Lockerbie bombing suspect in US custody

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

A Libyan man accused of making the bomb which destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie 34 years ago is in United States custody, Scottish authorities have said.

The US announced charges against Abu Agila Masud two years ago, alleging that he played a key role in the bombing on 21 December, 1988.

The blast on board the Boeing 747 left 270 people dead.

It is the deadliest terrorist incident to have taken place on British soil. (...)

Last month it was reported that Masud had been kidnapped by a militia group in Libya, leading to speculation that he was going to be handed over to the American authorities to stand trial.

In 2001 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of bombing Pan Am 103 after standing trial at a specially-convened Scottish court in the Netherlands.

He was the only man to be convicted over the attack.

Megrahi was jailed for life but was released on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government in 2009 after being diagnosed with cancer.

He died in Libya in 2012. (...)

A spokesperson for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) said: "The families of those killed in the Lockerbie bombing have been told that the suspect Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi ("Mas'ud" or "Masoud") is in US custody.

"Scottish prosecutors and police, working with UK government and US colleagues, will continue to pursue this investigation, with the sole aim of bringing those who acted along with Al Megrahi to justice."

[What follows is excerpted from a report just published on the website of The New York Times:]

The arrest of the operative, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, was the culmination of a decades-long effort by the Justice Department to prosecute him. In 2020, Attorney General William P Barr announced criminal charges against Mr Mas’ud, accusing him of building the explosive device used in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 passengers, including 190 Americans.

Mr Mas’ud faces two criminal counts, including destruction of an aircraft resulting in death. He was being held at a Libyan prison for unrelated crimes when the Justice Department unsealed the charges against him two years ago. It is unclear how the US government negotiated the extradition of Mr Mas’ud.

Mr Mas’ud’s suspected role in the Lockerbie bombing received new scrutiny in a three-part documentary on “Frontline” on PBS in 2015. The series was written and produced by Ken Dornstein, whose brother was killed in the attack. Mr Dornstein learned that Mr Mas’ud was being held in a Libyan prison and even obtained pictures of him as part of his investigation. [RB: A critical commentary by John Ashton on the Dornstein documentary can be read here.] 

“If there’s one person still alive who could tell the story of the bombing of Flight 103, and put to rest decades of unanswered questions about how exactly it was carried out — and why — it’s Mr Mas’ud,” Mr Dornstein wrote in an email after learning Mr Mas’ud would finally be prosecuted in the United States. “The question, I guess, is whether he’s finally prepared to speak.”

After Col Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, was ousted from power, Mr Mas’ud confessed to the bombing in 2012, telling a Libyan law enforcement official that he was behind the attack. Once investigators learned about the confession in 2017, they interviewed the Libyan official who had elicited it, leading to charges.

Even though extradition would allow Mr Mas’ud to stand trial, legal experts have expressed doubts about whether his confession, obtained in prison in war-torn Libya, would be admissible as evidence.

Mr Mas’ud, who was born in Tunisia but has Libyan citizenship, was the third person charged in the bombing. Two others, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, were charged in 1991, but American efforts to prosecute them ran aground when Libya declined to send them to the United States or Britain to stand trial.

Instead, the Libyan government agreed to a trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law. Mr Fhimah was acquitted and Mr. al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. (...)

Prosecutors say that Mr Mas’ud played a key role in the bombing, traveling to Malta and delivering the suitcase that contained the bomb used in the attack. In Malta, Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhimah instructed Mr Mas’ud to set the timer on the device so it would blow up while the plane was in the air the next day, prosecutors said.

On the morning of Dec 21, 1988, Mr Megrahi and Mr Fhimah met Mr Mas’ud at the airport in Malta, where he turned over the suitcase. Prosecutors said Mr Fhimah put the suitcase on a conveyor belt, ultimately ending up on Pan Am Flight 103.

Mr Mas’ud’s name surfaced twice in 1988, even before the bombing took place. In October, a Libyan defector told the CIA he had seen Mr Mas’ud at the Malta airport with Mr Megrahi, saying the pair had passed through on a terrorist operation. Malta served as a primary launching point for Libya to initiate such attacks, the informant told the agency. That December, the day before the Pan Am bombing, the informant told the CIA that the pair had again passed through Malta. Nearly another year passed before the agency asked the informant about the bombing.

But investigators never pursued Mr Mas’ud in earnest until Mr Megrahi’s trial years later, only for the Libyans to insist that Mr Mas’ud did not exist. Mr. Megrahi also claimed he did not know Mr Mas’ud.

“Great – but let’s see what the evidence is"

[What follows is the text of an article published in today’s edition of The National:]

Lockerbie campaigner Dr Jim Swire last night called on investigators to reveal the evidence levelled at two new suspects.

Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the 1988 bombing, has repeatedly criticised the handling of the enquiry over the years, maintaining the innocence of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and insisting that Scottish authorities bungled the investigation.

Last night he welcomed the news that two new suspects had been identified as Scottish police and the FBI requested permission from Libyan authorities to conduct formal interviews in Tripoli.

However, he said the failure of judges to allow the families of victims of the atrocity to pursue an appeal on behalf of Megrahi had created a “difficult situation”.

The Libyan was released from Greenock Prison on compassionate grounds and died of cancer in May 2012 after serving eight-and-a-half years of a life sentence.

Reacting to the development, Swire, who leads the Justice for Megrahi campaign, said: “Great – but let’s see what the evidence is against them. Of course we want to know who killed our family members – we still believe that no one has been held to account for Lockerbie as we think the conviction against Megrahi is unsound.”

Prosecutors have always maintained Megrahi did not act alone and the two new suspects are said to have aided him in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which claimed 270 lives.

Swire told the BBC: “I think there is a need for evidence to be made available as to why these two are suspects.

“We have recently been refused permission in Scotland to have a further appeal held into Megrahi’s conviction, and many in this country simply don’t believe Megrahi was involved and that this was a miscarriage of justice.

“To try and bolt two more names on top of that is a very difficult situation. It will need to be supported by better evidence than was produced to achieve the conviction of Megrahi.”

The opinions of the families of Lockerbie victims remains split on the issue of Megrahi’s guilt, but both sides have been critical of the authorities in their handling of the investigation.

Yesterday US citizen Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theodora was amongst those killed, said: “I’m delighted that they are doing this. We, the American families, have been pressing and pressing for the bombing to be properly investigated.

“I want to make it clear that I think Megrahi did it but the trial was framed too narrowly.

“The governments have been dragging their feet and they should have been looking for other people involved, because it wasn’t just Megrahi.”

The development follows the US broadcast of a three-part series into the Lockerbie bombing. My Brother’s Bomber followed filmmaker Ken Dornstein’s search for answers into the death of his older brother David, one of 189 Americans killed.

In the series, Dornstein honed in on 10 individuals ranging from dictator Muammar Gaddafi to Edwin Bollier, whose Swiss company, MEBO, made the timer believed to have detonated the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103. Brian Murtaugh, the top US prosecutor in the case against Megrahi, told Dornstein: “The case isn’t finished, because all those responsible for the crime have not been identified and prosecuted, much less convicted.”

Retired FBI agent Richard Marquise, who helped lead the international investigation, said: “Lockerbie is still an open case. If I was writing the novel version, we would have identified not only the people who put the bomb on the plane, but those who ordered it up the chain of command.”

This week Rev John Mosey, whose teenage daughter Helga died in the bombing, spoke to families seeking justice for loved ones killed when the Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down over Ukraine that they face a battle for truth.

He said: “I’ve told them I hope in their countries the politicians can’t control the legal system, which is what happened here [in Britain]. That is what they’ll be up against.”

[An editorial in the same newspaper reads as follows:]

For many the night Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie seems like an age ago. The world has moved so much in the years since then.

Scotland has changed. Libya has changed.

And yet for many that night is still fresh. The sights and sounds still painfully sharp.

And at the heart of those memories, is the fact that we still do not know exactly what happened, why it happened and who was responsible.

There are those who wish al-Megrahi had stayed in prison.

Even though it was widely accepted that he wasn’t guilty, plenty thought we should accept al-Megrahi as a close substitute.

It would have been easy to do just that.

Yet, it is the relatives of the people who died that night who have been unwilling to accept the convenience of al-Megrahi.

Not al-Megrahi’s relatives, lost in the quagmire of Libya in 2015. Scared of what might happen.

But the families of those who were on the plane and who were in Lockerbie are unwilling to accept the compromise. Those families feel let down by the legal system, the government and are, understandably, unwilling to trust what they are told by their political leaders.

Yesterday they have been given another shot of hope as Scottish prosecutors seek to interview two new individuals suspected of being involved, along with al-Megrahi, in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

For the families it seemed as if we have moved one step closer to finding out the truth.

Though with Libya in chaos, this may not be as easy as it seems.

The repercussions of that night are still being felt across the world.

They define Scotland’s relationship with the US. They impact on Daesh.

For the sake of those of died and those who survived them, and the sake of moving on, the truth must come out.

[A report in The Herald can be read here; and a report in The Scotsman here.]

Investigators to interview Lockerbie suspects

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

Scottish prosecutors are poised to announce a breakthrough in their investigation into the Lockerbie bomb plot.

They believe they have identified a group of Libyans who were involved along with Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 which killed 270 people in December 1988.

Frank Mulholland, the lord advocate, has agreed a joint course of action with Loretta Lynch, the US attorney-general. They have requested permission from the Libyan authorities to travel there with a view to interviewing the suspects as soon as the political situation on the ground allows it.

The move follows a six-year investigation undertaken after al-Megrahi dropped his appeal against conviction in August 2009 and was released by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds to return to Libya. He died there in 2012 from prostate cancer.

It is the first time the Crown Office, which always stressed that the Lockerbie inquiry remains “live,” has confirmed that members of the group that planned and helped carry out the bombing were still alive and in Libya.

Last month The Times reported that an American TV documentary was naming several suspects. Ken Dornstein, whose brother died in the bombing, was responsible for the three-part series aired on the US Public Broadcasting Service.

After a 25-year investigation, he claimed to have identified the bomb-maker as Abu Agila Mas’ud, who is being held in a Libyan prison, accused of unrelated terrorist activities.

Another suspect, Abdullah al-Senussi, Colonel Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and head of intelligence, is also behind bars in Libya, sentenced to death.

Mr Dornstein told The Times that he believed Nasser Ali Ashour, a Libyan intelligence officer who supplied the IRA with explosives and weaponry in the 1980s, was also a suspect.

It is not known whether any of these are among the suspects the Scottish and US authorities wish to interview. The crown office refused to confirm or deny whether they were on the list.

[A response by John Ashton to Ken Dornstein’s findings can be read here.]

Three dead men and their secrets

[This is the headline over an article by Kenneth Roy in today’s issue of the Scottish Review. It reads in part:]

Three of the key figures in the tangled politics of Lockerbie have now died within four years of each other: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person ever to have been convicted of the bombing (died 2012), Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, the Lord Advocate who initiated the criminal proceedings against al-Megrahi (2013) and Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness (a few days ago). To say that all three left unanswered questions would be one of the under-statements of our time.

Gauci was the owner of a clothes shop in Malta called Mary’s House. It was alleged that on 7 December 1988, a fortnight before the atrocity, al-Megrahi bought some clothes and an umbrella from his shop, that the clothes were wrapped round the device which brought down flight 103, and that al-Megrahi, a former head of security at Libyan Arab Airlines, collaborated with an official of the airline to breach the security at Luqa Airport and get the device on the first stage of its journey as an interline bag to Frankfurt.

But how reliable was Gauci? His credibility took a battering four years after the trial in a remarkable newspaper interview with Lord Fraser. The words attributed to Fraser – he never denied using them – were: 'Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say he was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy. I don’t think he was deliberately lying, but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer’.

When his successor as Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, read this assessment of the Crown’s star witness, he asked Fraser to clarify his opinion of Gauci; others, including Tam Dalyell and al-Megrahi’s counsel, William Taylor QC, spoke out more strongly. If Fraser did clarify his opinion, the world was not made aware of it at the time.

Three years later, however, he gave Gauci a friendlier character reference in a television programme about the Lockerbie case: 'I have always been of the view, and I remain of the view, that both children and others who are not trying to rationalise their evidence are probably the most reliable witnesses and for that reason I think that Gauci was an extremely good witness’.

How this statement could be reconciled with his earlier disobliging view of the witness, Fraser did not divulge. But the remarks received little attention, for the story had moved on dramatically: al-Megrahi was now on his way home to Tripoli, released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, after serving eight years of a life sentence for mass murder.

Fraser’s re-evaluation of Gauci as 'an extremely good witness’ looked ridiculous on close scrutiny. When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had a detailed look at the case, it concluded that there was 'no reasonable basis’ for the judges’ opinion that the purchase of the clothes from Mary’s House took place on 7 December; the commission decided that they have must have been bought on some unspecified date before then.

This was an encouraging finding for the many defenders of al-Megrahi (myself included) who believed that 7 December was the date of his only visit to Malta. But in 2014, in a documentary for American television, Ken Dornstein, whose brother died at Lockerbie, produced evidence which undermined the case for al-Megrahi’s innocence. During 15 years of patient investigation, Dornstein discovered that al-Megrahi had been in Malta in the weeks leading up to the bombing, and that he had company: a Libyan bomb-maker, Abu Agila Mas’ud, who was among those who greeted him on his return to Libya. (...) [RB: It was never disputed that Megrahi had been in Malta earlier in 1988. What was disputed -- and what has never been proved -- is that he was there on 23 November, the other possible purchase date. On the Dornstein films, see John Ashton here and Kevin Bannon here.]

A number of fascinating secrets now go to the grave and seem destined to stay there. We shall never know what Peter Fraser really thought of the witness who was to prove so vital to his successful prosecution. We shall never know how much Tony Gauci was paid by the American authorities in return for his helpful evidence (or how much the Scottish authorities knew of the deal). And we shall never know what al-Megrahi was doing in Malta with Mas’ud if he was not there to facilitate the planting of the device.

There is a fourth 'we shall never know’ that can be stated with a sense of growing probability: that with the passage of time, and as the important players in the saga continue to fall off their perches, we shall never know the truth about Lockerbie.

Profoundly and wilfully mistaken

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

21 October 2015

Sir

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Robertson

Private Eye on the Masud charges

[What follows is the text of an article that appears in the latest edition of Private Eye:]

Late charges 

The parting shot by US attorney-general William Barr just before Christmas that another Libyan, Abu Agila Masud, was to be charged over the Lockerbie bombing will have delighted Scotland's prosecutors. The Crown Office is nervously awaiting the outcome of a posthumous appeal against the copviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the 1988 atrocity, which killed 270 people. 

The case against Megrahi was always riddled with holes, and since his 2001 conviction more evidence - some withheld from his trial - has emerged to cast further doubt (Eyes passim). Last March the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his case back to the appeal court on the basis that no reasonable court could have reached a guilty verdict "beyond all reasonable doubt" and significant non-disclosure of evidence. 

Both grounds related to the damning evidence of the key prosecution witness, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who said Megrahi resembled a man who bought the clothes found wrapped around the bomb. It subsequently emerged that Gauci was paid $2m by the US Department of Justice (DoJ). But other troubling evidence was excluded from the appeal. That included forensic material suggesting that a circuit board fragment found at the scene could not have originated from the batch of timers said to incriminate Libya and Megrahi, and new evidence indicating that the bomb almost certainly originated from Heathrow rather than Malta (adding to the fact of a break-in at Heathrow the night before the flight).  

Masud, the third Libyan to be charged (Lamin Fhimah who stood trial alongside Megrahi, was acquitted), is now said to be the Lockerbie bombmaker. He is also alleged to have made the bomb for the 1986 La Belle Disco attack in Berlin, which killed two US servicemen and a Turkish woman.  

The new charges are based on an investigation by American film-maker Ken Dornstein,  who lost his brother m the Lockerbie bombing, and on an affidavit by an FBI agent, which describes a confession allegedly made by Masud to "a Libyan law enforcement officer". That "confession" names Megrahi, a fellow intelligence officer, as a co-conspirator. It dates from 2012, when Masud was in prison awaiting trial for making booby-trapped bombs for use against opponents of the Gaddafi regime, which fell in 2011. As it came during a time of revenge and score-settling, key questions will be what side the Libyan law officer was on and under what circumstances the confession was made. 

US prosecutors might also seek to rely on a key witness in Dornstein's documentary, Musbah Eter, a Libyan former diplomat who was convicted in 2001 of the La Belle bombing. He claims Masud told him he was involved in Lockerbie. However, as declassified East German Stasi documents revealed, Eter has a credibility problem - not least because he was a CIA "asset" who had never previously claimed any knowledge of Lockerbie. 

Nevertheless, the news has received a guarded welcome by those convinced of Megrahi's innocence. Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the blast, would like any evidence properly tested in open court to try to get to the truth about Lockerbie and what US and UK investigators knew. But he tells the Eye that if the case is linked to Megrahi and Malta it is already fatally flawed. 

The DoJ has been sitting on Masud's damning confession and evidence gathered by Dornstein for years, so why did it wait until last month before charging Masud? Might the answer be, as Swire suggests, that it is Barr's attempt to salvage his own credibility? Or, as those representing Megrahi's family believe, a timely attempt to add to the already considerable pressure on the Scottish appeal judges to uphold the only conviction? 

Are we just bored with Lockerbie now?

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Jonathan Brocklebank headlined A box-set binge or a genuine murder mystery? published today in the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail:]

Sixteen years ago I sat with a notebook and listened as witnesses told a courtroom what it was like to have a bombed Boeing 747 drop out of the sky in flames onto their town.

A wall of bullet-proof glass separated me from the people giving evidence and from the two Libyan men being tried for the atrocity. It afforded no protection from the searing images haunting the memories of those who watched Pan Am 103’s hellish descent.

These were painted so vividly, so matter-of-factly, that it felt rather like watching Lockerbie happen through binoculars. One man saw a ‘clean wing’, silhouetted against the clouds by the town lights, plunging vertically towards people’s houses.

Amidst a ‘rolling ball of fire’ descending from the sky, he saw much smaller black objects plunging earthward. Were these passengers? He did not say. I guessed so.

The testimony of the Lockerbie residents who travelled to the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands took up most of a day and I will never forget it. Nothing they had to say about the night of December 21, 1988, may have shed any light on the guilt or innocence of the two Libyan men sitting feet away from them in the dock, betraying no emotion.

But their graphic narration left no doubt about the monstrous scale of the crime being tried before three Scottish judges in 2000.  

With a death toll of 270 people, it remains Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity. And, if you’re into that kind of thing, it remains something of a murder mystery.

Even if you believe Adbelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi planted the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 – and I am not convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that I do – then you almost certainly do not believe that he acted in isolation. Who were his co-conspirators? Are they still alive? How many more years must their victims’ families wait before they are brought to justice?

Alternatively, could it be credible that an innocent man was tried and convicted of carrying out the most heinous act in Scottish criminal history? Can the most crucial trial ever conducted in Scots Law truly have returned the wrong verdict? Alternatively, could it be credible that an innocent man was tried and convicted of carrying out the most heinous act in Scottish criminal history? Can the most crucial trial ever conducted in Scots Law truly have returned the wrong verdict?

This is not simply the belief of a few conspiracy theorists with Sellotape holding their spectacles together. Some highly respected legal and investigative experts believe so, too – not to mention figures such as Dr Jim Swire, a former GP who has spent more than 25 years in pursuit of the truth about his daughter Flora’s killers.

At a time when much of the nation is glued to a documentary series on Netflix called Making a Murderer, concerning a man from Wisconsin whose name meant nothing to us a month ago, these seem questions worth asking... together with this one: are we just bored with Lockerbie now?

Six weeks before the story of convicted US murderer Steven Avery became the most obsessed-over topic at office water coolers across the land, another true crime TV documentary surfaced on BBC4 to little fanfare. It was not the full, three-part investigative film which Ken Dornstein made about the Lockerbie bombing following half a lifetime of research into the atrocity that killed his brother David.

It seems that was too much TV for a feature of global significance about an atrocity in Scotland. Instead, the three utterly compelling hour-long programmes in which Mr Dornstein identifies two possible further suspects for the bombing were chopped into one 90-minute film and broadcast on one of the Beeb’s out-ofthe-way channels on a rainy November night. (...)

As a direct result of his investigative odyssey across three continents, the Crown Office formally announced in October that there were now two new Lockerbie bombing suspects, Abu Agila Mas’ud and Abdullah Al Senussi.

I wonder how Mr Dornstein’s viewing figures on the BBC compared to those on Netflix for Making a Murderer, a tenpart, 607-minute splurge of true crime programming in which viewers are supposed to decide what kind of a man Steven Avery is. (...)

Me, I gave Making a Murderer an hour and no more. By contrast, who placed the bomb on board Pan Am 103, how and why, matters far more to my country, to the US and many other nations whose citizens died.

There are critical questions concerning the compassionate release of Megrahi in 2009 after little more than eight years in prison. Was he really freed by then Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill because of his prostate cancer – and, if so, why three full years before the cancer took his life?

Or was Megrahi packed off home purely to ensure that his appeal against conviction went away, for it was an appeal which might result in an unthinkably embarrassing quashed verdict?

I don’t know the answers to these questions any more than I know who killed Teresa Halbach. But, in the land of Lockerbie, it would be nice to think they were more pressing.

Lockerbie relatives fated never to know truth

[This is the headline over an article by Magnus Linklater that appears in today’s edition of The Times. It reads as follows:]

After the death of Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, those who could shed light on the tragedy are dwindling

One by one, the key players in the Lockerbie drama fade from the scene, taking with them its secrets. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi himself, prime suspect; Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Lord Advocate, who brought the case against him; and now Tony Gauci, the chief prosecution witness, who died last week. As Kenneth Roy, the editor of the Scottish Review, noted in his obituary: “To say that all three left unanswered questions would be one of the under-statements of our time.”

Gauci, who owned a clothes shop in Malta, where, on some disputed day in 1988, a man came in to buy the items of clothing later found burnt and shredded around the bomb in Lockerbie, did not have a good press. An unsure witness at best, his testimony about when and by whom the clothes were bought, seemed to change each time he was questioned; and he was questioned a lot — 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police, many more by prosecuting counsel, and later by journalists. Was the man who ordered such an odd assortment of clothes — shirts, jackets, trousers, baby clothes, without checking on their sizes — tall and dark-skinned, as Gauci seemed to remember, or medium-built and light-skinned as Megrahi turned out to be? Did he come into the shop two weeks before Christmas, or in late November? Was it raining, or merely dripping? Were the Christmas lights on or not? Which football match was his brother watching on the day? Gauci tried and tried to remember, and each time seemed to retreat further and further from the truth.

All that has led his detractors to mock his evidence, and dismiss him as a witness of no worth. Lord Fraser notoriously once described him as “not quite the full shilling,” though he was more generous later on.

Those who believe Megrahi was innocent, and the prosecution a charade, point to Gauci as its weakest link. As chief witness for the prosecution, they claim that if his evidence falls, then the entire case collapses. One member of the defence team, hearing of his death, said that he went to his grave carrying responsibility for Megrahi’s wrongful conviction.

That is a dishonourable epitaph for a decent man. The more one re-reads Gauci’s evidence, the more one warms to him as a character. A simple man, the only things he really cared about were his clothes business, and his pigeons. When, on several occasions, he was taken to Scotland for his safety by police, he worried more about the pigeons, and who was minding the shop, than whether the scenery was beautiful, or his hotel comfortable. The one thing he was sure about was that the clothes found at the bomb site were bought from his shop, and on that he never wavered. Who could forget a man who bought such a strange assortment of clothes without bothering to check on their sizes?

Much has been made of the alleged rewards offered to him by police or intelligence agencies. No one, however, has been able to prove that money was a motive for Gauci. [RB: A more accurate account of Tony Gauci’s attitude towards “compensation” is to be found here.] His struggles to remember dates, times and descriptions may sometimes be laughable. But they are honest attempts, not those of a bribed man. Here he is, trying to remember whether or not he had had a row with his girlfriend on the day of the purchase: “We had lots of arguments. I am asked whether I had a girlfriend at the time of the purchase of the clothing. I do not recall having a girlfriend in 1988 but I am always with someone. It is possible that I had an argument with my girlfriend that day. My girlfriend would cause arguments by suggesting a wedding day or suggesting that we buy expensive furniture . . . it is possible that in 1988 I had a girlfriend, but I am not sure.” He is like that with days of the week, or the size of the man who bought the clothes. “I did not have a tape measure to measure the man’s height,” he complains.

For all his confused recollections, the trial judges liked him: “The clear impression that we formed was that he was in the first place entirely credible, that is to say doing his best to tell the truth to the best of his recollection, and indeed no suggestion was made to the contrary,” was their verdict. When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission later came up with six reasons for suggesting that there were grounds for an appeal, they did not dismiss Gauci himself, but said that some of his evidence, and the circumstances in which it was given, were withheld from the defence. Whether that would have altered the outcome will never now be known.

In the end, what are every bit as important as Gauci’s evidence, are undeniable facts: Megrahi’s presence in Malta on the day before the bomb was loaded; his departure back to Tripoli the morning after; his use of a false passport supplied by Libyan intelligence — one he never used again; the large sums of money in his bank account; and now, the evidence uncovered by Ken Dornstein. [RB: If, as Dr Morag Kerr has conclusively established, the bomb suitcase was ingested at Heathrow, not Luqa Airport, none of this is of the slightest relevance.]

Mr Dornstein’s brother died at Lockerbie, and, after 15 years of investigations, he discovered that during his trips to Malta in the weeks leading up to the bombing, Megrahi was accompanied by a man called Abu Agila Mas’ud, a convicted terrorist, who today sits in a Libyan jail. Quite what he and Megrahi were doing there, only Mas’ud can reveal, though Abdullah Senussi, the former Libyan intelligence chief who is also languishing in jail, would be able to shed much light on it as well. [RB: Analyses of the revelations in, and omissions from, Ken Dornstein’s film can be found here and here.]

That light, however, is fading. One by one, the witnesses are disappearing. All that remains are the memories of those who lost loved ones at Lockerbie, and who are destined never to know the full truth.

[RB: What follows is extracted from a comment by Morag Kerr on Kenneth Roy’s Scottish Review article:]

It's odd how this type of article keeps resurfacing. Someone has died, who either told everything they possibly knew about it to the authorities years ago and who could not conceivably have remembered anything further, or who knew nothing at all about it in the first place. But now he's dead, oh the secrets he has taken to his grave!

Tony Gauci appears to have served someone connected to the bombing in his shop. His police statements and his evidence at Camp Zeist are in the public record. So too is the diary of Harry Bell, which recounts the (mis)handling of Tony as a witness and the money that was apparently dangled before his eyes. Three separate expert witness reports take this entire sorry episode apart forensically, but even so they only reinforce what common sense tells us - that a shopkeeper cannot possibly be expected to recognise a customer he saw once, for about half an hour, after the extraordinary lengths of time involved in this case.

We don't need Tony to realise that whoever the man was, it was not Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Not only was the day of the transaction (almost certainly 23rd November) one when there is no evidence at all that Megrahi was on the island, the multiple discrepancies between Tony's initial description of the purchaser and Megrahi's actual appearance are glaring.

All this happened almost 28 years ago. Even if we had someone who was now alleged to have been that purchaser, and Tony Gauci was still alive, there is no chance whatsoever that a positive identification could be made. What else could Tony tell us? How much money he was paid? What he did with it? Could he give us any real insight into his thought processes when he repeatedly said Megrahi resembled the purchaser but declined to say he actually WAS the man? I doubt it.

So what has the case lost with the death of Tony Gauci? I'd say nothing at all.