Netflix "The Bombing of Pan Am 103": Incomplete, one-sided portrayal

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Patrick Huber published today on the Austrian Wings website:]

In a six-part miniseries, the US film giant Netflix dramatized the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on December 21, 1988. Despite its high level of detail, the series ultimately disappoints with a one-sided portrayal of the perpetrators, a perspective that is objectively untenable, argues Patrick Huber, a long-time contributor to Austrian Wings, in his recent commentary. Huber has been researching the topic for over 20 years and published the first German-language book on the subject in December 2023, titled Pan Am Flight 103: The Tragedy of Lockerbie - A Christmas Journey to Death.

The facts of the Lockerbie disaster (Pan Am Flight 103) in brief. A bomb exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am's Boeing 747-121, N739PA, Clipper Maid of the Seas, which was scheduled to fly as PA 103 from London Heathrow to New York JFK on December 21, 1988. The aircraft broke apart in mid-air and crashed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie. The 243 passengers, 2 pilots (captain and first officer), 1 flight engineer, and 13 flight attendants on board the Pan Am jumbo jet died, as did 11 residents of the Lockerbie community. Many children were among the victims; entire families were wiped out.

The question of who was responsible for the bomb was never definitively answered. A trial under Scottish law in the Netherlands in 2001 led to the conviction of a suspected Libyan secret agent – ​​a verdict that remains highly controversial in expert circles. However, experts (including legal scholars and UN trial observer Professor Hans Köchler, whose reports can be found here ) and many relatives of the victims considered it a miscarriage of justice and are convinced of the alleged perpetrator's innocence. Professor Köchler, who contacted me by email on August 6. 2026, after the publication of this commentary, pointed out that he had always consideredEl-Megrahi "not guilty as charged."

Professor Köchler literally wrote in a statement dated August 23, 2003 that can be read online here: "It is highly likely that the convicted Libyan national is not guilty as charged and that one or more countries other than Libya, through their intelligence services and/or financial and logistical support for a terrorist group, may have responsibility for the crime. In this regard, last year's revelations by Atef Abu Baker of the Fateh Revolutionary Council (made public after the assassination of Abu Nidal in Baghdad) will have to be further investigated. Since the events of September 11, 2001, there is absolutely no excuse for not fully investigating the responsibility for the Lockerbie crime. Terrorism cannot be fought through a political deal aimed at covering up the truth, but must be eradicated through identification and punishment of all countries, individuals and organizations that may have had responsibility for a specific terrorist act." 

I also recommend my commentary from October 2025, "Commentary on the Lockerbie Bombing - Who Bombed Pan Am Flight 103?" . Two years earlier, shortly before the 35th anniversary of the disaster, my book Pan Am Flight 103: The Lockerbie Tragedy - A Christmas Journey to Death, published after years of research , examines the attack and all open and already resolved questions in minute detail. (...)

When I heard about the new six-part Netflix series The Bombing of Pan Am 103, I decided to watch it. After decades of studying this tragedy, I was eager to see it. It's not a documentary, of course, and some elements have been altered for dramatic effect, but it's fundamentally very well-researched. Even little-known facts are addressed, and the seat numbers of individual passengers are accurately depicted.

While the first five parts are consistently worth watching, the final part is a huge disappointment and ruins everything. It deals with the trial of the two Libyan defendants, which ultimately ended with Abdel Bassit Ali Mohammed el Megrahi being convicted, while his co-defendant was acquitted.

The series concludes with this, usually leaving viewers with the (completely false) impression that the case is (largely) solved – but in reality, it is far from that. The series makes no mention whatsoever of the fact that not only (as mentioned at the beginning) numerous (primarily British) relatives of the victims doubt El-Megrahi's guilt, but also that both UN trial observer Hans Köchler and Scottish law professor Robert Black criticized the verdict as a "miscarriage of justice" that stigmatized an innocent man and deprived him of his freedom. In an interview with "The Scotsman" on November 1, 2005, Professor Black described El-Megrahi's conviction as "the most shameful miscarriage of justice in Scotland in 100 years."

The Netflix series instead adopts the decidedly "convenient" narrative for the US and UK of the convicted Libyan (lone) perpetrator and presents it to the viewer as "the whole truth." But it is, at best, only a part of the story, by no means the whole picture. A great deal is missing.

For although Libya's (and its intelligence agents') complicity in the attack on Pan Am 103 cannot be ruled out and is quite possible, there were and are leads pointing to Iran, more precisely the Islamic Republic of Iran (established in 1979), to Syria, and to the Palestinian territories of the Middle East. The evidence against Iran was particularly strong. However, the Netflix series largely ignores these facts, not even in the end credits. There are only a few tentative hints. To me, they seem like a tiresome "obligatory exercise" by the creators, along the lines of: check item, next scene.

From a legal standpoint, it doesn't have to depict everything (it's a series, not a documentary or academic work), but this one-sided portrayal, on the one hand, simply doesn't correspond to the known facts, and on the other hand, it's a slap in the face to the relatives of the 270 victims, who, after almost 40 years of uncertainty, finally deserve a definitive answer to the question of who was responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. A lone perpetrator—whether El-Megrahi or anyone else—could absolutely not have been responsible, as the UN trial observer clearly stated over 20 years ago. A single perpetrator could never have managed the incredible logistical effort of such a terrorist operation; even two or three perpetrators would have been insufficient. According to UN trial observer Köchler, at least "a dozen" participants would have been needed. It's quite possible that it was some kind of terrorist cooperation between Iran, Libya, Syria, and the Palestinians. It's also not out of the question that the convicted El-Megrahi might have been involved in some way. However, the evidence was simply insufficient for a conviction according to modern legal standards – and that's a crucial point. Because in a modern legal process, the principle of "in dubio pro reo" (presumption of innocence) must always apply. The evidence in El-Megrahi's conviction was extremely weak, leaving many questions unanswered. Or, to quote the UN trial observer, university professor Hans Köchler: "If someone had submitted this verdict as a seminar paper to me, it would have received a clear failing grade for inconsistency of argumentation." Ouch. That stings. (...)

Netflix also omits the fact that Dr Jim Swire (whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack on Pan Am 103) was also convinced of El-Megrahi's innocence, and that a friendship even developed between the two men. Dr. Swire doesn't appear at all (or only so briefly and insignificantly that I must have missed it), even though he made a crucial contribution to improving security measures in the aftermath of the disaster. (...)

If I had to grade the Netflix series "The Bombing of Pan Am 103" using the school grading system, my personal verdict would be, at best, a "Sufficient," and even that only because the first five episodes are solid and well-produced. If I were to evaluate only the sixth episode, my rating would be a clear "Fail."

For anyone interested in this complex case, I have two link recommendations here – in addition to my own book :

The Lockerbie Case (Blog by Professor Robert Black, Scotland)

The video documentary The Maltese Double Cross  by American filmmaker Allan Francovich (d. 1997); public screenings of the film were heavily restricted by Great Britain and the USA, which is why it did not achieve widespread distribution; it has never been publicly shown in the USA.

Thus, every reader can form their own opinion on this matter and how they personally categorize the Netflix series The Bombing of Pan Am 103.

A Libyan perspective on the overlooked side of the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over a long and important article by Dr Mustafa Fetouri just published in the May 2025 edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It reads as follows:]

The trial of Libyan citizen Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, 74, was due to begin in Washington, DC on May 12, but has been postponed at the request of the prosecution and defense due to Mas’ud’s health issues and the complexity of the case. He is accused of making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec 21, 1988. Many observers believe if Mas’ud gets a fair trial and good defense, he will not be convicted.

KIDNAPPED AND SMUGGLED TO US CUSTODY

Septuagenarian Mas’ud has been in and out of the hospital almost 20 times since he was kidnapped and smuggled into the US in 2022. He suffers from chronicle illnesses including type one diabetes and had to undergo two operations: first for spine issues and then to amputate three gangrene-affected toes. His family told the Washington Report that they doubt he will survive the trial. The entire episode is outside of any legal framework, and Mas’ud is very unlikely to change the not guilty plea he entered when first arraigned in February 2023.

Back in 2001, two other Libyans were tried in special court in The Netherlands which ended in convicting Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and acquitting Lamin Fahima. Al-Megrahi, who died in 2012, protested his innocence until his last breath. Most observers and legal experts, including Dr Hans Köchler, the United Nations-appointed expert, believed that al-Megrahi and Libya were framed and the court in The Netherlands was neither objective nor fair.

COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT

The US accused the two Libyans of involvement in the disaster in 1991. In accordance with the 1971 Montreal Convention on Civil Aviation, the Libyan government offered to try both men in its courts and invited the US and the UK to submit their evidence; both countries rejected the idea. Libya in turn refused to hand over its citizens. The standstill continued for years. 

The Security Council adopted several resolutions calling on Libya to hand over its citizens to stand trial—not in Scotland where the crime took place but in the US. Many legal experts questioned the merits of the Security Council involvement in a purely criminal act. 

On midnight of April 15, 1992, Security Council Resolution 748 came into effect, imposing stringent restrictions on Libya including a ban on all civilian flights in and out of Libya while obliging all UN member states to close offices of Libyan Airlines, the national carrier.

That effectively isolated Libya and its people for a crime their government has always denied. In later years several pieces of evidence completely exonerated Libya from the Lockerbie disaster. 

Between 1992 and 1999, when sanctions were suspended, the UN Security Council passed three Lockerbie-related resolutions. Nonbinding resolution 731 (1992) called on Libya to hand over the two suspects. In 2003 Security Council Resolution 1506 ended all sanctions. Libya waited another year for the US to lift is own sanctions, some imposed as early as 1986.

NATION IN AGONY

The resolution was only the third time the Security Council had imposed collective punishment on an entire nation. And unlike apartheid South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later apartheid South Africa, Libya was sanctioned in the absence of any proof linking the government to the crime. 

While much has been written over the last 37 years about the Lockerbie crime, very little has been written about how Libya’s 4.6 million citizens (the estimated population at the time) coped with the harsh sanctions, which affected every aspect of their daily lives, including medicines and equipment for essential services. Travel became cumbersome; people had to travel overland to neighboring countries and then board flights to their final destination. Hundreds of students studying abroad, like myself, had to give up going home during school breaks either because it was too expensive or too time-consuming. To reach Tripoli, one had to fly to Tunisia’s Southern Djerba, take a boat from Malta or fly to Cairo, and then take ground transportation to Libya.

ACCUMULATING LOSSES

The Washington Report spoke to several former Libyan officials, all speaking anonymously, to put together a broader picture of how the country functioned while under almost complete sanctions and how its people went about their lives.

Precise figures of the economic impact of the sanctions are lacking either because of lack of documentation or because much of the government files were looted and destroyed during the upheavals of 2011 and the civil war that followed, again facilitated by the UN Security Council. The former deputy foreign minister estimates that Libya’s overall economic losses between 1992 and 2003 amounted to more than $100 billion.

The former deputy foreign minister said, “Libya took certain steps” to “document” the overall losses incurred because of the sanctions. Asked why not many countries came to Libya’s help, he explained that “many countries tried but could not because UN binding resolutions” are like “international law” and compliance is mandatory. He added, “behind the scenes the US, UK and France scared every country that considered helping Libya.” The three countries have veto power in the Security Council.

His colleague, another Qaddafi-era minister responsible for the Lockerbie losses file, said: “we documented all details including how many people died and were injured” as they took circuitous routes to catch flights to reach their destinations. 

The oil sector, the main source of revenue for the state, lost between $18 billion and $33 billion during that period. After Security Council Resolution 883 targeted the oil industry, the country’s production dropped from 1.4 mp/d (thousand barrels a day) to below 1.2 mp/d and the downward trend continued, hitting less than 1 mp/d in some months. The long-term effect was significant: the return to pre-sanction oil production levels entailed raising prices, which affected competitiveness.

Low oil prices and higher production cost meant less cash for the government which, in turn, affected its ability to import things like machinery, consumer goods, food and medicine. Medicine in particular was badly affected; patients continued to receive them for free, even as the cost to the government increased substantially, and certain medications became scarce. In general the healthcare system was disrupted and accumulated an estimated loss of some $92 million. Many Libyans sought treatment abroad, which requires hard currency, increasing demand for dollars and forcing the government to heavily regulate the availability of the dollar. This gave rise to the black market, where the price of the dollar was nearly 10 times that of government-controlled prices. 

The transportation sector lost some $900 million as spare parts become more expensive. Government control of hard currency affected both the agriculture and industry sectors, whose combined estimated losses totalled $10 billion. 

After the oil industry, the second most impacted sector was aviation. Many Libyan Airlines aircraft were stranded in airports around the world because they were already out of the country when the sanctions hit. It took the company decades to renew its fleet and resume normal services after the sanctions were lifted. Some sources estimate that the sector lost nearly $30 billion during the seven years of sanctions.

Increased road travel led to higher road accidents. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 deaths were recorded every year during the sanction period. Lack of spare parts, restrictions on importing new cars, crumbling roads and weaker road safety made a bad situation even worse. 

By the time sanctions were completely lifted in 2003, every economic sector in the country was in need of heavy government cash injections to revive it. On top of that, Libya had  to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims, as part of the settlement with the United States.

WILL LIBYA BE COMPENSATED?

The abduction and subsequent trial of Mas’ud has opened old wounds in Libya. Many Libyans protested what they considered the illegal incarceration of Mas’ud, accusing the Tripoli-based government of selling out after the Lockerbie case had already been settled. In 2008, and as part of the larger agreement to re-establish diplomatic relations between Libya and the US, the two countries signed a Claims Settlement Agreement, ending all claims against each other including all claims arising from the Lockerbie disaster. The agreement does not say anything about possible compensation for Libyan losses.

Many Libyans question how the UN’s highest body, the Security Council, could take aggressive measures against Libya without any hard facts. 

Will Libya one day be compensated as a victim of an unjust international system? This is beyond the purview of the Washington court and is likely to remain an open question after the current case is concluded.

Britain rejected secret deal to prosecute Lockerbie bomber in Ireland

[This is the headline over a report published in today's edition of The Sunday Times. It reads in part:]

Officials feared Irish courts were ‘soft on terrorism’ and more likely to acquit Libyan agent Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, previously classified papers reveal

Britain rejected a secret deal to put the Lockerbie bomber on trial in Dublin amid suggestions that Ireland was “soft on terrorism” and more likely to acquit him, it has emerged.

Previously classified diplomatic documents disclose that Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, expressed a willingness to hand over Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi to the Irish authorities.

The US and British governments maintained that al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was responsible for the bombing in December 1988 which led to the deaths of 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland.

Gaddafi refused to hand him and fellow suspect Lamin Khalifa Fhimah to the authorities in Washington or Edinburgh, leading to years of sanctions and negotiations.

Albert Reynolds, the Irish prime minister, met John Major, his British counterpart, in an attempt to broker a deal to end the stalemate.

However, Downing Street ruled the proposal was too risky after a senior diplomat claimed Irish courts were prone to making “inexplicable” decisions and raised fears that any hearing would be targeted by terrorists.

Gaddafi, who ruled Libya from 1969 when he seized power until he was overthrown and murdered in 2011, was outspoken in his support for the IRA. (...)

Previously unpublished documents from 1994, seen by The Sunday Times, have been opened and placed at the National Archives at Kew.

One, written by Sir Roderic Lyne, Major’s private secretary, confirms for the first time that a clandestine Anglo-Irish summit took place.

“During the tete-a-tete conversation between the prime minister and the taoiseach on May 26, the latter surfaced a Libyan proposal to hold the Lockerbie trial in Ireland,” he wrote.

A handwritten addendum states: “Ireland would be preferable to Canada. But given the Provisional IRA connection a trial there would be piquant to say the least!”

The following month John Dew, deputy head of mission at the UK embassy in Dublin, said the proposal posed unacceptable risks and raised particular concerns about the possibility of al-Megrahi being cleared by a sympathetic Irish court.

“This should not be taken lightly,” he wrote. “Irrespective of the independence of the Irish judiciary — and we all know of some strange rulings in the past — an acquittal would have major implications for Anglo-Irish relations.

“Our public opinion would inevitably interpret it as confirmation that Ireland was soft on terrorism.

“Her Majesty’s government would face serious questioning about why it had allowed the trial to take place in Ireland in view of inexplicable and unpredictable past rulings.” (...)

A separate memo written in the same month by UK Foreign Office civil servants said Reynolds’s suggestion should be taken seriously.

“A trial in Ireland would have some distinct attractions; it is a compatible legal system, it is nearby and it is not a realm or even in the Commonwealth,” it said.

“A number of Irish citizens were on board flight Pan Am 103. It seems that trial in Ireland might be acceptable, both to the Irish government and Libya.

“However, in view of the Provisional IRA connection it would be a more controversial venue than, for example, Australia.”

The British government ultimately rejected the Irish offer, along with an invitation from Nelson Mandela months later for a trial to take place in South Africa.

Eventually, the Libyan suspects went on trial in May 2000 in a Scottish court set up in a former US air base in the Netherlands.

After eight months Lord Cullen, the presiding judge, pronounced a guilty verdict on al-Megrahi. [RB: The presiding judge was actually Lord Sutherland. Lord Cullen presided over the 2001 appeal at Camp Zeist.]

He was sentenced to 27 years in a Scottish prison but released on compassionate grounds while terminally ill in 2009.

He maintained his innocence until his death in 2012 and his family are still fighting to have his conviction overturned.

Fhimah was found not guilty and returned to Libya.

More than three decades on, another man who is suspected of building the bomb that downed Pan Am flight 103 is being prosecuted in the US.

A court in Washington DC fixed a date of May 12, 2025, for the trial of Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, a Libyan citizen who maintains he is not guilty.

In 2018 relatives of Lockerbie victims told The Times that they had been repeatedly bugged by the security services after official documents suggested that they needed “careful watching”.

The Rev John Mosey, a church minister who lost his teenage daughter Helga in the atrocity, said that after speaking publicly his phone calls were often disrupted and documents relating to the bombing had gone missing from his computer.

Jim Swire, an English GP who lost his daughter Flora and became the public face of the campaign to secure an independent inquiry into the atrocity, reported similar intrusions and deliberately included false information in private correspondence, only for it to appear in the press days later.

The claims were corroborated by Hans Köchler, an Austrian academic appointed by the United Nations to be an independent observer at the Netherlands trial, who alleged that data had been taken from his computers.

"The final mysteries of the Lockerbie terrorist attack"

[This is an English version of the headline over a report published today on the website of the Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung. The report, translated into English, reads as follows:]

On December 21, 1988, a jumbo jet belonging to the iconic American airline Pan Am crashed into the small Scottish town of Lockerbie after a bomb exploded on board. 270 people lost their lives in a cruel way three days before Christmas. A Libyan was convicted of this terrorist attack, but not least thanks to the work of the Tyrolean university professor Hans Köchler, who critically observed the trial for the UN over 20 years ago, it is now considered very likely that a scandalous miscarriage of judgment was made at the time. The real perpetrator or perpetrators may still be at large. On the 35th anniversary of the attack, a book about this tragedy has now been published for the first time in German. It's called [translation from German] "Pan Am Flight 103: The Lockerbie Tragedy - Christmas Voyage to Death."  It was written by the Austrian aviation photographer and flight expert Patrick Huber. Krone+ publishes excerpts from it and spoke to the author.

The airline Pan American World Airways, better known as Pan Am, which slipped into bankruptcy in 1991 after 64 years of operation, was considered a pioneer of scheduled air travel and an American institution par excellence for decades. Whether New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Berlin, Frankfurt, Beirut, Johannesburg, Salzburg, Vienna or Sydney - the aircraft with the distinctive blue and white globe and the US flag on the vertical tail were a familiar sight at airports all over the world.

The other side of the coin: as a prominent figurehead of the US, Pan Am was also a ‘popular’ target for terrorists. The worst attack on society occurred 35 years ago, on December 21, 1988, and simultaneously sealed its demise.

[A longer description of the book, also in German, appears on the Austrian Wings website. What follows is a translation into English:]

On December 21, 1988, a cold, inhospitable Wednesday three days before Christmas, a bomb exploded over Lockerbie at 7:02:50 p.m. in the front cargo hold of a Pan Am jumbo that was at an altitude of around 9,450 meters on the night flight from London Heathrow New York JFK was located. Some of the debris from flight PA103 fell directly into the residential areas of the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. The huge explosion of almost 100,000 kilograms of kerosene when the center part of the fuselage and the wings with the fuel tanks hit the ground set numerous houses on fire in a fraction of a second and ignited a veritable sea of ​​flames in the small community. In addition to the wreckage of the plane, passengers' luggage, freight containers and more than 200 human bodies fell from the dark sky and landed in meadows, in forests, on roofs, in garden hedges, on fences or in the middle of the front gardens of Lockerbie houses.

Inferno on the ground

It took the fire department until the early hours of the morning to put out the fires. Their use was made more difficult, among other things, by the fact that numerous power and telephone lines were destroyed when the plane crashed.

In addition to all 243 passengers and 16 crew members on board the Boeing 747-121 with the illustrious name “Clipper Maid of the Seas” (...) 11 residents also died in the incident. The youngest victim of this disaster was just 2 months old, the oldest was 82 years old. For some of the unfortunate, the flaming inferno left only ashes and charred bones. Since these dead could no longer be identified, their remains were finally buried in a common grave.

While the cause of the crash was quickly determined, it is still not clear who was actually behind the bomb attack. Although the Libyan Abdel Basit Ali al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment for the terrorist act in 2001, this guilty verdict was met with sharp criticism from both experts and many of the victims' relatives. The Austrian UN trial observer Hans Köchler, for example, immediately spoke of a “miscarriage of justice”. Nevertheless, the convicted man was imprisoned in Great Britain, and an initial appeal was promptly rejected.

Convicted Libyan probably victim of a miscarriage of justice

Around six and a half years after the guilty verdict, on June 28, 2007, a Scottish commission for the review of criminal convictions, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), declared that there was a “possible miscarriage of justice” in this case. cannot be ruled out. The widely accepted view is now that Al-Megrahi's conviction represents a miscarriage of justice. The SCCRC therefore authorized Al-Megrahi to bring new legal remedies, which he did.

In 2008, Al-Megrahi, who was still in prison at the time, was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer. Officially for “humanitarian reasons,” he was offered release in 2009, but only if he withdrew his second appeal beforehand - which the desperate man then did so as not to have to risk dying in a Scottish prison without his To see his children and his wife in freedom once again. Shortly afterwards, the father of five, who was already severely affected by his illness, was actually released and was able to return home to his family in Libya.

Al-Megrahi died there of cancer on May 20, 2012, in the midst of the turmoil of the Libyan civil war - not without first protesting his innocence on his deathbed. He has not yet been legally rehabilitated. 

But if Al-Megrahi actually had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 - and there is indeed a lot to be said for his innocence - then who was it? Iran, as numerous indications pointed to? After all, the radical Islamic mullah regime had sworn bloody revenge for the accidental shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane (290 fatalities) by the American warship “USS Vincennes” in the summer of 1988 - six months before the attack on the Pan Am Jumbo. The Palestinians? Syria? Maybe Libya? Or was it ultimately about secret drug shipments from the Middle East to the USA, which were supposedly tolerated by the US authorities out of intelligence interests? There are witness statements that drugs were found at the scene of the accident. In any case, it was noticeable that a number of important politicians, military officials and secret service employees did not board flight PA103 at short notice that day, including the then South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha and his 22-member delegation.

The non-fiction book “Pan Am Flight 103: The Tragedy of Lockerbie - Christmas Voyage to Death” meticulously traces the last flight of the “Clipper Maid of the Seas” and illuminates the biographies of crew members, passengers and residents of Lockerbie down to the smallest detail. The author also focuses on the accident experts' investigations, the work of the judiciary and those people who did not take flight Pan Am 103 or who missed it by lucky coincidence - including the well-known British actress Kim Cattrall ("Police Academy", "Sex and the City”). The technical aspects of the accident are also discussed in detail.

Camp Zeist should stand as a warning for our justice system

[This is the headline over an article by me published in today's edition of The Herald. It can be read here. What follows is an expanded version of the article:]

The Scottish Government is promoting legislation that will permit rape cases to be tried, on a trial basis, without a jury. The only recent instance in which judges of the High Court of Justiciary have presided over a trial on indictment without a jury is the Lockerbie case. 

The conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in that trial in 2001 has been widely criticised. The late Ian Hamilton KC opined, with only slight exaggeration, "I don't think there's a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted."  I myself commented "that a shameful miscarriage of justice has been perpetrated and that the Scottish criminal justice system has been gravely sullied." 

The official report by Professor Hans Köchler, a United Nations-appointed observer at the trial, contains the following:

"13. The Opinion of the Court is exclusively based on circumstantial evidence and on a series of highly problematic inferences. As to the undersigned's knowledge, there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational. This impression is enforced when one considers that the actual wording of the larger part of the Opinion of the Court points more into the direction of a 'not proven' verdict. The arbitrary aspect of the verdict is becoming even more obvious when one considers that the prosecution, at a rather late stage of the trial, decided to 'split' the accusation and to change the very essence of the indictment by renouncing the identification of the second accused as a member of Libyan intelligence so as to actually disengage him from the formerly alleged collusion with the first accused in the supposed perpetration of the crime. Some light is shed on this procedure by the otherwise totally incomprehensible 'not guilty' verdict in regard to the second accused.

"14. This leads the undersigned to the suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case and thus may have adversely affected the outcome of the trial. This may have a profound impact on the evaluation of the professional reputation and integrity of the panel of three Scottish judges. Seen from the final outcome, a certain coordination of the strategies of the prosecution, of the defense, and of the judges' considerations during the later period of the trial is not totally unlikely. This, however, − when actually proven − would have a devastating effect on the whole legal process of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands and on the legal quality of its findings.

"15. In the above context, the undersigned has reached the general conclusion that the outcome of the trial may well have been determined by political considerations and may to a considerable extent have been the result of more or less openly exercised influence from the part of actors outside the judicial framework − facts which are not compatible with the basic principle of the division of powers and with the independence of the judiciary, and which put in jeopardy the very rule of law and the confidence citizens must have in the legitimacy of state power and the functioning of the state's organs − whether on the traditional national level or in the framework of international justice as it is gradually being established through the United Nations Organization.

"16. On the basis of the above observations and evaluation, the undersigned has − to his great dismay − reached the conclusion that the trial, seen in its entirety, was not fair and was not conducted in an objective manner. Indeed, there are many more questions and doubts at the end of the trial than there were at its beginning. The trial has effectively created more confusion than clarity and no rational observer can make any statement on the complex subject matter 'beyond any reasonable doubt.' Irrespective of this regrettable outcome, the search for the truth must continue. This is the requirement of the rule of law and the right of the victims' families and of the international public."

The Lockerbie trial resulted in a conviction. But it also gravely besmirched the reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system. The proposal to institute, on a trial basis, non-jury courts in rape cases may well achieve the apparently desired objective of increasing convictions in such cases. But at what cost to the administration of justice and the reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system? Let the Lockerbie case stand as a warning.

Politics has obstructed justice for victims of the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over an article by Kim Sengupta published today on the website of The Independent. It reads in part:]

The appearance of Agila Mohammad Masud al Marimi in an American court last month after being held captive in Libya has been portrayed as a vital breakthrough in the long pursuit of justice in the Lockerbie bombing.

It is nothing of the kind. It is, instead, continuation of a course of action which had resulted in a shameful miscarriage of justice; one which brings us no nearer to establishing the truth about the terrible atrocity in which 270 people were killed when their Pan Am flight was blown up just before Christmas in 1988.

The Libyan government – such as it is in the currently fractured country – has ordered an investigation into the abduction of the 71-year-old man from his home in Tripoli by a militia before he turned up in the US. The country’s attorney general did not issue an arrest warrant, and says the handover to American authorities is likely to have been illegal.

The “confession” that he was the Lockerbie bombmaker which Masud – a former Gadaffi regime agent – allegedly made to Libyan officials after he was seized in Libya a decade ago, has long been considered dubious by many with knowledge of the bombing and its subsequent investigation.

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the rendition of Masud was the “product of years of cooperation between US and Scottish authorities and the efforts of Libyan authorities over many years.” Officials in Washington have refused to furnish any details of how the transaction took place.

But it is not just possible abuse of procedure which is the main issue in this. The prosecution of Masud is predicated on the narrative that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, was responsible for the attack.

But many of those closely involved in the case are convinced that his conviction, by a Scottish court, was fundamentally unjust, should have been overturned and have been campaigning for this over the years.

I saw Megrahi in the winter of 2011 in Tripoli, where he had been sent from his prison in Scotland after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was lying in bed attached to a drip, oxygen mask on his skeletal face, drifting in and out of consciousness. The medicine he needed had been plundered by looters in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of the Gaddafi regime; the doctors treating him had fled.

The vengeful pursuit of Megrahi, the feeling that he had escaped justice by failing to die in a cell, persisted among those who were adamant that he was guilty. He was faking his illness, they claimed right until his death; there were demands that the post-revolutionary Libyan government should arrest and send him back to Scotland or on to the US.

Megrahi died a few months later.

Members of some of the bereaved families in the bombing have long been convinced that his conviction was wrong. Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter, Flora was clear: “I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out thinking he had been framed. I am very afraid that we saw steps taken to ensure that a politically desired result was obtained.”

I reported from the specially constituted Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, where Megrahi and his fellow Libyan defendant, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, were tried and the flaws in the prosecution case became apparent very early.

The two men were charged with what amounted to joint enterprise, yet Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was freed. The prosecution evidence was circumstantial and contradictory. Key prosecution witnesses were shaky under cross-examination.

The evidence of a supposedly prime “CIA intelligence asset”, Abdul Majid Giaka (codename “Puzzle Piece”) – who turned up in court wearing a drag queen’s costume in an attempt to hide his identity – was widely ridiculed. It emerged later that important evidence had not been passed to the defence lawyers by the Crown.

There was scathing criticism from international jurists about the proceedings. Professor Hans Köchler, a UN appointed [observer], described them as an “inconsistent, arbitrary and a spectacular miscarriage of justice”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission subsequently identified six grounds where it believed “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”.

Cynical realpolitik had played a key role in the prosecution. Both British and American officials initially claimed that Iran commissioned the attack on the Pan Am flight using the Palestinian guerrilla group PFLP (GC), based in Damascus, in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US.

That changed suddenly, however, after the first Gulf War when Syria joined the US sponsored coalition against Saddam Hussein: the same Western officials now held that Libya was the culprit state.

Colonel Gadaffi’s regime eventually paid out (...) compensation to the families of the victims; but that was seen by those unconvinced by the new theory as one just of the deals which, at the time, brought him back into the international fold.

An appeal to clear Megrahi’s name, backed some of the bereaved families and eminent lawyers, was turned down by the Appeal Court in Edinburgh in 2015 because the law was “not designed to give relatives of victims a right to proceed in an appeal for their own or the public’s interest”.

The US case against Masud is that he had colluded with Megrahi and Fhimah to carry out the bombing. It is claimed that he met the two men in Malta with the bomb which went on to the hold of the Pan Am plane through a connecting flight.

But, as we know, Fhimah was acquitted by the Lockerbie court, where the prosecution had insisted that he and Megrahi were the two bomb plotters in Malta.

Robert Black, KC, an eminent law professor born in Lockerbie who played a key role in organising the Camp Zeist trial, and subsequently became convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice warned back in 2013 that British officials were trying to retrospectively manipulate information implicating Masud and buttressing the case against Megrahi. “It looks like the Crown Office is trying to shore up the Malta connection, which is pretty weak,” he said.

Much of the information implicating Masud as being linked to Megrahi is coming from a former Libyan security official called Musbah Eter, who the FBI has been interviewing.

Eter has had a chequered life. He was convicted of the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin in 1986; an attack which prompted Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya, with some of the warplanes flying from British bases. A German TV investigation subsequently revealed that Eter was a CIA “asset”.

We do not know why it took him more than two decades to come forward with the Lockerbie information, or what influence his relationship with US intelligence played in this.

As well as Masud, the Americans hold that Abdullah al-Senussi – who was both Muammar Gaddafi’s chief of intelligence and his brother-in-law – is involved in the bombing. He is in prison in Libya, and may also end up in the US.

We will see Masud, and probably Senussi as well, end up facing Lockerbie charges at a court, and we may yet see another CIA operative – Eter this time – doing a court turn in a drag queen’s wig. None of this, however, will bring us nearer to knowing the truth about the terrible Lockerbie massacre.

[RB: Further pieces on the Lockerbie case by Kim Sengupta can be accessed here.]

A new chapter in Lockerbie bombing horror story

[This is part of the headline over a long report just published on the Arab News website. It reads in part:]

For some, the arrest last week of a Libyan man charged with having made the bomb that downed the jumbo jet over Lockerbie on Dec 21, 1988, offers the prospect of long overdue justice for the 270 victims of the disaster and their families.

For others, though, confidence in the judicial system and the joint US-Scottish investigation that has led to the latest arrest was shaken long ago by uncertainties that continue to hang over the trial and conviction in May 2000 of another Libyan, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, who in 2001 was found guilty of carrying out the bombing. (...)

Last week, 71-year-old Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, an alleged former intelligence officer for the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, appeared in a US court accused of being the bombmaker.

It is a stunning development in a case which, for many relatives of the dead, has never been satisfactorily settled. Masud’s anticipated trial represents an unexpected opportunity for the many remaining doubts surrounding the Lockerbie disaster to be resolved once and for all.

Key among them is the suspicion, which has persisted for three decades, that the Libyans were falsely accused of a crime that was actually perpetrated by the Iranian regime.

Iran certainly had a motive. On July 3, 1988, five months before the bombing, Iran Air flight 655, an Airbus A300 carrying Iranian pilgrims bound for Makkah, had been shot down accidentally over the Strait of Hormuz by a US guided-missile cruiser, the Vincennes.

All 290 people on board were killed, including 66 children and 16 members of one family, who had been traveling to Dubai for a wedding.

In 1991, a subsequently declassified secret report from within the US Defense Intelligence Agency made it clear that from the outset Iran was the number-one suspect.

Ayatollah Mohtashemi, a former Iranian interior minister, was “closely connected to the Al-Abas and Abu Nidal terrorist groups,” it read.

He had “recently paid $10 million in cash and gold to these two organizations to carry out terrorist activities and ... paid the same amount to bomb Pam Am flight 103, in retaliation for the US shoot-down of the Iranian Airbus.”

The evidence implicating Iran piled up. It emerged that two months before the bombing, German police had raided a cell of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and seized a bomb hidden in a Toshiba cassette player, just like the one that would be used to blow up Pan Am flight 103.

Yet in November 1991 it was two Libyan intelligence operatives, Abdel Baset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, who were charged with the murders. The case against them was circumstantial at best.

After years of negotiations with Qaddafi’s government, the two men were eventually handed over to be tried in a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands. Their trial began in May 2000, and on Jan 31, 2001, Al-Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted.

The crown’s case was that an unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb had been carried on an Air Malta flight from Luqa Airport in Malta to Frankfurt. There, it was transferred to a Pan Am aircraft to London, where it was loaded onto flight 103.

Inside the suitcase, wrapped in clothing, was the Toshiba cassette player containing the bomb.

A small part of a printed circuit board, believed to be from the bomb timer, was found in the wreckage, along with a fragment of a piece of clothing. This was traced to a store in Malta where the owner, Tony Gauci, told police he remembered selling it to a Libyan man.

Gauci, who died in 2016, was the prosecution’s main witness, but from the outset there were serious doubts about his evidence. He was interviewed 23 times by Scottish police before he finally identified Al-Megrahi — and only then after seeing the wanted man’s photograph in a newspaper article naming him as a suspect.

In their judgment, even the three Scottish judges conceded that “on the matter of identification of the … accused, there are undoubtedly problems.”

Worse, in 2007 Scottish newspaper The Herald claimed that the CIA had offered Gauci $2 million to give evidence in the case.

Another part of the prosecution’s case was that the fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage, believed to have been part of the timer that triggered the bomb, matched a batch of timers supplied to Libya by a Swiss company in 1985.

However, the company insisted the timer on the aircraft had not been supplied to Libya, and in 2007 its CEO claimed that he had been offered $4 million by the FBI to say that it had.

Many have denounced the trial as a sham, suggesting that Qaddafi agreed to surrender Al-Megrahi and Fhimah, accept responsibility for the attack and pay compensation to the families of the victims, only because the US promised that the sanctions that had been imposed on Libya would be eased.

After Al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction was rejected in March 2002, one of the independent UN observers assigned to the case as a condition of Libya’s cooperation condemned what he called the “spectacular miscarriage of justice.”

Professor Hans Köchler said that he was “not convinced at all that the sequence of events that led to this explosion of the plane over Scotland was as described by the court. Everything that is presented is only circumstantial evidence.”

It remains to be seen what evidence will be presented in the upcoming trial of Masud.

Reports say that he was released only last year from prison in Libya, having been jailed for a decade for his part in the government of Qaddafi, who was overthrown in 2011.

Last week, Libya’s Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah said that his government had handed Masud over to the Americans.

“An arrest warrant was issued against him from Interpol,” he said on Dec 16. “It has become imperative for us to cooperate in this file for the sake of Libya’s interest and stability.”

As Dbeibah put it, Libya “had to wipe the mark of terrorism from the Libyan people’s forehead.”

From the very beginning, one of the strongest advocates for the innocence of Al-Megrahi was Jim Swire, a British doctor whose daughter Flora died in the bombing on the eve of her 24th birthday. Now 86, Swire has spent the past three decades campaigning tirelessly to expose what he believes was a miscarriage of justice.

Al-Megrahi, suffering from prostate cancer, was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. Shortly before his death in Libya in 2012, he was visited in his sick bed by Swire, who in an interview last year recalled Al-Megrahi’s last words to him: “I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.”

Last week, Swire called for the trial of Masud not to be held in the US or Scotland.

“There are so many loose ends that hang from this dreadful case, largely emanating from America, that I think we should … seek a court that is free of being beholden to any nation directly involved in the atrocity itself,” he said.

“What we’ve always been after amongst the British relatives is the truth, and not a fabrication that might seem to be replacing the truth.”

Peculiar reluctance to examine the whole of the available evidence

[Here are two pieces written by Dr Jim Swire to mark the thirty-third anniversary of the destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie:]

Those of us who lost family members in the Pan Am 103 disaster of 21st December 1988 just want to know the truth about why the disaster happened, why our innocent families had to die, why it was not prevented and who was responsible.

33 years later we still need those answers and believe that grievous mistakes were made both before and after the blow fell. We are therefore intensely grateful to those who, like some of us, are incredulous about the conviction of a man on such evidence and prepared still to seek the truth

The extraordinary tale of a bomb allegedly transferred from the hand of the Libyan, the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in Malta depended, at his trial in Zeist, upon the evidence of a shopkeeper Toni Gauci, who thought Megrahi “looked a lot like” the man who had bought some key clothing from his shop.

Not only is it now known that Gauci was paid about $2,000,000 for giving evidence that supported the conviction of Megrahi, but from police evidence it is now known that Gauci knew before the trial had even started that serious money would be on offer.

The inducement to give evidence by offering a witness wealth beyond his dreams, if that evidence would support a conviction, sounds to me like bribery or at least an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

Of course to openly accuse the US Department of Justice of such criminal behaviour was never going to add muscle to the US/UK ‘special relationship’. But it was the UN’s special observer at the Zeist trial, professor Hans Köchler of the IPO in Vienna who said and wrote that the proceedings there did not in his view represent a fair judicial process.

We believe that Scottish justice failed even to enforce its own rules at Zeist and that the massaging of the subsequent appeals has been a deep scandal which has allowed crucial defects, particularly in some of the forensic evidence, to remain inadequately examined in any court of law.

This dreadful business requires a full enquiry chaired and defined now by those unafraid of the power wielded by those states still awed by the historic rhetoric of the iron lady and her successors in the Anglo Saxon world.

        .....

[RB: An edited version of this second item has been published today on the website of The Herald.]

Recent evidence quoted in the press reveals that both the UK and US legal authorities were deeply nervous about the quality of the evidence of identification concerning the late Mr Abdelbaset al-Megrahi provided by Mr Tony Gauci the Maltese shopkeeper.

The Scottish police work in Malta leading to this evidence was obtained under the leadership of Harry Bell.

Harry Bell had been keeping a contemporaneous diary, which was irregular.

Giving evidence under oath in the Zeist court Mr Bell perfectly honestly revealed the existence of his diary which was at home in Glasgow.

To the astonishment of some relatives, present in that Zeist court, Mr Bell was not told to go home and get it.

Later that diary was made public.

It appears that Mr Bell knew that an offer of $10,000 ‘for his immediate needs’ was available for Mr Gauci from US Rewards for Justice [sic] funds with essentially unlimited rewards to follow. Mr Gauci is now known to have received $2,000,000.

The diary also reveals that Mr Tony Gauci and his brother were aware of and deeply interested in, the immense financial incentives. 

Wouldn’t you, dear reader, also have been?

Yet Mr Tony Gauci’s was the only supposedly genuine identification of Mr Megrahi as being involved, through the latter’s alleged buying of clothes from Gauci's shop on a certain date. 

Having failed to explore the contents of Mr Bell’s diary there in court, there seemed to some of us to be a peculiar reluctance on the part of the court to examine the whole of the available evidence. To us laymen it was almost as though Mr Megrahi’s guilt rather than innocence was a given. 

I can only agree with Professor Robert Black QC’s comment: “It is now more obvious than ever that the Megrahi conviction is built on sand. An independent inquiry should be instituted into the case by the Scottish government, the UK government or both.” 

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.

Lockerbie verdict "an aberration in the history of international law"

[What follows is an English translation (by me, with assistance from Google Translate) of an article published today on the website of the German newspaper Die Welt:]

Verdict over Lockerbie attack to be reviewed

In 1988, a bomb tore apart a plane over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.  A Libyan intelligence officer was convicted for the terrorist attack. But there are some indications that he was not the culprit. At the beginning of 2020, the case could be reconsidered.

More than 30 years after the attack on a jumbo jet of the former US airline Pan Am over Lockerbie, Scotland, a completely new legal review of the terrorist act may take place. In 2001, the Libyan intelligence officer Abdel Basit Ali al-Megrahi was convicted as the culprit, but his family has applied for a review.

According to information obtained by Welt am Sonntag, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) will decide at the beginning of 2020 whether to allow an appeal to the High Court of Justiciary, the highest criminal court in Scotland. 

In Germany, the Lockerbie case made headlines in the spring.  The SCCRC had made requests for judicial assistance to the German judiciary, and dozens of former employees of the GDR state security were interrogated. [RB: The interrogation of former East German Stasi officers took place at the instigation of Scottish police and prosecutors, not the SCCRC, as explained here and here. We do not know what information the SCCRC is seeking in Germany, but here is what I said to a Scottish journalist in July:  "I really have no idea what it is that the SCCRC is seeking evidence about in Germany. The only German connections that spring readily to mind are (a) Operation Autumn Leaves in Neuss [https://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2016/10/operation-autumn-leaves.html]; (b) the alleged movement of the bomb suitcase through Frankfurt Airport; and (c) Edwin Bollier's supply of MEBO timers to the East German Stasi. Because the court order granting the SCCRC a European Investigation Order refers to a specific person and his involvement with the Pan Am 103 case (and to possible criminal proceedings), I think (a) is the most likely. But this is merely guess-work."]

The background is that in the early 90s the investigation also followed a trail to East Berlin, which is now being pursued again. The bomb aboard the Boeing 747 exploded on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew. Eleven inhabitants from Lockerbie also died.

The verdict against the Libyan agent al-Megrahi is controversial. Austrian international law expert Hans Köchler, who observed the Lockerbie trial for the United Nations, told Welt am Sonntag: "The Lockerbie trial was more like a secret service operation than ordinary court proceedings." The result was an "aberration in the history of international law" that the international community must correct for its own sake.

The British doctor Jim Swire, who lost his daughter in the attack, considers a new procedure overdue. Swire told the newspaper, "I expected my country to find the truth, the whole truth." That the truth has been suppressed so far is "an insult to my murdered daughter."

The SCCRC deals with miscarriages of justice, and describes itself as "independent of Parliament, the Scottish Government, the Crown, the judiciary and the defense." As early as May 2018, the Commission stated that it was "in the interest of justice" to accept the request of the family of the convicted Libyan to consider whether they should be allowed to contest the verdict. At that time it stated that it wished to undertake a "total review", which is now almost complete, reports Welt am Sonntag.

A preliminary investigation into Lockerbie (file reference 50 Js 42.401 / 88) is pending at the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt am Main. The authority is acting in support of the Scots: "Currently, in Germany witness hearings are taking place by way of legal assistance," said the prosecutor to Welt am Sonntag. In the disaster, four Germans lost their lives, two women and two men, from Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.

[RB: A much longer article, with extensive interviews with Dr Jim Swire, Edwin Bollier and Professor Hans Köchler also appears today, behind a paywall, in Welt am Sonntag: 
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus203808432/Lockerbie-Attentat-Ein-trauernder-Vater-und-der-Kampf-seines-Lebens-fuer-die-Wahrheit.html.]

Guantanamo trials a reaction to US dissatisfaction with Lockerbie process

[What follows is the opening section of a very interesting article headed War Crimes, Justice, and the National Interest published yesterday on the website of The Tower, the newspaper of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC:]

Lawrence J Morris, chief of staff and counselor to Catholic University President John Garvey, was presented with the Mirror of Justice Scholars Award on Thursday, November 7th in the Slowinski courtroom at Columbus Law School. Morris’ role as chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo military commissions during the 9/11 trials was recognized with the award. It was presented by the St John Paul II Guild of Catholic Lawyers, which advocates the achievement of justice through law.

Subject to almost two decades of humanitarian criticism, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was established in Cuba at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Enacted by the George Bush administration, the facility was the result of swift action in the war on terrorism following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Twenty men believed to be involved in the attacks were detained on January 11th, 2002 and the prison population expanded to nearly 700 by May of 2003.

Morris was head of the Army’s criminal law branch during the establishment of the prison and was eventually asked to be chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions. 

Morris argued in 2002 for a public trial of the suspected 9/11 terrorists. He wanted to uphold the standards of the American justice system while still laying “bare the scope of al Qaeda’s alleged conspiracy,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Instead, Morris’ proposal was disregarded by the Bush administration which desired more rapid prosecution. Those accused were interrogated clandestinely as the priority of senior officials was prevention of future attacks over standard court proceedings. 

The Bush administration’s initial decision to deny public trials led to disarray. Several setbacks occurred and destructive allegations against Guantanamo drew public attention. Rumors of torture and abuse of inmates spread rapidly to civil rights groups and law professionals. The untimely combination of poor public image and internal disarray lead the administration to bring the cases to public trial, which they then asked Morris to conduct. He hoped to reintroduce military commissions, which are, as described by Morris, a “judicial mechanism and what is colloquially known as war-crimes tribunals.” Morris illustrated this with reference to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, which lead to the deaths of 270 people. 

Libyan prime minister Muammar al-Gaddafi produced the Libyan agents accused of the bombing in Lockerbie, who went to trial on the condition that “they would be tried under Scottish law in a Dutch courtroom,” said Morris. “Needless to say, there were no Americans involved.” [RB: Gaddafi was not the prime minister of Libya, but the "Leader of the Revolution". American lawyers from the US Department of Justice were in fact very heavily involved in the Zeist trial, as was noted by the UN Observer, Professor Hans Köchler, in his report on the trial and as can be seen in the references on this blog to Brian Murtagh and Dana Biehl.]

Thirteen years after the Lockerbie bombing, only one of the agents was convicted.

“We took from Lockerbie a sense of the limitations of relying on other sovereigns for justice,” says Morris.

In 2001, the young Bush administration spotted the similarities between the Lockerbie case and the 9/11 attacks and was looking to make rapid changes in response to past administrations. The thirteen-year delay of Lockerbie was unacceptable to the Bush administration, leading to their failed and controversial interrogation techniques which ultimately turned them to Morris’ appointment as the conductor of the public trials.

Morris turned to military commissions last used after World War II and “began drafting trial regulations and debating points of law with architects of the administration’s broad vision of presidential power,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Morris believed in the provision of due process to those being tried, allowing them similar court proceedings as those of US civilian court cases. However, the administration was steadfast in its view of the accused, one which saw the terrorists as below the fairness for which Morris advocated and which saw itself as above standard court practices. Morris and his team were presented once again with the issue of the disconnect between the meaning of justice to the White House and that to military lawyers, after the previous rejection of Morris’ proposal for public trials.

“Using conventional courts was insufficient [and] unable to bring these killers to justice in any matter that would be timely and just,” said Morris. “There was a need to make a point through the courts… that this was an unlawful attack by unlawful combatants and therefore to resurrect a dormant mechanism for justice that has not been used in years.” 

Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation with author Richard Marquise

[This is the title of a podcast uploaded yesterday to the Stratfor Worldview website. It takes the form of an interview with Richard Marquise conducted by Stratfor's Chief Security Officer Fred Burton. The podcast can be listened to, and a transcript can be read, here. The introduction reads as follows:]

On December 21, 1988, a plane full of travelers bound from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. All on board were killed, as were 11 people on the ground. The subsequent investigation into the bombing spread over hundreds of square miles in a hunt for evidence that had been blown to smithereens.

The FBI's lead investigator in the case, Richard Marquise, was assigned to the monumental task of helping determine what had happened, who was responsible and, eventually, how to prosecute the case. He talked about his book detailing those efforts, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation with Stratfor Chief Security Officer Fred Burton.

[RB: The podcast does not cover the criticisms of the investigation, prosecution and trial that have subsequently been made by the United Nations appointed observer at the trial, Professor Hans Köchler; by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission; by John Ashton; by Dr Morag Kerr and by many other persons and organisations. However it does contain interesting material, particularly on relations between the FBI and the Scottish police, and between the Scottish (and UK) authorities and the United States government.]

What is at stake is the reputation of the Scottish justice system

[Today's edition of The Scotsman carries an article by James Robertson under the headline Lockerbie anniversary: ‘One terrible injustice cannot be cancelled out’. It reads as follows:]

Like many other people, I remember exactly where I was on the night of 21st December 1988. I was a bookseller in what was then the only Edinburgh branch of Waterstones, on George Street, and that evening the shop was crowded with customers choosing Christmas presents. Popular titles included Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the paperback of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. The phones were ringing constantly as people called to ask what time we closed or whether we had a copy of this or that book.

At about eight o’clock I answered the telephone and recognised the voice of a friend, another bookseller, on the line. He had just heard a radio report that a plane had crashed onto the town of Lockerbie. It sounded like a major incident and since, mistakenly, he thought I was from that part of the country he wanted to let me know. I thanked him and went back to work.

By the time I got home and switched on the television it was the only news story. Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 passenger jet en route from London to New York, had fallen out of the sky and, as would be quite quickly established, all 259 passengers and crew, and a further eleven people on the ground, had been killed. A few days later, everybody’s worst fears were confirmed: this was not the result of bad weather or mechanical failure, but of a bomb having been placed on the plane.

That night is now half my lifetime away, and belongs to a world in which there was no internet, and in which news in the UK was accessed entirely via newspapers, radio and four TV channels. Through all the subsequent years of political, social and cultural change, the story of the Lockerbie bombing has never faded. In part this is because of the sheer scale of it: an event like no other in recent Scottish history − except perhaps the Piper Alpha disaster of the same year, which claimed the lives of 167 oil platform workers. But Piper Alpha was an accident, whereas the destruction of Pan Am 103 was an act of mass murder. It led to the biggest ever Scottish criminal investigation and, after more than twelve years, to the conviction of one Libyan man, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

The response to the bombing brought out some of the very best in human behaviour − kindness, care, courage and dignity. It also left deep emotional wounds that for some will never fully heal. It is completely understandable that many relatives of the victims, people of Lockerbie, police and other emergency workers involved in the traumatic aftermath have long wanted the story to be over, or as ‘over’ as it ever can be. But after the long investigation, then the trial of Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Khalifah Fhimah at a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands, and finally the conviction of Megrahi alone in 2001, too many questions were left unanswered for this to be possible.

Well-founded doubts about aspects of the investigation have existed almost since the night the plane came down. It is, for example, highly questionable whether the bomb was ingested into the air traffic system at Malta, as the prosecution case against Megrahi and Fhimah contended, rather than at Heathrow. There were serious shortcomings in the identification by Tony Gauci, a key witness, of Megrahi as the purchaser of clothes packed into the bomb suitcase. Likewise, there were clear failings in the metallurgical analysis of the timer used to trigger the bomb. The prosecution failed to disclose vital evidence to the defence. And the indictments against Megrahi and Fhimah, without which no case against them could have been brought, were based on information supplied by a witness found to have been completely unreliable and untrustworthy. Nevertheless, the juryless court acquitted Fhimah and, almost entirely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, found Megrahi guilty. The United Nations-nominated observer Professor Hans Köchler immediately condemned aspects of the judgement as ‘arbitrary’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘irrational’ and said that the trial as a whole was ‘not fair and was not conducted in an objective manner.’

Concerns that the conviction might be a gross miscarriage of justice were reinforced over the years as new information emerged that had not been considered during either the trial or at Megrahi’s first appeal. The report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) on his conviction, made public by the Herald newspaper in March 2012, found six grounds which might have warranted referring the case to the Court of Appeal.

But by that time Megrahi was back home in Libya with terminal cancer, having dropped his second appeal at the time of his controversial release from prison, on compassionate grounds, in 2009. Even his death in May 2012 did not draw a line under the whole affair.

The campaign group Justice for Megrahi (JfM), to which I belong, was founded in 2008. Its signatories include some of those who lost loved ones in the disaster, such as Jim Swire and John Mosey, the ‘architect’ of the Kamp Zeist court arrangements Professor Robert Black, and various journalists, writers, lawyers, politicians, former police officers and other citizens who independently reached the conclusion that something had gone very wrong in the Lockerbie investigation and the subsequent prosecution of Mr Megrahi. In September 2012 the committee of JfM drew up six − later increased to nine − allegations of criminality in connection with the Lockerbie investigation and trial, relating to possible malpractice by Crown Office personnel, police and other prosecution witnesses. The allegations were submitted to the then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill in strict confidence. They were passed nonetheless to the Crown Office, which at once publicly denounced them as ‘without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded’ even before the dossier of detailed evidence had been examined by the police.

This intervention, we felt, represented both prejudice and an intolerable conflict of interest since the Crown Office would ultimately decide whether or not the allegations had any validity. Furthermore, JfM’s allegations would be dealt with by Dumfries and Galloway Police, the force which had carried out the original investigation. None of this gave us confidence that these matters would be treated systematically, objectively and fairly. Indeed, one of the most important outcomes of the Lockerbie saga has been to expose serious faults in the mechanism and procedures of Scottish justice.

However, in 2013 Police Scotland came into being, and the treatment of our allegations changed substantially. ‘Operation Sandwood’ was established, which at its conclusion was described by the police as ‘a methodical and rigorous inquiry using our major investigation framework under the direction of an experienced senior investigating officer.’ We have no argument with that description. Regular liaison meetings took place between JfM and Police Scotland, who engaged a QC completely independent of Crown Office to review the findings of Operation Sandwood. These were unprecedented arrangements. The current Chief Constable, Iain Livingstone, had oversight of the entire investigation, which was completed on 21st November this year.

The Sandwood report has now been submitted to Crown Office. The police concluded that there was ‘no evidence of criminality and therefore no basis to submit a standard prosecution report’. Crucially, however, Police Scotland’s statement goes on to say, ‘The material collated during the inquiry and the findings and conclusions reached have relevance to … the potential appeal against conviction lodged on behalf of the late Mr Megrahi.’

JfM does not, of course, have any knowledge of the details of what the Sandwood report contains, but we are confident that the police have indeed been ‘methodical and rigorous’. We know from the amount of time and resources spent on Operation Sandwood that the police did not deem our allegations either vexatious or without substance. And when the report is received, as it must be, by the SCCRC -- the body currently considering whether to recommend that Mr Megrahi’s family be allowed to make a fresh appeal against his conviction -- we firmly believe that its contents will contain enough information to make that recommendation inevitable.

Such a development, long overdue, would enable all material relevant to the case to be reviewed in the Court of Appeal. JfM believes that in the absence of a public inquiry, which the Scottish Government has consistently refused to establish, this is the only way to have all the evidence examined and to bring some kind of finality to this aspect, at least, of the Lockerbie story.

What is at stake is not just whether there was a miscarriage of justice in Megrahi’s conviction but the reputation of the Scottish justice system. None of this will lessen the pain and grief felt by the families of the dead. But the terrible injustice perpetrated on that December night thirty years ago is not cancelled by another injustice: it is compounded.

The full truth about the Lockerbie bombing is not yet known, but gradually we are moving towards it.

We must hope that some of those, now elderly, who have sought that truth for so long, are still here when it is brought into the light.