So why did Westminster shirk its responsibility for Megrahi?

This is the headline over a series of letters in today’s edition of The Herald responding to yesterday’s report Megrahi survival is insult to families, says Cameron.  They read as follows:]


Yet again David Cameron attacks the Scottish administration over the release on compassionate grounds of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

The sister, brother-in-law and niece of a good friend of mine during my teaching days at Our Lady's High School, Motherwell, died on the night of December 21, 1988, when debris from the explosion aboard Clipper Maid of the Seas, Pan Am Flight 103, landed on their home in Lockerbie.

The Prime Minister states quite unequivocally: "One thousand days on, this is yet another reminder that Alex Salmond's Government's decision to free the biggest mass murderer in British history was wrong and an insult to the 270 people who were murdered." Naturally, Labour's Justice Spokesman at Holyrood, Lewis Macdonald, joins in: "Every anniversary and milestone reached by the man responsible for Scotland's worst-ever act of terrorism must be a grim reminder for the families of the Lockerbie victims." And the Tory Holyrood whip, John Lamont, speaks of "an embarrassing milestone" and a decision that "looks more and more outrageous".

Where were they and why were they functionally silent when the decision to free Megrahi was being made? I ask the same of Her Majesty's Government of the day.

I say "functionally silent" because a lot of these people had a lot to say in all the wrong places.

Under the devolution disposition, in relation to legislation all matters concerning national security, foreign policy and foreign relations are reserved to Westminster. Similarly, in relation to executive action all matters concerning national security, foreign policy and foreign relations are reserved to Whitehall. Megrahi's arrest, detention, trial, imprisonment and then, finally, the decision to set him free on licence intimately involved all elements of that oft-times-unholy trinity.

I am neither a politician nor a lawyer, but it would seem to me that prima facie the Westminster Government could and should have been the only organ of state to make any decisions in relation to Megrahi's possible release. And if the Scottish administration argued otherwise why did no-one from the Westminster Government, or the Opposition benches, seek to determine what the view of the courts, north and/or south of the Border, would be to an application to stay the Scottish administration's hand for want of jurisdiction by virtue of these higher political and constitutional considerations?
Hugh McLoughlin
[RB: Any such application would have failed.  Responsibility under the devolution settlement for compassionate release (or prisoner transfer) of prisoners in Scottish prisons rests in law squarely and clearly with the Scottish Government.  In any event, as we all know, the then Labour Government at Westminster was very keen indeed that Megrahi should be repatriated.  That, after all, was the principal aim of Tony Blair's deal in the desert.]

How convenient for our Prime Minister that Megrahi has survived 1000 days and he can rail at this and the First Minister, Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill and all the medical advisers who recommended release on compassionate grounds. Neither he nor his advisers seem to have taken into account the very real doubts over the safety of the conviction with bribed witnesses and withheld crucial information. Megrahi is not by any means the first person to survive a terminal condition for several years and he will not be the last.

However, by bringing this topic up in such a public way it gives him the opportunity to deflect attention from what is being called the "omnishambles" of his Government. Daily we are reminded just what an incompetent bunch he and his ministers are: witness the granny tax, pasty tax, the NHS reforms, P45s for troops on duty, sale of the Harrier jump-jet fleet at a knock-down price to America, destroying Nimrod surveillance aircraft, aircraft carriers that will have no planes until 2020 or thereby and now the jump-jet reversal of choice. If it had been written as a theatrical farce the audience would be in stitches.                           
Nigel Dewar Gibb

I was always a fan of Dr Finlay's Casebook but I didn't expect a Dr Cameron to make a return to medicine.

David Cameron obviously now sees himself as a medical expert (I guess as much a medical expert as he is a financial and political one) in that he seems to believe that he would have been able to predict the lifespan of Megrahi better than a few Scottish medical experts can.

Whatever the truth of the Lockerbie bombing it seems crass, to say the least, to use it to score rather weak political points. If this is the best case he can find to question the judgments of the Scottish Government then it seems we must be doing quite a good job of running our own country after all.
Dave Bertin

The Lockerbie bomber I know

[This is the headline over an article in today's edition of The Guardian. It reads in part:]

Two years ago Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was controversially released on the grounds he was about to die. But this shadowy figure has survived to become a pawn in the Libyan conflict. John Ashton, who has long believed in his innocence, describes the man behind the myth

It's an anniversary that the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, will have long dreaded. Two years ago tomorrow MacAskill granted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, AKA "the Lockerbie bomber", compassionate release from the life sentence he was serving for the murder of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing. MacAskill had been advised that terminal cancer was likely to end the Libyan's life within the following three months: he had, in short, been "sent home to die". As Megrahi's recent appearance at a pro-Gaddafi rally reminded us, he has not stuck to the script.

The anniversary presents sections of the media with another opportunity to splutter its outrage at MacAskill's decision, and to resurrect the theory that it was driven by backroom deals rather than medical evidence. More seriously, for many of the relatives of the Lockerbie dead it adds an appalling insult to their already grievous injury.

But Megrahi's survival, and the Lockerbie case in general, now has far wider significance. For western governments struggling to justify why Libya should be singled out for enforced regime change, the issue has become a godsend. In recent weeks both Barack Obama and William Hague have tried to boost wilting public support for the war by highlighting Gaddafi's responsibility for the 1988 attack.

Libya's government-in-waiting, the National Transitional Council, has weighed in too. Its leader, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, claimed in February that Gaddafi personally ordered the bombing, and its London PR company, Bell-Pottinger, followed up Hague's comments by circulating a claim by a leading cancer specialist that MacAskill's decision was based on flawed medical advice. [RB: This claim is repeated in an article published today on the BBC News website.]

There is, though, another view that is shared by many who have scrutinised the Lockerbie case. They hold that the true scandal was not Megrahi's release, but his 2001 conviction. The Justice for Megrahi campaign, founded in 2008, counts among its signatories Dr Jim Swire and Rev John Mosey, each of whom lost a daughter in the bombing, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien. Another signatory, Scottish QC Ian Hamilton, last year blogged: "I don't think there's a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted."

I go further than those lawyers: I am as certain as I can be that Megrahi is innocent. For three years until his return to Libya I worked as a researcher alongside his legal team and since then have been writing a book with him. I have read all his case files and have visited him many times, both in prison and in Tripoli. I'm one of a handful of people familiar with both the man and the evidence that convicted him.

It requires a book to explain all the flaws in that evidence. In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) granted Megrahi an appeal, having identified six possible grounds for overturning the conviction. Among these, remarkably, was that the original judgment, delivered by three Scottish judges at a specially constructed court in the Netherlands, was unreasonable. Four of the other grounds concerned the Crown's most important witness, a Maltese shopkeeper called Tony Gauci, in whose shop Megrahi allegedly bought the clothes that ended up in the same suitcase as the bomb. In 1991 he picked out Megrahi from a lineup of photos. The SCCRC discovered that before doing so he had expressed an interest in receiving a reward, and that after Megrahi's conviction the Scottish police secretly approached the US Department of Justice to secure a $2m payment. Gauci's evidence was, in any case, highly unreliable. His descriptions of the clothes purchaser all suggested the man was around 50 years old, 6ft tall and with dark skin, whereas Megrahi was 36, is 5ft 8in and has light skin. (...)

He was born in Tripoli in 1952, into poverty that was typical of the times in Libya. One of eight siblings, his family shared a house with two others, and his mother supplemented his father's customs officer's income by sewing for neighbours. As a young child he was plagued by chest problems, for which he received daily vitamin supplements at his Unesco-administered school. His main passion was football, which continues to absorb him.

After finishing school in 1970, he briefly trained as a marine engineer at Rumney Technical College in Cardiff, hoping to become a ship's captain or navigator. When his eyesight proved too poor, he dropped out and returned to Tripoli, where he trained as a flight dispatcher for the state-owned Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA). Having completed his training and gained his dispatcher's licence in the US, he was gradually promoted to head of operations at Tripoli airport. Keen to improve his education, he studied geography at the University of Benghazi. He came top in his year and was invited to join the teaching staff on the promise that he could study for a master's degree in climatology in the US. When the promise proved hollow, he opted to boost his salary by returning to LAA.

In 1986 he became a partner in a small company called ABH and was temporarily appointed LAA's head of airline security. The following year he became part-time coordinator of the Libyan Centre for Strategic Studies. His Scottish prosecutors aimed to prove that these roles were cover for his activities as a senior agent for the Libyan intelligence service, the JSO.

Megrahi maintains that his only involvement with the JSO came during his 12-month tenure as head of airline security when he was seconded to the organisation to oversee the training of some of its personnel for security positions within the airline. There is ample documentary evidence to support his claim that ABH was a legitimate trading company whose main business was the purchase of spares for LAA aircraft, often in breach of US sanctions. He admits that he sometimes travelled on a false passport, but insists that it was issued to give him cover for his sanctions-busting activities; unlike his true passport, it did not betray his airline background.

Megrahi says that it came as a complete surprise when, in November 1991, he and his former LAA colleague Lamin Fhimah were charged with the bombing (Fhimah was found not guilty). Megrahi also maintains that it was their decision to stand trial and that they were not ordered to by their government. He was repeatedly warned that he was unlikely to receive a fair trial, but believed he would be acquitted.

During his decade in prison his good manners and cooperative behaviour earned him the respect of the officers. (...)

He was cheered by visits from well-known figures, most notably Nelson Mandela, and by hundreds of letters of support. In 2005 he was transferred to a low-security wing of HMP Gateside in Greenock, where he was placed among long-term prisoners nearing the end of their sentences. He was soon accepted by both inmates and officers, one of whom volunteered to me: "We all know he didn't do it." (...)

We were optimistic that his appeal would succeed, but its progress was glacial. In autumn 2008, with the first hearing still six months away, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He had always dreamed of clearing his name and returning to his family, but eventually felt compelled to choose between the two. Although the compassionate release decision carried no legal preconditions, he knew that abandoning the appeal would smooth the process. No longer able to make his case in court, he asked me to write his story so he could make it to the public.

Writing the book required numerous visits to Tripoli, where he received me warmly in the home he shares with his wife and four sons in a middle-class suburb. His illness limited our sessions to a couple of hours. He would check every word I'd written for accuracy and was insistent that I include the case for both sides and not shy away from awkward facts. He repeatedly told me: "I understand that people will judge me with their hearts, but I ask them to please also judge me with their heads."

His reception, on his return to Tripoli, was portrayed as a triumphant official welcome, but, as a WikiLeaks cable revealed, the Libyan authorities limited the crowd to 200, with thousands of supporters and the international media kept away. A few months later the Sunday Times reported that, at the time he was convicted, he had $1.8m in a Swiss bank account. In fact the account had been dormant since 1993, when it had a balance of $23,000. This year the same paper reported a claim by NTC leader Abdel-Jalil that Megrahi had blackmailed Gaddafi to secure his release from prison "by threatening to expose the dictator's role" in the bombing. Had he done so he would have severely jeopardised both his chance of freedom and the safety of his family in Libya. Although he responded to such misreporting with a faint smile and a roll of the eyes, it hurt him deeply that anyone could believe him guilty of murder. (...)

When I last saw him, in September 2010, he visited me at my hotel. It was the only time I saw him among ordinary Libyans. Again we were repeatedly interrupted, this time by strangers thanking him, not for an act of terrorism, but for sacrificing his liberty for the good of the nation. His decision to stand trial helped free the country from UN sanctions that imposed 12 years of collective punishment on the assumption of his guilt. We now know that that assumption was based on evidence that was, at best, flimsy and, at worst, fabricated.

His appearance at the rally in a wheelchair probably won't silence the conspiracy theorists who claim he is living the life of Riley. The fact that he has made it this far is partly down to the superior medical care he receives. But I believe it's as much to do with his will to live and the knowledge that every day survived is a fragment of justice reclaimed.

[Today's edition of The Independent contains a report headlined Lockerbie release milestone nears which records the varying views of Lockerbie relatives and commentators on Megrahi and his release. There is a similar article in The Scotsman. An article in The Times, behind the paywall, contains, apart from reactions to Megrahi's release and survival, the latest information on the state of his health. An article on The Telegraph website attributes his survival to Abiraterone, a drug developed in the UK but not yet approved for use here. A letter from Rev Dr John Cameron supportive of the release decision appears in today's edition of The Herald.]

Reflecting on Lockerbie

[This is the heading over a very recent post on John Cameron's Blog. It reads as follows:]

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London Heathrow to [New York] exploded over Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground.

Just a few months earlier, a US Navy battlecruiser, the Vincennes, had shot down an Iranian passenger jet over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people.

Not only did the US government refuse to apologise, but the Pentagon went into full cover-up mode, decorating the warship’s crew.

The Lockerbie bombing was soon attributed to the Syrian-based radical Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, as a revenge attack commissioned by the Iranian government.

Some weeks prior to Lockerbie, the German police had rounded up a Palestinian terrorist cell, in whose apartment they found equipment for fitting bombs into Toshiba radio-cassette players.

Unfortunately, not all of these barometric bombs were recovered – such a device was subsequently used at Lockerbie – and one of the key terrorists evaded capture.

By 1990, the crime had effectively been solved; however, at that point, the political background changed as a result of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

The US and the UK now needed to court countries such as Syria and Iran so an alternative theory suddenly emerged in which Libya became the suspect.

In 2001, the case against two Libyans, Abdel Al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was heard at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands before three Scottish law lords.

Gadaffi would have been briefed about the vagaries of the Scottish criminal justice processes, but he clearly did not appreciate it could be so obtuse.

It might have been anticipated that only the most reputable forensic scientists would be used but in fact the Crown employed the services of three men whose credentials were a disgrace.

The evidence of Dr Thomas Hayes in previous trials had contributed to the convictions of several innocent people and he was later publicly humiliated by Sir John May’s inquiry which slated him for ‘knowingly placing a false and distorted scientific picture before the jury’.

Allan Fer[a]day had the barest of qualifications in the field and was condemned by the Lord Chief Justice in 1996 who stated he “should under no circumstances be considered an expert witness in explosives cases.”

Then there was the American Tom Thurman, who was later sacked by the FBI for ‘routinely altering reports in the explosives unit’ to support the prosecution case.

Fhimah was acquitted but Al-Megrahi was unaccountably convicted on the basis that he had placed the bomb on board a feeder flight in Malta.

Not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!

So the trial led inexorably to the wrongful conviction of Al-Megrahi and the final betrayal of the bereaved families.

Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the title of a long article by Dr J U Cameron published yesterday on John Cameron's Blog. It reads in part:]

One of the UK’s foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said “Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to believe that its practioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading.” There is, in fact, a kind of “canteen culture” in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than investigators seeking the truth.

At first this did not seem to matter in the aftermath of the destruction Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. It was quickly established by air accident investigators that there had been an explosion in the forward cargo hold in the baggage container AVE 4041. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase which appeared to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with parts of a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder in which the bomb had been concealed. There were also items of clothing which looked as if they had also been in the case. At this stage the forensic evidence appeared robust and no credible doubt has been raised in the years since the event that this was the method by which the plane was destroyed.

The police discovered that the baggage container AVE 4041 had been loaded with interline baggage at Heathrow. The baggage had been x-rayed by Sulkash Kamboj of Alert Security, an affiliate company of Pan Am. John Bedford, a loader-driver employed by Pan Am told police that he had placed a number of cases in the container before leaving for a tea break. When he returned he found an additional two cases had been added, one of which was a distinctive brown Samsonite case. Bedford said that Kamboj had told him he had added the two cases. When questioned by the police, Kamboj denied he had added the cases or told Bedford he had done so. This matter was only resolved at the trial when under cross examination Kamboj admitted that Bedford was telling the truth.

All the evidence at this stage pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine –General Command (PFLP-GC). Five weeks before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was apprehended in Germany. Haffez Dalkamoni, right-hand man to the group’s leader Ahmad Jibril, and the bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, were arrested while visiting electrical shops in Frankfurt. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Under German police interrogation, Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also admitted that Khreesat had built other bombs including a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches but he claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts.

The involvement of the PFLP-GC was consistent with what was assumed at the time to be the motive for the Pan Am atrocity. In July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet containing some 300 Iranian pilgrims, had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by the renegade US battlecruiser Vincennes. Not only did America refuse to apologize, the captain of the ship and his gunnery officer were decorated for their actions. This crass behaviour caused outrage within Iran and throughout the Middle East. Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered skies’.

Soon the US Air Force Command was issuing warnings to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion with mass casualties.’ Later warnings were more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’

Within weeks the CIA reported that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC had met government officials in Iran and offered his services. Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs to all European airports. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was ‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff remain extra vigilant’. After the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell Heathrow received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities.

In the aftermath of Lockerbie, all the Toshiba cassette bombs seized by the Germans were tested and found to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of the barometric timer employed is that it is not activated until the plane is airborne so the bomb will not go off on the ground if the flight is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes will elapse as the aircraft gains height and the air pressure drops enough to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie.

The clothing thought to have been in the suitcase with the bomb contained labels which allowed the items to be traced to a shop in Malta. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, was known to have visited Malta shortly before the atrocity. When first questioned the owner of the shop, Tony Gauci, described the purchaser of the clothes as a dark-skinned, 50 year old man over six feet in height – which fitted Abu Talb – and identified him from a photograph.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a memo on September 24th, 1989 which stated, “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command leader, for a sum of $1m. $100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hussan Akhari for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission.”

A DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled “Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation” confirmed the American belief that Iran was the state sponsor of the bombing. It claimed that the PFLP-GC was “fast becoming an Iranian proxy” and that the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air 655 airbus was the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation. It specifically discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was “no current credible intelligence” implicating her. It stated: “Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya in 1986, Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks.”

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait thereby putting at risk the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary. If Iraq was to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated with kid gloves and the Syrian regime must be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam’s invading army and the increasingly isolated Colonel Gadaffi gradually became the chief suspect on the Lockerbie bombing.

As a result of the change in overall narrative and the fact that there had been absolutely no Libyan activity in London, interest in Heathrow as the scene of the bomb planting suddenly ceased. Now the Maltese connection became crucial. Heretofore it had simply been assumed the clothes were purchased at a Maltese tourist shop in preference to the more regulated shops of Frankfurt or London.

But there was a long standing connection between Malta and Libya which survived all the twists and turns of international diplomacy. In particular, it was one of the key conduits through which essential supplies could be transferred to Tripoli when Gaddafi’s behaviour had provoked yet another set of sanctions being imposed on his country.

The purchaser of the clothes in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta now magically morphed from a non-Libyan giant in late middle age to a youthful, 5’ 7” tall Libyan in his mid-thirties. His name, it appeared was Abdelbaset al Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines. Educated in the USA and Britain, he was also director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A cosmopolitan figure with a wide range of international contacts it was rumoured that he was used by Libya to import essentials during periods of sanctions. The claim that he had suddenly changed into a terrorist bomber was met with derision at home and abroad. The idea that he and his colleague Khalifah Fhimah, the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta, had somehow secreted an unaccompanied suit case onto flight KM180 was thought to be absurd.

The Maltese police also protested that this was a most unlikely scenario. They had questioned the senior airport baggage loader who was adamant that he always double-counted his luggage: once when it was finally gathered and again as it was physically loaded onto the plane. This extremely reliable official was absolutely certain that there were no unaccompanied cases in the luggage that he counted on to the flight. In fact, not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!

The theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as a piece of unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe before finding its way onto Pan Am 103 in London was widely ridiculed. The excellent screening at Frankfurt would have surely picked it up or, if not, it could well have been lost on the twilight zone of European baggage handling. But the greatest problem lay with the barometric trigger which would have caused flight KM180 to explode 38 minutes into the first leg to Frankfurt. This was the moment when the forensic scientists stepped up to the plate.

The two British scientists involved in the Lockerbie case were the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment’s Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes. Charred material found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie in mysterious circumstances had been sent for analysis to explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. According to his later testimony Hayes teased out the cloth of one piece of the material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt. Within it he found fragments of white paper, fragments of black plastic, a fragment of metal and a fragment of wire mesh—all subsequently found to be parts of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual. Hayes testified that he also found embedded a half-inch fragment of circuit board.

The next reference to this famous circuit board fragment occurred when Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification. In June 1990, Feraday and DCI Williamson visited FBI headquarters in Washington and together with Thomas Thurman, an FBI explosives expert, finally identified the fragment as being part of a timer circuit board.

Thurman’s involvement in identifying the fragment later proved highly controversial because in spite of his claim to be an “explosives forensic expert” he had no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever. He read politics at university and had somehow drifted into the FBI Labs. Worse was to follow when in 1997 the US Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, issued a report stating that in other trials Thurman had “circumvented procedures and protocols, testified to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications and fabricated evidence”. Numerous defendants had to be released and Thurman was fortunate not to be prosecuted himself. He was fired from the FBI labs and banned from acting as an expert witness in any other court case.

Thurman could not therefore give evidence at the Lockerbie trial and the Crown’s case would be further damaged when the testimony of his UK counterpart, Alan Feraday, was called into question. In three separate cases — where Feraday had been the expert witness — men against whom he gave evidence have had their convictions overturned. Like Thurman, Feraday was not actually a professional scientist and in 2005, after yet another successful appeal, the Chief Lord Justice said that “under no circumstances should Feraday be allowed to present himself as an expert witness in electronics”.

By the time of the trial the career of Thomas Hayes was also over because a British Parliamentary inquiry had found he had conspired to withhold evidence in the notorious trial of the Maguire Seven. Sir John May had said, “The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the conviction should be set aside.” Hayes jumped before he was pushed and by the time of the trial was working as a chiropodist.

As the argument for a Maltese connection and Libyan involvement progressed the tiny fragment of circuit board became increasingly important. Thurman now “indentified” it as part of a batch made by the Swiss manufacturer Mebo for the Libyan military. This was not the simple design thought to have been used in the Pan Am 103 bombing but a complex type of long timer. Edwin Bollier later revealed that he declined an offer of $4 million by the FBI to testify that the fragment was indeed part of the Mebo MST-13 timer. Fortunately one of his employees, Ulrich Lumpert, was prevailed upon to do so at the trial though later, in a sworn affidavit, he would admit he had lied. The other co-owner of Mebo, Erwin Meister, confirmed that MST–13 timers had been sold to Libya and helpfully identified Megrahi as a “former business contact”.

All the ducks were finally in a line and the Anglo-American authorities indicted the two Libyan suspects in November 1991. Gaddafi was then ordered to extradite them for trial in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Since no bilateral extradition treaty was in force between any of the three countries, he refused to hand the men over but did offer to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.

In November 1994, President Nelson Mandela offered South Africaas a neutral venue for the trial but this was rejected by John Major. A further three years elapsed until Mandela’s offer was repeated to Major’s successor, Tony Blair, when the president visited London in July 1997 and again at the 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh in October 1997. At the latter meeting, Mandela warned that “no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge” in the Lockerbie case.

A compromise solution was eventually engineered by the legal academic Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University of a trial in the Netherlands governed by Scots law. Since this was in accordance with the New Labour government’s promotion of an “ethical” foreign policy, it was given political impetus by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. A special High Court of Justiciary was set up in a disused United States Air Force base called Camp Zeist in Utrecht.

In recent years no forensic-based case has caused greater concern than the Lockerbie trial and the prosecution has been widely accused of using the tactics of disinformation. The lead prosecutor was the highly controversial Lord Advocate, Colin (later Baron) Boyd who three years before had prosecuted DC McKie in another forensic disaster. The policewoman denied an accusation by Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) fingerprint officers that she left her thumb print at a murder scene in January 1997. She was arrested in March 1998, charged with perjury but at her trial in May 1999 the SCRO fingerprint evidence was rejected out of hand and she was acquitted.

A senior Scottish police officer, James Mackay QPM, was appointed by the Crown Office to investigate the matter and he submitted his report to Boyd in October 2000. It found that the actions of the SCRO personnel amounted to 'collective manipulation and collusion' and four of them were immediately suspended by the SCRO. With the Lockerbie trial in full swing Boyd was obviously reluctant to prosecute the officers involved and to great public indignation he allowed them to be reinstated. It would clearly have damaged his fragile case in the Lockerbie trial to have four of Scotland’s forensic scientists prosecuted for covering up acts of criminality. The finger-print scandal was only resolved in 2006 when the policewoman was awarded £750,000 compensation and Boyd was rightly forced to resign as Lord Advocate.

There were profound inconsistencies in much of the evidence presented to the trial. For instance, the entry of the discovery of the timer fragment was recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. The German police files indicate that fragments of the bomb timer were found on the shirt in January 1990. So the shirt collar could hardly have been examined nor the items of evidence extracted on 12 May 1989 as was claimed by Hayes at the trial. German documents also contain photographs showing a piece of the shirt with most of the breast pocket undamaged but the images presented to the trial were different.

It is also disconcerting that an additional page was inserted into the evidence log detailing the discovery of the Slalom shirt with particles of the bomb timer on it. The record of the discovery was inserted into a loose-leaf folder with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand – a procedure for which the scientist could offer no explanation at the trial. The prosecution’s evidence looked at times like a co-coordinated effort to mislead the court. Yet the Judges helpfully concluded that the compromised evidence log did not matter because “each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”

During the trial, MeBo engineer Ulrich Lumpert – whose evidence was crucial in connecting the famous fragment to the Libyan batch – caused consternation by adding that the fragment on display belonged to a timer that had never been connected to a relay, ie had not triggered a bomb. This claim could not be countered by the prosecution because Hayes had inexplicably not thought it necessary to test the tiny timer fragment for explosive residue. However, given their conduct of the trial it came as no surprise that the three Scottish judges were untroubled by what should have been a disaster for the prosecution.

The lead judge was the veteran Lord Sutherland accompanied by an inveterate tribunal chairman, Lord Coulsfield, and the sentencing and parole expert Lord MacLean. They admitted the uncertainties in the testimony and the dangers inherent in “selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which do not fit”. They also admitted it was possible they were “reading into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern and conclusion which was not really justified” but ploughed on regardless.

In the end, the judges accepted that the absence of a credible explanation of how the suitcase was placed into the system at Luqa airport was “a major difficulty for the Crown case”. However they still managed to convince themselves that this was indeed what had happened. “When the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible.” This statement was met with derision in Scotland and rightly dismissed as “inference piled upon inference”.

The judges further accepted that the PFLP-GC were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period but found “no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime.”

If most observers found this a very odd way of looking at the evidence, the final decisions of the judges provoked utter consternation. It appeared beyond any shadow of a doubt that the two accused were either both guilty or both not guilty but the Law Lords managed to find clear blue water between them. The judges were unanimous in finding the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. He was freed and he returned to Libya on 1 February 2001.

As for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi the judges said: “There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment.” Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.

Huge doubts remain about the prosecution’s case and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in 2007 found prima facie evidence of a miscarriage of justice. It is clear from their report that the unreliability of the prosecution’s key witness Tony Gauci was one of the main reasons for the referral of Megrahi’s case back to the Appeal Court. Gauci had been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police during which he gave a series of inconclusive statements and there was evidence that leading questions had been put to him. Gauci was clearly not the “full shilling” as Lord Fraser, Scotland’s senior law officer during the investigation, had admitted. And yet he was not entirely stupid. The Americans paid him $2 million for his revised identification and he now resides in comfortable obscurity in Malta.

The review commission also discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose a document from a foreign power which confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya. This document, passed to the commission by the foreign power in question, contained considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb and linked it to the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the investigation. Moreover, the Iranian defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, who provided intelligence for the Germans, had already told the prosecutors in 1996 that the bombing been ordered by Tehran, not Tripoli.

Scientists generally recommend selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions. Known as Occam’s razor, we use it to cut out crazy, complicated constructions and to keep theories grounded in the laws of science. The Maltese evidence linking Megrahi to the atrocity is so fragile, so complex and so full of unsupported assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the forensic scientists. It is therefore unfortunate that it would be difficult to find three more disreputable practioners than Thurman, Hayes and Feraday. It should be a matter of deep concern that Megrahi is the only man convicted on the evidence of these three individuals whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.

There is also no credible evidence that the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop found among the Lockerbie wreckage were really bought on the day stated in the trial. The sale seemed much more likely to have happened on a day when Abu Talb was on Malta and Megrahi definitely was not. It is also known that when the Swedish police arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they found some of the same batch of clothing in his flat in Uppsala. No explanation for that was forthcoming at the trial.

Finally, the behaviour of the chief prosecutor Colin Boyd, both in concealing the nefarious activity of his forensic scientists and withholding essential evidence from the defence, is utterly reprehensible. Together with lack of moral fiber shown by Lord Cullen and the Court of Criminal Appeal [at Megrahi's first appeal] it has left a permanent stain on the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

Scottish prosecutors in secret meeting with Libyans about al‑Megrahi and Lockerbie

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

A clandestine meeting between the Crown Office and Libyan officials has taken place as part

of efforts to bring those behind the Lockerbie bombing to justice.

The Sunday Times has learnt that Scottish prosecutors want to interview at least one suspect

about the 1988 atrocity, and they met their Libyan counterparts in March to enlist their help.
It is understood the suspect may be linked to the purchase of a suitcase that concealed the
bomb. The Crown maintains that the suitcase was loaded onto a plane in Malta and
transferred onto Pan Am flight 103, which took off from Heathrow for New York. (...)

Scottish prosecutors maintain that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was accused of buying

clothes in Malta that were packed in the suitcase, did not act alone and have vowed to bring
his accomplices to justice. Megrahi is the only person convicted of the bombing.

According to a diplomatic source, Libyan officials visited the UK at the invitation of

Scottish prosecutors and are “keen” to assist the Lockerbie investigation.

“Megrahi is regarded as unfinished business because the inquests determined that he

was not acting by himself,” said the source.

“Investigators have been looking at the people who were involved in the purchase of

a bag in Malta. This is something they have been trying to follow up and they have
leads which still need to be fully explored.”

He added: “Police Scotland have been pursuing the possibility of questioning

individuals in Libya and they have some information relating to an individual ... They
will be looking to the prosecutor [to see] if they can be tracked down and interviewed
on their behalf.”

The disclosure follows a decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission

(SCCRC) to review Megrahi’s conviction. (...)

The SCCRC said last week that it was in “the interests of justice” to accept the

application by Megrahi’s family. The move has been welcomed by campaigners who
believe Megrahi was innocent. A separate police investigation into claims that
prosecutors, police and forensic officials perverted the course of justice is expected
to conclude shortly.

The Crown Office declined to comment.

[RB: A comment by John Cameron under this article on The Sunday Times website reads as follows:]

My Italian friends were deeply embarrassed by the judicial shenanigans of the Meredith

Kercher murder trial which showed their nation's Byzantine legal system at its worst.
But the fact is the Italian system was self-correcting and in the end, the manifestly innocent
students Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were released.

The conviction of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi for the Pan Am bombing raised a similar international

outcry. From the UN observer to Nelson Mandela, from the UK relatives' leader Dr Swire to
the Scottish churches, from his prison inmates and staff to every journalist who investigated
the case, no-one believed he was guilty.

Megrahi and co-defendant Lamin Fhimah were remanded into custody by my dear old friend, the late Sheriff Graham Cox in whose jurisdiction Lockerbie lay. He later confided, "I'm sure they've got the wrong men" adding that in the event of a miscarriage of justice, the Scottish judiciary was "too small and too inbred" to sort it out.

We shall see!

Relatives of Lockerbie victims split over defector

[This is the headline over a report by Carolyn Churchill in today's edition of The Herald, whose coverage of the Mouusa Koussa story seems to me to be the best to be found in the Scottish dailies. It reads as follows:]

Former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa’s defection has provoked a further split in opinion among relatives of the 270 people killed in the Lockerbie bombing.

Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up in December 1988, said it should be seen as a moment for rejoicing as it offered a chance to shed light on the truth behind the atrocity.

But on the other side of the Atlantic, family members in America said they were horrified that Koussa had not been charged with mass murder as soon as he stepped on to British soil.

Despite assurances from Prime Minister David Cameron that the Libyan is not being granted immunity from prosecution, several relatives in the US expressed doubts that this would be guaranteed in the long-term.

Others voiced concern that there was no defection and he may, in fact, have travelled to England under a diplomatic mission.

Their concerns were fuelled by Professor Robert Black, QC, one of the architects of the Lockerbie trial at Camp Zeist, who said there was a “strong indication” that Koussa’s arrival was a diplomatic manoeuvre.

Speaking from her home on the east coast of America, Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband Michael died in the atrocity, told The Herald: “I’m very nervous about what this deal contains – there clearly is a deal or he would not have come.

“This man was the main architect for the Lockerbie bombing. He has a tremendous amount of blood on his hands and it is absolutely critical that Scottish and US law enforcement are able to question him.”

Rosemary Wolfe, whose step-daughter Miriam was also on the flight, said she did not believe Mr Cameron’s statement that Koussa was not being given immunity. She said: “That doesn’t mean that he won’t be [given immunity].

“I’m absolutely nauseated and disgusted. He should have been put in handcuffs as soon as he got off the plane.

“I am sure he wouldn’t have arrived on British soil without some sort of pre-arrangement or discussion. That he should be exchanging his own freedom for any information that he could provide is absolutely horrendous.”

Some of the UK relatives have expressed doubts about the conviction of the Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, who was found guilty of the murder of 270 people, and they said Koussa’s defection could lead to the truth being uncovered.

Dr Swire, who has met Koussa previously, said the Libyan was “extremely frightening, more frightening than Gaddafi himself”.

He said: “He was clearly running things. If Libya was involved in Lockerbie, he can tell us how they carried out the atrocity and why.”

Reverend John Mosey, whose 19-year-old daughter died in the bombing, said he was “95% convinced” that Libya was not responsible for the atrocity.

But he said that since Megrahi had been found guilty in a court of law, Koussa should also have been taken into custody when he arrived on British soil.

He said: “[Megrahi] is the only one found guilty by a Scottish court, therefore Megrahi is guilty of mass murder. If he is guilty this man was his boss so if Megrahi is guilty this man is surely guilty.

“He ought to be in custody being closely questioned or at some point or other brought to court or trial. That would be the just thing if Megrahi is guilty. Even if Libya were not guilty I would think if anybody knows, Mr Koussa will know who did it.”

Professor Black, meanwhile, said: “If he were defecting he would not defect to a country that was going to put him on trial for murder. He would seek immunity from prosecution. The fact that he hasn’t would lead me to believe that he has not defected.

“If he has defected then he could be a source of informa-tion about any involvement Libya may have had in Lockerbie. My position is that the Libyan who was convicted ought not to have been because the evidence simply did not warrant it.

“It is perfectly possible that Libya was involved in someway, whether supplying personnel or materials or logistic support.

“If anybody would know about that it would be Mr Koussa, because if he was involved his fingerprints would be all over it.

“Given his position and the positions he held at the time there is no way that if Libya was involved it could have happened without his participation.”

[Michael Settle, the paper's UK political editor, contributes a report headlined Tell us the secrets of Lockerbie. It reads in part:]

Scottish detectives and prosecutors are to interview Libyan defector Moussa Koussa about his involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

“This could be all the evidence that we wanted given to us on a silver platter,” declared Frank Duggan, president of the Victims of Pan Am 103 group in the US.

“Koussa was at the centre of Gaddafi’s inner circle. This is a guy who knows everything,” said Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity. He added: “This is a fantastic day for those who seek the truth about Lockerbie. He could tell us everything the Gaddafi regime knows.”

Last night, there were reports that other senior figures were preparing to follow Koussa’s lead.

Al Jazeera broadcast that “a number of figures” close to Gaddafi were leaving the country for neighbouring Tunisia.

Earlier reports claimed the Foreign Office was in secret talks with six more of the dictator’s aides about defecting, but this was played down by Downing Street. (...)

A Whitehall source explained British officials “need to tread carefully” and take their time talking to [Koussa]. “It’s a delicate situation and we need to take a measured approach. It’s early days,” he told The Herald.

However, apart from any historical evidence the defector might have on Lockerbie, MI6 will be hoping for as much intelligence as possible on Gaddafi’s current strategy.

It is believed he may also know the identity of the killer of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.

And as head of the Libyan intelligence agency from 1994 to 2009, he is likely to be able to provide details of Libya’s support for the IRA.

It is thought the debriefing could take some time, so any questioning by the Crown Office and Dumfries and Galloway Police might not take place for several days, if not weeks [RB: if at all]. (...)

Gaddafi’s spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said Koussa had been given permission to go to Tunisia for health treatment. He added: “His heart and body cannot take the pressures. If someone wants to step down, that’s his decision,” he added.

Tory backencher Robert Halfon compared the defection to that of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s disillusioned lieutenant, who crash-landed near Eaglesham in East Renfrewshire in 1941.

He said Koussa “should be put in front of a British or international court for war crimes, if it is true that he was behind the Lockerbie bombing”.

Last night, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said America should not pursue nation building or seek to direct the future of a post-Gaddafi Libya. It follows claims President Barack Obama had signed secret orders allowing intelligence operatives to provide support for rebels.

“I think that the last thing this country needs is another enterprise in nation building,” Gates told a Senate hearing.

[A further report by Carolyn Churchill in The Herald reads as follows:]

One of five Libyan diplomats expelled from the UK is understood to be the country’s former consul-general in Scotland.

Abdulrahman Swessi was based in Glasgow while the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, was behind bars in Barlinnie and then Greenock prisons.

Mr Swessi is thought to have been working in the Libyan embassy in London since Megrahi returned to Tripoli and is believed to be among five people given until April 6 to leave the country.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office would not confirm the identity of the diplomats yesterday, but reiterated William Hague’s comments to Parliament on Wednesday when he said they were asked to leave because of concerns they could pose a risk to national security.

Professor Robert Black QC, Professor Emeritus of Scots Law at Edinburgh University, questioned the reasoning behind Mr Swessi’s expulsion from the UK and said it was more likely to be because his name is forever linked with the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

He said: “He was never a high policymaker in any way. He was appointed simply to safeguard Megrahi’s interests while Megrahi’s family had their house in Glasgow. He was a social worker, if anything.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “They are five members of the Libyan embassy, including the military attache, who we believe are the strongest Gaddafi supporters. We believe they have been putting pressure on opposition and student groups in the UK.”

[Reports in today's edition of The Times (accessible only by subscribers) contain the following:]

Scottish police and prosecutors are seeking to interview Moussa Koussa, the defecting Libyan Foreign Minister, raising the prospect of resolving once and for all the truth about the Lockerbie bombing.

Officials at the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecuting authority, last night contacted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office saying they wished to speak to Mr Koussa in connection with the attack on PanAm Flight 103 in December 1988, which led to the death of 270 people.

Meanwhile Patrick Shearer, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway Police, the force which is still investigating the atrocity, said it would be unusual if they did not seek the opportunity to speak to “a senior member of the Government in Libya”.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, in response to the Scottish authorities, gave a strong indication that Scottish detectives would be allowed to question him. He told a news conference: “The investigation is still open. They should follow their investigation wherever it leads and we will respond to any request they make.”

However, in an unusual intervention, Whitehall officials insisted that Mr Koussa was not the “prime suspect” over Lockerbie. The Government also failed to rule out the possibility that he might leave the country before lengthy investigations by the International Criminal Court are complete. [RB: surprise, surprise!] (...)

Moussa Koussa visited Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi in Greenock Prison where he was serving his life sentence, it emerged yesterday.

Official documents reveal that, at a meeting with Scottish officials in Glasgow in January 2009, he warned that al-Megrahi had only a few months to live, and said that if he were to die in a Scottish prison it “would not be viewed well by the Muslims or the Arabs”. The minute indicates that Mr Koussa also made it clear that it would “not be good for relations” between the UK and Libya. That such a senior figure in the Libyan administration should have had access to al-Megrahi, and have exerted pressure on Scottish officials, will further convince those who opposed the Libyan’s return, that there was more to his release than compassion.

Mr Koussa, it has emerged, met Scottish Government officials twice — in late 2008 and again in early 2009 — after al-Megrahi had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Curiously, in the minutes of the first meeting on October 27, 2008, which included Foreign Office and Scottish Government officials as well as three Libyans, Mr Koussa is referred to as an “interpreter”. At a meeting in Glasgow on January 22, 2009, attended by six Libyans and four Scottish government officials, Mr Koussa is referred to as “Minister for Security” and the minutes shows that he intervened to draw attending to al-Megrahi’s illness. The minute goes on: “He (Koussa) spoke of al-Megrahi’s medical condition and that he feels that he only has a few months left.”

It was made clear by the Scottish Government last night that although officials had met him, Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister who in August 2009 released al-Megrahi, had had no direct contact with Mr Koussa.

Scottish campaigners who met Mr Koussa during their decades spent fighting for the truth about the Lockerbie bombing have told The Times that they found him more frightening than Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. And they said that they gleaned from encounters with the former Libyan foreign minister that, if the country were responsible for the explosion of Pan Am flight 103, then “his fingerprints will be all over it”.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, was one of the 270 people killed, said he met Mr Koussa in 1991. “I realised straight away that he was a central figure who had everything at his fingertips and was a chief executive in deciding what would happen in the country.”

Two years later, Robert Black, the Scottish QC who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist, went to meet Mr Koussa — the first of about nine encounters over 16 years. “The Libyans were very frightened of him. That was transparently obvious. Moussa would come into the hotel where I was staying and I could see everyone else, all the Libyans ... it was as if a shiver was going down their spines.”

“Certainly if Libya was involved in Lockerbie in any capacity then I have no doubt at all that Moussa Koussa knows about it,” said the lawyer. “If Libya was involved then it will have Moussa Koussa’s fingerprints all over it.”

[The Daily Telegraph runs a breathless story headlined Libya: dilemma over defector's 'electrifying' Lockerbie information. The text in no way supports the headline.

Dr Jim Swire and Steven Raeburn, editor of The Firm, appeared last night on the BBC's Newsnight Scotland. The programme can be viewed here.]

Letter from Dr Swire to Senator Kerry

[What follows is the text of a letter sent yesterday by Dr Jim Swire to Senator John Kerry, chairman of the US Senate committee on foreign relations, which has scheduled a hearing into the release of Abdelbaset Megrahi. An article based on the letter can be found on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm.]

My deeply loved elder daughter Flora aged 23 was among the victims aboard the plane. I think that all affected families, both here and in the US would welcome knowing the whole truth about every aspect of who caused the disaster and why they were not stopped.

I’m sure we are all united in that, though many of those you represent are much more confident in believing in the integrity of the trial process to which Mr Megrahi was subjected than are some of us over here.

So may I welcome you and your band of 4 Senators in your search for aspects of that truth, but this letter proposes reasons why it would be wise to consider the question of why the atrocity was not prevented as well as Megrahi’s guilt or innocence rather than only the reasons for his release.

I do not feel proud of the circumstances that have led me to hope that representatives of the USA rather than my own nation should be searching for the truth on our behalf. Below are some reasons why that is now a hope for us.

A Fatal Accident Inquiry (= inquest) was held in Scotland which found that the disaster had been preventable, and that the aircraft had been under the ‘Host State Protection of the United Kingdom’ at all relevant times. The failure of any UK Prime Minister to date to inquire into this ghastly failure of UK responsibility is enough in itself to justify this letter appealing to you.

We have approached every Prime Minster to seek a full inquiry and been as often rejected. David Cameron has not had time to reply yet, but I think you should know a little of the roles of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in particular.

Mrs Thatcher refused even to meet us (our group is called UK Families-Flight 103) to discuss an inquiry. She decreed that the Dumfries and Galloway (D&G) police, the UK's smallest police force should conduct the criminal investigation, even though she must have known that The Metropolitan police, through their special anti-terrorist branch, had already discovered a break-in at Heathrow airport the night before Lockerbie, which had given the untraced intruder access to the Iran Air facilities there, close to where bags were loaded for Pan Am 103 the next night.

The information concerning the break-in remained unknown to the Megrahi trial it only became known after the verdict had been reached,. when a junior Heathrow security man publicly complained that his evidence to the Metropolitan police early in 1989 had not been heard in the trial. Why did that happen?

In 1993 (two years after the indictment of the Libyans) Mrs Thatcher published a book The Downing Street Years. In it (p 449) she wrote that following the USAF raid on Tripoli/Bengazi in 1986 Gaddafi had been humbled and “the much vaunted Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place. There was a marked decrease in Libyan terrorism in succeeding years.”

‘Succeeding years’ would include 1988 and therefore the Lockerbie disaster. Why did she write that, though in power when Lockerbie happened?

We also requested Tony Blair to launch a full inquiry. He did meet with us but after a month of ‘asking the relevant people’ told us that ‘they’ did not consider any further inquiry necessary. When he went to see Colonel Gaddafi for the so called ‘Deal in the Desert’, the first we heard of it was through the media.

Scotland’s Criminal Case Review Commission meanwhile had found that the trial might well have been a miscarriage of justice, while the UN’s special observer to the trial, Professor Hans Koechler of Vienna had strongly criticised the trial as biased and the verdict as ‘incomprehensible’. Many jurists agree, and some would voluntarily give evidence before you.

As a result of the SCCRC’s comments Mr Megrahi’s case was referred back to the High Court in Edinburgh. Many believed that re-examination of the evidence would be bound to overturn the verdict.

However a succession of delays ensued, but even so Mr Jack Straw, the Labour government’s Minister of Justice was reduced to overriding the wishes of the House of Commons Select Committee on Human Rights, in order to have the Prisoner Transfer Agreement up and running by the start of the appeal.

Many thought this looked like an attempt to stop the appeal and thus ‘save’ the verdict by sending Mr Megrahi home. It was a unusual and unwelcome breech of custom for a Committee to be overridden in this way.

In the event the Scots did not use the Prisoner Transfer Agreement, but compassionate release, an option long enshrined in Scots law, when a prisoner has a short life prognosis (there is no ‘deadline’ of three months by the way) but for some reason Mr Megrahi withdrew his appeal, though this was not required for Compassionate release.

Was pressure put upon him to do so? Maybe a proper inquiry would answer that question too.

You may of course believe that it was pressure from BP which caused the panic, if Libya or BP were claiming that the UK was dragging her feet over her share of the ‘Deal in the Desert’.

Maybe you can find out whether it was that or a desire to 'protect' the verdict which motivated Mr Straw's precipitate actions.

Senator Kerry, I am heartened to hear that UK Prime Minister David Cameron has just undertaken to meet with you after all, according to today’s press. But I do wonder in view of the behaviour of successive UK governments, with all their delays and withholding of information over the past 21 years, and their failure to protect the plane in the first place, whether the Government of the UK is the right entity to hold an inquiry into this atrocity.

Would it be putting the fox in charge of the hencoop?

Previous UK governments have tried to ‘pass the buck’ to Scotland over the release of Megrahi, but there are far greater issues than that here. I do hope that David Cameron will be sufficiently independent of his predecessors to rebut the above fear: we too have just asked for a meeting with him to discuss an inquiry.

I understand that the Scottish authorities have agreed to cooperate with any appropriately empowered inquiry. Would you consider, in view of the multinational complexity of this case, whether a multinational board of respected individuals, a panel of jurists perhaps, should examine all aspects, including the behaviour of our Westminster administrations?

If so they would have to command the respect of the world and be seen to be independent of all those nations directly involved, which includes the USA of course. Such an inquiry would presumably require at least the full cooperation of the present UK administration.

Nelson Mandela said publicly just as the trial court was announced ‘No one country should be complainant prosecutor and judge’. We should not fall into the same trap again.

Please do not allow your determination to investigate this tragedy be thwarted by any one, it will be a tough call, but we relatives have a right to the whole truth.

'Tiny' Rowland got Lockerbie lawyer

[This is the headline over a report that was published in The Independent on this date in 1993 (the date attached to the article on the newspaper’s website is erroneous). It reads as follows:]

Roland 'Tiny' Rowland, head of Lonrho, the international conglomerate, has intervened to speed moves to bring two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing to trial.

Mr Rowland, who has close links with Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, helped to secure a Scottish lawyer for the men. The appointment of Alistair Duff, an Edinburgh solicitor-advocate, has raised hopes that they may go on trial in Scotland over the downing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988, which left 270 people dead.

The news of Mr Rowland's involvement comes as the United Nations is due to consider tougher sanctions against Libya. Last year Mr Rowland condemned sanctions in an article in The Observer, which he then owned.

Lonrho has extensive business links with Libya. Last year Libya bought one third of the shares in Lonrho's Metropole Hotel chain for pounds 177.5m through the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company.

UN sanctions imposed after Colonel Gaddafi refused to hand over the men - in particular the ban on air traffic - has made doing business with Libya difficult.

John Cama, former senior partner at Lonrho's City solicitors, Cameron Markby Hewitt, and a consultant to Lonrho, revealed Dr Ibrahim Legwell, the Libyan leading the legal team, asked Mr Rowland to help to find a laywer to advise on Scottish law. He said: 'Tiny consulted me, as his legal adviser, after Dr Legwell approached him. I recommended Alistair Duff.'

Mr Rowland's intervention was not a surprise, he added. 'Tiny has been a friend of Colonel Gaddafi for over 24 years.'

Although Mr Cama is not an official member of the legal team, he and Peter Hewes, a Cameron Markby partner, met the suspects - Abdel Baset Ali Mahmed al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhima - in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, this weekend. They also attended a meeting of the legal advisers.

Mr Cama, Mr Hewes, Mr Duff and Lord Macaulay of Bragar, an Edinburgh QC, flew home from Tunisia on a private jet thought to have been chartered by Lonrho.