Gaddafi and Lockerbie

[What follows is part of an item posted on this blog on this date in 2011. It is excerpted from an article by Nigel Horne to be found now on the website of The Week:]

A senior member of Col Gaddafi's administration has claimed that Gaddafi himself ordered the the bombing of the PanAm jetliner which exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988, killing a total of 270 people, the majority of them Americans.

Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who was Libya's justice minister until he resigned in protest at Gaddafi's orders to murder unarmed protesters, has told the Swedish tabloid Expressen that he possesses proof that Gaddafi gave the order.

Conspicuously, neither Abdel-Jalil nor the paper's correspondent, Kassem Hamade, can reveal what the 'proof' is. (...)

But is Abdel-Jalil telling the truth - or is this a convenient lie, told in the hope that Gaddafi will go to his grave with the secret intact?

The fact is, many politicians and journalists - not nutcase conspiracy theorists, but serious investigative reporters - who have observed and reported into the Lockerbie bombing from the outset have never been persuaded that Libya masterminded the attack. They remain convinced that Libya only ever acted as an agent for another Middle Eastern power and/or - as Alexander Cockburn reported here last year - that Libya and Megrahi were framed.

Iran, Syria, Hezbollah - all have been held up over the past two decades as likely candidates for ordering the bombing.

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, still alive in Tripoli, will likely die without giving up his story: recent reports suggest the prostate cancer that was supposed to kill him in 2009 has spread through his body and he has little time left.

But if Gaddafi should die in some final conflagration as the Libyan endgame approaches, there is a real danger that the Lockerbie relatives seeking 'closure' will have been fooled if they accept Abdel-Jalil's claim.

Their best hope of learning the truth is that Gaddafi gets out of Libya alive and in handcuffs, to appear before the International Criminal Court at The Hague, and that he is persuaded to tell the whole truth about the worst terrorist atrocity ever perpetrated on British soil.

Such is the nature of what he could tell the court, however, that there are some western governments who might prefer that he meets his end before that can happen.

Should the Scottish government offer to bring al-Megrahi back to Scotland?

[This is the headline over an article by Robert Forrester published yesterday on the Newsnet Scotland website. It reads as follows:]

When Mr al-Megrahi was repatriated, he returned to Libya in a climate of ‘back to the oil business as usual’. Once the Arab uprisings of North Africa and the Middle East had taken hold in Libya, the US and other NATO members promptly rode roughshod over the UN and converted a civil war into one of international dimensions.

For months now, we have been hearing wholly unsubstantiated claims from Mr Abdel-Jalil, Chairman of the National Transitional Council (NTC) of Libya, that Mr al-Megrahi carried out the Lockerbie bombing. The only time Mr Abdel-Jalil has come close to producing any evidence on this score was on the 1st of April 2011 when he said he knew what he was claiming was true as Colonel Gaddafi had provided financial and legal assistance to Mr al-Megrahi whilst the latter was incarcerated in Scotland.

It seems that Mr Abdel-Jalil was a judge in his previous employ. If this is the standard of evidence he used to find acceptable in courts where he was presiding, one dreads to think how many miscarriages of justice he has been responsible for.

The NTC has now been recognised as the legitimate government of Libya by the US, France and now the UK. There is a strong likelihood that if members of the NTC lay their hands on Mr al-Megrahi, he may quickly find himself in possession of a one way ticket to the USA, with all the dire consequences that that could hold in store for him.

It hardly requires to be pointed out that if this were to occur, it would be deeply embarrassing to Scotland, its government and the Crown Office. In short, it would be a diplomatic disaster for Scotland. Now that the US and others have recognised the NTC as the legitimate government of Libya, the door will clearly be open for these countries to take a much more active role in bringing down Colonel Gaddafi, thus making Mr al-Megrahi's rendition to the US an ever more realistic proposition.

Mr al-Megrahi still falls under Scottish jurisdiction. He was convicted by the Kamp van Zeist Court under terms the US agreed to. In recent times, the US has demonstrated a complete disregard for the codes and conventions of international law to the extent that she has invaded countries, kidnapped and murdered individuals on foreign soil and transported 'undesirables' for the purposes of torture to locales where such practices are par of the course.

It is now of vital importance that the Scottish authorities at least offer Mr al-Megrahi an open door through which to escape his current circumstances if he wishes to do so, not least because so many profound doubts exist over his 2001 conviction.

Robert Forrester is the Secretary of the ‘Justice for Megrahi’ group

Acquitted Lockerbie bomber could be retried

[This is the headline over the lead story in today's edition of the Maltese newspaper The Independent on Sunday. It reads as follows:]

Just when Malta thought it may have been seeing the infamy attached to it by way of the Lockerbie disaster subsiding, Scottish prosecutors are looking into the prospect of retrying acquitted Lockerbie bomber Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

The prospect, if realised, would reopen an ugly chapter in recent Maltese history as having been alleged to be the place where the bomb, concealed in a suitcase, was first loaded. The bomb was eventually loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in Christmas 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

But the Scottish authorities appear unwilling to let the matter die a natural death following the acquittal and the subsequent guilty verdict and release of the second accused person, and rightly so seeing that a new legal window has now opened up.

A change in double jeopardy laws now provides the possibility of an accused person to stand trial a second time if compelling new evidence surfaces, and a specialist unit at the Crown Office in Edinburgh is in the process of re-examining the evidence against Mr Fhimah to ascertain the potential strength of such a case.

Mr Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, had been accused of helping Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi place the bomb into the luggage system at Malta International Airport, where it was claimed the bomb’s fateful journey had begun.

Mr Fhimah had been acquitted in the Lockerbie trial at The Hague in 2001 after his defence argued the case against him was nothing more than “inference upon inference upon inference upon inference leading to an inference”.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the co-accused, had been convicted and the rest of his story is by now well known. He was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 just before he was about to appeal his guilty verdict, on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and had only a short time left to live. He is still alive.

But more than merely seeking once again to bring Mr Fhimah to justice, the Crown Office believes that the collapse of Libya’s Gaddafi regime could provide evidence for still further Lockerbie prosecutions.

Scottish prosecutors recently interviewed Libyan defector Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s former foreign minister and intelligence chief, when he was on British soil, and it is believed a number of questions about Mr Fhimah had been raised during the interview.

In an interview with The Times of London, the new Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC, appealed for Koussa’s fellow high-ranking Libyan defector, former justice minister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, to come forward with information on the bombing. Mr Abdul Jalil, who is now the head of the provisional Libyan government in Benghazi, had said in a number of interviews that he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing.

In one interview, he had told Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” he said, but did not describe the proof.

“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Mr Mulholland meanwhile told The Times of London in the interview, “I cannot send our investigators into an unsafe place but he [Fhimah] could pick up the phone. [RB: Surely the "he" Mulholland is referring to is Abdel-Jalil.] If he has relevant information on Lockerbie we would be delighted to see it.

“If a meeting can be arranged we would be prepared to see him in another country. The interview with Moussa Koussa was easier to arrange because he was in UK jurisdiction so it was quicker.”

[As I have said before on this blog, there will be no re-trial of Lamin Fhimah or any trial of Colonel Gaddafi for the bombing of Pan Am 103. The Crown Office is perfectly well aware that the evidence simply does not exist to make a conviction a realistic prospect; and that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi on the evidence led at Zeist was a travesty perpetrated by a credulous court which has long since been exposed, by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst many others.]

No visible progress on Lockerbie "live investigation"

What follows is an item published on this blog on this date three years ago.

[The lead story in today's edition of the Maltese newspaper The Independent on Sunday reads as follows:]

Just when Malta thought it may have been seeing the infamy attached to it by way of the Lockerbie disaster subsiding, Scottish prosecutors are looking into the prospect of retrying acquitted Lockerbie bomber Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

The prospect, if realised, would reopen an ugly chapter in recent Maltese history as having been alleged to be the place where the bomb, concealed in a suitcase, was first loaded. The bomb was eventually loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in Christmas 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

But the Scottish authorities appear unwilling to let the matter die a natural death following the acquittal and the subsequent guilty verdict and release of the second accused person, and rightly so seeing that a new legal window has now opened up.

A change in double jeopardy laws now provides the possibility of an accused person to stand trial a second time if compelling new evidence surfaces, and a specialist unit at the Crown Office in Edinburgh is in the process of re-examining the evidence against Mr Fhimah to ascertain the potential strength of such a case.

Mr Fhimah, a former station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta, had been accused of helping Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi place the bomb into the luggage system at Malta International Airport, where it was claimed the bomb’s fateful journey had begun.

Mr Fhimah had been acquitted in the Lockerbie trial at The Hague in 2001 after his defence argued the case against him was nothing more than “inference upon inference upon inference upon inference leading to an inference”.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the co-accused, had been convicted and the rest of his story is by now well known. He was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 just before he was about to appeal his guilty verdict, on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and had only a short time left to live. He is still alive.

But more than merely seeking once again to bring Mr Fhimah to justice, the Crown Office believes that the collapse of Libya’s Gaddafi regime could provide evidence for still further Lockerbie prosecutions.

Scottish prosecutors recently interviewed Libyan defector Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s former foreign minister and intelligence chief, when he was on British soil, and it is believed a number of questions about Mr Fhimah had been raised during the interview.

In an interview with The Times of London, the new Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, QC, appealed for Koussa’s fellow high-ranking Libyan defector, former justice minister Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, to come forward with information on the bombing. Mr Abdul Jalil, who is now the head of the provisional Libyan government in Benghazi, had said in a number of interviews that he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing.

In one interview, he had told Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie,” he said, but did not describe the proof.

“To hide it, he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get al-Megrahi back from Scotland,” Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Mr Mulholland meanwhile told The Times of London in the interview, “I cannot send our investigators into an unsafe place but he [Fhimah] could pick up the phone. [RB: Surely the "he" Mulholland is referring to is Abdel-Jalil.] If he has relevant information on Lockerbie we would be delighted to see it.

“If a meeting can be arranged we would be prepared to see him in another country. The interview with Moussa Koussa was easier to arrange because he was in UK jurisdiction so it was quicker.”

[As I have said before on this blog, there will be no re-trial of Lamin Fhimah or any trial of Colonel Gaddafi for the bombing of Pan Am 103. The Crown Office is perfectly well aware that the evidence simply does not exist to make a conviction a realistic prospect; and that the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi on the evidence led at Zeist was a travesty perpetrated by a credulous court which has long since been exposed, by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission amongst many others.]

Three years later there are no signs of any move to re-indict Lamin Fhimah or, indeed, that the Crown Office’s much vaunted “live investigation” is making any progress in uncovering supposed Libyan accomplices who can be charged and tried.

New Libyan government "will not hand over Megrahi"

[The following are excerpts from a report published (behind the paywall) in today's edition of The Sunday Times:]

Libya’s new government will refuse to hand over the suspected killer of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and the Lockerbie bomber if Britain seeks their extradition, senior officials warned this weekend.

Members of the National Transitional Council (NTC) said they would block any request for a British trial of the man suspected of shooting Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984.

They would also reject any attempt to return Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to prison in Scotland.

Hassan al-Sagheer, a member of the NTC and a legal expert, said: “Libya has never extradited or handed over its citizens to a foreign country. We shall continue with this principle.” (...)

[The comments will] dismay relatives of the Lockerbie victims and politicians in Britain and America who have called for Megrahi to be sent back to jail. David Cameron has said he should not have been released two years ago when it was thought he would die from prostate cancer within months. (...)

Members of the NTC said they were highly unlikely to change the position.

“According to our laws, no one can be handed over unless there are previous agreements or special agreements to do so,” said Fawzi al-Ali, another NTC member.

A senior judge who took part in the early stages of the uprising that toppled Gadaffi last week emphasised another reason why Megrahi would not be sent to Britain or — as some US politicians have demanded — America.

The bomber is a member of one of the largest tribes that sided with Gadaffi during the revolt. “Any move to hand him back would cause internal conflict at a time when we are trying to bridge differences,” the judge said.

[Here is UK Foreign Secretary William Hague's response, as reported on The Telegraph website:]

Speaking in a round of broadcast interviews this morning, Mr Hague said: "This is an ongoing police investigation so it is quite difficult for me to comment.

"I would say that when chairman (Mustafa Abdel) Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council, was with us in London in May he committed himself and the council to co-operating fully with the British government on this issue.

"It is true, it is a fact, that there is no extradition treaty with Libya. but we look to them to cooperate fully.

"So I would not take what has been written in the press today as the last word."

[And here is the Libyan National Transitional Council's rejoinder, as reported by The Press Association news agency:]

On Sunday morning, Foreign Secretary William Hague struck an optimistic note on the case, saying National Transitional Council (NTC) chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil had pledged to "co-operate fully".

"I would say that when chairman Jalil...was with us in London in May he committed himself and the council to co-operating fully with the British government on this issue," Mr Hague said in a round of broadcast interviews. It is true, it is a fact, that there is no extradition treaty with Libya. But we look to them to co-operate fully."

Mr Hague played down comments by junior NTC members that extraditions would be blocked, insisting they were not the "last word".

However, on Sunday evening new justice minister Mohammed al-Alagi became the most senior figure so far to rule out handing individuals over.

"We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West," he told reporters in Tripoli. "Al-Megrahi has already been judged once and he will not be judged again ... We do not hand over Libyan citizens. (Muammar) Gaddafi does."

[It should be noted that Libya did not extradite Megrahi and Fhimah for trial at Zeist, for exactly the reason set out above -- Libyan law (like that of many other countries) does not permit the extradition of its citizens for trial abroad. Megrahi and Fhimah voluntarily surrendered for trial, a decision that Megrahi at least must now bitterly regret.]

Trade deal link to Lockerbie bomber release

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

The politician who freed the Lockerbie bomber today reveals the full story of how the Westminster government made him eligible for return to Libya, including the role of trade deals potentially worth £13bn to British companies.

In a dramatic new book, serialised exclusively in The Sunday Times, former justice minister Kenny MacAskill also admits his decision to free one of the world’s most notorious terrorists was partly motivated by a fear of violent reprisals against Scots if the killer died in Scottish custody.

His account divulges:

•Ministers refused to travel with MacAskill amid threats to his life;

•The SNP sought concessions from Westminster in exchange for Megrahi’s possible return;

•His view on who was really responsible for Britain’s worst terrorist attack.

MacAskill claims the UK government made Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi eligible for return to his Libyan home under a “trade for terrorist plan” to try to secure a massive oil and gas deal for BP which was in doubt. He says Jack Straw, then UK justice secretary, shared the details in a “highly confidential” telephone call which casts new light on a controversy that has dogged Tony Blair since his 2007 “deal in the desert” with the Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

That deal was to give British industry access to Libyan oil reserves worth up to £13bn and £350m of defence contracts as the former rogue state was rehabilitated, and involved a prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) allowing offenders to be moved between the countries.

Six months after that desert summit, MacAskill claims Straw warned him Gadaffi was threatening to cancel the energy contact and award it to a US firm unless Megrahi was covered by the PTA, after learning the new SNP regime was trying to exempt him.

Sensing that the British government, which had previously been prepared to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, was going to give in to Libya’s demands, MacAskill reveals that he and Salmond then tried to extract concessions in exchange for the agreement.

Although the Scottish government denied this five years ago, MacAskill says the concessions sought were changes to the law to give Holyrood power to regulate firearms and to curb lawsuits from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had been forced to use slop-out buckets in their cells instead of toilets.

Straw rejected MacAskill’s claims as a “highly embroidered version of what happened” while Salmond said his administration “played the whole thing with a straight bat from start to finish”. (...)

Within weeks of the UK government agreeing not to exempt Megrahi from the PTA, Gadaffi ratified the BP deal with Libya’s national oil corporation.

Negotiations for Megrahi’s return were interrupted after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and the Scottish government opted to free him on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in Libya three years later.

A spokesman for BP said the company had no comment on the UK government’s actions or discussions.

In The Lockerbie Bombing, to be published on May 26, MacAskill reveals he feared the potential for a violent backlash in the Arab or wider Muslim world if Megrahi had been allowed to die while in Scottish custody.

Just a few weeks before MacAskill’s announcement to free him, UK hostages taken prisoner in Iraq had been murdered, which followed the execution of other Western nationals captured in the area.

He writes: “There was hostility to the West and ordinary citizens were becoming targets. Most in North Africa or the wider Arab world neither knew of Scotland nor cared about it. I was aware of the deaths of prison officers that had occurred in Northern Ireland where some had died through terrorist attack.

“The last thing I wanted was to have Scotland become a place that was demonised and its citizens targeted. I would not allow Scottish oil workers or others, wherever they might be, to face retribution as a consequence of my decision.”

In an interview with The Sunday Times, MacAskill, whose own safety was thought to be at risk as he considered whether to free Megrahi, added: “I think, looking at events in Brussels and Paris, I stand by that. We would have kept him in if we had decided that was necessary but he would never have been allowed to die here.”

In a book extract in this newspaper today, the former minister argues that a coalition involving Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestinian terrorists were behind the Lockerbie bombing, in revenge for the downing of an Iran Air flight by a US naval ship in July 1988.

[RB: In the extract published in The Sunday Times today, Mr MacAskill cites three reasons for his belief in Libyan (and Abdelbaset Megrahi’s) involvement in the atrocity. They are (1) an alleged interview given by Colonel Gaddafi to The Washington Times in 2003; (2) Mustafa Abdel-Jalil’s statement reported in the Swedish newspaper Expressen; and (3) Scottish investigators’ and prosecutors’ belief in the accuracy of the information disclosed in Ken Dornstein’s recent films. It is interesting, however, that Mr MacAskill explicitly states "Clothes in the suitcase that carried the bomb were acquired in Malta, though not by Megrahi. But if Megrahi didn’t buy the clothes, he was certainly involved." If the Zeist court had not made the finding-in-fact that Megrahi purchased the clothes, it would not, and could not, have convicted him.

As regards (1): There was no such 2003 interview. What MacAskill is referring to, as is clear from the “quote” from Col Gaddafi that he provides, is the claim by the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that in an off-the-record conversation in 1993 Gaddafi admitted that Libya played a part in a scheme to destroy an American aircraft which had been instigated by Iran. De Borchgrave’s account of this conversation can be read on this blog here. My comment at the time was as follows:

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

As regards (2): An account of the statement by Mustafa Abdel-Jalil can be read here. Evidence that he promised to supply never materialised. The best he could come up with was the assertion that the Gaddafi regime paid Megrahi’s legal expenses -- something that had never been hidden or denied. A response to Abdel-Jalil by John Ashton can be read here. Blistering commentaries by the late Ian Bell can be read here and here.

As regards (3): A lengthy response by John Ashton to the disclosures in the Dornstein films can be read here. Another long and detailed commentary by Dr Kevin Bannon can be read here. Dr Neil Berry makes critical comments on the films here.

Nowhere in The Sunday Times coverage is there mention of (a) the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s findings that, on six grounds, the Megrahi conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of Justice; (b) the evidence disclosed in John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury and, in particular, the metallurgical discrepancy between the dodgy circuit board fragment PT35b and circuit boards used in the MST-13 timers supplied to Libya; and (c) the evidence supplied in Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies which establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the suitcase containing the bomb did not arrive at Heathrow as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt but was already in the relevant luggage container before the feeder flight arrived. Perhaps these issues are dealt with elsewhere in Mr MacAskill’s book. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Libya: connect the dots and you get a giant dollar sign

[I an grateful to a reader of this blog for drawing my attention to a long article with the above title by Russ Baker published yesterday on the Business Insider website. The following are extracts:]

This February, several days after Hosni Mubarak resigned in Egypt, civil protest began in neighboring Libya. Quickly, Muammar Qaddafi’s Justice Minister turned against him and became a rebel leader. And, he made the dramatic claim that his ex-boss was the culprit behind the bombing of Pan Am 103:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a former Libyan cabinet minister was quoted as saying by a Swedish newspaper on Wednesday.

Former Justice Minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil, reported to have resigned this week over the violence used by the government against protesters, told the tabloid Expressen he had evidence Gaddafi ordered the bombing that killed 270 people.

“I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order for (the) Lockerbie (bombing),” Expressen quoted Al Jeleil as saying in an interview at an undisclosed large town in Libya.

The newspaper did not say what the evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the bombing was.

A Libyan, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was tried and jailed in Scotland for the bombing, and Gaddafi, in power since 1969, was branded an international pariah for years.

In 2009, the Scottish government freed al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds after doctors said he had terminal prostate cancer, a decision strongly criticized by the United States. He returned to Libya and is still alive.

“In order to conceal it (his role in ordering the bombing), he did everything in his power to get Megrahi back from Scotland,” al Jeleil was quoted as saying.

“He (Gaddafi) ordered Megrahi to do it.”

This story made it into major news media throughout the world, without anyone stopping to raise questions about the propaganda benefit of the statement, or of the timing. For example, the UK paper, The Telegraph, interviewed Jeleil/Jalil:

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the head of the provisional rebel government in Benghazi and Libya’s former justice minister, said he had evidence of Gaddafi’s involvement in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

“The orders were given by Gaddafi himself,” he told Rob Crilly.

Mr Abel Jalil claimed he had evidence that convicted bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi worked for Gaddafi.

“This evidence is in our hands and we have documents that prove what I have said and we are ready to hand them over to the international criminal court,” he added.

Since then, I haven’t seen any sign that Jalil’s evidence has been shown to anyone. So we don’t know that it actually exists, or that he was telling the truth. But the original headlines did the trick—anyone watching television or reading stories then would have been led to believe that Qaddafi was behind this dastardly deed.

A couple of days later, for the first time, President Obama called for Qaddafi to step down. And not long thereafter, the US, UK and their allies were getting ready to pitch military action against Qaddafi, originally characterized as solely humanitarian, “to protect civilians.” (Eventually, the top British military figure would indiscreetly admit that the relentless bombing was intended to remove the Libyan leader.)

We’ll get back to the propaganda machine and its effectiveness later, but let’s now examine the relationship between the Western governments and Qaddafi. Was it, as presented in the media, merely a case of doing the right thing against a brutal tyrant? One also accused of being behind the murder of those airline passengers? (...)

But the thing that turned much of the world against Qaddafi was the alleged role of Libya in blowing Pan Am 103 apart.

Most of us probably remember, vaguely, that Libya’s role in that is an established fact. If so, we’re off base. Let’s start with this 2001 BBC report, following the conviction of Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer:

Robert Black, the Scottish law professor who devised the format of the Netherlands-based trial, was quoted on Sunday as saying he was “absolutely astounded” that Al Megrahi had been found guilty.

Mr Black said he believed the prosecution had “a very, very weak circumstantial case” and he was reluctant to believe that Scottish judges would “convict anyone, even a Libyan” on such evidence.

The view, published in British newspapers, echoes that of some of the families of UK victims of the Lockerbie bombing, who are calling for a public inquiry to find “the truth of who was responsible and what the motive was”. (...)

For more on doubts about Libya’s role in the bombing, see the excellent summary of powerful evidence that the Libyans may have been framed, evidence not presented at trial, on Wikipedia. (While Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive source, it is often a good roundup of what may be found elsewhere and thus a starting point for further inquiry.) The troubling elements, which constitute a very long list, include an alleged offer from the FBI of $4 million for certain incriminating testimony, the subsequent admission by a key witness that he had lied, details of strange goings-on in the FBI’s crime lab, and indications that the bomb may have been introduced at an airport where the defendant was not present.

Nevertheless, Megrahi’s conviction, and the media’s dutiful reporting of it as justice done, meant that Libya, and Qaddafi, would continue under sanctions that had already isolated the country for a decade from the international community.

Clinton: We'll investigate Gadhafi over Pan Am 103

[This is the headline over a report published today on the MSNBC website. It reads in part:]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that the Obama administration may seek the prosecution of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

Responding to a question by Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle, R-NY, about what the US is doing to build a case against Gadhafi, Clinton said that former Gadhafi officials have made statements in the past few days that he was behind the terrorist attack and that the U.S. would "move expeditiously." (...)

Clinton said that she would be in touch with FBI Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday about how to move on this case. (...)

If there is evidence that he was behind the attack, Clinton said, that would be one of the many counts against Gadhafi in the international criminal court "if he is ever captured alive for justice proceedings."

Clinton said it was a matter of personal importance for her given that she used to represent the Syracuse area. Thirty-five students from Syracuse University were aboard the flight, coming home from overseas study.

Over the weekend, the former Libyan justice minister was quoted as saying the man convicted of the bombing had blackmailed Gadhafi into securing his release by threatening to expose his role in the attack.

The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Mustafa Abdel-Jalil as saying that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi had warned Gadhafi that he would "reveal everything" about the bombing if he wasn't rescued from a Scottish prison.

Abdel-Jalil told a Swedish tabloid last week that he had proof Gadhafi had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. He did not describe the proof.

Al-Megrahi was the only man convicted for the attack, which killed 270 people. He was released in 2009 on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He remains alive.

[Any genuine investigation into the role (if any) played by Gaddafi in the Lockerbie bombing would be most welcome, as Dr Jim Swire says in this report on the Channel 4 News website. A genuine investigation would inevitably discover that the version of events accepted by the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist was fallacious. This, of course, is precisely the reason why no such investigation can realistically be anticipated.]

What's Libya got to do with it...?

[This is the headline over a long article by Justice for Megrahi secretary Robert Forrester published today on the website of Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm. It reads in part:]

Despite the distress caused to anyone directly connected to the Pan Am 103 incident, it almost seems wrong to draw a spotlight on to the Lockerbie/Zeist case at a time when Libya is being torn apart by civil war. Nevertheless, David Cameron has chosen to do just that recently in seeking to justify his belligerence by saying of Muammar al-Gaddafi: "The people of Lockerbie know what this man is capable of." (David Cameron - 21/3/2011). Justice Secretary Ken Clark is also now playing the Lockerbie card by saying that we have to bring Gaddafi down to prevent him from seeking "another Lockerbie" in revenge for the UK’s support of the rebels.

It is always much healthier if you can draw on some moral high ground to justify your cause in the public eye. We tried it on in Afghanistan with how we were lifting the Afghans out of their feudal political system by waving our magic wand of democracy over them. Now, with Libya, it is Lockerbie and terrorism.

Ever since Libya’s ex justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, set himself up as leader of Eastern Libya in February with claims that he had proof that Gaddafi was behind the Lockerbie incident, this has provided the opportunity to indulge in a bit of sleight of hand and massaging of public opinion. The Lockerbie crash combines public ignorance, terrorism, fear and righteousness, and, it sells papers into the bargain.

Abdel-Jalil’s claims are simply that, claims. After a month, he has yet to produce one iota of substance.

Is he saying that he was negligent enough to leave the documents back in Tripoli? Once Tripoli falls and no documents are produced, are we then going to hear that Gaddafi must have destroyed them? Perhaps though, documents will be produced, however, we all know what is said about truth and the fog of war. It surely comes as no surprise to anyone that Gaddafi would have been behind an action such as the Lockerbie event if one of his countrymen had carried it out. But, did Abdelbaset al-Megrahi do it?

To say that the case against Mr al-Megrahi has one or two problems would be arch understatement.

There was a break in to Heathrow airside giving access to Pan Am 103’s loading bay area shortly before take off. This incident was reported to the Heathrow authorities at the time but not made public until after the verdict was passed twelve years later.

There is no evidence of any unaccompanied luggage leaving on flight KM180 from Malta’s Luqa airport.

There are question marks over the provenance of documentary evidence provided by Frankfurt Airport (the transit point from Luqa to Heathrow).

Along with other alleged inducements, the Crown’s star witness, Mr Tony Gauci (the proprietor of a Maltese clothes outlet) and his brother, Paul, are accused of having been in receipt of payments of $2,000.000 and $1,000,000 respectively under an American rewards for justice scheme for their testimony (a practice understandably alien to Scots Law, and presumably sufficient to dismiss both Tony and Paul Gauci as witnesses. The US authorities have yet to deny this deal). Tony Gauci’s testimony falls considerably short of being conclusive in terms of his eye witness account, which attempts to match up the identity of the purchaser of clothes from his shop, on account of key discrepancies with regard to the date of the purchase and the height, weight, age and build of the purchaser. Even though he had been prompted by numerous photo spreads containing pictures of Mr al-Megrahi and privy to media photographs of the accused prior to the trial, Mr Gauci could do little better than say that the man in the dock “resembled” the purchaser of the clothes. (...)

The above simply serve to illustrate some of the more prominent worries over the safety of the conviction. To compound this, the judges chose to believe a tale of how a bombing was carried out that defies what any normal person could accept as credible, namely: that Mr al-Megrahi contrived to place an unaccompanied luggage item on to flight KM180 from Malta which was then subsequently transferred at Frankfurt to a feeder flight to Heathrow, again unaccompanied, where it was finally loaded on to Pan Am 103, unaccompanied. Thus defying three security regimes in three separate countries, and the bomb still managed to blow up its target and not either one of the first two flights despite the inevitability of delays etc which would have been par for the course around Christmas time. It is truly hard to believe that 15 lay Scottish jurors could reach anything other than a not guilty verdict in such circumstances. Although impeccably qualified as judges, their Lordships, MacLean, Sutherland and Coulsfield, in arriving at their guilty verdict, displayed an absence of experience when it comes to the role of being a juror. Indeed, to give credence at all to the story of the Luqa-Frankfurt-Heathrow connection, especially as it was presented at Zeist, demonstrates a complete inability to imagine how paramilitaries operate. (...)

Mr al-Megrahi’s first appeal failed, this is true. However, in their judgement, the judges were at pains to point out that they took no account of the sufficiency of evidence since the defence did not require them to do so. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) then referred the case back to the Court of Appeal on six grounds suggesting that no reasonable court would have reached a guilty verdict on the basis of the evidence laid before the Crown by the prosecution. This appeal was then, unnecessarily, dropped by Mr al-Megrahi in his attempt to gain compassionate release.

There has been much speculation regarding the possibility that he may have come under pressure to do so even though the terms of compassionate release do not require an appeal to be dropped to become a beneficiary of it.

The long and the short of it is, therefore, that this conviction has not yet been fully tested in law in the interests of justice.

The best that the Crown, in the form of the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, has been able to offer as a counter to these concerns is a mind-boggling merry-go-round of circular polemic which amounts to little more than: he was convicted, therefore, he did it. So parlous are the arguments offered up by the Crown that one almost feels bound to ask what qualifications are required for the job of Lord Advocate. To reassure us all that the Crown and the police are still taking the Lockerbie/Zeist affair seriously though, even at a point ten years after the conviction, Angiolini also claims that the Dumfries and Galloway police are conducting an on-going review of the investigation. It, in fact, transpires that this is being carried out by one sole officer. In the words of Christine Grahame MSP, this constitutes little better than “file management.” (...)

It is hard to see Gaddafi going anywhere now except to follow Saddam to the gallows. The West will do what it knows best and install someone who is suitably on message until the oil runs out. Who knows what may become of Mr al-Megrahi? A one way ticket to the US’s Guantánamo rest home perhaps?

Whatever transpires, it will make no difference to the case being put before the Scottish parliament by justice campaigners. No amount of dissembling mendacity claimed by politicians and others can ever change the documented historical fact of what took place at Zeist. This conviction simply does not stack up, no matter how good your gas mask.

Gaddafi ordered Lockerbie bombing, claims ex-Libyan minister

[This is the headline over the report in today's edition of The Herald on the claim by the former Libyan justice minister that Colonel Gaddafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. It reads in part:]

Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who resigned on Monday amid violent clashes between protesters and security forces, said: “I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie.”

Mr Abdel-Jalil, who has not revealed yet what the proof is, quit over the “excessive use of force” used against demonstrators during anti-regime uprisings across the north African state.

The Scottish Government said yesterday it never doubted the safety of the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al Megrahi, 58, who was controversially freed from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2009 as he was suffering from prostate cancer. (...)

Pamela Dix, from the group UK Families Flight 103, who lost her brother Peter in the bombing, said of the latest development: “If this is true, it is shocking. It really rocks to the core the way that the UK Government has dealt with the whole Lockerbie issue, which is to sweep it under the carpet.

“It is really incredible. I would be really interested to know what evidence he has got. Perhaps he is trying to ingratiate himself with the US.”

Ms Dix also called for a fresh investigation into the bombing in light of the claims.

She said: “If he has really got evidence, the Crown Office in Scotland should investigate. If this is a lead, they should be following this up.”

[The Scotsman's report on the issue can be read here. A related article in the same newspaper headined "Yes or no: Was he really behind act of mass murder?" can be read here.

There was a visit to this blog yesterday from within Libya, the first such visit for over a week.

Because I have to make a trip from the Roggeveld Karoo to Cape Town to pick up a Scottish visitor, it is unlikely that I shall be in a position to make further posts to this blog until Saturday 26 February.]

The crumbling Lockerbie case

[This is the headline over an article published today on the Consortium News website. It reads as follows:]

A quarter century ago, the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people and later was pinned on a Libyan agent. In 2011, Lockerbie was used to justify a US-backed war to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, but the evidence now suggests the case was a miscarriage of justice, John Ashton writes.

Dec 21, 2013, marked the 25th anniversary of what, until 9/11, was the worst terrorist attack on US civilians. A total of 270 people died when Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the sky over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie; 189 of the dead were Americans.

Officially the crime was partially solved on Jan 31, 2001, when Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the murders by a panel of three senior Scottish judges, sitting at a specially convened Scottish court at Kamp Zeist in The Netherlands. His co-defendant, Lamin Fhimah, was acquitted.

As Megrahi was allegedly a puppet of the Gaddafi regime the Scottish and US prosecutors have vowed to pursue those who were pulling his strings. The ex-FBI Director Robert Mueller said on the 25th anniversary that he expected further charges to be brought. Yet, to most of those who have scrutinized the Megrahi conviction – and Consortiumnews.com is one of the few U.S. media outlets to have done so (see here, here and here) – it is, at best, odd and, at worst, a sham.

One of the UN trial observers, Professor Hans Koechler, noted: “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime. In such a context, the guilty verdict in regard to the first accused appears to be arbitrary, even irrational,” while eminent Scottish lawyer Ian Hamilton QC has said, “I don’t think there’s a lawyer in Scotland who now believes Mr Megrahi was justly convicted.”

More importantly, in 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, a statutory body that reviews alleged miscarriages of justice, referred the conviction back to the appeals court on no fewer than six grounds, one of which was that the trial court’s judgment was unreasonable. Shockingly, four of the other grounds concerned the non-disclosure of important evidence by the prosecution. Sadly, Megrahi succumbed to pressure to abandon the appeal, shortly before his release from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

More Promising Leads

Another reason to doubt the official line that the bombing was a solely Libyan operation is that there is ample circumstantial evidence that it was commissioned by Iran (possibly in retaliation for the U.S. military shoot-down of an Iranian airliner on July 3, 1988, killing 290 people) and carried out by a radical Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Two months before the Pan Am 103 attack, on Oct 26, 1988, the group was caught red-handed by the German federal police with a barometric bomb designed to explode at altitude. The police also uncovered a huge terrorist arsenal, which the group had amassed in an apartment in Frankfurt, the city from which PA103’s feeder flight, PA103A, would originate. Like the Lockerbie bomb, the barometric bomb had been built into a Toshiba radio cassette player. Although it was a single-speaker model – the Lockerbie device had twin speakers – by a rather sick twist, both models were from Toshiba’s BomBeat range.

The man who made the German bomb, Marwan Khreesat, turned out to be a mole for both the Jordanian and German intelligence services. He told the police that he had made five bombs, only four of which were recovered. He and another PFLP-GC member, Mobdi Goben, who led the group’s Yugoslavian cell, confirmed that the organization had other bomb makers and that the Oct 26 raids did not snare all of its German operatives.

Significantly, both men independently named a member with the nomme de guerre Abu Elias as the operation’s linchpin. His true identity remains unknown. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents stated as fact that Iran and the PFLP-GC were behind the bombing. Another, written months after the investigation had shifted decisively to Libya, said that Iranian interior minister had paid $10 million for the hit.

The increasingly rickety “Libya-did-it” line appeared to receive a much-needed boost 2½ years ago with the fall of the Gaddafi regime. At the start of the revolution, in early 2011, the opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who had been Gaddafi’s justice minister, told the Swedish newspaper Expressen that he had proof that his old boss was responsible for Lockerbie. Other senior government defectors implicated the old regime in the bombing.

So, when Scotland’s prosecution service, the Crown Office, announced that it would be seeking the cooperation of the new Libyan government to gather evidence against Megrahi’s alleged co-conspirators, Lockerbie watchers were braced for some rapid developments.

Getting Nowhere

Unfortunately for the Crown Office and police, in the intervening 2½ years, they appear to have got precisely nowhere. Last December, Libya’s new UK ambassador, Mahmud Nacua, said that his government would be happy to open all of its Lockerbie files to the police, but added that this would only happen when the government had fully established security and stability – a process he believed would take at least a year. A year on, there’s no hint that the files are about to be opened.

It was not until February 2013 that the police, prosecutors and the FBI got to visit Tripoli to speak to the new government. Embarrassingly, no sooner had they left than the new deputy justice minister, Hameda al-Magery, told the Daily Telegraph that the case was closed.

The Crown Office swiftly issued a press release, which described the discussions with the Libyans as “positive” and added “it is hoped there will be further progress as a result.” That hope seems increasingly forlorn. Only last month did the Libyan government appoint prosecutors to work on the case with Scottish and US investigators.

The development was hailed as a “significant step” by Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland. That is one interpretation, but, when viewed as a whole, the events since Gaddafi’s fall suggest that the Libyans might be trying to put off the day when they have to admit to the Scots and FBI that the cupboard is bare: they have no evidence of the Gaddafi regime’s involvement.

Since Gaddafi’s fall, the only document about the case to surface publicly from his regime’s files is a letter from Megrahi to his relative, Gaddafi’s security chief Abdullah Sennousi, in which, according to the Wall Street Journal, he protested his innocence and blamed his plight on “the immoral British and American investigators” who “knew there was foul play and irregularities in the investigation.”

What, then, of Mustafa Abdel Jalil’s proof? When asked about it on BBC Newsnight, the best he could offer was the fact that Gaddafi’s government had paid Megrahi’s legal bills. A year later Jalil insisted in another newspaper interview that Expressen had misquoted him, adding: “All I said then is what I say right now, which is that the regime was involved in this case, evident by insisting [Megrahi] returns [to Libya] and that they spent a lot of money on him while he was in jail.”

It was preposterous to claim that the old regime’s funding of Megrahi’s legal defense, and its efforts to secure his return to Libya, was evidence of its guilt.

Exonerating Evidence

While the police investigation in Libya has stalled, the police and Crown Office are studiously ignoring new evidence that destroys the case against Megrahi and Libya. It concerns the most important physical evidence of the entire case, a tiny fragment of circuit board, known by its police reference number of PT/35b, which was allegedly part of the bomb’s timer.

According to the prosecution case, the fragment matched boards in timers designed and built for the Libyan intelligence service by a Swiss firm called Mebo. During preparations for Megrahi’s aborted second appeal, his legal team (with whom I worked as a researcher) discovered that the fragment could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers’ boards, because it bore a crucial metallurgical difference.

When combined with a wealth of existing anomalies concerning the fragment’s provenance, the discovery strongly suggested that it was a fake that was planted in order to implicate Libya. According to the published memoir of the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, his opposite number in the Swiss police also suspected the fragment was a plant.  The thought even occurred to Marquise and the Scottish police’s senior investigating officer, Stuart Henderson.

Why, then, have the Scottish police and Crown Office failed to approach the witnesses who can attest to the mismatch between the fragment and the Libyan timers – witnesses who include the man who made the boards used in the those timers, and two independent scientists? The obvious answer is that they want to avoid evidence that shows the official case to be built on sand.

John Ashton, who worked as a defense investigator on the Pan Am 103 case, is the author of Scotland’s Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters.