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.

Fhimah’s diary

[What follows is the text of a report that was published on the BBC News website on this date in 2000:]

The Lockerbie trial has continued to hear legal debate over whether the contents of a diary belonging to one of the accused can be heard in evidence.

Defence lawyers have argued that a notebook belonging to Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah was seized by Scottish police officers without a search warrant.

The prosecution wants to bring evidence from the diary which was taken from the offices of a travel company that Fhimah ran with Maltese businessman Vincent Vassallo.

The Scottish Court, sitting at Camp Zeist in The Netherlands, heard on Tuesday that police officers visited the offices of Medtour Services in Malta in April 1991.

Mr Vassallo told chief prosecutor Alastair Campbell that he had set up the business with Fhimah in February 1989, two months after the bombing.

He said he received several visits from the police at the office in Mosta. On one occasion they looked in drawers and began picking things up.

He said: "I sometimes used Fhimah's desk and from his desk they took my diary, Fhimah's diary and business cards.

"They told me they were taking the diaries. I could not say either yes or no."

On Friday, detective chief superintendent Harry Bell told the court that the police did not take out warrants when they went to the Mediterranean island looking for clues. [RB: The court ultimately allowed the diary to be received in evidence.]

The prosecution alleges that Fhimah and Megrahi, who was the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport, in Malta, were both members of the Libyan Intelligence Service.

It is alleged they used their positions to place a bomb in a suitcase aboard an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, which was then routed onto Pan Am flight 103.

[RB: Fhimah’s diary contained an entry for 15 December 1988 that read “collect taggs from the Air Malta”. Only “taggs” was in English, the rest in Arabic. The Crown’s contention was that this was a reminder to Fhimah to collect airline luggage tags that would enable the bomb suitcase to be routed as unaccompanied baggage on Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt, then on to Heathrow and into the hold of Pan Am 103. Fhimah’s explanation to his defence team for this diary entry was that he wanted to secure a contract for printing Libyan Arab Airlines luggage tags in Malta, and the printer had asked for a sample. The diary contains several entries about visiting or contacting the printer.]

Gauci brothers rewarded

[What follows is the text of an item posted today on the Lockerbietruth.com website run by Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph:]

On this day, 1st September 1989, the sole identification witness in the Lockerbie trial, Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, met with a police investigation team headed by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell.

At this first meeting Gauci offered a vague account of a customer who had come into his shop to buy an assortment of clothes. In no way did it resemble the convicted Libyan al-Megrahi.

Gauci's next two interviews were on the 14th and 26th of that month. Neither indicated that al-Megrahi was the purchaser of the clothes.

Two days later on the 28th of that month, Bell wrote in his police diary that "The US Department of Justice are prepared to offer unlimited money to Tony Gauci, with $10,000 available immediately."

The purpose of the "immediately available" $10,000 was clear. Gauci could draw on it for his immediate use. There can be no other interpretation.

These three interviews would be the first of many extending over two years, each interview adding more and more detail. Only in February 1991 did Gauci finally say "he resembles the man a lot".

Every discussion at which money was mentioned was recorded in Bell's diary. But he concealed this diary from the trial judges and the defence team. It was discovered in 2007, six years after the conclusion of the trial and a subsequent appeal.

At the conclusion of the trial Tony Gauci was paid $2 million and his brother Paul Gauci $1 million.

But what did Tony have to do to get the money to be shared between himself and his brother? In the words of the US Department of Justice, "only if he gives evidence".

Since the original 1991 indictment against al-Megrahi was substantially based on eye witness evidence by Tony Gauci it was clear what that evidence would be. It would prove that al-Megrahi was guilty.

Cover-up, conspiracy and the Lockerbie bomb connection

[This is the headline over an article by Marcello Mega that was published in Scotland on Sunday on 19 February 2006:]

If there is a day when the seemingly inconsequential case involving DC Shirley McKie morphed into the crisis which today is threatening the reputation of Scotland's judicial and political system, it is Thursday, August 3, 2000.

It was already more than three years since McKie had visited a house in Kilmarnock where a woman called Marion Ross had been brutally murdered. Since then McKie had been accused of entering that house unauthorised, and leaving her fingerprint on the crime scene. She had been charged with perjury, after claiming in court she had never set foot in there. She had been humiliated at the hands of her former colleagues.

Now, on that August day, a group set up by the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland (ACPOS) to examine the McKie case, was faced with a stunning report. It had already been established that the fingerprint experts at the Scottish Criminal Records Office (SCRO) had got it wrong and that the print was not McKie's. Now, the document in front of the group - an interim update from James Mackay, the man they had asked to investigate the case - claimed the SCRO officers had acted criminally to cover up their mistakes. The consequences were immense: if Scotland's forensic service was both guilty of errors and of attempting to conceal those errors, what confidence could anyone have in the entire justice system?

Last week, Scotland on Sunday revealed the contents of Mackay's final report, which had been kept secret for six years, and which was never acted upon by Scotland's chief prosecutor, Lord Advocate Colin Boyd. This week, we can reveal that it was not just police and prosecutors who knew its contents; the devastating findings of the interim version were passed on to ministers as well.

Mackay, a much respected former Deputy Chief Constable of Tayside police, had been commissioned to investigate the McKie case after a separate report by HM Inspectors of Constabulary had found that - despite the SCRO's claims - McKie's prints had never been at the crime scene. Mackay now probed deeper. As this newspaper revealed last week, his final report found that a mistake had been made, yet had not then been owned up to. "The fact that it was not so dealt with," he reported, "led to 'cover up' and criminality." (...)

On Friday, [Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC] declared that he had seen the full Mackay report and decided that there was still insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone from the SCRO. This decision, taken in September 2001, astonished Mackay. He is understood to have expressed his "surprise" and "disappointment" to the Crown Office and to have relayed his concerns to the then deputy crown agent, Bill Gilchrist. Indeed, so curious is the Lord Advocate's decision not to prosecute, that many are reaching their own conclusions as to why he didn't press ahead with a prosecution.

One is the theory that such a prosecution would undermine the case against David Asbury, the man jailed for the murder of Marion Ross. Such a fear was misguided: Asbury's conviction was quashed anyway in August 2002 on the back of the McKie revelations.

A second theory brings in the shadow of the Lockerbie bombing. Mackay's explosive report into the McKie case that August came three months after Boyd began the prosecution of Libyan suspects Abdelbaset Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. The eyes of the world were focused on Scottish justice. What would it have said of that system if - just as the Crown was trying to convict the bombers - it emerged that fingerprint officials had been involved in "criminality and cover-up"?

Boyd strenuously denies that Lockerbie has any relevance to his judgments regarding the McKie case. When Iain McKie first raised the issue in 2000, Crown Office officials declared that Lockerbie "had not affected in any way the response from this or indeed any other department of the Scottish Executive to the issues raised by you."

But there is clear proof that senior justice chiefs had a stake in both cases; SCRO director Harry Bell, for example - whose agency was coming under such scrutiny - was a central figure in the Lockerbie investigation, having been given the key role in the crucial Maltese wing of the investigation, and given evidence in court.

Today's revelation that two American fingerprint experts who savaged the SCRO over the McKie case were asked by the FBI to "back off" suggests that plenty of people were aware of the danger that the case could undermine the Lockerbie trial.

Former MP Tam Dalyell - who has long campaigned on the Lockerbie case -

said: "I have always felt that there was something deeply wrong with both the McKie case and the Lockerbie judgment. It is deeply dismaying for those of us who were believers in Scottish justice. The Crown Office regard the Lockerbie case as their flagship case and they will go to any lengths to defend their position."

The pressure for a full public inquiry is now growing day by day.

Lockerbie Revealed: The secret report that damns Scottish justice

[This is the headline over an article by Lucy Adams that was published in The Herald on this date in 2012. It reads as follows:]

A damning secret report has revealed the flawed handling of the Lockerbie case by Scottish prosecutors and the key documents not disclosed to the defence team which could have cleared the Libyan convicted of the atrocity.

The full 821-page Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) dossier, which has been seen by The Herald, uncovers serious discrepancies in the Crown Office's reasons for not disclosing vital information.

The Herald can reveal the commission – whose job it is to review cases post-appeal and investigate whether a miscarriage of justice may have occurred – even wrote to the Crown warning it would take legal action if the prosecution did not hand over important documents and speed up information sharing.

The SCCRC rejected many of the defence team's submissions but upheld six different grounds which could have constituted a miscarriage of justice.

The Crown failed to disclose seven key items of evidence that led to the Lockerbie case being referred back for a fresh appeal.

The SCCRC made clear that, had such information been shared with the defence, the result of the trial could have been different.

Its full report details why the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi was referred for a second appeal.

The Scottish Government says it wants to release the document in the interests of transparency but cannot do so because it is covered by data protection law, which is reserved to Westminster.

The report reveals failings on the part of the Crown and shows it delayed the SCCRC by responding very slowly to requests for documents. In several cases the SCCRC was told items had gone missing or there was no record of them.

Three of the undisclosed documents related to payments of around $3 million (£1.9m) made by the US Justice Department to Paul and Tony Gauci – key witnesses in the Crown's case.

Tony Gauci claimed Megrahi bought clothes in his Malta shop, which were later found to be in the suitcase that contained the bomb which killed 270 in December 1988. His identification of Megrahi was critical to the prosecution case.

However, the defence did not know he had been offered and paid reward money after Megrahi's appeal failed in 2002. If Megrahi's legal team had been made aware of the payments they could have challenged the credibility of the prosecution case. In its report the SCCRC says: "Such a challenge may well have been justified, and in the commission's view was capable of affecting the course of the evidence and the eventual outcome of the trial."

The Crown was unable to adequately explain why a memorandum by Scottish police officer Harry Bell referring to reward money was not disclosed. The Crown claimed a 1998 High Court case, which set a precedent for disclosing important information to a defence, barred disclosure.

This has since been challenged at the UK Supreme Court and even greater disclosure is now required.

The commission also found Mr Gauci had a magazine with a photograph of Megrahi stating he was the Lockerbie bomber three days before he identified him at an identification parade in Holland.

In 2001 the Scottish court sitting at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands convicted Megrahi of murder. A second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was acquitted.

Robert Black, QC, one of the architects of the Camp Zeist trial, said: "I don't think there could possibly have been a guilty verdict if the Crown had disclosed to the defence all the material they had in their possession and they were obliged to disclose, even as the law on disclosure stood in 2000/01.

"Why didn't the Crown disclose? Was it because they convinced themselves getting a guilty verdict was more important than obeying 'technical' rules – after all, this was a terrorism case?

"The law about disclosure was clarified after the Zeist trial. But even in 2000/01 the law as it stood would have required the Crown to disclose all the material they withheld. I am delighted The Herald is unveiling this information."

A Crown Office spokesman said last night: "We note the Commission reported delays in obtaining materials from the Crown but also accepted that the Crown's responses to requests were often detailed and helpful in this uniquely large and complex case."

He added: "Mr Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior judges following trial during which the evidence was rigorously tested and his conviction was upheld unanimously by five judges, in an appeal court presided over by the Lord Justice General."

Why the SCCRC report has not been officially published

When the SCCRC referred the Lockerbie case back for a fresh appeal in June 2007 they were only able to publish a summary of their findings.

At that stage if they had published the full report they could have been prosecuted. Legally their hands were tied.

In an effort to get the report published, the Scottish Government passed a statutory instrument, which meant it would no longer be a criminal act for the SCCRC to publish such reports.

However, the 821-page document was still bound by Freedom of Information and Data Protection legislation.

The commission wrote to the individuals mentioned in the report asking for their consent for publication. Consent was not given.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi said he would agree if the Crown did. Ultimately, however, the Crown did not.

To try to get the report into the public domain, ministers brought forward legislation to ease publication. This should be enacted in May but because of the status of the SCCRC, they are still bound by Data Protection legislation.

Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has written to UK Justice Secretary Ken Clarke to ask for an exemption under Data Protection.

The Herald is the first newspaper to have had access to the report. Five years on it is finally closer to being aired.

Shocking admissions about date of Malta purchases

A long journey, followed by a power cut, made it impossible for me to post to this blog yesterday, 22 January. Here is what I would have posted had circumstances permitted:

[On this date in 2010 an article headed Harry Bell and Paul Gauci on the date of purchase: two shocking admissions was published on Adam "Caustic Logic" Larson's blog The 12/7-9/11 Treadmill and Beyond. The admissions relate to the date of purchase in Mary's House, Sliema, of the clothes that, in the official explanation of the Lockerbie disaster, were in the brown Samsonite suitcase along with the bomb. It was essential to the prosecution case against Megrahi that the date of purchase was shown to be 7 December 1988 (when Megrahi was on Malta) and not 23 November (when he was not). The following are excerpts from the article:]

Detective Inspector Harry Bell, who headed the Scottish police effort on Malta and was the main contact point for the Gaucis, was interviewed in 2006 by the SCCRC [Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission]. Some extracts were re-printed in Megrahi's rock-solid grounds of appeal.

Excerpts from there:

DI Bell SCCRC interview (25-26/7/06)

"...The evidence of the football matches was confusing and in the end we did not manage to bottom it out..."

"...I am asked whether at the time I felt that the evidence of the football matches was strongly indicative of 7th December 1988 as the purchase date. No, I did not. Both dates 23rd Nov and 7th Dec 1988 looked likely.

"...It really has to be acknowledged how confusing this all was. No date was signficant for me at the time. Ultimately it was the applicant's [Megrahi’s] presence on the island on 7th December 1988 that persuaded me that the purchase took place on that date. Paul specified 7th December when I met with him on 14th December 1989 and I recorded this..."

The bolded is a shocking admission of just what many had guessed. And then, almost as an afterthought (and a quick one I'd venture) "Paul specified 7th December" as the right day, during a meeting of "14th December 1989." He even has the date memorized! No direct quotes provided there of this meeting. But two months earlier, in a 19 October meeting with the same Harry Bell, he clearly specified the other day. In a police report obtained by Private Eye and published in Paul Foot's 2000 booklet Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice, Mr. Gauci said:

“I was shown a list of European football matches I know as UEFA. I checked all the games and dates. I am of the opinion that the game I watched on TV was on 23 November, 1988: SC Dynamo Dresden v AS Roma. On checking the 7th December 1988, I can say that I watched AS Roma v Dynamo Dresden in the afternoon. All the other games were played in the evening. I can say for certain I watched the Dresden v Roma game. On the basis that there were two games played during the afternoon of 23 November and only one on the afternoon of 7th December, I would say that the 23rd November 1988 was the date in question.” [Foot, 2000, p 21]

The date of the Malta clothes purchase

[What follows is part of a statement taken by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell from Paul Gauci (Tony’s brother) on this date in 1989:]

“On Thursday 19 October 1989 Mr Bell called at my shop at 63 Tower Road where I was shown a list of European football matches I know as UEFA. I checked all the games and dates. I am of the opinion that the game I watched on TV was on 23 November, 1988: SC Dynamo Dresden v AS Roma. On checking the 7th December 1988, I can say that I watched AS Roma v Dynamo Dresden in the afternoon. All the other games were played in the evening. I can say for certain I watched the Dresden v Roma game. On the basis that there were two games played during the afternoon of 23 November and only one on the afternoon of 7th December, I would say that the 23rd November 1988 was the date in question.” 

[RB: It was crucial to the conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi that the purchases from Mary’s House in Sliema should have taken place on 7 December 1989. On the basis of Tony Gauci’s evidence (and notwithstanding convincing meteorological evidence that supported 23 November) the court accepted 7 December as being the date. Paul Gauci was not called as a witness. In its report in June 2007, one of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s six reasons for holding that Megrahi’s conviction might have amounted to a miscarriage of justice was that, on the evidence, no reasonable court could have found that 7 December was the date of purchase.]

Sunday Times INSIGHT "The Lockerbie Files" 1990

[On this date in 1990 The Sunday Times published an article of almost 8000 words entitled The Lockerbie Files. It is no longer to be found on the newspaper’s website. What follows is taken from the version posted on 29 October 2012 on the International Skeptics website:]

It was the biggest murder ever committed in Britain. Tomorrow, 21 months after a bomb sent a PanAm jumbo jet plunging into the town of Lockerbie, the public inquiry into the deaths of the 270 victims will open, at last, before John Mowat, sheriff principal of South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway. He will hear dozens of witnesses and scrutinise thousands of pages of evidence over the next three months.

Since the bombing, the Lockerbie investigators have probed the depths of terrorism, challenged powerful foreign interests and extended the frontiers of forensic detection. But most of the fruits of this painstaking police investigation will not be presented at the inquiry.

Lord Fraser, the Lord Advocate, the law officer leading for the crown at the inquiry, has decided not to present evidence that would cover such questions as how the bomb was put on the plane, who did it, and where. Nor will he introduce evidence uncovered by the extensive international criminal investigation evidence of security lapses at foreign airports and allegations of blunders by foreign police, including a bungle over a baggage loading list that may have enabled one of the terrorists to avoid capture by a matter of hours.

The inquiry is not equipped to probe the obstruction, bureaucracy, rivalry and incompetence that may have shielded the killers from justice. Nor is it able to consider the international political pressures behind the fact that today after an investigation costing Pounds 8.5m not one arrest has been made in direct connection with Lockerbie.

After an INSIGHT inquiry ranging over the whole breadth of police investigations in Britain and Germany, The Sunday Times is able to tell the story that the official inquiry will not hear. It is a story full of questions that the investigators still cannot answer. They may never be resolved.

Nobody noticed the undercover police officers as they sat in their unmarked cars in a quiet suburban street in the West German city of Neuss. It was Monday, October 24, 1988. Members of the anti-terrorist unit of the federal police the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) were watching a block of grey council flats at 16 Isarstrasse in the city's Arab quarter. Their targets were terrorists belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

This group had been dormant since the early 1970s, when it carried out spectacular attacks on Western airliners. But, alerted by Israeli tip-offs that the group had smuggled weapons into Europe to attack Israeli and American targets, the BKA had begun round-the-clock surveillance of 16 suspects across West Germany. The police called the operation Autumn Leaves.

The Isarstrasse flat belonged to an Arab greengrocer. But the BKA was more interested in his visiting brother-in-law, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni, 43, and a recently arrived companion, Marwan Abdel Khreesat, also 43.

Dalkamoni was a Syrian terrorist identified by the Israelis as leader of the PFLP-GC's European network. He had been captured by the Israelis after losing a leg during a cross-border raid in 1969 and released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange arranged by Ahmed Jibril, leader of the PFLP-GC.

Officially, the limping, grey-haired Palestinian was in Germany for medical treatment. But the BKA suspected him of smuggling detonators into the country in his artificial leg.

Khreesat's presence was even more alarming to the BKA. He had arrived on October 13 with his wife and two bronze Samsonite suitcases. Inside one, Dalkamoni admitted later, was a black Toshiba ''bombeat 453'' radio cassette recorder. Remains of a similar model were later found among the debris at Lockerbie.

Balding and paunchy, Khreesat seemed typical of the thousands of Arabs who regularly visit the large Middle Eastern community in West Germany. He was silent for most of his stay, rarely leaving his room except to listen to his hosts' young son practising on a small electric piano in the living room. His wife explained that he liked music and that he owned a television repair shop back in Amman.

But Khreesat was no ordinary TV repairman. He was one of the world's most skilled aviation bombers. Italian secret service files showed he was wanted in connection with the bombing of an Israeli airliner in 1972, when ammonium nitrate concealed in a Philips record player had exploded minutes after take-off from Rome airport.

The BKA wondered, in October 1988, whether Khreesat was now planning an attack against a target in West Germany. As the surveillance team followed Khreesat and Dalkamoni on shopping trips around Neuss and Frankfurt, they began to fear the worst. Why else were the two men buying clocks, batteries, switches and glue?

BKA wiretappers heard Dalkamoni telephone Khreesat from Frankfurt to tell him that an accomplice would deliver ''black boxes with lids'', ''gloves'' and ''paste''. Dalkamoni also promised to bring ''at least seven white pointed aluminium buttons, four of which would be electric''.

On the morning of October 24, as the BKA monitored the flat, Khreesat settled himself at a table in his bedroom with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Dalkamoni arrived with some packages covered in aluminium foil and sealed with black sticky tape. Khreesat opened the back of his Toshiba radio cassette player and set to work.

He worked alone for the rest of the day and the whole of the next; others in the flat were told he was putting together an amplifier. Then Khreesat made a long distance call to Damascus, monitored by the BKA, and said: ''I've made some changes to the medication. It's better and stronger than before.''

Fearing an attack was imminent, the BKA moved in next day. Manfred Klink, its senior anti-terrorism officer, was taking no chances. Armed officers seized Dalkamoni and Khreesat near their green Taunus car. In its boot they found a black Toshiba radio cassette recorder armed with about 300 grammes of Semtex-H high explosive and a barometric trigger designed to close an electric circuit at altitude.

''The detonating mechanism ... is suited to detonate explosives automatically in an aircraft,'' the BKA reported later. ''When the necessary operating height has been reached the fall in pressure connected with it will start the timing mechanism, and when the delay period has elapsed the detonator will be activated''.

The BKA simultaneously raided addresses in Frankfurt and four other cities, seizing 14 more supects and a lethal arsenal that included an anti-tank gun, sub-machine guns, mortars, rifle and hand grenades, TNT and five kilos of plastic explosives.

The Germans also issued an international alert to airline and airport security chiefs about the possibility of other Toshiba radio bombs made by Khreesat. They had reason to congratulate themselves. It seemed a massive plot to bomb an aircraft had been foiled and a terrorist cell taken out.

Events swiftly proved otherwise. For, in an astonishing decision that Scottish detectives would later believe had a direct bearing on the Lockerbie disaster, Khreesat was set free.

After holding him for two weeks on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a crime, the German police needed a new warrant to keep him in custody. On November 10, Dr Christian Rinne, an investigating judge of the federal high court in Karlsruhe, let Khreesat go.

Rinne said there was insufficient evidence to connect him with the Autumn Leaves gang's arsenal; nor had it been possible ''to discover a target or location for a crime of explosion''. If the BKA suspected Khreesat of involvement in earlier bombings, they did not disclose that to Rinne. ''According to the facts known so far, the accused is certainly suspected of the alleged charge. The strong suspicion of crime necessary for a warrant of arrest is, however, lacking,'' said Rinne.

Dalkamoni and one other suspect had been positively linked with the Frankfurt arsenal and were still under arrest. They would later be charged for bomb attacks aimed at American military trains. But the other suspects seized in the Autumn Leaves round-up were all out of custody. Marwan Khreesat, master bomb-maker, walked out of the courthouse and vanished without trace.

Seven weeks later, a terrorist bomb weighing less than a bag of sugar exploded on flight PA103 as it flew six miles high over Lockerbie. It was 7.03pm on Wednesday December 21, 1988. Many of the passengers were Americans going home for Christmas. All 259 people on board were killed; so were 11 Lockerbie residents.

The following day, from his temporary headquarters in the Lockerbie Academy, John Boyd, the chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway police, Britain's smallest force, began a vast search and recovery effort. He appointed Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr to head a team of 130 detectives to hunt down the bombers. Orr had no experience of airline bombings; but he quickly focused on three lines of inquiry.

One was that a suicidal terrorist had smuggled a bomb aboard. But tests on the bodies of the victims showed no indication that any of them had recently handled explosives. ''Profiling'' of their backgrounds by Special Branch revealed no terrorist connections.

Another possibility was the ''mule theory'': an innocent passenger had been duped into taking the bomb aboard. This was only ruled out after every single bag belonging to every passenger had been shown not to contain a bomb.

Lastly there was the ''inside man'' theory: an airport worker had managed to smuggle a bomb on to the aircraft in unaccompanied baggage.

It would take months and a tortuous journey through more than 9,250 leads before Orr would discover the answer. [...]

They found that a small magnet had been fused by the heat of the explosion into the metal frame of one damaged suitcase. A tangled piece of scorch-marked clothing in another case yielded a fragment of black-painted loudspeaker grille. A tiny screw melted into a third suitcase was a further pointer. By mid-February 1989, Feraday had identified a crucial piece of evidence pointing to the bomber the tiny piece of circuit board.

''I am completely satisfied that those fragments originate from a Toshiba-brand radio cassette recorder types RT 8016 or RT 8026,'' he wrote to Orr. ''The fragments are shattered in a manner consistent with their intimate involvement in an explosion and I therefore conclude that the bomb was contained in the aforementioned Toshiba-type portable radio cassette player.''

A charred instruction manual written in Arabic and English indicated that the radio had been sold in the Middle East. But there was no prospect of tracing the buyer.

Orr assigned a specialist search team to trawl five square miles of bush and shrubland on the western fringes of Newcastleton forest 23 miles from Lockerbie. It was laborious work. But the team members were fired up by the belief that they might bring the killers to justice.

They eventually found 27 pieces of a suitcase that Rarde was able to establish had contained the bomb. The pieces of scorched or melted brown plastic were all, Rarde concluded, part of a hard-sided brown Samsonite, the kind Khreesat had with him at the bomb flat in Neuss.

Harry Bell, a detective chief inspector, flew to Samsonite's headquarters in Denver, Colorado, where the suitcase was identified as an Antique Copper System Four Samsonite. The model had been manufactured between 1985 and 1988 and sold in the Middle East. But more than 3,500 had been made and there was no way of tracing the buyer. As with the fragments of the Toshiba bomb, the remains of the Samsonite seemed to lead to a dead end.

It was time to look elsewhere for clues. Since the first days after the bombing, Orr had been aware of a possible connection between Lockerbie and the Autumn Leaves operation in West Germany. On his advice, a formal British request went to the BKA for all possible assistance. But as February turned to March, Scottish detectives began to complain of BKA obstructiveness. At first it just seemed like bureacratic red tape. ''There were delays in answering our specific requests,'' said one detective. ''Later it became deliberate prevarication.''

The BKA at first rejected requests to interview detainees connected to the Autumn Leaves gang. When interviews finally did take place, the BKA insisted on asking the questions, and in German. Orr complained privately that the Germans were withholding the full Autumn Leaves files.

It was a delicate situation. A provincial Scottish police force, with little previous experience of terrorism, was challenging the counter-terrorism department of West Germany's equivalent of the FBI; the BKA is probably Europe's most efficient police organisation.

Matters came to a head in late March at a co-ordinating meeting of Scottish and German investigators at the inquiry headquarters in Lockerbie, where Orr outlined the growing evidence of connections between the PFLP-GC in West Germany and the Lockerbie bombing.

Evidence from Autumn Leaves proved conclusively that the group was once more planning to attack aircraft, said Orr. The Toshiba radio bomb, Samsonite suitcase and the use of Semtex were common factors pointing to links between the cell and the Lockerbie bombing. Orr also pointed out that, although Dalkamoni had been in custody when flight PA103 exploded, other members of the gang, including Khreesat, had been free for seven weeks.

Orr argued that it was essential to know the whereabouts of the Autumn Leaves gang after they had been released. ''It is vital to know where the PFLP-GC people arrested and then released were from 2829 October 1988 onwards; the whereabouts of their associates; if all the property capable of being used in bomb-making had in fact been recovered?'' Orr demanded that the BKA release their full files on Autumn Leaves.

''He made it clear,'' notes of the meeting read, ''that while he did not wish to interfere in any way with the investigation of the crimes committed by these people in West Germany, his first priority lay in solving the murder of 270 people in Scotland.''

The following month the long-delayed Autumn Leaves files at last arrived in Lockerbie from the BKA. They held some surprises for Orr. For weeks, he had been puzzled by Judge Rinne's decision to free Khreesat. Now, as he sifted through hundreds of pages of the English translation of Autumn Leaves, his bewilderment turned to horror.

The prima facie case against Khreesat appeared to be overwhelming. Dalkamoni had told the BKA that Khreesat had built bombs not just inside the Toshiba radio that police had seized but also in two tuners and a video screen. He modestly explained: ''Mr Khreesat was the expert. I brought him specially to Germany from Amman.''

Traces of explosives had been found on the table where Khreesat had worked in the Autumn Leaves flat, and Khreesat himself had revealed to police an extensive knowledge of the workings of the PFLP-GC. He had admitted that, about a month previously he had been in Dalkamoni's office in Damascus when he overheard a discussion by four PFLP-GC members about an attack on an American club.

But the really stunning discovery was that on November 5, while still in custody, Khreesat had telephoned Jordan. The call was monitored by an Arab-speaking intelligence officer who reported that Khreesat appeared to be taking orders from an official of the Jordanian intelligence service.

Suddenly the whole investigation took on a different complexion. Was Marwan Khreesat, television repairman and master bomber, also a Jordanian spy? More disturbingly, had a decision been made to let the bomb-maker go free because German intelligence knew he was employed by the Jordanians as an informer on Palestinian terrorism in Europe? Had he even helped the German police to break up Dalkamoni's group?

Perhaps this explained why the case to remand Khreesat had collapsed. Had the evidence against him been ''badly led'' by the police? Did Khreesat's ambiguous role lie behind the apparent reluctance of the BKA to hand over the Autumn Leaves file? It would certainly explain why the BKA was so keen to deny any link between the Autumn Leaves gang and the PanAm bombing.

For the detectives in the Lockerbie schoolhouse, this was a glimpse of a world they knew little about, where the priorities of police work and intelligence diverged, and morality played a subordinate role.

Further shocks lay ahead. In May 1989, police searchers returned from Newcastleton Forest in triumph with the lock to the Samsonite suitcase that had contained the bomb. If the key could be found, it could lead to the Samsonite's owner.

More than 100 luggage keys were scattered among the estimated 10,000 items from the wreckage stored in the investigators' warehouse. Superintendent Angus Roxburgh, the man in charge of the property store, spent the next 48 hours wrestling to fit one key after another into the lock. But none fitted. So Orr asked the BKA about keys he knew had been recovered in the Autumn Leaves raids. Perhaps one would fit: a terrific breakthrough. But the Germans prevaricated. They said no keys had been found, then that they had been house keys, and then that they had been destroyed.

Angrily, the Lockerbie detectives pursued the suitcase connection, and their suspicions about the BKA grew even stronger.

They were intensely interested in the bronze Samsonites which Khreesat had brought to Germany. One of Dalkamoni's relatives had told police that, just minutes before Dalkamoni and Khreesat were arrested, he had seen a bronze Samsonite in the boot of their car. Between this sighting and the arrests, Dalkamoni had parked the car and Khreesat had made a call from a street telephone.

No reference to a Samsonite appeared in German police files. The BKA had reported finding a Toshiba bomb in the boot, but no suitcase What had happened to it?

The Lockerbie police conjectured: ''It is possible that the brown suitcase was delivered to another person while Dalkamoni was 'parking the car', and that the suitcase contained another IED (bomb) and that the suitcase referred to is the brown Samsonite suitcase which contained the IED on PA103.''

In other words, the Scottish detectives suspected that the vanished suitcase was the missing link between Germany and Lockerbie. They surmised that, perhaps unknown to Khreesat himself, one of the bombs he had made had eventually sent 270 people to their deaths.

Such was the atmosphere in the Lockerbie incident control centre (LICC) over this question that Orr ordered an examination of the BKA's scene-of-crime photographs of the car. These showed cigarette packets and other litter in the interior yet a spotlessly clean and empty boot where the Samsonite had been seen. Suspicious, the Scots examined the film, and discovered that the picture of the boot had been taken on a separate roll. The BKA said it had run out of film. The Scots suspected dirty tricks.

What were the Germans up to? As the Lockerbie team chewed over such facts and as it knew about the arrest of Khreesat and Dalkamoni, another suspicion took shape. If Khreesat had been a known informer for the Jordanians, had he actually tipped off German intelligence that he had made his bombs and that it was time to arrest the Autumn Leaves gang before Dalkamoni could distribute them?

That might explain the BKA's apparent efforts to obfuscate what had happened. If it knew about Khreesat's double identity, it would have had to detain him to maintain his cover.

Dalkamoni also had suspicions on these lines. Months later, as he sat in a high security cell in Hessen, he reflected on whether a man he had regarded as a trusted associate in the cause of Palestinian terrorism had all along been working for the West. During a prison visit by his wife in April 1989, he told her that he thought Khreesat had ''played a double game''. [...]

Once again the imperatives of a team of detectives pursuing mass murderers had clashed with those of the intelligence community. The Scottish investigators were under public and political pressure to get at the truth of a dreadful crime; but no intelligence service would willingly unmask its operatives to prying eyes. In their schoolhouse, some of the Scots felt that they were fighting a losing war against encircling secrecy.

Their sense of helplessness grew with the realisation that the tide of international politics was also turning against them. The West was moving towards better relations with Syria, host to the PFLP-GC, and with Iran, whose radical former interior minister, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, was suspected of instigating the Lockerbie bombing in revenge for the American destruction of an Iranian airbus in July 1988.

Orr had been told that he would be unable to produce a shred of evidence against Iranian or Syrian officials in court. But he told his men not to worry about politics.

''He repeatedly told us to keep our heads down and get on with the job,'' said one detective. ''But only a fool could ignore the implications if we got a successful result.''

While gloom spread at Lockerbie, the forensic team at Rarde was trying to resolve another dispute between the two police forces. Had the suitcase packed with the bomb slipped past airport security at Heathrow or at Frankfurt, where a feeder flight to PA103 had originated?

Britons and Germans were blaming each other, and Orr was under pressure from the joint intelligence steering group of the Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates intelligence and security policy, to resolve the disagreement. There was a danger that the festering dispute would compromise co-operation between the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and its German counterparts in the hunt for IRA terrorists on the European mainland.

It was a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Luggage pallet AVE4041, holding the bomb in the Samsonite suitcase, had been loaded at Heathrow; but Special Branch detectives had established that none of the bags in it had originated in London. Most had been transferred off feeder flight PA103A from Frankfurt, apart from seven or eight bags in the bottom layer which had come direct from Cyprus and other airports.

If the scientists could establish the exact location of the bomb suitcase within the pallet, this would indicate the airport where it had been loaded.

Feraday, Rarde's expert, flew to America for a series of secret tests at the US Navy's explosive ordnance disposal technology centre at Indian Head, Maryland. Pointedly, the Germans were not invited.

Moulding varying amounts of Semtex into Toshiba 8016 radios, Feraday built five bombs which were wrapped in clothes and packed into five Samsonite suitcases. Each suitcase was loaded into luggage pallets similar to AVE4041 and the bombs were blown up.

The test report concluded: ''Results clearly indicate that the case containing the IED (the bomb) was not ... in the bottom layer of passenger baggage.'' This meant the bag had come from Frankfurt. It was a rare victory for the Scots.

For the BKA, one embarrassment followed another. Returning in April to a greengrocer's shop owned by Dalkamoni's brother-in-law, which it had already searched during the Autumn Leaves raids the previous October, the BKA found that it had overlooked two home-made bombs in a Sanyo data monitor and an Ultrasound radio tuner. Primed with Semtex, both had barometric pressure switches linked to time delays.

To Orr's men, this discovery was more evidence that the Autumn Leaves gang had been planning attacks against aircraft using bombs made by Khreesat and powerful support for the theory that the Pan Am device had been put aboard PA103A at Frankfurt.

The Germans disagreed, and a battle of scientific memoranda began. The BKA now had three bombs in its possession: one seized with Khreesat and Dalkamoni in October, the other two found in the greengrocer's. It asked its forensic section, ST33, to report if these could survive a flight from Frankfurt to London (flight time 1 hour 18 minutes) without detonation, and then explode, as the Pan Am bomb had done, 38 minutes after take-off from Heathrow.

Unfortunately, one of the bombs blew up while being examined at BKA headquarters, killing a junior technician; and in the resulting panic, another exploded after being rushed outside and blasted with water from a firehose.

Although the BKA was left with only one fully functioning example of Khreesat's bombs, it reported that all three had a time delay of between 30 and 45 minutes, and concluded: ''Presupposing that an explosive device of the same construction was used in the attack, then this must have been taken on board for the first time in London, or at least made acute by insertion of the master switch.''

Bombs built by Khreesat had a maximum time delay of 45 minutes, argued the BKA. Therefore, if he had made the PA103 bomb it must have been loaded at Heathrow. It could not have been loaded at Frankfurt, on a flight of more than an hour, because it would have activated within 45 minutes; so it could not have been made by Khreesat and was not overlooked by the BKA during the arrest of the Autumn Leaves gang. Either way, the BKA had not been responsible.

This logic infuriated senior Lockerbie detectives, who complained that the BKA was ignoring a wealth of circumstantial forensic evidence pointing to Khreesat, Dalkamoni and the rest of the Autumn Leaves gang. [...]

Between the rows there was important progress. By August, after months of painstaking work, Hayes and Feraday had drawn up a detailed list of clothing that had been with the bomb in the suitcase. This gave the police the strongest clue yet to its owner.

The clothing included a white singlet; brown tartan trousers marked ''Yorkie, size 34''; a grey shirt or blouse; a blue and white pin-striped shirt or blouse; a grey herringbone pattern jacket; a coarse herringbone pattern skirt, a cream and brown striped jacket and a blue Babygro romper babysuit. They all showed scorch marks. Fibres from them had been fused into parts of the Samsonite suitcase. The Babygro provided the single most important lead in the whole inquiry. It was labelled ''Malta Trading Company''.

Rarde had also identified a second category of bomb-damaged clothes. None of the clothing showed traces of the radio bomb or the Samsonite suitcase. But the damage was so intense that the clothes must have been inside or at least very close to the bomb suitcase.

These other clothes included: a pair of white jogging trousers or longjohns; a multicoloured headscarf; a purple sweatshirt; a tartan pattern grey jacket a white singlet, a white bra and part of a green slip- on tennis shoe. Most revealing of all was a pair of cream jogging trousers marked "Noonan". The passenger list revealed that Karen Elizabeth Noonan, a 20-year-old American student from Potomac, Maryland, had been on board. Her background revealed she had spent time in Vienna and had befriended an Arab called Bilbassi.

The point did not escape Hayes. "We are therefore able to conclude," he wrote, "that all of the above clothing, much of which could be regarded as lady's clothing, could have originated from within the prime suitcase and, in the case of the first listing above, in all probability did originate from within the prime suitcase,." Had Noonan been a "mule"?

Follow-up inquiries on the Babygro indicated it had been sold at outlets throughout Europe, including Dublin. Noonan had been to Dublin just weeks before the bombing to watch her college team play football.

Hayes's memo caused a stir of excitement at the Lockerbie Academy. During one of his daily phone calls to Douglas Gow, the FBI's supervisory officer in Washington, Orr made it clear that the Noonan lead was the strongest yet, Gow agreed. Noonan fitted the profile of a "mule" perfectly. Could she provide the answer the Scots were looking for?

On the morning of August 16, the telephone rang in John Orr's office. He switched the device on to the orange scrambling machine. Detective Inspector Watson McAteer, deputy liaison officer with the BKA, said the Germans had at last produced the baggage loading list for PA103A, the feeder flight from Frankfurt.

The computerised printout was an itemised list of 111 bags which had been loaded on the afternoon of December 21. Orr had been asking for it since early Janaury. "First the Germans said it didn't exist; then they said they had lost it. Finally they said it had been destroyed," claimed one detective.

This was the goldmine Orr had been waiting for. Casting his eye down the left side of the list, he saw a handwritten cross in the margin beside one entry. It referred to a bag, numbered S0009, which had been entered into the computer at 13.07pm. A separate typewritten worksheet showed that this bag had gone through handling station 206. A third worksheet revealed only one bag had been recorded at station 206 at 13.07pm. It was from Air Malta flight KM180, which had left Valletta at 9.45am that morning, docking at Frankfurt's terminal B at 13.40pm. [...]

Police in Scotland and Germany hope the shifting allegiances and faction fighting within the world of Palestinian terrorism will produce and evidence they need. "It won't be today or tomorrow, but I'm confident that one of these days somebody involved will break their silence," said one Western intelligence official.

But as the fatal accident inquiry opens in Dumfries tomorrow, the Scots and the Germans are still far apart in their theories about what that evidence will be.

The Scots police remain convinced that the Pan Am bomb was one of those made by Marwan Khreesat as he sat at his bedroom table on October 24 and 25, 1988. They suspect the BKA missed this device when it seized the Autumn Leaves gang and that the device was subsequently smuggled out of the country and, somehow, taken to Malta via Cyprus. But this is a theory with several holes.

Principally, how could the bomb have been taken to Malta? There is the Talb link, and there is a report of a member of the Autumn Leaves gang traveling by train to Vienna with a Toshiba radio under his arm after his release from custody. But would terrorists take a homemade bomb with a propensity to go wrong halfway around Europe, rather than move a bomb-maker to the point where the device was needed?

Furthermore, if the bomb was a barometric device made by Khreesat, why did it explode neither on the Malta-Frankfurt flight nor on the Frankfurt-London flight? The fact that it blew up 38 minutes our of Heathrow when, but for a diversion caused by high winds, PA103 would have been over the Irish sea suggests that it was precisely primed to send the plane plunging into deep water, where no evidence would ever be found.

As a result, the Germans treat the argument implicating Khreesat with a mixture of irritation and contempt. They argue that a bomb originating in Malto must have been constructed to a different design by another bomb-maker.

"The Scottish evidence is rather flimsy," said one senior German security official in charge of the case. "If you have a point and you like that point you try to fit everything into that scheme. That's what they are doing." He said evidence pointing away from Khreesat is in the hands of the Scottish police, "they might not like it, but it's there". Yet just what this evidence is he would not say.

Twenty-one months on, while the police bicker, the political steam has started to go out of the Lockerbie issue. Morale amount the investigators has plummeted, and men and resources have been diverted elsewhere. Just 35 of the original team of 130 detectives remain at the Lockerbie Academy; Orr has been promoted to deputy chief constable of the region. In Germany, Klink's Lockerbie team has dropped from 20 to just a handful.

On Thursday, as Sheriff Mowat's fatal accident inquiry enters its fourth day, Hafez Dalkamoni will appear before Frankfurt high court accused of possessing weapons and membership of a terrorist organization. He is expected to plead guilty to possessing one of Khreesat's bombs. But he insists this was meant for a target in Israel. With remission for good behaviour and the time already spent in custody, Dalkamoni can expect to be free within a few years.

Khreesat himself, television repairman and bomb-maker, is believed to be living in Amman, almost certainly under the protection of the Jordanian government. Senior Western intelligence officials refuse to discuss his real allegiances.

"We never confirm or deny the identity of our agents, " said one intelligence official who has supervised the Lockerbie case. "All I can say is that if Khreesat is a penetration agent, I wish we could have many of his sort."

Compromised by such sentiments, the hunt for the truth about the Lockerbie disaster faces an even greater obstacle: the Gulf crisis.

When James Baker, the American secretary of state, visited Syria earlier this month seeking solidarity against Iraq, he indicated that the CIA and West German intelligence had extensive evidence linking the Damascus-based PFLP-GC to the Lockerbie bombing, and he asked President Assad to expel the organization from Syria. Baker said American-Syrian relations could not be normalized until Assad acted.

The Syrians replied that if there was hard evidence to link any person or group in Syria with any terrorist acts, then those responsible would be placed on trail. But pressure to make the Syrian fulfil that promise is increasingly unlikely.

For, in a world suddenly endangered by the Gulf crisis, Syria and Iran have become unexpected partners with the West against Saddam Hussein. When Syrian troops stand shoulder-to-shoulder with British and American soldiers, the 270 victims of Lockerbie take second place in the struggle for justice.