Scientific shenanigans

[What follows is an extract from The people who moved the world, a forthcoming book by Jim Swire. It appears here by kind permission of Dr Swire and Peter Biddulph.]

Dr Thomas Hayes was formerly head of the forensics explosives laboratory at the British Royal Armaments Research and Defence Establishment (RARDE), and was a key witness in the prosecution case. I would find his evidence at times breathtaking and worrying.

He was aged fifty three, having retired from his RARDE post ten years earlier. As a bachelor of science honours in chemistry, a master of science in the faculty of forensic science, a doctor of philosophy in the faculty of forensic science, a chartered chemist, and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, we might expect an outstanding memory. And yet he seemed reluctant to tell the court why or when he'd retired to start a new career as a chiropodist. When did he start work at Fort Halstead? In July 1974. And when did he leave? " The exact date of my leaving is a little circumspect, but I believe it was in 1990."

He actually retired in 1989, a year that for him may have been circumspect, but was, in relation to our trial, most significant. Hayes, I would discover from our own research, had an uncomfortable history in relation to one other major terrorist event, namely the IRA bombing said to involve seven members of the Maguire family - The Maguire Seven. In that trial Hayes and two close colleagues - including his immediate supervisor Dr Higgs - had performed a central and discredited role, and were found out by a Parliamentary investigation. To add to that Dr Higgs was also discovered to have conspired to mislead the court - with a further two RARDE colleagues of Hayes - in the case of Judith Ward, accused of a bombing in Guildford.

Was Hayes carefully avoiding using the numbers, "1989", so as to deter the court from forming its own conclusion? When asked by friendly advocate Campbell, Hayes could not recall when he became a chiropodist. Nor did his memory improve as he faced defence QC Richard Keen.

"KEEN. Dr Hayes, you told us in your earlier evidence that you were head of the Forensics explosives laboratory at RARDE until 1989? And your change of career from forensic scientist to chiropodist would appear to coincide in point of time with the decision of the Home Secretary to appoint Sir John May to inquire into the trial of those known as the Maguire Seven. Is that true?
HAYES. I believe so. I don't recall clearly."

I am convinced to this day that Hayes really did recall the date and reason. He simply did not dare say it in front of the judges. For in May 1989, even as he examined the fragment which appeared in the evidence bag with a label signed by Detective Constable Gilchrist and altered by unknown persons, a campaign was running in Parliament to have him and his colleagues investigated for their roles in both IRA trials. The Parliamentary findings were published in 1992 and 1996, long after the November 1991 indictments of the Libyan suspects Al-Megrahi and Fhimah.

In his study of the 1976 trial of the Maguire Seven, Sir John May found that the notebooks of three RARDE scientists, including Hayes, had been consciously withheld from the court. The first of the three was Douglas Higgs, Principal Scientific Officer and head of department; second was Walter Elliott, a Senior Scientific Officer; and the third was Hayes, at that time a Higher Scientific Officer.

During the trial, results of tests for traces of nitro-glycerine on skin and fingernails of the Maguire family were firmly maintained by the three scientists to be positive and decisive. Unknown to the court, however, the three had performed a second set of tests plus a series of experiments. Both tests and experiments indicated a negative result and an innocent means of contamination. They therefore knew of evidence pointing to the innocence of the accused yet failed to inform the court. Furthermore, during the inquiry their notebooks were disclosed to Sir John May only at the final "hearing" stage of that Inquiry. Thus he was forced to view the case files only on the last day of his public hearings.

Sir John recorded his unease at the delay, and concluded: "In all the elements of the prosecution case the Crown relied on the evidence of three RARDE scientists. Their accuracy, reliability, fairness and credibility were fundamental to the convictions. In my opinion the whole scientific basis upon which the prosecution was founded was so vitiated that on this basis alone the Court of Appeal should set aside the convictions."

Then the Judith Ward case: in February 1974 twelve people were killed in an IRA bombing attack on a military bus in Guildford. Ward was arrested, and in an almost exact parallel to the Maguire case, the evidence central to her conviction was an analysis of samples taken from the skin and fingernails. These, maintained three lying scientists, were evidence of her guilt. In November of 1974 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She would spend fifteen years in jail before her innocence could be established.

Hers was one of a spate of miscarriages of justice including the Maguire case and the Birmingham Six. In every appeal, the manipulation of evidence by RARDE forensic scientists was a major feature of the convictions, and its exposure the cause of successful appeals.

Of the dishonesty revealed in the Ward case Lord Justice Glidewell observed that the catalogue of the lamentable omissions included "failure to reveal actual test results, the failure to reveal discrepant Rf values, the suppression of the boot polishing experimental data, the misrepresentation the first firing cell test results, economical witness statements calculated to obstruct inquiry by the defence, and most important of all, oral evidence at the trial in the course of which three senior RARDE scientists knowingly placed a false and distorted picture before the jury. It is, in our judgement, also a necessary inference that the three senior RARDE forensic scientists acted in concert in withholding material evidence."

Of Higgs Lord Justice Glidewell commented "We reject Mr Higgs' account as a deliberate falsehood" Higgs was, in the words of the appeal panel "An experienced chemist… the head of a closely knit team." The words "deliberate falsehood" are clear. The man and two senior members of his organisation were nothing less than liars.

Dealing with another item of evidence, an apparently bomb damaged suitcase, prosecution advocate Campbell QC led Hayes through what seemed an endless list of items in his detailed schedule. The catalogue droned onward for seventy six pages of transcript. Suddenly Hayes reached a thirteen word sentence, almost hidden from, and mostly missed by, the court and the relatives. It was quietly read: "… The suitcase was fitted with a rigid plastics handle, bright metal trim and locks, which were devoid of any proprietary or owner's identification. A rectangular hole had been cut in the hard shell above the handle. The left-hand edge of the suitcase showed evidence of having been damaged by an explosion, with disruption and blackening of the outer skin and bright metal body frame, [etc]

The suitcase belonged to Major Charles McKee, leader of a four-man CIA team returning from Beirut. He, with colleagues Gannon, Lariviere, and O'Connor, were on a mission to explore ways of freeing a group of American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian-based terrorists. McKee's suitcase contained something that the US government were desperate to keep from the sight of the media or the public. That something remains so important to America's security that for twenty years the White House has never even hinted at what it might be.

McKee's case had been removed by unknown persons, a rectangular hole expertly sawn just below the handle, the contents taken away and new contents put in. Security suitcases of this type were fitted with an incendiary explosive device on the interior of the case, just by the handle. Should the suitcase be opened without the use of a security code, the suitcase would explode and incinerate the contents. Hence the hole sawn into the case to enable disablement of the explosive trigger. A clean set of clothes were inserted and the case was returned to the crime scene and placed on a Lockerbie hillside so that it could be "found". The removal of evidence from a crime scene is of itself a criminal offence. Yet nothing would be said of it in the trial by the prosecution or the judges.

It was and is - for me - a disturbing tale. How had Hayes, publicly demonstrated as untrustworthy, and working in a close-knit organisation discredited by two major criminal cases, become so central to the Lockerbie tragedy? His repeated plays on words, his professions of innocence, his claims of forgetfulness, all were greatly worrying. As a skilled forensic scientist he should have been immediately alerted by the tampering that took place between the finding of McKee's suitcase and its arrival in his laboratory. Label, name tag and contents had been removed, and a set of clothes put into the case. These were recorded as to '...show no evidence of explosive damage, as opposed to the suitcase which was damaged.' It was as if a new set of clothes had been put into the case. And when writing notes about the identification tags and name tag of the suitcase, instead of using the word 'removed', Hayes chose the words 'devoid of'; technically correct, but in the true sense meaning simply not there. What most worried me, and auguring badly for whatever verdict might follow, was the nature of Lord Sutherland's interjection. His Lordship saw intelligence service interference with the trial process and illegal tampering with evidence as no cause for concern. It seemed to me that he was not the first senior trial judge to be fooled by RARDE's economical witness statements calculated to obstruct inquiry by the defence.

"KEEN. A rectangular hole has been cut in the top of the case, and that cannot be attributed in any form to blast damage or impact damage in the disaster, can it?
HAYES. No, it cannot.
KEEN. You are presented with the alleged contents in a bag marked with the name of the owner of the case? That wasn't usual, so far as the presentation of evidence to you at RARDE was concerned, was it?
HAYES. I don't think I can helpfully answer your question. I don't know.
KEEN. You have no recollection of other cases being presented to you in this fashion, for the purposes of your forensic examination?
HAYES. A case outside this Lockerbie investigation?
KEEN. Outside this particular case on page 22.
HAYES. The suitcase?
KEEN. The suitcase.
HAYES. No particular recollection, no.
KEEN. What appears to have happened, Dr. Hayes, in respect of this case, is that it has been the subject of interference or intromission by some third party.
HAYES. The cut hole would seem to suggest that. The rest of the observations may have some quite innocent explanation.
KEEN. Well, was any innocent explanation proffered to you for the state of this evidence when it was given to you for forensic examination at RARDE?
HAYES. I never asked for an explanation.
KEEN. Was any explanation ever volunteered to you?
HAYES. I'm sorry, I don't recall."

Under further cross-examination Hayes was unable to explain his notes concerning a fragment of circuit board from the MEBO MST-13 timer which was said to be part of the bomb. He found and identified it on 12th May 1989, labelling it "PT35-B" on page fifty one of his one hundred and seventy two page loose-leaf notebook. He would maintain that he was the first person to observe this, finding it in the evidence bag signed and dated by DC Gilchrist, mentioned above.

Hayes said he always kept detailed notes, yet his sheets were strangely renumbered for all pages subsequent to that containing information on the circuit board fragment. Was that particular page later written up and inserted so as to create the illusion of a contemporaneous sequence of entries? Richard Keen tried to extract the truth:

"KEEN. Well, whether it be the date or the page number, Dr. Hayes, would you like to explain how the present page fifty one came to be in your examination notes?
HAYES. How it came to be there?
KEEN. Yes.
HAYES. I'm rather lost for words. It came to be there in exactly the same way as every other page came to be there.
KEEN. If that was the case, Dr. Hayes, the pagination of your notes would run quite simply from pages fifty to fifty six, without the need for the alterations that have been made in the pagination of the notes themselves, and the index; is that not the case?
HAYES. Well, I can understand you expressing some concern on page fifty two onwards. But to my mind, fifty two follows from page fifty one, page fifty one follows from page fifty in a perfectly normal way.
KEEN. But page fifty one can only be there because what preceded it as page fifty one has been changed to page fifty two; is that not equally obvious, Dr. Hayes?
HAYES. Well, otherwise there would be two pages fifty one, of course.
KEEN. And what would have appeared at the end of pages fifty two to fifty six now appears at the bottom half of page forty nine? That is the entry for PI/991.
HAYES. Well, the mystery -- apparent mystery of the entry on the bottom of page forty nine, PI/991, to my mind is no more complex than there was space available on the page. And rather than waste part of the page, I inserted an examination note and dated it. The pagination, to me, is of no great consequence. The date and day of the examination, to me, is of much greater consequence.
KEEN. Well, I understood you to tell us that these were contemporaneous notes that you prepared as you were carrying out your examinations; is that right?
HAYES. Yes. But presumably our definitions of "contemporaneous" are different. My -- I only mean that these notes were written on the date on the page, and that the notes were written at the time precisely of the examination, and not any time afterwards.
KEEN. Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no need for the insertion of what is now page fifty one, would there?
HAYES. Well, it is your suggestion that it was inserted. I have no recollection of an insertion of that form at all. If it was, then it was done for a particularly good and perfectly innocent reason.
KEEN. Which you can't now recollect?
HAYES. I wish I could help you. It would save a lot of awkwardness. But I cannot, no."

He was then re-examined by friendly prosecution advocate Campbell, who steered him methodically through his notes on those same pages. Suddenly, lo and behold, Hayes remembered it all.

"CAMPBELL. Does that explanation of the way in which the items detailed in examination notes are listed help to jog your memory?
HAYES. It has helped me, sir, in attempting to explain what appears to be an unfathomable mystery. And I think the solution is very straightforward. And it is this: That when I wrote these notes, I initially did not number the pages… And in numbering the pages, I mistakenly used the number 51 twice, realised my error, after numbering a few pages, and corrected it… So whereas the page numbers may be in sequential order, the dates would not be."

This sudden flash of recall under Campbell's friendly re-examination for me remains unconvincing, and differed totally from his previous explanation, namely that "… the mystery was no more complex than there was space available on the page. And rather than waste part of the page, I inserted an examination note and dated it." As I watched him playing games with the defence, I became more and more convinced that he was misleading the court so as to achieve a prosecution, and not for the first time. He may have made notes, but unlike all similar items which he found, the sole piece of material evidence, PT/35B, claimed to link Bollier and MEBO to the Libyans, was absent from his drawings. And he gave it a higher identification number in his index than a similar sized piece of material he was to examine four weeks later.

Then as Richard Keen probed further concerning the fragment of shirt collar found by Detective Constable Gilchrist, Hayes could not quite remember the moment of finding the fragment.

"KEEN. Do you actually recall finding this fragment?
HAYES. I think so. If I was -- it's tempting to be too helpful in answering your question and saying clearly a very important piece, you must have a memory of it. You have flashbacks of certain important items that you've looked at. I question whether those are flashbacks to the correct case examination or another case examination. So although in my mind there is no question whatever that I did find it within this neck-band, whether I have a clear recollection in my memory of teasing it out, I would prefer not to be too definite about it."

Finally Hayes' notes dated 12th May 1989 recorded the following: "Trapped in the grey material within the blackened area were A. several fragments of black plastics, B. a fragment of a green-coloured circuit board". Thus he exposed, in an unguarded moment, a serious discrepancy from the evidence previously given by DC Thomas Gilchrist.

"KEEN. Dr Hayes, you record in those notes on page fifty one that PT/35B was trapped in the collar of a shirt or in a piece of material. So that fragment could not, presumably, have come to light as far as the police were concerned, prior to it being extracted from the cloth by yourself?
HAYES. That's correct. Yes.
KEEN. It would follow that it could not have been seen by the police prior to the cloth being passed to you at RARDE and the article being extracted by you from the trapped area of material?
HAYES. I'm sure that is the case."

Thus he twice maintained that neither Gilchrist - nor anyone else - could have seen the fragment prior to his probing the collar on his workbench. So we may ask when was the label altered to "DEBRIS", and by whom? More importantly, for what purpose was the label altered, other than to draw attention to a piece of "debris" inserted into the bag by persons unknown? That discrepancy was never challenged either during the trial nor at the subsequent appeal.

In yet another puzzling exchange with Richard Keen, Hayes admitted that even though his initial conclusion was that the green fragment - PT35/B - was a fragment from a bomb timer, he failed to undertake a routine chemical trace analysis to determine whether it had been in contact with an explosion. This was quite contrary to standard forensic process, and can only be described as negligence. It contrasted with the chemical trace analyses he undertook of each of the twenty four pieces of luggage surrounding the immediate explosion of which the fragment was a component. In spite of prolonged cross-examination, Hayes could provide no logical explanation for it. Or, perhaps, did Hayes know what he would find, namely that the fragment possessed no trace of explosive? Only a controlled analysis by an independent forensic scientist might test the fragment's provenance. And that could not occur without a special form of appeal. Such would not prove possible until the year 2009, and I will return to this subject later in this book.

Meanwhile in Kamp Zeist the judges had only Hayes’ word. They knew of his record as a conspirator in with-holding evidence in a major IRA trial, and that of his immediate colleagues in a second IRA trial. They watched his contrasting explanations regarding the pagination of his notebook and the sudden return of his memory when gently steered under re-examination by the prosecution. They witnessed his word games regarding McKee's suitcase - illegal evidence tampering by the intelligence services of either the United Kingdom or America. They listened to him twice claim that he was the first to find debris - the fragment of the bomb - in the evidence bag, and that therefore neither Gilchrist nor anyone else could have seen it before he did. Yet instead of basing their judgement on what Hayes actually said, they would substitute their own explanations and believe the man implicitly.

Hundreds of fragments from the luggage container and its contents were discovered. From the remains of the Toshiba cassette recorder that contained the bomb; from twenty four items of luggage in the immediate vicinity of the explosion; from clothing and personal effects; even from a black umbrella. For me it was not unreasonable to expect many fragments from the bomb and timer, the wires, the circuits, the frame, the timer itself, to be embedded in surrounding clothing and luggage, the luggage container, the aircraft spars and structure. Yet apart from a charred shirt collar, none contained a single fragment of the bomb. The fragment too, when displayed before the court, and apart from fraying around the edges (said to have been done by laboratory processing), was almost pristine. Its bright green anti-solder covering was still bright green. Its printed circuits remained just as pristine. Both in spite of its position at the centre of a three thousand degree high explosive fireball.

In time I would watch witness Allan Feraday, who prepared the final forensic report for the trial, confirm under oath that only one fragment - the Hayes four millimetre square piece of "debris" - was ever found. That of itself seemed an unusual occurrence. I found myself asking how much other material might have been removed, or re-inserted, or even planted. One of Cannistraro's colleagues in the White House had discussed the use of manufactured evidence to destabilise a middle eastern government. If such was good for Yemen, then why not for Libya? Yet in spite of my suspicions - also shared by many of those following the progress of the trial - the miraculous fragment would pass without challenge.

CIA had duplicate timers.

"There has been some speculation about timers from that same series being provided to STASI [The East German Secret Police, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989], and it's true that they were. But they were on brown circuit boards. The circuit board that was used in the explosion at Lockerbie was a green production model of the timer, and that came from Libyan intelligence." So spoke Vincent Cannistraro into the camera in 1993. His words were of interest, not for what he said, but for what he did not say. During that time, unknown to the public and the media, within the storeroom of the CIA laboratories in Langley Virginia lay at least one exact duplicate of an MST-13 timer. It was set on a green lacquered baseboard identical to the type from which the Hayes fragment was said to have originated.

8th June 2000.

A column of vans with blacked-out windows glided to a halt at the entrance to the court building. Shielded from public and journalist gaze several men were ushered into the rear entrance.

One of the men was witness Richard Louis Sherrow, a retired US Army veteran of twenty years' service, and an expert in firearms and explosives, who'd worked for the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Service (ATF). Prosecution advocate Turnbull led Sherrow through his evidence-in-chief. In 1986 Sherrow had been instructed by the ATF to travel to Lome, Togo, with an Edward Owen of the ATF, and James Casey of the State Department. During the visit, Sherrow observed a number of items, including explosives and several timers. One timer was of special interest to him.

"TURNBULL: Had you ever seen electronic timers similar to the ones you saw in Lome?
SHERROW: Not exactly similar, no, sir. Subsequently, I was allowed to take one timer and a sample of, I believe, three different types of explosives. They were placed in the United States diplomatic pouch and returned. I examined [the timer] at the headquarters of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, performed bench tests, functioning tests.
TURNBULL: Did you photograph it at the headquarters?
SHERROW: Yes, I did.
TURNBULL: And having performed these tests and photographed it, what did you then do with it?
SHERROW: I was requested to take it to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and give a briefing on what I found.
TURNBULL: And did you take the timer back with you?
SHERROW: No, I didn't. That was released to their custody."

The discovery of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[It was on this date in 1989 that the fragment of circuit board that was used to link the Lockerbie bomb to a MST-13 timer and hence to Libya was discovered among material that had been collected in January. Here is what Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer says on his PT35B website:]

Fragment of circuit board is found in PI/995 by Dr Hayes on 12 May 89, according to page 51 of Dr Hayes notes. The police production logs for PT/35 record it as having been found by Dr Hayes at RARDE on 12 May 1989. In his evidence (p2608) Hayes said he had no memory of finding the timer fragment independent of his notes. In his chapter 8 Crown precognition (“CP”), Hayes said his recollection was that he worked alone when carrying out examination of debris, but that he occasionally called Allen Feraday in when something of interest was found. Feraday in his chapter 8 CP referred to the discovery of PT/35 and PT/2 and said that he remembered when this was done. He stated that although Hayes was carrying out the examination, he thought Hayes invited him in to see the pieces embedded in PI/995 before Hayes removed them. He stated that Hayes knew he would be interested in what Hayes found, and he therefore remembered that PT/2 and PT/35 were extracted from PI/995. In his chapter 10 CP Feraday does not specifically mention his memory of PT/35’s extraction. He states that initially the main concern was with the pieces of cassette recorder manual that were found in PI/995, as they appeared to support the identification of fragments discovered earlier, and it was only at a later stage that the potential significance of PT/35(b) became clear.

A response to Richard Marquise

[I am deeply grateful to Peter Biddulph for allowing me to post the following response written by him to Richard Marquise's recent broadcast and print contributions to Lockerbie lore.]

1. It would appear that Mr Marquise never handled the fragment [of circuit board allegedly from the MST-13 timer that allegedly detonated the bomb], never saw the fragment. All his forensic information appears to have come from Thomas Thurman, proven to be a manipulator of prosecution reports by the US Department of Justice in 36 out of the 52 Thurman cases that they investigated.

And yet Thurman too never saw the fragment or handled it. When challenged by journalists, he admitted that he had worked solely on photographs supplied by the Scottish police and Thomas Hayes. And the evidence he gave on US TV about identifying the fragment was given as a voice-over using photographs of a sample from the CIA's own laboratory in Langley, Virginia.

Thurman, by resigning and "leaving" the employ of the FBI avoided being a witness at the trial, and his claims and record regarding the fragment were never tested in court. All references to Thurman in the trial transcript took "a priori" that he was on the team who found the fragment that proved Libya did it. His questionable history was never challenged by the defence. Were they negligent?

2. Mr Marquise's senior FBI colleague Oliver Revell never saw the fragment, never handled the fragment. In a televised discussion in 1995 on UK Channel Four TV he claimed :

". . . And we were operating on the premise that [Iran] was the responsible party. But we simply could not bring to bear all of the information we had, and the evidence, and make it fit. And then when the item – the microchip – was found and was identified – and by the way it was through both RARDE and Tom Thurman of the FBI laboratory – independently – that we found the other connection, and then we started working on that." (My italics).

So, whatever might be said by the FBI now, their case in 1991 centred entirely upon the provenance of the fragment of the bomb said to have been found in July 1989 by Dr Thomas Hayes. Should Hayes' evidence be in any way suspect, the case would collapse.

Mr Marquise has claimed elsewhere that the retirement of the CIA's Vincent Cannistraro took place before the key evidence was found. He has said that to for us to say otherwise is wrong.

Well, it's not wrong. Cannistraro was busy as head of the Lockerbie team when Hayes claimed to have found the fragment. Cannistraro retired a year and a half later, in November 1990.

3. The chief identification witness, Tony Gauci, was exposed in 2005 by the very man who - in 1991 - helped with the indictments against Megrahi and Fhimah, former Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's own words, Gauci could not be trusted.

And now a Mr Clancy [Ronnie Clancy QC] of the Scottish Crown team has conceded in a recent Scottish High Court hearing in Edinburgh that even if Gauci's evidence is discredited, it would not significantly affect the prosecution case. A strange claim and admission indeed. Are they already conceding the case in total? [RB: What Mr Clancy said was that the Crown’s view was that there was sufficient evidence to justify Megrahi’s conviction even if Gauci’s evidence were discounted.]

4. Marquise's information regarding the British forensic tracing of the fragment came from Dr Thomas Hayes.

At the time of the trial, Hayes' record in the case of the IRA Maguire Seven (Guildford bombing) was never discussed in court. All that the judges heard was an oblique reference to "deliberate falsehoods" told by his former colleague and supervisor Dr Higgs in another IRA case, that of Judith Ward.

Since Hayes had not been part of that particular Higgs episode, he could - and did - deny all connection or knowledge of that particular Higgs conspiracy. The trial then moved on without further comment or question.

And yet Hayes was central to a Higgs conspiracy in another IRA trial, that of the Maguire Seven, in which the Hayes and Higgs were proved by Parliamentary investigation to have conspired to with-hold evidence that might assist the defence case.

But since the Maguire Seven story was not rehearsed in the Lockerbie trial, none of this could be considered by the Lockerbie judges.

I believe that if Hayes' history in the case of the Maguire Seven had been examined in court, his testimony in the case of Lockerbie would have been discredited in the same way as that of Majid Giaka, the double CIA and Libyan agent.

In his book Scotbom, and since, Mr Marquise gives the impression that American investigation was led and controlled by the FBI. In fact it was controlled overall by the CIA, and by certain people with much blood and lies on their hands. Among the White House team around that time were people proven by declassified documents to understand well the technique of the manufacture of evidence to destabilise Middle Eastern governments. These documents are now freely available. But nobody - including the media in both countries - seems to care any more. It's old news, unwelcome news. People die, so what? Life must go on etc.

All of this, naturally, never came to the attention of the Lockerbie judges. Hopefully the second appeal will offer a long overdue opportunity for the true back-story of Lockerbie to emerge.

If Mr Marquise wishes to challenge any of the above, I will gladly supply the document dates and references with appropriate quotations. I will also arrange for sections of the film and television records to be put on the web. And I will ensure that relevant sections of the trial transcript are also put on the web. People can then judge for themselves where this story might go over the next six months.

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a long and detailed article -- 6500 words -- by Gareth Peirce in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It is an utterly devastating critique of the Lockerbie trial and what led up to it and flowed from it. Anyone interested in the Lockerbie affair needs to read and digest it in full. The following are extracts.] Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. (...) [A] number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends. Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police. (...) Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution. In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket. All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. (...) It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found. (...) That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit. Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army. The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. (...) The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links. Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years. On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’. (...) There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive. (...) No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes. Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? (...) To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars. That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained. Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’.

There was only ever an illusion of a trial

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009.

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a long and detailed article -- 6500 words -- by Gareth Peirce in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It is an utterly devastating critique of the Lockerbie trial and what led up to it and flowed from it. Anyone interested in the Lockerbie affair needs to read and digest it in full. The following are extracts.]

Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. (...)

[A] number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police. (...)

Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution.

In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket.

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. (...) It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found. (...)

That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army.

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. (...)

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’. (...)

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive. (...)

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? (...)

To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars.

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’.

Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury

[This is the headline over a long article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer that was published on the Global Research website on this date in 2007. The whole article is well worth reading. The following are excerpts from six of its fourteen sections:]

The Lockerbie Affair has taken yet another extraordinary twist. On Friday, August 31st, I received from Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based MeBo AG, a copy of a German original of an Affidavit.

The document is dated July 18th 2007 and signed by Ulrich Lumpert who worked as an electronic engineer at MeBo from 1978 to 1994. I have scrutinized the document carefully and concluded that I have no reason to doubt its authenticity or the truthfulness of its content.

Lumpert was a key witness (no 550) at the Camp Zeist trial, where a three Judges panel convicted a Libyan citizen of murdering 270 persons who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

In his testimony, Lumpert stated that: “of the 3 pieces of hand-made prototypes MST-13 Timer PC-Boards, the third MST-13 PC-Board was broken and [he] had thrown it away.”

In his affidavit, certified by [notary] Walter Wieland, Lumpert admits having committed perjury.

“I confirm today on July 18th 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 Timer PC-Board consisting of 8 layers of fibre-glass from MEBO Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22nd 1989 to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case,” Lumpert wrote. (The identity of the official is known.)

“It did not escape me that the MST-13 fragment shown [at the Lockerbie trial] on the police photograph No PT/35(b) came from the non-operational MST-13 prototype PC-board that I had stolen,” Lumpert added.

“I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time, for the innocent Libyan Mr. Abdelbaset Al Megrahi sentenced to life imprisonment, and for the country of Libya.”

In just seven paragraphs, the Lumpert affidavit elucidates the longstanding mysteries surrounding the infamous MST-13 timer, which allegedly triggered the bomb that exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie on December 21st 1988.

The discovery of the MST-13 timer fragment

In the months following the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, someone discovered a piece of a grey Slalom-brand shirt in a wooded area located about 25 miles away from the town. According to a forensics expert, the cloth contained a tiny fragment – 4 mm square – of a circuit board. The testimony of three expert witnesses allowed the prosecutors to link this circuit board, described as part of the bomb trigger, to Megrahi.

There have been different accounts concerning the discovery of the timer fragment. A police source close to the investigation reported that it had been discovered by lovers. Some have said that it was picked up by a man walking his dog. Others have claimed that it was found by a policeman “combing the ground on his hands and knees.”

At the trial, the third explanation became official. “On 13 January 1989, DC Gilchrist and DC McColm were engaged together in line searches in an area near Newcastleton. A piece of charred material was found by them which was given the police number PI/995 and which subsequently became label 168.”

The alteration of the label

The officer had initially labelled the bag ‘cloth (charred)’ but had later overwritten the word ‘cloth’ with ‘debris’.

The bag contained pieces of a shirt collar and fragments of materials said to have been extracted from it, including the tiny piece of circuit board identified as coming from an MST-13 timer made by the Swiss firm MeBo.

“The original inscription on the label, which we are satisfied, was written by DC Gilchrist, was “Cloth (charred)”. The word ‘cloth’ has been overwritten by the word ‘debris’. There was no satisfactory explanation as to why this was done.”

The judges said in their judgement that Gilchrist’s evidence had been “at worst evasive and at best confusing”.

Yet the judges went on to admit the evidence. “We are, however, satisfied that this item was indeed found in the area described, and DC McColm who corroborated DC Gilchrist on the finding of the item was not cross-examined about the detail of the finding of this item.” (...)

The new page 51

According to documents obtained by Scotland on Sunday, the entry of the discovery is recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. Moreover, a new page 51 has been inserted in the record of evidence.

During the Lockerbie investigation, Dr Thomas Hayes and Allan Feraday were working at the DERA Forensic laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent.

Dr Hayes was employed at the Royal Armament Research Development Establishment (RARDE). In 1995, RARDE was subsumed into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). In 2001, part of DERA became the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).

Dr Hayes testified that he collected the tiny fragment of the circuit board on May 12th 1989. He testified that the fragment was green. (Keep in mind that the board stolen from Lumpert is brown.) His colleague, Allan Feraday, confirmed his story at the Zeist trial.

The record is inserted on a loose-leaf page with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand. Dr Hayes could not provide a reasonable explanation for this rather strange entry, and yet the Judges concluded that: “Pagination was of no materiality, because each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”

The argument of the Court is illogical as the index number Dr Hayes gave to the piece is higher than some entry he made three months later.

And there is more. In September 1989, Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of the piece and wrote in the attached memorandum that it was “the best he could do in such short time.” So, are we supposed to believe that it takes forensic experts several months to take a Polaroid picture?

Dr Hayes could not explain this. He merely suggested that the person to ask about it would be the author of the memorandum, Mr Feraday.

This however was not done. At the young age of 43, Hayes resigned just a few months after the discovery of the timer fragment.

Based on the forensic Dr Hayes had supplied, an entire family [The Maguire Seven] was sent to jail in 1976. They were acquitted in appeal in 1992. Sir John May was appointed to review Dr Hayes forensic evidence.

“The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution in [the trial of the alleged IRA Maguire Seven] was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone, the Court of Appeal should be invited to set aside the conviction,” said Sir John May.

In the Megrahi’s case, Dr Hayes did not even perform the basic test which would have established the presence of explosive residue on the sample. During the trial, he maintained that the fragment was too small while it is factually established that his laboratory has performed such test on smaller samples.

Had he performed such test, no residue would have been found. As noted by Lumpert, the fragment shown at the Zeist trial belongs to a timer that was never connected to a relay. In other words, that timer never triggered a bomb.

Allan Feraday’s reputation is hardly better. In three separated cases,where men were convicted on the basis of his forensic evidence, the initial ruling was overturned in appeal.

After one of these cases in 2005, a Lord of Justice said that Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics.

According to forensic scientist, Dr Michael Scott, who was interviewed in the documentary The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie, Feraday has no formal qualifications as a scientist.

The identification of the MeBo timer

Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late 80’s and most of the 90’s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying the fragment as part of a MST-13 timer produced by the Swiss company Mebo.

“When that identification was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it,” Thurman told ABC in 1991. “Absolute, positively euphoria. I was on cloud nine.”

Again, his record is far from pristine. The US attorney General has accused him of having altered lab reports in a way that rendered subsequent prosecutions all but impossible. He has been transferred out the FBI forensic laboratory.

“He’s very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management,” says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who filed the complaints that led to the Inspector General’s report.

“We’re not necessarily going to get the truth out of what we’re doing here,” Whitehurst concluded.

The story shed some light on his formation. The report says “Williams and Thurman merit special censure for their work. It recommends that Thurman, who has a degree in political science, be reassigned outside the lab and that only scientists work in its explosives section.” (...)

The modification of the MST-13 timer fragment

Forensic analysis of the circuit board fragment allowed the investigators to identify its origin. The timer, known as MST-13, is fabricated by a Swiss Company named MeBo, which stands for Meister and Bollier.

The company has indeed sold about 20 MST-13 timers to Libyan military (machine-made 9 ply green boards), as well as a few units (hand-made 8 ply brown boards) to a Research Institute in Bernau, known to act as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police.

The two batches are very different but, as early as 1991, Bollier told the Scottish investigators that he could not identify the timer from a photograph alone. Yet, the Libyans were indicted in November 1991, without ever allowing Bollier to see the actual fragment, on the ground that the integrity of the evidence had to be protected.

But in 1998, Bollier obtained a copy of a blown-up photograph that Thurman had shown on ABC in 1991. Bollier could tell from certain characteristics that the fragment was part of a board of the timers made for East Germany, and definitely not one of the timers delivered by him to Libya.

In September 1999, Bollier was finally allowed to see the fragment. Unlike the one shown by Thurman on ABC, this one was machine-made, as the one sold to Libya. But, from the absence of traces of solder, it was obvious that the timer had never been used to trigger a bomb.

“As far as I’m concerned, and I told this to [Scottish Prosecutor Miriam Watson], this is a manufactured fragment,” Bollier says. “A fabricated fragment, never from a complete, functional timer.”

The next day, Bollier was shown the fragment once more. You may have already guessed that it now had the soldering traces. “It was different. I’m not crazy. It was different!” says Bollier.

Finally, at the trial, Bollier was presented a fragment of a circuit board completely burnt down. Thus, it was no longer possible to identify to which country that timer had been delivered. As he requested to explain the significance of the issue, Lord Shuterland told him that his request was denied.

How did the Judges account for all the mysterious changes in the appearance of the fragment? They simply dismissed Bollier as an unreliable witness.

“We have assessed carefully the evidence of these three witnesses about the activities of MEBO, and in particular their evidence relating to the MST-13 timers which the company made. All three, and notably Mr Bollier, were shown to be unreliable witnesses. Earlier statements which they made to the police and judicial authorities were at times in conflict with each other, and with the evidence they gave in court. On some occasions, particularly in the case of Mr Bollier, their evidence was self contradictory.” (para 45)