The origin of the Lockerbie bomb

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today's edition of The Sunday Times of Malta, following an article in last Sunday's edition of the newspaper. The letter reads as follows:]

After all these years of attempting to discover the truth about the murder of my daughter, Flora and all those 269 others, our group UK Families-Flight 103 have researched the allegations in depth. That search has always and only been for truth.

If there is one aspect of the tragedy about which we are certain, it is that the Lockerbie bomb did not start its journey from Malta.

There seems no robust evidence to show that it did do so, other than the bought ‘evidence’ given by Tony Gauci concerning the buying of clothes from Mary’s House in Sliema and the discovery of a fragment of circuit board produced in the Zeist court from within a Scots police evidence bag.

It is clear that the fragment of circuit board, which was labelled PT35b in the Zeist court, was planted false evidence. It has been repeatedly carefully analysed in the UK by a series of responsible and academic authorities. These analyses showed that the copper tracks on PT35b had been plated with pure tin, not the alloy of tin and lead which was in universal professional use in 1988.

In addition, a series of trial explosions were conducted for the Zeist defence team by a UK based explosives expert of many years standing which found that the circuit board of the bomb would have been reduced to a brown powder by the blast and heat of the IED bomb. PT35b simply could not be genuine, yet, it was said in America to be the one thing that enabled the Zeist trial to be set up.

The court chose both to ignore these findings and failed to explore how a clearly false item could have entered an official Scots police evidence bag. 

If PT35b had been genuine, it would have proved that a digital electronic timer had been used. The flight time from Luqa to Frankfurt is around two hours and 45 minutes and digital timers like that from which PT35b was alleged to have come can be user settable and encompass delays of many hours. Our work shows that an analogue timing circuit with a maximum run time of around 45 minutes was what really triggered the bomb, so no one could have sent it on its way from Luqa without it exploding over the Mediterranean or continental Europe.

We hope that some aspect of truth may emerge from the upcoming trial of the Libyan Masud but there is no way that that trial can be made to bridge this two hours and 45 minutes between your lovely island and the now peaceful fields surrounding the little town of Lockerbie.

Only truth, not revenge, allows us to heal and forgive

[This is part of the headline over an article by Dr Jim Swire published in today's edition of Scotland on Sunday. A longer version of the article reads as follows:]

Looking at the situation in the Middle East, we may never have a better opportunity to decry the use of brute force, public deception and material power as a route to bettering our future than we have at this moment. 

On 3rd July 1988 the USS Vincennes a cutting edge American missile cruiser equipped with a state of the art Aegis weapons control system, and commanded by (the late) Captain Will C Rogers III was in the Persian Gulf. American warships then were busy protecting international oil tanker traffic in the straits of Hormuz from Iranian attacks. History repeats itself.

Back in 1988 the Vincennes’ helicopter had reported coming under fire from Iranian speedboats, and though unscathed was ordered back to the Vincennes. The ship herself turned into Iranian waters in order to fire back at the Iranian speedboats, known as ‘Boghammers’, with which she then immediately engaged. At this time the ship’s radar picked up the trace of an aircraft climbing out of Bandar Abbas Airport (Iran). This was Iran Air Flight 655 an airliner with 290 people aboard. The airport supported both civil and military aircraft. Those interested to learn more might attempt to get access to a copy of STORM CENTER the USS Vincennes and Iran Air Flight 655 published by the (US) Naval Institute Press ISBN 1 755750 727 9, a personal account of tragedy and terrorism by Will and Sharon Rogers. It is a riveting account from the cutting edge by the Vincennes’ captain and his family.

Back on that 3rd of July 1988, the ship’s captain Will C Rogers III was led to misinterpret the radar trace of IR Flight 655 as being an attacking Iranian warplane, but it must be remembered this occurred in the tense circumstances of the fire from the Boghammers, and the restrictions placed on his ship’s duties from higher levels of the US navy. 

We humans do all make mistakes. 

Two of the ships missiles were fired and destroyed the airliner: the wreckage and the 290 bodies plunged into the waters of the Hormuz straits, killing all aboard; among cheers over the threat-resolution from the crew [and a from a media team who happened to be recording the amazing facilities of the ship and her technology that day.]

Captain Rogers remained in charge of his ship, and was later awarded the Legion of Merit decoration "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer of USS Vincennes from April 1987 to May 1989”, though IR655 was downed in 1988. The award was given for his service as the Commanding Officer of Vincennes, specifically highlighting his tactical skills and leadership in the Persian Gulf, including engagements with Iranian surface craft. There was no mention there of flight IR655.

Iranian sources immediately publicly swore revenge upon “The Great Satan”, over the tragic loss of IR655 with all those people aboard. 

In November 1991, Scottish and American prosecutors simultaneously indicted Libyans Abdel Baset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Both were identified as members of the Libyan intelligence service. This was a sudden dramatic reversal of the previous years of work between the disaster in 1988 at Lockerbie and 1991, in which time intelligence services had concluded, as do we now, that the Lockerbie bombing was a revenge attack by Iran in return for the fate of IR 655. 

Within some ten days of this startling about turn [published simultaneously in the USA and by Scotland’s Lord Advocate], to blaming Libya, for the Lockerbie disaster, two Western hostages, one of whom happened to be the British Terry Waite an emissary of the UK’s then archbishop of Canterbury and both having been held by Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, were released, others soon followed. 

Now that the Persian Gulf is again sporting US warships, with Iran’s leaders no doubt plotting how to manage the repercussions of being bombed this time by US and Israeli warplanes, and also with US marine groups on their way. We need to heed the words of German philosopher Georg Hegel: “The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” 

For starters the subsequent bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 has been shown for our group ‘’UK Families-Flight 103’ by our own careful researches over more than 38 years, to have been the work of Iran, through the use of Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC terrorist group in Damascus acting as mercenaries and financed - just as Hezbollah in the Bekaa has always been - by the Iranian Ayatollas. The PFLP-GC workshop in Damascus was where a set of cunning IED bombs intended to destroy aircraft in flight was made, under Jordanian Marwan Khreesat meanwhile the capture of a terrorist intermediary had confirmed to us [through incriminating documents found on his person by CIA assets], the passage of funds from Iran to Jibril’s group.

We had also obtained in early 1989 access to an illustrated warning sent in July 1988 to the UK Government, [among many others], by the German BKA police group under Herr Rainer Gobel. Containing colour photographs and descriptions of bombs recovered by them from members of Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC Palestinian terrorist group now caught in the small German town of Neuss, convenient to Frankfurt airport.

Please study the story contained in our book LOCKERBIE: a father’s search for justice (ISBN 978 1 78027 920 6: Birlinn, Edinburgh, reprinted 2025) to understand how our search for the truth as to who had murdered our families was pressed forward over the decades, and how it came to fundamentally differ from the official account. It has had no driving force other than the need for us to know the truth about who really had murdered our family members, and to improve, if we could, the protection for other air travellers in the future. Many who have attempted to understand what is said to be the complex story of why Lockerbie happened, seem unaware of how it was shown that the one seemingly solid link between the bomb used at Lockerbie is nothing other than fake news. The link to Malta for the bomb simply did not exist. Its main support among the story tellers of the world was a tiny fingernail sized fragment of circuit board, named from the Zeist trial onwards as PT35b, and allegedly recovered from the crash debris at the site of the tragedy.

The first pointer we got as to the significance of this forensic element ‘PT35b’ found inside a Scottish police evidence bag and produced in court as proof of the concept of the bomb’s travel from Malta, was words from the USA attributed to Richard Marquise working on the tragedy for the FBI from the USA, who is alleged to have said that a court trial without this tiny piece of evidence would not have been possible.

This fragment now known as ‘PT35b’ was treated with great gravity by those attempting to defend the two accused Libyans. The fragment was submitted to electron microscopic and spectroscopic analysis. What that showed was that in the two surviving tracks on it’s small surface, the copper had been plated with pure tin.

At first this seemed part of the normal manufacturing processes used by a reputable Swiss firm ‘Turing’ who were supplying circuit boards to MEBO, who in turn had made the ‘MST13’ digital timers some of which were supplied by MEBO to the Libyans, and which the prosecution decided had been used for the Lockerbie bomb.

There were however two major problems: FIRST,During the intervening years between the disaster and the trial, the electronics industry had undergone a significant change. Those responsible at an international level for industrial and domestic waste disposal practices had become acutely aware of the risks to human health from the metal lead both in the domestic environment and when deposited in landfill. Rapidly it was decided that the metal lead must be removed from domestic use and in the platings on electronic circuit boards. With the cooperation of the EU, Japan and America in particular, it was agreed that all lead should be forbidden in the manufacture of electronic printed circuit boards. Meanwhile statements from Turing about their circuit board manufacture until after December 1988 confirmed that their output was universally made from boards plated in the standard electronic platings of the time, in which the blend of metals used always consisted of tin and lead.

Turing’s director Bonfadelli signed a sworn statement that his firm had been equipped solely for the application of tin/lead platings, before 1988 and so could not have made the board from which ‘PT35b’ would have had to have come. 

Second, the police evidence bag in which the fragment PT35b was found was unique in having had its label altered, and in such a way as to make it evident that debris within should be examined, rather than only the charred cloth also within, (which was readily shown to have originated from Malta). The Zeist court failed to have the details of who might have altered the label and what his/her motives might have been for doing so probed.

It was clear that neither the Scottish police nor any agent for the Crown Office were remotely likely to be responsible for originating ‘PT35b’, for we know that the investigating Scots police were in possession of pristine circuit boards given to them by MEBO, and that these were coated with a tin/lead alloy from which the lead could not be removed by the heat or blast of a Semtex explosion.

The likely origin for PT35b therefore seems to lie outwith the investigating team in Scotland, even though ‘PT35b’ was first revealed from a police evidence bag, and access to the police evidential bags seems to have been most generous for American agents from the FBI or intelligence agents also from the US. Without the ability to investigate the detailed behaviour of US agents in the investigation, we were made aware that a MEBO type timer had been acquired by the CIA from a site in Togo and that that evidence was passed from the CIA to the FBI, to an operative called James Thurman working in the FBI’s laboratories. This man broke the news to US media that he was the man who identified the CIA materials given to him which carried with them Libyan tainted details. He was lauded as man of the month, for establishing in many US minds the concept that this was a link to Libya. Unfortunately Mr James Thurman was soon removed from his position in the FBI labs after it came to light that internal investigations had shown persistent distortions by him of evidence in other FBI major investigations, his removal seems to have been the work of his superior ‘line manager’ Whitehurst. 

There can be no doubt that access to potentially evidential materials was gained by US agents right from the earliest hours following the disaster itself, and that this was found shocking by some who were honestly engaged in extensive searching of the disaster crash site. The late Labour MP Tam Dalyell had experienced the doubts of many who had been witnesses to the early evolution of the police investigations. We had hoped that people within the US would gather what evidence they could, and we never have wanted to disturb any ‘closure’ that American bereaved families might feel they had obtained for themselves.

Recent international political and military events, particularly some emanating from the USA have confirmed what we had already discovered the hard way: truth had been suborned into US foreign policy and there crushed underfoot along with the interests of those bereaved families in the UK who merely sought that truth. Inability to reach that truth is echoed in the subheading of the Washington Post newspaper: ‘democracy dies in darkness’.

Knowingly or not those currently assaulting Iran and her people from above will now find themselves embedded in asymmetrical warfare. The story of how Vincennes captain Will Rogers III’s wife Sharon came to escape miraculously from the shrapnel of a powerful pipe-bomb placed underneath the family’s van within the Continental USA itself in 1989 should leave no doubt about that prediction. American investigators were ‘unable to discover’ who had planted that pipe bomb.

Just so long as those in power in Iran, (Ayatollahs or not), remain in power and able to slake their lust for revenge, so long will the world be a needlessly dangerous place. The Iranian people on the other hand have tried to make their dissatisfaction with their regime known with the greatest bravery, losing around10,000 citizens' lives to the weapons of their own rulers recently.

It is a desperately sad aspect of humanity that the first visceral reaction that comes into so many of our human brains when we are attacked, or worse still those we love are killed, is to seek revenge. Yet it does not have to be so. We do not in our group ‘UK Families-Flight 103’ seek revenge against Iran for the Lockerbie atrocity. We have sought the truth, and not simply in ’Truth Social’ either. 

Knowledge of what the truth really is about the origins of the dreadful attack on Pan Am 103, has only reinforced the realisation for us that revenge is self-defeating and generates hatred and the lust for revenge. 

Revenge attempted by Iran against the family of the Captain of the Vincennes was amplified for many through the killing of 270 people at Lockerbie. Yet there still is another way; from accepting the truth of where blame lies could spring the roots of healing. If on the other hand, for reasons of State, of International Politics or simply from our own human nature we were to enlarge or repeat the words and acts of revenge, where then would be the route to forgiveness or healing? One cannot forget, but can forgive. Even for that, we need to know the truth.

Sometimes it is educational to remember days long past when young. As an eight year old boy, the writer living in the Scottish Island of Skye was aware of family links to Canada, whose current leader speaks so much free common sense nowadays. There, like so many in Scotland we had Canadian cousins, who unlike us in 1946 had freedom already to buy as much food as they required, and who sometimes were able to send to us food parcels to help fill the limitations of post World War 2 rationing. One day a large parcel from Canada arrived for us, inside were large packets of tea and white sugar, sent with love.

Seated around a dining room table in Skye our family were set to work, the younger ones with sharp eyes, but the adults also dedicated to the task of disentangling the contents of those bags, for they had burst and the sugar and the tea leaves so precious to us in those days had mixed in the jumbling of their travels. We were separating tea leaves from grains of sugar. It took all day, with the rain beating on the windows as though it disapproved of this affront to the limits of the post war rationing. Sometimes it is all too easy to think of people together as if all were to be tarred with the same brush and to think that all the parcel contents were good for would be to make cups of exceedingly sweet tea, or plates of sweet but tannin laden porridge. Dealing with Iran can be like failing to disentangle the sweet from the sour. It would be wise to think of Iranian people not as evil but like a mixed up parcel, just like we are here. Iran, after all is the remaining rootstock of one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever seen and its people of today may hold the seed-corn of a great future.

Not being Iranians ourselves we should not seek to distinguish between one Iranian and another, we are not this time best placed to tell the ‘sugar' from the 'tea leaves' and can only say that those who claim to run their Iranian 'theocracy’ have, over many years, held themselves free to attack and destroy the lives of others indiscriminately, whether or not those others appeared to have any connection other than just their nation or even just their common language with any acts of violence or hatred.

True, Iranians have emerged to find themselves governed by a ‘theocracy’ which they themselves may have summoned back from France, but which, given the reins of power, corrupted itself through the lust for even greater influence through militarism and terrorist-related bloody revenge.

Our Western bible does tell us stories of the life of Jesus, and at Easter we are there bidden to remember even stories of resurrection and glory. Let us though not forget, believers or not, how, in one such story when a woman was to be stoned to death for adultery, none of the accusing rabble of men could convincingly tell himself that he ‘at least’ was free of sin, and so they did not cast the first stone, but slunk away, and the woman lived. Elsewhere in that book we are told ‘judge not, that you be not judged, and forgive even those who have sinned grievously against us.

Both Iran and the UK whether Muslim, Christian, agnostic, or atheist can read or listen to the teachings which Jesus Christ left behind, namely that judgement of others should be the realm of God, not us, and that our privilege is to love one another.

By chance it so happens that only last week in England was enthroned a fresh Archbishop of Canterbury, for the first time ever in history a woman. How healing it would be if the people of Iran who have suffered so much already could somehow come to forgive their Western assailants. How hard that would be today with bombs and missiles being showered on them.

But meanwhile here in an act of amnesty towards our little group of Lockerbie victims, (‘UK Families - Flight 103’) now that the bonds between our own country and the USA have loosened considerably, and the truth has been so often crushed, perhaps the restrictions upon being allowed to know the contents of all the files that our own country keeps relevant to Lockerbie, but has kept out of public or media sight in Kew all these years, could be released for us to see. It was after all our loved ones who were killed, and time must have loosened both the need for security over the events of December 1988 and the need to protect any ongoing idea of prosecuting the guilty. We only seek to know the truth and after so many years surely the whole of the truth known, by our Government at least, about the atrocity over Lockerbie could be allowed out into the daylight? As the Washington Post heading proclaims ‘Democracy dies in Darkness'.

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.

System cannot admit it made mistake with Lockerbie

[Yesterday's decision by the High Court of Justiciary dismissing the posthumous appeal on behalf of Abdelbaset Megrahi receives extensive coverage in UK and overseas media. A selection, courtesy of Google News, can be found here. 

What follows is excerpted from reports by Mike Wade here and here on the website of The Times:]

An attempt by the family of the only man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing posthumously to clear his name has been rejected by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland.

The family of Abdul Ali Baset al-Megrahi had appealed his conviction after a ruling by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) that “it was in the interests of justice” that his case was reconsidered.

Mr Anwar said that Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted man’s son, said that his family had been “left heartbroken by the decision of the Scottish courts, (but) maintained his father’s innocence and is determined to fulfil the promise he made to clear his name and that of Libya”.

The family has instructed its legal team to appeal to the UK Supreme Court and an application will be lodged within two weeks. (...)

Megrahi previously lost an appeal against his conviction in 2002. Five years later the SCCRC recommended that he should be granted the second appeal, which he later dropped.

Al-Megrahi insisted in his authorised biography, published in the year of his death, that a Scottish government decision to agree his early release from prison was conditional on his decision to drop his second appeal.

He said that Kenny MacAskill, who was then the Scottish justice secretary, had suggested the deal to a Libyan government official.

In the latest appeal the court was not asked by the SCCRC to consider a tiny fragment of circuit board, believed to have been from the bomb’s timer. This, campaigners insist, was a key piece of evidence that could have cleared al-Megrahi’s name.

After this morning’s decision the al-Megrahi family demanded the release of secret evidence held by the UK government that they believe incriminates others such as Iran and a Syrian-Palestinian group. (...)

In December, on the 32nd anniversary of the bombing, William Barr, the US attorney-general, announced new criminal charges against an alleged bombmaker involved in the atrocity.

Abu Agila Masud, another former Libyan intelligence officer, allegedly admitted to assembling the bomb that blew up the plane as it passed over Lockerbie en route from London to New York. Masud was the third person to face charges in the attack after al-Megrahi and another Libyan, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, were charged nearly 30 years ago. Fhimah was found not guilty in 2001.

It was Mr Barr who announced the charges against al-Megrahi and Fhimah in 1991, saying at the time: “This investigation is by no means over.” Al-Megrahi’s supporters claim that Mr Barr’s recent intervention weighed heavily on the appeal court judges.

A source said: “For the judges to overturn the conviction would be absolutely momentous and I don’t think they have the stomach for that. William Barr piled on the pressure by announcing new indictments. It was too much of a hot potato for them.”

Mr Anwar said the first ground for appeal — that “no reasonable jury properly directed could have convicted” — was built largely around the evidence of Tony Gauci, who died in 2016.

In the 2001 trial, Mr Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, identified al-Megrahi as the man who bought clothes from him that were later packed in a suitcase containing the bomb. After the trial it was disclosed that he had received $2 million from the US authorities.

In his judgment Lord Carloway said the original trial had given due consideration to Mr Gauci’s identification.

Mr Anwar said the second ground of appeal — the failure to disclose information to the defence — hinged on a “compatibility issue” arising from a question relating to a breach of human rights. This will be the basis for the application to the Supreme Court.

[A further article in The Times, headlined System cannot admit it made mistake with Lockerbie, says lawyer who designed first trial contains the following:]

The Scottish court system is unable to acknowledge that a mistake has been made, the lawyer who designed the 2001 Lockerbie trial has said.

Robert Black, emeritus professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, drew up plans to enable a Scottish court to sit on neutral territory in the Netherlands but when the trial ended he was convinced that he had witnessed a miscarriage of justice.

He said yesterday that the Scottish criminal justice system was unable to acknowledge “a mistake has been made” in the conviction of Abdul Baset al-Megrahi and it was “a matter of grave concern” that the most recent appeal had been so narrowly restricted to certain legal areas. The Scottish Criminal Case Review Committee allowed al-Megrahi’s posthumous appeal on only two grounds: that the verdict had been unreasonable and that some evidence had not been disclosed to the defence.

Four other grounds for appeal were rejected by the committee, including evidence about a fragment from a circuit board and a theory that the suitcase that contained the bomb had not been loaded onto an aircraft in Malta.

The Crown argued that the circuit board, part of a timing device, was one of many sold to the Libyan government by Mebo, a Swiss company. It was found in the remains of a shirt collar, which in turn led to a shop in Malta owned by Tony Gauci. Campaigners for al-Megrahi say forensic analysis has shown the circuit board was coated in pure tin and not in a tin-lead alloy, the only kind supplied by Mebo. Independent scientists, consulted by the Crown, had noticed the difference but maintained the tin fragment and the tin-lead amalgam were “similar in all respects”.

Professor Black also cited evidence the bomb suitcase was put on at Heathrow before luggage from Malta arrived.

Lockerbie bombing 30 years on: What is the truth behind UK's deadliest terrorist atrocity?

[This is the headline over a long article in The Independent today. The following are excerpts:]

Thirty years ago on Friday the name Lockerbie became synonymous with disaster.

The grim sequel is that today, Lockerbie does not just conjure up images of tragedy. 

It brings to mind suggestions of conspiracy, of murky deals done in the diplomatic margins, of international machinations that betrayed justice, ensuring – some say – that the only person convicted in connection with the bombing, Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was an innocent man. (...)

It still took nearly 12 years before the trial of two Libyan suspects began on May 3 2000, at a specially convened tribunal, operating under Scottish law and heard by three Scottish judges without a jury, at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands.

The tortuous road to trial included the imposition of sanctions on Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, suggestions the international consensus on sanctions was collapsing, and lengthy secret negotiations between the UK, US and the Netherlands, initiated by Tony Blair’s foreign secretary Robin Cook.

The investigation that put Megrahi and alleged accomplice Lamin Khalifa Fhimah in the frame had involved interviewing 15,000 people and examining 180,000 pieces of evidence.

When the trial began in the Netherlands, Dr [Jim] Swire was convinced both men were guilty.

By the time the judges acquitted Fhimah and found Megrahi guilty on 31 January 2001, Dr Swire was convinced that the only man convicted was innocent. 

He befriended Megrahi, visiting him, exchanging Christmas cards, becoming relentless in his efforts to clear the Libyan’s name, and thus to find his daughter’s ‘real killers’. (...)

The Scottish Crown Office - backed it should be said by many American victims' families - remains sure Megrahi was a Libyan agent, a key player in a plot where an unwitting Air Malta worker checked the Samsonite onto a Frankfurt-bound flight as a favour for a “friend” in Germany, where the suitcase was routed to Heathrow, then loaded on to Pan Am 103.

Tony Gauci, whose shop Mary’s House was near Malta’s airport, identified Megrahi as the man who bought clothes from him that were later found to have been packed into the Samsonite, concealing the bomb.

But there were reports of large undisclosed payments going from the US Justice Department to Mr Gauci.

The suspicion was growing that, either by accident or cover-up, Megrahi had become the innocent fall guy who got a life sentence for mass murder.

The Libyan was described, by The Independent among others, as less secret agent and more “Tripoli airport control manager briefly assigned to Libyan intelligence for bureaucratic rather than specialist tradecraft reasons.”

Many came to believe the Lockerbie atrocity was the work of Palestinian militants, with suspicion falling in particular on the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

The trial, for example, had heard evidence from FBI agent Edward Marshman that Jordanian bomb maker Marwan Khreesat told him he had supplied the PFLP-GC with explosive devices similar to the one used to down Pan Am 103.

By contrast there was considerable scepticism about the prosecution’s attempts to link Libya’s intelligence services to the improvised explosive device that destroyed the jet.

A fingernail-sized fragment of circuit board found in the wreckage was identified by prosecutors as being part of a timer made by contractor Thuring and sold by Swiss company Mebo to the Libyan armed forces.

But sceptics said independent analysis of the timer fragment showed it had a pure tin coating, whereas Thuring devices were covered in a tin-lead alloy.

Dr Swire came to disbelieve the official story of a bomb going from Malta to Frankfurt to London, thinking instead that the bomb had been smuggled through Heathrow and only ever travelled on one aeroplane: Pan Am 103.

One Heathrow staff member reportedly told police in January 1989 that he had seen a hard-shell Samsonite in a luggage container heading for the Boeing 747’s hold before the Frankfurt feeder flight that was supposed to have carried the bomb had even landed at the London airport.

Some accounts were prepared to accept that Libyan money might have helped fund the Palestinian militants – the US bombing raid on Tripoli in 1986 certainly gave Gaddafi plenty of motive for becoming (or continuing as) a terrorist paymaster.

But the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by a missile fired in error from a US warship in July 1988 gave another Middle East government a far more recent grievance, one that would have made targeting American civilian air passengers particularly appealing.

Whatever the truth, the conflicting accounts and the seeming entanglement with Middle Eastern intrigue left many with the sense that Lockerbie had become a decidedly murky affair. (...)

In 2015 Scottish prosecutors effectively re-opened the Lockerbie investigation by naming two Libyans they wanted to talk to: Abdullah al-Senussi, Gaddaffi’s brother-in-law and formerly a senior Libyan intelligence official, and Abu Agila Masud, a man believed to have bomb-making skills.

Both men are in jail in Libya.  Scottish and American prosecutors are said to be hopeful they will be allowed, despite the chaos now bedevilling Libya, to talk to the two suspects. 

A report in this week’s Times suggested prosecutors were “closing in” on their two targets.  The response from the Libyan government – or at least the UN-backed version of it – was said to have been “positive and constructive”.

Megrahi’s family, meanwhile, has launched a fresh appeal against his conviction to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC).

When he died in 2012, his brother Abdulhakim said: “Just because Abdulbaset is dead doesn’t mean the past is now erased.  We will always tell the world my brother was innocent.”

For his part, Dr Swire described the death of his friend as “a very sad event”.  He praised the way that Megrahi, even when dying and in great pain, had sought to pass on the information amassed by his defence team.

Dr Swire himself is now 82.

Thirty years on from being called from his study to watch a TV news bulletin that changed his life, he is still searching for simple, undisputed truth about what happened to his daughter and 269 others.

Given what we now know about Lockerbie, it seems rash to assume that anyone will ever find 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.

Investigation into Lockerbie prosecutors nearing completion

[This is the headline over a report by Marcello Mega in today’s edition
of The Times. It reads as follows:]

Retired detectives, former prosecutors who now serve as judges and expert

witnesses in the Lockerbie case will learn early in the new year if they will be
charged with criminal conduct.

Police Scotland said yesterday that Operation Sandwood, their investigation

into claims of criminality by investigators and prosecutors, was at the reporting
stage and was well advanced.

The evidence uncovered will set the ball rolling on what could be the final act

in the drama surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which claimed
the lives of 270 people on December 21, 1988.

As the police team conducted their inquiries investigators working for the family

of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing who died in 2012,
made a breakthrough.

Scientific tests carried out on the most crucial piece of evidence in the case,

a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that enabled prosecutors to link
Libya to the bombing, suggested strongly that it was a fake.

This means that the family will continue to push for the Scottish Criminal Cases

Review Commission to refer the case back to the court of appeal to try to clear
al-Megrahi’s name.

The Sandwood team, led by Deputy Chief Constable Iain Livingstone, is taking

advice from an independent QC.

Police Scotland took the view when the allegations were made by the Justice

for Megrahi (JfM) pressure group that it could not be led by the Crown Office as
many of the claims related to the office’s conduct.

The final report, with recommendations about any potential prosecutions, will be

with the Lord Advocate James Wolffe, QC, by February.

The Sandwood team has faced a difficult and sensitive task because it has had

to investigate the conduct of people at the heart of the Scottish justice system.
It would not be unprecedented for former police officers to face charges, and
the forensic experts under scrutiny have already been discredited through their
conduct in other trials, notably a number of IRA cases where verdicts were
reversed on appeals.

However, it would send shockwaves through the system if any of the prosecutors i

n the case, two now sitting as High Court judges and one as a sheriff, faced
questions about their integrity.

Iain McKie, a former police superintendent and now a key figure in JfM, said:

“We have been impressed by Police Scotland and the way in which Iain Livingstone
and others have dealt with this matter and kept us informed.

“If they have established there was criminality, they won’t shy away from it.

I fully believe that. But the problem might be that ultimately it would still be for
the Crown to make a final decision after considering the police report.”

It is likely that if any charges do result, the forensic experts in the case would be

the most likely targets, and the new evidence uncovered by the al-Megrahi family’s
legal team would support that strongly. One of the experts testified at the trial
that the timer fragment was “similar in every respect” to a set of timers supplied
to Libya.

However, it has emerged that while the timers supplied to Libya contained

a tin/lead alloy, the fragment came from a timer made of pure tin. It also yielded
absolutely no explosives residue when tested, so had never been at the seat of
an explosion.

Gareth Peirce, the lawyer who helped clear the Birmingham Six and the

Guildford Four, said: “[They were] the same forensic scientists who produced
the wrongful conviction of Giuseppe Conlon, the Maguire family and of
Danny McNamee, and had been stood down for the role they played.

“Yet here they were. Without them, there wouldn’t have been a prosecution, far

less a conviction in Lockerbie.”

Al-Megrahi’s elder son, Khaled, said: “We are sure that our cause is right and

we will prevail no matter how long. We know one day the truth will come out.
We will never stop our work to make sure of it.”

Criminality allegations submitted to Justice Secretary

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the website of The Scotsman on this date in 2012:]

Lockerbie campaigners have lodged “fresh allegations” with justice secretary Kenny MacAskill about the conduct of the Scottish authorities at the trial 11 years ago.

Demands for a fresh inquiry into the bombing of the Pan Am jet in 1988 will come before MSPs on Holyrood’s justice committee today. The Justice for Megrahi (JfM) campaign has compared the “cover-up” surrounding the trial to the recent Hillsborough revelations. But the claims were branded “false and deliberately misleading” by Scotland’s Crown Office yesterday.

In a submission to the committee, the JfM group states: “The outcome of the Hillsborough inquiry has undoubtedly shone a light on the inner workings of a justice system that purported to keep its citizens safe and secure.

“Now we can see that protection of the system and the wrongdoers within it took precedence over protection of the individual citizen. If Hillsborough was England’s shame, then Lockerbie is Scotland’s, and much of the indifference and arrogance identified within the former can be identified in the latter.”

The campaign submitted a letter to Mr MacAskill which lodges “serious formal allegations” relating to the conduct of the investigation and the Kamp van Zeist trial.

[RB: JfM’s letter to Kenny MacAskill, with names of individuals removed, reads as follows:]

The Committee of Justice for Megrahi hereby formally lodge with you complaints alleging criminal wrongdoing in the investigation and prosecution of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah for the murder of 270 people in the downing of Pan Am 103 on 21 December 1988.

These complaints are directed against the persons and bodies named below whom, for the reasons given, we believe may be guilty of the criminal offences specified.

1.  On 22 August 2000 the Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC, communicated to the judges of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands information about the contents of CIA cables relating to the Crown witness Abdul Majid Giaka that was known to members of the prosecution team [A B and C D] who had scrutinised the cables, to be false. The Lord Advocate did so after consulting these members of the prosecution team. It is submitted that this constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

2.  Members of the Lockerbie prosecution team, including but not limited to [C D], devised and presented or allowed to be presented to the trial court a scenario regarding the placement of items in luggage container AVE4041 which was known to be false, in order to obfuscate and conceal compelling evidence that the bomb suitcase was introduced by a terrorist infiltration at Heathrow airport. It is submitted that this constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

3.  Dumfries and Galloway Police, and those individuals employed by that force responsible for the recording, prioritising and submission to the Crown Office of evidence gathered in the investigation into the downing of Pan Am Flight 103, and the Crown Office, and those individuals in that organisation responsible for the analysis of said evidence and identifying what material required to be passed on to those acting for Megrahi and Fhimah, concealed the witness statement relating to the break-in to Heathrow airside giving access to the luggage loading shed used by Pan Am 103 in the early hours of 21st December 1988 which was provided by Heathrow Security Officer Raymond Manly to the Metropolitan Police shortly after Mr Manly’s discovery of the break-in. It is submitted that the concealment of this witness statement, which was or ought to have been known to Dumfries and Galloway Police and the Crown Office to be of the highest possible significance to the defence, constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

4.  [In the course of his testimony at Camp Zeist, witness E F] told the Court that the materials and tracking analysis of fragment PT/35b, the sliver of printed circuit board said to have originated from a circuit board contained in one of the 20 MST-13 digital timer instruments supplied by MEBO AG to Libya (the boards for all these timers having been custom-made for MEBO by Thuring AG), were “similar in all respects” to the control samples of MST-13 circuit boards. [E F] consistently used this form of words to describe analyses of items which were identical or of common origin. This statement was false. While the tracking pattern was indeed identical, [E F] was aware that the coating on the circuitry of the control boards was the standard alloy of 70% tin and 30% lead, while the coating on the circuitry of fragment PT/35b (most unusually) lacked the 30% lead content. It is submitted that his statement to the Court was a deliberate falsehood designed to conceal a significant and material difference between the evidential fragment and the control items, and thus constituted both perjury and an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

5.  The Lockerbie investigation, and in particular [police officer G H], knew by 1990 that the coating on the circuitry of fragment PT/35b was composed of pure tin, and that this composition was highly unusual, being described as “by far the most interesting feature” of the fragment by all the experts who were consulted, “without exception”. By early 1992 [G H]  and those in the Crown Office to whom he reported also knew that the metallurgy testing on the control MST-13 circuit boards showed the circuitry on these boards to be coated with the standard 70% tin / 30% lead alloy. [G H] and those in the Crown Office to whom he reported

either failed to inquire with the manufacturer Thuring AG whether they had supplied any MST-13 timer boards with the unusual lead-free coating, or did make such inquiries and failed to disclose the results of these inquiries to the defence. It was discovered by the defence team in 2008 that Thuring AG did not manufacture printed circuit boards with a lead-free coating, and indeed lacked the manufacturing capacity to do so. If [G H] and/or those in the Crown Office to whom he reported failed to make the relevant inquiries with Thuring AG, it is submitted that this omission was grossly negligent. If [G H] and/or those in the Crown Office to whom he reported made such inquiries and failed to disclose the results to the defence, it is submitted that this failure constitutes an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

6.  From our assessment of the ‘SCCRC Statement of Reasons’, relating to its referral of Mr Megrahi’s case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2007, and the ‘Grounds of Appeal 1 and 2' documents prepared by his legal team in furtherance of that appeal, it is clear that a number of questions have been raised in relation to the process which led to the identification of Mr Megrahi by witness Mr Anthony Gauci. These include doubts about the legitimacy of the process by which Mr Gauci’s identification evidence was obtained, assessed and delivered, and what prompted significant failures by the Crown to disclose related material information. From these documents it appears that [police officer I J] and other police officers who were involved in this identification process might well have been aware that a number of the aspects of the process they were following were flawed and did not accord with guidelines extant at the time or with any general principles of fairness to the accused. It is submitted that the omissions and failings referred to in the relevant reports indicate that [I J] and others have important questions to answer in connection with the identification process, and we believe, taken as a whole, that their conduct constitutes an attempt to pervert the course of justice and a breach of section 44 (2) of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 (violation of duty by a constable).

The above numbered complaints simply constitute the basic allegations. Documents containing detailed supporting material have been prepared and will be made available to the investigating authorities as and when requested by them.

You above all will realise the seriousness of these allegations which strike at the very heart of the Lockerbie investigation past and present. Effectively, we are complaining about the actions of Crown Office officials, the prosecution and investigating authorities including the police, and certain other agencies and individuals. Given the controversy surrounding this whole affair we request that you give serious thought to the independence of any investigating authority you appoint. As a group we believe that you should appoint someone outwith Scotland who has no previous direct or indirect association with Lockerbie or its ramifications.

You will be aware of the disquiet we feel about the delay and obfuscation which have surrounded this whole affair since 1988. Nevertheless we understand you will require reasonable time to inquire into these allegations and decide how you wish to proceed. We therefore propose to keep these matters private and confidential for a period of thirty days from the date of this letter to allow you to carry out the necessary enquiries, decide how you wish the matter to be investigated, and respond to us. We thereafter reserve the right to make the above matters public as and when we feel appropriate and reasonable. Furthermore, on the grounds that PE1370 is due for consideration on 25th September, we also reserve the right to inform the Justice Committee of the fact that we have lodged this document with yourself, making reference (in general terms only) to the fact that it contains serious allegations relating to the Lockerbie/Zeist case.

In passing we would also note the recent publicity given to the perceived lack of independence in Scotland between the Lord Advocate and the Scottish Government by Mr Andrew Tickell. (http://lallandspeatworrier.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-unpolitical-snps-pied-lord-advocate.html)

We also share this concern and would hope, for reasons that must be obvious from the foregoing, that your response to this letter will be free from Crown Office influence of any kind.

We thank you for your time and attention in this matter and look forward to an acknowledgment of receipt by return.

[RB: Three additional allegations were added by JfM at a later date. These nine allegations remain under investigation in Police Scotland’s Operation Sandwood.]