Wednesday, 14 March 2012

Ten years on from dismissal of Megrahi's first appeal

[Today marks the tenth anniversary of the dismissal by a five-judge court sitting at Zeist of Abdelbaset Megrahi’s first appeal.  The Crown Office, in its increasingly desperate attempts to maintain that the Megrahi conviction is sustainable, is resorting to the hoary old chestnut that the appeal court, presided over by the then Lord Justice General, Lord Cullen, confirmed the findings of the trial court and added its own authority to them.  As the Crown Office well knows, the appeal court did no such thing.
 
Here is part of what I wrote in the first ever post on this blog:]

The only ground upon which a criminal appeal can succeed in Scotland is that there has been a miscarriage of justice. In the Note of Appeal lodged on behalf of Megrahi there were set out in 21 paragraphs (many of them subdivided) the grounds upon which, individually or in combination, it was contended that a miscarriage had occurred. One of those grounds related to the existence and significance of evidence which was not heard during the original proceedings. This evidence related to a breach of security at Heathrow Terminal 3 (potentially giving access to the baggage build-up area) the night before Pan Am 103 departed from that terminal on its fatal flight. The Appeal Court allowed the new evidence to be led before it, but ultimately concluded that it could not be regarded as possessing such importance as to have been likely to have had a material bearing on the trial court’s determination of the critical issue of whether the suitcase containing the bomb was launched on its progress from Luqa Airport in Malta (an essential plank in the prosecution case) or from Heathrow. This ground of appeal was accordingly rejected.

As far as the appeal based on the remaining twenty paragraphs of the written grounds of appeal was concerned, its failure appears to have been rendered virtually inevitable by two concessions made in the course of argument by the appellant’s counsel. The first of these, as recorded in the Opinion of the Court (paragraph 4) is as follows:

“At the trial it was not submitted on the appellant’s behalf that there was insufficient evidence in law to convict him. In its judgment the trial court rejected parts of the evidence relied upon by the Crown at the trial. Nevertheless, it was not contended in the appeal that those parts of the evidence not rejected by the trial court did not afford a sufficient basis in law for conviction.”

The second concession is recorded in the following terms (paragraph 5):

“Under subsection (3) [of s106 of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995] an appellant may bring under review of the High Court:

‘any alleged miscarriage of justice, which may include such a miscarriage
based on –

(b) the jury’s having returned a verdict which no reasonable jury, properly directed, could have returned.’ …

Mr Taylor, who appeared for the appellant, expressly disavowed any reliance on para (b).”

The importance of these concessions is emphasised by the Appeal Court in the penultimate paragraph of its Opinion (paragraph 369):

“When opening the case for the appellant before this court Mr Taylor stated that the appeal was not about sufficiency of evidence: he accepted that there was a sufficiency of evidence. He also stated that he was not seeking to found on section 106(3)(b) of the 1995 Act. His position was that the trial court had misdirected itself in various respects. Accordingly in this appeal we have not required to consider whether the evidence before the trial court, apart from the evidence which it rejected, was sufficient as a matter of law to entitle it to convict the appellant on the basis set out in its judgment. We have not had to consider whether the verdict of guilty was one which no reasonable trial court, properly directing itself, could have returned in the light of that evidence.” (...)

As far as the outcome of the appeal is concerned, some commentators have confidently opined that, in dismissing Megrahi’s appeal, the Appeal Court endorsed the findings of the trial court. This is not so. The Appeal Court repeatedly stresses that it is not its function to approve or disapprove of the trial court’s findings-in-fact, given that it was not contended on behalf of the appellant that there was insufficient evidence to warrant them or that no reasonable court could have made them. These findings-in-fact accordingly continue, as before the appeal, to have the authority only of the court which, and the three judges who, made them.

HMA v HMA: The Next Pan Am 103 trial

[This is the headline over a blistering article on the website of Scottish lawyers’ magazine The Firm by Steven Raeburn, the editor. It reads as follows:]

As the discredited Pan Am 103 case continues to crumble further, with damning revelations coming to light on an almost daily basis, the failure of duty by some of Scotland’s senior law officers over the years since the aircraft was destroyed is becoming clearer. Their actions and inaction is being exposed to scrutiny that reinforces the UN trial observer Hans Kochler’s conclusion that they amount to new criminal offences in themselves. 

For example, The Herald is quoting former Lord Advocate Colin Boyd this morning as follows: 

“I reject the suggestion that I or anyone else in the prosecution team failed to disclose material evidence to the defence. All of the relevant CIA cables were disclosed subject to some exceptions, principally to ensure that the lives of named individuals were not put at risk. They were disclosed as a result of a request from the court directed to me. 

“I am satisfied that the Crown acted with propriety throughout the trial and endeavoured in this case, as with any other conducted in my name as Lord Advocate, to secure the accused’s right to a fair trial.”

Subject to some exceptions... This is crucial, and reveals the identifiable moment when the showpiece trial (or was it simply a show trial?) trial was corrupted. 

Leaving aside for the moment the 
numerous flaws in the handling of the case between 1988 and the commencement of the trial, co-accused Fhimah's solicitor Eddie McKechnie told me that the process of disclosure of these cables was tortuous. 

He said the Crown dissembled, hummed and hawed and delayed passing them over to the defence for months. (it was reported yesterday that the SCCRC threatened civil action against the Crown Office for the same reason.) As is now well known, the cables revealed only the useless testimony of CIA salaried informer Abdul Majid Giaka, whose evidence as a "fantasist" was dismissed in its entirety by the trial judges. 

What is not generally known, McKechnie told me, is that Crown Office themselves did not know what was in the cables until after the trial had commenced, because they had only been given redacted versions from the CIA, and hollow assurances from US intelligence that they contained key evidence that would stand up in court. In particular, they were told that Giaka could positively identify Megrahi and Fhimah and link them to the atrocity. 

The material in the cables was not evidence gathered by COPFS or Dumfries and Galloway police, as would normally be the case in a trial brought in Scotland. It was delivered on a plate fully formed by US intelligence services, a somewhat murky group of people not renowned for their honesty nor the integrity of their motivations. 

This point is rarely if ever understood or reported. It is often overlooked that Megrahi and Fhimah themselves were sourced and presented to the Crown Office by the CIA. They were not tracked down nor placed in the frame by Scottish investigators.

By the time the cable contents were disclosed, the trial arrangements were irrevocable and the geopolitical deals that continue to define this case were done at UK level in Westminster. Scots law was a passenger from this point, and a hijacked one at that. 

The revelation of the non-redacted cables is the key moment when the case should have been dropped by Lord Fraser, and where the criminal ineptitude begins. Everything COPFS has done since then (and the Scottish Government, to a more or less equal degree) is designed to shore up that mistake and the shoddy trial that resulted from it, and to deflect any suggestion of error, or worse. It was under Fraser’s tenure that key witness Tony Gauci was 
bribed, or rather, received “possible reward payments.” [RB: My understanding is that the payments were not made until after the Zeist trial in Lord Advocate Colin Boyd's tenure of office. There were, of course, inquiries, nods and winks aplenty long before that time.] 

Key Crown personnel can be forgiven for naiveté, but the mistakes that have been evidenced escalate from incompetence in the first instance, but morph into negligence, malfeasance and dereliction of duty as time has gone on and every opportunity to address and correct these issues is not only spurned, but actively blocked. The trial itself was tainted by the perpetuation of this error, as witnessed by United Nations Observer Hans Koechler. In 2005 he said that "the falsification of evidence, selective presentation of evidence, manipulation of reports, interference into the conduct of judicial proceedings by intelligence services," he observed at the Zeist trial were "criminal offences in any country."

He said that the "possible criminal responsibility, under Scots law, of people involved in the Lockerbie trial should be carefully studied by the competent prosecutorial authorities." 

Successive Crown regimes have aggressively protected their own flawed conduct to preserve the personal reputations of a very few. The justice system has suffered, and a new culture of paranoia, fear and insularity has put the Crown Office in a permanent mode of lockdown. The late Paul McBride described it as a siege mentality, although in the real world, removed from the paranoid fantasies of the Crown Office, the only assault it has actually been under is from the truth, sought by bereaved families, and, as time has gone on, a growing army of observers including luminaries such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Professor Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Gareth Peirce, Robert Black QC, Cardinal Keith O Brien and those who signed an online petition submitted to the Holyrood petitions committee by the JFM group, all of whom have looked at the case for themselves and staked their reputations against the need for an inquiry. 

A full re-examination of the case will reveal the truth of Pan Am 103. It will also expose those culpable in our system to ridicule and the damning judgement of history.

If Scotland retained an independent Lord Advocate and a mature justice system, rather than the current degraded, paranoid runt of the once proud system, indictments would be issued at once by Frank Mulholland against former Lords Advocate Fraser, Boyd and Angiolini. Mulholland himself would step aside and submit to his successor for criminal scrutiny. The fact that the case of HMA v HMA is unlikely to appearing on the rolls of court anytime soon demonstrates the scale of the problem our system now faces in respect of this case. Her Majesty’s Advocate requires to investigate itself, but will not. Does the ICC now beckon? We are through the looking glass now.

Lockerbie Revealed: other key findings from 'secret' report

[This is the headline over a long article by John Ashton published today on the heraldscotland.com website.  It reads in part:]

During its four-year investigation, as well as finding six grounds why Megrahi may have suffered a miscarriage of justice, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission examined numerous other issues which, according to his lawyers, affected the safety of his conviction. (...)

The Libyan informant
A key witness against Megrahi was a former Libyan Arab Airlines colleague, Majid Giaka, who was also a junior intelligence officer and CIA informant. At trial the defence were provided with partially redacted CIA cables about him.
After two of the Crown team had viewed almost complete cables on 1 June 2000, the Lord Advocate assured the court that the blanked out sections were of no relevance.
However, when less redacted versions were eventually released they cast further doubt on Giaka’s credibility. In their application to the SCCRC, Megrahi’s lawyers, who were not those who represented him at trial, argued that the failure to release the full, unredacted cables breached Megrahi’s right to a fair trial.
Remarkably, the SCCRC was not allowed to view the full cables, but having read the partially redacted ones, it commented:

it is difficult to understand the Lord Advocate’s assurances to the court on 22 August 2000 that there was “nothing within these documents which relate to Lockerbie or the bombing of Pan Am 103 which could in any way impinge on the credibility of Mr Majid on these matters”. The matter is all the more serious given that part of the reason for viewing the cables on 1 June 2000 was precisely in order to assess whether information behind the redacted sections reflected upon Majid’s credibility.

The SCCRC nevertheless concluded that the failure to release the full cables had not resulted in a miscarriage of justice.  Twenty-two years on, Giaka’s full story remains unknown.

The terrorist whistleblower
Six months into Megrahi’s trial the Crown disclosed a transcript of a lengthy deathbed confession by Palestinian self-confessed terrorist Mobdi Goben. He  claimed that the bombing was the work of his own group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a Syrian and Iranian backed faction who were the original prime suspects in the bombing.

The defence interviewed a number of Goben’s relatives and associates who were seeking asylum in Norway, plus a man whom Goben had implicated in the bomb plot.
However, the court refused a defence motion to request further information from the Syrian, Iranian, American and Swedish governments, and the allegations were never raised at trial. Megrahi’s SCCRC submission argued that the Crown’s approach to the matter breached his right to a fair trial.
The SCCRC raised the matter with Megrahi’s junior counsel John Beckett, who said that the Goben evidence would have been difficult to use. It also had access to undisclosed Crown documents, which, in its view, contained nothing the defence didn’t already know. It concluded: the Commission does not consider that the Crown’s handling of matters concerning the Goben memorandum gave rise to a breach of the Crown’s obligations … Accordingly, the Commission does not consider that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred in this connection.
Goben’s claims remain unproven, but many who have studied the case, including the British Lockerbie relative Dr Jim Swire, continue to hold the PFLP-GC responsible for Lockerbie.

Prime suspect No.1: Abu Elias
Mobdi Goben and PFLP-GC member, bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat, each implicated another of group member, known as Abu Elias, in the bombing. (…)
A number of Megrahi’s unsuccessful submissions to the SCCRC referred to Abu Elias. Although the Commission could find no direct evidence of his involvement in the bombing, Abu Elias remains the prime suspect for many of those who doubt Megrahi’s guilt. 

Prime suspect No.2: Abu Talb
The most unusual Crown witness at Megrahi’s trial was convicted terrorist Mohamed Abu Talb, who was serving a life sentence in Sweden for fatal bombings in Northern Europe in the mid-eighties.

Previously a prime suspect in the Lockerbie bombing, he had visited Malta two months before Lockerbie, returning with clothes, and some of his associates had visited the German flat in which the PFLP-GC’s Marwan Khreesat made barometric bombs. (…)
The SCCRC uncovered no significant new evidence about Abu Talb, but was unable to properly investigate an airline ticket, which suggested that he possibly made a second trip to Malta at around the time that Tony Gauci said he sold the bomb suitcase clothing.

The report says: The Commission requested that D&G (Dumfries and Galloway Police) ask the police officers involved in enquiries relative to Abo Talb whether they had established that the position in respect of the return portion of the ticket. D&G confirmed in a letter dated 19 April 2006 that none of the officers could recall making enquiries in this connection … In the Commission’s view, although it is regrettable that the matter was not checked with Scandinavian Airlines at the time of the police investigation, there was no failure by the Crown to disclose material evidence about the return portion of Talb’s flight ticket.

There is no smoking gun to implicate Abu Talb, but his trip to Malta and his PFLP-GC connections continue to fuel suspicions of his involvement in Lockerbie.
The shopkeeper
Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci was the key witness against Megrahi, as it was he who sold the clothes that were supposedly packed into the bomb suitcase. In 1991 he made a tentative identification of Megrahi, which he repeated at an ID parade 8 years later and again during his trial evidence.

Although four of the SCCRC grounds of referral concerned Gauci, the Commission rejected a number of submissions contained in Megrahi’s original application.  Among these was the claim that Gauci had been taken to Scotland by the police, where he received treats and hospitality, which may have influenced his evidence.
The Commission confirmed that Gauci was taken to Scotland on a number of occasions, but considered that nothing improper had taken place. It says: … almost all of Mr Gauci’s visits to Scotland took place after he had given evidence. The only exception to this is his visit in 1999 when he attended Dumfries for precognition and was taken sight-seeing in Edinburgh the following day. However, in the Commission’s view any possible significance that might have been attached to this by the defence has to be seen in light of the other information contained in the reports described above. It appears from this that far from viewing his visits to Scotland and elsewhere as an incentive Mr Gauci was strongly opposed to his removal from Malta which he regarded as a source of inconvenience.
Large question marks remain over Gauci’s evidence. The SCCRC discovered that post-trial he received a reward of at least $2 million from the US Department of Justice.

The CIA agent
The only US investigator interviewed by the SCCRC, former CIA agent Robert Baer, reported intelligence indicating that the Iranian government had commissioned the PFLP-GC to bomb Pan Am 103. His sources suggested that two days after the bombing $11 million was transferred into a PFLP-GC Swiss bank account and a few months later $500,000 was paid into an account thought to belong to Abu Talb at the Degussa Bank in Frankfurt.

Overall, the SCCRC concluded: … the Commission has no reason to doubt [Mr Baer’s] credibility. However, as he himself acknowledged, he has no direct knowledge of any of the information in his possession, which came largely from CIA telexes. As with all intelligence, the validity of that information was very much dependent upon the reliability of its source which in many cases Mr Baer was unable to vouch.

The Baer chapter demonstrates the limited reach of the SCCRC’s inquiry and is probably the report’s most disappointing.  
‘The Golfer’
The Golfer was the cover name of a police officer who told Megrahi’s then legal team that key items of evidence had been manipulated to fit the prosecution case.

Subsequent submissions to the SCCRC by the lawyers, MacKechnie & Associates, highlighted anomalies in police documentation, which appeared to support these claims. (…)
The Commission did not consider the documentary anomalies to be sinister: while some of the allegations made in the submissions were based upon information said to have been provided by the Golfer, others were based purely on perceived irregularities in the recorded chain of evidence. The Commission’s approach to the latter was that in any police enquiry, let alone one as large scale and complex as the present one, human error is inevitable. Although apparent omissions, inconsistencies or mistakes in productions records may, after a long period of time, appear difficult to explain, or even suspicious, in the Commission’s view they do not, in themselves, support allegations of impropriety against those involved in the investigation.
The police will be relieved by the report’s conclusions. That relief won’t be shared by the Crown Office, which the SCCRC has left with some important questions to answer. (…)
Megrahi himself
Before referring Megrahi’s conviction to the appeal court, the SCCRC had to be satisfied that, regardless of the weaknesses in the Crown case, there was not overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

In practice this meant exploring the issues that would have been raised during cross-examination, if he had opted to give evidence.
These included his relationship with the JSO, his use of a false passport, large payments into his Swiss bank account and lies he had told in a US television interview. The Commission conducted lengthy interviews with Megrahi and studied 37 of his precognition statements.  
The report says: while at no time did the applicant admit that he was a “member” of [the JSO], in the Commission’s view he was so closely associated with it as to amount to the same thing … It is important to bear in mind in any assessment of the applicant’s accounts that each of them was given in English rather than in his native tongue. It is obvious … that on occasions the applicant had difficulty expressing himself clearly. Caution is therefore required in analysing his accounts … On the other hand, the applicant speaks English relatively well, having previously studied the subject in Cardiff, and he did not request the assistance of an interpreter at any stage in his interview with the Commission. In these circumstances the Commission does not consider the inconsistencies in his accounts are merely the result of communication difficulties … In particular, the Commission believes that there was a real risk that the trial court would have viewed his explanations for his movements on 20 and 21 December 1988, and his use of the [false] Abdusamad passport on that occasion, as weak or unconvincing.

It concluded: The Commission has also considered whether, notwithstanding its conclusion that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, the entirety of the evidence considered by it points irrefutably to the applicant’s guilt. The Commission’s conclusion is that it does not.

Megrahi insists that he had nothing to hide from the SCCRC and that the inconsistencies in his accounts are all innocent. While he disputes some of its conclusions he has made clear that he is happy for them to be made public.

Crown Office runs out of arguments

[This is the heading over an item posted this morning on John Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury website. It reads as follows:]

In response to an interview with me about the SCCRC report’s findings, the Crown Office issued a quite remarkable statement to BBC Radio Scotland’s Newsdrive programme. You can listen to the statement here for the next seven days (it appears at around 1:15:50). It goes like this:

The former Libyan regime, according to the new Libyan government, was responsible for the atrocity and Megrahi played a part along with others.

The case against Abdelbaset is now so shot through, that the Crown Office has to fall back on the (largely equivocal) claims of a selection of Gadafy regime defectors and the former head of a CIA-backed anti-Gadafy faction, none of whom has produce a shred of evidence of the old regime’s involvement, let alone Abdelbaset’s.  I wrote a detailed article on this subject last month.

The Crown Office conveniently ignores the fact that one prominent member of the regime, Mohamed al-Alagi, who now has responsibility for human rights, has publicly stated that Abdelbaset is innocent.

Report fails to address crucial evidence

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton in today’s edition of The Herald.  It reads in part:]

The 821-page SCCRC report is impressively detailed and argued, but important areas of evidence remain untouched and it's clear the commission missed important facts that strengthen Megrahi's claims of innocence.
The most notable is the failure to consider evidence from the three airports that, according to the Crown, the Lockerbie bomb passed through: Luqa in Malta, Frankfurt and Heathrow.
The Crown case relied on documents from Frankfurt, which seemed to show that an unaccompanied bag was transferred from an inbound Air Malta flight to Pan Am 103's Heathrow feeder flight.
Evidence from Malta suggests this was unlikely, and there was also evidence from Heathrow, not available to the trial court, suggesting that the bomb was loaded onto PA103 before the feeder flight arrived.
The FBI played a big role in the investigation, yet the only FBI files to which the commission had access were the ones held by the Crown Office. During its four-year review the commission only interviewed one US investigator, former CIA agent Robert Baer, and failed to conduct any investigations in Germany, home of the Palestinian cell who were the original suspects in the bombing.
The report's 24 volumes of appendices contain some important information, which the commission failed to comment upon. For example, a police report concerning possible reward payments to star witness Tony Gauci also states that he gave 23 statements and was visited by the police more than 50 times. Only 19 statements were disclosed to Megrahi's lawyers and the details of most meetings have never been revealed.
The biggest omission concerns the key forensic evidence that convicted Megrahi: a piece of circuit board alleged to be from one of 20 timing devices supplied to Libya. Last month the biography Megrahi: You Are My Jury, revealed that a metallic coating ruled it out as part of one of those timers. A supplementary report noted the discrepancy but said it was not "significant". 


[Another article by John Ashton in the same newspaper headlined "The other prime suspect and doubts over conviction" can be read here (and here); and a report by Lucy Adams headlined "Lockerbie trial QC criticized" can be read here (and here). The QC in question is Colin Boyd (Lord Boyd of Duncansby) who was Lord Advocate at the time of the Zeist trial. The criticism is as follows:]
In its 821-page report, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) criticises Lord Boyd for his handling of CIA cables, referring to Abdul Majid Giaka, an alleged double agent who was a Crown witness. Giaka identified Megrahi as a member of Libyan intelligence, but his subsequent evidence was rejected following revelations in the US intelligence agency's much-redacted cables that he had demanded and received reward money.
Lord Boyd originally told the trial there was no need for disclosure.
However, the SCCRC said it was "difficult to understand" his assurances on August 22, 2000, that there was "nothing" within the documents relating to Lockerbie or the bombing which could "in any way impinge" on Giaka's credibility. It added: "The matter is all the more serious given that part of the reason for viewing the cables on 1 June, 2000, was precisely in order to assess whether information behind the redacted sections reflected upon Majid's credibility."
The Crown subsequently shared some of the redacted cables after demands from the defence. 

[I have previously written about this utterly disgraceful episode in an article published in The Scotsman on 23 July 2007. Today's edition of that newspaper contains a report headlined Lockerbie: Fresh plea to release Lockerbie dossier as 6 key doubts emerge.]


Tuesday, 13 March 2012

Crown Office 'threatened with prosecution over Lockerbie documents delay'

[This is the headline over a report published this afternoon on the BBC News website.  It reads in part:]

The Crown Office was threatened with prosecution over delays in handing over key documents about the Lockerbie bombing, it has been claimed.
The Herald newspaper says the warning came from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) during its investigation into a possible miscarriage of justice in the case.
The Crown Office, which is responsible for preparing prosecutions in Scots courts, said the SCCRC had noted that its responses were often detailed and helpful. (…)
The Herald article suggests that the commission faced a struggle to obtain documentation from the Crown Office during its investigation.
It is understood that one request for papers was not answered for more than a year, and that the SCCRC warned the Crown Office it would take legal action.
The author of a recently-published book about the Lockerbie case, John Ashton, said the revelations would cause embarrassment for the Crown Office.
"This is the first time the extent to which the Crown Office has held back evidence has been revealed," he told BBC Radio Scotland.
"Here we have a detailed account of what the Crown told the commission when the commission was trying to get an explanation for why documents were being withheld from Megrahi's defence."
He said the Crown had a duty to disclose these documents - and claimed that if they had done so, Megrahi would have walked free.
"This is really a scandal, and the Crown must be held accountable for it," he said.
Mr Ashton was asked about claims that payments were made to the key prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who identified Megrahi as a man who bought clothes which were later found in the suitcase which had contained the bomb.
These payments were not made until after the conclusion of Megrahi's first appeal in Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands in 2002.
Mr Ashton said: "Mr Gauci, the witness in question, knew that rewards were on offer. He'd asked the police about them and he was under the influence of his brother, who was nagging the police, it seems, regularly about this” he said.
He said that was just one of seven pieces of evidence which were not disclosed to the defence team.
"I'm clear that if that evidence had been disclosed to Mr Megrahi's lawyers, it's very unlikely that he would have been convicted," he said.

Lockerbie Revealed: extracts and analysis

Extracts from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's Statement of Reasons in the Megrahi case, and analysis by John Ashton, can be read here on the heraldscotland.com website.

Lockerbie Revealed: The secret report that damns Scottish justice

[This is the headline over the lead story by Lucy Adams in today’s edition of The Herald.  The following are just a few paragraphs from the long article:]

A damning secret report has revealed the flawed handling of the Lockerbie case by Scottish prosecutors and the key documents not disclosed to the defence team which could have cleared the Libyan convicted of the atrocity.

The full 821-page Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) dossier, which has been seen by The Herald, uncovers serious discrepancies in the Crown Office's reasons for not disclosing vital information.
The Herald can reveal the commission – whose job it is to review cases post-appeal and investigate whether a miscarriage of justice may have occurred – even wrote to the Crown warning it would take legal action if the prosecution did not hand over important documents and speed up information sharing.
The SCCRC rejected many of the defence team's submissions but upheld six different grounds which could have constituted a miscarriage of justice.
The Crown failed to disclose seven key items of evidence that led to the Lockerbie case being referred back for a fresh appeal.
The SCCRC made clear that, had such information been shared with the defence, the result of the trial could have been different. (…)
Robert Black, QC, one of the architects of the Camp Zeist trial, said: "I don't think there could possibly have been a guilty verdict if the Crown had disclosed to the defence all the material they had in their possession and they were obliged to disclose, even as the law on disclosure stood in 2000/01.
"Why didn't the Crown disclose? Was it because they convinced themselves getting a guilty verdict was more important than obeying 'technical' rules – after all, this was a terrorism case?
"The law about disclosure was clarified after the Zeist trial. But even in 2000/01 the law as it stood would have required the Crown to disclose all the material they withheld. I am delighted The Herald is unveiling this information."
[In an accompanying article headed Six key points that cast doubt on Megrahi's guilt, John Ashton discloses the six grounds on which the SCCRC concluded that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice. Another short article is headlined Main players: The people who were key to the storyAn editorial in the same newspaper headed Lockerbie: inching closer to the truth contains the following:]


This newspaper has taken a close interest in the case over many years and has revealed a number of significant developments (…) In consequence, we have consistently called for publication of the SCCRC report and for a public inquiry into the case. Having seen the report, we are now further convinced that publication and investigation are necessary if justice is to be served and the Scottish legal system is to retain public confidence.
It must be of serious concern that the Crown not only failed to share significant information with the defence leading up to the trial in 2000 at Camp Zeist in The Netherlands but also subsequently delayed providing the SCCRC with documents and then said it did not hold certain records. (…)
 It is increasingly difficult to argue the report should be withheld to comply with data protection law and the Scottish Government should push for permission to publish in the interest of shedding light on a conviction that, far from closing the case on Britain's worst terrorist atrocity, has, with the passage of time and the growing volume of revelations, raised questions about the integrity of Scottish justice.
Taking account of our disclosures today and tomorrow, the case for a public inquiry has become even more compelling.

[John Ashton's post "The Herald reveals SCCRC report contents" on his website Megrahi: You are my Jury can be read here.]

Monday, 12 March 2012

A Lockerbie nightmare that keeps coming back

[This is the headline over a report published today in the Maltese newspaper The Times.  It reads in part:]

Lockerbie is a nightmare Dennis Vella wants to forget but, more than two decades after Pan Am flight 103 blew up over the Scottish town, the bad dream keeps resurfacing.

Mr Vella, 60, was a manager of the Valletta-based sales office of Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta at the time of the Lockerbie bombing. His desk was located opposite that of Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the second Libyan man accused of the bombing but who was acquitted by an international court. [RB: the court was a Scottish, not an international, one even though it sat in the Netherlands.]

Mr Vella speaks highly of Mr Fhimah. “He was a gentleman and a good office friend.”

Despite being described as a computer expert by investigators, he adds, Mr Fhimah never seemed like a tech-savvy individual. “He used to ask me to input the passenger lists on the computer.”

But it is the latest instalment of the Lockerbie saga involving the alleged escapades in Malta of Mr Fhimah and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan man convicted of the bombing, that prompts Mr Vella to speak out.

A news report featured by the BBC last week purported to reveal how the two Libyan men had Maltese girlfriends whom they met regularly at the now defunct Central Hotel in Mosta.

It transpired that the news was not new and details of the clandestine relationship between the two Libyan men and their Maltese girlfriends had already featured in official documents published in the book Lockerbie: Qabel Il-Verdett by journalist Joe Mifsud 12 years ago.

The girls were reported to have worked with Libyan Arab Airlines and it is this that Mr Vella feels should be corrected not to shed a bad light on the female employees who worked for him.

“There were only a handful of women who worked at the Libyan Arab Airlines head office and sales office in Malta and they were all decent and definitely never had any relationship with Fhimah or Megrahi,” he insisted.

The two women might have been employed as air hostesses and could have been based in Libya or else might have worked with other Libyan companies, he added. “If this is the case I would not know them but they definitely did not work for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.”

Mr Vella said Lockerbie cost him numerous sleepless nights as British and Maltese investigators questioned him and other office workers in the aftermath of the bombing.

“It is already horrible to think of all those dead people but in the years that followed we kept being questioned by investigators about Fhima and Megrahi. Lockerbie would not go away. We were dragged into the affair but we were only trying to earn a living with the airline.”

Mr Vella, who worked for more than 15 years with Libyan Arab Airlines, said Mr al-Megrahi was never employed by the airline, although he did not know whether the Libyan Embassy had listed him as a company employee. (…) [RB: Mr Megrahi was employed by Libyan Arab Airlines and eventually became their head of security.  However, it appears that he was never stationed in Malta.]

“I only saw him once or twice when he came to buy an airline ticket and Fhimah never mentioned his name to me,” Mr Vella said of Mr al-Megrahi.

This is as far as Mr Vella goes when speaking about Mr al-Megrahi, the man some believe was wrongly convicted of the bombing.

Housekeeping announcement

When this blog is opened, it appears that now only the most recent post comes up on the opening page, rather than the six or eight posts that previously appeared. I did nothing to alter the old system and the "tools" provided to bloggers do not appear to allow me to restore it. However, readers can get access to posts other than the most recent one by clicking on "Older Posts" immediately beneath the most recent post. Apologies for the inconvenience.

[No sooner had I posted this item than one earlier post appeared along with it on the opening page. "Older Posts" now, of course, appears beneath the bottom post on the page. Gremlins (or authorial stupidity)?]