Megrahi campaigners welcome MSPs' decision to keep petition 'open' on Lockerbie investigation

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

A campaign group calling for an independent inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing has welcomed a decision by MSPs to keep its petition “open” and maintain a watching brief on a police inquiry into the case.

Justice for Megrahi (JfM) had claimed the findings of the Police Scotland investigation into allegations surrounding the disaster might “never see the light of day”, because the Crown Office and Lord Advocate had “already come to a view” on allegations it had made casting doubt on the conviction.

Al-Megrahi died in May 2012, three years after the Scottish Government released him from a life sentence on compassionate grounds.

JfM had written to the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland QC early in November, asking a series of questions about his intentions regarding the report of the investigation – named Operation Sandwood – and the appointment of an independent counsel to consider it.

Mulholland had named the Crown Office point of contact as crown agent and chief executive Catherine Dyer, who, he said, had “no involvement whatsoever” in the investigation into the bombing.

Retired police officer Iain McKie, a member of JfM, said yesterday: “We had sent eight questions to the Lord Advocate about how they would deal with the police report, which he failed to answer.

“The committee have now decided to ask these questions on our behalf and that’s a significant step forward.”

The group’s questions focused on the status of the “independent counsel”, their association with the Crown Office and whether they would receive the Operation Sandwood report directly from Police Scotland without any intervention from the Lord Advocate or the Crown Office.

Independent MSP John Finnie told the committee the issue was “all about process” and not personalities.

He said: “We do have the suggestion that the Crown agent is an independent person in this process, or will play a role in this process and, as we’ve seen from the letters, I think any reasonable judgment would say that that’s not necessarily the case, given that the crown agent defended the Crown Office’s position on this in a letter of 2012.”

Finnie added: “I would like the clerk to write to the Lord Advocate with the particular questions.

“Hopefully we’ll get some response to them that would advise what further action, if any, we would need to take.”

A Crown Office spokesman told The National: “Further to the Lord Advocate’s letter of 8 May 2015 to the Justice Committee, and his letter of 24 December 2015 to Justice For Megrahi, the Lord Advocate can confirm that he has had no involvement in the appointment of Counsel undertaking this work other than to identify their criteria of independence and no previous involvement with the Lockerbie investigation.

“The counsel undertaking this work is not under the direction of the Lord Advocate.

“The Lord Advocate considers it important that any criminal allegations against persons who were representing the Crown are dealt with independently of the Crown.

“As indicated above steps have been taken to ensure this is the case.”

[RB: The eight questions referred to by Iain McKie are contained in a letter dated 5 November 2015 sent by JfM’s secretary, Robert Forrester, to the Lord Advocate. That letter is now to be found on the Scottish Parliament website (link here). It reads as follows:]

Date: 5th November 2015 

Dear Lord Advocate, 

Justice for Megrahi: Criminal Allegations: Appointment of Independent Prosecutor 

I refer to my previous letter of 24th August 2015, your response of 18th September and your recent correspondence with the Justice Committee on the above subject. 

JFM is still unclear as to your intentions in respect of any report emanating from the police ‘Operation Sandwood’ investigations. 

To assist us in our understanding we would appreciate it if you would answer the following questions. 

1. What is the status of the appointed independent Counsel? Is he or she a present or former member of Crown Office staff? Or a member of the Bar who has had no previous association with Crown Office? 
2. Who appointed the independent Counsel? If it was not the Crown Office, who was it? 
3. What are the ‘Terms of Reference’ under which the independent Counsel is working and who created them? 
4. Under whose ‘direction’ is the independent Counsel working? 
5. Will the independent Counsel receive the ‘Operation Sandwood’ report directly from the police/police QC without any intervention or comment by the LA or Crown Office and before those authorities are aware of the report’s  contents? 
6. Will the independent Counsel make a totally independent decision on the report without any input from the Crown Office? 
7. Will Crown Office have authority to reject or change any recommendation made by the independent Counsel? 
8. Will the recommendations of the independent Counsel be implemented in full and if not who will make this decision? 

We believe that answers to these questions are essential if we are to have any faith that a truly independent and objective assessment of the police report will be carried out. 

Given the importance of the legal and constitutional issues under debate we have written to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and the Convenor of the Justice Committee and have supplied them with a copy of this letter. 

We look forward to an early response.

The survival of the circuit board fragment

[What follows is taken from an item posted on this blog on this date in 2010:]

'Flaws' in key Lockerbie evidence

An investigation by BBC's Newsnight has cast doubts on the key piece of evidence which convicted the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Tests aimed at reproducing the blast appear to undermine the case's central forensic link, based on a tiny fragment identified as part of a bomb timer.

The tests suggest the fragment, which linked the attack to Megrahi, would not have survived the mid-air explosion. (...)

Newsnight has been reviewing that evidence, and has exposed serious doubts about the forensics used to identify the fragment as being part of a trigger circuit board.

The fragment was found three weeks after the attack. For months it remained unnoticed and unremarked, but eventually it was to shape the entire investigation.

The fragment was embedded in a charred piece of clothing, which was marked with a label saying it was made in Malta. (...)

Newsnight has discovered that the fragment - crucial to the conviction - was never subjected to chemical analysis or swabbing to establish whether it had in fact been involved in any explosion.

And the UN's European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, has told Newsnight that there are further doubts over the whether the fragment could have come from the trigger of the Lockerbie bomb.

He has recreated the suitcase bomb which it is said destroyed Pan Am 103, using the type of radio in which the explosive and the timer circuit board were supposedly placed, and the same kind of clothes on which the fragment was found.

In each test the timer and its circuit board were obliterated, prompting Mr Wyatt to question whether such a fragment could have survived the mid-air explosion.

He told Newsnight: "I do find it quite extraordinary and I think highly improbable and most unlikely that you would find a fragment like that - it is unbelievable.

"We carried out 20 tests, we didn't carry out 100 or 1,000, but in those 20 tests we found absolutely nothing at all - so I found it highly improbable that you would find anything like that, particularly at 10,000 feet when bits are dropping into long wet grass over hundreds of miles."

[RB: John Wyatt’s findings were later comprehensively discredited: see especially John Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury, and the comments that follow the blog item Lockerbie: 25 years on. Was the bomb really planted in Malta?]

Today's Justice Committee consideration of Megrahi petition

[What follows is from a message sent this afternoon by Justice for Megrahi’s secretary, Robert Forrester, to JfM supporters:]

Following a splendidly diplomatic contribution from John Finnie MSP, supported by Alison McInnes MSP, the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament today resolved to maintain 1370's status as open before them, and, even more importantly, in the final words of the Deputy Convener, the JC is going to write to the Lord Advocate asking him what his response is to JFM's eight specific questions surrounding the appointment of an independent prosecutor who will consider Police Scotland's final report on Operation Sandwood. These questions have remained unanswered by the Crown Office since the beginning of November 2015. The response from Chambers Street is now eagerly awaited.

Today's proceedings may be viewed by clicking on the link below.

Click on the link and go two hours and 30 minutes into the broadcast.

http://www.scottishparliament.tv/Archive/Index/19a16110-bf48-4b3d-b417-a373a49c7691?categoryId=02b0ce45-3c90-4738-9580-25467469c73b&parentCategoryClicked=False&pageNumber=1&orderByField=ScheduledStart&queryOrder=DESC

[RB: A message sent to supporters yesterday by Mr Forrester, which contains a link to the relevant committee papers, can be found here.]

The Malta connection

[The January 2016 issue of the excellent iScot magazine, which is in newsagents today, contains an article entitled “Lockerbie: the mystery shopper”, the second in a series by Dr Morag Kerr, the first of which is referred to here. The second instalment deals with the evidence from Malta that put a Libyan into the frame. It reads in part:]

A pair of men’s cheap slacks recovered from the wreckage of Pan Am 103 (...) were not only traced to the manufacturer but to the shop that sold them 2,519 miles from Lockerbie

The trousers were among the debris from Pan Am flight 103 picked up around Lockerbie in early 1989, severely blast-damaged and believed to have been packed in the suitcase with the bomb.  It took months to track “Yorkie Clothing” to an industrial estate on Malta, but once there, the firm’s stock records were a goldmine.  The size, the material and a serial number identified the trousers as having been supplied to a small local retailer on 18th November 1988.  

The shop, “Mary’s House”, was only three miles from Malta airport where the investigators believed the bomb had been smuggled on board a flight to Frankfurt.

Detectives visited the shop on 1st September 1989.  Incredibly, the proprietor Tony Gauci remembered selling the slacks to a customer.  Not only that, he listed other items sold in the same transaction, items which also corresponded to clothing found blast-damaged at Lockerbie.

Tony was a men’s outfitter, and he mainly remembered the customer’s body shape and size.  He recalled the face less well, but construction of a photofit was arranged, and he worked with an artist to produce a sketch drawing.  A local suspect was suggested by a Maltese policeman and Tony was shown his first photospread, a card with a number of photographs including one of the suspect.  He didn’t pick anyone out, so they tried again.  And again.  Over several months he was shown dozens of photographs more or less resembling his description of the customer, but he never made a confident identification.

This itself is problematic. Repeated viewings of photospreads, and the construction of photofits and artist’s impressions, are known to erode a witness’s original memory and decrease the accuracy of subsequent identifications.  There were other problems too.

The pictures were simple mug-shots, with no clue about height or build.  Tony said the man was dark-skinned, but nobody asked him how dark, or if the man was actually black.  Tony consistently put the customer at about fifty years old, but most of the pictures were of much younger men.  When he picked out a couple as “resembling” the purchaser, he also said they were “too young”.

A year passed, and it began to look as if the Gauci lead was going nowhere. Then, in late 1990, the focus of the investigation shifted from the Syrian-based PFLP-GC to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.  In January 1991 an FBI agent provided the Scottish investigators with names of known or suspected Libyan agents plus a couple of photos of one of them – Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

One of the al-Megrahi photos was incorporated into yet another photospread.  Once again Tony rejected all the pictures as “too young”, but this time the detectives didn’t leave it at that and asked him to look again and he finally indicated Megrahi’s picture.  He merely stated that it “resembles [the customer] a lot”, then qualified that by remarking that the resemblance wasn’t as close as another photo he had been shown.  However, this was enough for the detectives to treat it as a positive identification of a suspect as the clothes purchaser. (...)

Mr Gauci never explicitly stated that Megrahi was his customer, not then and not when he came face to face with him eight years later at Camp Zeist.  Even at the formal identity parade he said “not the man I saw in my shop, but he resembles him a lot.”  

And Megrahi wasn’t the only person Tony thought ‘resembled’ the purchaser.  For a time he was enamoured of a picture of the Palestinian terrorist Abu Talb, an early police suspect.  Twice he told the police he’d seen the man again in Malta – once in a bar, and once actually in his shop.  On neither occasion is it at all likely he saw either Megrahi or Abu Talb.

None of this appeared to bother the police.  

The other major issue was the date of the purchase.  Obviously this must have been between 18th November and 20th December.  Mr Gauci said it was evening, midweek, and he was alone in the shop because his brother Paul was watching football on television.  It was before the Christmas lights were erected, and it was raining.

After checking details of televised football matches the date was narrowed down to either 23 November or 7 December.  Objective analysis clearly comes down in favour of the earlier day with the later one more of an outside possibility, but after it was discovered that Megrahi had visited Malta on 7 December and hadn’t been near the place on 23 November, all the stops were pulled out to promote the December date.

It’s difficult to believe the judges bought into this narrative, but they did.  They decided the December date was the correct one, despite the presence of Christmas lights and the absence of rain, and on that basis declared that Megrahi must have been the man who bought the clothes.

They were helped by Mr Gauci’s memory, which tended to shift towards whatever the detectives seemed to want him to remember.  By the time of the trial he had changed his mind about the customer’s height, build, age, skin colour, the extent of the rain and the presence of the Christmas lights, always to favour the prosecution case. (...)

Within days of the Gauci/Mary’s House connection being discovered the US authorities were keen to offer these crucial witnesses “unlimited money” for their evidence.  A sum of $10,000 could be made available immediately.  The Scottish investigators demurred, knowing this could cause serious difficulties for a prosecution under Scots law.  As a result the brothers didn’t receive any money until after the case was over, but they were well aware that a reward of $4 million had been publicly advertised for information against Megrahi and his co-accused Fhimah.

In the end, after the trial ended, Tony received $2 million and Paul $1 million.  Paul, who didn’t give evidence in court, was rewarded for “maintaining the resolve of his brother.”

When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission issued its 2007 report, finding six grounds for believing that Megrahi’s conviction might have been a miscarriage of justice, all six related directly or indirectly to the identification evidence.  Most damningly, the Commission found that there was no basis in evidence for the trial court’s finding that the clothes had been purchased on 7th December – the hook that supported the entire daisy-chain of circular reasoning.

The subsequent appeal was widely expected to succeed, until it was abandoned by Megrahi when he returned to Libya in 2009.  In spite of this, investigation of the case has continued.  While the Crown Office insists it is exploring the possibility of charging others they allege acted as Megrahi’s accomplices, experts connected to his defence team have been otherwise engaged.

Non-disclosure of evidence by the Crown was a perennial problem throughout the case and repeated legal challenges prompted a constant trickle of new material.  Crucial documents that emerged in the days before the appeal was withdrawn opened up new avenues of inquiry and work continued.  In a parallel effort, a group of interested amateurs re-examined evidence that had been available for some time.

As we enter the 28th year of the Lockerbie investigation we know more than ever about how the atrocity was carried out, but at the same time deeper mysteries have emerged.

Megrahi petition at Justice Committee on 5 January 2016

[What follows is from a message sent today by Justice for Megrahi’s secretary, Robert Forrester, to JfM supporters:]

Tomorrow, 5th January 2016, the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament will convene to consider, amongst other matters, PE 1370. This meeting will commence at 10 AM, however, given that the Justice Committee will be conducting evidence sessions with two government ministers prior to hearing public petitions, it is unlikely that the committee will consider 1370 before 11 AM. The meeting may be watched live via the parliament's TV broadcasting system by connecting to the following link and clicking on links which will take you to the meeting of the Justice Committee in committee room 4:

http://www.scottishparliament.tv/

Background information on 1370 may be found here:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/44107.aspx#PE1370

You will note that JFM sent a letter to the Lord Advocate on 5th November 2015. With respect to this letter, he defaulted on his ministerial responsibility to reply to queries from the general public within a maximum of twenty working days. This limit was overshot by a total of fourteen working days, thus, JFM was not in receipt of his response until 31st December 2015. We have, therefore, submitted an emergency supplement to the Justice Committee outlining our considerable displeasure at both the conduct of Chambers Street in the above regard and at the content of his letter. Indeed, we have lodged official complaints with COPFS and the Jusice Committee.

Since Police Scotland's Operation Sandwood final report on our nine allegations of criminality against Crown, police and forensic officials is likely to be forthcoming in the near future, we sincerely hope that the committee will be able to accommodate this supplement in its busy schedule tomorrow.

US/UK manoeuvres to pressurise Libya to hand over suspects

[What follows is the text of an article published in The New York Times on this date in 1992:]

US and Allies to Seek UN Support Against Libya

Before seeking international sanctions, the United States, Britain and France plan to ask the United Nations Security Council to support their demand that Libya turn over agents accused in the bombings of two airliners, Western diplomats said today.

The three countries would ask the Council to approve sanctions against Libya only if Tripoli refused to obey the proposed order by the Security Council, which would also demand compensation.

Libya has been asked to extradite two agents in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, which killed 270 people, and turn over four men charged in a blast aboard a French airliner over the Sahara in September 1989 that killed 170. Should Libya still refuse to turn over the agents, the three nations would probably seek some sort of mandatory ban on all civilian air traffic to and from the country and on the sale of commercial aircraft and spare parts to Libya, diplomats said.

The three Western allies had previously indicated that they might threaten Libya with immediate trade penalties. But after sounding out other Security Council members, they opted for a slower step-by-step approach similar to the one used by the Council to increase pressure on Iraq to give up Kuwait during the Persian Gulf crisis.

Britain's United Nations representative, Sir David Hannay, who is President of the Council this month, confirmed today that Britain, France and the United States, all permanent members of the Council, are discussing the possibility of bringing the Libyan matter before the Council this month.

Sir David said that Prime Minister John Major was talking to other Security Council members about the possibility of convening a meeting of the heads of government of nations belonging to the Council this month. No date has been set for such a meeting.

In November, the United States and Britain jointly charged two Libyans with involvement in blowing up the Pan Am plane. France had issued arrest warrants in October for four Libyan officials, including a brother-in-law of Col Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, in connection with the bombing of the French plane, which belonged to the airline Union de Transports Aeriens.

The United States, France and Britain began campaigning for support of their two-stage strategy to win Libyan compliance on Thursday, sending ambassadors to put their case to foreign ministers in the capitals of the 12 other countries that are members of the Security Council.

But they expect an uphill struggle with some countries, which are reluctant to pass judgment on accusations of state-sponsored terrorism against another country.

The three allies recognize that Colonel Qaddafi is maneuvering to divide the Security Council by offering to put the accused men on trial in Libya or hand them over to some international tribunal for judgment, rather then surrendering them to the United States, France and Britain.

The Bush Administration formally repeated its demands on Libya today without suggesting any change in its tactics.

"Should Libya continue to fail to comply voluntarily with our demands for justice, we have ruled out no option to gain their compliance," said Richard A Boucher, a State Department spokesman.

But a senior Administration official cautioned that a decision on whether to press for sanctions can only be made after the allies have assessed the Council's response to an initial call for a resolution supporting extraditions.

"This is an unprecedented action we are asking for, and it is going to be very difficult," the official said.

The United States representative at the United Nations, Thomas R Pickering, has advised the Administration that to get the Security Council action it wants over Libya, Washington must be prepared to mount a diplomatic campaign of comparable intensity to the one undertaken during the Persian Gulf crisis, diplomatic officials said.

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has already expressed unhappiness over the planned initiative, the officials said. A few weeks ago Mr. Mubarak was so concerned about American intentions that he called President Bush to urge him not to take any new military action against Libya.

Today the United States, France and Britain sent their United Nations representatives to explain their position to the new United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Ghali, who is said to be worried that a new crisis is developing over the Libyan issue.

The three allies deliberately postponed their campaign against Libya until this month after calculating that changes in the roster of Security Council members effective Jan 1 would make the body more sympathetic to their plans.

Cuba and Yemen, which voted against many of the gulf war resolutions affecting Iraq, have left the Council after completing two-year terms, as have the Ivory Coast, Zaire and Romania. Their places have been taken by Venezuela, Japan, Morocco, Cape Verde and Hungary.

Now that Japan has assumed one of the seats reserved for African and Asian states, the number of Council members belonging to the so-called non-aligned movement has fallen from seven to six. That means the non-aligned nations can no longer prevent the adoption of resolutions by the 15-member Council by voting as a bloc; only nine votes are needed to adopt a resolution.

Morocco, however, may be reluctant to see the Council act against Libya, its northern African neighbor.

[RB: The first Security Council resolution requiring Libya to hand over the suspects was passed on 21 January 1992 (UNSC Resolution 731). It was followed on 31 March 1992 by a resolution imposing sanctions on Libya for failure to comply (UNSC Resolution 748).]

The Lockerbie case remains unsolved

[What follows is the text of an article by Nathan Thrall that was published in US News & World Report on this date in 2009:]

Twenty years after Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 residents of the town below, it appears that resolution has finally come to the decades-long mystery surrounding the worst terrorist attack in British history and the deadliest attack on American civilians before 9/11.

A Libyan intelligence officer has been convicted of murdering Lockerbie's 270 victims; the Libyan government, in a letter to the United Nations, has "accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials"; and less than two months ago, Libya completed payments of $1.5 billion to victims of terrorism, including Lockerbie's 189 American victims (35 of them Syracuse University students returning home from study abroad). Sanctions against Libya have been lifted, the United States has granted Libya immunity from further terrorism-related lawsuits, and the Senate confirmed the first U.S. ambassador to Libya in 36 years.

"We're proud to announce we won, and Libya has been held accountable," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, said at a November news conference with the families of victims. One of the victims' relatives added, "We are free now to close this chapter in our nightmare."

But though a chapter may have closed, the Lockerbie case is today further from resolution than it has been since the investigation began 20 years ago.

An official Scottish review body has declared that a "miscarriage of justice may have occurred" in the conviction of the Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The reviewers examined a secret document, provided to the United Kingdom by a foreign government and seen during Megrahi's trial by only the prosecution, that they said cast serious doubts on Megrahi's guilt. A new appeal of Megrahi's conviction is scheduled for this coming spring. The U.N. special observer appointed by Kofi Annan to Megrahi's trial, Hans Koechler, has declared that Megrahi was wrongfully convicted, as have the legal architect of his special trial, Prof Robert Black, and a spokesperson for the families of the British victims, Jim Swire.

Piece by piece, the major elements of the prosecution's case are falling apart. A high-ranking Scottish police officer has said vital evidence was fabricated. One of the FBI's principal forensic experts has been discredited. The lord advocate—Scotland's chief legal officer—who initiated the Lockerbie prosecution has called the credibility of the government's primary witness into question, stating that the man was "not quite the full shilling...an apple short of a picnic." Another prosecution witness now claims, in a July 2007 sworn affidavit, to have lied about the key piece of evidence linking Libya to the bombing.So if the case against Megrahi and his government is so thin, why would Libya pay compensation to the families of Lockerbie's victims?

One answer came from Libya's prime minister. He told the BBC that his government took no responsibility for Lockerbie and had merely "bought peace," agreeing to pay compensation to the families of victims because it was the only means of ending the far more costly sanctions against his country. Saif al-Qadhafi, the Libyan leader's son and one of the regime's most prominent spokespersons, recently told CNN that Megrahi "had nothing to do with Lockerbie." When asked why his government would pay the victims of a terrorist act in which they played no role, Qadhafi responded, "There was no other way around. Because there was a resolution from the Security Council, and you have to do it. Otherwise, you will not get rid of the sanctions. It was very political. Very political."

Megrahi has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and may not live to see his second appeal. If he does live and his appeal succeeds, a new and independent international investigation—as has been called for by the U.N. observer to the Lockerbie trial—may commence. If it does, the investigators will return to the primary suspect of the first year and a half of the original investigation: a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, whose bank account, according to a CIA officer involved in the investigation, received a transfer of $11 million two days after Lockerbie and whose leaders the investigators believed had been contracted by Iran to avenge America's inadvertent shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner carrying 290 passengers and crew.

Yet the more likely outcome is that Megrahi will die just before or after his second appeal and that with the closure of his death, like that of Libya's payments, most will forget that the Lockerbie case remains unsolved.

Nathan Thrall has written on US foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics for Commentary, the Jerusalem Post, the Middle East Review of International Affairs, and the New York Times.

Delays and who caused them

[What follows is a Reuters news agency report from 2 January 1999:]

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an interview published on Sunday he would appeal to South African President Nelson Mandela to persuade Libya to hand over two men suspected of the Lockerbie bombing for trial in the Netherlands. Blair, who starts a four day visit to South Africa on Tuesday, said negotiations between Britain, the United States and Libya over the 1980 airline bombing had reached an impasse.

In the interview with the Sunday Business newspaper, he said Mandela had already played a “unique and important” role in trying to resolve the controversy and he would ask the South African leader to intervene again. “I will explain that we have done all that we reasonably can to resolve the impasse over the trial. The UK-US initiative for a trial in the Netherlands has been on the table for four months,” said Blair.

“The UK-US initiative for a trial in the Netherlands has been on the table for four months. I do not for one moment accept that Scottish courts would not give a fair trial, but was prepared to go for a third-country trial because this is what the Libyan Government said it wanted. I will appeal to President Mandela to convince the Libyan government that a third country trial should now proceed,” he added.

[Mr Blair conveniently fails to mention that while four months had passed since the announcement of the UK/US scheme, four years and seven months passed after the Libyan Government and defence team accepted my “neutral venue” proposal before the UK and US published their own amended (and inferior) version. After January 1994 the delay in achieving a Lockerbie trial was attributable almost exclusively to the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. The history is outlined here.

Nelson Mandela’s rôle in the resolution of the Lockerbie impasse can be followed here.]

Q: If Libya, then Megrahi? A: No

[What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2010:]

Gadhafi admitted it!

This is the subject-heading of an e-mail sent by Arnaud de Borchgrave to Frank Duggan and copied by the latter to me. It reads as follows:

"As Gaddafi explained it to me, which you are familiar with, it was indeed Iran's decision to retaliate for the Iran Air Airbus shot down by the USS Vincennes on its daily flight from Bandar Abbas to Dubai that led to a first subcontracting deal to Syrian intel, which, in turn, led to the 2nd subcontract to Libyan intel. As he himself said if they had been first at this terrorist bat, they would not have put Malta in the mix; Cyprus would have made more sense to draw attention away from Libya."

According to Arnaud de Borchgrave, Gaddafi made the admission, off the record, in the course of an interview in 1993. His published account reads:

"Megrahi was a small cog in a much larger conspiracy. After a long interview with Gaddafi in 1993, this editor at large of The Washington Times asked Libya's supreme leader to explain, off the record, his precise involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec 21, 1988, and for which Libya paid $2.7 billion in reparations. He dismissed all the aides in his tent (located that evening in the desert about 100 kilometers south of Tripoli) and began in halting English without benefit of an interpreter, as was the case in the on-the-record part of the interview.

"Gaddafi candidly admitted that Lockerbie was retaliation for the July 3, 1988, downing of an Iranian Airbus. Air Iran Flight 655, on a 28-minute daily hop from the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz to the port city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on the other side of the Gulf, was shot down by a guided missile from the Aegis cruiser USS Vincennes. The Vincennes radar mistook it for an F-14 Tomcat fighter (which Iran still flies); 290 were killed, including 66 children. A year before, in 1987, the USS Stark was attacked by an Iraqi Mirage, killing 37 sailors. The Vincennes skipper, Capt William Rogers, received the Legion of Merit, and the entire crew was awarded combat-action ribbons. The United States paid compensation of $61.8 million to the families of those killed on IR 655.

"Gaddafi told me, 'The most powerful navy in the world does not make such mistakes. Nobody in our part of the world believed it was an error.' And retaliation, he said, was clearly called for. Iranian intelligence subcontracted retaliation to one of the Syrian intelligence services (there are 14 of them), which, in turn, subcontracted part of the retaliatory action to Libyan intelligence (at that time run by Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi's brother-in-law). 'Did we know specifically what we were asked to do?' said Gaddafi. 'We knew it would be comparable retaliation for the Iranian Airbus, but we were not told what the specific objective was,' Gaddafi added.

"As he got up to take his leave, he said, 'Please tell the CIA that I wish to cooperate with America. I am just as much threatened by Islamist extremists as you are.'

"When we got back to Washington, we called Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey to tell him what we had been told off the record. Woolsey asked me if I would mind being debriefed by the CIA. I agreed. And the rest is history."

On the assumption that this account of an off-the-record conversation in 1993 is accurate, it in no way affects the wrongfulness of the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. As I have tried (without success) to explain to US zealots in the past, the fact -- if it be the fact -- that Libya was in some way involved in Lockerbie does not entail as a consequence that any particular Libyan citizen was implicated. The evidence led at the Zeist trial did not justify the guilty verdict against Megrahi. On that basis alone his conviction should have been quashed had the recently-abandoned appeal gone the full distance. That conclusion is reinforced (a) by the material uncovered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and (b) by the material released on Mr Megrahi's website.