What Lockerbie meant for Libyans

[This is the headline over an article by Owen Schalk just published in the July/August 2025 issue of the Scottish Left Review. The following are excerpts:]

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit exploded over the rural Scottish town of Lockerbie, raining hellfire on the community’s inhabitants. Eleven people were killed by falling debris. All 259 of the plane’s occupants died.

The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom pointed the finger at Libya. In 1992, the United Nations Security Council imposed wide-ranging sanctions against Libya over the bombing, including an air embargo, an arms embargo, and a ban on the sale of oil equipment to the country. In 1996, the US Congress tightened sanctions by passing the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act. These sanctions deprived the Jamahiriya of billions in revenue and contributed to the Libyan leadership’s ill-fated decision to “open up” economically to the West in the early 2000s.

37 years after the Lockerbie bombing, two TV shows aired in Britain: Lockerbie: A Search for the Truth (Sky Studios) and The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (BBC). The production of two TV series about Lockerbie almost four decades after the bombing shows the continued public interest in the case’s many ins, outs, and inconsistencies. Despite this, the retrospectives around Lockerbie leave out one important piece of the story: the Libyans themselves, namely, how they experienced the economic sanctions that resulted from the Lockerbie bombing.

The bombing and the trial

Initial investigations into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 implicated members of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), based in Syria. The group had apparently executed the bombing on behalf of the Iranian government, which sought revenge for the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988. 290 civilians died in the US warship’s attack.

On November 13, 1991, the Lockerbie investigation abruptly shifted focus from the PFLP-GC/Iran to the Libyan government. Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the bombing of Pan Am 103, recounted his shock at the sudden turn of events: “There were hints from various sources of surprises to come, but nothing has prepared me for this. Today Iran is forgotten; it’s all about Libya.”

An “official story” was provided to the public: the bombing was revenge for the Reagan administration’s assassination attempt against Muammar Qadhafi in 1986, a US attack that had killed dozens of civilians and the Libyan leader’s infant daughter Hana.

According to the main counternarrative of the Lockerbie bombing, the US and UK decided to shift blame for the attack to Libya because Libya, unlike Iran, was more vulnerable to destabilization and less likely to retaliate.

The Libyan government maintained its innocence. After years of diplomatic wrangling, a trial was held for the accused in the Hague. Two Libyans went to trial: Lamin Khalifah Fhimah and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fhimah was acquitted. Circumstances surrounding the trial remain highly questionable.

The Lockerbie case is a window, albeit a cloudy one, into the tense relationship between the West and Qadhafi’s Libya. Readers in the West have a general awareness about what the case meant to the US and the UK. However, they have little knowledge of what Lockerbie meant for Libyans themselves.

The sanctions period

In Libya, the Lockerbie sanctions resulted in constricted state revenues, which meant unpaid salaries, diminishing subsidies, and goods shortages. Inflation rose, public infrastructure decayed, while a growing number of smugglers and black marketeers sought to resell subsidized goods at higher prices in neighbouring countries. Corruption became increasingly normalized, a system of “favours” and “bribes” running through the public administration, damaging Libyans’ confidence in their socialist-oriented political system. As Matteo Capasso writes, the process of egalitarian development that characterized the early Jamahiriya was “abandoned in the 1990s. The structure of the dominant class started to change, the effectiveness of the newly democratic structures decreased and this affected the entire political edifice of al-Jamahiriyah, leading to the dramatic increase of socio-economic inequalities.”  

Estimates have been made regarding Libyan economic losses from the Lockerbie sanctions. One found that between 1992 and 1999, “the oil sector lost between $18 billion and $33 billion both as lost opportunities and lost revenue.” Meanwhile, $8 billion in overseas assets were frozen, “denying [Libya] the cash needed to buy all kinds of equipment, expertise, machinery, food and medicine.”

A former Libyan deputy foreign minister recalled that “steps were taken” by the Libyan government to compile data on economic losses. One Qadhafi-era minister said the Lockerbie losses file contained “everything including the number of deaths” caused by the sanctions. Some of these deaths resulted from a lack of medical care, which forced Libyans to take tortuous routes abroad for treatment. “Because of the sanctions,” writes Libyan academic Mustafa Fetouri, “people wishing to leave Libya had to drive to Djerba in Tunisia for example and take a flight from there.”

Libya’s Lockerbie losses file was destroyed during the 2011 NATO war. Fetouri estimates that the sanctions cost Libya nearly $100 billion. These losses hit the oil sector, aviation, healthcare, agriculture, and industry, and caused thousands of deaths. The daily price of food rose by an estimated 40 percent and the cost of medicine rose by 30 percent (though most medicines were free). In 2003, the Libyan government paid another $2.7 billion in compensation as part of the agreement to have the sanctions lifted.

In the context of massive economic losses caused by the Lockerbie sanctions, many in the Libyan leadership, including Muammar Qadhafi himself, became sympathetic to the idea of economic opening to the West. They believed such an opening would appease the imperialist powers while giving an economic boost to the Jamahiriya, thereby stabilizing the Libyan political system. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

The failure of “opening up”

Libya’s “opening up” was a disastrous failure riven by internal tensions and external interventions, both overt and covert, by the US government. Unlike China’s reform and opening up after 1978, Libya’s was the result of economic strain imposed from the outside, namely, the Lockerbie sanctions and destabilizing interventions from imperialist powers. For an export-dependent, import-reliant country like Libya, these interventions had a wide-ranging impact. The liberalizing reforms would not have happened without the above factors. The sanctions in particular devastated Libya’s economy, hindered Libya’s revolutionary momentum, and set the bounds for internal debate on the Jamahiriya’s economic policy. In order to reach détente with the West and encourage foreign investment, Libya sacrificed its nuclear program and ended support for revolutionary activities abroad. The sanctions were lifted in the early 2000s.

Qadhafi and his allies viewed opening up as a means of encouraging foreign investment in the oil sector, while retaining majority state control, in order to strengthen the economy and thereby stabilize the Jamahiriya political system. Not all agreed with this approach. The reformists – including the Western-trained Mahmoud Jibril and Shukri Ghanem – sought wide-ranging privatizations that would undermine the leading role of the state. For his part, Ghanem declared the need to “change the thinking, the mentality and the culture of the [Libyan] people,” describing the Libyan mindset as “their general feeling that the state is their father and it is their guarantor that has to pay everything for them and provide them with housing, treatment, work and everything else.” In the context of desperation over massive economic losses, individuals like Ghanem were empowered within Libyan power structures.

The US government funded opposition civil society and established contacts with the reformist camp, whose economic policies would give US companies greater access to Libyan labour and resources. Persistent fissures between the revolutionary and reformist camps in the leadership weakened the Libyan state. When protests over housing policy in early 2011 avalanched into a NATO-backed revolution, prominent reformists including Jibril and Mustafa Abdul Jalil defected to the increasingly Islamist-led opposition. (,,,)

Lockerbie sanctions and the fall of the Jamahiriya

The Lockerbie sanctions cost Libya billions of dollars, and they led the Jamahiriya’s leadership to make security concessions to the West and liberalize the economy in order to encourage foreign investment. Various factions in the leadership had conflicting views on how far this liberalization should go, and in the context of continued Western interference in Libya, these divisions proved fatal. Indeed, the sanctions-imposed liberalization spelled the end of the Jamahiriya, leading directly to various wars that have caused thousands of deaths, impoverished hundreds of thousands and led hundreds of thousands more to flee the country.

The above reality cannot be ignored in retrospectives on the Lockerbie bombing. The horror of subsequent tragedies in Libya (the civil war, the open-air slave markets, the Derna floods) may divert attention from Libyans’ experience of the 1990s, but one should remember the steps by which Libya reached its current situation of state collapse and internal conflict. The Lockerbie sanctions – which, it should be recalled, were imposed following dubious legal proceedings – had a significant impact on straining the Libyan economy, which led directly to “opening up” and the fall of the Jamahiriya.

This is what Lockerbie means to Libyans. It should be what Lockerbie means to people in the West too.

"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.”

How you build a lie

What follows is excerpted from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2011:

Lockerbie, Guilt & Gaddafi

[This is the heading over a post published yesterday on Ian Bell's blog. It reads in part:]

Mustafa Abdel-Jalil is quick on his feet, if nothing else. From senior functionary in a despised and brutish regime to freedom-loving “head of the provisional government” in under a fortnight is smart work indeed.

It is reassuring, too, that Gaddafi’s former justice minister has been “chosen”, in the Scotsman’s words, “to head new regime”. Alternatively – the Sky News version – Abdel-Jalil has been “elected... president of Libya’s newly-formed National Council”.

As it turns out, the born-again democrat appears to have done all the electing and choosing himself, backed by the overwhelming support of persons named Abdel-Jalil. (...)

He calculates, no doubt, that his access to the world’s media will bolster his status in a post-Gaddafi Libya. Name recognition, they call it. But to pull off that trick, Abdel-Jalil must first tell the western press what the western press wants to hear, and bet – a safe enough bet – that reporters will not think beyond the headlines. Over the weekend, he made excellent use of his brief spell as Mr President.

So here’s Murdoch’s Sunday Times, a paper to which the phrase “once great” attaches itself like a faded obituary. “Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing” was done and dusted by the weekend. A new line was required. Any ideas?

The Lockerbie bomber blackmailed Colonel Gaddafi into securing his re­lease from a Scottish prison by threatening to expose the dictator’s role in Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity, a former senior Libyan official [guess who] has claimed.

Now, let’s keep this simple. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was handed over to Scot­tish police on April 5, 1999, and released on compassionate grounds on August 20, 2009. Clearly, this was the most patient blackmailer the world has seen. If we believe a word, the man nursed his threat to exact “revenge” for over a decade, until terminal cancer intervened. As you do.

According to Abdel-Jalil and the Sunday Times, nevertheless, “Megrahi’s ploy led to a £50,000-a-month slush fund being set up to spend on legal fees and lobbying to bring him back to Tripoli”. Since the entire Libyan exchequer was Gaddafi’s per­sonal slush fund, the sum seems niggardly. If vastly more was not spent on the case, I’d be astonished. And why wouldn’t it be spent? Wasn't Megrahi threatening to “spill the beans”?

But here Abdel-Jalil pulls out another of his plums. Again, he provides noth­ing resembling the whiff of proof. Al-Megrahi “was not the man who carried out the planning and execution of the bombing, but he was ‘nevertheless involved in facili­tating things for those who did’”.

So where does that leave us? Megrahi – what with “planning and execution” omitted – didn’t do it. Another sensation. Or is that revelation perhaps designed to solve several tiny issues raised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and others over a miscarriage of justice and sundry associated issues?

Never fear: Gaddafi certainly did do it. That’s “on the record”, placed there by the erstwhile “head of the provisional government”, no less. So what then of “plan­ning and execution”; what of “those who did”? Yet again, Abdel-Jalil doesn’t say. Why not?

Smoke and mirrors is a cliché, God knows. You only wish they would polish the mirrors occasionally, and puff up some properly thick smoke. But why bother? It works. First: make sure that “everyone knows” Gaddafi did it. Secondly, as though inferentially, throw in a few details based on a “fact” established by hearsay and mere assertion. This is how you build a lie.

What happened – what is established by the evidence as having happened – matters less than perception and belief. Gaddafi, with his multifarious actual crimes, is now the handiest scapegoat imaginable. Perhaps he should complain to Tony Blair.

Or perhaps he should get himself to the Hague, and to a proper court. It would do the dictator no good, but it might do wonders, even now, for the reputation of Scottish justice. I put the chances of that at zero.

Gaddafi “blackmailed by Megrahi”

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Sunday Times on this date in 2011:]

The Lockerbie bomber blackmailed Colonel Gadaffi into securing his release from a Scottish prison by threatening to expose the dictator's role in Britain's worst terrorist atrocity, a former senior Libyan official has claimed.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi vowed to exact' "revenge" unless he was returned home, said Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Libya's former justice minister. In an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times, Abdel-Jalil says Megrahi's ploy led to a €50,000-a-month slush fund being set up to spend on legal fees and lobbying to bring him back to Tripoli.

His comments are highly embarrassing for Labour, after declassified documents revealed that Gordon Brown's govemment secretly worked to deliver the bomber's freedom in exchange for trade deals. They are also likely to further strain relations between Britain and the United States, which had opposed Megrahi's release. (...)

Abdel-Jalil, who quit his job last week over the regime's brutal crackdown and is now setting up an interim government in Benghazi, said Megrahi was involved in the attack ordered by Gadaffi as one of the Leader’s former spies.

He was not the man who carried out the planning and execution of the bombing, but he was "nevertheless involved in facilitating things for those who did".

Abdel-Jalil said he knew from two Libyan senior justice officials assigned to liaise with Megrahi in Scotland that he had threatened to "spill the beans" on several occasions. Megrahi had warned Gadaffi: "lf you do not rescue me, I will reveal everything. If you don't ensure my return home, I will reveal everything."

The threat paid off, ensuring the Libyan leader became heavily involved. "Abdelbaset received very special treatment as a Libyan prisoner abroad that was never shown to anyone else," said Abdel-Jalil.

"Gadaffi and his officials were dedicated to ensuring that Megrahi should return to Libya even if it cost them every penny they had. It was costing Libya £50,000 a month being paid to him, his legal team and family members for visitations and living expenses.” He claimed that up to £1.3 billion was spent on the case. (...)

Jim Swire, a retired British doctor whose 24-year-ald, daughter Flora was killed, said: “I’ve never known who ordered the bombing.

"I would love to see Gadaffi and his henchmen brought out of Libya alive and put in front of an international court in Holland to answer the questions we have about why and how this was carried out.

“Some may say if it can be proved Gadaffi ordered the Lockerbie bombings, does it matter how he did it? Well, it certainly matters to us, the relatives of the victims. We want to know the truth about how it was carried out and who was behind it."

Ben Wallace, the Conservative MP for Lancaster and Wyre, said the comments proved the conspiracy theorists who maintained Megrahi's innocence were wrong and intelligence services under Labour.

"Why were British intelligence and Scottish ministers not aware at the time of the threat being made by Megrahi, or had he already indicated to the authorities that he was prepared to talk?" Wallace said.

"If he was a foreign spy, why weren't we bugging those conversations? ... From start to finish Megrahi made fools of the Scottish government and the Labour government, with the Lockerbie victims and taxpayers paying the price."

[A somewhat shorter report in the New York Daily News can be read here.]

[RB: Here is a comment that I posted on this blog at the time:]

What has any of this got to do with whether Abdelbaset Megrahi was wrongly convicted on the evidence led at Camp Zeist? Is this no longer an issue of any concern? Is the question of the probity and integrity of the Scottish criminal justice system of no importance once a few Libyans who once, with no apparent qualms, supported Colonel Gaddafi decide that telling the US and the UK what they want to hear may be in their own best long-term interests?

His long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence

[What follows is an extract from an article by John Pilger that was published on the Information Clearing House website on this date in 2011:]

Gone from the Murdoch press are pejorative "insurgents". The action in Libya, says The Times, is "a revolution... as revolutions used to be". That it is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato is hardly news. The self-appointed "rebel leader", Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was Gaddafi's feared justice minister. The CIA runs or bankrolls most of the rest, including America's old friends, the Mujadeen Islamists who spawned al-Qaeda.

 

They told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence, unlike the abundant evidence of "rebel" massacres of black African workers falsely accused of being mercenaries. European bankers' secret transfer of the Central Bank of Libya from Tripoli to "rebel" Benghazi by European bankers in order to control the country's oil billions was an epic heist of little interest.

The entirely predictable indictment of Gaddafi before the "international court" at The Hague evokes the charade of the dying "Lockerbie bomber", Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, whose "heinous crime" has been deployed to promote the west's ambitions in Libya. In 2009, al-Megrahi was sent back to Libya by the Scottish authorities not for compassionate reasons, as reported, but because his long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence and described how he was framed by the Thatcher government, as the late Paul Foot's landmark expose revealed. As an antidote to the current propaganda, I urge you to read a forensic demolition of al-Megrahi's "guilt" and its political meaning in Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice (Verso) by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.

Trade deal link to Lockerbie bomber release

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

The politician who freed the Lockerbie bomber today reveals the full story of how the Westminster government made him eligible for return to Libya, including the role of trade deals potentially worth £13bn to British companies.

In a dramatic new book, serialised exclusively in The Sunday Times, former justice minister Kenny MacAskill also admits his decision to free one of the world’s most notorious terrorists was partly motivated by a fear of violent reprisals against Scots if the killer died in Scottish custody.

His account divulges:

•Ministers refused to travel with MacAskill amid threats to his life;

•The SNP sought concessions from Westminster in exchange for Megrahi’s possible return;

•His view on who was really responsible for Britain’s worst terrorist attack.

MacAskill claims the UK government made Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi eligible for return to his Libyan home under a “trade for terrorist plan” to try to secure a massive oil and gas deal for BP which was in doubt. He says Jack Straw, then UK justice secretary, shared the details in a “highly confidential” telephone call which casts new light on a controversy that has dogged Tony Blair since his 2007 “deal in the desert” with the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

That deal was to give British industry access to Libyan oil reserves worth up to £13bn and £350m of defence contracts as the former rogue state was rehabilitated, and involved a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) allowing offenders to be moved between the countries.

Six months after that desert summit, MacAskill claims Straw warned him Gadaffi was threatening to cancel the energy contact and award it to a US firm unless Megrahi was covered by the PTA, after learning the new SNP regime was trying to exempt him.

Sensing that the British government, which had previously been prepared to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, was going to give in to Libya’s demands, MacAskill reveals that he and Salmond then tried to extract concessions in exchange for the agreement.

Although the Scottish government denied this five years ago, MacAskill says the concessions sought were changes to the law to give Holyrood power to regulate firearms and to curb lawsuits from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had been forced to use slop-out buckets in their cells instead of toilets.

Straw rejected MacAskill’s claims as a “highly embroidered version of what happened” while Salmond said his administration “played the whole thing with a straight bat from start to finish”. (...)

Within weeks of the UK government agreeing not to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, Gadaffi ratified the BP deal with Libya’s national oil corporation.

Negotiations for Megrahi’s return were interrupted after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and the Scottish government opted to free him on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in Libya three years later.

A spokesman for BP said the company had no comment on the UK government’s actions or discussions.

In The Lockerbie Bombing, to be published on May 26, MacAskill reveals he feared the potential for a violent backlash in the Arab or wider Muslim world if Megrahi had been allowed to die while in Scottish custody.

Just a few weeks before MacAskill’s announcement to free him, UK hostages taken prisoner in Iraq had been murdered, which followed the execution of other Western nationals captured in the area.

He writes: “There was hostility to the West and ordinary citizens were becoming targets. Most in North Africa or the wider Arab world neither knew of Scotland nor cared about it. I was aware of the deaths of prison officers that had occurred in Northern Ireland where some had died through terrorist attack.

“The last thing I wanted was to have Scotland become a place that was demonised and its citizens targeted. I would not allow Scottish oil workers or others, wherever they might be, to face retribution as a consequence of my decision.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, MacAskill, whose own safety was thought to be at risk as he considered whether to free Megrahi, added: “I think, looking at events in Brussels and Paris, I stand by that. We would have kept him in if we had decided that was necessary but he would never have been allowed to die here.”

In a book extract in this newspaper today, the former minister argues that a coalition involving Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestinian terrorists were behind the Lockerbie bombing, in revenge for the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US naval ship in July 1988.

[RB: In the extract published in The Sunday Times today, Mr MacAskill cites three reasons for his belief in Libyan (and Abdelbaset Megrahi’s) involvement in the atrocity. They are (1) an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003; (2) Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s statement reported in the Swedish newspaper Expressen; and (3) Scottish investigators’ and prosecutors’ belief in the accuracy of the information disclosed in Ken Dornstein’s recent films. It is interesting, however, that Mr MacAskill explicitly states "Clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved." If the Zeist court had not made the finding-in-fact that Megrahi purchased the clothes, it would not, and could not, have convicted him.

As regards (1): There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to, as is clear from the “quote” from Col Gaddafi that he provides, is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran. De Borchgrave’s account of this conversation can be read on this blog here. My comment at the time was as follows:

“On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.”

As regards (2): An account of the statement by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil can be read here. Evidence that he promised to supply never materialised. The best he could come up with was the assertion that the Gaddafi regime paid Megrahi’s legal expenses -- something that had never been hidden or denied. A response to Abdel-Jalil by John Ashton can be read here. Blistering commentaries by the late Ian Bell can be read here and here.

As regards (3): A lengthy response by John Ashton to the disclosures in the Dornstein films can be read here. Another long and detailed commentary by Dr Kevin Bannon can be read here. Dr Neil Berry makes critical comments on the films here.

Nowhere in The Sunday Times coverage is there mention of (a) the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s findings that, on six grounds, the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of Justice; (b) the evidence disclosed in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury and, in particular, the metallurgical discrepancy between the dodgy circuit board fragment PT35b and circuit boards used in the MST-13 timers supplied to Libya; and (c) the evidence supplied in Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived. Perhaps these issues are dealt with elsewhere in Mr MacAskill’s book. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Ian Bell on Lockerbie - five years ago today

What follows is the text of an item that was posted on this date in 2011 on this blog. It demonstrates perfectly just how much we have lost through the tragically early death of Ian Bell:

Lockerbie: Scoundrel Time

[This is the headline over the most recent post on Ian Bell's blog. It reads as follows:]

“There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world,

and the worst of it is that half of them are true.”

Churchill.

Expressen’s Kassem Hamade has been filing non-stop from Libya since he found his way into the country. You can hardly blame him. It’s not often a journalist winds up in the middle of a revolution, with a historic tale unfolding wherever he happens to look. Hamade files like a man in a hurry.

His Swedish newspaper is one of Europe’s more lurid tabloids, which is, of course, saying something. At a glance, it seems to publish just about anything its war correspondent elects to send. Whether it then asks many questions is another matter. You don’t dick around, as the Swedes may or may not say, with world exclusives. Print first, worry later.

Hamade is either a very good journalist, or a very bad one. Which is to say that either he has an instinct for a tale, or more luck than is strictly credible. This week, in any case, Expressen’s man found himself outside “a local parliament build­ing” in an unnamed Libyan town, just as someone important was being greeted by several hundred locals.

Given that it appears the gent in the “dark winter suit” and burgundy hat had only decided to switch sides and “join the people” on February 19, Hamade was luckier than usual. Here he was with a “40-minute interview” (readable in less than ten) with a top-level defector no more than three days after the event. This was smart work, on someone’s part.

Even better, the new-born patriot had the sound-bite of the year, perhaps of the decade: Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing. How about that?

Given that Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s words reach us from Arabic via Swedish via (Googleised) English, we should probably exercise a little caution. This would set us apart from just about every newspaper, Scottish titles included, and web-site in the world, who excelled themselves if they remembered the word “claim”, and who oth­erwise didn’t give a toss. Gaddafi’s “justice minister” had spoken: gossip was proof.

Did any journalist, Hamade included, know anything at all about the erstwhile “Secretary of the General People’s Committee for Justice”, lately of Tripoli’s al-Salad Street, former recipient of numerous file-and-forget Amnesty petitions, nominal stew­ard of an arbitrary system of murder, torture, kidnapping, and “disappearance”? Thought not.

Did anyone know how close – or not – this individual had ever been to Gaddafi, particularly in December of 1988? A mere detail.

Did anyone pause to wonder why Abdel-Jalil’s revulsion at a massacre – the first he had ever heard of in Libya? – had coincided neatly with the regime’s collapse? Did they ask what he might have to gain, or to lose? But that sort of talk can seriously damage a world exclusive.

Hamade appears not to have allowed such words to enter his head. He did at least ask whether Abdel-Jalil possesses such a thing as proof, however, but was reas­sured by the functionary’s claim to have “information that is 100% sure” and “nothing I think... 100%.”

As the week wore on, this turned out to be the evidence heard around the world. It was enough, as any glance at the web will show, for almost every media outlet on the planet to go on. For most, the exciting follow-up was Abdel-Jalil’s loyal promise that “the devil” (Gaddafi) will “die like Hitler”, rather than a simple, scepti­cal question or two.

A pity. Had anyone read on, they would have found that Hamade did in fact get a little more change from his 40-minute investment. Why couldn’t his subject – who seemed to have returned to the business of governing in short order – just spill the beans?

Answer: “It is not time to reveal everything now”. Why not? Second answer: “I do not want to reveal the names involved, for the sake of the country”.

Aside from the fact that numerous individuals around the world involved with the Lockerbie case could – and have – allowed themselves the same excuse, this was interesting. Many of Gaddafi’s once stalwart ministers and diplomats have hit the rat runs; Abdel-Jalil is no different. But he seals his discretion in an odd fashion.

So he names Gaddafi as a mass murderer: that will suit Washington and Lon­don. It won’t upset Edinburgh much, either. Another slaughter to add to a lunatic’s charge sheet, and to bury therein. If the lunatic winds up dead “like Hitler”, so much the better. But Abdel-Jalil seems to be extending his insurance cover: having named a name, he retains “names”, and all “for the sake of the country”.

Things took another turn on Friday night. With his usual taste for self-dramatisa­tion, the BBC’s John Simpson secured an interview in the vicinity of Ben­ghazi with an escapee from the crumbling regime more significant than Abdel-Jalil. Until the end of last week, General Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abidi was Gaddafi’s trusted Interior Minister. He has also known the Colonel for 47 years.

Here was still another Libyan big shot who suddenly found himself unable to stomach the day job. In his own account, al-Abidi was sent to Benghazi to crush the demonstrations there. When he decided to break the habit of a lifetime – or simply failed in the task – he pleaded with Gaddafi, he claims, not to bomb the protesters, and suffered an assassination attempt for his trouble.

So the general also felt the urge to “join the people”. He was also able to con­firm that his former friend and leader will commit suicide or be killed. And the gen­eral also felt able to say for certain that Gaddafi had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

Except he did nothing of the sort. Simpson, like Hamade, was content, oddly in this case, just to hear a lapsed member of the regime pin the blame for mass murder on his old boss. Nothing in the way of proof was sought. All that al-Abidi told the BBC’s correspondent was, “There is no doubt about it. Nothing happens without Gaddafi’s agreement. I’m sure this was a national, governmental decision.” What a coincidence: two superannuated thugs with the same gambit.

Writing on the BBC’s web-site, Simpson prefaced the general’s quote with the following: “Although he was a military man rather than a politician at the time of the Lockerbie bombing in the 1980s, he [al-Abidi] maintains that Col Gaddafi was per­sonally responsible for the decision to blow up the Pan Am flight”.

There is no argument here for argument’s sake: if Gaddafi did it, he did it. But thus far we are being asked to accept – as the world is being asked to accept – the tes­timony of two men (no doubt there will be more) with skins to save and plenty of questions of their own still to answer. Yet even as they “confirm” they evade.

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but persuasive testimony runs from remarks such as “It was common knowledge in the regime” to “I was there when he gave the order” to “This is how it was done”. The general was latterly Interior Minister, in Simpson’s words “one of the most powerful men in Libya”. Yet the best he can manage is “I’m sure this was a national, governmental decision”? What else would it be?

Stories and alibis are being assembled. Were you in the shoes of al-Abidi or Abdel-Jalil, bartering for your life and manoeuvring for a place in whatever power structure emerges when Gaddafi has gone, you would probably do the same. There’s no surprise in that.

My interest lies in how these off-handed confirmations, glib yet vague, con­nect with the Scottish justice system, the activities of successive British governments, and the statement of reasons – all 800-plus pages of it – produced by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in June of 2007 identifying “six grounds where (the Commission) believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred” in the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, “the Lockerbie Bomber”.

The short answer is that they do not, on the face of it, connect. Yet if there is somehow a connection the demand for explanations from the Scottish, British and American political and legal establishment is liable to become more, rather than less, intense. I’m betting we never reach that point. Our two new “witnesses” thus far re­semble nothing more than a pair of concentration camp guards who know the game is up, and who rack their brains for tales to tell.

These two emerge from the fog of war with hands full of mist. Here in Scot­land, meanwhile, that statement of reasons is locked still in a hall of legal mirrors, along with a Scottish government’s courage to insist on its legal right to inquire into the bombing. Which is worse?

In less than a week, a few evasive remarks by two tainted, desperate men have become common currency around the world, disseminated happily by those who know nothing, and gratefully by those who know better. Meanwhile, the evidence of crucial choices touching at the heart of justice lie buried from sight. Every party of government available to Scotland – Tory, Labour, and Nationalist – has been content to settle for that. Is it the questions they fear, or the answers? That could be settled easily enough.

Instead, we are asked to swallow the pronouncements of two individuals who worked hand in bloody glove with Gaddafi.

[Ian Bell ends his blog post with a graceful tribute to this blog. I find it difficult to express how much I appreciate this. To my mind Ian Bell (whom I have never met) is the best politics and current affairs commentator operating in the Scottish media today.]