Lockerbie, and the mangled logic of Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over an article by John Ashton in today’s edition of the Scottish Review.  It reads as follows:]

Earlier this month, together with other supporters of the 'Lockerbie bomber', Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, I found myself accused in the Scottish Review of being an obsessive conspiracy theorist, impervious to fact or reason. The article's author, The Times' columnist Magnus Linklater, believes that, far from being a stain on Scottish justice, Mr Megrahi's case 'triumphantly vindicates' it.

He argues that we prefer innuendo, myth, and half-truths to straight evidence and independent judgement, yet he displays exactly that preference. For good measure, he misrepresents his opponents, mangles logic and contradicts himself.

He ascribes to us two related conspiracy theories: firstly that the bombing was commissioned by Iran and carried out by the Syrian-based anti-PLO, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; and, secondly, that there was a grand conspiracy to shift blame to Megrahi and Libya, to which the police, the Crown Office, witnesses, judges, senior politicians and the intelligence services were all willing parties.

A word about that term 'conspiracy theory'. It's a cheap and nasty little put-down that herds honest truth-seekers into the same pen as the Elvis-was-abducted-by-aliens crowd, while relieving the user of the obligation to properly address the facts.

If the Iran/PFLP-GC scenario is a conspiracy theory, then so too is what the Crown posited at Megrahi's trial. That theory went as follows. On 21 December 1988 he placed a suitcase on board Air Malta flight KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt. It contained a bomb concealed within a Toshiba BomBeat radio-cassette player and was labelled for New York on PA103. From Frankfurt it was transferred to a Heathrow then loaded onto PA103.

The suitcase was packed with clothes that Megrahi had bought in Malta on 7 December, from a shopkeeper called Tony Gauci. He took the case to Malta on 20 December and the following morning flew home on a flight whose check-in time overlapped with KM180's. Before leaving, he managed to place the suitcase on KM180 with the help of his former LAA colleague Lamin Fhimah, with whom he stood trial.

The two men fronted companies for the Libyan intelligence service, the JSO. One of them, ABH, co-owned by Megrahi, shared Zurich offices with electronics company Mebo, which, three years before Lockerbie, had supplied 20 unique electronic timers to Libya, one of which was used in the bomb.

As conspiracy theories go, it was pretty lousy. Mr Linklater acknowledges that the case was entirely circumstantial. What he ignores is that, towards the end of the trial, the Crown amended the indictment, quietly dropping many of the conspiracy claims, a tacit admission that much of its theory was unsupported.

What of the evidence? Mr Linklater's summary thoroughly exaggerates its strength: 'It placed al-Megrahi in Malta on the relevant date, travelling in the company of another intelligence operative, holding a false passport, and identified as the purchaser of clothing, later found in the case which held the explosives. Forensic evidence, in the form of a fragment of timer used to detonate the bomb, had been supplied to the Libyans by its Swiss manufacturer. Subsequent evidence also turned up some $1.8 million in al-Megrahi's personal bank account, calling into question the Libyan government's description of him as a low-ranking airline worker'.

To summarise more accurately: the evidence suggested that Megrahi was not in Malta on the clothes purchase date; there is no evidence that his travel companion was an intelligence operative and the evidence suggests that he only worked for the service in 1986 (the claim that he was a senior intelligence agent was made by discredited Libyan CIA informant Magid Giaka, who also alleged that Colonel Gaddafi was a freemason); he kept the false passport and handed it over at trial – hardly the actions of a terrorist; forensic evidence proves that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 Libyan timers; Megrahi never described himself as a low-ranking airline worker, rather he admitted that he used his connections to senior Libyan officials to make a nice living importing goods through ABH; had he testified at trial, the court would have been shown bank and company records that support his claim that all the bank transactions were legitimate. (...)

Many aspects of the Crown's theory were incredible. For example, Megrahi chose to buy clothes in a small shop and did so in a random manner, which seemed designed to bring attention to himself. Rather than compartmentalising the operation, as any sensible terrorist would, he returned to the island a fortnight later to plant the bomb. Furthermore, he chose to launch it on a three-stage journey from Malta's Luqa airport, where Mr Fhimah was well known, and which had unusually strict baggage procedures.

Libya's supposed motive was revenge for the US air raids of 1986. This element of the theory was contradicted by none other than Margaret Thatcher, who wrote in her autobiography that the 'Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place…There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years'.

Since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, no evidence has emerged publicly to suggest that Libya was involved in the bombing – this despite the fact that the opposition leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil claimed to have proof of Gaddafi's involvement. (When pressed on the claim by the BBC, the best he could offer was that the government had paid for Megrahi's legal case.) Inconveniently for the Crown, some senior anti-Gaddafi figures have challenged claims of Libyan involvement.

In defending the official narrative, Mr Linklater offers the following king-sized non-sequitur: 'Even the Libyan government appears to accept that the origins of the plot lie in their country – it has appointed prosecutors to liaise with Scottish investigators in their search for further proof'. The appointment of prosecutors does not connote an acceptance of Libyan involvement.

Mr Linklater points out that my books barely touch upon another alleged case of Libyan aviation terrorism, the bombing of UTA flight 772 in 1989. The reason is simple: I am not an expert on it and am therefore happy to accept that Libya might have been to blame. (French journalist Pierre Péan, who is an expert, has, I am told, destroyed the official case.) The UTA bombers' use of a Samsonite suitcase and a timer, according to Mr Linklater, makes the attack 'strikingly similar' to Lockerbie, yet the Sikhs who blew up Air India flight 182 in 1985 also used a Samsonite case and a timer.

A more startling parallel, in my view, is the fact that the forensic cases both rested on tiny fragments of the alleged timers recovered from a vast crash site, which were analysed by the same discredited FBI expert, and traced to a shady European supplier. And, as with Lockerbie, the prosecution rested upon the erratic testimony of a single witness.

What, then, of the Iran/PFLP-GC conspiracy theory? Mr Linklater ascribes it to Megrahi's supporters, yet the Justice for Megrahi campaign, to which most of the supporters are signatories, is deliberately neutral on the matter. For reasons I am about to explain, however, as I cautioned in my book Megrahi: You are my Jury, the case against these alternative suspects may turn out to be as flawed as the one against Megrahi – a statement that undermines Mr Linklater's characterisation of me as wholly wedded to this counter theory.

Iran had a powerful motive: revenge for the US Navy's shoot-down of Iran Air flight 655, which killed 290 six months before Lockerbie. Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that Iran hired the PFLP-GC. Another, written months after the investigation had switched to Libya, stated that Iran's interior minister had paid the bombers $10 million. In October 1988 a PFLP-GC cell in West Germany was caught by the police planning an attack on western airlines. Its bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, confessed that he had made five barometrically triggered bombs, two of which he had concealed within a mono Toshiba BomBeat radio cassette players. The Lockerbie Toshiba BomBeat was stereo.

According to Khreesat, a senior group member and airline security expert known as Abu Elias evaded arrest. Less than three weeks before the bombing, without naming the PFLP-GC, a US State Department security bulletin warned of an imminent attack by anti-PLO Palestinian terrorists based in Europe. It added: '[Targets] specified are Pan Am airlines and US mil[itary] bases'.

Apologists for the official line have claimed that the intelligence documents merely recycled old and unreliable intelligence, yet a deep-cover CIA asset called Richard Fuisz was told by numerous high ranking Syrian officials as late as 1995 (four years after the two Libyans were indicted) that the PFLP-GC's leader, Ahmed Jibril, was taking credit for the bombing. These sources, said Fuisz in a 2001 court hearing, the scope of which was severely limited by the CIA, interacted with Jibril on a constant basis.

Mr Linklater wrote in an email to me: 'I am amazed that you should be touting shadowy CIA agents like Fuisz…whose evidence would never stand up in court'. He stopped short of calling Fuisz a liar, because there is nothing to suggest that he is, but the pejorative verb and adjective carried the innuendo that neither of us were to be trusted. How does Mr Linklater know that Fuisz's evidence would not stand up? If the CIA had loosened its leash on Fuisz, he could have named names, and provide leads and evidence that would have been accepted in court.

On to that second conspiracy theory. According to Mr Linklater's Times column of 13 August 2012, we allege a huge plot to shift the blame from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya, which involved: 'the planting or suppression of forensic evidence, the control of witnesses by intelligence services, the approval of senior politicians, the complicity of police officers, a prosecution team prepared to bend every rule to secure a conviction, and a set of senior Scottish judges willing to go along with that'.

The last sentence is key. It suggests that we claim that everyone from the police to the judges plotted with government and intelligence services to protect the likely bombers and convict those whom they knew to be innocent. The trouble is neither I, nor the great majority of Megrahi's supporters, have ever made such a claim.

To be clear, I believe that two different things happened: firstly, the US government ensured that blame was from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Libya; secondly, the Scottish criminal justice system screwed up massively. The first I consider likely, but unproven, the second I consider a cert. Both are based upon a rational evaluation of the available facts. I do not believe that the second occurred because the Americans told the Scots to exonerate the real culprits and frame innocents, indeed I find such suggestions fanciful.

In an email to me, Mr Linklater wrote: 'I've been in the [journalism] business for more than 40 years, and have learned over that time a simple principle of reporting: that good investigation requires sound proof'. Yet he has failed to produce any evidence that the majority of Megrahi's supporters have posited a grand conspiracy. The Justice for Megrahi campaign committee has formally alleged that some of the failures might have involved criminal conduct by certain Crown servants. They do not, however, claim that it happened at the behest of governments and intelligence services.

The US government was motivated to exonerate Iran, I believe, because the Iranians knew where the Iran-Contra skeletons lay and also held sway over the US hostages held in Lebanon – whose safe return was an obsession of the Reagan-Bush White House. Another obsession was Libya. As Watergate journalist Bob Woodward revealed, CIA director William Casey launched one of the biggest covert programmes in the agency's history, with the clear aim of toppling Gaddafi. Disinformation – that is, lying and fakery – was at its core.

The Lockerbie investigation was supposedly driven by old-fashioned detective work, but, as we have learned over the years, behind the scenes the CIA played a key role. We now know that the timer fragment was not from one of the 20 timers to Libya. Is it really far-fetched to suggest that the CIA planted it in order to conclusively link Libya to the bombing?

I have done many months of my own old-fashioned detective work among the hundreds of people who searched the crash site. They witnessed American officials in Lockerbie within two hours of the crash, CIA agents searching the site without police supervision, and substantial drug and cash finds – all things that have been officially denied. There may well be innocent explanations for these events, in which case the authorities should reveal them. And, instead of writing me off as a conspiracy theorist, perhaps Mr Linklater should do some door knocking of his own.

The core of his argument is that we have dismissed hard evidence in favour of speculation, yet our chief concern is not the suspicion that blame was shifted. Rather, it is that the evidence that convicted Megrahi was anything but hard, and that the hard evidence that should have acquitted him was withheld.

Our case is built on facts, not speculation – these facts in particular:

1. The trial court judgement, delivered by three of Scotland's most senior judges, was deemed unreasonable by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, indeed the commission came as close as it legally could to saying that the guilty verdict itself was unreasonable.

2. The SCCRC discovered that the Crown had withheld numerous items of evidence that, in its view, would have been important to Megrahi's defence. No fewer than four of the SCCRC's six appeal referral grounds concerned such undisclosed evidence.

3. During the trial, two senior prosecutors viewed the previously redacted extracts of CIA cables concerning the key Crown witness and CIA informant Magid Giaka. They reported back to their boss, the Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, that there was nothing within them that might assist the defence, and he relayed the assurance to the court. However, when that material was later disclosed to the defence, it was found to contain numerous damaging details, including the fact that his CIA handlers had grown so dissatisfied with him that they had been on the verge of sacking him. The revelations prompted Fhimah's leading counsel, Richard Keen QC, to comment that he found it 'inconceivable' that the Crown could have considered the material had no bearing on the case. The SCCRC noted that Mr Boyd's assurance to the court was 'difficult to understand'. (...)

4. The Crown Office allowed the police to obtain a $2m reward for the most important prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, despite the payment of such rewards being against its own rules (a subject on which I have also written for the Scottish Review). The Crown withheld the results of forensic tests, which had been supervised by the chief prosecution forensic scientist, that directly contradicted his crucial assertion that the timer fragment was 'similar in all respects' to the boards used in the timers supplied to Libya.

5. Despite being under a legal obligation to investigate all leads, not only those that point to Libya, the police and Crown Office have failed to interview witnesses who can attest to the fact that the fragment could not have originated from the Libyan timers.

6. When, in 2012, the committee of Justice for Megrahi submitted a summary of their allegations of criminal misconduct in confidence to the justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, and invited him to appoint an independent investigator to consider them, MacAskill instead passed them to the Crown Office and told them to take the allegations to the police, even though Crown Office officials and police officers were named in the allegations. Despite having seen neither the detailed allegations, nor the supporting evidence, the Crown Office immediately declared publicly that they were 'without exception, defamatory and entirely unfounded' and that the committee had been 'deliberately misleading', i.e. were liars.

These are all facts, not opinions or theories. Mr Linklater fails to acknowledge most of them and the rest he brushes over lightly. I believe that they add up to the greatest scandal in Scotland's post-devolution era. The Crown Office's response to the Justice for Megrahi committee's allegations is especially disturbing. The allegations remain unproven and their subjects are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but they were made in good faith by people of intelligence and integrity, among them a former police superintendent, the former parish priest of Lockerbie and the father of one of the Lockerbie victims. However, the Crown Office's petulant and partisan response excluded from the outset any prospect of prosecutions.

Rather than engaging with the SCCRC report's awkward contents, Mr Linklater has used it to mow down his straw men of conspiracy nuts. In a Times article he claimed that the report 'triumphantly vindicates' the justice system. This is like suggesting that the emergency services who save lives at a train crash are a triumphant vindication of rail safety.

He asserts that the SCCRC disposes of most of our 'cherished theories' in particular claims that evidence had been manipulated by the police. These allegations emanated not from Megrahi's supporters, but from a former police officer known as the Golfer. I have also been critical of the Golfer. Strange, then, that Mr Linklater should have inferred that I cherish the Golfer's claims.

He accuses us of rejecting parts of the report that don't suit us, when we in fact accept most of them. But if, as we believe, the report is a curate's egg, are we not entitled to say so? Parts of it are demonstrably poor; for example, the commission conducted a lengthy review of the evidence concerning the timer fragment, yet failed to uncover the crucially important fact – based upon the evidence of Crown witnesses – that it could not have originated from one of the Libyan timers. Its investigation of events at the crash site was very limited and it failed to interview any of the civilian and military witnesses who attest to the events and finds that I have described above.

It is not only Mr Linklater's conspiracy theorists who don't accept all the SCCRC's findings: neither did the lawyers who led Megrahi's second appeal (which, sadly, he felt compelled to abandon in order to secure compassionate release). They also contended that there were serious failings in the conduct of his defence and that the defence team was mistaken in not leading certain evidence in relation to, inter alia, the PFLP-GC, Heathrow airport and Tony Gauci.

I am not a lawyer and therefore make no judgement on the defence team, who have vigorously contested these claims. But to imply, as Mr Linklater does, that it is a matter of uncontested fact that they properly evaluated all the evidence is simply misleading.

Mr Linklater is apparently oblivious to the contradictions in his own arguments, with occasionally hilarious consequences. For example, having dismissed my summary of the police investigation as 'little more than a caricature', he delivers this cartoon-like portrait of his antagonists: 'Once seized with the virus of suspicion, nothing in the way of fact or reason will deter those who are determined to prove their case'.

He berates me for using the phrase 'we may never know', declaring that he has always distrusted it as 'it is a means of dropping a hint without ever revealing whether there is any truth in it'. How marvellous that he later writes: 'The SCCRC raised questions about the identification, which, it determined, were grounds for appeal. Whether that would have overturned the verdict we may never know'.

The hint dropped by this particular 'we may never' is that the verdict would have stood. To drive home the point he claims that Megrahi might have been convicted, even if he had not been correctly identified as the clothes purchaser. If he has properly read the court's judgement, he should know that the 'identification' – not an identification at all, of course – was central to the conviction. But maybe he hasn't properly read it, because, as he acknowledges, he is not a Lockerbie specialist. This is especially apparent in his account of the Heathrow evidence, which has come under fresh scrutiny thanks to the publication of the book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by another of his targets, Dr Morag Kerr.

Mr Linklater's Times article of 21 December highlighted an assertion by Mr Megrahi's trial counsel, Bill Taylor QC, that the Heathrow evidence was 'tested to destruction'. An unnamed member of the defence team added the suggestion that the bomber had bought clothes in Malta then planted the bomb at Heathrow: 'just doesn’t stack up'. Again, this was odd, because during his final submissions to the court Mr Taylor argued, quite rightly, that Maltese clothing did not prove the bomb's origin. Clothes bought weeks earlier had plenty of time to leave the island prior to the bombing.

Mr Linklater says that the implication that the bomber bought clothes in Malta and planted the bomb at Heathrow 'requires a heavy suspension of disbelief'. The idea that the same person bought the clothes and planted the bomb is, I agree, far fetched (although this is what the Crown posited at trial), but is not the suggestion that the bombers used the clothes to lay a false trail to Malta. As Mr Taylor asked during his final submissions: 'If the clothes buyer had intended to place the bomb bag on to a plane at Luqa, having regard to the high level of risk of detection, wouldn't one have expected him to remove the clothing labels?'.

Mr Linklater claims that the SCCRC found the evidence of a Heathrow bomb 'so thin' that it did not bother to examine it. What the SCCRC actually said was that it did not examine the Heathrow evidence because it received no submissions on the matter, and because it received substantial attention at trial. The evidence we found when preparing Megrahi's second appeal was, in the view of senior counsel, significant and should have been before the trial court. It is clear, both from Dr Kerr's analysis and the second appeal team's, that the trial court was not given a clear view of the Heathrow evidence. (I wrote more about this in an open letter to Mr Linklater, to which he has so far failed to respond.)

Mr Linklater's biggest howler is his assertion that Dr Kerr and I claim that the bombing was linked to a break-in that occurred at Heathrow 15 hours earlier. We do no such thing, indeed we both accept that the break-in may well be wholly irrelevant. Mr Linklater points out, as I have previously, that the matter was considered and rejected at Mr Megrahi's first appeal, but this does not excuse the Crown's failure to disclose it.

For all that he insults me as an irrational conspiracy theorist, we should be grateful to Mr Linklater for his contributions. The Megrahi case deserves public debate and, until he emerged as the voice of the 'it-couldn't-happen-here' tendency, that debate was very one-sided. When boiled down, his defence of the conviction is that the Crown case 'has been tested and re-tested under the strict conditions imposed by a court of law', whereas the counter evidence has not. Yet he knows that court scrutiny is no guarantee of a conviction's safety.

The most notorious miscarriage of justice cases, like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, were only resolved when the courts accepted the evidence and arguments of the victims' supporters. Which begs a big question: when those convictions still stood, but their weakness were widely known, would Mr Linklater have defended them with the equivalent vigour? As he might say, we may never know.

John Ashton is a writer, researcher and TV producer. He has studied the Lockerbie case for 18 years and from 2006 to 2009 was a researcher with Megrahi's legal team. His book 'Megrahi: You Are My Jury', is published by Birlinn  

[An expanded version of this article can be found on Mr Ashton's Megrahi: You are my Jury website.]

An open letter from John Ashton to Magnus Linklater

[What follows is an open letter posted today on John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury website.  It reads in part:]

Dear Magnus,

First of all, let’s keep this civil. People I respect assure me that you are a decent man. I don’t want to make an enemy of you, or things to get nasty.  I’m writing to respond to a few things that you have written, to put the record straight on certain matters and to invite your response. I would like a debate, not a row – shouting doesn’t win arguments.

The first matter I would like to discuss is your article of 13 August last year, which commented upon the Edinburgh book festival event at which, Jim Swire, Professor Hans Koechler and I spoke. Here is what you wrote: [RB: The full text of Mr Linklater’s article can be found here.]

This seriously misrepresented my position and, as far as I know, that of Dr Swire and Professor Koechler. I have never alleged that there was a grand conspiracy to frame Megrahi and Libya, in which the police, the Crown Office, witnesses, judges, senior politicians and the intelligence services were all complicit. You claim to have read my book, Megrahi: You are My Jury.  Perhaps, then, you had forgotten pp 371 to 373, which discuss the possible framing of Libya, either by the CIA, or by the real bombers. At no point do those page suggest that the Scottish authorities (the police, Crown Office and judges) were party to such a plot. You may also have forgotten this passage on p376 in Megrahi’s words, which happens to mirror my own view:

I often wonder who is to blame for my ordeal. I doubt we’ll ever know who framed me and my country. The police cannot be blamed for following leads that fell into their laps. Together with the Crown, they stitched together a flimsy case based around a mercenary double agent, a highly unreliable identification, a hopeless CIA informant, some highly equivocal documents and overstated forensic conclusions, but, again, they were only doing their jobs.

My new book, Scotland’s Shame, is more explicit. Chapter 6 opens as follows:

Let us be clear, there was no grand conspiracy by the intelligence services, senior politicians, police officers, prosecutors and judges to subvert the Lockerbie investigation and frame Megrahi and Libya. Conspiracies, of course, do sometimes happen, but seldom ones involving so many diverse parties.

To digress for a moment, both books posit that there may have been a plot, hatched in the murkier recesses of the US intelligence world, to frame Libya. You can write this off as a crazy conspiracy theory if you like, but, remember, these are the people who spawned a far bigger conspiracies to sell arms to Iran in return for US hostages and to use the profits to illegally support Nicaraguan terrorists. They are also the people who spent the Eighties spreading disinformation about Libya; a fact reported by, among others, Bob Woodward and confirmed by US government documents (in case you think I am recycling old conspiracy theories). Remember also that one of the three key witnesses, Magid Giaka, was a CIA informant before Lockerbie. Another, Edwin Bollier, was also almost certainly a western intelligence asset (the Stasi, with whom he had been dealing since at least the early Seventies, kept close tabs on him and were convinced that he was). We now know that the famous fragment of circuit board, PT/35b, which the Crown claimed originated from one of the 20 timers supplied by Bollier to Libya, could not have done so. We don’t know its origin, but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that it was faked in order to lay a false trail to Libya. According to the head of the FBI investigation, Richard Marquise, the Swiss security police believed that it was a plant, and the same thought even crossed Marquise’s mind. He also revealed that an unnamed US intelligence agency (the NSA from his description) was aware that Megrahi was travelling around on a false passport. It is quite possible that the CIA identified Megrahi as a handy culprit and worked backwards to implicate him.

But this is to stray from the big issue, which is the very Scottish debacle of Megrahi’s conviction. Let’s start by considering the guilty verdict and the 80-page judgment upon which it was founded. As you know, the verdict was based on him buying clothes from the Maltese shop, owned by the Crown’s star witness, Tony Gauci, on 7 December 1988. According to the Crown’s evidence, this was his only window of opportunity, so, if it wasn’t 7 December, the case collapses. The court was told by Gauci that, as the man left the shop, he bought an umbrella because it was raining. The trouble is, the weather data for 7 December, recorded just a few kilometres away, show that it wasn’t raining.  The judges knew this, yet still concluded the clothes were bought on 7 December. We say this was unreasonable. Does that make us conspiracy theorists? If so, we’re in good company, because the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said it too; in fact it was one of the six grounds upon which they referred the case back to the appeal court. These are their exact words:

The Commission does not consider there to be any reasonable basis for the trial court’s conclusion that the purchase took place on 7 December 1988 and therefore for the inference it drew that the applicant was the purchaser of the items from Mary’s House.

This is devastating, because, given the centrality of 7 December to the conviction, the commission had come as close as it legally could to saying, not only that the judgment was unreasonable, but also the guilty verdict itself.

The other major concern of Megrahi’s supporters is with the conduct of the Crown. We say that they withheld numerous items of evidence that would have helped Megrahi’s defence.  Does that make us conspiracy theorists? No, it merely means that we have read the SCCRC’s report. Remember that no fewer than four of the SCCRC’s six grounds of referral concerned undisclosed evidence.

Remember also what happened at trial in relation to the CIA cables concerning Majid Giaka. The Crown originally disclosed only heavily redacted versions. The defence then got word that the Crown had secretly viewed largely unredacted copies at the US embassy in The Hague. When the defence raised this with the court, the lord advocate Colin Boyd offered the assurance that there was nothing in the blanked out sections that bore upon the defence case. When, under pressure from the judges, the Crown handed over less redacted versions, one close observer noted: ‘Some of the material which is now disclosed goes to the very heart of material aspects of this case, not just to issues of credibility and reliability, but beyond.’ In a pointed nod to the lord advocate’s earlier assurance, he noted ‘I frankly find it inconceivable that it could have been thought otherwise.’ In other words, he believed that the lord advocate, had seriously, if unwittingly, misled the court. Was this observer a crazy conspiracy theorist? No, actually it was defence counsel Richard Keen, the current dean of the faculty of advocates. And why did he say it? Because it was blindingly obvious that the redacted information cast Giaka in a very bad light and thus, contrary to the lord advocate’s claim, significantly undermined the Crown case.

We do not allege that the withholding of important evidence was part of a huge government and intelligence services inspired plot, rather we suggest that it resulted from a series of appalling failures that were specific to the Crown Office and its servants. The committee of Justice for Megrahi, of which I am not a member, has made allegations – which do not appear in either of my books – that some of these failures might amount to criminal conduct. Whether they do or not, as I have made clear in Scotland’s Shame, the failings almost certainly arose because those responsible wished to secure the conviction of people whom they sincerely believed to be guilty, and not because they wanted to protect the real bombers and see innocent people convicted.

Conspiracy theorist is a label that is often used by politicians and, I hate to say it, lazy journalists, who have run out of reasonable arguments, in order to denigrate and marginalise those who challenge the official line on controversial issues. Funnily enough, the current lord advocate, Frank Mulholland, uses it too.

Which brings me to your interview with Mulholland, published on the 21 December last year, under the headline Pro-Megrahi backers flayed. The article billed the interview as ‘the most detailed rebuttal yet made’ against the claims of Megrahi’s supporters, yet there was no detailed rebuttal at all, just general assertions, a bit a bluster and some serious distortions.

You reported that Mulholland had invited in an independent counsel to conduct a review of the evidence and that he or she had concluded that the conviction was sound. The truth was very different. As Mulholland later revealed in a letter to MSP James Kelly, the independent counsel was in fact brought in by his predecessor Elish Angiolini five years earlier at the time of the SCCRC’s referral of the case to the appeal court. The purpose of the review was to establish whether there was anything in the SCCRC report and its appendices that suggested that the Crown should not defend the conviction. Mulholland told Kelly: ‘The outcome of the review satisfied me that the Crown had a robust defence to the potential grounds of appeal identified by the SCCRC.’ This did not mean that the independent counsel had concluded that the conviction was sound. The review had not considered any of the important evidence that had emerged since 2007, in particular the forensic evidence, revealed in Megrahi: You Are My Jury, which showed that PT/35b could not have originated from one of the 20 Mebo timers supplied to Libya.

On the subject of the book, the article said that Mulholland had considered all of its claims and ‘finds no evidence to support them’. Did it not occur to you that this was rather an odd statement to make, given that the book’s assault on the Crown case was all based on Crown evidence – much of it previously undisclosed – and the word of Crown witnesses? And did you not think to ask him why the Crown had withheld so much important evidence? And why the Crown Office had allowed the police to seek a multi-million dollar reward for Tony Gauci from the US government, even though it was forbidden by its own rules from seeking or making such a reward itself? Isn’t the role of responsible journalism to ask awkward questions of those in authority, rather than amplify their defences?

And did you not think it rather inappropriate for the lord advocate to be denigrating as conspiracy theorists people such as Dr Jim Swire and the former parish priest of Lockerbie, Father Pat Keegans? The Crown Office claimed in a press statement that these same people had been ‘deliberately misleading’, in other words, that they were liars. What a truly appalling – and, for the record, untrue – thing to say about decent people who are simply concerned that justice has not been done. I can’t imagine the Director of Public Prosecutions and the CPS lashing out like that, can you?

You revived the ‘conspiracy theorists’ slur in a Times column on 4 October. This time you added two further claims. One was that Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal ‘has never been properly explained’, which, in your view, is the weakest plank in his case.  If you had properly read Megrahi: You are my Jury, you would know that the explanation for Megrahi dropping his appeal is that the Libyan minister Abdelati al-Obedi told him that Kenny MacAskill had privately indicated to him (Obedi) that it would be easier to grant compassionate release if he did so.  I have spoken to all the witnesses to the conversation between Obedi and Megrahi and they all confirm the accuracy of the book’s account of it. Megrahi had advanced cancer and was desperate to get back to his family. He knew that he was not legally obliged to abandon the appeal, but, in the circumstances, felt that he had no choice. If you had been stuck in a foreign prison with advanced cancer, would you have reacted differently to such pressure? I doubt it.

Your other claim concerned the evidence about Heathrow airport. You wrote:

For all the many thousands of words that have been written suggesting that the prosecution case was flawed, and that the Scottish legal system presided over a spectacular miscarriage of justice, the alternative theories are well short of sustaining proof.

It is one thing to challenge the evidence on which al-Megrahi was convicted, another to sustain a case that is not, itself, threadbare.

Dr Swire believes that the bomb was not put on board Pan Am 103 on Malta, but that it was smuggled onto the plane at Heathrow Airport. This, along with other theories, was advanced at the time of the trial, examined, and dismissed for want of evidence.

You subsequently tweeted that Heathrow is the weak link in our argument, that the evidence suggesting that the bomb originated there ‘was tested to destruction’ at Megrahi’s trial and that ‘there’s simply no evidence to back it.’ Dear me, how misinformed can you be?

Before responding in detail, it’s worth pointing out that it is not incumbent upon us, Megrahi’s supporters, to prove an alternative case. It just so happens that we think that there is at least one alternative that stands up better than the prosecution case.

Anyway, about that Heathrow evidence. As you know, the bomb exploded in luggage container AVE4041. Most of the bags in there had been unloaded from the Frankfurt feeder flight, PA103A, including, according to the Crown, the brown Samsonite from Malta. However, there was some other luggage in there, which had been loaded before PA103A arrived. This was supposedly Heathrow interline luggage, meaning it had arrived at Heathrow on other flights. All of the loaders who were involved in packing AVE4041 confirmed something very significant: before the Frankfurt bags were loaded the entire floor of the container was covered with luggage. One of the loaders, John Bedford, recalled seeing something still more significant: a brown hardshell suitcase ‘the type Samsonite make’, positioned very close to where the explosion later occurred. He saw it when AVE4041 was in the interline baggage shed, well before the Frankfurt flight arrived. Bedford was clear that he hadn’t put it there and so too was the only other person on duty in the shed, Sulkash Kamboj.

The police produced a detailed schedule of all the baggage that could have found its way into AVE4041. It demonstrated that a maximum of six Heathrow interline bags could have been in the container before PA103A arrived, all of which were within the normal size range. However – and here’s the rub – covering the base of the container could have required seven or eight standard sized cases, just as in this photo:

The schedule showed something else very important: none of the six legitimate bags were brown, hard-shelled suitcases.

The loader who added the Frankfurt bags, Amarjit Sidhu, was sure that he did not move any of the bags that were already in AVE4041 when he added the Frankfurt bags, indeed, most of the loaders said that it was not their custom to rearrange bags. So, the Bedford case must have been very close to the explosion, indeed, according to the Crown case, it should have been immediately below the brown Samsonite suitcase from Malta. If that suitcase existed, then the police should have recovered fragments of two brown hard-shelled cases, but they only found fragments of one. So, what happened to the Bedford case? The obvious answer is that it contained the bomb and that the Malta case never existed.  Security around the interline shed was non-existent and, as Bedford acknowledged in evidence, anyone with airside access could have placed a suitcase into the container.

But wasn’t the bomb suitcase in the second layer of luggage, slightly overhanging the angled section of AVE4041 and Bedford’s in the first layer? That’s what the Crown claimed, but the scientific support for it is, to say the least, equivocal (see pp 395-404 of Megrahi: You are my Jury). And, if you look back at that photo, it’s clear that a suitcase could be in the bottom layer yet still overhang the angled section.

The Crown disclosed the police schedule to the defence early on during the trial preparations and notified them that they would be running an exclusion case, ie they would show that all the bags in AVE4041 were legitimate apart from the one allegedly from Malta. But, guess what, the schedule was not among the Crown productions that were later lodged with the court. Furthermore, the Crown didn’t run an exclusion case, probably because they couldn’t exclude the Bedford suitcase.

The Crown told the defence that the schedule contained inaccuracies, which may account for why the defence didn’t use it at trial. However, there is no evidence that its key finding – that there were only six legitimate items in AVE4041 when the Frankfurt flight arrived, none of which was a brown hard-sided case – was mistaken. If there was such evidence, the Crown would likely have used it to undermine the Bedford bag theory.

As for the evidence being ‘tested to destruction’ at the trial, this is simply wrong for two reasons. The first is that much of the key the evidence was absent. The Crown relied on the Maltese clothes and documents from Frankfurt airport to support their claim that the bomb had come from Malta, while the defence submitted that the Bedford case matched the bomb suitcase, that it was at, or could easily have been moved to, the location at which the explosion occurred, and that remains of only one brown hard-shelled case had been recovered. None of the following were not put before the court:

• The crucial baggage schedule
• The voluminious witness and documentary evidence upon which it was based
• Detailed evidence forensic and witness evidence about the likely positioning of most of the blast damaged cases (a potentially crucial issue in determining the location and identity of the primary suitcase)
• The evidence of Sidhu, who added the Frankfurt luggage, who was sure that he never rearranged any of the bags.

The defence’s reasons for not running an exclusion case based on the baggage schedule were articulated by John Beckett in a response to the appeal court and are summarised at pp335-6 of Megrahi: You are My Jury. Regardless of whether those reasons hold water – and one can make a strong case that they don’t – by not presenting the schedule and the other evidence listed above, both sides prevented the full picture from emerging.

The second reason is that the judges sidestepped the issue of the Bedford suitcase. To remind you, they acknowledged that Bedford was ‘a clear and impressive witness’ and that the evidence supported the defence submission ‘that a suitcase which could fit the forensic description of the primary suitcase was in the container when it left the interline shed.’ So, how did they get around the issues? By relying on evidence from another loader, Terence Crabtree, who was not involved in loading the Frankfurt bags into AVE4041, that luggage was sometimes rearranged. They acknowledged that, if this happened – and according to the actual loader of AVE4041, Sidhu, it didn’t – then the Bedford case could have ended up in the second layer, in exactly the position that the Crown claimed the primary suitcase was in. But, they then added: ‘if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Mr Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container, and while the forensic evidence dealt with all the items recovered which showed direct explosive damage, twenty-five in total, there were many other items of baggage found which were not dealt with in detail in the evidence in the case.’ So, it seemed that the judges believed that it for was the defence to run an exclusion case in order to prove the Bedford suitcase bomb scenario, not for the Crown to run one in order to prove the Maltese scenario. A novel reversal of the burden of proof, wouldn’t you say? And one that fell a long way short of testing the Heathrow evidence to destruction.

There is much more to be said about Heathrow, all of which goes to demonstrate that the Bedford suitcase contained the bomb. Dr Morag Kerr has written a book about it, due to be published soon, which I recommend that you read. She is no daft conspiracy theorist, indeed, before her involvement in the case she spent a lot of time taking on 9/11 conspiracists; she simply combines rigorous attention to detail with rigorous logic. I doubt that anyone, including the Crown and defence lawyers, has devoted so much time to the issue. Her aim has been to uncover the truth, not to win a tactical court battle.

If, as seems very likely, the Bedford case contained the bomb, then the evidence from Malta and Frankfurt becomes irrelevant, but let’s look at it anyway. First Malta. What evidence is there from Luqa airport, from where the bomb supposedly began its journey? None. That’s right, none. According to the Crown, Megrahi and Fhimah somehow – the advocate depute was not specific – smuggled the bomb suitcase onto Air Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt. The airline had unusually strict baggage procedures, which meant that the head loader had to physically count the number of bags in the hold to check that the total tallied with the number of legitimate check-in bags. It did. What’s more, there is no evidence of any suspicious activity around the plane and no evidence that the pair had corrupted any Air Malta staff. The Crown case was that the difficulties of getting a rogue bag onto KM180 were such that Megrahi must have had assistance from Fhimah, ie they must both have been guilty. Fhimah was, of course, acquitted, which begs the question, which the judges failed to answer: how, and with whose help, was Megrahi able to get a suitcase onto KM180?

Another close observer of the case commented:

[T]here is considerable and quite convincing evidence that [the placing of an unaccompanied suitcase onto KM180] could not have happened … Now, it’s quite difficult rationally to follow how the Court can take the step of saying, ‘Well, we don’t know how it got on to the flight. We can’t say that. But it must have been there.’ On the face of it, it may not be a rational conclusion.

Was this person a deluded conspiracy theorist? No, he was Lord Osborne, one of the judges who heard Megrahi’s first appeal. (In view of this comment, one wonders if the outcome of that appeal might have been different had the defence submitted that the trial verdict was unreasonable.)

What other evidence is there from Malta? Only the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop. Clearly, they do not prove the origin of the bomb. They were bought, according to the Crown, on 7 December 1988, so could have been anywhere by the day of the bombing two weeks later.

It was the documents from Frankfurt airport that proved to be the clincher. They supposedly showed the transfer of a bag from KM180 to PA103A, but they fell woefully short of proof. All they in fact showed that a luggage tray was dispatched through the airport’s automated luggage system from a particular input station to PA103A’s departure gate at a time when bags from KM180 were supposedly being processed at the station. We assume that there was a bag in the tray, but there’s no proof that there was, still less proof that it was a brown Samsonite from Malta. As the German police discovered, the Frankfurt evidence was incomplete and confusing. What evidence there was indicates that at least one other unaccounted for unaccompanied bag was on PA103A. The police produced a schedule of all the baggage found at Lockerbie, but the Crown did not see fit to disclose it. It’s likely that it included bags that the police were unable to link to their owners, any one of which could have been in the tray that supposedly contained the Maltese suitcase.

The officer who conducted the luggage transfer analysis at Frankfurt, Jurgen Fuhl, concluded after an 18-month investigation: ‘Throughout the enquiries in to the baggage for PA103A there was no evidence that the item of baggage containing the bomb had gone with the baggage from or via Frankfurt/Main to London. In connection with the information about the other contents of the bomb-case (textiles from a shop on Malta) and the possible transfer of a case in Frankfurt from KM180 this possibility can however not be excluded altogether.’ So, the Crown’s claim that the bag was transferred from KM180 to PA103 could not, in the words of the man who knew most about the Frankfurt baggage evidence ‘be excluded altogether.’ Hardly proof beyond reasonable doubt, eh?

Remember, no one at Malta or Frankfurt recalled seeing a brown, Samsonite type suitcase anywhere near the feeder flights KM180 and PA103A. Only one person recalled seeing such a case, John Bedford, furthermore, in contrast to much of the evidence of the Crown’s star witnesses Tony Gauci and Majid Giaka, his recollection was unprompted.

Finally, some questions for you.

1. Do you still say that we believe that the Scottish police, prosecutors and judges were party to a grand conspiracy?

2. Do you not think that the SCCRC’s findings that the trial court judgment was unreasonable, and that the Crown had withheld numerous items of exculpatory evidence, leave a terrible stain on Scottish justice?

3. Are you comfortable with the lord advocate and Crown Office branding their opponents as conspiracy theorists and de facto liars?

4. Do you really still believe that the Heathrow evidence was tested to destruction?

You can email me via this website. I look forward to your response.

Kind regards,

John.

A second open letter to Magnus Linklater from John Ashton

[Following Magnus Linklater’s article in yesterday’s edition of The Times, John Ashton has written him another open letter.  It reads as follows:]

Dear Magnus,

More than two months ago I wrote you an open letter and invited your response. You promised that you would, but, so far, you have not. Yesterday you wrote another commentary piece for the Scottish edition of The Times. So riddled is it with distortions that I feel I must again make a public response. Your article follows in italics, with my comments in regular type.

Why does Lockerbie retain such a hold on the memories of those who suffered the loss of friends, relatives, and loved ones all those years ago? That awful day, when Pan Am 103 crashed into the little Borders town on December 21, 1988, has faded into distant memory. Lockerbie itself has moved on. These days people there prefer to talk about the way the town has developed, its modest expansion, its new houses, the jobs it has created, its hopes for the future, and yet the agony goes on.

Today, as on every anniversary since December 21, 1988, the American families of those who died will meet again at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, to remember those they lost. They have grown old with Lockerbie, but they have not forgotten.

In recent years there has been another impetus to their grief: they are outraged by the campaign that has been waged in Scotland by those determined to prove that the conviction of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi was a miscarriage of justice.

They see the sustained attempts by supporters of al-Megrahi to suggest that he was innocent and that Libya was never involved in the plot, as a betrayal of the victims.

Bob Monetti, whose son, Rick, 20, was killed in the atrocity, is enraged by what he calls “the conspiracy theorists”.

“They have lost sight of reality,” he says. “We cannot let go of these memories so long as this campaign to peddle a false version of events goes on.”

It’s not just Bob Monetti who calls Mr Megrahi’s supporters ‘conspiracy theorists’ is it Magnus? You and the Lord Advocate do it too, but in this instance you are using Mr Monetti as your proxy. I repeat the point that I made in my last letter: if we are conspiracy theorists for suggesting that the trial court judgment was unreasonable and that the Crown withheld numerous items of important exculpatory evidence, then we are in good company, because the SCCRC came to exactly the same view. Also, to repeat, I and the majority of Mr Megrahi’s supporters do not believe that the Scottish authorities were knowingly complicit in a plot to wrongly convict Mr Megrahi. The relatives are entitled to call Mr Megrahi’s supporters what they like (some, of course, are among his supporters). They are also entitled to the truth and, for many years vital evidence that would help them know the truth was withheld – indeed, for all we know, important evidence is still being withheld.

At the heart of the American concern — and it is held by all the families — is a profound conviction that the Scottish police and judicial authorities got things right when they followed the trail of evidence that led to al-Megrahi and implicated Libya. “The Scottish police are our heroes,” says Mr Monetti.

Steadily, over the years, however, the counter-theory — that Iran, not Libya, were the sponsors of the terrorist attack — has gained ground. Because judges and lawyers at the original trial and appeal, including prosecutors and defence, have had to remain silent, constrained by the conventions of the Scottish judicial system, they have had to stand by as increasingly wild theories have spread about where and by whom the bomb was loaded onto the plane. In consequence, the impression has grown among the public at large that a gross miscarriage of justice has taken place.

Setting aside the occasional cranks like Patrick Haseldine, what are these increasingly wild theories, and who is peddling them? Please enlighten me. The supposed counter theory that Iran, rather than Libya, was behind the attack is in fact older than the Libyan theory. Declassified US intelligence documents state as fact that Iran commissioned the bombing from the PFLP-GC.

What you omit to mention is that the Justice for Megrahi group, who is at the forefront of the efforts to clear Mr Megrahi, are deliberately neutral on the issue of which country sponsored the bombing.

There are only three places at which the bomb could have been loaded. As I explained at length in my last letter, Heathrow is the most likely and Malta the least.  Dr Morag Kerr has written a book on the subject, which I suggest you read. She has devoted years to studying to the issue – a luxury not available to the lawyers.

Yet what has been ignored is that each and every counter-theory, advanced to exonerate al-Megrahi and Libya, was examined in detail at the time of the original trial — not by the prosecution, but by the defence. After all, it was very much in their interests that an alternative version of events, clearing the two accused, should be presented to court.

Some of the best legal minds in Scotland, who have gone on subsequently to become sheriffs, senators and judges, were involved in this, the highest-profile case ever to have been heard under Scottish law. The notion that they, in examining evidence which could have been to their advantage, knowingly overlooked or suppressed vital evidence, is bizarre.

Neither I, nor, to the best of my knowledge, Mr Megrahi’s other main supporters have ignored the fact that counter theories were examined by the defence. What you ignore is a) that some key evidence was withheld from the defence by the Crown, and b) that, in the view of counsel for Mr Megrahi’s second appeal (no less eminent than the original defence team), certain aspects of his defence team’s approach at trial constituted defective representation. What is bizarre, Magnus, is your suggestion that Megrahi’s supporters have accused the defence of knowingly overlooking or suppressing vital evidence. That accusation has never been made by the JFM committee, by me, or by the lawyers who subsequently represented Mr Megrahi. The accusation – which, as a non-lawyer, I do not make – is that the defence team made some serious misjudgements, not that they deliberately undermined Mr Megrahi’s defence. Such arguments are, in my view, a sideshow. The bottom line is that the defence easily did enough to get Mr Megrahi acquitted. To remind you, the Crown case hinged on the claim that Mr Megrahi bought clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop on 7 December 1988. Mr Gauci was clear that, as the man left the shop, he bought an umbrella because it has started to rain. Defence witness Major Joseph Mifsud, formerly Malta’s chief meteorologist, testified that the weather records indicated that there was no rain on 7 December, yet the judges concluded that the purchase took place on that day. This was, in the view of the SCCRC, unreasonable. Do you believe otherwise?

Later, in meticulous detail, an appeal court, presided over by five of Scotland’s leading judges, considered each of the grounds for overturning the original verdict, and rejected them all.

As you should know, the first appeal was brought on very limited grounds. To the surprise of many observers, the defence did not argue that the verdict was unreasonable.

Finally, over four years, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) drew up a 700-page document that must count as one of the most exhaustive and detailed ever produced in Scotland. It is both a profound piece of investigation and a masterly legal report, and must stand as the definitive account of the Lockerbie evidence.

It determined that there were grounds for a further appeal and referred them to the High Court. This was al-Megrahi’s opportunity to have his often proclaimed innocence heard in a court of law. He turned it down, however, preferring to return home to Libya on compassionate grounds rather than risk sacrificing his liberty.

The SCCRC report is exhaustive in some areas, notably the evidence of Tony Gauci, but is very poor in others. Its investigation of the crucial circuit board fragment PT/35b, for example, was lengthy, but completely missed the fact that it could not have originated from one of the 20 timers supplied to Libya. Its investigation of the claims of former CIA agent Robert Baer were also very poor. He claimed that large amounts of money were transferred to Swiss and German bank accounts of the PFLP-GC and one of the early prime suspects Mohamed Abu Talb, yet the SCCRC failed to conduct any inquiries in Germany and Switzerland, and with the CIA, and instead accepted the word of the police and British security services. Worst of all, the SCCRC report failed to consider, let alone investigate, the evidence relating to any of the three airports involved in the case. How, then, can you call it the definitive account of the Lockerbie evidence?

That said, the fact that the SCCRC referred the case to the appeal court on no fewer than six grounds, including that the judgment was unreasonable, was a devastating indictment of the Scottish criminal justice system. Not that one would know it from reading your articles. By the way, I note with satisfaction your account of why Mr Megrahi dropped his appeal. In your last Lockerbie article you wrote that his decision ‘has never been properly explained’. Maybe you are, after all, inching towards a better understanding of the case.

Most press reports have focused on the SCCRC’s grounds for questioning the original decision. Those principally concerned the evidence given by Tony Gauci, the owner of the shop in Malta where the clothing found in the bomb suitcase was bought. The SCCRC considered that evidence that was never seen by the defence, particularly concerning reward money offered to Gauci, and the prior disclosure to him of photographs of the accused, might have aided al-Megrahi’s defence.

What is impressive about the document as it considers every aspect of the Lockerbie affair, is the way it systematically disposes of the counter-theories offered by those who are convinced that al-Megrahi was innocent, and that Libya was not involved.

Time after time it examines the various stories that have emerged in the media, suggesting that Iran was the paymaster, that Palestinian terrorists carried out the bombing, that the explosive device was smuggled aboard at Frankfurt or Heathrow rather than Malta, that Abu Talb, a known terrorist, was involved, or possibly a shadowy figure known only as Abu Elias.

It disposes clinically of all of them. It interviews and re-interviews the various figures who have emerged over the years to cast doubt on the operations of the Scottish police or the role of the CIA and reveals their evidence as hollow “speculative, unfounded, unfocused, and unsupported by proper evidence”, as the report puts it. Yet these are the foundations on which the various conspiracy theories about Lockerbie have been laid.

See my last comments. The SCCRC was completely ill-equipped for investigating terrorism. Its investigation of the alternative suspects relied almost entirely on the word of the police and the British intelligence services relied entirely. Many of the claims made in favour of the counter theories have indeed been ‘speculative, unfounded, unfocused, and unsupported by proper evidence’, but many are not. To write them off as conspiracy theories is fatuous and intellectually dishonest. As numerous eminent legal commentators have pointed out, the words speculative, unfounded, and unsupported by proper evidence apply equally to the Crown case and the trial court judgment.  

Today, as grieving relatives remember the disaster that devastated their lives, they might perhaps draw comfort from the fact that, far from this being a case that exposes the failures of Scottish justice, it is one that triumphantly vindicates it.

I doubt that all the relatives will draw comfort from the fact that multiple items of exculpatory evidence were withheld from the trial court, that a UN observer described the guilty verdict as ‘incomprehensible’ and that the SCCRC considered the judgment to be unreasonable. Rather than a triumphant vindication, I think these facts are a terrible scar upon Scottish justice.

As ever, I look forward to your response, but please don’t forget to respond to my original letter.

Best wishes,

John.