Call to clear up Lockerbie doubt

[This is the headline over a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2005. It reads in part:]

Lord Advocate Colin Boyd has asked one of his predecessors to clarify an apparent attack he made on a key witness in the Lockerbie trial.

Remarks by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who issued the indictment against two Libyans charged with the 1988 bombing, were reported in a Sunday newspaper.

Lord Fraser said he had attempted to correct the "erroneous interpretation" of his views on Tony Gauci's evidence.

He said he had written to Mr Boyd expressing his dismay over it. (...)

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted of smuggling a bomb aboard the New York-bound flight on 21 December, 1988.

The former Libyan intelligence officer was found guilty after a trial by a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted.

On Friday, Mr Boyd said that remarks attributed to Lord Fraser expressed doubts about Mr Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing to Megrahi which was used to pack the bomb suitcase.

Mr Boyd said: "It was Lord Fraser who, as Lord Advocate, initiated the Lockerbie prosecution.

"At no stage, then or since, has he conveyed any reservation about any aspect of the prosecution to those who worked on the case, or to anyone in the prosecution service."

The lord advocate said that the position of the Crown both before and after Lord Fraser left office in 1992 had always been that Tony Gauci was a reliable and credible witness.

He said that the three High Court judges who saw Mr Gauci giving evidence said that they found him entirely credible.

Lord Fraser said: "I have already told the Crown Agent in two telephone calls that I have no aspersions to cast on Tony Gauci's evidence."

"Indeed such was the thoroughness of the investigation and the way in which it developed that I probably would place greater emphasis and credibility on Mr Gauci's evidence than any of my successors as lord advocate."

He added: "As the present lord advocate wholly correctly asserts, however, any view of mine is essentially irrelevant. What matters is the judgment of the court.

"Three of Scotland's High Court judges heard him give evidence properly subject to cross-examination and they were specific in their conclusion that he was entirely credible."

Lockerbie: the politicization of justice

[This is the heading over an article by Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of Rai al-Youm, published on his website on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

The British police have decided to reopen the investigation into the 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing on the pretext that there are new lines of inquiry and new names to investigate. On the basis of past experience, this suggests that we are about to witness a new bout of manipulation and blackmail aimed at more than one party and more than one state such as Libya, Iran and Syria. That justice will once more be politicized.

Abd-al-Basit al-Meqrahi demanded a retrial for years through his lawyers as there was irrefutable evidence of his innocence. But all his pleas were rejected and he was even forced to give up his lst appeal after he was faced with the ugly dilemma of choosing between going ahead with the appeal and remaining in jail or dropping it and returning to Tripoli to spend his last days with his family and children.

In December 2007, I went to Glasgow to meet Abd-al-Basit Al-Meqrahi, the main and only defendant in the Lockerbie bombing. He was a regular reader of our newspaper and had telephoned me several times. I spent more than three hours with him, during which I spoke very little in an office allocated to visitors. He wept uncontrollably with anger and grief as he swore vehemently that he was innocent of this charge and that it was pinned on him unfairly and wrongfully. He also stressed that he would not have hesitated for a single minute to admit openly that he had committed the crime if he had done it and would have then committed suicide out of shame.

I found myself before a man who bore the bitterness that only men with profound dignity have. This was particularly evident when he presented me with the prosecution's file, which contained full pages blacked out with ink for security reasons. The first time he appealed before the Scottish court was in 2002 but it was turned down when Dr Hans Köchler, the UN observer who attended the session said it was a clear act of aborting justice. Two new pieces of evidence appeared in 2007 confirming that the evidence was tampered with. The first was in September when Engineer Ulrich Lumpert, the Swiss eyewitness in the case, admitted before the Zurich policy officers that he lied about the detonators used in the bombing. One month later, in October of the same year, Al-Meqrahi's lawyers found out that a second eyewitness, the Maltese Tony Gauci, was paid 3 million US dollars by the American and British intelligence services to say that Al-Meqrahi bought the children's clothes which were wrapped around the bomb in the suitcase from his shop in Valetta (Malta's capital). This principal eyewitness now lives in Australia having emigrated there and become very rich.

Al-Meqrahi's release in August uncovered further proof of the "politicization" of justice. It emerged that there was a lot of haggling behind the scenes to barter the release of a sick man suffering from prostrate cancer with only three months to live in exchange for massive oil deals for British companies. The latter received billions of dollars in return for both three months of freedom for a man on his death bed and for enabling his country's authorities to score a media victory as they celebrated 40 years of seizing power.

Libya has yielded to this blackmail twice. Firstly when its authorities extradited Al-Meqrahi and paid out $3 billion in compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims, in addition to legal fees totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, and secondly when it gave up its programmes for weapons of mass destruction [WMD] giving the "two heroes" of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Tony Blair and George Bush, a diplomatic victory when their claims concerning Iraq's WMDs were proved to be lies.

By paying out the money and destroying their nuclear, chemical and biological equipment, the Libyan authorities may have bought their freedom and lifted the unfair blockade imposed on them, but one thing is certain – they now face a new act of blackmail. The British police who are now to reopen the investigation of the Lockerbie case want to question eight other people, which means we are now facing a new and costly legal battle. The more significant point however, is the timing of the announcement about reopening the investigations. It has coincided both with the exacerbated US/Israel crisis with Iran over its refusal to hand over its enriched uranium to Russia and France, as well as the joint air exercises conducted by the USA and Israel, which included attacking potential nuclear targets and supplying bombers with fuel in midair.

We are facing a new chapter of a dirty intelligence game to prepare for a new war in the region. The victims will be hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the aim will be the same ones behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, namely, to secure Israel and oil sources and keeping the latter under US hegemony.

Abd-al-Basit Al-Meqrahi's name might disappear soon from the front pages because of his inevitable death from the prostrate cancer which has spread to all his body organs; but other names might appear soon, some of them Syrian, others Palestinian, and thirdly Libyan. A famous television channel is currently preparing a documentary proving that Iran, Syria, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command [PFLP-GC] were involved in the American "Pan Am" plane bombing over Lockerbie to avenge the American bombing of an Iranian civilian plane over the Gulf one year before. The painful thing is that Al-Meqrahi, with whom I sympathize very much and whom it is difficult for me to doubt the sincerity of his tears, will not be alive to witness his own vindication. His only consolation is that he will spend his last days with his sick mother (80 years old) and his children – he told me repeatedly that he was saddened that they grew up without him enjoying their childhood and taking them to school like other fathers.

Clean-up

Martin Rowson’s cartoon in The Guardian on this date in 2009:

What do you say, Mr Linklater?

[What follows is the text of a letter to the editor of The Times by Len Murray (a committee member of Justice for Megrahi who has been described by a Scottish High Court judge as the most distinguished pleader of his generation) following Magnus Linklater’s most recent Lockerbie article in that newspaper. As with James Robertson’s letter, it has not been selected for publication:]

Why does Magnus Linklater insist in keeping his head buried in the sands of Libya?  Why does he not face up to the facts of the scandalous conviction of Abdul Basset Al-Megrahi?

The judges found that the unaccompanied suitcase containing the bomb was put on a flight to Frankfurt from Malta when there was not even a scintilla of evidence to justify that finding.  What made that finding worse (if that were possible) was the fact that the records at Luqa Airport accounted for every single piece of luggage and there was none which was unaccompanied.

Their Lordships also held also that this same suitcase managed to make its way, still unaccompanied, from Frankfurt to Heathrow when there was no adequate evidence to justify that conclusion.

Gauci, without whom the Crown had no case, never positively identified Megrahi as the purchaser of the clothing wrapped around the bomb.  His earlier descriptions of the purchaser were so far out in age, height and colouring that they surely constituted proof that Megrahi was NOT the purchaser.

What do you say, Mr Linklater, about the $2 million dollars paid to Gauci by the CIA and which was never mentioned at the Trial?  Or the break-in at the Pan Am hangar right next door to Air Iran only 16 hours before Pan Am 103 took off?

Or what does he make of the finding that the purchase was made on 7 December when Megrahi was on Malta when the preponderance of the evidence was that the purchase was made on 23 November when he was not?

What do you say, Mr Linklater, of the subsequent discrediting of the forensic scientists who gave evidence at Megrahi’s trial?

Why was it that every single inference unfavourable to Megrahi was drawn when there were so many innocent explanations available?

These are the facts of the disgraceful conviction of Megrahi, a conviction utterly condemned by, amongst others, the UN observer at the trial.

But Mr Linklater does not stop at ignoring the facts.  He goes on to say something that is nothing short of astonishing.  He says:  “….every thread of evidence has been examined to distraction and has led nowhere.”  An astoundingly misleading assertion.  Examined where and by whom?

Certainly not the Appeal Court who have never had the opportunity of looking at Megrahi’s conviction.  The first appeal was taken on the wrong grounds and so the evidence was never examined; the second appeal was abandoned before any hearing and Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds.

The nearest the case got to a judicial tribunal was when the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission examined the conviction and referred it to the Appeal Court since they detected no fewer than six possible grounds of a miscarriage of justice.

Even some of the relatives of the victims wanted SCCR to examine the case since they are unhappy about the conviction.

These are the facts of the Megrahi case.  May I respectfully suggest to Mr Linklater that he lift his head out of the sands of Libya and face up to the truth of this national disgrace.  We of Justice for Megrahi would welcome his considerable abilities.

Why does Lockerbie rhyme with irony?

[This is the headline over an article by Michael Glackin published today by the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star. It reads as follows:]

Oh the irony. What are we to make of news last week that Scottish prosecutors suddenly want to interview two Libyans they have identified as “new suspects” in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, in which 270 people were killed? The short answer is not much. One reason is that the suspects are hardly new. Both men were of interest to the original investigation in 1991. Abdullah al-Senussi, a former Libyan intelligence chief and brother in law of Moammar Gadhafi, was convicted in absentia by a French court in 1999 after having been found guilty of involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989. How ironic is that? He is currently on death row in Tripoli for crimes committed by the Gadhafi regime.

The other suspect, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Tripoli for bomb-making. Masud was almost indicted for the Pan Am bombing in 1991, alongside Abdelbaset Ali Megrahi, the former head of security at Libyan Arab Airlines and the only person convicted of the atrocity.

Masud is also thought to have been involved in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986 frequented by American military personnel. The attack led to US airstrikes against Libya soon thereafter. Ironically, and depending on your point of view, this is what led to the bombing of Pan Am 103.

But the chances of either man appearing in a Scottish court are slim. The Tripoli-based General National Congress, backed by Islamist extremists and not recognized by the West, controls the fate of both men. It’s unlikely they will be extradited, and hard to see anyone volunteering to travel to Tripoli to interview them.

The conviction of Megrahi, who died in 2012, three years after he was released from a life sentence “on compassionate grounds,” was based on the theory that Gadhafi had ordered the bombing in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against Libya.

Gadhafi admitted responsibility in 2003, but this was always seen as an economically pragmatic move, rather than an admission of guilt. A former Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, said as far back as 2005 that the decision to accept responsibility was to “buy peace and move forward.”

Another irony is that while the authorities insist the investigation into the bombing remains “ongoing,” the Scottish judiciary recently refused a request from some of the relatives of victims to hear an appeal against Megrahi’s conviction that would have allowed new evidence to be presented in court.

The legal case against Megrahi had more holes in it than Swiss cheese. His early release from jail in 2009, after being convicted of the biggest mass murders in British history, only added to the bad smell around the entire case.

The key witness against Megrahi, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, was given a $2 million reward for his evidence by the CIA and a place in a witness-protection program. Gauci, who even the Scottish prosecutor who indicted Megrahi described as being “an apple short of a picnic,” is now understood to be living in Australia.

It’s worth remembering that in October 1988, two months before the Pan Am bombing, German police raided an apartment in Frankfurt and arrested several Palestinians. The raid unearthed explosives, weapons and, crucially, a number of radio cassette recorders similar to the one used to detonate the Pan Am 103 bomb. Most of the Palestinians were members of the Syrian-controlled Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, headed by Ahmad Jibril, a Palestinian former Syrian Army officer. Jibril has spent recent years defending the regime of President Bashar Assad. He was reported to have been killed in August although this has since been denied.

Much of the evidence indicates Jibril and the PFLP-GC carried out the bombing on behalf of Iran and Syria to avenge the July 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian commercial airliner by a US warship, killing 290 people. This is backed up by evidence from the US Defense Intelligence Agency showing that the PFLP-GC was paid $1 million to carry out the bombing. The DIA also claimed that Jibril was given a down payment of $100,000 in Damascus by Iran’s then-ambassador to Syria, Mohammad Hussan Akhari.

Many believe then-Syrian President Hafez Assad’s support for the U.S.-led alliance to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 meant Syria’s role in the bombing was swept under the carpet. It is worth pointing out that Megrahi was not formally indicted by the United States and the United Kingdom until November 1991.

But the PFLP-GC is not the only non-Libyan suspect. The Frankfurt raid also revealed compelling evidence against Muhammad Abu Talib, a former leader of the Palestine People’s Struggle Front. Oddly enough Talib was released from a life sentence he was serving in Sweden for involvement in bomb attacks weeks after Megrahi’s release in 2009.

Finally, given that the authorities remain keen to pursue the Libyan angle, it is odd they spent so little time interviewing Gadhafi’s former spymaster Moussa Koussa when he fled to London as the regime was collapsing in 2011. Koussa, who in the words of one British government official was “up to his neck” in the bombing, spent just three days in London and then flew on to Qatar, where he remains, living on assets that were quietly unfrozen by the West around the same time. Oh the irony.

Mandela presses for neutral-nation trial of Lockerbie suspects

[This is the headline over a report published in The New York Times on this date in 1997. It reads in part:]

President Nelson Mandela of South Africa pressed Britain today to let two Libyans accused of blowing up an airliner over Scotland stand trial in a neutral country.

Justice cannot be done if Britain insists on trying the suspects in Britain or the United States, he said at a news conference during a meeting of Commonwealth leaders here.

Mr Mandela set off controversy this week by visiting Libya en route to Scotland to support Libya's plan for the two men to stand trial in a neutral country.

Britain and the United States are demanding the extradition of the pair, suspected of killing 270 people in the bombing of a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Libya for more than four years to force compliance.

Mr Mandela said he had not raised the matter with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, but he added: ''I have never thought in dealing with this question that it is correct for any particular country to be the complainant, the prosecutor and the judge at the same time. Justice cannot be said to be done in that situation.''

He noted that British relatives of Lockerbie victims backed a trial in a neutral country, as do some American relatives, as well as the Organization of African Unity, the Arab League, the Islamic Conference and the Nonaligned Movement.

British officials were adamant that there was no question of accepting the Mandela proposal, even if a foreign court abided by Scottish law. ''We believe they should be brought to justice here or in the United States,'' one said.

He said the Government took the views of the relatives seriously but saw ''formidable obstacles'' to a trial in a neutral country. The International Court of Justice in The Hague has been mentioned as one possibility.

It would be necessary for the British Parliament to pass primary legislation, and any third country would struggle to find the expertise in Scottish law needed at short notice to permit a meaningful trial, the officials said.

They said Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had underlined Britain's determination to insure a free trial by inviting representatives of African and Arab countries to come to Scotland to study its legal system and observe the trial.

''We wholly reject any suggestion that it would be an unfair trial,'' Mr Cook told ITN news on Friday. ''Scotland was where the murders took place. Scotland is the place where the trial should happen.''

But Mr Cook will come under further pressure when he meets Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims, on Sunday. ''I will be telling Mr Cook that we should have a trial in a third country under Scots law and that he has been badly advised in his opposition to this,'' Mr Swire told The Scotsman newspaper.

[What follows is an excerpt from an account that I wrote several years ago about the UK Government’s objections to my neutral venue proposal:]

On my return to the United Kingdom [from Libya in January 1994] I submitted the relevant documents [about my neutral venue proposal and Libyan agreement to it] to the Foreign Office in London and the Crown Office (the headquarters of the Scottish prosecution service) in Edinburgh.  Their immediate response was that this scheme was impossible, impracticable and inherently undesirable, with the clear implication that Professor Black must have taken leave of what few senses nature had endowed him with. That remained the attitude of successive Lord Advocates and Foreign Secretaries for four years and seven months.  During this period the British government's stance remained consistent: United Nations Security Council Resolutions placed upon the government of Libya a binding international legal obligation to hand over the accused for trial to the UK or the US authorities.  Nothing else would do.  If Libyan law did not currently permit the extradition of its own nationals to stand trial overseas, then Libya would simply have to alter its law (and, if necessary, its Constitution) to enable it to fulfil its international duty.

Over the years British government sources put forward six specific objections to my proposal. 

(...)

Objection 2

There would be formidable technical difficulties in implementing the proposal to set up a non-jury court applying Scottish criminal law and procedure but sitting outside Scotland, for example in the Netherlands.

I had always accepted that my proposal would involve the necessity of amending the law. As the law stood, a Scottish High Court judge had no authority to preside over a sitting of the court anywhere outside Scotland.  Nor, assuming the trial resulted in a conviction, were Scottish prison governors entitled to incarcerate in their institutions persons other than those committed by the warrant of a duly-constituted UK court.  However, I contended that it was not beyond the competence, capabilities and expertise of Scottish parliamentary draftsmen, in consultation with the Crown Office (the body responsible for the running of the Scottish criminal prosecution system) and the officials of The Scottish Office Home Department’s Criminal Justice Division (the Government Department then responsible for criminal law and policy in Scotland) speedily to draft primary or secondary legislation constituting such a court and providing that it should apply all the rules of evidence and procedure applicable to High Court trials in Scotland, save only those relating to the presence and functions of the jury.  I also argued that, if such legislation were promoted, it would be unlikely to meet with serious opposition in either House of Parliament; and that both the United Nations and the Netherlands would be willing to cooperate if such a court were established.  That I was right about all these matters can be seen from the ease with which, in 1998, the Scottish Court in the Netherlands was eventually set up.

Libya may refuse to extradite Lockerbie suspects

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

Two men named by the Crown Office as suspects in the Lockerbie bombing would not be allowed to stand trial outside Libya, officials in Tripoli have indicated.

Earlier this month Nicola Sturgeon signalled her support for Abdullah al-Senussi and Mohammed Abouajela Masud to face justice in this country for the 1988 attack that led to the loss of 270 lives.

The pair — a former spy chief of the Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi and an explosives expert — are being held in a Tripoli prison for crimes committed during Libya’s 2011 revolution, respectively facing the death penalty and 10 years in prison.

As head of the Libyan external security service, Senussi is thought to have recruited Abdelbaset al- Megrahi, the only person so far convicted for Britain’s worst terrorist attack after Libya agreed to hand him over for trial. “Gadaffi sent Megrahi to be judged abroad but that was against the law because there was no agreement between our countries for extradition,” Jamal Zubia, head of the foreign media department in Tripoli, told The Sunday Times.

“I don’t think it would happen again. What Gadaffi did was shameful but now we must respect our laws and our state.”

Scottish investigators first tried to interview the men, along with six others, in 2009 but their request was rejected by Gadaffi. Scottish authorities have sent a new request to quiz the suspects. However, they have reportedly directed this to the internationally recognised parliament now based in the east of Libya, which has no power in the capital Tripoli — controlled by rival institutions for more than a year.

“The problem is that the Scottish court sent their demand to Tobruk, which shows they know nothing about Libya because they don’t realise the government is in Tripoli,” added Zubia. “They will be waiting maybe for ever for a reply from Tobruk because they can’t give permission for anyone to come to Tripoli and meet these prisoners.”

The Tripoli-based minister of justice, Mustafa al-Glaib, confirmed that no official request had been received by authorities in the capital. “What is circulating is media reports only. Until this time, we don’t even know for sure the names of the Libyans concerned, what the accusations are or what evidence there is against them,” he said.

“We will act according to Libyan law and we will not let the Libyan state be violated.”

The head of investigations for Libya’s general prosecutor’s office, Sadiq al-Sour, said if the UK or US made a request that was acceptable within Libyan law, it would be considered.

Senussi was given the death penalty on July 28 for a list of crimes including the killing of protestors and the distribution of weapons. The former head of a technical branch of Gadaffi’s external security agency, Masud is facing a 10-year sentence for arming vehicles with explosives and transferring these to Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi, the birthplace of the 2011 revolution.

Both men are appealing against the sentences, given in a trial that was criticised for failing to meet international fair trial standards. Legal teams say the judgment on the appeals by Libya’s supreme court could take anything from two months to two years.

Ibrahim Aboisha, one of Senussi’s lawyers, said he had only heard about the renewed interest in the Lockerbie case from the media. “I have not discussed any pre-revolution matters with my client and I can’t just go straight to him and ask him about Lockerbie as it could come as a big shock,” he said. “I would first need to see any official requests and discuss the matter with his family.”

Senussi, who has appeared gaunt at the court hearings, has been held in solitary confinement since his extradition from Mauritania in 2012.

Masud’s lawyer declined to talk to the press, saying that he was concerned the West might have a hidden agenda in reopening the Lockerbie case.

Access to either Senussi or Masud is likely to be challenging for UK or US investigators. Both men are held in Tripoli’s high-security Hadba prison, along with other senior officials from the former regime, and Gadaffi’s playboy footballer son Saadi.

Lawyers, relatives, human rights organisations and the UN have all reported difficulties with visiting high-profile prisoners in the facility. Several inmates have made allegations of mistreatment, and video footage leaked on the internet earlier this year showed the former dictator’s son Saadi being tortured.

Why the Lockerbie families deserve an inquiry

[This is the headline over an editorial published in The Sunday Telegraph on this date in 2009. It reads as follows:]

Telegraph View There are strong grounds for a thorough and independent investigation into Britain's worst terrorist atrocity

Lockerbie is a name burned into the consciousness of the British public. Like Omagh and other places associated with atrocious terrorist outrages, it retains a grim resonance, more than 20 years after this vicious mass murder that saw 270 innocent people, including 51 British citizens, subjected to an exceptionally cruel death. To this day it remains the worst act of terrorism perpetrated on British soil. For the victims' families it is a wound that can never heal. The trauma would be alleviated, however, if the bereaved and the wider public could confidently feel that the circumstances had been investigated to the core and the truth established.

Today, therefore, we are proud to support the campaign being launched by relations of the victims to demand an independent inquiry into who ordered and carried out the bombing. This weekend, the families have written to Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, requesting such a step. The demand is well founded: the Crown Office, the prosecuting authority in Scotland, is already pursuing fresh inquiries, following the withdrawal of a second appeal by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, in order to secure his release.

Particularly welcome is the assurance by Scottish authorities that this is no token gesture, but a thorough investigation, focusing partly on forensic evidence and with a full-time team of detectives assigned to it. The fact that the Scottish judiciary had given Megrahi permission to appeal for a second time testifies that experienced judges believed there was merit in further consideration of the case. This businesslike response by prosecutors and police requires to be supported by the Government ordering an independent inquiry.

Virtually nobody believes that the true facts about the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 have been revealed. Alongside the inevitable conspiracy theories, there are substantive allegations regarding possible Iranian and Palestinian involvement that have never been properly investigated, not to mention a suspicious break-in that occurred at Heathrow Airport 17 hours before Flight 103 took off from there.

Potential scrutiny of such evidence was aborted by Megrahi's abandonment of his appeal. An independent inquiry would effectively test his appeal in absentia.

It would also go some way to restoring the reputations of the Scottish and British justice systems. The decision taken by the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, to release Megrahi from prison on compassionate grounds and allow him to return to Libya, was the wrong one. The role of the British Government – the murky rumours of oil-related deals – was shameful. American officials remain angry at how the matter was handled.

If the authorities had investigated the case more rigorously and placed all the evidence in the public domain, an inquiry would not now be necessary. Considering the history of obfuscation surrounding the Lockerbie case, however, the details must be brought into the light of day. Nobody is asking for an open-ended, Bloody Sunday-style inquiry; but a full, detailed and public investigation of all the available evidence is now essential, if any kind of closure is to be achieved for the victims' families and the country.

Profoundly and wilfully mistaken

Following Magnus Linklater’s most recent Lockerbie article in The Times, James Robertson (in my view Scotland’s most distinguished living novelist, and a Justice for Megrahi stalwart) was moved to pen a letter to the editor. Since The Times has not published the letter, I reproduce it here, with James Robertson’s permission:]

21 October 2015

Sir

Magnus Linklater asserts, once again, that those who believe the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing to be unsound are ‘conspiracy theorists’, and that they should ‘accept that the evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya rather than the myriad of misty theories and unsupported allegations on which their case has rested’. It is Mr Linklater who is, once again, profoundly and wilfully mistaken.

He states that last week the Crown Office announced that it had ‘identified two further suspects, and was asking the government in Tripoli to allow it access to them in prison’. This identification appears to have come, not from any ‘long and dogged investigation’ by the Scottish police or Crown Office, but from information contained in the recent American television documentary made by Ken Dornstein, whose brother David was killed at Lockerbie. Mr Dornstein’s motivation in wanting to find out who murdered his brother cannot be questioned, but whether he has uncovered any significant new evidence remains to be seen.

There remain, too, the difficulties of interviewing these men given the current chaotic situation in Libya. The Crown Office has requested the Attorney General of Libya to allow it access to them, but they are held, not by the administration based in Tobruk and recognised by the UK, but by the National Salvation administration based in Tripoli. Those of us who seek justice for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as well as for the families of the victims of Lockerbie would welcome the case being re-opened in a court of law: the prospects of this happening as a result of these latest developments are remote indeed.

Elsewhere, Mr Dornstein has been quoted as saying of one of the suspects, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, that, ‘figuring out simply that he existed would solve many of the unanswered questions to the bombing because he was attached to Megrahi according to the best information there was, including at the airport in Malta on the day that the bomb was said to have been infiltrated into the baggage system and ultimately on to Flight 103.’ If this is representative of the quality of the ‘new’ evidence, it is deeply disappointing. It simply reinforces an already discredited line of reasoning, albeit one which the court at Camp Zeist accepted,which insists – despite compelling evidence to the contrary – that the bomb began its journey in Malta and not at Heathrow, that the timer used to detonate the bomb was ‘similar in all respects’ to timers in Libyan hands, that there was no dubiety about the identification of Megrahi as purchaser, in a Malta shop, of clothes later retrieved from the bomb suitcase, and so on.

Despite what Mr Linklater avers, the arguments which oppose this version of events have ‘followed the evidence’ and are indeed based on ‘hard facts’. To dismiss the serious concerns about the way in which the case against Megrahi was prosecuted is to accept that the Scottish justice system operated impeccably throughout, and is beyond reproach. The ‘hard facts’ suggest the very opposite.

It is time, Mr Linklater writes, to ‘extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long.’ There is a straightforward way of doing that: allow all the evidence to be heard by an appeal court or by a properly constituted inquiry.

James Robertson

Opaque and secretive

[Today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph contains a letter from Dr Jim Swire headlined A fair Lockerbie trial. It reads as follows:]

When I met the Libyan attorney general in 1991 following the indictments of two Libyans over the Lockerbie bombing, he was incensed because the West frustrated his attempts to put them on trial there by refusing to share the evidence against them. No one outside Libya trusted the Gaddafi regime’s justice system.

Like America and Britain, Libya was a signatory to the International Civil Aviation Organisation of the UN, which provided for those accused of crimes against civil aircraft to be tried in their own countries. The only reachable solution was a trial under Scots law at Zeist in Holland.

With Rev John Mosey – who had also lost a daughter on the flight – I sat through all the Zeist evidence: it did not convince us that the Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, had been involved. More disturbing information relevant to that verdict has accumulated since.

Some of us now feel that we cannot trust the West’s justice system either. After the removal of Gaddafi, I visited the interim government in Tripoli in December 2011. It was determined to pin the blame for Lockerbie on the Gaddafi regime, believing that this reduced Libya’s blame as a country. It had no evidence for Libyan involvement other than the Zeist verdict.

Unfortunately the Scottish appeals system was dealt a further blow earlier this year when I and 24 other British relatives were blocked by the High Court judge Lord Carloway, sitting with two other judges, from requesting a further appeal against the Megrahi verdict. Apparently we could be considered “a mischief” by the Scottish system. That decision left Scottish law looking even more opaque and secretive than had previously been the case.

Since both Libya and the West seem to have failed to convince the world as to what really happened, after 27 years, we might have more confidence were these two new suspects to be handed over to an international body, such as a modified version of the International Criminal Court.