[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of The Telegraph. It reads in part:]
The pianist a few feet away played “I Just Called to Say I love You". Men in traditional Qatari white kandouras – gowns – and headdresses sat scattered around the nearby café.
Yet, the man’s distinctive features were until recently one of the best-known faces of the regime of Col Muammar Gaddafi.
Moussa Koussa, the Libyan foreign minister who defected to Britain at the end of March, left for Qatar shortly afterwards to take part in a “Gulf contact group” meeting of countries with an interest in resolving the Libya crisis.
He was expected to return to Britain shortly afterwards, where he was facing calls for his prosecution over accusations ranging from the Lockerbie bombing to supplying arms to the IRA.
Ten weeks later, there is little sign of that at the Four Seasons, causing growing anger among Libyan exiles and others who want him to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court.
“I remain firmly of the view that he should face the ICC,” said Robert Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow whose family are of Libyan-Italian-Jewish ancestry and fled after suffering during pogroms. “You can’t have people like that being given protection without any recourse to justice.”
Mr Koussa was one of Col Gaddafi’s longest serving aides. He first came to attention in Britain as ambassador in 1980, giving an interview announcing that two Libyan exiles in London were to be killed. He was expelled immediately.
He was deputy head of Libyan intelligence at the time of the Lockerbie bombing, and then head, before becoming foreign minister in 2009. The intelligence agency was responsible for tracking down and killing regime opponents outside the country.
When the uprising against Col Gaddafi’s rule began, he was still very much part of the inner circle. He gave angry press conferences in the Rixos Hotel, where journalists have been lodged in Tripoli, to denounce foreign interference. But just a few days later he negotiated safe passage to London with MI6. The British intelligence services had long regarded Mr Koussa as an “asset”.
Nevertheless, his presence in Britain led to demands for legal action. (...)
He eats regularly from the £35 all-you-can-eat buffet, though he is also said to have a liking for the expensive Il Teatro Italian restaurant. Both have views over the hotel’s swimming pools and private beach, and the yacht marina next door.
It is not clear who is paying. He was originally a guest of the Qatari government, but he also had his private assets unfrozen as a reward for defecting. He occasionally relaxes in the lobby, accompanied always by one of a number of men who are clearly intelligence minders – they are dressed in Western style in jeans and T-shirts, and work on iPads.
When The Daily Telegraph approached to request an interview, a minder snapped his fingers, and within seconds a group of kandoura-wearing Qataris on duty in the lobby formed a protective shield.
“I am a little too busy to talk now,” Mr Koussa said. He had previously been reading a newspaper. Mr Koussa’s life of luxury reflects a dilemma in how to treat renegades from the Gaddafi regime.
Whitehall officials privately express fears that other Libyans would be deterred from defecting if Mr Koussa faced charges for his past role.
Yet, many Libyan exiles and the families of Lockerbie victims are outraged to see corrupt members of the former regime freely taking up senior positions with the opposition.
In Mr Koussa’s case, the situation is complicated because of his relationship with MI6. William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said he had not been given immunity from prosecution, yet the Foreign Office said as far as it was concerned Mr Koussa was free to come and go.
Political sources have said that the decision to allow him to leave was made “in the interests of national security”.
Monday, 27 June 2011
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Acquitted Lockerbie bomber could be retried
[This is the headline over the lead story in today's edition of the Maltese newspaper The Independent on Sunday. It reads as follows:]
Just when Malta thought it may have been seeing the infamy attached to it by way of the Lockerbie disaster subsiding, Scottish prosecutors are looking into the prospect of retrying acquitted Lockerbie bomber Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.
The prospect, if realised, would reopen an ugly chapter in recent Maltese history as having been alleged to be the place where the bomb, concealed in a suitcase, was first loaded. The bomb was eventually loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in Christmas 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
But the Scottish authorities appear unwilling to let the matter die a natural death following the acquittal and the subsequent guilty verdict and release of the second accused person, and rightly so seeing that a new legal window has now opened up.
A change in double jeopardy laws now provides the possibility of an accused person to stand trial a second time if compelling new evidence surfaces, and a specialist unit at the Crown Office in Edinburgh is in the process of re-examining the evidence against Mr Fhimah to ascertain the potential strength of such a case.
Mr Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, had been accused of helping Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi place the bomb into the luggage system at Malta International Airport, where it was claimed the bomb’s fateful journey had begun.
Mr Fhimah had been acquitted in the Lockerbie trial at The Hague in 2001 after his defence argued the case against him was nothing more than “inference upon inference upon inference upon inference leading to an inference”.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the co-accused, had been convicted and the rest of his story is by now well known. He was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 just before he was about to appeal his guilty verdict, on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and had only a short time left to live. He is still alive.
But more than merely seeking once again to bring Mr Fhimah to justice, the Crown Office believes that the collapse of Libya’s Gaddafi regime could provide evidence for still further Lockerbie prosecutions.
Scottish prosecutors recently interviewed Libyan defector Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s former foreign minister and intelligence chief, when he was on British soil, and it is believed a number of questions about Mr Fhimah had been raised during the interview.
In an interview with The Times of London, the new Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC, appealed for Koussa’s fellow high-ranking Libyan defector, former justice minister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, to come forward with information on the bombing. Mr Abdul Jalil, who is now the head of the provisional Libyan government in Benghazi, had said in a number of interviews that he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing.
In one interview, he had told Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” he said, but did not describe the proof.
“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.
Mr Mulholland meanwhile told The Times of London in the interview, “I cannot send our investigators into an unsafe place but he [Fhimah] could pick up the phone. [RB: Surely the "he" Mulholland is referring to is Abdel-Jalil.] If he has relevant information on Lockerbie we would be delighted to see it.
“If a meeting can be arranged we would be prepared to see him in another country. The interview with Moussa Koussa was easier to arrange because he was in UK jurisdiction so it was quicker.”
[As I have said before on this blog, there will be no re-trial of Lamin Fhimah or any trial of Colonel Gaddafi for the bombing of Pan Am 103. The Crown Office is perfectly well aware that the evidence simply does not exist to make a conviction a realistic prospect; and that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi on the evidence led at Zeist was a travesty perpetrated by a credulous court which has long since been exposed, by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst many others.]
Just when Malta thought it may have been seeing the infamy attached to it by way of the Lockerbie disaster subsiding, Scottish prosecutors are looking into the prospect of retrying acquitted Lockerbie bomber Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.
The prospect, if realised, would reopen an ugly chapter in recent Maltese history as having been alleged to be the place where the bomb, concealed in a suitcase, was first loaded. The bomb was eventually loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in Christmas 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
But the Scottish authorities appear unwilling to let the matter die a natural death following the acquittal and the subsequent guilty verdict and release of the second accused person, and rightly so seeing that a new legal window has now opened up.
A change in double jeopardy laws now provides the possibility of an accused person to stand trial a second time if compelling new evidence surfaces, and a specialist unit at the Crown Office in Edinburgh is in the process of re-examining the evidence against Mr Fhimah to ascertain the potential strength of such a case.
Mr Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, had been accused of helping Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi place the bomb into the luggage system at Malta International Airport, where it was claimed the bomb’s fateful journey had begun.
Mr Fhimah had been acquitted in the Lockerbie trial at The Hague in 2001 after his defence argued the case against him was nothing more than “inference upon inference upon inference upon inference leading to an inference”.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the co-accused, had been convicted and the rest of his story is by now well known. He was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 just before he was about to appeal his guilty verdict, on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and had only a short time left to live. He is still alive.
But more than merely seeking once again to bring Mr Fhimah to justice, the Crown Office believes that the collapse of Libya’s Gaddafi regime could provide evidence for still further Lockerbie prosecutions.
Scottish prosecutors recently interviewed Libyan defector Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s former foreign minister and intelligence chief, when he was on British soil, and it is believed a number of questions about Mr Fhimah had been raised during the interview.
In an interview with The Times of London, the new Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC, appealed for Koussa’s fellow high-ranking Libyan defector, former justice minister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, to come forward with information on the bombing. Mr Abdul Jalil, who is now the head of the provisional Libyan government in Benghazi, had said in a number of interviews that he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing.
In one interview, he had told Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” he said, but did not describe the proof.
“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.
Mr Mulholland meanwhile told The Times of London in the interview, “I cannot send our investigators into an unsafe place but he [Fhimah] could pick up the phone. [RB: Surely the "he" Mulholland is referring to is Abdel-Jalil.] If he has relevant information on Lockerbie we would be delighted to see it.
“If a meeting can be arranged we would be prepared to see him in another country. The interview with Moussa Koussa was easier to arrange because he was in UK jurisdiction so it was quicker.”
[As I have said before on this blog, there will be no re-trial of Lamin Fhimah or any trial of Colonel Gaddafi for the bombing of Pan Am 103. The Crown Office is perfectly well aware that the evidence simply does not exist to make a conviction a realistic prospect; and that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi on the evidence led at Zeist was a travesty perpetrated by a credulous court which has long since been exposed, by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst many others.]
Justice for Megrahi petition further considered
The new Public Petitions Committee of the Scottish Parliament meets on Tuesday, 28 June at 10.00am in Committee Room 2. Amongst the items on the agenda is the Justice for Megrahi petition seeking an independent inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The committee clerk's note on the agenda item reads as follows:
Note by the Clerk
PE1370 – lodged November 2010
Petition by Dr Jim Swire, Professor Robert Black QC, Mr Robert Forrester, Father Patrick Keegans and Mr Iain McKie on behalf of ‘Justice for Megrahi’ calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.
Purpose
1. The Committee is invited to agree what action it wishes to take on this petition. This petition has been carried over from the previous session. At the meeting on 1 March 2011, the previous PPC discussed the petition and agreed to keep it open in order to let the incoming committee decide what it wishes to do. The option of passing it on to the Justice Committee was canvassed but given the proximity to dissolution was not acted upon.
Background
2. The previous PPC asked the then Scottish Government whether it would open an independent inquiry. By letter of 7 January 2011, the then Scottish Government responded, saying:
“The Government does not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr AlMegrahi. He was tried and convicted by a Scottish court before three judges and his appeal against conviction, heard by a panel of five judges, was unsuccessful. A second appeal, following a referral from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, was abandoned by Mr Al-Megrahi. The conduct of his defence during his trial and the appeals, including his decision not to give evidence at trial and the decision to abandon the second appeal, was entirely a matter for Mr Al-Megrahi and his legal advisors. The Government’s view is that the petition is inviting the Scottish Government to do something which falls properly to the criminal justice system i.e. inquire into whether a miscarriage of justice has taken place. The criminal justice system already provides a mechanism for that to happen. The fact that Mr Al-Megrahi chose to abandon his second appeal rather than pursue it is entirely a matter for him and it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to institute an inquiry as a result.”
In response to the question who would have the power to undertake an inquiry in the terms proposed in the petition, the Scottish Government responded in the same letter:
“The Inquiries Act 2005 provides that, to the extent that the matters dealt with are devolved, and criminal justice is devolved, the Scottish Government would have the power to conduct an inquiry. However, the wide ranging and international nature of the issues involved (even if the inquiry is confined to the trial and does not concern itself with wider matters) means that there is every likelihood of issues arising which are not devolved, which would require either a joint inquiry with or a separate inquiry by the UK government. Separately, the Scottish Government intends to bring forward legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish a statement of reasons in cases such as Mr Al-Megrahi's where an appeal is abandoned, subject of course to legal restrictions applying to the SCCRC such as data protection, the convention rights of individuals and international obligations attaching to information provided by foreign authorities.”
3. The previous Committee received written evidence from the following—
Scottish Government letter of 7 January 2011
Petitioner letter of 13 January 2011
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission letter of 7 February 2011
Scottish Government letter of 3 February 2011
Lord Advocate letter of 9 February 2011
Petitioner letter of 16 February 2011
4. More recently, the Petitioner submitted the following further evidence (enclosed with these papers):
• PE1370/G: Petitioner letter of 17 June 2001
• A copy of an article by Stephen Raeburn in The Independent Law Journal [The Firm]
Action
5. The Committee is invited to consider what action it wishes to take; there are three possible options:
(1) To continue the petition in order to seek an update from the Scottish Government on its plans for legislation regarding the SCCRC;
(2) To refer the petition on to another Committee (the Justice Committee) under Rule 15.6.2; or
(3) To close the petition under Rule 15.7. If the Committee decides to close the petition it must state publicly its reasons for doing so. On a strict reading of the petition the Parliament has done what was asked to do and the Scottish Government has responded to say that it does not intend to open an independent inquiry.
Note by the Clerk
PE1370 – lodged November 2010
Petition by Dr Jim Swire, Professor Robert Black QC, Mr Robert Forrester, Father Patrick Keegans and Mr Iain McKie on behalf of ‘Justice for Megrahi’ calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.
Purpose
1. The Committee is invited to agree what action it wishes to take on this petition. This petition has been carried over from the previous session. At the meeting on 1 March 2011, the previous PPC discussed the petition and agreed to keep it open in order to let the incoming committee decide what it wishes to do. The option of passing it on to the Justice Committee was canvassed but given the proximity to dissolution was not acted upon.
Background
2. The previous PPC asked the then Scottish Government whether it would open an independent inquiry. By letter of 7 January 2011, the then Scottish Government responded, saying:
“The Government does not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr AlMegrahi. He was tried and convicted by a Scottish court before three judges and his appeal against conviction, heard by a panel of five judges, was unsuccessful. A second appeal, following a referral from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, was abandoned by Mr Al-Megrahi. The conduct of his defence during his trial and the appeals, including his decision not to give evidence at trial and the decision to abandon the second appeal, was entirely a matter for Mr Al-Megrahi and his legal advisors. The Government’s view is that the petition is inviting the Scottish Government to do something which falls properly to the criminal justice system i.e. inquire into whether a miscarriage of justice has taken place. The criminal justice system already provides a mechanism for that to happen. The fact that Mr Al-Megrahi chose to abandon his second appeal rather than pursue it is entirely a matter for him and it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to institute an inquiry as a result.”
In response to the question who would have the power to undertake an inquiry in the terms proposed in the petition, the Scottish Government responded in the same letter:
“The Inquiries Act 2005 provides that, to the extent that the matters dealt with are devolved, and criminal justice is devolved, the Scottish Government would have the power to conduct an inquiry. However, the wide ranging and international nature of the issues involved (even if the inquiry is confined to the trial and does not concern itself with wider matters) means that there is every likelihood of issues arising which are not devolved, which would require either a joint inquiry with or a separate inquiry by the UK government. Separately, the Scottish Government intends to bring forward legislation to allow the SCCRC to publish a statement of reasons in cases such as Mr Al-Megrahi's where an appeal is abandoned, subject of course to legal restrictions applying to the SCCRC such as data protection, the convention rights of individuals and international obligations attaching to information provided by foreign authorities.”
3. The previous Committee received written evidence from the following—
Scottish Government letter of 7 January 2011
Petitioner letter of 13 January 2011
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission letter of 7 February 2011
Scottish Government letter of 3 February 2011
Lord Advocate letter of 9 February 2011
Petitioner letter of 16 February 2011
4. More recently, the Petitioner submitted the following further evidence (enclosed with these papers):
• PE1370/G: Petitioner letter of 17 June 2001
• A copy of an article by Stephen Raeburn in The Independent Law Journal [The Firm]
Action
5. The Committee is invited to consider what action it wishes to take; there are three possible options:
(1) To continue the petition in order to seek an update from the Scottish Government on its plans for legislation regarding the SCCRC;
(2) To refer the petition on to another Committee (the Justice Committee) under Rule 15.6.2; or
(3) To close the petition under Rule 15.7. If the Committee decides to close the petition it must state publicly its reasons for doing so. On a strict reading of the petition the Parliament has done what was asked to do and the Scottish Government has responded to say that it does not intend to open an independent inquiry.
Saturday, 25 June 2011
SCCRC Megrahi report discussed on Newsdrive
Steven Raeburn, editor of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm, was interviewed yesterday on BBC Radio Scotland's Newsdrive programme about the reasons for the non-disclosure of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's report on the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. The interview can be heard here, 45 minutes into the programme.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Moolah For Memories…
[This is the heading over a post published today on bensix's blog Back Towards The Locus. It reads as follows (full references and links in the original, but omitted here):]
Richard Marquise, the FBI investigator into the Pan Am bombing, is, as far as I’m aware, the only public figure who’s tried to defend the prosecution. It’s interesting, then, that he does it rather badly.
Anyway, in an interview with OhmyNews, back in 2009, Marquise addressed the evidence that crucial (if unconvincing) witness Tony Gauci was rewarded for his testimony in the form of loadsamoney…
"I can assure you that no witnesses were ever offered any money by anyone…"
When he was interviewed for Gideon Levy’s documentary Lockerbie Revisited Marquise seems to have been more equivocal…
"Richard Marquise states categorically that no money was paid to any of the witnesses before the trial. In relation to witness Tony Gauci, Marquise refuses to say whether any money was paid out after the trial."
After the Al Jazeera documentary – which provided a sceptical view of the investigation – Marquise popped up in the comments at Robert Black’s blog and gave an even weirder response…
"I believe that I and any of my Scottish colleagues could well have testified in Zeist that no witness asked for, was promised or paid money in exchange for saying anything anything."
Let’s all play a game where we answer the relevant question! Was money offered? Given? It seems so…
"Presented with documents showing that Scottish police officers and FBI agents had discussed as early as September 1989, ‘an offer of unlimited money to Tony Gauci, with $10,000 being available immediately’, Lord Fraser said: “I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it.”
"The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission conducted its own investigation into the case, which resulted in it being referred back for a second appeal – abandoned when Megrahi was freed. Unlike the trial court, it required police officers to produce notebooks and diaries.
"Harry Bell’s diary reveals that reward money was discussed from September 1989 onwards, within days of Gauci being traced.The Commission also reported that Gauci’s brother, Paul, who made important witness statements, ‘had a clear desire to gain financial benefit’, and that ‘the US authorities offered to make substantial payments to Tony Gauci at an early stage’."
Witness payments have typically been an issue when the media has offered witnesses moolah for their tales. It’s so controversial that the practice was nearly banned, and is subject to a host of regulations. (One of them, which might interest Lord Fraser, is that any payment or offer of payment must be disclosed to the prosecution and defence.) They’re concerned that the idea of cash might sway the witnesses’ judgements.
Hmm.
Seems like Mr Marquise has some ‘splaining to do.
Richard Marquise, the FBI investigator into the Pan Am bombing, is, as far as I’m aware, the only public figure who’s tried to defend the prosecution. It’s interesting, then, that he does it rather badly.
Anyway, in an interview with OhmyNews, back in 2009, Marquise addressed the evidence that crucial (if unconvincing) witness Tony Gauci was rewarded for his testimony in the form of loadsamoney…
"I can assure you that no witnesses were ever offered any money by anyone…"
When he was interviewed for Gideon Levy’s documentary Lockerbie Revisited Marquise seems to have been more equivocal…
"Richard Marquise states categorically that no money was paid to any of the witnesses before the trial. In relation to witness Tony Gauci, Marquise refuses to say whether any money was paid out after the trial."
After the Al Jazeera documentary – which provided a sceptical view of the investigation – Marquise popped up in the comments at Robert Black’s blog and gave an even weirder response…
"I believe that I and any of my Scottish colleagues could well have testified in Zeist that no witness asked for, was promised or paid money in exchange for saying anything anything."
Let’s all play a game where we answer the relevant question! Was money offered? Given? It seems so…
"Presented with documents showing that Scottish police officers and FBI agents had discussed as early as September 1989, ‘an offer of unlimited money to Tony Gauci, with $10,000 being available immediately’, Lord Fraser said: “I have to accept that it happened. It shouldn’t have and I was unaware of it.”
"The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission conducted its own investigation into the case, which resulted in it being referred back for a second appeal – abandoned when Megrahi was freed. Unlike the trial court, it required police officers to produce notebooks and diaries.
"Harry Bell’s diary reveals that reward money was discussed from September 1989 onwards, within days of Gauci being traced.The Commission also reported that Gauci’s brother, Paul, who made important witness statements, ‘had a clear desire to gain financial benefit’, and that ‘the US authorities offered to make substantial payments to Tony Gauci at an early stage’."
Witness payments have typically been an issue when the media has offered witnesses moolah for their tales. It’s so controversial that the practice was nearly banned, and is subject to a host of regulations. (One of them, which might interest Lord Fraser, is that any payment or offer of payment must be disclosed to the prosecution and defence.) They’re concerned that the idea of cash might sway the witnesses’ judgements.
Hmm.
Seems like Mr Marquise has some ‘splaining to do.
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Chicken and egg as SCCRC state that no Pan Am 103 documents can be released without “unqualified” consent of all
[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. It reads as follows:]
The full report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which concluded that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi will not be published, the Commission says, because the parties who gave information to it have not all given “unqualified” consent.
However, the only qualification that the board said applied [in the case of Abdelbaset Megrahi himself] was that the other parties had to each consent too.
The First Minister confirmed that the Government would introduce primary legislation to allow the report to be published. The current requirement that the consent of all parties be obtained before publication was however introduced under secondary delegated legislation only.
Campaigners have argued that the restriction could be removed swiftly and easily without recourse to a complex primary legislative process.
In a Freedom of Information request from campaigner William Beck, the Commission was asked which of the named parties who provided information to the Commission had provided their consent, and which had not.
A senior legal officer at the SCCRC said:
“The Commission wrote to a number of the main parties who were responsible, either directly or indirectly, for providing information to the Commission, asking them if they were prepared to provide their consent, in writing, to the disclosure of the information they provided which was contained within the statement of reasons it issued in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.
“Those parties were the Crown Office, Dumfries and Galloway Police, the Foreign Office, Mr Megrahi and his legal representatives, and Mr Fhimah and his legal representatives. None of those parties gave their unqualified consent to the disclosure of the information.
“Mr Megrahi did not give his unqualified consent to the disclosure of the information he provided which was contained within the statement of reasons the Commission issued in his case.”
The Commissioner referred to a statement placed on the Megrahi: My Story website, which said that in a meeting on April 12th 2010, Megrahi ‘was happy for the documents to be released, providing all the official bodies that provided documents to the Commission agreed to the release of all of those documents.’
“In other words, he consented to the disclosure of all information only if others do so too,” the Commissioner concluded.
No timeframe has been provided from the First Minister for the introduction of the primary legislation he referred to.
[So we know what the only qualification was that Mr Megrahi attached to his consent. It would be interesting to discover what the qualifications were that the other persons and bodies attached. An expansion and clarification by the SCCRC to The Firm of Megrahi's attitude towards disclosure can be read here.]
The full report of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which concluded that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi will not be published, the Commission says, because the parties who gave information to it have not all given “unqualified” consent.
However, the only qualification that the board said applied [in the case of Abdelbaset Megrahi himself] was that the other parties had to each consent too.
The First Minister confirmed that the Government would introduce primary legislation to allow the report to be published. The current requirement that the consent of all parties be obtained before publication was however introduced under secondary delegated legislation only.
Campaigners have argued that the restriction could be removed swiftly and easily without recourse to a complex primary legislative process.
In a Freedom of Information request from campaigner William Beck, the Commission was asked which of the named parties who provided information to the Commission had provided their consent, and which had not.
A senior legal officer at the SCCRC said:
“The Commission wrote to a number of the main parties who were responsible, either directly or indirectly, for providing information to the Commission, asking them if they were prepared to provide their consent, in writing, to the disclosure of the information they provided which was contained within the statement of reasons it issued in the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.
“Those parties were the Crown Office, Dumfries and Galloway Police, the Foreign Office, Mr Megrahi and his legal representatives, and Mr Fhimah and his legal representatives. None of those parties gave their unqualified consent to the disclosure of the information.
“Mr Megrahi did not give his unqualified consent to the disclosure of the information he provided which was contained within the statement of reasons the Commission issued in his case.”
The Commissioner referred to a statement placed on the Megrahi: My Story website, which said that in a meeting on April 12th 2010, Megrahi ‘was happy for the documents to be released, providing all the official bodies that provided documents to the Commission agreed to the release of all of those documents.’
“In other words, he consented to the disclosure of all information only if others do so too,” the Commissioner concluded.
No timeframe has been provided from the First Minister for the introduction of the primary legislation he referred to.
[So we know what the only qualification was that Mr Megrahi attached to his consent. It would be interesting to discover what the qualifications were that the other persons and bodies attached. An expansion and clarification by the SCCRC to The Firm of Megrahi's attitude towards disclosure can be read here.]
Megrahi conviction inquiry "can of worms"
[What follows is taken from an article entitled Ideology trumps sovereignty? by Stuart Winton published yesterday on the Better Nation website.]
But the stink over the Supreme Court itself reveals a pro-independence split between the more obvious rights-oriented psyche which supports the court’s intervention on the human rights convention’s right to a fair trial, as opposed to the undercurrent of a more illiberal stance from Mr Salmond and Mr MacAskill.
This is perhaps neatly encapsulated in a Scotsman article by Nationalist historian Michael Fry, who arguably displays little appreciation of the impact of ECHR jurisprudence on Scots law irrespective of the Supreme Court aspect – and instead highlights the dangers of British/English law to Scottish legal independence – but who in any case seems to demonstrates a distinctly anti-rights ethos:
“Till a year or two ago, there were no appeals in criminal proceedings beyond the High Court in Edinburgh. Today there is the possibility of or even the invitation to one for cases somehow involving human rights, and such an appeal will go to the Supreme Court in London. So a back door has been left ajar that could be hard to push to: there may be many cases in which clever and unscrupulous Scots defence lawyers will look for, indeed delight in finding, some aspect of human rights. The vaunted independence of the Scottish judiciary could in this area face the fatal risk of absorption into a British system of justice. And here, as in other areas, British may mean in reality English.”
By the same token, it may also be the case that the first minister and justice secretary are more concerned about the reputation of Scotland’s justice system than justice per se, thus their reaction to the Fraser and Cadder cases are perhaps less about the Supreme Court and the procedural and sovereignty aspects than how its decisions are perceived to reflect badly on the efficacy of an independent Scottish nation. Hence this all may represent a continuation of the misgivings regarding the Lockerbie bomber’s conviction, with al-Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds reflecting more positively on the SNP’s desired perception of Scotland than the can of worms that an inquiry into the whole affair could represent, as dissenting Nationalist voices demonstrate.
But the stink over the Supreme Court itself reveals a pro-independence split between the more obvious rights-oriented psyche which supports the court’s intervention on the human rights convention’s right to a fair trial, as opposed to the undercurrent of a more illiberal stance from Mr Salmond and Mr MacAskill.
This is perhaps neatly encapsulated in a Scotsman article by Nationalist historian Michael Fry, who arguably displays little appreciation of the impact of ECHR jurisprudence on Scots law irrespective of the Supreme Court aspect – and instead highlights the dangers of British/English law to Scottish legal independence – but who in any case seems to demonstrates a distinctly anti-rights ethos:
“Till a year or two ago, there were no appeals in criminal proceedings beyond the High Court in Edinburgh. Today there is the possibility of or even the invitation to one for cases somehow involving human rights, and such an appeal will go to the Supreme Court in London. So a back door has been left ajar that could be hard to push to: there may be many cases in which clever and unscrupulous Scots defence lawyers will look for, indeed delight in finding, some aspect of human rights. The vaunted independence of the Scottish judiciary could in this area face the fatal risk of absorption into a British system of justice. And here, as in other areas, British may mean in reality English.”
By the same token, it may also be the case that the first minister and justice secretary are more concerned about the reputation of Scotland’s justice system than justice per se, thus their reaction to the Fraser and Cadder cases are perhaps less about the Supreme Court and the procedural and sovereignty aspects than how its decisions are perceived to reflect badly on the efficacy of an independent Scottish nation. Hence this all may represent a continuation of the misgivings regarding the Lockerbie bomber’s conviction, with al-Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds reflecting more positively on the SNP’s desired perception of Scotland than the can of worms that an inquiry into the whole affair could represent, as dissenting Nationalist voices demonstrate.
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
A legal fable
This is the title of an article just published on the website of the Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. Though the article is not on the face of it about Lockerbie, the moral of the story has everything to do with the sort of prosecutorial attitude that resulted in the shocking conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Some Gaddafi regime Lockerbie myths
[What follows is an excerpt from a long report published yesterday on the Libyan (Gaddafi regime supporting) Mathaba news agency website. It is instructive to see the Libyan media peddling myths about Lockerbie that are just as fanciful as those peddled by the Western media (though, of course, very different).]
During the 1990's when Libya was unjustly subjected to a decade of sanctions and no-fly zone by the same colonial powers and the USA, it was African countries that broke the deadlock by refusing to recognise the UN resolutions because those who sponsored them, the usual culprits, had not taken up any initiatives to resolve the issues.
By flying to Libya in violation of the British-American UNSC resolutions, a long-standing plan of Nelson Mandela and Muammar Qaddafi to allow the trial of two Libyans to take place at The Hague in Holland, was finally accepted by the British and Americans, who attempted to pass it off as their own plan.
The Americans paid a Libyan $4 million in order to give false testimony which led to the conviction of one and the release of the other accused, even though both had been charged on the same charges and evidence, and lawyers around the world were stunned. The accused remained in jail for decades, after being transferred to Scotland, and released to die, without compensation.
The initial judges at what was called the "Lockerbie Trial" had resigned ahead of the start of the trial, because of "political pressure exerted upon them to reach a guilty verdict even before the trial had begun", and the trial only started after judges who were willing to go along with the promise to reach a guilty verdict, had been found.
Libya had paid billions of dollars to the families of the victims of the Israeli attack against Pan Am 103, which occurred because of a bomb placed in the skin of the aircraft some weeks earlier with a timer, during a major maintenance overhaul of the Boeing 747 in New York.
As the airliner had been delayed, it blew up over Lockerbie, instead of, as planned, over the Atlantic Ocean where wreckage would not have been found. All VIP, including racist Apartheid South Africa's senior official, various senior American officials, and other VIP's had been taken off the plane before it took off, and mainly students who had been on standby, waiting at the airport to return home to the US for Christmas, took up the seats.
Libya in a deal reached with the US and Britain in order to have the unjust sanctions lifted, gave a statement that "Libya claims responsibility for the actions of its officials", but not at all in reference to any terrorism nor Lockerbie, so that the British and American media could claim that Libya had "claimed responsibility" but adding "for Lockerbie."
To this day many western media, who have not followed the Lockerbie Trial nor developments since, nor bothered to check the facts of the historical record on what statements had been given, continue to wrongly attribute the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Libya, instead of to Israel's MOSSAD.
As the air craft had not meant to be downed over land but far out to sea, within hours of the timer-bomb exploding, the CIA including with helicopters, were on the scene in Scotland, removing evidence, as witnessed by Scottish police and British explosives experts. They could not have arrived so fast, had they not already realised with the delay of take-off, that the plane may crash on land rather than out to sea. The CIA, MOSSAD and Britain's SIS (MI6) work closely together.
During the Lockerbie Trial there was uproar when it was found that the person responsible for briefing the international media during the trial, was exposed as being a senior MI6 officer.
[For the first time in two weeks, the blog yesterday had a visit from within Libya.]
During the 1990's when Libya was unjustly subjected to a decade of sanctions and no-fly zone by the same colonial powers and the USA, it was African countries that broke the deadlock by refusing to recognise the UN resolutions because those who sponsored them, the usual culprits, had not taken up any initiatives to resolve the issues.
By flying to Libya in violation of the British-American UNSC resolutions, a long-standing plan of Nelson Mandela and Muammar Qaddafi to allow the trial of two Libyans to take place at The Hague in Holland, was finally accepted by the British and Americans, who attempted to pass it off as their own plan.
The Americans paid a Libyan $4 million in order to give false testimony which led to the conviction of one and the release of the other accused, even though both had been charged on the same charges and evidence, and lawyers around the world were stunned. The accused remained in jail for decades, after being transferred to Scotland, and released to die, without compensation.
The initial judges at what was called the "Lockerbie Trial" had resigned ahead of the start of the trial, because of "political pressure exerted upon them to reach a guilty verdict even before the trial had begun", and the trial only started after judges who were willing to go along with the promise to reach a guilty verdict, had been found.
Libya had paid billions of dollars to the families of the victims of the Israeli attack against Pan Am 103, which occurred because of a bomb placed in the skin of the aircraft some weeks earlier with a timer, during a major maintenance overhaul of the Boeing 747 in New York.
As the airliner had been delayed, it blew up over Lockerbie, instead of, as planned, over the Atlantic Ocean where wreckage would not have been found. All VIP, including racist Apartheid South Africa's senior official, various senior American officials, and other VIP's had been taken off the plane before it took off, and mainly students who had been on standby, waiting at the airport to return home to the US for Christmas, took up the seats.
Libya in a deal reached with the US and Britain in order to have the unjust sanctions lifted, gave a statement that "Libya claims responsibility for the actions of its officials", but not at all in reference to any terrorism nor Lockerbie, so that the British and American media could claim that Libya had "claimed responsibility" but adding "for Lockerbie."
To this day many western media, who have not followed the Lockerbie Trial nor developments since, nor bothered to check the facts of the historical record on what statements had been given, continue to wrongly attribute the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Libya, instead of to Israel's MOSSAD.
As the air craft had not meant to be downed over land but far out to sea, within hours of the timer-bomb exploding, the CIA including with helicopters, were on the scene in Scotland, removing evidence, as witnessed by Scottish police and British explosives experts. They could not have arrived so fast, had they not already realised with the delay of take-off, that the plane may crash on land rather than out to sea. The CIA, MOSSAD and Britain's SIS (MI6) work closely together.
During the Lockerbie Trial there was uproar when it was found that the person responsible for briefing the international media during the trial, was exposed as being a senior MI6 officer.
[For the first time in two weeks, the blog yesterday had a visit from within Libya.]
Monday, 20 June 2011
Ex Lord Advocate challenged over Pan Am 103 bribery
[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. It reads as follows:]
The former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser of Carmyllie has been challenged by Dr Jim Swire to explain his position after he told an Al Jazeera documentary film crew that he accepted a key witness in the Pan Am 103 trial was bribed by Scottish Police.
Fraser, who was Lord Advocate at the time proceedings were raised against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and acquitted co-accused Lhamin Khalifa Fhimah, acknowledged that Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci appeared to have been offered financial inducements for his testimony, which ultimately placed Megrahi in Malta, purchasing clothes linked to an explosive device.
Dr Swire said he had watched the documentary, which disclosed the revelations contained in police diaries, in "astonishment", and said that it added to "defects evident in the trial itself, which indicate a dire need for reappraisal of the trial verdict."
"The Al Jazeera programme used material from the diary of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell, who had performed a key role in the Scottish police inquiries in Malta. The documentary also highlighted the astonishing provision of 'all expenses paid' holidays in Scotland for the shopkeeper, before he gave his evidence," Swire said.
"During this documentary Lord Peter Fraser, who was Lord Advocate at the relevant times, explained that he was unaware of this offer of money to this key witness, at the time of the trial, but now that it seemed to have been shown to have been the case, he did not believe that the bribe, for such it surely was, had affected Gauci's evidence given under oath in court.
"It would appear to a layman that a bribed witness's evidence should be of little value in a criminal court where 'reasonable doubt' has to be excluded.
"Perhaps initially Lord Fraser would care to explain the position he took 'on camera'," Swire concluded.
Lord Fraser has not made any comment following the broadcast.
The Parliament's petitions committee will hear the fourth presentation from the Justice for Megrahi committee of their application for a full inquiry into the debacle on 28 June.
Swire's letter can be read in full, here.
The former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser of Carmyllie has been challenged by Dr Jim Swire to explain his position after he told an Al Jazeera documentary film crew that he accepted a key witness in the Pan Am 103 trial was bribed by Scottish Police.
Fraser, who was Lord Advocate at the time proceedings were raised against Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and acquitted co-accused Lhamin Khalifa Fhimah, acknowledged that Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci appeared to have been offered financial inducements for his testimony, which ultimately placed Megrahi in Malta, purchasing clothes linked to an explosive device.
Dr Swire said he had watched the documentary, which disclosed the revelations contained in police diaries, in "astonishment", and said that it added to "defects evident in the trial itself, which indicate a dire need for reappraisal of the trial verdict."
"The Al Jazeera programme used material from the diary of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell, who had performed a key role in the Scottish police inquiries in Malta. The documentary also highlighted the astonishing provision of 'all expenses paid' holidays in Scotland for the shopkeeper, before he gave his evidence," Swire said.
"During this documentary Lord Peter Fraser, who was Lord Advocate at the relevant times, explained that he was unaware of this offer of money to this key witness, at the time of the trial, but now that it seemed to have been shown to have been the case, he did not believe that the bribe, for such it surely was, had affected Gauci's evidence given under oath in court.
"It would appear to a layman that a bribed witness's evidence should be of little value in a criminal court where 'reasonable doubt' has to be excluded.
"Perhaps initially Lord Fraser would care to explain the position he took 'on camera'," Swire concluded.
Lord Fraser has not made any comment following the broadcast.
The Parliament's petitions committee will hear the fourth presentation from the Justice for Megrahi committee of their application for a full inquiry into the debacle on 28 June.
Swire's letter can be read in full, here.
As Megrahi passes 600-day landmark, was he guilty?
[This is the headline over an article published today on The First Post website. It reads in part:]
The only man ever convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, passes an extraordinary landmark today: assuming he has not been killed by a Nato missile, then he has now survived 600 days beyond the time limit he was given by medical experts in 2009.
A team of doctors who visited him in Greenock prison on July 28, 2009 gave him three months to live because of his worsening prostate cancer. Based on that prognosis, the Scottish government agreed to free him on compassionate grounds and sent him home to Tripoli so that he might die in the bosom of his family. (...)
Families on both sides of the Atlantic who lost loved ones when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in December 1988 were furious that a man found guilty of such a monumental crime should be set free, however ill he might have been. [RB: I saw no sign of such fury from UK relatives of Pan Am 103 victims.]
The fact that he has conspicuously not died from his cancer - and that he was apparently not as ill as the medics believed - has only compounded their fury.
It was hardly surprising that in March this year President Obama announced that if Gaddafi is ousted from power, it will be a condition of the United States working with the Benghazi-based rebels that they find and hand over Megrahi.
Intriguingly, Obama did not say the White House wanted to throw Megrahi back into a prison cell based on his conviction at the 2000-01 trial in the Netherlands. Instead, Obama wants a re-trial under American law. And such a re-trial could exonerate Megrahi.
There is little doubt as the 600 days landmark is reached - and there'll be another 'anniversary' in a few weeks' time when it will be two years since Megrahi was flown home - that the long-rumbling argument that Megrahi was never guilty of the Lockerbie bombing is gaining ground. (...)
Those seeking the truth are now hoping for a legal breakthrough as a result of Scotland scrapping the double jeopardy law which for 800 years prevented a person standing trial twice for the same crime.
Scotland's recently appointed chief prosecutor, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, has set up a double-jeopardy unit to look at recent failed prosecutions. And according to a report last week by the Scotsman, top of his list of potential re-trials is that of Lamin Khalifa Fhimah.
Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines, was Megrahi's co-defendant in the 2000-2001 trial, held under Scots law at Camp Zeist, a disused US airbase in the Netherlands. While Megrahi was convicted of murder, Fhimah was acquitted. Gaddafi duly greeted Fhimah on his return to Tripoli in 2001, just as he would welcome Megrahi home eight years later.
According to The Scotsman, Frank Mulholland is examining new evidence against Fhimah. He has also said he would be willing to launch a prosecution against Gaddafi should he be captured alive. And he is eager to speak to Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the former Libyan justice minister who claimed in February to have proof linking Gaddafi to Lockerbie.
Although some victims' families are not sure whether Fhimah was any more guilty than Megrahi, they welcome the chance to throw new light on what they see as an unsatisfactory outcome of the Camp Zeist trial.
Jean Berkley, co-ordinator of the UK Families Flight 103 group, who lost her son in the Lockerbie bombing, told the Scotsman: "We've always been told the investigation remains open, but it never occurred to us they would be coming back for Fhimah.
"Anything that sheds any light we would be interested in. Our concern has been that we were unconvinced by the trial or that the evidence was sufficient to find Megrahi guilty."
A Cumbrian priest, the Rev John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter at Lockerbie, said: "Having sat through the trial, the first appeal and the second appeal - until it was aborted - I am 95 per cent certain that Megrahi was innocent. There was even less evidence against Fhimah.
"However, the more they look at it, the more possibility they will see that there's something very, very wrong here." [RB: John Mosey, a Protestant pastor, will, I think, be greatly amused to be described as a "priest".]
The only man ever convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, passes an extraordinary landmark today: assuming he has not been killed by a Nato missile, then he has now survived 600 days beyond the time limit he was given by medical experts in 2009.
A team of doctors who visited him in Greenock prison on July 28, 2009 gave him three months to live because of his worsening prostate cancer. Based on that prognosis, the Scottish government agreed to free him on compassionate grounds and sent him home to Tripoli so that he might die in the bosom of his family. (...)
Families on both sides of the Atlantic who lost loved ones when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie in December 1988 were furious that a man found guilty of such a monumental crime should be set free, however ill he might have been. [RB: I saw no sign of such fury from UK relatives of Pan Am 103 victims.]
The fact that he has conspicuously not died from his cancer - and that he was apparently not as ill as the medics believed - has only compounded their fury.
It was hardly surprising that in March this year President Obama announced that if Gaddafi is ousted from power, it will be a condition of the United States working with the Benghazi-based rebels that they find and hand over Megrahi.
Intriguingly, Obama did not say the White House wanted to throw Megrahi back into a prison cell based on his conviction at the 2000-01 trial in the Netherlands. Instead, Obama wants a re-trial under American law. And such a re-trial could exonerate Megrahi.
There is little doubt as the 600 days landmark is reached - and there'll be another 'anniversary' in a few weeks' time when it will be two years since Megrahi was flown home - that the long-rumbling argument that Megrahi was never guilty of the Lockerbie bombing is gaining ground. (...)
Those seeking the truth are now hoping for a legal breakthrough as a result of Scotland scrapping the double jeopardy law which for 800 years prevented a person standing trial twice for the same crime.
Scotland's recently appointed chief prosecutor, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, has set up a double-jeopardy unit to look at recent failed prosecutions. And according to a report last week by the Scotsman, top of his list of potential re-trials is that of Lamin Khalifa Fhimah.
Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines, was Megrahi's co-defendant in the 2000-2001 trial, held under Scots law at Camp Zeist, a disused US airbase in the Netherlands. While Megrahi was convicted of murder, Fhimah was acquitted. Gaddafi duly greeted Fhimah on his return to Tripoli in 2001, just as he would welcome Megrahi home eight years later.
According to The Scotsman, Frank Mulholland is examining new evidence against Fhimah. He has also said he would be willing to launch a prosecution against Gaddafi should he be captured alive. And he is eager to speak to Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the former Libyan justice minister who claimed in February to have proof linking Gaddafi to Lockerbie.
Although some victims' families are not sure whether Fhimah was any more guilty than Megrahi, they welcome the chance to throw new light on what they see as an unsatisfactory outcome of the Camp Zeist trial.
Jean Berkley, co-ordinator of the UK Families Flight 103 group, who lost her son in the Lockerbie bombing, told the Scotsman: "We've always been told the investigation remains open, but it never occurred to us they would be coming back for Fhimah.
"Anything that sheds any light we would be interested in. Our concern has been that we were unconvinced by the trial or that the evidence was sufficient to find Megrahi guilty."
A Cumbrian priest, the Rev John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter at Lockerbie, said: "Having sat through the trial, the first appeal and the second appeal - until it was aborted - I am 95 per cent certain that Megrahi was innocent. There was even less evidence against Fhimah.
"However, the more they look at it, the more possibility they will see that there's something very, very wrong here." [RB: John Mosey, a Protestant pastor, will, I think, be greatly amused to be described as a "priest".]
Sunday, 19 June 2011
The photographic identification of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
This is the title of a paper prepared by Dr Morag Kerr which can be accessed here. It demonstrates, with illustrations, just how suspect was the alleged identification of Abdelbaset Megrahi as the purchaser from Mary’s House in Sliema, Malta, of the items which were in the suitcase with the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Another lone gunman debunked: Conspiracy and cover-up in Lockerbie
[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the Bread & Circuses website, vol 3 issue 11. It reads in part:]
In Libya, there were mass celebrations to honor the homecoming of their national hero, while in the Western press, there were repeated protests over the premature release of a convicted terrorist, but the whole sordid affair died within a short time, even if Megrahi hasn’t yet, and it has all been pretty much long forgotten.
If you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. It’s just the beginning. And it’s a story that’s all too familiar, involving international intrigue, the CIA tampering with evidence, lies and cover-ups by disreputable prosecutors, and two world powers anxious to bring about a conviction at all costs, which included a $2 million payoff to buy fabricated witness accounting. As a result, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who may be one of the most hated men in the world, whose deteriorating health was considered too mild a punishment to many people around the world, and who has been incarcerated for perpetrating the attack on Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland since 1991, may also be innocent.
This won’t be the first time our Government has been involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, to cover up a crime, or to frame an innocent person to protect someone or something it considers more important in the big picture. In this case, the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Scotland were driven by a powerful need to attach this terrorist attack to a face as soon as possible. Under the circumstances, it served all of their purposes to pin it on a Libyan, without having to go to war with Libya itself. At that point, it didn’t matter all that much which Libyan, since to us Westerners, they all look alike anyway.
Between the eagerness of Scottish prosecutors and Government officials to circumvent the procedures of law to make their story fit the facts, and the $2 million dollars the United States Government put up as a bribe to anyone believable enough sell a phony story to a panel of judges hearing this case, it wasn’t all that difficult to make up a scenario that fit the crime. From beginning to end, there were inconsistencies and problems with the gathering of evidence and procedural misconduct on the part of investigators from the police department and the attorneys building this case. Using every manipulative trick and fraud they could come up with, they managed to hammer the square pegs into the round holes and Megrehi was convicted, in spite of protests not only from him and his attorneys who were denied fair access to police evidence and adequate appeals, but to people around the world who looked at the case against Megrahi and called foul. Those included private investigators from around the world who have taken an unbiased look at the evidence, to Nelson Mandela who pleaded with the Church of Scotland to independently investigate the case against Megrahi on their own.
In 2009, under mounting pressure, the Scottish Government had no choice but to allow the appeal to reopen the case. At this point, the British, American, and Scottish Governments were in a quandary. The latest appeal process and the world attention it was bringing, was going to open more than a can of worms for those closest to the conspiracy. It was going to open all the evidence, including formerly withheld and altered evidence, much of which was clearly tampered with by the authorities pressing for a conviction, to public scrutiny that they were previously able to keep a lid on.
So instead of taking that chance on having to explain the obvious framing and conspiracy to defraud the Courts, a deal was struck and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was set free. While President Obama and Prime Minister Tony Blair were displaying their public outrage over Megrahi’s early release, behind the scenes they were wiping the sweat from each other’s brows, knowing that a serious political crisis had been averted. Unfortunately, the victims and their surviving families of the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, must live with the frustration of believing that the murderer of their loved ones was freed on humanitarian grounds, when in fact, they should be more outraged than anyone else that the truth of what really happened will remain buried with the dead.
This is one of those stories that you will not see in the mainstream news media run by multi-national corporations in this country. This story was reported in a documentary film released on Al Jazeera English, the Arab news network. Before you judge the reliability of the source based on prejudices and opinions formulated for you by the American news networks with a strong motive in not wanting us to listen to this news forum with an opened mind, please watch this video and judge for yourself.
In Libya, there were mass celebrations to honor the homecoming of their national hero, while in the Western press, there were repeated protests over the premature release of a convicted terrorist, but the whole sordid affair died within a short time, even if Megrahi hasn’t yet, and it has all been pretty much long forgotten.
If you think that’s the end of the story, you’re wrong. It’s just the beginning. And it’s a story that’s all too familiar, involving international intrigue, the CIA tampering with evidence, lies and cover-ups by disreputable prosecutors, and two world powers anxious to bring about a conviction at all costs, which included a $2 million payoff to buy fabricated witness accounting. As a result, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who may be one of the most hated men in the world, whose deteriorating health was considered too mild a punishment to many people around the world, and who has been incarcerated for perpetrating the attack on Pan-Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland since 1991, may also be innocent.
This won’t be the first time our Government has been involved in a conspiracy to commit murder, to cover up a crime, or to frame an innocent person to protect someone or something it considers more important in the big picture. In this case, the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, and Scotland were driven by a powerful need to attach this terrorist attack to a face as soon as possible. Under the circumstances, it served all of their purposes to pin it on a Libyan, without having to go to war with Libya itself. At that point, it didn’t matter all that much which Libyan, since to us Westerners, they all look alike anyway.
Between the eagerness of Scottish prosecutors and Government officials to circumvent the procedures of law to make their story fit the facts, and the $2 million dollars the United States Government put up as a bribe to anyone believable enough sell a phony story to a panel of judges hearing this case, it wasn’t all that difficult to make up a scenario that fit the crime. From beginning to end, there were inconsistencies and problems with the gathering of evidence and procedural misconduct on the part of investigators from the police department and the attorneys building this case. Using every manipulative trick and fraud they could come up with, they managed to hammer the square pegs into the round holes and Megrehi was convicted, in spite of protests not only from him and his attorneys who were denied fair access to police evidence and adequate appeals, but to people around the world who looked at the case against Megrahi and called foul. Those included private investigators from around the world who have taken an unbiased look at the evidence, to Nelson Mandela who pleaded with the Church of Scotland to independently investigate the case against Megrahi on their own.
In 2009, under mounting pressure, the Scottish Government had no choice but to allow the appeal to reopen the case. At this point, the British, American, and Scottish Governments were in a quandary. The latest appeal process and the world attention it was bringing, was going to open more than a can of worms for those closest to the conspiracy. It was going to open all the evidence, including formerly withheld and altered evidence, much of which was clearly tampered with by the authorities pressing for a conviction, to public scrutiny that they were previously able to keep a lid on.
So instead of taking that chance on having to explain the obvious framing and conspiracy to defraud the Courts, a deal was struck and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was set free. While President Obama and Prime Minister Tony Blair were displaying their public outrage over Megrahi’s early release, behind the scenes they were wiping the sweat from each other’s brows, knowing that a serious political crisis had been averted. Unfortunately, the victims and their surviving families of the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, must live with the frustration of believing that the murderer of their loved ones was freed on humanitarian grounds, when in fact, they should be more outraged than anyone else that the truth of what really happened will remain buried with the dead.
This is one of those stories that you will not see in the mainstream news media run by multi-national corporations in this country. This story was reported in a documentary film released on Al Jazeera English, the Arab news network. Before you judge the reliability of the source based on prejudices and opinions formulated for you by the American news networks with a strong motive in not wanting us to listen to this news forum with an opened mind, please watch this video and judge for yourself.
Friday, 17 June 2011
Lautenberg, Menendez call on Clinton & Holder to seek justice for Pan Am 103 bombing
[What follows is the text of a letter sent on 15 June by Senators Lautenberg and Menendez to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder.]
Dear Secretary Clinton and Attorney General Holder:
As high-level Libyan officials continue to defect from the Qaddafi regime, we urge you to do everything in your power to obtain information regarding and hold the responsible parties accountable for the bombing of Pan Am 103 and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by Libyan officials.
Defecting Libyan officials like former Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa may hold valuable information regarding the Pan Am 103 bombing – or may be culpable themselves. The US case to prosecute this heinous crime remains open and our government must do everything possible to gather evidence and any information that could help bring all of those responsible, including Qaddafi, to justice.
As you know, the only person that has been convicted in the Pan Am bombing is now living freely in Libya. On August 20, 2009, the Scottish government released al-Megrahi, based on the assertion that he had less than three months to live. Almost 22 months later, the convicted terrorist is living in luxury in Libya. The families of the victims of Pan Am 103 waited over a decade to see justice with the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, only to have that justice taken away. This is an entirely unacceptable situation and every effort must be made to return al-Megrahi to prison.
The current upheaval in the Libyan government provides a new opportunity to demand responsibility for this act of terrorism. While we recognize there are many critical foreign policy decisions to be made with regard to Libya at this extraordinary time, we ask that justice for the Lockerbie bombing victims and their families remain a top priority and not be overlooked.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Dear Secretary Clinton and Attorney General Holder:
As high-level Libyan officials continue to defect from the Qaddafi regime, we urge you to do everything in your power to obtain information regarding and hold the responsible parties accountable for the bombing of Pan Am 103 and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by Libyan officials.
Defecting Libyan officials like former Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa may hold valuable information regarding the Pan Am 103 bombing – or may be culpable themselves. The US case to prosecute this heinous crime remains open and our government must do everything possible to gather evidence and any information that could help bring all of those responsible, including Qaddafi, to justice.
As you know, the only person that has been convicted in the Pan Am bombing is now living freely in Libya. On August 20, 2009, the Scottish government released al-Megrahi, based on the assertion that he had less than three months to live. Almost 22 months later, the convicted terrorist is living in luxury in Libya. The families of the victims of Pan Am 103 waited over a decade to see justice with the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, only to have that justice taken away. This is an entirely unacceptable situation and every effort must be made to return al-Megrahi to prison.
The current upheaval in the Libyan government provides a new opportunity to demand responsibility for this act of terrorism. While we recognize there are many critical foreign policy decisions to be made with regard to Libya at this extraordinary time, we ask that justice for the Lockerbie bombing victims and their families remain a top priority and not be overlooked.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing
[This is the title of a long article by Dr J U Cameron published yesterday on John Cameron's Blog. It reads in part:]
One of the UK’s foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said “Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to believe that its practioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading.” There is, in fact, a kind of “canteen culture” in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than investigators seeking the truth.
At first this did not seem to matter in the aftermath of the destruction Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. It was quickly established by air accident investigators that there had been an explosion in the forward cargo hold in the baggage container AVE 4041. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase which appeared to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with parts of a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder in which the bomb had been concealed. There were also items of clothing which looked as if they had also been in the case. At this stage the forensic evidence appeared robust and no credible doubt has been raised in the years since the event that this was the method by which the plane was destroyed.
The police discovered that the baggage container AVE 4041 had been loaded with interline baggage at Heathrow. The baggage had been x-rayed by Sulkash Kamboj of Alert Security, an affiliate company of Pan Am. John Bedford, a loader-driver employed by Pan Am told police that he had placed a number of cases in the container before leaving for a tea break. When he returned he found an additional two cases had been added, one of which was a distinctive brown Samsonite case. Bedford said that Kamboj had told him he had added the two cases. When questioned by the police, Kamboj denied he had added the cases or told Bedford he had done so. This matter was only resolved at the trial when under cross examination Kamboj admitted that Bedford was telling the truth.
All the evidence at this stage pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command (PFLP-GC). Five weeks before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was apprehended in Germany. Haffez Dalkamoni, right-hand man to the group’s leader Ahmad Jibril, and the bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, were arrested while visiting electrical shops in Frankfurt. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Under German police interrogation, Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also admitted that Khreesat had built other bombs including a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches but he claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts.
The involvement of the PFLP-GC was consistent with what was assumed at the time to be the motive for the Pan Am atrocity. In July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet containing some 300 Iranian pilgrims, had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by the renegade US battlecruiser Vincennes. Not only did America refuse to apologize, the captain of the ship and his gunnery officer were decorated for their actions. This crass behaviour caused outrage within Iran and throughout the Middle East. Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered skies’.
Soon the US Air Force Command was issuing warnings to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion with mass casualties.’ Later warnings were more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’
Within weeks the CIA reported that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC had met government officials in Iran and offered his services. Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs to all European airports. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was ‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff remain extra vigilant’. After the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell Heathrow received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities.
In the aftermath of Lockerbie, all the Toshiba cassette bombs seized by the Germans were tested and found to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of the barometric timer employed is that it is not activated until the plane is airborne so the bomb will not go off on the ground if the flight is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes will elapse as the aircraft gains height and the air pressure drops enough to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie.
The clothing thought to have been in the suitcase with the bomb contained labels which allowed the items to be traced to a shop in Malta. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, was known to have visited Malta shortly before the atrocity. When first questioned the owner of the shop, Tony Gauci, described the purchaser of the clothes as a dark-skinned, 50 year old man over six feet in height – which fitted Abu Talb – and identified him from a photograph.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a memo on September 24th, 1989 which stated, “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command leader, for a sum of $1m. $100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hussan Akhari for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”
A DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled “Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation” confirmed the American belief that Iran was the state sponsor of the bombing. It claimed that the PFLP-GC was “fast becoming an Iranian proxy” and that the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 airbus was the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation. It specifically discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was “no current credible intelligence” implicating her. It stated: “Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya in 1986, Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks.”
Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait thereby putting at risk the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary. If Iraq was to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated with kid gloves and the Syrian regime must be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam’s invading army and the increasingly isolated Colonel Gadaffi gradually became the chief suspect on the Lockerbie bombing.
As a result of the change in overall narrative and the fact that there had been absolutely no Libyan activity in London, interest in Heathrow as the scene of the bomb planting suddenly ceased. Now the Maltese connection became crucial. Heretofore it had simply been assumed the clothes were purchased at a Maltese tourist shop in preference to the more regulated shops of Frankfurt or London.
But there was a long standing connection between Malta and Libya which survived all the twists and turns of international diplomacy. In particular, it was one of the key conduits through which essential supplies could be transferred to Tripoli when Gaddafi’s behaviour had provoked yet another set of sanctions being imposed on his country.
The purchaser of the clothes in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta now magically morphed from a non-Libyan giant in late middle age to a youthful, 5’ 7” tall Libyan in his mid-thirties. His name, it appeared was Abdelbaset al Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines. Educated in the USA and Britain, he was also director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A cosmopolitan figure with a wide range of international contacts it was rumoured that he was used by Libya to import essentials during periods of sanctions. The claim that he had suddenly changed into a terrorist bomber was met with derision at home and abroad. The idea that he and his colleague Khalifah Fhimah, the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta, had somehow secreted an unaccompanied suit case onto flight KM180 was thought to be absurd.
The Maltese police also protested that this was a most unlikely scenario. They had questioned the senior airport baggage loader who was adamant that he always double-counted his luggage: once when it was finally gathered and again as it was physically loaded onto the plane. This extremely reliable official was absolutely certain that there were no unaccompanied cases in the luggage that he counted on to the flight. In fact, not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!
The theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as a piece of unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe before finding its way onto Pan Am 103 in London was widely ridiculed. The excellent screening at Frankfurt would have surely picked it up or, if not, it could well have been lost on the twilight zone of European baggage handling. But the greatest problem lay with the barometric trigger which would have caused flight KM180 to explode 38 minutes into the first leg to Frankfurt. This was the moment when the forensic scientists stepped up to the plate.
The two British scientists involved in the Lockerbie case were the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment’s Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes. Charred material found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie in mysterious circumstances had been sent for analysis to explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. According to his later testimony Hayes teased out the cloth of one piece of the material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt. Within it he found fragments of white paper, fragments of black plastic, a fragment of metal and a fragment of wire mesh—all subsequently found to be parts of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual. Hayes testified that he also found embedded a half-inch fragment of circuit board.
The next reference to this famous circuit board fragment occurred when Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification. In June 1990, Feraday and DCI Williamson visited FBI headquarters in Washington and together with Thomas Thurman, an FBI explosives expert, finally identified the fragment as being part of a timer circuit board.
Thurman’s involvement in identifying the fragment later proved highly controversial because in spite of his claim to be an “explosives forensic expert” he had no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever. He read politics at university and had somehow drifted into the FBI Labs. Worse was to follow when in 1997 the US Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, issued a report stating that in other trials Thurman had “circumvented procedures and protocols, testified to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications and fabricated evidence”. Numerous defendants had to be released and Thurman was fortunate not to be prosecuted himself. He was fired from the FBI labs and banned from acting as an expert witness in any other court case.
Thurman could not therefore give evidence at the Lockerbie trial and the Crown’s case would be further damaged when the testimony of his UK counterpart, Alan Feraday, was called into question. In three separate cases — where Feraday had been the expert witness — men against whom he gave evidence have had their convictions overturned. Like Thurman, Feraday was not actually a professional scientist and in 2005, after yet another successful appeal, the Chief Lord Justice said that “under no circumstances should Feraday be allowed to present himself as an expert witness in electronics”.
By the time of the trial the career of Thomas Hayes was also over because a British Parliamentary inquiry had found he had conspired to withhold evidence in the notorious trial of the Maguire Seven. Sir John May had said, “The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the conviction should be set aside.” Hayes jumped before he was pushed and by the time of the trial was working as a chiropodist.
As the argument for a Maltese connection and Libyan involvement progressed the tiny fragment of circuit board became increasingly important. Thurman now “indentified” it as part of a batch made by the Swiss manufacturer Mebo for the Libyan military. This was not the simple design thought to have been used in the Pan Am 103 bombing but a complex type of long timer. Edwin Bollier later revealed that he declined an offer of $4 million by the FBI to testify that the fragment was indeed part of the Mebo MST-13 timer. Fortunately one of his employees, Ulrich Lumpert, was prevailed upon to do so at the trial though later, in a sworn affidavit, he would admit he had lied. The other co-owner of Mebo, Erwin Meister, confirmed that MST–13 timers had been sold to Libya and helpfully identified Megrahi as a “former business contact”.
All the ducks were finally in a line and the Anglo-American authorities indicted the two Libyan suspects in November 1991. Gaddafi was then ordered to extradite them for trial in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Since no bilateral extradition treaty was in force between any of the three countries, he refused to hand the men over but did offer to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.
In November 1994, President Nelson Mandela offered South Africaas a neutral venue for the trial but this was rejected by John Major. A further three years elapsed until Mandela’s offer was repeated to Major’s successor, Tony Blair, when the president visited London in July 1997 and again at the 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh in October 1997. At the latter meeting, Mandela warned that “no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge” in the Lockerbie case.
A compromise solution was eventually engineered by the legal academic Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University of a trial in the Netherlands governed by Scots law. Since this was in accordance with the New Labour government’s promotion of an “ethical” foreign policy, it was given political impetus by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. A special High Court of Justiciary was set up in a disused United States Air Force base called Camp Zeist in Utrecht.
In recent years no forensic-based case has caused greater concern than the Lockerbie trial and the prosecution has been widely accused of using the tactics of disinformation. The lead prosecutor was the highly controversial Lord Advocate, Colin (later Baron) Boyd who three years before had prosecuted DC McKie in another forensic disaster. The policewoman denied an accusation by Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) fingerprint officers that she left her thumb print at a murder scene in January 1997. She was arrested in March 1998, charged with perjury but at her trial in May 1999 the SCRO fingerprint evidence was rejected out of hand and she was acquitted.
A senior Scottish police officer, James Mackay QPM, was appointed by the Crown Office to investigate the matter and he submitted his report to Boyd in October 2000. It found that the actions of the SCRO personnel amounted to 'collective manipulation and collusion' and four of them were immediately suspended by the SCRO. With the Lockerbie trial in full swing Boyd was obviously reluctant to prosecute the officers involved and to great public indignation he allowed them to be reinstated. It would clearly have damaged his fragile case in the Lockerbie trial to have four of Scotland’s forensic scientists prosecuted for covering up acts of criminality. The finger-print scandal was only resolved in 2006 when the policewoman was awarded £750,000 compensation and Boyd was rightly forced to resign as Lord Advocate.
There were profound inconsistencies in much of the evidence presented to the trial. For instance, the entry of the discovery of the timer fragment was recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. The German police files indicate that fragments of the bomb timer were found on the shirt in January 1990. So the shirt collar could hardly have been examined nor the items of evidence extracted on 12 May 1989 as was claimed by Hayes at the trial. German documents also contain photographs showing a piece of the shirt with most of the breast pocket undamaged but the images presented to the trial were different.
It is also disconcerting that an additional page was inserted into the evidence log detailing the discovery of the Slalom shirt with particles of the bomb timer on it. The record of the discovery was inserted into a loose-leaf folder with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand – a procedure for which the scientist could offer no explanation at the trial. The prosecution’s evidence looked at times like a co-coordinated effort to mislead the court. Yet the Judges helpfully concluded that the compromised evidence log did not matter because “each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”
During the trial, MeBo engineer Ulrich Lumpert – whose evidence was crucial in connecting the famous fragment to the Libyan batch – caused consternation by adding that the fragment on display belonged to a timer that had never been connected to a relay, ie had not triggered a bomb. This claim could not be countered by the prosecution because Hayes had inexplicably not thought it necessary to test the tiny timer fragment for explosive residue. However, given their conduct of the trial it came as no surprise that the three Scottish judges were untroubled by what should have been a disaster for the prosecution.
The lead judge was the veteran Lord Sutherland accompanied by an inveterate tribunal chairman, Lord Coulsfield, and the sentencing and parole expert Lord MacLean. They admitted the uncertainties in the testimony and the dangers inherent in “selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which do not fit”. They also admitted it was possible they were “reading into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern and conclusion which was not really justified” but ploughed on regardless.
In the end, the judges accepted that the absence of a credible explanation of how the suitcase was placed into the system at Luqa airport was “a major difficulty for the Crown case”. However they still managed to convince themselves that this was indeed what had happened. “When the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible.” This statement was met with derision in Scotland and rightly dismissed as “inference piled upon inference”.
The judges further accepted that the PFLP-GC were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period but found “no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime.”
If most observers found this a very odd way of looking at the evidence, the final decisions of the judges provoked utter consternation. It appeared beyond any shadow of a doubt that the two accused were either both guilty or both not guilty but the Law Lords managed to find clear blue water between them. The judges were unanimous in finding the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. He was freed and he returned to Libya on 1 February 2001.
As for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi the judges said: “There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment.” Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.
Huge doubts remain about the prosecution’s case and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in 2007 found prima facie evidence of a miscarriage of justice. It is clear from their report that the unreliability of the prosecution’s key witness Tony Gauci was one of the main reasons for the referral of Megrahi’s case back to the Appeal Court. Gauci had been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police during which he gave a series of inconclusive statements and there was evidence that leading questions had been put to him. Gauci was clearly not the “full shilling” as Lord Fraser, Scotland’s senior law officer during the investigation, had admitted. And yet he was not entirely stupid. The Americans paid him $2 million for his revised identification and he now resides in comfortable obscurity in Malta.
The review commission also discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose a document from a foreign power which confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya. This document, passed to the commission by the foreign power in question, contained considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb and linked it to the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the investigation. Moreover, the Iranian defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, who provided intelligence for the Germans, had already told the prosecutors in 1996 that the bombing been ordered by Tehran, not Tripoli.
Scientists generally recommend selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions. Known as Occam’s razor, we use it to cut out crazy, complicated constructions and to keep theories grounded in the laws of science. The Maltese evidence linking Megrahi to the atrocity is so fragile, so complex and so full of unsupported assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the forensic scientists. It is therefore unfortunate that it would be difficult to find three more disreputable practioners than Thurman, Hayes and Feraday. It should be a matter of deep concern that Megrahi is the only man convicted on the evidence of these three individuals whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.
There is also no credible evidence that the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop found among the Lockerbie wreckage were really bought on the day stated in the trial. The sale seemed much more likely to have happened on a day when Abu Talb was on Malta and Megrahi definitely was not. It is also known that when the Swedish police arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they found some of the same batch of clothing in his flat in Uppsala. No explanation for that was forthcoming at the trial.
Finally, the behaviour of the chief prosecutor Colin Boyd, both in concealing the nefarious activity of his forensic scientists and withholding essential evidence from the defence, is utterly reprehensible. Together with lack of moral fiber shown by Lord Cullen and the Court of Criminal Appeal [at Megrahi's first appeal] it has left a permanent stain on the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
One of the UK’s foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said “Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to believe that its practioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading.” There is, in fact, a kind of “canteen culture” in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than investigators seeking the truth.
At first this did not seem to matter in the aftermath of the destruction Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. It was quickly established by air accident investigators that there had been an explosion in the forward cargo hold in the baggage container AVE 4041. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase which appeared to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with parts of a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder in which the bomb had been concealed. There were also items of clothing which looked as if they had also been in the case. At this stage the forensic evidence appeared robust and no credible doubt has been raised in the years since the event that this was the method by which the plane was destroyed.
The police discovered that the baggage container AVE 4041 had been loaded with interline baggage at Heathrow. The baggage had been x-rayed by Sulkash Kamboj of Alert Security, an affiliate company of Pan Am. John Bedford, a loader-driver employed by Pan Am told police that he had placed a number of cases in the container before leaving for a tea break. When he returned he found an additional two cases had been added, one of which was a distinctive brown Samsonite case. Bedford said that Kamboj had told him he had added the two cases. When questioned by the police, Kamboj denied he had added the cases or told Bedford he had done so. This matter was only resolved at the trial when under cross examination Kamboj admitted that Bedford was telling the truth.
All the evidence at this stage pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command (PFLP-GC). Five weeks before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was apprehended in Germany. Haffez Dalkamoni, right-hand man to the group’s leader Ahmad Jibril, and the bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, were arrested while visiting electrical shops in Frankfurt. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Under German police interrogation, Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also admitted that Khreesat had built other bombs including a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches but he claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts.
The involvement of the PFLP-GC was consistent with what was assumed at the time to be the motive for the Pan Am atrocity. In July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet containing some 300 Iranian pilgrims, had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by the renegade US battlecruiser Vincennes. Not only did America refuse to apologize, the captain of the ship and his gunnery officer were decorated for their actions. This crass behaviour caused outrage within Iran and throughout the Middle East. Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered skies’.
Soon the US Air Force Command was issuing warnings to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion with mass casualties.’ Later warnings were more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’
Within weeks the CIA reported that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC had met government officials in Iran and offered his services. Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs to all European airports. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was ‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff remain extra vigilant’. After the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell Heathrow received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities.
In the aftermath of Lockerbie, all the Toshiba cassette bombs seized by the Germans were tested and found to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of the barometric timer employed is that it is not activated until the plane is airborne so the bomb will not go off on the ground if the flight is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes will elapse as the aircraft gains height and the air pressure drops enough to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie.
The clothing thought to have been in the suitcase with the bomb contained labels which allowed the items to be traced to a shop in Malta. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, was known to have visited Malta shortly before the atrocity. When first questioned the owner of the shop, Tony Gauci, described the purchaser of the clothes as a dark-skinned, 50 year old man over six feet in height – which fitted Abu Talb – and identified him from a photograph.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a memo on September 24th, 1989 which stated, “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command leader, for a sum of $1m. $100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hussan Akhari for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”
A DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled “Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation” confirmed the American belief that Iran was the state sponsor of the bombing. It claimed that the PFLP-GC was “fast becoming an Iranian proxy” and that the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 airbus was the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation. It specifically discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was “no current credible intelligence” implicating her. It stated: “Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya in 1986, Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks.”
Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait thereby putting at risk the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary. If Iraq was to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated with kid gloves and the Syrian regime must be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam’s invading army and the increasingly isolated Colonel Gadaffi gradually became the chief suspect on the Lockerbie bombing.
As a result of the change in overall narrative and the fact that there had been absolutely no Libyan activity in London, interest in Heathrow as the scene of the bomb planting suddenly ceased. Now the Maltese connection became crucial. Heretofore it had simply been assumed the clothes were purchased at a Maltese tourist shop in preference to the more regulated shops of Frankfurt or London.
But there was a long standing connection between Malta and Libya which survived all the twists and turns of international diplomacy. In particular, it was one of the key conduits through which essential supplies could be transferred to Tripoli when Gaddafi’s behaviour had provoked yet another set of sanctions being imposed on his country.
The purchaser of the clothes in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta now magically morphed from a non-Libyan giant in late middle age to a youthful, 5’ 7” tall Libyan in his mid-thirties. His name, it appeared was Abdelbaset al Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines. Educated in the USA and Britain, he was also director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A cosmopolitan figure with a wide range of international contacts it was rumoured that he was used by Libya to import essentials during periods of sanctions. The claim that he had suddenly changed into a terrorist bomber was met with derision at home and abroad. The idea that he and his colleague Khalifah Fhimah, the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta, had somehow secreted an unaccompanied suit case onto flight KM180 was thought to be absurd.
The Maltese police also protested that this was a most unlikely scenario. They had questioned the senior airport baggage loader who was adamant that he always double-counted his luggage: once when it was finally gathered and again as it was physically loaded onto the plane. This extremely reliable official was absolutely certain that there were no unaccompanied cases in the luggage that he counted on to the flight. In fact, not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!
The theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as a piece of unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe before finding its way onto Pan Am 103 in London was widely ridiculed. The excellent screening at Frankfurt would have surely picked it up or, if not, it could well have been lost on the twilight zone of European baggage handling. But the greatest problem lay with the barometric trigger which would have caused flight KM180 to explode 38 minutes into the first leg to Frankfurt. This was the moment when the forensic scientists stepped up to the plate.
The two British scientists involved in the Lockerbie case were the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment’s Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes. Charred material found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie in mysterious circumstances had been sent for analysis to explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. According to his later testimony Hayes teased out the cloth of one piece of the material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt. Within it he found fragments of white paper, fragments of black plastic, a fragment of metal and a fragment of wire mesh—all subsequently found to be parts of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual. Hayes testified that he also found embedded a half-inch fragment of circuit board.
The next reference to this famous circuit board fragment occurred when Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification. In June 1990, Feraday and DCI Williamson visited FBI headquarters in Washington and together with Thomas Thurman, an FBI explosives expert, finally identified the fragment as being part of a timer circuit board.
Thurman’s involvement in identifying the fragment later proved highly controversial because in spite of his claim to be an “explosives forensic expert” he had no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever. He read politics at university and had somehow drifted into the FBI Labs. Worse was to follow when in 1997 the US Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, issued a report stating that in other trials Thurman had “circumvented procedures and protocols, testified to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications and fabricated evidence”. Numerous defendants had to be released and Thurman was fortunate not to be prosecuted himself. He was fired from the FBI labs and banned from acting as an expert witness in any other court case.
Thurman could not therefore give evidence at the Lockerbie trial and the Crown’s case would be further damaged when the testimony of his UK counterpart, Alan Feraday, was called into question. In three separate cases — where Feraday had been the expert witness — men against whom he gave evidence have had their convictions overturned. Like Thurman, Feraday was not actually a professional scientist and in 2005, after yet another successful appeal, the Chief Lord Justice said that “under no circumstances should Feraday be allowed to present himself as an expert witness in electronics”.
By the time of the trial the career of Thomas Hayes was also over because a British Parliamentary inquiry had found he had conspired to withhold evidence in the notorious trial of the Maguire Seven. Sir John May had said, “The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the conviction should be set aside.” Hayes jumped before he was pushed and by the time of the trial was working as a chiropodist.
As the argument for a Maltese connection and Libyan involvement progressed the tiny fragment of circuit board became increasingly important. Thurman now “indentified” it as part of a batch made by the Swiss manufacturer Mebo for the Libyan military. This was not the simple design thought to have been used in the Pan Am 103 bombing but a complex type of long timer. Edwin Bollier later revealed that he declined an offer of $4 million by the FBI to testify that the fragment was indeed part of the Mebo MST-13 timer. Fortunately one of his employees, Ulrich Lumpert, was prevailed upon to do so at the trial though later, in a sworn affidavit, he would admit he had lied. The other co-owner of Mebo, Erwin Meister, confirmed that MST–13 timers had been sold to Libya and helpfully identified Megrahi as a “former business contact”.
All the ducks were finally in a line and the Anglo-American authorities indicted the two Libyan suspects in November 1991. Gaddafi was then ordered to extradite them for trial in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Since no bilateral extradition treaty was in force between any of the three countries, he refused to hand the men over but did offer to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.
In November 1994, President Nelson Mandela offered South Africaas a neutral venue for the trial but this was rejected by John Major. A further three years elapsed until Mandela’s offer was repeated to Major’s successor, Tony Blair, when the president visited London in July 1997 and again at the 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh in October 1997. At the latter meeting, Mandela warned that “no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge” in the Lockerbie case.
A compromise solution was eventually engineered by the legal academic Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University of a trial in the Netherlands governed by Scots law. Since this was in accordance with the New Labour government’s promotion of an “ethical” foreign policy, it was given political impetus by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. A special High Court of Justiciary was set up in a disused United States Air Force base called Camp Zeist in Utrecht.
In recent years no forensic-based case has caused greater concern than the Lockerbie trial and the prosecution has been widely accused of using the tactics of disinformation. The lead prosecutor was the highly controversial Lord Advocate, Colin (later Baron) Boyd who three years before had prosecuted DC McKie in another forensic disaster. The policewoman denied an accusation by Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) fingerprint officers that she left her thumb print at a murder scene in January 1997. She was arrested in March 1998, charged with perjury but at her trial in May 1999 the SCRO fingerprint evidence was rejected out of hand and she was acquitted.
A senior Scottish police officer, James Mackay QPM, was appointed by the Crown Office to investigate the matter and he submitted his report to Boyd in October 2000. It found that the actions of the SCRO personnel amounted to 'collective manipulation and collusion' and four of them were immediately suspended by the SCRO. With the Lockerbie trial in full swing Boyd was obviously reluctant to prosecute the officers involved and to great public indignation he allowed them to be reinstated. It would clearly have damaged his fragile case in the Lockerbie trial to have four of Scotland’s forensic scientists prosecuted for covering up acts of criminality. The finger-print scandal was only resolved in 2006 when the policewoman was awarded £750,000 compensation and Boyd was rightly forced to resign as Lord Advocate.
There were profound inconsistencies in much of the evidence presented to the trial. For instance, the entry of the discovery of the timer fragment was recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. The German police files indicate that fragments of the bomb timer were found on the shirt in January 1990. So the shirt collar could hardly have been examined nor the items of evidence extracted on 12 May 1989 as was claimed by Hayes at the trial. German documents also contain photographs showing a piece of the shirt with most of the breast pocket undamaged but the images presented to the trial were different.
It is also disconcerting that an additional page was inserted into the evidence log detailing the discovery of the Slalom shirt with particles of the bomb timer on it. The record of the discovery was inserted into a loose-leaf folder with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand – a procedure for which the scientist could offer no explanation at the trial. The prosecution’s evidence looked at times like a co-coordinated effort to mislead the court. Yet the Judges helpfully concluded that the compromised evidence log did not matter because “each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”
During the trial, MeBo engineer Ulrich Lumpert – whose evidence was crucial in connecting the famous fragment to the Libyan batch – caused consternation by adding that the fragment on display belonged to a timer that had never been connected to a relay, ie had not triggered a bomb. This claim could not be countered by the prosecution because Hayes had inexplicably not thought it necessary to test the tiny timer fragment for explosive residue. However, given their conduct of the trial it came as no surprise that the three Scottish judges were untroubled by what should have been a disaster for the prosecution.
The lead judge was the veteran Lord Sutherland accompanied by an inveterate tribunal chairman, Lord Coulsfield, and the sentencing and parole expert Lord MacLean. They admitted the uncertainties in the testimony and the dangers inherent in “selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which do not fit”. They also admitted it was possible they were “reading into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern and conclusion which was not really justified” but ploughed on regardless.
In the end, the judges accepted that the absence of a credible explanation of how the suitcase was placed into the system at Luqa airport was “a major difficulty for the Crown case”. However they still managed to convince themselves that this was indeed what had happened. “When the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible.” This statement was met with derision in Scotland and rightly dismissed as “inference piled upon inference”.
The judges further accepted that the PFLP-GC were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period but found “no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime.”
If most observers found this a very odd way of looking at the evidence, the final decisions of the judges provoked utter consternation. It appeared beyond any shadow of a doubt that the two accused were either both guilty or both not guilty but the Law Lords managed to find clear blue water between them. The judges were unanimous in finding the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. He was freed and he returned to Libya on 1 February 2001.
As for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi the judges said: “There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment.” Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.
Huge doubts remain about the prosecution’s case and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in 2007 found prima facie evidence of a miscarriage of justice. It is clear from their report that the unreliability of the prosecution’s key witness Tony Gauci was one of the main reasons for the referral of Megrahi’s case back to the Appeal Court. Gauci had been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police during which he gave a series of inconclusive statements and there was evidence that leading questions had been put to him. Gauci was clearly not the “full shilling” as Lord Fraser, Scotland’s senior law officer during the investigation, had admitted. And yet he was not entirely stupid. The Americans paid him $2 million for his revised identification and he now resides in comfortable obscurity in Malta.
The review commission also discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose a document from a foreign power which confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya. This document, passed to the commission by the foreign power in question, contained considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb and linked it to the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the investigation. Moreover, the Iranian defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, who provided intelligence for the Germans, had already told the prosecutors in 1996 that the bombing been ordered by Tehran, not Tripoli.
Scientists generally recommend selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions. Known as Occam’s razor, we use it to cut out crazy, complicated constructions and to keep theories grounded in the laws of science. The Maltese evidence linking Megrahi to the atrocity is so fragile, so complex and so full of unsupported assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the forensic scientists. It is therefore unfortunate that it would be difficult to find three more disreputable practioners than Thurman, Hayes and Feraday. It should be a matter of deep concern that Megrahi is the only man convicted on the evidence of these three individuals whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.
There is also no credible evidence that the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop found among the Lockerbie wreckage were really bought on the day stated in the trial. The sale seemed much more likely to have happened on a day when Abu Talb was on Malta and Megrahi definitely was not. It is also known that when the Swedish police arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they found some of the same batch of clothing in his flat in Uppsala. No explanation for that was forthcoming at the trial.
Finally, the behaviour of the chief prosecutor Colin Boyd, both in concealing the nefarious activity of his forensic scientists and withholding essential evidence from the defence, is utterly reprehensible. Together with lack of moral fiber shown by Lord Cullen and the Court of Criminal Appeal [at Megrahi's first appeal] it has left a permanent stain on the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.
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