Lockerbie bombing: 30 years of grief

[This is the headline over an article published yesterday on the website of the Daily Express. It reads in part:]

Still the worst terrorist atrocity on British soil, 270 passengers, crew and residents of a small Scottish town died when a bomb in a radio/cassette player packed in a Samsonite suitcase exploded in the cargo hold of Pan Am flight 103 nearly 30 years ago.

To mark the anniversary, Channel 5 documentary Lockerbie: The Unheard Voices, tells the story of 12 victims and survivors - and reveals two warnings were ignored. (...)

But could the horror have been avoided if warnings were heeded? A fortnight before the explosion, a caller rang the US Embassy in Finland to say there was a "plot against a Pan American flight to the US sometime in the next two weeks".

This was passed to the US Federal Aviation Administration but was "ultimately dismissed as a hoax".

A second, less widely known warning, came two days before the ill-fated flight. The UK Department of Transport "sent out a letter" warning a "bomb had been placed in a cassette player", according to the documentary. "The warning was based on detailed information sent out by the German intelligence services."

This was never heeded. It is not known how the brown Samsonite case made its way into cargo hold, but "security checks" failed to pick up anything.

It contained the Toshiba radio/ cassette tape player, in which 450g of Semtex and a timer was hidden. [RB: Dr Morag Kerr's researches have established conclusively that bomb suitcase was already in the luggage container AVE4041 at Heathrow before the aircraft supposedly carrying the case that the Libyans had sent as unaccompanied baggage from Malta arrived in London: Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.] (...)

But the ultimate suspect was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Libyan Airlines' security chief, who was convicted in 2001 of the bombing.

He died in May 2012, maintaining his innocence. His family are still trying to appeal his conviction.

Last week, a police probe found no evidence of criminality in relation to the handling of the investigation and prosecution in the case. [RB: The Chief Constable of Police Scotland has stated that the report contains material that is relevant to the Megrahi family's current application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and to any subsequent appeal against Megrahi's conviction.]

The film states: "For many of the families of the 270 victims there are still many unanswered questions."

The unanswered questions…

1 Will al-Megrahi's family get the chance to appeal on his behalf? The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is looking at Megrahi's conviction and if it decides there has been a miscarriage of justice, the case will return to the Court of Appeal. Some believe the truth will finally be brought to light.

2 Why was key evidence overlooked at the original Lockerbie trial? A break-in at the Pan Am baggage department at Heathrow airport before the bombing was never disclosed to the judges. And a $2million reward paid to witness Tony Gauci by the US only emerged years after Megrahi's conviction.

3 How can a discrepancy in forensic evidence be explained? A fragment of bomb timer found in a field near Lockerbie was linked to Libya, as Swiss firm Mebo had sold timers to Colonel Gaddafi's regime. It has since emerged the fragment was made of pure tin, not the lead/tin alloy used by Mebo.

4 If Megrahi did not plant the bomb then who did? Some believe Iran paid Palestinian terror group PFLP-GC to carry out the attack after the US Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner in July 1988, killing 290 people.

5 What were the warnings? German police told British authorities a PFLP-GC cell might plant bombs hidden in tape recorders on passenger planes, while a man with an Arabic accent rang the US Embassy in Helsinki on December 5 to say a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the US would be blown up.

Kenneth Roy: 26 March 1945 - 5 November 2018

I am saddened to learn of the death today of Kenneth Roy. As editor of the Scottish Review he wrote many articles about the Lockerbie case and the disgraceful conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, as well as publishing contributions by other Megrahi campaigners, such as Robert Forrester, Morag Kerr, John Ashton, James Robertson and me. A selection of these pieces can be found here. Although the Justice for Megrahi campaign and Ken Roy had occasional spats (he was a prickly character), his support for Megrahi and his advocacy of the case for the conviction to be overturned were unwavering.

At Ken's invitation, I spoke about the Lockerbie case on several occasions in the Young Scotland Programme organised by the Institute of Contemporary Scotland which Ken had set up. And on a memorable occasion in 2011, I shared a platform with him at the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow. A recording of our conversation, chaired by Iain Anderson, can be found here. Scotland has too few journalists of the calibre of Kenneth Roy. I shall miss him.

Air Malta wins out-of-court settlement over Lockerbie programme

[This is the headline over a report published on this date in 1993 in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reads as follows:]

Air Malta has won an out-of-court settlement from an independent British television company over a programme it felt implied negligence on its part in the 1988 Lockerbie Pan Am airliner bombing, lawyers for the Maltese carrier said yesterday.

Granada Television agreed to pay Air Malta Company Limited £15,005 to settle the dispute in connection with a dramatised documentary Why Lockerbie? About the bombing of the Pan American World Airways Boeing 747 over Scotland in which 270 people were killed.

The payment was made without any admission of liability, Air Malta’s lawyers said in a statement.

Air Malta had objected to a reconstruction of how the bomb might have been smuggled into the international airline system. The dramatized segment showed an Arab checking the bag on to an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt.

The Pan Am flight from London to New York, carrying some passengers who had travelled from Frankfurt, was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. Two suspected Libyan intelligence agents have been accused of carrying out the attack but Tripoli has not handed them over for trial.

[RB: Granada was compelled to settle because there was no credible evidence that the bomb started from Luqa Airport in Malta. The judges at the Zeist trial held that it had done so. What follows is my published comment at the time of the verdict:]

The trial judges held it proved that the bomb was contained in a piece of unaccompanied baggage which was transported on Air Malta flight KM 180 from Luqa to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and was then carried on a feeder flight to Heathrow where Pan Am flight 103 was loaded from empty. The evidence supporting the finding that there was such a piece of unaccompanied baggage was a computer printout which could be interpreted to indicate that a piece of baggage went through the particular luggage coding station at Frankfurt Airport used for baggage from KM 180, and was routed towards the feeder flight to Heathrow, at a time consistent with its having been offloaded from KM 180. Against this, the evidence from Luqa Airport in Malta (whose baggage reconciliation and security systems were proven to be, by international standards, very effective) was to the effect that there was no unaccompanied bag on that flight to Frankfurt. All luggage on that flight was accounted for. The number of bags loaded into the hold matched the number of bags checked in (and subsequently collected) by the passengers on the aircraft. The court nevertheless held it proved that there had been a piece of unaccompanied baggage on flight KM 180.

[RB: Dr Morag Kerr has since, in her book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, conclusively established that the bomb suitcase started its fatal progress at Heathrow Airport, not Luqa.]

Lockerbie talk by Dr Morag Kerr

Dr Morag Kerr will be giving a talk on the Lockerbie case on Friday, 3 August 2018 at 7pm at the Yes Hub - Edinburgh South, 31 Lasswade Road, Edinburgh EH16 6TD. This is a revised and expanded version of a talk given by Dr Kerr on 17 June 2015.

The case that never goes away

[What follows is the text of a talk given by Dr Morag Kerr on Saturday, 16 June 2018 at a rally at Inch Park, Edinburgh:]

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, the case that never goes away.

I've heard people say, drop it, it's history.  But it's not much longer ago than Hillsborough, and that was only resolved to public satisfaction very recently.  And I personally have an aversion to a false narrative going down in history.  Other people feel the same way, including people personally impacted by the atrocity, and that's why we still have active campaigns.

Why is it that there's still so much concern about Lockerbie?Fundamentally, because the verdict in 2001 never made any sense.  As the court proceedings unfolded the prosecution case appeared to be falling apart.  The evidence against the accused was far far weaker than the public had been led to believe and credible alternative culprits and lines of inquiry had never been properly investigated.  The guilty verdict against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi came as a genuine shock to many informed observers, and their concerns have never been laid to rest.

Two separate but parallel campaigns have been going on for the last few years, and both are seeing significant developments unfolding.  First, there is the application by Megrahi's family for a posthumous appeal against his conviction.

This case has already had two appeals come to court.  The first appeal, the automatic one immediately after the conviction, was brought on the wrong grounds by Megrahi's inept advocate, and was dismissed essentially on a string of technicalities.  The second appeal was the result of a prolonged investigation by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission and it came to court in 2009.  But by that time Megrahi had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer and was anxious to return home to his family before he died, and he formally abandoned that appeal immediately before he was granted compassionate release.

This introduced a legal controversy.  Megrahi himself and his legal team maintained that he had withdrawn the appeal to make it more likely that compassionate release would be granted.  Kenny MacAskill denied having made that a condition of granting compassionate release.  When Megrahi's family applied to the SCCRC for a third appeal, the point that had to be decided was, how many bites at the cherry is anybody allowed to have?  The appellant abandoned his appeal voluntarily, so why should another be allowed?

The SCCRC's decision on this was reported last month.  They accepted that Megrahi withdrew the appeal because he believed it would improve his chances of being allowed to go home, and that it wasn't in any way a capitulation or an admission of guilt.  They have therefore decided to carry out a full evaluation of the new application from his family.  I anticipate that this will result in a third appeal being allowed and going to court.

The second campaign is an initiative by the pressure group Justice for Megrahi, of which I'm secretary depute.  The JFM committee includes retired senior lawyers and a retired senior police officer as well as relatives of Lockerbie victims, so we have a lot of expertise to call on.  Back in 2012 when the prospects of getting a third appeal to court were looking remote, we had a look at other options to force the authorities to look again at the case.  The thing is, you can't just go to the police or the Crown Office and say, look, here's why I think you got this wrong, you must reconsider.  It doesn't work like that.  What you can do, is force the police to look at the case again by making formal allegations of criminality against other people, which they are then duty bound to investigate.

I'm not talking about allegations against alternative suspects, but against people involved in the original investigation and the trial at Camp Zeist.  We had very good reason to believe that significant shenanigans had taken place at both stages of the proceedings, and that we had sufficient evidence to compel the police to investigate this seriously.  Eventually we submitted nine separate allegations to the authorities, backed up with credible evidence in each case.  These included police misconduct, forensic fraud and/or criminal negligence, perjury, and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

Now of course talk is cheap and anyone can allege anything, but if there had been no substance to our allegations the police could have disposed of them quickly with very little trouble.  That's what they thought they were going to do, at first.  However it was eventually realised that there was serious substance to what we were saying, and in 2014 a dedicated Police Scotland investigation was set up, codenamed Operation Sandwood.  I think the fact that it has taken these detectives four years to finalise their report says a lot about how well-founded our position is, and how thorough the investigation has been.

It seems likely that the Operation Sandwood report will be submitted to the Crown Office before the SCCRC is ready to report, but I don't really know how much longer it will be for either of them.  Both reports will be confidential and will not automatically be made public, so we're going to have to do a fair bit of reading between the lines.

Although the two investigations are separate, they are essentially investigating the same thing -- the evidence in the Lockerbie case.   There's a huge amount of that, but systematic analysis boils it down to three critical points, only two of which specifically incriminate Megrahi.

The first of these is the identification evidence.  Clothes packed in the suitcase with the bomb were traced to their manufacturer, and from there to the shop where they were sold.  Amazingly the shopkeeper remembered selling more than one of these items to a customer, and he had some recollection of what that man looked like.  The prosecution alleged that it was Megrahi who had bought these clothes.

The first SCCRC report detailed six grounds on which the commission believed it was possible that a miscarriage of justice had occurred, and all of these related to the clothes purchase.  It seems to me inevitable that the new SCCRC investigation will have to allow a new appeal on these grounds if nothing else.  However, we hardly need to wait for the SCCRC on that one.  Kenny MacAskill has already, belatedly, conceded the point.  In his recent book and again in press articles, he agrees that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes.

In fact that's all it should take to overturn the conviction entirely.  If he didn't buy the clothes the case against him falls apart in logic.  However, Kenny doesn't see it that way, and pins his continued assertion that Megrahi was involved in the bombing on the second main point which appears to incriminate him, the fact that he was present at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane.  This also seems to be the fall-back position of the Crown Office.  Well, maybe someone else bought the clothes, but Megrahi was there when the crime took place and he was a Libyan security agent so go figure.

That aspect of the case is my own personal speciality.  Was Megrahi present at the scene of the crime?  There's no doubt he was at the airport in Malta that morning, catching a short-hop flight back to Tripoli after an overnight business trip to Malta.  The question is, was that actually the scene of the crime?  There was no evidence at all that security at Malta airport was breached that morning, no evidence that an illicit, unaccompanied suitcase was smuggled on to the flight to Frankfurt, and considerable evidence that no such thing actually happened.  Exactly how the prosecution managed to persuade the judges that it had happened is one of the enduring conundrums of the Lockerbie saga.

The Crown case depends absolutely on their preferred modus operandi, the story of the suitcase that was smuggled on to an aircraft in the morning on Malta, was transferred automatically through the baggage transfer system at Frankfurt without anyone realising that there was no passenger attached to it, and was then in due course transferred to the transatlantic airliner Maid of the Seas at Heathrow.  It was the transatlantic leg that blew up over Lockerbie.

However, as I said, there's no evidence at all of that suitcase being present at Malta airport, and the evidence from Frankfurt that was used to assert that it must have been there is tenuous beyond belief.  It's only when you look at the evidence from Heathrow itself that things get a lot clearer.  To cut a long story short, there is clear and incontrovertible evidence that the bomb suitcase was already in the baggage container at Heathrow a full hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed.  This evidence was available to the investigation at an early stage, but it appears the investigating officers simply didn't want to know.  The amount of effort expended in ignoring that suitcase is quite remarkable.

But once that is accepted, Megrahi really is exonerated.  This smear of "well maybe he didn't buy the clothes but he was there when the bomb was smuggled on board the plane so obviously he was involved" simply doesn't stand up.  He was 1,500 miles away at the time -- the distance from London to Tripoli.

The Crown Office case simply collapses.  It's not a situation where the crime has been more or less solved but there just isn't enough admissible evidence to get a conviction to stick, the Lockerbie investigation was up a gum tree almost from the beginning. Despite clear and compelling evidence that Heathrow was the scene of the crime, the police chased a red herring down a blind alley to Malta, and refused to think again even when prolonged investigation there turned up no sign of the bomb.

This admission would be hugely embarrassing for the legal establishment.  Millions of pounds spent on an investigation that was investigating the wrong airports.  An entire country ruined by punitive sanctions imposed on the assumption that its nationals were guilty of the atrocity.  Millions more spent on that three-ring-circus of a trial.

So I think we can anticipate some pretty strenuous resistance to this finding.  I expect the SCCRC to be pressurised to confine their investigation to the original six grounds of appeal, which were all about the clothes purchase, and not to extend their remit to the route of the bomb suitcase or indeed to the third point of contention, the identity of the fragment of printed circuit board that was alleged to have been part of the bomb's timing mechanism.

I also expect the Crown Office to try to bury the Sandwood report into our allegations of criminality.  There's an unavoidable weakness there.  The stratagem that we had to use was to accuse individuals of criminal offences in the course of these matters being wrongly investigated and wrongly presented to the court.  However, even if Operation Sandwood agrees with us on all three main headings -- that Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes, that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow not Malta, and that the fragment of circuit board was not what the prosecution said it was -- it's quite possible that no actual prosecutions will result.

The people involved are now quite elderly, in their seventies or older.  Some of them are dead.  John Orr, the first senior investigating officer assigned to the case, who was prominent in turning a blind eye to the Heathrow evidence, died about four months ago.  Even if Operation Sandwood concludes that there is credible evidence of criminal wrongdoing as opposed to blind incompetence, it's not impossible that a decision might be taken that prosecutions are not in the public interest.

So I'm somewhat prepared for the announcement that no prosecutions are to be brought as a result of the Operation Sandwood investigation.  That, in my opinion, will not be good enough.  The public paid for that investigation, and the public is entitled to know the broad outcome of its inquiry into the facts.  Does the Sandwood report accept that the witness Tony Gauci was groomed and pressurised into identifying Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes, even though he looked absolutely nothing like him?  Does it agree that the Lockerbie bomb started its journey in the late afternoon at Heathrow airport, not in the morning on Malta?  And does it agree that the scrap of printed circuit board, whatever it was, was never part of one of the timers in the batch that was sold to Libya?

We may have to wait for the third appeal coming to court to get to the bottom of all this, but these are the questions that the public, and in particular journalists, should be asking.

Now if anyone wants to hear a lot more detail about this, I will be giving a longer, illustrated talk on the evidence at the Yes Hub in a couple of weeks time, and there will be more opportunity for questions, and you won't have to stand in the rain to do it.  But if anyone has anything they want to ask now, fire away.

What is source of information on which Kenny MacAskill's opinions based?

[The following are two letters submitted a few days ago to The Scotsman but not, as far as I can see, selected for publication:]

As the 30th anniversary of the Lockerbie Pam Am disaster approaches it appears as if a light is finally going to be shone into the murkiness surrounding the UK’s worst ever terrorist outrage.

Police Scotland is finalising its four-year investigation into Justice for Megrahi’s (JfM’s) nine criminal allegations against some of those involved in the investigation and trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, and is preparing its report for Crown Office.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has decided that it is in the interests of justice to conduct a full review of Mr Megrahi's conviction in order to decide if the case should be referred back to the Court of Appeal.

The Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament continues its consideration of JfM’s petition for a public enquiry and is monitoring the police, Crown Office and SCCRC initiatives.

At such a critical time therefore it is surprising that Kenny MacAskill (Scotsman 10 May - Kenny MacAskill: Lockerbie bomber’s conviction may well collapse) should yet again see it appropriate to speculate publicly about the likely outcome of these enquiries and Mr Megrahi’s guilt.

It must be remembered that Mr MacAskill, as Cabinet Secretary for Justice, made the controversial 2009 decision to release Mr Megrahi on compassionate grounds and in 2013  turned down JfM’s request for a public enquiry, underlining that the Scottish Government 'did not doubt the safety of the conviction'. Yet, since leaving office, he has repeatedly, in writing and in interviews, questioned and dismissed key pieces of the evidence on which Mr Megrahi was convicted. If, as Mr MacAskill avers, that evidence is in doubt, then as he himself acknowledges the case against Mr Megrahi falls.

Both in reaching his decision to release Mr Megrahi and in making the statements that he has since leaving office Mr MacAskill must have received substantial confidential information from the police, Crown Office and other sources which he now chooses to release into the public arena before the various investigations are complete and apparently without regard to the effect this might have.

Has Mr MacAskill reported his concerns to Police Scotland and/or Crown Office? Where did he obtain the information on which he is basing his speculation and opinions? Was this confidential information received while acting as Cabinet Secretary for Justice and should it have  been used for public speculation and profit?

It is in the interests of justice that these questions are asked and that Mr MacAskill passes any relevant evidence to the authorities as a matter of urgency.

Iain A J McKie 

Secretary of Justice for Megrahi

I am sorry to see that Kenny MacAskill's article contains a number of easily refutable errors, but I value his continued contributions.

One of the more obvious errors is that there is, so far as we know, no proof that Gaddafi ever admitted responsibility for Lockerbie. 

That means that when, as I believe will eventually happen, the Megrahi verdict is seen as untenable, it is likely that many will continue to believe that 'it must have been Libya's work through Malta somehow'.

When I last met members of the Tripoli based Government after the murder of Gaddafi, senior members were seized with a determination to blame Lockerbie onto their fallen leader, perhaps in the hope of reducing blame on others. It seemed to be a belief without any 'proof', except for their own enthusiasm for it.

Among all the conspiracy theories of thirty years, my friend has always been William of Occam [1287-1347] who seems to have believed quaintly that the simplest explanation compatible with the actual facts was the most likely to be true. Here are some facts about Lockerbie, suggesting a relatively simple explanation:-

1. Iran had an airbus containing 290 innocent victims destroyed by a US missile 5 months before Lockerbie, and received no timeous apology whatever for that dreadful error. Indeed the man responsible for firing the missile, Captain Will Rogers of the USS Vincennes, received a medal.

2. Iran publicly swore revenge.

3.Iran was linked to the Damascus based terror group known as the PFLP-GC and their bomb maker, the Jordanian, Marwan Khreesat. The CIA knew this and also were aware of a payment by Iran into a numbered PFLP-GC bank account discovered in the possession of an arrested member of that group. 

4. A letter from the King of Jordan to John Major claiming that Lockerbie was not the work of the Libyans was in possession of the Zeist prosecution, but when later requested for defence purposes was hastily given a PII certificate by the then Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, at the request of Scotland's Advocate General.

5. Kreesat had developed anti-aircraft bombs based on an air pressure sensitive switch and crude timer. His bombs were not adjustable, were stable at ground level, but constructed to explode automatically within 30 - 45 minutes of take off if placed in an aircraft.

6. A detailed analysis of these devices by the West German police had been sent to UK and US authorities well before Lockerbie, confirming that not all the examples of these devices were thought to have been recovered from the terrorists.

7. Steps taken to block insertion of such devices at Heathrow were wildly inappropriate.

8. In the light of Morag Kerr's book Adequately explained by stupidity? there is powerful reasoned argument for re-assessment of the happenings at Heathrow that evening, and in particular uncertainty over the origins of two suitcases loaded there aboard the fatal flight, and placed close to the origin of the explosion. 

9. The fatal flight exploded in the very middle of the designed fixed flight time for Khreesat's devices.

These are but a few simple facts from among many others. It is to be hoped that the question of ingestion of the bomb at Heathrow, not just Malta or Frankfurt as well as the bomb's most probable origins, will soon accompany new steps by the Scottish authorities to review this dreadful case in detail, on behalf of the late Mr Megrahi's family. 

Dr Jim Swire

An unpleasant picture

[What follows is the text of a letter from Dr Morag Kerr that was published in The Herald on this date in 2010:]

Has it occurred to the US senators and others who maintain that Megrahi should have remained in prison that, if that had happened, his appeal would not have been withdrawn and would have been decided by now? Any rational examination of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) findings and the evidence as a whole must concede the overwhelming probability it would have been successful, and Megrahi would now be home by right as a free man. Kenny MacAskill may be prevented from “looking behind the appeal”, but the rest of us are under no such constraints, and the conclusion is not difficult to reach.

The notes of MacAskill’s meeting with Megrahi are now public, and reveal an unpleasant picture of a sick and desperate man being treated like a mushroom (kept in the dark and fed manure) in an attempt to pressurise him into dropping his appeal. The hand-written letter from Megrahi [RB: quoted in Megrahi: You are my Jury, page 353] is really quite distressing, when read in the light of the SCCRC report and the striking weakness of the case against him in general. This is not someone who should have escaped on a technicality; this is an innocent man sitting in jail looking at a medical death sentence.

Our criminal justice system and we as a nation are guilty of a far worse crime than taking international relations and trade deals into account when releasing a foreign prisoner. We have convicted a man on evidence that, in my view, wouldn’t support the issuing of a parking ticket, imprisoned him 1,800 miles from home and family, and turned him into an international hate figure while he is in the terminal stages of aggressive prostate cancer.

If any wide-ranging inquiry is appropriate, surely this is the matter that should concern us, rather than silly conspiracy theories linking Megrahi’s release to the Gulf oil spill.

Lockerbie — Pan Am 103: the truth at last?

[This is the headline over an article about the Megrahi family’s forthcoming application to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission posted today on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s Intel Today website. In the article he quotes an email that I sent to him earlier today. Here is what I wrote:]

I am optimistic about the outcome of the Megrahi family's forthcoming application to the SCCRC. In June 2007 the SCCRC decided, on six grounds, that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. Since then even more evidence has come to light casting doubt on the verdict (not least Dr Morag Kerr's masterly analysis of the bomb-damaged luggage, which demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the bomb suitcase was ingested at Heathrow, not Luqa in Malta).

My only slight worry is how the SCCRC will apply the "interests of justice" requirement (ie not only must the Commission be satisfied that there might have been a miscarriage of justice, it must also be satisfied that it is in the interests of justice for there to be a fresh appeal). It is possible to envisage the SCCRC saying that there have already been two appeals (the first of which Megrahi lost and the second of which he abandoned) and that it is not in the interests of justice for there to be a third bite at the cherry. I am reasonably optimistic that the Commission will not adopt this approach -- the Megrahi conviction still casts a dark shadow over the Scottish criminal justice system and is far from being generally accepted as just by the public in Scotland and elsewhere. I would expect the SCCRC to take the view that it is in the interests of justice in Scotland that an appeal take place that can remove this dark shadow, one way or the other.

The true story of how Megrahi was framed

[What follows is the text of an article that appeared on this date in 2012 on Tony Greenstein’s Blog:]

Not before time a detailed overview of the Lockerbie bomb case

When Muammar Ghadaffi made his peace with western imperialism and Tony Blair , part of the price was the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber. A special court had been convened at Camp Zeis in the Netherlands 8 years before, but only Scottish judges were to sit there, whereas the original Libyan demand had been for an international panel of judges.

Ghadaffi was eager to come in from the cold and conceded the point. The judges decided, when faced with 2 prisoners, to convict one and acquit the other. The pressures on them were, of course, enormous. Megrahi was convicted in January 2001 and freed, as a ‘humanitarian gesture’ in August 2009.

It is widely believed that the reason for Pan Am 103 being brought down had nothing whatsoever to do with Ghadaffi and everything to do with a pro-Syrian Palestinian group, the PFLP-General Command. The reason? An Iranian aircraft had been shot from the skies by the US navy some years previously.

And of course, whilst we have heard countless tales of how much the relatives of the Pan Am passengers have suffered, I have yet to see a single interview with the 300 or so Iranians who were murdered. Arab people are somehow not quite as human for the BBC as white Americans.

The evidence was always extremely tenuous and depended on things like the bomb having been put on a flight in Malta and then relying on it to go undetected. Far more likely, the bomb was put on in Paris. But the judges were under political pressure to come up with a result and that is what they did, aided by CIA and British Police skullduggery and the planting of evidence, the disappearance of other evidence and the paying of bribes to witnesses.

When Megrahi was freed in August 2009 one of the conditions, although Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill denies that he gave him this advice, was that he had to drop his appeal. The evidence had all but disappeared as the true story of how Megrahi was framed began coming out. An appeal hearing when the judges were forced to admit that the evidence was simply not credible or sufficient would have been a damaging blow. Far better to release Megrahi on ‘humanitarian’ grounds, even if the largely stupid and ignorant American relatives were outraged, because they preferred to take the word of Bush and the Republicans rather than examine the convictions themselves. Many of the British relatives were not so easily taken in, in particular Jim Swire whose daughter died in the atrocity.

As Mick Hall writes, ‘below Morag Kerr of the Justice for Megrahi Committee has put together a detailed overview of the Lockerbie case. It was commissioned by the Scottish Review, and is designed to unpick the many strands of the case past and present. This is the first time, a concise statement justifying the argument that the Lockerbie trial resulted in a colossal miscarriage of justice has been placed in the public arena.’

Tony Greenstein

What happened? The Story of Pan Am 103

Maid of the Seas, Pan Am 103, left the gate at Heathrow airport on time at 18.07 on the evening of 21st December 1988, taking off at 18.25. The aircraft was loaded from empty at Heathrow, however 49 passengers and their luggage were transferred from a feeder flight (Pan Am 103A) which had left Frankfurt at 16.50 local time. Maid of the Seas was due to land at John F Kennedy airport, New York, at 01.40 GMT. She fell out of the sky at 19.03 over southern Scotland, with the fuel-laden wings causing carnage in the small town of Lockerbie when they landed on occupied houses. In total, 270 people lost their lives. It was soon established that the cause of the crash was an explosion in the baggage container that had held the luggage transferred from the Frankfurt flight.

What was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi supposed to have done?

The court decided that he was a senior Libyan security officer who had bought a selection of clothes in a small shop in Sliema, Malta, only three miles from Luqa airport. Fragments of clothes from that shop were recovered from the crash scene, and the shopkeeper (Tony Gauci) remembered the sale. Megrahi then (allegedly) smuggled a suitcase containing these clothes and a Semtex bomb disguised in a radio-cassette recorder on to Air Malta flight KM180, which left Luqa at 09.45 local time on 21st December, for Frankfurt. The suitcase was said to be unaccompanied, and to carry Air Malta tags directing it to be transferred at Frankfurt to PA103A, and then at Heathrow to PA103. He was alleged to have used an electronic countdown timer set to detonate the bomb after the transatlantic leg had left Heathrow.

What was the evidence for this?

Evidence against Megrahi fell under a number of headings.

1. A member of the Libyan security services who had turned CIA informer identified him as a senior security operative.

2. Tony Gauci identified him as 'resembling' the man who bought the clothes in his shop.

3. He was shown to have been at Luqa airport at the time KM180 departed, travelling on a false passport.

4. Baggage transfer records at Frankfurt showed evidence of an item of luggage being transferred from KM180 to PA103A, even though no passenger from the Malta flight was booked on the Heathrow flight, and all the passengers collected their luggage at their destinations with nothing going astray.

A small piece of printed circuit board found embedded in a scrap of the Maltese clothes was identified as a part of a countdown timer made by a Swiss firm which Megrahi had had business dealings with. This timer was part of a special order of only 20 items supplied exclusively to Libya.

The difficulty with this is firstly that each of these points fails to stand up to serious scrutiny, and secondly that far more robust evidence exists for both a different modus operandi and a different set of perpetrators.

Membership of the Libyan security services

The CIA informant, Majid Giaka, was originally the Crown's star witness. Without his evidence, the indictments against Megrahi and his colleague Lamin Fhimah (who was acquitted) could not have been issued in the first place. However, CIA cables revealed during the trial exposed Giaka as a fantasist who was inventing 'intelligence' for favours and money from the CIA. The judges discounted all his evidence except for his statement that Megrahi was a member of the Libyan security forces. No other evidence for this was produced, and Megrahi has consistently denied the allegation. No evidence has ever emerged linking Megrahi to any other terrorist atrocities or human rights abuses of the Gaddafi regime, or to refute his claim that he was merely an airline employee who was also moonlighting as an entrepreneur businessman.

The identification evidence Tony Gauci was first interviewed about the clothes sale on 1st September 1989, nine months after the event. He described the purchaser as Libyan, aged about 50, over six feet tall, heavily built and dark-skinned. Megrahi is 5 feet 8 inches tall, light-skinned, of medium build, and was 36 at the time of the purchase. A photofit and an artist’s impression produced at the time suggest the man may have been negro or mixed race. Gauci was unsure of the date, but this was narrowed down to either 23rd November or 7th December 1988 on the basis of televised football games. Gauci stated that the Christmas lights were not yet lit, and it was raining when the customer left the shop.

On 15th February 1991 (well over two years after the purchase) Gauci was shown a police photospread including a picture of Megrahi. He initially rejected all the men as being 'too young', but when urged to reconsider he chose Megrahi's picture as the one that looked most like the customer. However, all the policemen present knew which picture was the suspect's, a recognised confounder in such exercises and something now banned, and Megrahi's picture was appreciably different from the others in both size and quality. As a further confounder the passport photo reproduction used was such a poor likeness of Megrahi as to be essentially unrecognisable. It did, however, look a bit like the photofit Gauci had produced in 1989.

By the time of the live identity parade in April 1999, better likenesses identifying Megrahi as the 'Lockerbie bomber' had appeared in many publications, which Gauci is known to have seen. (So widespread had been the publicity that most people following the case could probably have picked the accused out without ever having met him.) Megrahi was by then 47, close to the age the purchaser was said to be in 1988. The 'foils' in the parade were nearly all much younger (and bore little resemblance to Megrahi), even though by Gauci's original estimate the purchaser would by then have been in his early sixties. Megrahi in the flesh looked nothing like the images Gauci had produced for the police in 1989, or the blurry passport photo he picked out in 1991. Nevertheless, Gauci once again fingered him as 'resembling' the purchaser.

The date of the purchase was important, as Megrahi was in Malta on 7th December 1988 (using his own passport), but not on 23rd November. Meteorological evidence demonstrated that there was light rain in Sliema at the relevant time on 23rd November, but not on 7th December. The Christmas lights were eventually found to have been switched on on 6th December.

In late 1998 a magazine article was published with a recognisable photograph of Megrahi, together with a list of all the discrepancies between Gauci's original description of the purchaser and date, and the case against Megrahi. Gauci had a copy which was only taken from him four days before the identity parade. When he gave evidence, he consistently back-tracked on his original statements regarding height, build, age, Christmas lights and rain, always to favour the prosecution case. Tony Gauci's brother Paul, who was later rewarded for 'maintaining the resolve of his brother', had long expressed interest in a reward for the family's input, and after Megrahi was convicted the brothers were paid an alleged $3 million by the US Department of Justice's 'Rewards for Justice' programme.

Presence at Luqa airport

Megrahi was at Luqa airport on the morning of the disaster, using a passport in the name of 'Abdusamad'. However, all he did was catch his flight for Tripoli, without going airside, and without checking in any hold luggage. The court accepted that he could not have got the bomb suitcase on to KM180 himself, and must have had an accomplice. That accomplice was originally said to have been Lamin Fhimah, but Fhimah could not even be shown to have been at the airport that morning. The 'false' passport was a legal one, issued to Megrahi to allow him to conceal his airline employment while negotiating business deals to circumvent the sanctions then in force against Libya, and which he occasionally used for personal travel. Although Megrahi used it for that trip, he had business meetings in Malta using his own name, and stayed at a hotel where he was well known.

Not only was no other accomplice identified, security at Luqa airport was unusually tight in 1988, and baggage records provided strong evidence that there was no unaccompanied luggage on flight KM180. Despite intensive and intrusive investigation lasting many months, no plausible mechanism whereby the bomb suitcase could have been loaded was ever identified, and no trace of the bomb was found on the island.

Baggage transfer at Frankfurt

The only evidence for an unaccompanied suitcase coming from Malta was a single line of code in a printout taken from the Frankfurt airport automated baggage system, which surfaced in August 1989. However, that system was far from transparent, and a number of guesses and assumptions were necessary to conclude that something might have been transferred from KM180 to PA103A. In the end, two items apparently loaded on to the Heathrow flight could not be identified, one seeming to have come from Malta and one from Warsaw. The coincidence of the Maltese clothes caused the investigators to become convinced the former item was the bomb, and this was never reconsidered despite the failure to find any way the bomb could have been put on board at Luqa. The Warsaw-origin item was never investigated.

The timer fragment.

This is the most notorious item in the Lockerbie case. Originally the investigators believed the bomb to have been triggered by an altimeter device, operating on air pressure, and designed not to explode until the device was airborne (see the PFLP-GC, below). This introduced problems in respect of a Frankfurt introduction, as such a device should have exploded over France. A hypothesis was developed that the altimeter had malfunctioned on the feeder flight, only to detonate after the second take-off. When the focus of the investigation switched to Malta and a third flight, this introduced a paradox that was not addressed for over a year, until the identification of this fragment as part of a countdown timer resolved the difficulty.

The MST-13 timer was said to be one of a special run of only 20 supplied exclusively to Libya by the Swiss firm MEBO. Megrahi had business dealings with that firm, but not relating to, or at the time of, the purchase of the timers. Nevertheless this was said to be the 'golden thread' linking him to the bomb. This item had extraordinarily irregular provenance within the forensic investigation, with paperwork anomalies leading many commentators to suspect its appearance in the chain of evidence had been back-dated. In addition, the Libyan provenance was less certain than claimed, with Lockerbie occurring over two years after the timers were supplied, and examples having been found in other parts of Africa.

Irrespective of who had bombed the plane, the countdown timer introduced another paradox. Maid of the Seas exploded only 38 minutes after her wheels left the tarmac, and the plane was not late. There was a seven-hour flight ahead of her, with a thousand miles of Atlantic ocean where incriminating clothes and PCB fragments could have been buried forever. An altimeter timer would inevitably have exploded around 40 minutes into the flight, regardless of take-off time. Using a countdown timer set so early in the flight time carried a huge risk that the explosion would have occurred harmlessly on the tarmac if the plane had missed its slot at Heathrow – as could easily have happened on a stormy winter evening.

It was only in February 2012 that metallurgical evidence concealed from the original trial was revealed, which showed that the fragment could not have been one of the 20 items MEBO had supplied to Libya. This discovery calls into question whether the PCB chip was even part of a countdown timer, rather than some other electronic component using the same basic template.

Evidence for a Heathrow introduction

Although Maid of the Seas was loaded from empty at Heathrow, a press release issued on 30th December 1988 announced that the bomb had almost certainly not been introduced there, apparently because the location of the explosion had been traced to the baggage container holding the Frankfurt luggage. However, that container already held a number of suitcases before the Frankfurt items were added, and had been unattended in Terminal 3 for some time during the afternoon.

Baggage-handler JohnBedford was interviewed on 3rd January 1989, and told a strange story. He had left the container with a few suitcases already inside while he took a tea break. When he returned (this was still an hour before the feeder flight landed), he noticed two more cases had been added. He described the left-hand one, which was only a few inches from the position of the explosion, as 'a maroony-brown hardshell, the kind Samsonite make'. It was not until several weeks later that forensic analysis identified the bomb suitcase as a Samsonite hardshell in 'antique copper', variously described by investigators as brown, bronze, maroon and even burgundy. It was known that security at Heathrow was very lax, with many airside passes unaccounted-for. However, there is no evidence the police seriously investigated the possibility that the suitcase Bedford saw was the bomb-bag.

Reasons why this suitcase was not the bomb varied during the inquiry.

Originally (at the 1991 fatal accident inquiry) it was assumed absolutely that the case could not have been moved at all, thus as the explosion had occurred a few inches outside its last recorded position, it was innocent. Later (at Camp Zeist) this was reversed, and a suitcase from Frankfurt was placed in the position the Bedford case had originally occupied. One might think this obviously allowed for the possibility, even probability, that the Bedford case, replaced on top of this Frankfurt item, was indeed the bomb. Especially as no innocent suitcase recovered on the ground was ever matched to the one Bedford described. Nevertheless the prosecution insisted that the tenuous trail of the Frankfurt baggage printout was the one to follow, rather than the only brown Samsonite suitcase actually seen by any witness.

It was only after Megrahi had been convicted that another witness came forward to testify that there had been a break-in into that very area of the Heathrow airside, the night before the disaster. This had been reported at the time, but not acted on. Clearly, this could have been the way the suitcase was taken airside, to allow the terrorist to enter the next day, apparently empty-handed. It was not until 2007 that it was realised that one witness whose evidence had been crucial both at the FAI and the civil actions against Pan Am in the USA in the early 1990s had not been called at Camp Zeist. DC Derek Henderson had conducted reconciliations on the baggage carried by passengers on PA103, and concluded that none of them had checked in a brown-ish Samsonite. This was considered crucial in proving that the bomb had not been planted in a passenger's luggage. However, it also proved that the suitcase Bedford saw was not legitimate passenger baggage. Lacking his evidence, the Zeist judges were able to decide that Bedford's case belonged to a passenger, and had simply vanished over Lockerbie.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command

The saga of the Frankfurt cell of this terrorist group, its murderous members, their shocking past form in blowing up airliners, their possession of explosives, radio-cassette recorders and altimeter-type timers, and their serious intent to blow up an airliner in autumn 1988, has been well-rehearsed elsewhere. There is evidence to suggest they were sponsored by Iran to take revenge for the US shooting down of the Iranian airbus flight IR655 over the Straits of Hormuz in July 1988. What there was not, was any evidence to link this group to the actual placing of a device on Pan Am 103. Whether this is because the investigators spent all their time and effort investigating the feeder flight, and latterly concentrating exclusively on Malta, and neglected to investigate Heathrow as a possible point of origin, cannot be known.

The reasoning of the Zeist court

The trial at Camp Zeist took place nine years after the indictments were issued against Megrahi and Fhimah. Nine years of international publicity and condemnation, of house arrest for the suspects, and punitive sanctions imposed on Libya, which was assumed to be guilty. It is difficult to see how the presumption of innocence could be maintained in this context. The reasoning of the judges has been subject to much criticism as being perverse; 'inference piled upon supposition'. At almost every turn a less probable explanation that implied guilt was preferred to a more probable explanation that implied innocence.

The rationale of the judgement has been variously described as circular reasoning, petitio principii and begging the question. First, the judges decided for no readily apparent reason that the date of the clothes purchase was 7th December,despite the evidence of the rainfall records. Then, they decided that although Gauci's identification of Megrahi was 'only partial', the fact that Megrahi had been in Malta on the day of the purchase, and had been at the airport at the time they had decided the bomb was invisibly levitated on board KM180, and knew the manufacturer of the timing devices, showed that he was indeed the purchaser beyond reasonable doubt. Then, when turning to the extraordinarily tenuous evidence at Frankfurt, the possibility that the entry being relied on was a mere coding anomaly was rejected on the grounds that the man they had decided had bought the clothes in the suitcase was at the airport when the flight in question had left.

Although Giaka was acknowledged as a lying fantasist his assertion that Megrahi was a senior security operative was accepted, and the 'coded' diplomatic Abdusamad passport judged to be highly incriminating. Megrahi having lied to a journalist in a panicked interview shortly after being indicted was also held against him. The extensive terrorist record of the PFLP-GC members was brushed aside in favour of blaming a man who had no such history, and their possession of radio-cassette bombs designed to attack aircraft ignored in favour of an imaginary device that Megrahi was merely assumed to have assembled.

Withholding of evidence

Inquiries carried out in connection with Megrahi's appeals revealed an alarming amount of important evidence never disclosed to the defence. These are only a selection.

• The report of the break-in at Heathrow the night before the disaster

• DC Henderson’s baggage reconciliation report (despite his having given evidence at the FAI and in the USA in the 1990s)

• A statement from Gauci stating that the clothes purchase occurred on 29th November

• Police notes documenting the desire of the Gauci brothers for a reward payment

• The metallurgy results showing the coating on the 'timer' fragment was pure tin, while all the timers made for MEBO were coated with a tin-lead alloy

• The infamous 'public interest immunity' documents relating to the timer fragment

It seems inescapable that if the Zeist court had had access to the withheld evidence, their reasoning might well have been different.

Conclusion

The weight of evidence that the Lockerbie bomb was introduced at Heathrow (not all of which can be rehearsed here) is absolutely compelling. In contrast the evidence that the bomb transited from Malta through Frankfurt is beyond tenuous. In addition, no dispassionate examination of Tony Gauci's various and varied statements can possibly lead to the conclusion that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi bought the clothes in the bomb suitcase. Bearing in mind that Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli at 4pm on 21st December 1988, the time John Bedford took his tea break, some might reasonably observe that he has an alibi. It was his misfortune to be at the other end of the blind alley the investigators pursued to Malta, looking just suspicious enough and with the right contacts to have a wholly inferential case constructed against him.