DNA extracted from Lockerbie bomb suitcase, 37 years after atrocity

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

Forensic experts have extracted DNA from the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb for the first time and will seek to match it against swabs taken from the Libyan explosives chief accused of Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity.

Advances in technology have allowed Scottish scientists to gather DNA from the suitcase lining and an umbrella packed into the luggage before Pam Am Flight 103 exploded in mid-air in December 1988, killing 270 people.

Prosecutors hope the new evidence could match samples from Abu Agila Masud, 74, the alleged bomb-maker, who is waiting to go on trial in America.

The potential breakthrough is outlined in US court papers obtained by The Sunday Times. The documents identify a list of expert witnesses for the prosecution, including Dr Nighean Stevenson, a leading authority in DNA analysis at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA). She has re-examined exhibits retrieved from the crash site more than three decades ago. (...)

The only suspect convicted to date is Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer who was jailed for life in 2001 following a trial in the Netherlands presided over by Scottish judges.

Megrahi was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He lived for another 33 months, dying at his home in Tripoli, aged 60.

A co-defendant in Megrahi’s trial, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, another Libyan intelligence officer, 69, was acquitted. However, he remains the subject of an active US arrest warrant.

Masud’s name came up in the original investigation into the atrocity after Scottish police, aided by the FBI, established that the bomb had travelled in an unaccompanied suitcase from Malta to Heathrow, via Frankfurt, before being loaded on to Flight 103. However, investigators were unable to trace him. [RB: The theory that the bomb on Pan Am 103 was in a suitcase offloaded from the feeder flight from Frankfurt to Heathrow has been convincingly demolished by Dr Morag Kerr in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.]

It was only after the fall of Colonel Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, in 2011 that Masud, a bomb-maker for the Libyan External Security Organisation, the intelligence service, was detained by opposition forces.

He was extradited to the US at the end of 2022 after allegedly confessing to building the Lockerbie bomb and taking it in a suitcase from Tripoli to Malta. [RB: Masud was not extradited. He was abducted from his home by a local warlord, sold on to US authorities and then the victim of extraordinary rendition to the United States.] His defence team are set to argue that the confession was extracted in Libya under duress, and is therefore inadmissible. He has entered a not guilty plea.

That means a DNA match between items from the bomb suitcase and Masud could be highly significant.

“If you’ve got his DNA [in the suitcase] … it would knock down the building blocks of his potential defence,” said Dick Marquise, the FBI special agent who led the US end of the original investigation.

Marquise said he was not aware of any DNA evidence collected in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in 1988. “It was much too new a science,” he added. (...)

Outlining her expertise as a potential prosecution witness, US court papers state: “Dr Stevenson examined items relating to an umbrella and an item relating to the lining of a suitcase.

“These items were examined using specialised lighting, and DNA samples were taken from each. The DNA profiles obtained from these items were of varying quality and were generally commensurate with the expectations of these items.”

The document continues: “Analysis of a DNA reference sample relating to the accused nominal [Masud] has yet to be carried out. When a DNA profile relating to this individual has been generated, it will thereafter be compared to any suitable DNA profiles which have already been obtained.”

This weekend it remained unclear whether a DNA match had been found. However, software used by Stevenson’s team is able to generate a “likelihood ratio” of a “person of interest” contributing to a specific DNA profile rather than other individuals.

In theory, the tests could also prove whether Megrahi had handled items packed into the bomb suitcase.

Part of the evidence against him in 2001 revolved around the testimony of a Maltese shop owner, who claimed Megrahi had bought various items of clothing and an umbrella from his business days before the Lockerbie attack.

Masud’s trial in Washington was due to start last month. However, the complexity of the case and the defendant’s poor health have led to it being pushed back until spring.

In his alleged confession, made in a Libyan jail in 2012, Masud named both Megrahi and Fhimah as co-conspirators.

A criminal complaint filed by the FBI states: “Approximately three months after [the bombing], Masud and Fhimah met with the then Libyan leader, Muammar Gadaffi, and others, who thanked them for carrying out a great national duty against the Americans, and Gadaffi added that the operation was a total success.”

[RB: The following comment is from an article published today on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer's Intel Today website:]

The Old “Look at the Door” Trick

Henri Landru was a French serial killer tried in 1921. During World War I, he posed as a lonely widower seeking companionship through classified ads. In reality, he lured wealthy widows to his villa in Gambais, murdered them, and allegedly disposed of their bodies in his oven.

Ten women—and the teenage son of one of them—disappeared after visiting Landru. There were no bodies, no direct eyewitnesses, and no confession. The entire case was built on circumstantial evidence, which left—just barely—room for reasonable doubt.

Landru’s defense lawyer, Vincent de Moro Giafferri, was a master of courtroom theatrics. During his closing argument, he focused on the absence of physical proof. He knew that if he could shake the jury’s certainty, he might save his client from the guillotine.

At a dramatic moment, Moro Giafferri played a psychological card. As he neared the end of his plea, he said something like:

“One of the women Landru is accused of killing—what if she is still alive? What if she walked through that door right now?”

He gestured toward the courtroom entrance. And naturally, every juror turned to look. Then came the punchline:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you all looked. That means you’re not sure. And in our justice system, if there is doubt, it must benefit the accused.”

Back to Lockerbie

It was a brilliant moment—simple, theatrical, unforgettable. A masterclass in planting uncertainty.Now, 37 years after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, US authorities claim they have extracted DNA from the suitcase believed to have held the bomb.

The sample is being tested to determine whether it matches that of Abu Agila Mohammad Masud, the Libyan man accused of constructing the device.

Let’s be clear: the FBI and the US DoJ know the DNA won’t match. The purpose of this operation isn’t to prove Masud’s guilt — it’s to perform certainty. It’s the modern version of the “look at the door” trick.

Only this time, it’s not the defense gesturing at the door. It’s the prosecution — and they already know no one’s coming through. Because this trial isn’t for a jury. It’s for public consumption.

By conducting a highly publicized DNA analysis — decades after the fact, with compromised evidence — they aren’t seeking truth.

They’re selling belief. They’re telling the world: “We’re still working the case. We believe in the evidence. We believe in the guilt.”

But they don’t. And we know it.

ADDENDUM

RB: I am grateful to John Ashton for the following comment on the above article:

A couple of points re the DNA story in The Sunday Times. The SCCRC, in its original review, considered a DNA trace on one of the umbrella fragments – see paras 4.50 to 4.56 of the Statement of Reasons). The results, while inconclusive, pointed to the Crown forensic experts. Also attached is a photo of the circuit board fragment from the crown forensic report (see below). All the photos in the report were taken at RARDE. The fact that the fragment was resting on a bare fingertip suggests a lack of regard for DNA evidence (and, for that matter, fingerprint evidence).

Serious evidence-based concerns never addressed

[What follows is the text of an article by Dr Morag Kerr which is published today on the Scottish Legal News website:]

Dr Morag Kerr, secretary-depute of Justice for Megrahi, replies to Ronnie Clancy KC’s recent articles on Lockerbie and argues that despite the slur of ‘conspiracy theorist’ used by the UK and Scottish governments, the Crown Office, the SSCRC and the Americans, Mr Megrahi still suffered a miscarriage of justice.

I declare that the bomb that caused the Lockerbie disaster was in the suitcase seen by John Bedford in the baggage container in the interline shed at Heathrow at 4.30 pm, an hour before the PA103 feeder flight from Frankfurt landed. I challenge Mr Clancy, or anyone else, to prove me wrong using facts and reason, not the unevidenced opinions of others, and not legal technicalities.

Mr Clancy makes a number of assertions in his two-part article of 6th and 7th January, and delivers a number of ad hominem attacks on critics of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction, but actual evidence is in short supply. Reasoned refutation is conspicuous by its absence. Much of his argument consists of “the SCCRC have looked at this and say it’s fine, nothing to see here folks,” and “these people are dreadful conspiracy theorists.”

The lazy “conspiracy theorist” slur is a repeat of Magnus Linklater’s perennial articles for The Times, built on a false premise, or rather the logical fallacy of the unexcluded middle. There is a third possibility between that of Megrahi being guilty as charged and the police, the justice system and the SCCRC all being complicit in a conscious conspiracy to perpetuate a miscarriage of justice, and that is the aspect of human nature known as confirmation bias. Reading Mr Clancy’s articles it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that he too is a victim of this particular form of fact-blindness.

When one is personally invested in a particular conclusion, whether as an individual or as part of a self-reinforcing group, the act of considering the possibility that one might be mistaken can be repugnant, almost painful. This is particularly true when the consequences of having to acknowledge that a mistake has been made are wide-ranging. The brain will seize on any scrap of evidence, however peripheral to the core argument, any line of reasoning no matter how convoluted and sophistic, to shore up the original conclusion and avoid the cognitive dissonance of seriously contemplating a contradictory one.

It is disingenuous in the extreme to cherry-pick public statements by those advancing the proposition that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted to imply that some grand, conscious and co-ordinated conspiracy is being alleged (how could that possibly be, surely these people are malicious!), rather than the obvious interpretation that what is being proposed is that those determinedly shoring up the conviction are mistaken, in thrall to confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. (Indeed, the very title of my own book about the case, referencing the aphorism known as “Hanlon’s Razor”, should have provided something of a clue.)

It is particularly disingenuous do this, and to base an entire argument on the premise that the SCCRC is to be trusted implicitly, in the very week of the debacle in England surrounding the wrongful conviction of Andrew Malkinson and the very credible allegations that the CCRC “has been infected with a culture of denial”. A culture, that is, steeped in confirmation bias. The Malkinson case is not the only one. Can we really, hands on hearts, trust that the SCCRC is a completely different animal?

In the second part of his article Mr Clancy appears to call on specific pieces of evidence to support his position. Nevertheless, once again the argument is little more than “trust the SCCRC, they’ve looked at this very thoroughly,” rather than reasoned, factual refutation.

The timer fragment

Given the mysterious nature of this object it’s hardly surprising to find it surrounded by a fog of speculation and indeed conspiracy theorising. That also is human nature. However, the speculation comes after the observation that this item was not what the prosecution claimed it was, and does not negate that observation.

Dr Swire and Mr Biddulph, and indeed Mr James, are entirely justified in their doubts about the provenance of the fragment, and their criticism of the way this was handled by the SCCRC. To inject some facts into the discussion (a bit of a shock to the system, I know), the central issue is this. It was recognised at an early stage in the investigation that the circuitry of the fragment was coated with pure tin, a technique used by amateur hobbyists making single or small-batch PCBs, and which is not suitable for large-scale commercial use. This was considered a very significant finding when the fragment was first analysed in Scotland in early 1990. While the pattern of the circuitry on the fragment seems to confirm to a high degree of certainty that it was made from a Letraset template produced by the Swiss electronics firm MEBO, all the PCBs for the MST-13 timers that were manufactured from that template for MEBO by Thüring AG had their circuitry coated with a 70/30 tin/lead alloy. Thüring did not have the facilities to apply a pure tin coating. It is one of the many highly regrettable features of the Zeist trial that this discrepancy was fudged and obscured in court, mainly thanks to a highly misleading statement by Allen Feraday, an English forensics expert, and the bench was never made aware of it.

Speculation and conspiracy theorising aside, nobody knows what that fragment is, who made it or when or for what purpose. All that can be said is that it was not from one of the batches of PCBs manufactured by Thüring and which were supplied to Libya by MEBO, as alleged by the Crown. Mr Clancy refers to “… the large body of evidence, including scientific evidence, that questions the accuracy of [these] claims.” What evidence would that be, then? According to their public news release the SCCRC rejected this ground of appeal on the narrow technical point that “… the applicants have not provided a reasonable explanation as to why the fresh evidence concerning the metallurgy issue was not led at the trial,” and because they believed that the failure of the original defence team to uncover the discrepancy did not amount to “defective representation”, not because they had obtained scientific findings which contradicted this evidence.

The suitcase

This is my own personal area of expertise in the case, and Mr Clancy refers to my 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, which is largely devoted to examining this issue. I wonder if he has read it?

According to Mr Clancy, “… the SCCRC carried out a thorough examination of the allegation taking account of all the relevant evidence including information which was not available to Justice for Megrahi. The SCCRC concluded that ‘… it was not arguable that the Justice for Megrahi theory could show conclusively that the bomb had entered the airline luggage in Heathrow’.” (Note, not that this information disproved the proposition, merely that it apparently rendered it inconclusive.)

The evidence presented in my book formed part of Justice for Megrahi’s submission to the COPFS which resulted in the police Operation Sandwood. In the course of that investigation I was interviewed by officers on several occasions, going through the evidence and my reasoning in minute detail. Repeatedly, I assured them that I had no dog in this fight beyond a desire to solve the puzzle (which the original forensic investigators had so signally failed to do). I was (and still am) convinced that the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the bomb suitcase was already in London an hour before the flight supposedly carrying it landed. As a scientist, though, I always strive to maintain an open mind. I begged the police officers on several occasions to tell me if they discovered either additional evidence I didn’t have, or an alternative interpretation I hadn’t thought of, that would cast doubt on my conclusion. I stated categorically that if such evidence were to be found, I would withdraw my thesis and issue a public retraction. Nothing of that nature happened. Contact with Operation Sandwood tailed off and then ceased entirely, with no explanation. All I ever got was a personal jibe from Kenny Macaskill to the effect that (and I paraphrase) “I know something you don’t know, so you’re wrong.”

This is more or less exactly Mr Clancy’s position, echoing the position of the SCCRC. They know “something” that allows an entire book full of minute detail and closely-reasoned argument to be dismissed, but no hint at all is given of what this something might be. I find the secrecy over this point very disturbing.

The best guess I can make is that Operation Sandwood, Mr Macaskill, the SCCRC and Mr Clancy are placing the supposed confession of Abu Agila Masoud to having been involved in the smuggling of the bomb on board Flight KM180 in Malta above my analysis. However, this “confession” is a highly contradictory and confusing document, in places flatly contradicting evidence relied on to convict Megrahi. False confessions are one of the most frequent causes of miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions, and indeed in this case the lord advocate was unable to assure Justice for Megrahi that he was confident that the confession had not been obtained by torture. My position on this matter is that if someone confesses to doing something that provably didn’t happen, it still didn’t happen.

My analysis of the evidence, which is entirely theoretical, has recently been independently confirmed experimentally.[1] A Dutch forensic scientist, Dr Erwin Vermeij, carried out multiple test explosions using used aluminium LD3 containers with mocked-up suitcases and IEDs made to simulate the Lockerbie bomb, with the bomb suitcase in various positions in the container. These experiments were far more rigorously designed and executed than the botched tests carried out in the USA in 1989. His conclusion states:

Regarding the damage to the luggage containers, experiment 7 where the IED suitcase was in the first (bottom) layer with one end slightly elevated on to the horizontal strut comes closest to replicating the damage observed on LD3 luggage container AVE4041. This suggests that the reported so called Claiden spot is probably too high, presuming that 450g explosive was used. If the center of the Lockerbie bomb was really on the Claiden spot, the only possibility is that the explosive charge must have been larger than 450g.

It was demonstrated in court that it was impossible to get more than 450g of Semtex inside the radio-cassette player used to construct the IED. The position that “comes closest” to the damage observed on the Lockerbie luggage container is the one described in my book.

The luggage tags

The single piece of actual evidence discussed by Mr Clancy is the peripheral matter of an entry in the diary of Lamin Fhimah, Megrahi’s co-accused, relating to his obtaining “taggs” (sic) for Megrahi. As a statement by someone other than Megrahi himself, this was held by the trial court not to be evidence against him. However, it was admitted by the court in the 2021 appeal in order to “considerably bolster” the evidence that the bomb was infiltrated in Malta. There’s no evidence that these tags were even obtained, let alone given to Megrahi, or what he did with them if they were. The accuseds’ explanation was that they were needed as samples to get a printing quote. The re-introduction of this extremely trivial and non-probative evidence suggests to me that someone was getting a bit desperate.

The identification evidence

This is barely touched on by Mr Clancy, despite its actually being the central issue as regards Megrahi’s conviction. He describes it as “qualified (resemblance) identification”, which is being remarkably kind. Frankly, no normal human being, as opposed to angels dancing on the heads of pins, could possibly imagine that the bribed and cajoled Tony Gauci’s fifty-year-old, over six feet tall, dark-skinned, heavily-built customer was in fact the 36-year-old, five feet eight, light-skinned, slightly built Megrahi. Even Tony prefaced his line-up “identification” with “Not the man I saw in my shop, but…” The identification is in fact the shaky hook on which the entire daisy-chain of circular reasoning dreamed up by the police investigation and embellished by the trial court was hung. It has been challenged by four eminent experts in the psychology of memory – Prof Timothy Valentine (70 pages, 2008), Professor Steven Clark (49 pages, 2008), Professor David Canter (105 pages, 2010) and Professor Elizabeth Loftus (seven page journal publication, 2013[2]). The full list of problems with it is much too long to go into here, and it seems yet another problem has now arisen.

One of the things Masoud allegedly confessed to doing, in these interviews in the prison dungeon in Tripoli, was buying the clothes from Tony Gauci. Tony described one customer, not two, and as he has since died, the police have no further opportunity to go back and persuade him to change his statement on that point also. If Masoud bought the clothes, Megrahi didn’t, and if he didn’t, the entire case is a pile of daisy-heads on the floor. However, if Masoud’s confession is required in order to refute the suitcase evidence, this must create a bit of a dilemma for his prosecutors.

Conclusion

Over many years Justice for Megrahi has raised serious, evidence-based concerns about the conviction. These concerns have never been addressed in detail, or at all, by the Crown Office or by any of those who support the conviction – they have simply been cavalierly dismissed and those raising them stigmatised as conspiracy theorists. That must now change. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dared to challenge the conviction of Oscar Slater, the response of the prosecution authorities was as dismissive as that of the Crown Office in relation to the Megrahi conviction. But history proved Conan Doyle to be right. 

Reference 1: Vermeij, E. (2024) Survivability of IED components, suitcases, their contents and luggage containers in suitcase bombs. Elsevier: Forensic Science International: Reports, vol 9, July 2024.

Reference 2: Loftus, E. F. (2013) Eyewitness testimony in the Lockerbie bombing case. Memory, vol 21 issue 5, pp 584-590.

Megrahi appeal dismissed

The High Court has dismissed the posthumous appeal brought on behalf of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The 64-page opinion of the court can be read here. [RB: In the version originally issued, the date of the disaster was stated by the court to be 22 December 1988, the same blunder as was made in the trial court's judgement. This has since been corrected to 21 December. Careless.] A summary can be found here. 

As regards the first ground of appeal, the court concludes in paragraph 87 that, notwithstanding evidence challenging 7 December 1988 as the date of purchase of the items from Tony Gauci's shop, and notwithstanding concerns about the evidence supporting Gauci's "identification" of Megrahi, "... the contention that the trial court reached a verdict that no reasonable court could have reached is rejected. On the evidence at trial, a reasonable jury, properly directed, would have been entitled to return a guilty verdict."

As regards the ground of appeal founding upon failure by the Crown to disclose material that would have been helpful to the defence the court concludes that even if the material had been disclosed it would not have made a difference to the guilty verdict. Paragraph 135 of the opinion reads: "The contention that the Crown failed to disclose material which would have created a real prospect of a different verdict is rejected."

The outcome of the appeal is a cogent illustration of just how difficult it is to have the Scottish criminal justice system acknowledge that a mistake has been made, as I continue to believe has happened here. It is, I contend, a matter of grave public concern, that the appeal was so narrowly confined and that issues such as the metallurgy of the circuit board fragment and Dr Morag Kerr's findings regarding the loading of the bomb suitcase at Heathrow were not ventilated.

The Herald's report on the dismissal of the appeal contains the following statement from the Megrahi family's solicitor, Aamer Anwar:

"Ali Al-Megrahi the son of the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing said his family were left heart broken by the decision of the Scottish courts, he maintained his father’s innocence and is determined to fulfil the promise he made to clear his name and that of Libya.

"As of this morning the Megrahi family have instructed our legal team to appeal to the UK Supreme Court [and] we will lodge an application within 14 days.

"The family demand the release of secret evidence held by the UK Government, which they believe incriminates others such as Iran and the Syrian-Palestinian group, the Foreign Secretary had refused to do so, this must happen for the truth to emerge."

[What follows is excerpted from a press release issued today by Aamer Anwar:]

Significant material has been received by the Legal team over the last several months, but especially since the announcement by Donald Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr on 21 December 2020, where he stated that the USA wished to extradite a former Libyan Intelligence Officer, Abu Agila Mohammad Masud for the Lockerbie bombing, 32 years later.

Masud’s confession to being involved in the conspiracy with Al-Megrahi to blow up Pan Am Flight 103, was supposedly ‘extracted’ by a ‘Libyan law enforcement agent’ in 2012, whilst in custody in a Libyan Prison. No new information appeared to be presented by Attorney General Barr.

What was significant in the US criminal complaint against Masud was his claim that he bought the clothes to put into the Samsonite suitcase that is claimed went on to blow up Pan Am Flight 103.

Of course, the problem for the US Department of Justice is that the case against Megrahi is still based on the eye-witness testimony of Toni Gauci stating that Megrahi bought the clothes. How can both men be held responsible?

The al-Megrahi family believe that if the conviction against their father were to be overturned then the US case against Masud would be non-existent.

Undoubtedly there will now be huge pressure on Libya and the GNA, the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli to extradite Abu Agila Masud to the US, but of course the American authorities will be also aware that if the Megrahi’s were to be successful at the Supreme Court, then so called case against Abu Masud would crumble. 

A reversal of the verdict would have meant that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for 32 years, imprisoning a man they knew to be innocent and punishing the Libyan people for a crime which they did not commit.

All the Megrahi family want for Scotland is peace and justice, but as Ali stated today their journey is not over, Libya has suffered enough, as has family for the crime of Lockerbie, they remain determined to fight for justice.

They are grateful to their legal team for their unwavering commitment and also to the British families for their compassion and search for justice.

Ali said God willing, he will visit his father's grave one day to tell him that justice was done and that he fulfilled his promise to clear his name and that of Libya.

In this appeal the legal arguments related to two distinct challenges to the conviction. The first was that it was contended that no reasonable jury properly directed could have convicted Mr Megrahi on the evidence led, focusing in particular on the evidence of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci stating that Megrahi bought clothes from him that were ultimately placed into a suitcase containing the bomb planted on the plane.

The second ground was that the failure to disclose information to the defence, led to the trial being unfair and thus a miscarriage of justice, these related to the reliability of Mr Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the person who bought the clothes, as well as the content of CIA cables.  

In relation to the second ground of appeal, the failure to disclose information to the defence, the decision of the Appeal Court is the determination of a “compatibility issue” – an issue arising from a question relating to the breach of human rights, in this case article 6 the right to a fair trial.   

Where the Appeal Court in Scotland determines a compatibility issue, it is competent to seek leave to appeal from the Appeal Court of the determination of that issue to the UK Supreme Court in London.  If leave to appeal by the Scottish courts is refused, it is competent to seek leave to appeal directly from the Supreme Court in London. 

... the Megrahi family have instructed us to make an application to the UK Supreme Court.  We must now lodge an application within 14 days. Today’s decision will be carefully considered and intimated to the Crown and the UK Advocate General and lodged with the Justiciary Clerk with 14 days of the opinion of the court which is dated 15th January  2021.

The Justiciary Clerk will then ask for written submissions.  The Crown is allowed to lodge  submissions to object. Written submissions are always required even if there is an oral hearing.  It may be that the court will advise that the matter will be considered on paper submissions only. 

The time for a decision on that application is difficult to estimate, however we would expect the al-Megrahi case to progress relatively quickly and no longer than 2-3 months.

When the decision of the High Court of Justiciary is known - if it is an adverse decision then within 28 days an application for 'permission to appeal' can be lodged with the UKSC Registrar to directly appeal to the Supreme Court. One would hope that if such a process were followed then the appeal would be heard before the end of 2021.

Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing: Fresh appeal launched to clear Megrahi

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James published today on the WSWS.org website. It reads in part:]

Relatives ... of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi have won the right to posthumously appeal his 2001 conviction for murder following a decision by the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC). (...)

The Lockerbie attack came only six months after an Iranair Airbus, IR655, was shot down in an unprovoked act of mass murder, by the US missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes. In that instance 290 passengers and crew were killed. At the time, most commentary and media coverage assumed that the Lockerbie atrocity was an act of revenge.

From the outset, however, it was apparent there was some level of foreknowledge or complicity on behalf of the US and British intelligence services. Warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights had been issued. PA103, flying just before Christmas, was half empty because of cancellations. On the crash site in Scotland, numerous reports emerged of unrecorded activity by the FBI, items of wreckage being removed under armed guard, and luggage interfered with.

In 1990, UK citizen Martin Cadman, whose son Bill was killed on the flight, attended a briefing at the US Embassy for relatives of victims of the attack. Cadman was, without prompting, told by an unnamed member of the US President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, “Your government and ours know exactly what happened and they are never going to tell.”

By 1991, around the time the Iranian government declared its neutrality during the US Desert Storm war on Iraq, the British and US authorities shifted responsibility for Lockerbie to Libya.

Pinning the blame on Libya served to isolate and pressure the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and provided a pretext for punitive economic sanctions, which undermined the North African country’s oil-based economy.

Magrahi’s trial, at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, was held under Scots law as part of a deal brokered by South African leader Nelson Mandela between the British and Libyan governments. Its purpose was to allow some veneer of legal process on the rapprochement between the two countries, as Gaddafi abandoned his former radical posturing and US and British imperialism eyed the country’s oil resources.

The trial, however, revealed extraordinary inconsistencies in the Scottish Crown Office case. Not least was that there was no proof that Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, had ever loaded a comparable suitcase in Luqa airport in Malta, no proof that any unaccompanied suitcase had travelled from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow, to be loaded onto PA103, and no explanation of how Luqa airport’s rigorous security was overcome.

Nevertheless, Magrahi was convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, later increased to 27.

In another of countless inconsistencies, Megrahi’s co-accused, Llamen Fhimah was set free. For his part, Gaddafi duly offered compensation to the attack’s victims without accepting Libyan responsibility. [RB: Libya accepted "responsibility for the actions of its officials" and nothing more.]

Megrahi had an initial appeal rejected in 2002, but the passage of time has only increased the perception that he was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up and show trial.

In 2007, the SCCRC authorised another appeal, reporting there was “no reasonable basis” to place Megrahi in Malta where he had been identified as allegedly purchasing clothing identified as being in a suitcase containing the bomb. However, in 2009 Megrahi, in prison in Greenock, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was allowed to return to Libya following an understanding reached with the Scottish government that his appeal should be dropped. Megrahi died in 2012, still protesting his innocence.

In 2011, 10 years after the trial, US, French and British imperialism launched a bloody neo-colonial war to overthrow Gaddafi. It ended with Gaddafi being hunted down and butchered. The country was pitched into a catastrophic civil war, which continues to this day.

This latest appeal was launched by Megrahi’s family and [supported by] the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) campaign. This includes relatives of several victims of the disaster such as Dr Jim Swire, who has steadfastly campaigned for the truth around his 23-year-old daughter’s murder on PA103.

JFM members include Robert Black, a lawyer and one of the architects of the original Camp Zeist trial. Another member is former police superintendent Iain McKie, whose daughter Shirley was the subject of a debacle which, in the end, discredited the Scottish Criminal Records Office entire finger-printing methodology. Shirley McKie was charged with perjury before finally being exonerated and compensated.

A SCCRC press statement reported grounds for allowing the new appeal. Referring to the identification of Megrahi as the purchaser of clothing in the bomb suitcase by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the SCCRC concluded that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred because no reasonable trial court, relying on the evidence led at trial, could have held the case against Mr Megrahi was proved beyond reasonable doubt.”

The SCCRC statement found that the Crown failed to “disclose a statement and a police report” confirming that Gauci had photographs of Megrahi in his possession before he identified him. This “deprived Mr Megrahi a real chance of an acquittal.” The commission also found that “reward money to be paid to Mr Gauci under a scheme administered by the US Department of State” meant that “Mr Megrahi was denied a fair trial.”

Gauci was coached by the Scottish police and bribed by the US government—$2 million was eventually said to have been handed over.

The SCCRC rejected further grounds for appeal relating to:

The date on which Megrahi was identified as having been in Gauci’s shop in Malta

* Evidence emerged of the date at which Christmas lights were switched on in Sliema, Malta and which contradicts the prosecution claim that Megrahi made the purchases. Yet, the SCCRC “decided that the fresh evidence in question is not likely to have assisted Mr. Megrahi’s cause.” In a repeated theme, the SCCRC’s pointed to the fact that Megrahi’s defence team “chose not to lead it in connection with his appeal in 2002.”

The metallurgical characteristics of circuit board fragment PT/35(b)

* This fragment was claimed to be part of an MST-13 timer constructed by MEBO AG of Switzerland. The fragment appeared late in the investigation with records of its discovery apparently altered. PT/35(b)’s significance in the case against Megrahi is that it implicated the Libyan government, which had purchased 20 such timers.

Evidence emerged, and was available early in the investigation, to confirm that the MST-13 circuit board fragment could not have been part of the batch of timers sold to Libya, as the board’s soldering had different characteristics from control samples provided by MEBO. When this was made available to Megrahi’s original defence team, they again, for reasons unclear, declined to use it.

The SCCRC nevertheless found that “the decision by the defence team to proceed without investigating the metallurgy issue did not mean that Mr. Megrahi’s defence was not presented to the court.”

Suitcase ingestion at Heathrow

* This is most damaging to the entire case against Megrahi and was clearly explained in the 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by JFM member, Dr Morag Kerr.

Kerr makes a detailed and methodical examination of the recorded progress of all items of luggage through Luqa, Frankfurt and Heathrow airports, their position in the luggage container AVE4041 at Heathrow airport, and their subsequent condition and location when discovered on the hills around Lockerbie. Her conclusion is that the bomb suitcase, a Samsonite Silhouette 400, was introduced in London prior to a feeder flight, PA 103A, arriving from Frankfurt carrying any luggage from Malta.

Kerr makes clear that, despite the vast and complex investigation, this suitcase has no known provenance and its owner has never been identified. It was noticed by several airline staff prior to and during transfer to PA 103. It appeared the day after a highly unusual break-in to the Heathrow luggage storage area adjacent to where AVE4041 was loaded.

The SCCRC agreed that “If accepted, this would fatally undermine the Crown case,” but claimed the allegation lacked information highlighted by Operation Sandwood—a four-year police inquiry into allegations of police criminality during the Lockerbie investigation made by JFM.

This counterclaim is not substantiated. Operation Sandwood concluded in 2018 that “no criminality” had been found. Its report has not been published, nor the basis of its findings released.

Learning of the news of the appeal being allowed, Megrahi’s youngest son, Ali, told The Times “If the world discovers the identity of the true bomber, it will have to accept that it was not my father. Those who lost their loved ones deserve to know the truth, who was responsible and why it happened.”

"... the FBI was put in charge of the crime scene in Lockerbie"

[What follows is excerpted from a report published today on the website of North Carolina's Bladen Journal:]

The former FBI investigator, [John Kelso] who led the probe in the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103, was the guest speaker for the Bladen Leadership Luncheon, a fundraiser for the Cape Fear Council Boy Scouts of America. (...) [RB: Until today John Kelso's name has not once appeared on this blog during its (almost) twelve year existence. The head of the FBI's Lockerbie investigation team is usually given as Richard Marquise.]

On a topic that could be discussed or presented over many sittings, the skilled orator explained how the FBI was put in charge of the crime scene in Lockerbie, Scotland, how it went about determining suspects and what has happened in the 30-plus years since. [RB: Is it really the case that the FBI, and not the Scottish police, were in charge of the crime scene? If true, this might explain a lot. But I am reluctant to believe that it is true.]

The plane with 200,000 pounds of fuel carrying 259 people was at 31,000 feet flying 500 mph. When a Semtex device of about 1 pound exploded, all aboard and 11 on the ground were killed.

The crime scene was scattered over 845 square miles, which is roughly just smaller than Bladen County.

“We initially had three theories,” said Kelso, who retired in 2002. “One was a suicide bomber, someone knowingly checked in the device. The second was a mule, which is a situation, for example, of boyfriend and girlfriend. Someone says if you take some of my luggage, I’ll join you later. The mule is the one who takes the luggage.

“And then the third was an inside job, which is what happened.”

The agency’s investigation had a lucky break and a mystery letter, elements that seem to often accompany movie thrillers and good books. The break was two-fold, that the airplane didn’t take off on time and the explosive device was a straight timer as opposed to a barometric device.

Had the plane been on time, the explosion would not have happened over land, and all the evidence would have been on an ocean floor. [RB: Dr Morag Kerr has debunked the claim that the aircraft was late in leaving Heathrow. It left its stance within two or three minutes of the scheduled time.]

The anonymous letter was written and left at a US embassy in Vienna within weeks of the bombing, yet left pretty well out of the three-year probe. When a suspect connected to the timer was fingered, his conversation with the FBI uncovered his authorship of the letter. [RB: The strange story of the letter written by Edwin Bollier on a Spanish-keyboard typewriter is discussed in the trial court's judgement at paragraph 47.]

Kelso told the group he’s met with families of those killed. The meetings were emotionally draining.

At Syracuse University, which had several students onboard, an anniversary is held each year. Kelso and his wife have stayed in touch with one family, connected as parents of twins.

“One was a student at Syracuse, one at Rensler — both on the same flight and were killed,” Kelso said of the parents’ sons. “They both keep hoping, as do I, that there will be a stable government in Libya to help us get to the bottom of this. We indicted two, and convicted one, but we know there is more to this.

“For us who worked the case, and the families grieving, that’s what they’d like to see. If they could have some closure, charges against other Libyan officials, that would make things better.”

A verdict based upon findings-in-fact that, on the evidence led, no reasonable court could have reached

[Today's edition of The Scotsman contains an article headlined Lockerbie anniversary: No reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi, says Robert Black. It reads as follows:]

“I don’t think there’s a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted.” Ian Hamilton QC, 7 October 2010

On 31 January 2001, after just over 130 court days of a trial that had started on 3 May 2000, the three judges in the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist (Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean) returned a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder in respect of the first accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and a unanimous verdict of not guilty of murder in respect of the second accused, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima.

Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he serve at least 20 years (altered under later legislation to life with a “punishment part” of 27 years).

Since the day of the verdict I have contended that no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led at the trial. Here are three instances of the trial court’s idiosyncratic approach to the evidence. More examples could be provided.

1. The suitcase which contained the bomb also contained clothes and an umbrella bought in a particular shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta. Megrahi was identified by the Maltese shopkeeper as the person who bought the clothes and umbrella.

Commentary: The most that the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, would say (either in his evidence in court or at an identification parade before the trial or in a series of nineteen police statements over the years) was that Megrahi “resembled a lot” the purchaser, a phrase which he equally used with reference to Abu Talb, one of those mentioned in the special defence of incrimination lodged on behalf of Megrahi. Gauci had also described his customer to the police as being dark skinned, six feet tall and over fifty years of age. Megrahi was light skinned and the evidence at the trial established (i) that he was five feet eight inches tall and (ii) that in late 1988 he was thirty-six years of age. Norwithstanding this evidence, the judges found in fact that Megrahi was the purchaser.

2. The suitcase containing the bomb was sent as unaccompanied baggage from Luqa Airport in Malta, via Frankfurt, on the morning of 21 December 1988 on an Air Malta flight, KM 180. Megrahi was in Malta on the night of 20/21 December 1988 and left for Tripoli from Luqa Airport on the morning of 21 December.

Commentary: The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. Notwithstanding this evidence the court held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.

3. A vitally important issue was the date on which the goods that surrounded the bomb were purchased in a shop in Malta.

There were only two live possibilities: 7 December 1988, a date when Megrahi was proved to be on Malta and 23 November 1988 when he was not. In an attempt to establish just which of these dates was the correct one, the weather conditions in Sliema on these two days were explored. The shopkeeper’s evidence was that when the purchaser left his shop it was raining so heavily that his customer thought it advisable to buy an umbrella to protect himself while he went in search of a taxi.

The unchallenged meteorological evidence led by the defence established that while it had rained on 23 November at the relevant time, it was unlikely that it had rained at all on 7 December; and if there had been any rain, it would have been at most a few drops, insufficient to wet the ground.

Notwithstanding this evidence, the judges found in fact that the clothes were purchased on 7 December.

My view on this issue, first expressed within days of the verdict being delivered in January 2001, was that on the evidence led at the trial, no reasonable court could have reached the conclusion that the date of purchase was 7 December. Weighty support for this view was supplied by the findings of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in June 2007. Among the six reasons found by the SCCRC for concluding that the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice was the following:

“The Commission formed the view that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988.

“Although it was proved that the applicant was in Malta on several occasions in December 1988, in terms of the evidence 7 December was the only date on which he would have had the opportunity to purchase the items. The finding as to the date of purchase was therefore important to the trial court’s conclusion that the applicant was the purchaser.

“Likewise, the trial court’s conclusion that the applicant was the purchaser was important to the verdict against him. Because of these factors the Commission has reached the view that the requirements of the legal test may be satisfied in the applicant’s case.”

The reasons given by the commission for finding that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in this case were therefore not limited to the effect of new evidence which has become available since the date of the original trial and the non-disclosure by the police and prosecution of evidence helpful to the defence (though both of these things happened and are important).

The prima facie miscarriage of justice identified by the commission includes the trial court’s finding in fact on the evidence heard at the trial that the clothes which surrounded the bomb were purchased in Malta on 7 December 1988 and that Megrahi was the purchaser. This was the very cornerstone of the Crown’s case against him.

If, as suggested, that finding had no reasonable basis in the evidence, then there was no legal justification whatsoever for his conviction.

An appeal against conviction failed in 2002 because, for reasons that are to me utterly inexplicable, Megrahi’s lawyers failed to argue that the evidence had been insufficient to convict or that no reasonable court could have convicted on that evidence.

Since the Zeist trial and appeal important additional evidence has emerged that further undermines the guilty verdict against Megrahi. For example, the fragment of circuit board that was the principal link between the bomb and Libya is now known to have a significantly different metallurgical composition from the timers that were supplied to the Gaddafi regime.

This difference was known to the Crown but was never disclosed to the defence or to the court.

Again, the painstaking research of Dr Morag Kerr in 2012 into the placement and condition of the items of baggage in luggage container AVE4041 that is known to have housed the suitcase containing the bomb has conclusively demonstrated that the guilty Samsonite suitcase was already in that container before any suitcase could have arrived from Malta in the feeder flight from Frankfurt.

Research and analysis of this type ought, of course, to have been done before the trial. But it wasn’t (or, if it was, the outcome was not presented in evidence to the court, perhaps because it failed to support the Malta ingestion scenario).

This new material is without doubt significant. But even more significant is that in the most important criminal trial ever held under the Scottish criminal justice system, the court returned a verdict of guilty based upon findings-in-fact that, on the evidence led, no reasonable court could have reached.

Abdelbaset Megrahi is now dead.

But his widow and children have launched an application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to be allowed to bring a fresh appeal against his conviction.

It is to be hoped that such an appeal takes place, not only to remove from Megrahi’s name the stigma of being “the Lockerbie bomber” but also to allow the international and domestic reputation of Scottish criminal justice system to recover from the stain of having presided over such an egregious miscarriage of justice and of having failed for years to have the courage to take the steps necessary to rectify it.

Lockerbie bombing: 30 years of grief

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the website of the Daily Express. It reads in part:]

Still the worst terrorist atrocity on British soil, 270 passengers, crew and residents of a small Scottish town died when a bomb in a radio/cassette player packed in a Samsonite suitcase exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am flight 103 nearly 30 years ago.

To mark the anniversary, Channel 5 documentary Lockerbie: The Unheard Voices, tells the story of 12 victims and survivors - and reveals two warnings were ignored. (...)

But could the horror have been avoided if warnings were heeded? A fortnight before the explosion, a caller rang the US Embassy in Finland to say there was a "plot against a Pan American flight to the US sometime in the next two weeks".

This was passed to the US Federal Aviation Administration but was "ultimately dismissed as a hoax".

A second, less widely known warning, came two days before the ill-fated flight. The UK Department of Transport "sent out a letter" warning a "bomb had been placed in a cassette player", according to the documentary. "The warning was based on detailed information sent out by the German intelligence services."

This was never heeded. It is not known how the brown Samsonite case made its way into cargo hold, but "security checks" failed to pick up anything.

It contained the Toshiba radio/ cassette tape player, in which 450g of Semtex and a timer was hidden. [RB: Dr Morag Kerr's researches have established conclusively that bomb suitcase was already in the luggage container AVE4041 at Heathrow before the aircraft supposedly carrying the case that the Libyans had sent as unaccompanied baggage from Malta arrived in London: Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.] (...)

But the ultimate suspect was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Libyan Airlines' security chief, who was convicted in 2001 of the bombing.

He died in May 2012, maintaining his innocence. His family are still trying to appeal his conviction.

Last week, a police probe found no evidence of criminality in relation to the handling of the investigation and prosecution in the case. [RB: The Chief Constable of Police Scotland has stated that the report contains material that is relevant to the Megrahi family's current application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and to any subsequent appeal against Megrahi's conviction.]

The film states: "For many of the families of the 270 victims there are still many unanswered questions."

The unanswered questions…

1 Will al-Megrahi's family get the chance to appeal on his behalf? The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is looking at Megrahi's conviction and if it decides there has been a miscarriage of justice, the case will return to the Court of Appeal. Some believe the truth will finally be brought to light.

2 Why was key evidence overlooked at the original Lockerbie trial? A break-in at the Pan Am baggage department at Heathrow airport before the bombing was never disclosed to the judges. And a $2million reward paid to witness Tony Gauci by the US only emerged years after Megrahi's conviction.

3 How can a discrepancy in forensic evidence be explained? A fragment of bomb timer found in a field near Lockerbie was linked to Libya, as Swiss firm Mebo had sold timers to Colonel Gaddafi's regime. It has since emerged the fragment was made of pure tin, not the lead/tin alloy used by Mebo.

4 If Megrahi did not plant the bomb then who did? Some believe Iran paid Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC to carry out the attack after the US Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner in July 1988, killing 290 people.

5 What were the warnings? German police told British authorities a PFLP-GC cell might plant bombs hidden in tape recorders on passenger planes, while a man with an Arabic accent rang the US Embassy in Helsinki on December 5 to say a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the US would be blown up.

Air Malta wins out-of-court settlement over Lockerbie programme

[This is the headline over a report published on this date in 1993 in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads as follows:]

Air Malta has won an out-of-court settlement from an independent British television company over a programme it felt implied negligence on its part in the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner bombing, lawyers for the Maltese carrier said yesterday.

Granada Television agreed to pay Air Malta Company Limited £15,005 to settle the dispute in connection with a dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? About the bombing of the Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.

The payment was made without any admission of liability, Air Malta’s lawyers said in a statement.

Air Malta had objected to a reconstruction of how the bomb might have been smuggled into the international airline system. The dramatized segment showed an Arab checking the bag on to an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt.

The Pan Am flight from London to New York, carrying some passengers who had travelled from Frankfurt, was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. Two suspected Libyan intelligence agents have been accused of carrying out the attack but Tripoli has not handed them over for trial.

[RB: Granada was compelled to settle because there was no credible evidence that the bomb started from Luqa Airport in Malta. The judges at the Zeist trial held that it had done so. What follows is my published comment at the time of the verdict:]

The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.

[RB: Dr Morag Kerr has since, in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, conclusively established that the bomb suitcase started its fatal progress at Heathrow Airport, not Luqa.]

The case that never goes away

[What follows is the text of a talk given by Dr Morag Kerr on Saturday, 16 June 2018 at a rally at Inch Park, Edinburgh:]

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, the case that never goes away.

I've heard people say, drop it, it's history.  But it's not much longer ago than Hillsborough, and that was only resolved to public satisfaction very recently.  And I personally have an aversion to a false narrative going down in history.  Other people feel the same way, including people personally impacted by the atrocity, and that's why we still have active campaigns.

Why is it that there's still so much concern about Lockerbie?Fundamentally, because the verdict in 2001 never made any sense.  As the court proceedings unfolded the prosecution case appeared to be falling apart.  The evidence against the accused was far far weaker than the public had been led to believe and credible alternative culprits and lines of inquiry had never been properly investigated.  The guilty verdict against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi came as a genuine shock to many informed observers, and their concerns have never been laid to rest.

Two separate but parallel campaigns have been going on for the last few years, and both are seeing significant developments unfolding.  First, there is the application by Megrahi's family for a posthumous appeal against his conviction.

This case has already had two appeals come to court.  The first appeal, the automatic one immediately after the conviction, was brought on the wrong grounds by Megrahi's inept advocate, and was dismissed essentially on a string of technicalities.  The second appeal was the result of a prolonged investigation by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and it came to court in 2009.  But by that time Megrahi had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and was anxious to return home to his family before he died, and he formally abandoned that appeal immediately before he was granted compassionate release.

This introduced a legal controversy.  Megrahi himself and his legal team maintained that he had withdrawn the appeal to make it more likely that compassionate release would be granted.  Kenny MacAskill denied having made that a condition of granting compassionate release.  When Megrahi's family applied to the SCCRC for a third appeal, the point that had to be decided was, how many bites at the cherry is anybody allowed to have?  The appellant abandoned his appeal voluntarily, so why should another be allowed?

The SCCRC's decision on this was reported last month.  They accepted that Megrahi withdrew the appeal because he believed it would improve his chances of being allowed to go home, and that it wasn't in any way a capitulation or an admission of guilt.  They have therefore decided to carry out a full evaluation of the new application from his family.  I anticipate that this will result in a third appeal being allowed and going to court.

The second campaign is an initiative by the pressure group Justice for Megrahi, of which I'm secretary depute.  The JFM committee includes retired senior lawyers and a retired senior police officer as well as relatives of Lockerbie victims, so we have a lot of expertise to call on.  Back in 2012 when the prospects of getting a third appeal to court were looking remote, we had a look at other options to force the authorities to look again at the case.  The thing is, you can't just go to the police or the Crown Office and say, look, here's why I think you got this wrong, you must reconsider.  It doesn't work like that.  What you can do, is force the police to look at the case again by making formal allegations of criminality against other people, which they are then duty bound to investigate.

I'm not talking about allegations against alternative suspects, but against people involved in the original investigation and the trial at Camp Zeist.  We had very good reason to believe that significant shenanigans had taken place at both stages of the proceedings, and that we had sufficient evidence to compel the police to investigate this seriously.  Eventually we submitted nine separate allegations to the authorities, backed up with credible evidence in each case.  These included police misconduct, forensic fraud and/or criminal negligence, perjury, and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Now of course talk is cheap and anyone can allege anything, but if there had been no substance to our allegations the police could have disposed of them quickly with very little trouble.  That's what they thought they were going to do, at first.  However it was eventually realised that there was serious substance to what we were saying, and in 2014 a dedicated Police Scotland investigation was set up, codenamed Operation Sandwood.  I think the fact that it has taken these detectives four years to finalise their report says a lot about how well-founded our position is, and how thorough the investigation has been.

It seems likely that the Operation Sandwood report will be submitted to the Crown Office before the SCCRC is ready to report, but I don't really know how much longer it will be for either of them.  Both reports will be confidential and will not automatically be made public, so we're going to have to do a fair bit of reading between the lines.

Although the two investigations are separate, they are essentially investigating the same thing -- the evidence in the Lockerbie case.   There's a huge amount of that, but systematic analysis boils it down to three critical points, only two of which specifically incriminate Megrahi.

The first of these is the identification evidence.  Clothes packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to their manufacturer, and from there to the shop where they were sold.  Amazingly the shopkeeper remembered selling more than one of these items to a customer, and he had some recollection of what that man looked like.  The prosecution alleged that it was Megrahi who had bought these clothes.

The first SCCRC report detailed six grounds on which the commission believed it was possible that a miscarriage of justice had occurred, and all of these related to the clothes purchase.  It seems to me inevitable that the new SCCRC investigation will have to allow a new appeal on these grounds if nothing else.  However, we hardly need to wait for the SCCRC on that one.  Kenny MacAskill has already, belatedly, conceded the point.  In his recent book and again in press articles, he agrees that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes.

In fact that's all it should take to overturn the conviction entirely.  If he didn't buy the clothes the case against him falls apart in logic.  However, Kenny doesn't see it that way, and pins his continued assertion that Megrahi was involved in the bombing on the second main point which appears to incriminate him, the fact that he was present at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane.  This also seems to be the fall-back position of the Crown Office.  Well, maybe someone else bought the clothes, but Megrahi was there when the crime took place and he was a Libyan security agent so go figure.

That aspect of the case is my own personal speciality.  Was Megrahi present at the scene of the crime?  There's no doubt he was at the airport in Malta that morning, catching a short-hop flight back to Tripoli after an overnight business trip to Malta.  The question is, was that actually the scene of the crime?  There was no evidence at all that security at Malta airport was breached that morning, no evidence that an illicit, unaccompanied suitcase was smuggled on to the flight to Frankfurt, and considerable evidence that no such thing actually happened.  Exactly how the prosecution managed to persuade the judges that it had happened is one of the enduring conundrums of the Lockerbie saga.

The Crown case depends absolutely on their preferred modus operandi, the story of the suitcase that was smuggled on to an aircraft in the morning on Malta, was transferred automatically through the baggage transfer system at Frankfurt without anyone realising that there was no passenger attached to it, and was then in due course transferred to the transatlantic airliner Maid of the Seas at Heathrow.  It was the transatlantic leg that blew up over Lockerbie.

However, as I said, there's no evidence at all of that suitcase being present at Malta airport, and the evidence from Frankfurt that was used to assert that it must have been there is tenuous beyond belief.  It's only when you look at the evidence from Heathrow itself that things get a lot clearer.  To cut a long story short, there is clear and incontrovertible evidence that the bomb suitcase was already in the baggage container at Heathrow a full hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed.  This evidence was available to the investigation at an early stage, but it appears the investigating officers simply didn't want to know.  The amount of effort expended in ignoring that suitcase is quite remarkable.

But once that is accepted, Megrahi really is exonerated.  This smear of "well maybe he didn't buy the clothes but he was there when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane so obviously he was involved" simply doesn't stand up.  He was 1,500 miles away at the time -- the distance from London to Tripoli.

The Crown Office case simply collapses.  It's not a situation where the crime has been more or less solved but there just isn't enough admissible evidence to get a conviction to stick, the Lockerbie investigation was up a gum tree almost from the beginning. Despite clear and compelling evidence that Heathrow was the scene of the crime, the police chased a red herring down a blind alley to Malta, and refused to think again even when prolonged investigation there turned up no sign of the bomb.

This admission would be hugely embarrassing for the legal establishment.  Millions of pounds spent on an investigation that was investigating the wrong airports.  An entire country ruined by punitive sanctions imposed on the assumption that its nationals were guilty of the atrocity.  Millions more spent on that three-ring-circus of a trial.

So I think we can anticipate some pretty strenuous resistance to this finding.  I expect the SCCRC to be pressurised to confine their investigation to the original six grounds of appeal, which were all about the clothes purchase, and not to extend their remit to the route of the bomb suitcase or indeed to the third point of contention, the identity of the fragment of printed circuit board that was alleged to have been part of the bomb's timing mechanism.

I also expect the Crown Office to try to bury the Sandwood report into our allegations of criminality.  There's an unavoidable weakness there.  The stratagem that we had to use was to accuse individuals of criminal offences in the course of these matters being wrongly investigated and wrongly presented to the court.  However, even if Operation Sandwood agrees with us on all three main headings -- that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes, that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow not Malta, and that the fragment of circuit board was not what the prosecution said it was -- it's quite possible that no actual prosecutions will result.

The people involved are now quite elderly, in their seventies or older.  Some of them are dead.  John Orr, the first senior investigating officer assigned to the case, who was prominent in turning a blind eye to the Heathrow evidence, died about four months ago.  Even if Operation Sandwood concludes that there is credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing as opposed to blind incompetence, it's not impossible that a decision might be taken that prosecutions are not in the public interest.

So I'm somewhat prepared for the announcement that no prosecutions are to be brought as a result of the Operation Sandwood investigation.  That, in my opinion, will not be good enough.  The public paid for that investigation, and the public is entitled to know the broad outcome of its inquiry into the facts.  Does the Sandwood report accept that the witness Tony Gauci was groomed and pressurised into identifying Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes, even though he looked absolutely nothing like him?  Does it agree that the Lockerbie bomb started its journey in the late afternoon at Heathrow airport, not in the morning on Malta?  And does it agree that the scrap of printed circuit board, whatever it was, was never part of one of the timers in the batch that was sold to Libya?

We may have to wait for the third appeal coming to court to get to the bottom of all this, but these are the questions that the public, and in particular journalists, should be asking.

Now if anyone wants to hear a lot more detail about this, I will be giving a longer, illustrated talk on the evidence at the Yes Hub in a couple of weeks time, and there will be more opportunity for questions, and you won't have to stand in the rain to do it.  But if anyone has anything they want to ask now, fire away.