Victim of one of the most spectacular miscarriages of justice in history

[Abdelbaset al-Megrahi died in Tripoli on this date five years ago. What follows is an obituary written by Tam Dalyell that was published in The Independent:]

Acres of newsprint have appeared in recent years, covering various rather separate theories about the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber.

If I thought for one moment that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was guilty as charged in the mass murder of 270 innocent people in the crash of the Pan Am airliner "Maid of the Seas" at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, I would not have agreed to pen an obituary – let alone an affectionate one.

My settled conviction, as a "Professor of Lockerbie Studies" over a 22-year period, is that neither Megrahi nor Libya had any role in the destruction of Pan Am 103. The Libyans were cynically scapegoated in 1990, two years after the crash, by a US government which had decided to go to war with Iraq and did not want complications with Syria and Iran, which had harboured the real perpetrators of the terrible deed.

Libya and its "operatives", Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, only came into the frame at a very late date. In my informed opinion, Megrahi has been the victim of one of the most spectacular (and expensive) miscarriages of justice in history. The assertion of innocence is confirmed in the 497 pages of John Ashton's scholarly and remarkable book, Megrahi: You Are My Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence, published by Birlinn.

This is an opinion shared by the senior and experienced solicitor Eddie McKechnie, who successfully represented Fhimah at Zeist in Holland, where a Scottish court was assembled to try the two accused under rules conducted by the jurisdiction of the laws of Scotland, and who took on Megrahi's case following his conviction; by Tony Kelly, the immensely thorough solicitor who has represented him for the past six years; by the bereaved relatives Dr Jim Swire and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost daughters and attended the entire Zeist trial; by Professor Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, and Lockerbie-born; and by many others in legal Edinburgh.

Furthermore, the Scottish Criminal Review Commission, in the course of its 800-page report, says (paragraph 24, page 708): "The Crown deprived the defence of the opportunity to take such steps as it might have deemed necessary – so the defence's case was damaged." It concluded: "The commission's view is that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred."

Megrahi was not in Malta on the date the clothing, so crucial in the whole Lockerbie saga, was bought from the shopkeeper Tony Gauci. The proprietor of Mary's House identified a number of different people, including Abu Talb, who appeared at the trial to deny his part in the bombing.

Talb was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command and is now serving a life sentence in Sweden for the 1985 bombings in Copenhagen and Amsterdam. These discrepancies were part of the reason why the Scottish criminal review commission concluded that there could have been a miscarriage of justice; another was the unexplained payment of $10m from Iranian sources into the coffers of the Popular Front.

The testimony of Lesley Atkinson, who knew Megrahi well in Tripoli, is interesting. She is the wife of Neville Atkinson, who, in 1972, left a career as a night-fighter pilot in the Royal Navy to take up a position as personal pilot to the president of Libya, Colonel Gadaffi, until 1982. "Megrahi was polite and friendly and worked for Libyan Arab Airlines," Mrs Atkinson told me. "Of course, lots of people who worked for LAA were connected to the security services and I do not doubt that he was one of them. We knew him both at work and at the Beach Club – he was a normal, nice guy. I cannot imagine that he would ever have dreamt of planting a bomb on an airliner. He just would not have done that to passengers."

Eddie McKechnie described Megrahi as a cultured man doing a job for his country, and certainly not a mass-murderer. Had he not been given extremely bad advice not to appear in the witness box Megrahi would have revealed the truth – that he was a sanctions-buster, travelling the world to find spare parts for the Libyan oil industry and Libyan Arab Airlines. This role was confirmed to me by Colonel Gadaffi, when, as leader of the Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to Libya in March 2001, I saw him in his tent outside Sirte. Gaddafi's own knowledge or involvement in Lockerbie is a different matter.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi was born in 1952 and educated in Tripoli and in the Engineering Faculty of Benghazi University. He became involved in the Ministry of Trade, and like many other officials, certainly did so in the intelligence services. He served as the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and as director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A genuine believer in what the young Gaddafi was trying to achieve, and in the Great Jamariyah, Megrahi was happy to put his talents at the service of the state. Where else in Africa is there no hint of personal corruption among the leadership, he asked me! He had good relations with engineers at Brown and Root, I was told by their chairman and managing director, Sir Richard Morris (1980-90). Brown and Root was the contractor for the huge irrigation projects in Cyrenerica, south of Benghazi, the man-made river bringing water to desert areas that had been fertile in Roman times.

He was understandably proud of the traditional skills associated with his people. On one occasion, when I visited him in Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow and told him that I had been to Leptis Magna, he responded: "You know that my Tripolitanian ancestors were the artists in stone, responsible for work throughout the Empire, not least in Rome itself!" Had the judges had the opportunity to get to know Megrahi, as I knew him, they could never have arrived at the verdict of "guilty" – at most, the good Scots legal term "not proven".

After Zeist, Fhimah, represented by the aggressively formidable barrister Richard Keen QC, was cleared and returned to a hero's welcome in Tripoli. Fhimah talked with knowledge and pride, as did Megrahi, about the wonderful sight of Sabbratah and the glories of the Greek colonial city at Cyrene.

Meanwhile, Megrahi was incarcerated in Barlinnie Prison. I was not his only visitor there and in Greenock who came away with a favourable opinion. Dr Swire, who lost his daughter Flora, a medical student at the University of Nottingham, told me: "On meeting Abdelbaset in Greenock prison, I found him charming, rational, not given to anger or bluster. He made it obvious that his first priority was to clear his name before returning to his much-loved family in Tripoli.

"I saw him for the last time just before Christmas 2008, when, he, a devout Muslim, gave me a Christmas card in which he asked me and my family to pray for him and his family. That card is one of my most precious possessions.

"This meeting was before he could have known just how closely death loomed. I cannot criticise his apparently voluntary decision to spend his last months on earth with his family, above the priority of clearing his name."

I know that in some uninformed quarters, Dr Swire's views are regarded as eccentric. But it is the other British relatives who have studied the position in depth, such as Martin Cadman, who lost his son Bill; Pamela Dix, who lost her brother; and the Reverend John Mosey, who lost a daughter, have arrived at precisely the same conclusions about Megrahi's innocence. Unlike some American relatives, they have bothered to make exhaustive studies of the detail.

In my opinion, whatever Gordon Brown, Kenny MacAskill, Alec Salmond and Jack Straw – all fundamentally decent human beings – may feel they have to say in public due to pressure, and wickedness in Washington and in the Crown Office in Edinburgh, which, above all, did not want their misdeeds exposed by the truth, they all knew that they were acquiescing in the release of an innocent man. I am not quite so sure that Fhimah did not have an inkling about potentially explosive material on its way to the Bekaa valley.

Even in his final hours, controversy never deserted Megrahi. The Libyan authorities were absolutely justified in declining to extradite him, both for reasons of international law and more importantly, that he was not guilty as charged of the Lockerbie crime – also the considered opinion of Dr Hans Koechler, who attended Megrahi's trial as an official UN observer and has examined his appeal process in Scotland.

As James Cusick, who has followed the twists and turns of the Lockerbie saga for many years as a highly informed journalist, wrote in The Independent on Tuesday 30 August, "The truth behind the Lockerbie bombing remains enmeshed in diplomatic gains."

My last sight of Abdelbaset was on TV on 3 October, attended by Mrs Megrahi, with tubes galore, thanking Dr Swire in gentle tones for trying to furnish necessary drugs and hissing out that there were many liars at Zeist. So there were.

"Utterly impossible" to reconstruct where, when and by whom items found

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

Tiny fragments of the suitcase suspected by police to have contained the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 were still being found months after the aircraft was blown up.

The fifth day of the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands has heard that thousands of items were sifted through for signs of blast damage.

In the spring and summer of 1989, officers returned to specific search areas and turned up more evidence. (...)

Teams of officers sorted and examined 40,000 pieces for signs of unusual damage. They were labelled and stored according to the search sector in which they were found.

DC McInnes identified items he had discovered from his work inside the hanger in March 1989.

They included blast-damaged fragments of a brown suitcase and burnt pieces of material about an inch square.

He then identified other items he found when further outdoor searches were conducted in Newcastleton forest in the April and May of that year.

They included more tiny pieces of a brown suitcase, possibly Samsonite.

He had labelled one find as "rubber trim, copper-coloured, possibly from the bomb case". (...)

Cross-examined, DC McInnes acknowledged that the sheer volume of wreckage, plus erratic police labelling, meant expert guesswork was sometimes used to locate evidence and date its discovery retroactively.

He told defence counsel Bill Taylor that in the weeks following the disaster, trucks filled with wreckage arrived at a warehouse where an initial reconstruction of the plane was made.

Not every individual piece was labelled by waves of police conducting fingertip "line searches" over vast stretches of open country, forest and farmland, and some paper labels were washed out or dissolved by rain.

The detective agreed that it was now "utterly impossible" to reconstruct where, when and by whom individual pieces were found and admitted a description of another piece was written over type-correcting fluid covering words no longer legible.

Another officer, Thomas Gilchrist, admitted under cross-examination by defence advocate Richard Keen, that a description on one label which was shown magnified on a courtroom imager might possibly have been changed from "clothes" to "debris".

Lockerbie trial personnel

What follows is excerpted from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2008:

Where are they now?

[I]t has been reported that Megrahi's junior counsel at the Zeist trial, John Beckett, has been appointed a sheriff (a judge in Scotland's lower court system). Beckett became a QC in 2005 after the trial, and served briefly as Solicitor General for Scotland (deputy to the Lord Advocate, the chief Scottish Government law officer and head of the prosecution system) in 2006 to 2007. See http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2008/04/10100308

As far as the other lawyers involved in the trial are concerned, most remain in practice but two of the prosecutors, Alastair Campbell QC and Alan Turnbull QC, have become judges of the Scottish supreme courts (the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary); Megrahi's solicitor, Alistair Duff, has become a sheriff; and Richard Keen QC, the senior counsel for the acquitted co-accused, Lamin Fhimah, has been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates (leader of the Scottish Bar). The then Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd QC (later Lord Boyd of Duncansby) has taken the highly unusual step of resigning from the Faculty of Advocates and becoming a solicitor. He is now a partner in a large Edinburgh law firm.

The three judges who presided at the trial, Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield and MacLean, have all now retired from the bench.

[RB: Sheriff Alistair Duff is now Director of the Judicial Institute for Scotland; Richard Keen QC is now Baron Keen of Elie and Advocate General for Scotland; Colin Boyd QC is now a judge of the Court of Session and High Court of Justiciary; Lord Coulsfield died in March 2016.]

Inference upon inference upon inference

Since my return to South Africa I have, until today, been in areas without internet connection. Here is what I would have posted on Wednesday, 18 January had it been possible.

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on the BBC News website on 18 January 2001:]

The Lockerbie trial has been adjourned until Tuesday 30 January while the judges consider their verdict after hearing 84 days of evidence. (...)

The trial itself lasted eight months but was persistently held up by procedural problems.

Defence counsel for the two Libyans accused of the bombing in which 270 died completed their closing arguments on Thursday and called on the judges to deliver not guilty verdicts.

They urged the three judges - Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord Maclean - to find their clients not guilty of the murder of 270 people in December 1988.

The trial is taking place at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands and is thought to have cost about £50m.

On the last day of evidence they heard Richard Keen, QC, representing Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, systematically atttempt to dismiss the Crown's claims by challenging the quality of the testimony.

He said: "We have inference upon inference upon inference, leading to an inference."

Mr Keen said the fact that Mr Fhimah had been, prior to the bombing, station chief for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta did not mean he had the know-how to slip an unaccompanied suitcase bomb onto an outgoing flight.

"Even if Al-Amin Fhimah had possessed the expertise that the Crown attributes to him," Mr Keen said, "the evidence does not suggest that Libyan intelligence services would have looked to him for the furtherance of their alleged plot."

Mr Keen suggested Fhimah could have been duped into supplying baggage tags, and that an entry in his diary about "getting tags - OK" proved nothing.

He added that Libya's JSO intelligence agency had its own agent at the airport, Abdul Majid Giaka, who later defected to the United States and, in September, testified as the prosecution's star witness.

Like William Taylor, QC, who is representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, Mr Keen challenged Mr Giaka's evidence in an attempt to convince the bench that the case against the accused is not watertight.

On several points, Mr Keen said, Giaka was "unreliable, and at some times simply incredible".

He urged the judges to look back at his testimony with "conspicuous care".

Sensitive information from a foreign government

[What follows is excerpted from a report published on this date in 2000 on the BBC News website:]

The Lockerbie trial is to be delayed again after "sensitive" information was given to the prosecution by a government.

In an unexpected development, Scotland's Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC told the judges on Monday it was impossible to proceed without further enquiries.

He gave few details to the court but confirmed that the information was related to the defence case and did not come from the United States.

Although some witnesses will be heard on Tuesday, the judges, with defence agreement, agreed then to adjourn the trial until Tuesday, 17 October.

On Monday the court at Camp Zeist in Holland was due to hear more evidence relating to the special defences of incrimination put forward by the two accused men.

They have denied all charges against them, blaming others for the atrocity including Mohamed Abo Talb, a former commander in the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front.

Talb, who was jailed for life in 1989 for bombing an airline's office in Copenhagen, was expected to give evidence as a prosecution witness on Monday.

The prosecution declined to comment further on the delay and a Crown Office spokesman said: "We can give no further information other than that given to the court by the lord advocate."

Mr Boyd told the court he had received the new information on Thursday and enquiries were carried out on Friday.

He said: "The matters raised by this information are of some complexity and considerable sensitivity. They relate not to the Crown case but to the defence case.

"Enquiries are continuing but it is likely, though not certain, that I will conclude that the information ought to be disclosed to the defence.

"However there are a number of difficult issues which require to be resolved before any disclosure is possible.

"The sensitivity of the enquiries is such that I am unable to give any further explanation at this stage."

Mr Boyd said it would be "inappropriate" to lead further Crown evidence relating to the special defences as the new information could have a bearing on the cross examination of witnesses.

William Taylor QC, defence counsel for Al Megrahi, told the judges he was "as much in the dark" as them about the reasons for the adjournment and therefore in no position to object to it.

However he added: "I am conscious that my client has now been in custody for some considerable time and any delay further extends that period."

Richard Keen QC, defending Fhimah, said: "It's obviously unfortunate the accused should have been in custody for one and a half years while 57 days of a trial has taken place.

"But the lord advocate was good enough to speak to myself and Mr Taylor before and I fully accept he has obligations incumbent on him in the public interest."

Presiding judge Lord Sutherland said that while a disruption to the proceedings was "unfortunate" the judges accepted the adjournment motion.

He said: "We will adjourn until next Tuesday for enquiries to be made. All we can do is express the hope that there will be sufficient time to resolve the difficulties."

[RB: I suspect that the document referred to above was not in fact provided to the defence at the Zeist trial and is the same document that was only disclosed six years later to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, and in respect of which the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, signed a Public Interest Immunity certificate to prevent its being revealed to Megrahi’s legal team for the subsequent appeal. The contents of the document were made public in a report in The Herald in June 2012. Kenny MacAskill made reference to it in his recent Lockerbie book: see Lockerbie: The bid to suppress evidence on this blog on 27 May 2016.]

Feraday’s legacy

[On this date in 2005 Hassan Assali’s explosives conviction was quashed by the English Court of Appeal. His conviction in 1985 was founded on evidence given by Allen Feraday. What follows is a comment that appeared during the Zeist trial on the website edited by Ian Ferguson and me:]

As one of the Crown's key witnesses gave his testimony this week in Camp Zeist at the trial of the two Libyans accused of the bombing of Pan Am 103, one man, Hassan Assali watched news reports with interest as Allen Feraday took the witness stand.

Assali, 48, born in Libya but who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1965, was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to nine years. He was charged under the 1883 Explosives Substances Act, namely making electronic timers.

The Crown's case against Assali depended largely on the evidence of one man, Allen Feraday. Feraday concluded that the timers in question had only one purpose, to trigger bombs.

While in Prison Assali, met John Berry, who had also been convicted of selling timers and the man responsible for leading the Crown evidence against Berry was once again, Feraday. Again Feraday contended that the timers sold by Berry could have only one use, terrorist bombs.

With Assali's help Berry successfully appealed his conviction, using the services of a leading forensic expert and former British Army electronic warfare officer, Owen Lewis.

Assali's case is currently before the [English] Criminal Cases Review Commission, the CCRC. It has been there since 1997. Assali believes that his case might be delayed deliberately, as he stated to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw in a fax in February 1999: "I feel that my case is being neglected or put on the back burner for political reasons."

Assali believes that if his case is overturned on appeal during the Lockerbie trial it will be a further huge blow to Feraday's credibility and ultimately the Crown's case against the Libyans.

There is no doubt that a number of highly qualified forensic scientists do not care for the highly "opinionated" type of testimony, which is a hall mark of many of Feraday's cases.

He has been known, especially in cases involving timers to state in one case that the absence of a safety device makes it suitable for terrorists and then in another claim that the presence of a safety device proves the same, granted that the devices were different, but it is the most emphatic way in which he testifies that his opinions are "facts", that worries forensic scientists and defence lawyers.

In his report on Feraday's evidence in the Assali case, Owen Lewis states, "It is my view that Mr. Feraday's firm and unwavering assertion that the timing devices in the Assali case were made for and could have no other purpose than the triggering of IED's is most seriously flawed, to the point that a conviction which relied on such testimony must be open to grave doubt."

A host of other scientists, all with vastly more qualifications than Feraday concurred with Owen Lewis.

A report by Michael Moyes, a highly qualified electronics engineer and former Squadron Leader in the RAF, concluded that "there is no evidence that we are aware that the timers of this type have ever been found to be used for terrorist purposes. Moreover the design is not suited to that application."

Moyes was also struck by the similarity in the Berry and Assali case, in terms of the Feraday evidence.

In setting aside Berry's conviction in the appeal Court, Lord Justice Taylor described Feraday's evidence as "dogmatic".

This week in the Lockerbie trial, Feraday exhibited that same attitude when questioned by Richard Keen QC.

Keen asked Feraday about Lord Justice Taylor's remarks on his evidence, but Feraday, dogmatically, said he stands by his evidence in the Berry case.

He was further challenged over making contemporaneous notes on items of evidence he examined. Asked if he was certain that he had made those notes at the time, he said yes. When shown the official police log book which showed that some of the items Feraday had claimed to have examined had in actual fact been destroyed or returned to their owner before he claimed to examined them, his response, true to his dogmatic evidence was the police logs were wrong.

Under cross-examination though, it did become clear that Feraday completed a report for John Orr who was leading the police Lockerbie investigation and in that report he stated he was,  "Completely satisfied that the Lockerbie bomb had been contained inside a white Toshiba RT 8016 or 8026 radio-cassette player", and not, as he now testifies, "inside a black Toshiba RT SF 16 model."

As recently as May [2000], the leading civil liberties solicitor, Ms Gareth Peirce, told the Irish Times that the Lockerbie trial should be viewed with a questioning eye as lessons learned from other cases showed that scientific conclusions were not always what they seemed.

Speaking in Dublin Castle at an international conference on forensic science, Ms Peirce said she observed with interest the opening of the Lockerbie trial and some of the circumstances which, she said, had in the view of the prosecution dramatically affected the case.

She asked herself questions particularly relating to circuit boards which featured in the Lockerbie case and also in a case that she took on behalf of Mr. Danny McNamee, whose conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions in connection with the Hyde Park bombings (another case in which Feraday testified) was eventually quashed. She asked herself whether the same procedures were involved.

Danny McNamee may be the most recent Feraday case to be overturned, Hassan Assali believes his case will be the next.

[RB: As mentioned above, Assali’s conviction was quashed on 19 July 2005. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, stated that Allen Feraday “should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics”.]

The positioning of the Lockerbie bomb

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James that was published on WSWS.org on this date in 2000:]

Testimony in the trial of the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 has deepened speculation regarding the bomb's location in the airplane and exposed divisions among the original air accident investigators.

Last week, prosecution witnesses robustly defended their view that the bomb that brought down the Boeing 747 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 259 passengers and crew as well as 11 local residents, had been in luggage container AVE 4041. The prosecution maintains that the two Libyan defendants, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had loaded a suitcase containing the bomb onto a feeder flight in Malta, which was then transferred onto Flight 103 at Frankfurt. This scenario rests on the assumption that the bomb was located inside a suitcase. If it was not, then the prosecution's charges against the two Libyans is in danger of collapse

Peter Claydon, one of the Air Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) team looking into the disaster, explained that investigators came to the conclusion the bomb was in a suitcase after studying the pattern of damage to container AVE 4041 and the rest of the surrounding aircraft. Blast damage was most concentrated around the rear quarter of the container, beside the aircraft's hull. Claydon, pressed by the prosecution lawyers, stated several times that he was certain that the "event" took place inside the container. He disagreed with a defence suggestion that damage to the neighbouring container, AVN 7511PA, pointed to the blast occurring outside AVE 4041. He also stated that he thought the luggage item containing the explosive was not on the floor of the container, as the floor showed signs of having been protected from the direct effects of the blast by another piece of luggage. He explained how he found a tiny charred fragment of a circuit board lodged in the container's marker plate.

Claydon's testimony was followed by that of Ian Cullis, an explosives expert, and Christopher Peel, both from the UK's Defence Research Establishment (DERA). Their names do not appear on the list of contributors to the initial AAIB report. Cullis claimed that the sooting of the container remains, and pitting in both the fuselage and container, showed that the explosion had taken place inside the container. He said that deformations of the container floor again pointed to another piece of luggage having been forced into the floor by a blast above it. Peel, who has subsequently worked on a research project into the effects of small bombs on pressurised aircraft, narrated a video on the results of this work, which including exploding 450g of plastic explosive inside a Boeing 747. He claimed that using complex mathematical calculations, he could accurately place the bomb inside the luggage container.

Defence lawyer Richard Keen QC said to Peel, "You have not simply developed an analytical model, but gone back and altered your view of the facts in order to apply the analytical model."

Later, during three days of cross-examination, Peel admitted to Alan Turnbull QC that an earlier calculation put the bomb 17 inches from the aircraft hull, rather than the 24 inches currently suggested by Peel, and other analytical models suggested a distance of as little as 12 inches.

The three investigators' evidence directly contradicts analyses made by another prosecution witness, Edmund Bollier of MEBO AG, the Swiss electronics firm who manufactured the timer alleged to have triggered the explosion. Bollier has claimed in two reports that the bomb was attached directly to the aircraft's hull.

Bollier's claims were strengthened by the testimony of accident investigator Christopher Protheroe, who was a member of the AIIB team along with Claydon.

The 1990 report from the AAIB team [https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/2-1990-boeing-747-121-n739pa-21-december-1988] was quite clear in locating the bomb inside container AVE 4041, reassembled from fragments scattered around the Scottish countryside. But Protheroe admitted in court that there had been a significant mathematical error in the official report of the accident. According to his examination of the "Mach stem" effect used to calculate blast wave effects after an initial explosion, correct calculations would place the bomb 12 inches from the fuselage and therefore outside luggage container AVE 4041. After Protheroe's testimony the court adjourned so the remains of the shredded container could be assembled inside the courtroom.

The recent resignation of the head of Glasgow University's Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit, Andrew Fulton, following his exposure as a long-standing MI6 operative points to the US and UK intelligence services maintaining an acute interest in Pan Am 103 from the moment it crashed until the present trial. The Briefing Unit was set up in late 1998 to provide "impartial" advice on the legal aspects of the Lockerbie trial and has been contacted by many representatives of the world's media. Fulton, a British diplomat for 30 years, had been MI6 station chief in Washington DC in his last position. He was appointed to the unit 18 months ago as a "visiting law professor", despite his complete lack of legal experience. He was placed in charge of press briefings and controlled the flow of information from the unit.

Expert guesswork sometimes used to locate evidence

[The following are excerpts from a report published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

Tiny fragments of the suitcase suspected by police to have contained the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 were still being found months after the aircraft was blown up.

The fifth day of the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands has heard that thousands of items were sifted through for signs of blast damage.

In the spring and summer of 1989, officers returned to specific search areas and turned up more evidence. (...)

Teams of officers sorted and examined 40,000 pieces for signs of unusual damage. They were labelled and stored according to the search sector in which they were found.

DC [Duncan] McInnes identified items he had discovered from his work inside the hanger in March 1989.

They included blast-damaged fragments of a brown suitcase and burnt pieces of material about an inch square.

He then identified other items he found when further outdoor searches were conducted in Newcastleton forest in the April and May of that year.

They included more tiny pieces of a brown suitcase, possibly Samsonite.

He had labelled one find as "rubber trim, copper-coloured, possibly from the bomb case". (...)

Cross-examined, DC McInnes acknowledged that the sheer volume of wreckage, plus erratic police labelling, meant expert guesswork was sometimes used to locate evidence and date its discovery retroactively.

He told defence counsel Bill Taylor that in the weeks following the disaster, trucks filled with wreckage arrived at a warehouse where an initial reconstruction of the plane was made.

Not every individual piece was labelled by waves of police conducting fingertip "line searches" over vast stretches of open country, forest and farmland, and some paper labels were washed out or dissolved by rain.

The detective agreed that it was now "utterly impossible" to reconstruct where, when and by whom individual pieces were found and admitted a description of another piece was written over type-correcting fluid covering words no longer legible.

Another officer, Thomas Gilchrist, admitted under cross-examination by defence advocate Richard Keen, that a description on one label which was shown magnified on a courtroom imager might possibly have been changed from "clothes" to "debris".

Police followed Palestine link, Lockerbie trial told

[This is the headline over a report in The Guardian on this date in 2000. It reads in part:]

Scottish police investigating the Lockerbie disaster flew to Rome and Germany within days of the bombing to study similar atrocities involving a Palestinian group, the Lockerbie trial in Holland was told today.

Retired detective chief inspector Gordon Ferrie said that the tragedy was treated as a murder inquiry from the day after it happened. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) quickly became the "focus of attention" because of arrests of some of its members in Germany only two months before Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

They included a man known as Marwan Kreeshat [or Khreesat] a technical expert who had been jailed for 18 years in his absence for his part in placing a bomb in a record player on an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv in 1972. He had been arrested by the Germans in October 1988, the court was told, but released in December, before the Lockerbie bombing later the same month.

About ten senior officers from the Lockerbie inquiry spent weeks at the German headquarters of the BKA, the German equivalent of the FBI, the court heard.

The two Libyans accused of the bombing, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, deny charges of murder and conspiracy to murder, and they have lodged special defences in which they incriminate, among others, members of the PFLP-GC.

Under cross-examination Mr Ferrie confirmed he had been sent to Rome twice to study the El Al incident, in which two British women had been befriended by three men - including Marwan Kreeshat - and persuaded to take a record player on board the plane. They did not know it contained a bomb.

El Al security measures ensured the record player went into the bomb-proof luggage hold, instead of in the passenger cabin. Fortunately, although the device exploded at about 13,000ft and blew a hole in the passenger floor, the plane landed back at Rome safely.

Mr Ferrie brought back to Lockerbie some of the Italian evidence in the case, including part of an altimeter which had been used in the bomb's trigger. Questioned by Richard Keen QC, representing Fhimah, Mr Ferrie confirmed that in Rome he had discovered that Kreeshat had been involved in other incidents "using improvised explosive devices", including the bombing of a plane using a Toshiba radio cassette recorder modified to act as a bomb.

The Lockerbie trial indictment accuses Megrahi and Fhimah of placing an "improvised explosive device" concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette recorder on board an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt labelled for onward connection to New-York bound Pan Am Flight 103 at Heathrow. (...)

Re-examined by Alan Turnbull QC, prosecuting, Mr Ferrie was asked: "There came a stage when the inquiry led officers in a direction other than the PFLP, weren't there?" Mr Ferrie agreed.

However, when he then asked Mr Ferrie what the eventual result of the police inquiry was, defence lawyers objected that it was hearsay evidence, because Mr Ferrie had later been moved to other work.

Questioned by Mr Keen for Fhimah, Mr McLean insisted that, although FBI and CIA agents from America were swiftly on the scene of the disaster, all evidence found was "religiously and meticulously" logged, including items recovered by the CIA.