Lockerbie bomb started at Heathrow, not Malta via Frankfurt

[Lockerbie bomb was loaded at Heathrow is the heading over a press release issued to mark the appearance of Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. The official publication date is 21 December, the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, but the book will be available on 10 December or very shortly thereafter.  The press release reads as follows:]

A new book proves that the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie originated at Heathrow and not at Malta as the Court accepted.

Adequately Explained by Stupidity? - Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies has been written by Dr Morag Kerr, Secretary-Depute of the Justice for Megrahi committee.

It’s the only book about Lockerbie to deal specifically with the detail of the transfer baggage evidence. It exposes shocking deficiencies in both the police enquiry and the forensic investigation which led the hunt in entirely the wrong direction.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outrage, the 220-page book comprehensively destroys the official account of what happened on December 21, 1988.

Dr Kerr’s book, described by Terry Waite in his foreword as “a masterpiece of forensic investigation”, shows with faultless logic that the bomb was loaded at Heathrow.

This means that Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing, is innocent. He didn’t do it.

“I have proved the bomb originated at Heathrow,” says Dr Kerr.

“I have been given access to statements, reports and photographs, some of which have not until now been publicly available. Detailed analysis of the forensic findings, something not done by the investigators themselves, contradicts the conclusions reached by the court.

“It is a very simple narrative. Heathrow was indeed the scene of the crime. There is irrefutable evidence the bomb was in a suitcase seen at Heathrow before the feeder flight from Frankfurt landed. Megrahi was nowhere near the place at the time and could not possibly have had anything to do with it. The Lockerbie investigation was horrifically bungled thanks to stupidity, carelessness and tunnel vision. The Police made a fatal error in 1989 and eliminated Heathrow on a false assumption.

”The damaged suitcases which were recovered at Lockerbie are like the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. The forensic scientists made no attempt to solve this puzzle but it’s actually not difficult. Once the puzzle is solved, the truth is revealed.

”The prosecution’s case was that two Libyans, Megrahi and Fhimah, had placed the bomb in a brown Samsonite suitcase in Malta. They then put the suitcase into the baggage system at Malta’s Luqa Airport as unaccompanied luggage. It then went on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, it was transferred to a feeder flight to Heathrow and was subsequently loaded onto Pan Am 103 where it exploded after thirty-eight minutes killing 270 people.”

Dr Kerr says: “The biggest mystery of the entire saga is why the police persisted in their absolute conviction that the bomb had travelled on that flight from Malta. All the luggage loaded onto the aircraft in question was accounted for and there were no unaccompanied bags.

“This is even more surprising when you realise that within weeks of the disaster, the investigation had very strong evidence indicating that the bomb had actually been smuggled into a baggage container at Heathrow Airport, an hour before the feeder flight from Frankfurt landed.”

In early January 1989, John Bedford, a baggage handler in the Heathrow interline shed, said he had seen a brown Samsonite suitcase which had mysteriously appeared in the bottom front left-hand corner of an aluminium baggage container, AVE4041, on his return from a tea break. This container held luggage that was to be loaded onto Pan Am 103 and that precise corner of the container was known by investigators to be where the explosion had happened.

The case John Bedford saw that afternoon has become known as the “Bedford suitcase”.

Dr Kerr writes: “Rather than pursuing this vital lead vigorously, the police more or less ignored it. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the forensic results to declare: bomb on second layer, no Heathrow-origin luggage on second layer, therefore bomb arrived fromFrankfurt.”

But by meticulously scrutinising baggage records, witness statements, police memos, forensic reports and original case photographs, Dr Kerr has pinpointed the precise location of the blast-damaged suitcases inside AVE4041 in relation to the seat of the explosion to show that the “Bedford suitcase” contained the bomb.

“We have to ask how the Scottish police managed to overlook a shed-load of evidence showing that the bomb had been introduced at Heathrow; how the forensic scientists and Air Accident Investigation Branch inspectors compounded this error by misinterpreting and failing to interpret the evidence from the recovered debris; and why the Crown prosecution at the Camp Zeist trial chose to conceal so much important information from the court and present a contrived scenario that was entirely at odds with fundamental forensic thinking about the case since 1989.”

She adds: “We convicted Megrahi on evidence that wouldn’t support the issuing of a parking ticket, imprisoned him 1800 miles from his home and family and turned him into an international hate figure while he was in the terminal stages of aggressive prostate cancer.

“They say “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”, but is that enough to account for what happened in the Lockerbie inquiry? Was this simply incompetence and tunnel vision or were the investigators deliberately lured away from making the Heathrow connection?”

Professor Robert Black QC commented: “Morag Kerr has analysed the information with forensic rigour and the prosecution scenario of the bomb being in an unaccompanied bag from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow is utterly destroyed. Whoever was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, Morag Kerr has conclusively demonstrated that it was not Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.”

Dr Kerr's detailed findings have been in the hands of the Scottish police for over a year now as part of the investigations surrounding allegations of criminality lodged by Justice for Megrahi against forensic, legal and police officials involved in the Lockerbie investigation and subsequent Camp Zeist trial.

The book’s publication date is December 21 but it has been released early by publishers Troubador Publications (www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=2499).

Morag Kerr was born in Lanarkshire in 1953. She qualified as a veterinary surgeon fromGlasgow University in 1976 and continued postgraduate study in biochemistry. She was awarded her PhD in 1985 and specialised in clinical pathology and laboratory medicine. She taught at the Royal Veterinary College from 1982-8 and then worked in private diagnostic laboratories in Scotland and England. She joined Justice for Megrahi in 2010. She lives in Peeblesshire

[Today's edition of The Scotsman carries this story.  The Herald also carries a report, which can be read here. The reaction of the Crown Office is reported in it as follows:]

Last night a Crown Office spokesman dismissed Ms Kerr's claims. He said: "The theory set out in this book was rejected as speculation by the court. [RB: The evidence uncovered and analysed by Dr Kerr was never placed before the court at Zeist. The Crown Office, as so often in this case, is being economical with the truth.]

"The only appropriate forum for the determination of guilt or innocence is the criminal court, and Mr Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior judges. His conviction was upheld unanimously by five judges, in an Appeal Court presided over by the Lord Justice General, Scotland's most senior judge.

"As the investigation remains live, it would not be appropriate to offer further comment."

Why Heathrow is back in the frame

[This is the headline over a report in the current issue of Private Eye.  It reads as follows:]

The bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie 25 years ago, killing 270 people, was loaded on to the plane at Heathrow, contrary to prosecution claims that it started its journey in Malta, a new book claims.

Adequately Explained by Stupidity?: Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies, by forensic pathologist Dr Morag Kerr, argues that crucial evidence about the suitcase bomb was withheld from the trial of Abdelbasset al-Megrahi because it would have provided the Libyan with a water-tight alibi.

The 220-page book is the result of a painstaking analysis of all the forensic evidence. Dr Kerr, a member of the Justice for Megrahi Committee, traced and matched baggage and passenger records of Pan Am 103 with its connecting flights, in particular the Maltese flight, which linked up with the Pan Am feeder flight from Frankfurt.

She examined witness statements, police memos and prosecution notes, as well as all the conflicting evidence – and judgments – about the bomb presented at the fatal accident inquiry, the civil case for damages against Pan Am brought by bereaved families, and at the trial and appeal of Megrahi. She makes a compelling case for identifying exactly which case contained the bomb and how it was smuggled aboard Pan Am 103 – and it wasn’t, she believes, from Malta.

It will not surprise those who have followed the Eye’s argument that Megrahi was the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice that Dr Kerr identifies instead the mystery brown/maroon suitcase spotted on a container at Heathrow destined for loading on to the US-bound flight.

Exact match

Baggage handler John Bedford noticed the hard-shell Samsonite after he returned from a break. His colleague denied putting it there, but as it was complete with security tags it didn’t arouse suspicion at the time. According to the baggage handlers, it was one of six or seven bags, which filled the bottom row of the container.

Coupled with the fact that there was a breach of the fence separating the public and secure airline areas the night before the flight (which was also not revealed at the trial), Dr Kerr barely conceals her incredulity that police seemed uninterested in following up the possibility that someone may have smuggled the bomb through the Heathrow baggage handling system – even when scientists discovered the Samsonite was an exact match to the bomb case.

That may have been because very early on suspicion fell on a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist cell, the PFLP, operating out of Germany, who had been caught with explosive devices equipped to bring down planes. Luggage from the Frankfurt feeder flight had been placed on top of Heathrow baggage and suspicion initially fell on German airport security.

Fool-proof security

Later, of course, the focus switched to Malta, with the discovery that the suitcase bomb was stuffed full of clothes bought from Tony Gauci, the shopkeeper who claimed – after seeing photographs of Megrahi – that the man who had bought the clothes strongly resembled the Libyan. But as Dr Kerr makes clear, there was no evidence of any unaccounted-for baggage at Malta and no evidence of how it could have been smuggled on to the plane by anyone, let alone Megrahi. He just happened to be at the airport that day. It was a difficulty in the prosecution case recognised at both Megrahi’s trial and appeal (in which the judge said that “there is considerable and quite convincing evidence that it could not have happened”) – but a difficulty they decided to ignore.

Unlike Malta, which had a pretty foolproof security system of double-checking luggage, Dr Kerr concludes that security at both Frankfurt and Heathrow was lax. There were multiple unaccounted-for bags at Frankfurt, while at Heathrow – the break-in aside – security was such that the loading shed and baggage trays were left unattended and security labels were available in unlocked drawers.

Not for the first time in the troubled case, Dr Kerr also completely takes apart the forensic evidence presented by the government scientists. Their evidence was that the exploding Samsonite case could not have been the bag described by Mr Bedford. In fact, says Dr Kerr, it is easy to piece together exactly which bag was next to which from the relative blast damage to all – something she says the scientists never did. She adds that all the evidence taken together shows “without any doubt whatsoever” that the bomb suitcase was loaded flat, with the handle facing the back of the container – just as described by Mr Bedford.

A ‘contrived scenario’

The Crown Office has dismissed Dr Kerr’s book as “speculation” and said that Mr Bedford’s evidence was “rigorously tested during the trial and subsequent appeal”. But as she goes to some lengths to demonstrate, the evidence in its entirety had never been properly tested until now.

Adding her weight to the calls for a fresh inquiry, Dr Kerr said it should include how Scottish police overlooked “a shed-load of evidence” pointing to Heathrow as the source of the bomb, how forensic scientists compounded the error by misinterpreting or failing to interpret all the evidence recovered from the crash site, and why prosecutors “chose to conceal so much important information from the court” and presented instead what she described as “a contrived scenario”.

Coming 25 years after the UK’s worst terrorist atrocity – and two years after new evidence showed that scientists’ claims at trial that a tiny piece of bomb fragment recovered from the site matched those supplied to Libya were also false – the case for an investigation into the scandal is now overwhelming.

Highest Bayesian probability of Megrahi guilt 23 per cent

[Two highly important articles have recently been posted on the website Three Sides to Every Story. The first is headed Why the Lockerbie bomb was loaded at Heathrow and Megrahi was innocent. The first two paragraphs and the last paragraph of the lengthy piece read as follows:]

It is slightly shocking that Morag Kerr's book, which gives the first ever convincing, evidence-based reconstruction of the Lockerbie bombing, has not been reviewed in a major UK-wide newspaper since coming out in December.

She completely rebuts the case which was pressed by the Crown and accepted by the Camp Zeist court against the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan agent, who served [8] years in prison in Scotland after conviction.  She also shows how the crime was really committed: not by Megrahi loading the suitcase with the bomb at Malta, to be transferred at Frankfurt onto the plane to Heathrow that was set to go on to New York City, before detonating over Scotland, but rather by persons unknown spiriting the suitcase onto the plane at Heathrow by placing it in a luggage shed ready to go directly on board Pan Am 103 to New York City. (...)

You will have to read the book and judge the forensic complexities for yourself.  For my part, I am convinced that Kerr is the first person to accurately reconstruct the Lockerbie bombing.  It was a crime perpetrated at Heathrow, and an innocent man suffered for it.  It is a textbook case of a miscarriage of justice, featuring leads missed by the police, unfeasible reconstructions of events and incompetent experts, as well as misconstrued, unreliable evidence both material and eye-witness.  The judges constructed a circumstantial case by irrationally explaining away key exculpatory evidence.  Kerr's book is not only a triumph of critical, evidence-based investigation, but also an instructive example of how a miscarriage of justice can occur.

[The second article is headed Bayesian probability analysis of the guilty verdict against Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing. The first two paragraph read as follows:]

In my first post about the Lockerbie bombing, I discussed Morag Kerr's book reconstructing the commission of the Lockerbie bombing and demonstrating the innocence of the convicted man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.  In common with most humanistic reasoning, neither the verdict that condemned him nor Kerr's argument for his exoneration deployed any arithmetic of probability in analysing the evidence.  I think the widespread lack of arithmetical analysis of evidence is a serious weakness in fields like criminal law and history.

In this, I am following Richard Carrier in his book Proving History.  I am persuaded by him that we ought not just to use adjectives like "possible" and "probable" when we debate which theories best explain the evidence before us on a contentious historical or forensic question.  Additionally, we should use Bayes' Theorem: using numbers to express our opinions, and multiplying and dividing them according to Bayes' formula in order to calculate our reckoning of which theory explains the evidence the best.  The three main virtues of Bayes' Theorem are that it forces the analyst of evidence to specify clearly how good they think a theory is at explaining the evidence; it enables them to put all the evidence together in a mathematically sound way; and, above all, it forces them to look for evidence that supports their theory better than alternative theories, thus helping them to overcome the common failure to give alternatives due consideration.  Of course, different people can have different opinions about probabilities: the virtue of Bayes is that it brings out exactly what people agree and disagree about, and thus focuses their debate productively on crucial areas of disagreement.

[The author then subjects the evidence against Megrahi to Bayesian probability analysis and concludes that the highest probability of guilt that the judges should have arrived at was 23% and concludes:]

The judges failed to use Bayesian reasoning, which would have shown them that, far from a series of improbabilities adding up to a proof of Megrahi's guilt, they should have multiplied them out to a much greater sense of doubt.  They failed to appreciate that the crime was such an unlikely one on principle, that iron-clad evidence of Megrahi's guilt was required to overcome the prior improbability: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  A circumstantial case built on improbabilities does not cut it.

If the judges had applied correct probabilistic reasoning to the facts they did have about an unaccompanied bag from Warsaw, then this would have neutralised the evidence of an unaccompanied bag coming from Malta.

Of course, if we included the evidence explained yesterday, and considered how probable it was, on a hypothesis of Megrahi's guilt, that a mysterious suitcase answering to the description of the bomb-case would be seen by a baggage-handler at Heathrow before the feeder flight from Frankfurt had even arrived, then it would only be fair to divide the 23% we have come to here by maybe 10 times, if not more.  Include all the evidence, and the probability of guilt is minimal.

Moreover, include a more realistic expectation of the probability of getting the bomb into the baggage system at Malta, and the probability drops again to a minuscule number.

In sum, even without the new understanding born of Kerr's investigation, Megrahi should not have been found guilty. With it, his innocence is proven.

Thus the worst mass-murder in British history, the killing of 270 people, should be regarded as an unsolved crime.

‘I’ve proved Lockerbie bomb not from Malta’

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday afternoon on the website of The Times of Malta.  It reads as follows:]

New book’s author says explosive device was planted on plane at Heathrow

The bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie originated at Heathrow and not Malta, a new book “proves” 25 years after the deadly explosion.

“I have proved the bomb originated at Heathrow,” said author Morag Kerr, who has been given access to statements, reports and photographs, some of which have not been publicly available until now.

The book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? – Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies comprehensively destroys the official account of what happened on December 21, 1988.

In 2001 Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of placing the bomb in a brown Samsonite suitcase and loading it on to an Air Malta aircraft at Luqa. It was then purportedly transferred to a feeder flight at Frankfurt before reaching the doomed aircraft at Heathrow. Minutes later it exploded over Scotland, killing 270 people, 11 on the ground.

The book by Dr Kerr, deputy secretary of the Justice for Megrahi committee, deals specifically with the detail of the transfer baggage evidence.

It exposes deficiencies in both the police enquiry and the forensic investigation which led the hunt in entirely the wrong direction.

“Al-Megrahi was nowhere near the place at the time and could not possibly have had anything to do with it. The Lockerbie investigation was horrifically bungled thanks to stupidity, carelessness and tunnel vision,” the author says.

The police made a fatal error in 1989 and eliminated Heathrow on a false assumption.

“The biggest mystery of the entire saga is why the police persisted in their absolute conviction that the bomb had travelled on that flight from Malta. All luggage loaded on to the aircraft in question was accounted for and there were no unaccompanied bags,” Dr Kerr says.

Within weeks of the disaster, the investigation had very strong evidence indicating the bomb had actually been smuggled into a baggage container at Heathrow Airport.

In early January 1989, a Heathrow baggage handler said he had seen a brown Samsonite suitcase which had mysteriously appeared in the baggage container on his return from a tea break. This container held luggage that was to be loaded on to Pan Am 103 and that precise corner of the container was known by investigators to be where the explosion had happened.

Rather than pursuing this vital lead vigorously, the police more or less ignored it, the author insists.

By scrutinising baggage records, witness statements, police memos, forensic reports and original case photographs, Dr Kerr has pinpointed the precise location of the blast-damaged suitcases. The author said her detailed findings have been in the hands of the Scottish police for over a year now.

Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed at Lockerbie, said when contacted yesterday that Dr Kerr’s book was compatible with his own probe into the matter.

Despite the new evidence, Dr Swire said the US and British governments will remain determined to sell the theory that al-Megrahi planted the bomb in Malta.

“Sadly they are determined to obstruct the truth. But we have long been convinced that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber,” Dr Swire told Times of Malta.

As the world marks the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie tragedy, a number of new facts and theories are emerging. A documentary to be released by Al Jazeera on Sunday will look into who could have really been the Lockerbie bomber.

Speaking on Times Talk recently, Maltese Foreign Affairs Minister George Vella said he was sure al-Megrahi was innocent.

Public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001

[What follows is a review by Graeme Purves on the Bella Caledonia website of Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies.]

Most of us who are old enough will remember the shock with which we learned of the atrocity which ended the lives of 270 people at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988.  I first heard about it from an evening BBC radio news bulletin while lying in bed with a nasty dose of flu.  At first I thought it was a preposterous fantasy conjured up by my fevered condition and staggered through to the television in the sitting room to have the horror confirmed.

Dr Morag Kerr is a Borders-based vet who has previously written books on veterinary laboratory medicine and pet care.  A trip which involved driving along the A74 less than two days after the Maid of the Seas fell from the sky was the initial stimulus for her meticulous research into how that terrible event came about.  She has been Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi since 2010.

The safety of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction at the trial at Camp Zeist has troubled the national conscience for the last 13 years.   Dr Jim Swire whose daughter Flora died at Lockerbie was one of those not persuaded by the prosecution case.  He subsequently befriended Megrahi and has campaigned tirelessly and with great integrity and dignity for a re-examination of the evidence.  Dramatisations challenging the version of events accepted in the Camp Zeist judgement have played to packed houses at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  James Robertson’s novel, The Professor of Truth, draws its power from the widespread unease over the official attribution of responsibility.

A number of books have examined the voluminous evidence accumulated as a result of the investigations into the crime. John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury explores in detail the provenance of the circuit board fragment identified by investigators as part of a timer used in the bomb and the questions over the reliability of Tony Gauci’s identification of Megrahi as the man who bought the clothes packed in the bomb suitcase.  And disquieting revelations about the case continue to emerge.  On 20 December, Channel 4 News reported that between 1990 and 1995 several senior Syrian officials had told CIA agent Dr Richard Fuisz that the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, led by Ahmed Jibril, was responsible for the bombing.

Morag Kerr’s book is the first book about Lockerbie to deal rigorously with the detail of the transfer baggage evidence.  On the basis of a careful analysis of reports, statements and photographs not previously available to the public she presents compelling evidence that the Samsonite hardshell case containing the bomb could not have been loaded on flight KM180 in Malta because it was already in luggage container AVE4041 in the interline shed at Heathrow an hour before the connecting Boeing 727 from Frankfurt (PA103A) had landed.

If the bomb was indeed introduced into the luggage transfer system at Heathrow, then the whole case against Megrahi and Libya crumbles away.  Morag Kerr wants to see an inquiry into the police and forensic investigations of Lockerbie which she regards as seriously flawed.  Given the growing body of evidence which cannot readily be reconciled with the Camp Zeist judgement, only a fresh consideration of the case by a Scottish court can assuage public concern that a great injustice may have been done in 2001.

Review of Morag Kerr's "splendid new book"

Baz, the author of The Masonic Verses blog (and a frequent commentator on this blog) has written a long review of Dr Morag Kerr’s Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. The whole review merits close study.  What follows is the first six paragraphs:]

1.      Chapter 1 of Doctor Morag Kerr's splendid new book on the Lockerbie disaster Adequately Explained by Stupidity? is titled  "A Case About Cases".   True enough but it is essentially a Tale of Two Cases, to be precise two identical brown (or "antique bronze")  hard-sided Samsonite suitcases one of which contained the Improvised Explosive Device that destroyed flight PA103 over Scotland on the evening of the 21st December 1989 twenty-five years ago.

2.      One of these suitcases was very real.  The second did not exist at all outside the collective imaginations of the Police investigators notably Chief Superintendent John Orr, relevant lawyers at the Crown Office, perhaps even amongst members of the defence team and the three (or four) trial judges at all.

3.    The real one was placed within container AVE4041 in the Interline baggage shed at Heathrow before the feeder flight  PA103A arrived from Frankfurt.  It was placed at the bottom front left close to or in the actual position the bomb exploded.  Three witnesses saw it.  Who put it there? Well nobody ever put there hand up.

4. And the second imaginary suitcase?  Well Mr Megrahi was seen on Malta with a brown Samsonite but the evidence of that "witness" Majid Giaka was almost entirely discounted by the Trial Judges (or so they said.)   This imaginary suitcase was smuggled on board flight KM180 at Luqa Airport on the morning on the 21st December 1988 where by coincidence (or not) Megrahi was taking a flight home to Tripoli.   Security at Luqa was tight.  How was it smuggled onto the flight?  Nobody knows.  it was the Crown case that security was circumvented but they didn't even have a theory.

5.   At Frankfurt this imaginary bag was supposedly transferred to the feeder flight PA103A all the while it's timer ticking away.  How was this done?  Well all computerised records were lost but some sort of printout was retrieved which supposedly proved with a lot of mumbo jumbo about baggage trays coding stations and x-ray machines and the bag arrived in Heathrow where with a number of other bags from the feeder flight were placed in AVE4041 on the tarmac on top of several bags that were already within the container (including the real Samsonite.)  The loader then decided to rearrange the bags positioning this new brown Samsonite with another and moving the original brown Samsonite to "some far corner of the container."  Although the loader never actually said he did this.

6.       Doctor Kerr's fascinating book tells the quite remarkable story of how these two brown samsonites became switched.  The imaginary one became real blowing up in exactly the same position the real bag had occupied and the real bag became a phantom disappearing in a puff of smoke or a wormhole!  While there are similarities in the story to other great miscarriage of justice cases (a comparison with Ludovic Kennedy's classic on the Lindbergh case The Airman and the Carpenter springs to mind it's closest parallel is oddly  with the Hans Christian Anderson fable The [Emperor’s] New Clothes.

Very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case

[What follows is the text of a contribution by John Ashton in The Café section of today’s edition of the Scottish Review:]

Does Magnus Linklater run his Lockerbie articles through reverse fact-checking software before submitting them? How else I wonder could almost every one he writes contain so many basic errors?

His latest piece accuses me of failing to address new evidence concerning Mr Megrahi's relationship with alleged bomber Abouagela Masud. No one reading my recent articles could have failed to miss the fact that I acknowledged the evidence's potential significance and expressed my wish that it be put before the court. I also set out the reasons to treat it with scepticism, which I suspect is Mr Linklater’s real beef. Being sceptical is not the same as failing to address, but maybe his software conflates the two.

Mr Linklater acknowledges that he hasn't looked in detail at the evidence assembled by Dr Morag Kerr, which demonstrates that the bomb originated from Heathrow, rather than Malta (the latter being where Megrahi and Masud flew from to Tripoli on the morning of the bombing). He doesn't need to, he says, because the evidence was considered and dismissed by the appeal court and Megrahi’s trial lawyers. Except it wasn’t. Dr Kerr has in fact gone far further than anyone else in considering the bomb’s origin. If Mr Linklater doesn’t believe me, I’ll be happy to send him the defence paperwork and copies of the appeal court transcripts. I challenge Mr Linklater to read Dr Kerr's book and tell us why it doesn't stand up.

Mr Linklater also asserts that '[for] a long time those who argued for the Heathrow theory placed a lot of weight on the evidence that there had been a break-in: a padlock had been cut, allowing access to a potential bomb-carrier. That theory, I believe, has now been abandoned, because the timing is not right'. Wrong again. The break-in may or may not be significant, but the evidence of Heathrow ingestion stands separately to it and has never been considered as reliant upon it. Furthermore, Dr Kerr, who is the most prominent proponent of Heathrow, has always said that the break-in was likely irrelevant.

Mr Linklater goes on to tell us: 'When you have a large and complex circumstantial case, everything has to to fit into a coherent picture. Picking one part and analysing it in detail is unconvincing if what you come up with ignores other contradictory evidence'. The trouble is, very little of the evidence now fits with the Crown case that he is so keen to defend. Mr Megrahi allegedly bought the clothes from a Maltese shop that were placed in the bomb suitcase, yet the evidence shows that he looked nothing like the purchaser and that the clothes were bought when he was not on the island. The Crown claimed that a fragment of circuit board found among the clothes matched ones in timers supplied exclusively to Libya, but we now know that it did not. Most importantly, the Crown’s central claim that the bomb originated from Malta has been destroyed by Dr Kerr. Take Malta out of the equation and Megrahi's presence there, his lies and his shady associations are irrelevant.

None of this has been properly addressed by Mr Linklater in any of his numerous articles on Lockerbie. Apparently it's okay to ignore contradictory evidence when it's the Crown case that is contradicted.