations are substantiated by information collected by investigators at the crash site in Lockerbie and by evidence of similar bombs discovered in an apartment in Frankfurt rented by terrorists in the PFLP-GC weeks before the bombing.

Reports at the time claimed that in 1990, then-US president George H W Bush and then-British prime minister Margaret Thatcher chose to ignore the leads and follow less compelling evidence pointing to Gaddafi because the US wanted then-Syrian President Hafez Assad to join the US-led Arab coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The case against the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was always controversial. Megrahi went to his death in 2012 protesting his innocence. And on May 3, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission decided to review his conviction “in the interests of justice.” A review request was submitted by his widow hoping to clear his name.

Of the 270 of the victims of Flight 103, 179 were Americans – 35 were students from Syracuse University coming home for Christmas after completing a semester of study abroad in London and Florence. It goes without saying that if Iran was responsible for their murder, the American people, and their families, have a right to the truth. Following the information presented by Mesbahi, and the information already gathered by FBI investigators at the time of the bombing, the US should open a new investigation of alleged Iranian responsibility for the attack. The investigation should be public, and the names of Iranian officials suspected of involvement in the attack should be widely publicized.

Similar actions should be taken by other governments whose citizens have been murdered by Iran in acts of international terrorism.

The deeper the regime is implicated in acts of mass murder, the less able its leaders will be to justify their continued grip on power. The more Khamenei’s personal role in recognized worldwide, the less capable he will be to wield power and command obedience. Branded as murderers at home and abroad, Khamenei and his henchmen will find it harder and harder to suppress demonstrators demanding that they end their sponsorship of Syria’s genocidal dictator Bashar Assad and the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas and surrender their power.

The reception given to Megrahi was low-key

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009.

No ‘Hero’s Welcome’ in Libya

[What follows is the text of an opinion piece in The New York Times by Saif-al-Islam Gaddafi, the Colonel's son and, so some speculate, his likely successor.]

Contrary to reports in the Western press, there was no “hero’s welcome” for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi when he returned to Libya earlier this month.

There was not in fact any official reception for the return of Mr Megrahi, who had been convicted and imprisoned in Scotland for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The strong reactions to these misperceptions must not be allowed to impair the improvements in a mutually beneficial relationship between Libya and the West.

When I arrived at the airport with Mr Megrahi, there was not a single government official present. State and foreign news media were also barred from the event. If you were watching Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network, at the time the plane landed, you would have heard its correspondent complain that he was not allowed by Libyan authorities to go to the airport to cover Mr Megrahi’s arrival.

It is true that there were a few hundred people present. But most of them were members of Mr Megrahi’s large tribe, extended families being an important element in Libyan society. They had no official invitation, but it was hardly possible to prevent them from coming.

Coincidentally, the day Mr Megrahi landed was also the very day of the annual Libyan Youth Day, and many participants came to the airport after seeing coverage of Mr Megrahi’s release on British television. But this was not planned. Indeed, we sat in the plane on the tarmac until the police brought the crowd to order.

So, from the Libyan point of view, the reception given to Mr Megrahi was low-key. Had it been an official welcome, there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of people at the airport. And the event would have been carried live on state television.

At the same time, I was extremely happy for Mr Megrahi’s return. Convinced of his innocence, I have worked for years on his behalf, raising the issue at every meeting with British officials.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair recently confirmed my statement that Libya put Mr Megrahi’s release on the table at every meeting. He also made it clear that there was never any agreement by the British government to release Mr Megrahi as part of some quid pro quo on trade — a statement I can confirm.

Mr Megrahi was released for the right reasons. The Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed Mr Megrahi, who is dying of cancer, on compassionate grounds. Mr MacAskill’s courageous decision demonstrates to the world that both justice and compassion can be achieved by people of good will. Despite the uproar over the release, others agree. A recent survey of Scottish lawyers showed that a majority of those surveyed agreed with the secretary’s decision.

It’s worth pointing out that we Libyans are far from the only ones who believe that Mr Megrahi is innocent of this terrible crime. In June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission determined that a “miscarriage of justice” may have occurred and referred the case to the High Court. A retired Scottish police officer who worked on the case has signed a statement saying that evidence was fabricated. The credibility of a key witness, a shopkeeper in Malta, has subsequently been disputed by the Scottish judge who presided in the review. Even the spokesman of a family group of Lockerbie victims has said that the group was not satisfied that the verdict in the Megrahi case was correct.

What’s more, although we Libyans believe that Mr Megrahi is innocent, we agreed in a civil action to pay the families of the victims, and we have done so. In fact, we could have withheld the final tranche of payments last year, because the United States had not kept its part of the deal, to fully normalize relations within the formally agreed-upon time frame. Still, we made the final payment as an act of good will.

The truth about Lockerbie will come out one day. Had Mr Megrahi been able to appeal his case through the court, we believe that his conviction would have been overturned. Mr Megrahi made the difficult decision to give up his promising appeal in order to spend his last days with his family.

Libya has worked with Britain, the United States and other Western countries for more than five years now to defuse the tensions of earlier times, and to promote trade, security and improved relations. I believe that clarifying the facts in the Lockerbie case can only further assist this process.

I once again offer my deepest sympathy to the families and loved ones of those lost in the Lockerbie tragedy. They deserve justice. The best way to get it is through a public inquiry. We need to know the truth.

“It happened. It shouldn’t have. It is obviously unacceptable”

[What follows is the text of a report headlined Maltese shopkeeper offered ‘unlimited funds’ for Lockerbie testimony that was published in the Maltese newspaper The Independent on this date in 2011:]

Former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser of Carmyllie QC has admitted that new documents show Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, whose evidence was the cornerstone in convicting Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie disaster did receive payment for his testimony.

The issue has been a hot potato for years and while American authorities insist that witnesses were never paid, the former law chief who led the Lockerbie bombing probe hit out after a leaked report claimed key witness Gauci had been paid £1.2million to testify.

In recent comments to The Scottish Sun, Lord Fraser said: “I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it. It is obviously unacceptable in the biggest case of mass murder ever carried out in Europe.”

He added that he had warned Scottish investigators at the time that offering bribes to witnesses would be “unacceptable”.

But a documentary aired recently on Al Jazeera, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber?, has revealed papers claiming Gauci was offered “unlimited funds” before he was paid.

The claims are made in findings from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which insists there is evidence of a mistrial, findings which had led convicted bomber Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi to launch an appeal against his conviction. The appeal was ditched two years ago when al-Megrahi was released from jail suffering from cancer.

The report was kept under wraps until now, despite the efforts of the SNP to release them.

The findings, which rely heavily on diary entries by retired Strathclyde Police detective Harry Bell, also say Gauci’s brother Paul received £600,000, despite not testifying.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission report says Scottish police applied to US authorities for reward cash after the trial and “substantial payments were received by both Tony and Paul Gauci after the appeal”.

Tony Gauci became the key witness as clothes from the suitcase that carried the bomb on Pan Am flight 103 - which killed 270 in 1988 - were traced back to his shop in Malta.

In addition to the payment of the Maltese witness for testimony, the Commission had previously found several other problems with the evidence on which al-Megrahi had been convicted.

Mr al-Megrahi’s appeal had been granted after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found the reliability of Maltese evidence used to convict the former Libyan intelligence agent of carrying out as highly questionable and recommended he be granted an appeal.

Al-Megrahi had been convicted largely on the basis of evidence supplied by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci of Mary’s House Tower Road Sliema. In his evidence Mr Gauci had identified Al-Megrahi as the purchaser of articles of clothing and an umbrella found in the suitcase - placed on an Air Malta flight and transferred to the Pan Am flight in Frankfurt - containing the bomb.

The Commission, however, found “there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988”, an argument that had sealed the indictment against Al-Megrahi.

The Commission noted that although it had been proven Al-Megrahi had been in Malta on several occasions in the month in question, it was determined through new evidence submitted that 7 December 1988 was the only date on which he would have had the opportunity to make the purchases from Mary’s House.

New evidence in the Commission’s hands at the time, not heard at the trial, concerned the date on which Christmas lights had been illuminated in Sliema near Mary’s House which, taken together with Mr Gauci’s evidence at trial and the contents of his police statements, indicates the purchase of the incriminating items had taken place before 6 December 1988 – when no evidence had been presented at trial to the effect that the applicant was in Malta before 6 December.

Yet more new evidence given to the Commission indicates that Mr Gauci, four days before the identification parade at which he picked out Al-Megrahi, had seen a photograph of Al-Megrahi in a magazine article linking him to the bombing.

The Commission found Mr Gauci’s exposure to the photograph, so close to the date of the identity parade, “undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself”.

A can of worms

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2011.

Conspiracy and cover-up in Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the Bread & Circuses website, vol 3 issue 11. It reads in part:]

In Libya, there were mass celebrations to honor the homecoming of their national hero, while in the Western press, there were repeated protests over the premature release of a convicted terrorist, but the whole sordid affair died within a short time, even if Megrahi hasn’t yet, and it has all been pretty much long forgotten.

If you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. It’s just the beginning. And it’s a story that’s all too familiar, involving international intrigue, the CIA tampering with evidence, lies and cover-ups by disreputable prosecutors, and two world powers anxious to bring about a conviction at all costs, which included a $2 million payoff to buy fabricated witness accounting. As a result, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who may be one of the most hated men in the world, whose deteriorating health was considered too mild a punishment to many people around the world, and who has been incarcerated for perpetrating the attack on Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland since 1991, may also be innocent.

This won’t be the first time our Government has been involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, to cover up a crime, or to frame an innocent person to protect someone or something it considers more important in the big picture. In this case, the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Scotland were driven by a powerful need to attach this terrorist attack to a face as soon as possible. Under the circumstances, it served all of their purposes to pin it on a Libyan, without having to go to war with Libya itself. At that point, it didn’t matter all that much which Libyan, since to us Westerners, they all look alike anyway.

Between the eagerness of Scottish prosecutors and Government officials to circumvent the procedures of law to make their story fit the facts, and the $2 million dollars the United States Government put up as a bribe to anyone believable enough sell a phony story to a panel of judges hearing this case, it wasn’t all that difficult to make up a scenario that fit the crime. From beginning to end, there were inconsistencies and problems with the gathering of evidence and procedural misconduct on the part of investigators from the police department and the attorneys building this case. Using every manipulative trick and fraud they could come up with, they managed to hammer the square pegs into the round holes and Megrehi was convicted, in spite of protests not only from him and his attorneys who were denied fair access to police evidence and adequate appeals, but to people around the world who looked at the case against Megrahi and called foul. Those included private investigators from around the world who have taken an unbiased look at the evidence, to Nelson Mandela who pleaded with the Church of Scotland to independently investigate the case against Megrahi on their own.

In 2009, under mounting pressure, the Scottish Government had no choice but to allow the appeal to reopen the case. At this point, the British, American, and Scottish Governments were in a quandary. The latest appeal process and the world attention it was bringing, was going to open more than a can of worms for those closest to the conspiracy. It was going to open all the evidence, including formerly withheld and altered evidence, much of which was clearly tampered with by the authorities pressing for a conviction, to public scrutiny that they were previously able to keep a lid on.

So instead of taking that chance on having to explain the obvious framing and conspiracy to defraud the Courts, a deal was struck and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was set free. While President Obama and Prime Minister Tony Blair were displaying their public outrage over Megrahi’s early release, behind the scenes they were wiping the sweat from each other’s brows, knowing that a serious political crisis had been averted. Unfortunately, the victims and their surviving families of the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, must live with the frustration of believing that the murderer of their loved ones was freed on humanitarian grounds, when in fact, they should be more outraged than anyone else that the truth of what really happened will remain buried with the dead.

This is one of those stories that you will not see in the mainstream news media run by multi-national corporations in this country. This story was reported in a documentary film released on Al Jazeera English, the Arab news network. Before you judge the reliability of the source based on prejudices and opinions formulated for you by the American news networks with a strong motive in not wanting us to listen to this news forum with an opened mind, please watch this video and judge for yourself.