Lockerbie: Morag Kerr hits back at Magnus Linklater

[This is the headline over a letter from Dr Morag Kerr in The Café section of the issue of the Scottish Review published on 17 February:]

How dare Magnus Linklater (10 February) repeatedly traduce in print a book he hasn’t even had the courtesy to read! The false assumptions and downright fabrications in his latest sally make it all too clear that this is the case, despite his assurance to me two years ago that he had – even going so far as to call the unread text 'a remarkable piece of work'.

Does Mr Linklater seriously believe that I wrote a book in 2013 based entirely on premises the appeal court rejected in 2002? Of course I didn’t. Does he believe that the book merely points out (for about the ten-thousandth time) that the suitcase John Bedford saw in the baggage container an hour before the connecting flight from Frankfurt landed looks suspiciously like the bomb? There is much more to it than that. Does he imagine that I examined the Heathrow evidence in isolation from the rest of the case? The book would hardly be 220-pages long if that were so.

The break-in into Heathrow Terminal 3 the night before the disaster is irrelevant. It was freely acknowledged in court that airside security in 1988 was abysmal, and it would have been child’s play for anyone to walk in any time they liked. No midnight cutting of padlocks would have been necessary. The break-in happened, but whether it was related to the introduction of the bomb into the baggage container 17 hours later is an entirely moot point. I make this perfectly clear in the book, and I would take it very kindly if Mr Linklater would cease and desist from dragging up this irrelevancy at every turn, as if it somehow discredits my thesis.

The possibility that the bomb might have been in the case John Bedford saw was explored in the original trial, with the defence obviously keen to suggest that it was. What is remarkable is that no evidence was presented of any specific investigation into the provenance of that suitcase by the original inquiry. Apparently, it was merely assumed that it wasn’t the bomb.

The 'meat' of my book is a thorough investigation into the provenance of the case Bedford saw; the investigation which should have been done in 1989 but wasn’t. In the course of this I examine witness statements, passenger and baggage transfer records and detailed photographs of the blast-damaged luggage – evidence that was for the most part not presented either at the original trial or the appeal. The results of this analysis are clear-cut. That was indeed the bomb suitcase, beyond any reasonable doubt. Once again I challenge Mr Linklater, and indeed anyone who has read the book, to explain why they don’t accept this analysis – based on evidence and logic, not dismissive sneers.

Mr Linklater implies that I am ignoring separate evidence of 'an unaccompanied bag coming from Malta that morning'. If he were to read my book he would discover that I pick apart the evidence for the existence of this bag in exhaustive detail, and come down firmly on the side of the German policeman who was originally assigned this task and whose report concludes: 'Throughout the inquiries into the baggage for PA103A there was no evidence that the bomb suitcase had been transferred with the luggage either from or via Frankfurt Main to London'.

Indeed, some clothing packed with the bomb was purchased on Malta, but as that purchase took place several weeks before the disaster it in no way precludes the bomb itself having been introduced at Heathrow. Again I deal with this point in great detail in the book, and in particular with the contention that Megrahi was the man who made that purchase. Clearly he was not, and the SCCRC report of 2007 underlined that pretty effectively.

Far from picking at one small point and ignoring the bigger picture, putting this point in context is exactly what the book is about. Not simply the compelling evidence that the bomb was already in the baggage container an hour before the flight from Frankfurt landed, but the extremely tight and well-documented security at Malta airport that shows no sign whatsoever of an illegitimate item of luggage on Air Malta flight 180. In this context I would refer Mr Linklater to the words of Lord Osborne at the first appeal in 2002. 'There is considerable and quite convincing evidence that that could not have happened.'

Mr Linklater, as always, sets great store by what the various judges concluded. In the context of a reasoned argument showing that these conclusions were wrong, this is an unhelpful begging of the question. The evidence I have analysed was not presented in court. Mine is an entirely new and more detailed dissection of the forensics than anything previously attempted.

I ask once again, although with fading hopes, that Mr Linklater go away and read my book, and then explain exactly where he takes issue with my reasoning or my conclusions. Or else refrain from commenting on something he clearly knows nothing about.

London's Heathrow, not Malta's Luqa

[What follows is an excerpt from Dr Morag Kerr’s Scottish Review article An overview of the Lockerbie case.  In it she sets out evidence for ingestion of the fatal suitcase at Heathrow and not, as the Crown claimed and the Zeist court accepted, Luqa Airport in Malta:]

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.

Looking in the wrong place

[What follows is the text of an article by Dr Morag Kerr that was published on Wings Over Scotland on this date in 2013:]

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie should be commended for starting 2013 with a legitimate request rather than a party-political attack. The Herald today reports his renewed call for a public inquiry into the events of the Lockerbie disaster.

The call was prompted by the new Libyan government’s pledge to release documents relating to the incident “as soon as time, security and stability permitted”. But what will such documents reveal beyond what we already know?

Tam Dalyell once said that the Lockerbie case is so complicated you’d need to be a Professor of Lockerbie Studies to understand it. In some ways that’s true, because there are interminable complications, wrinkles and what-ifs to consider. But there’s a simple way of looking at it too, and that is this: Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted because the police firmly believed the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 began its journey at Malta airport around nine o’clock on the morning of the disaster. Megrahi, who was suggested as a potential suspect by the CIA, was discovered to have been catching a plane from Malta to Tripoli that was open for check-in at precisely that time.

If the bomb really did fly from Malta, then it might be reasonable to regard Megrahi with a suspicious eye. But the evidence for the bomb ever having been within a thousand miles of the island of Malta is beyond tenuous, and Megrahi was never shown to have done anything at the airport that morning apart from catch his flight home. If the bomb was introduced somewhere else, he actually has a rather good alibi.

The biggest mystery of the entire saga is why the police persisted in their absolute conviction that the bomb had travelled on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, despite months and indeed years of investigation finding no evidence of anything untoward at the airport that morning, and in fact no way an unaccompanied suitcase could have been smuggled on board that plane. This is even more surprising when you realise that within only 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 a baggage handler at Heathrow described having seen a suitcase which he said had appeared mysteriously while he was away on a tea break, on the (previously bare) floor of the container in question, in the corner known by the investigators to be where the explosion had happened. He described the suitcase as a brown hardshell Samsonite. By mid-February, forensic examination had identified the suitcase containing the bomb as a brown plastic hardshell, and by March they knew it was a Samsonite.

The absence of any rejoicing at this point is positively spooky. Rather than pursuing this lead vigorously, the police more or less ignored it. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the forensic results to declare that the explosion had been in a suitcase on the second layer of luggage, and sure enough, the boffins concluded that’s probably how it was. There had been nothing on top of the mystery item before the Frankfurt luggage was added, therefore the bomb suitcase must have been one of the ones that came in on the feeder flight. The investigation remained stalled at this stage for months, until in August a tenuous lead was identified at Frankfurt which sent the police chasing off to Malta, and they never looked back.

The question that was never answered was this. Whose was the mystery suitcase loaded into the container while John Bedford was on his tea break, if it wasn’t the bomb?  The police seemed happy to leave that one hanging. That suitcase didn’t matter, because it was in the wrong place. By about two inches. That line of reasoning held up all through the initial stages of the investigation, and the Fatal Accident Inquiry in Dumfries in 1990-91. Bomb on second layer, no Heathrow-origin luggage on second layer, therefore bomb arrived from Frankfurt. This of course presupposed that the Heathrow-origin luggage had not been moved, but the baggage handler who loaded the suitcases from the feeder flight, Amarjit Sidhu, was adamant he hadn’t moved anything, so that was all right.

The problem with this is that it’s impossible. A suitcase under the bomb suitcase would inevitably have been pulverised. All six pieces of luggage identified as being legitimately placed in that container at Heathrow were recovered, and none of them sustained that sort of damage. Not only that, when the explosion ripped apart the bomb suitcase and the luggage in its immediate vicinity, it created a well-stirred mix of fragments which scattered across the countryside. The searchers combed the fields for these fragments, and the forensics team singled them out for special attention.

Numerous pieces of even the most severely damaged items were recovered in this way, and everything in that category (apart from the bomb suitcase itself) was known, legitimate Heathrow and Frankfurt passenger luggage. There was no sign of any innocent (even if unidentified) suitcase in the mix that might have been loaded at Heathrow and ended up below the bomb suitcase, brown Samsonite hardshell or not. So, if Sidhu hadn’t moved Bedford’s mystery suitcase, and the explosion had been in the case on top of Bedford’s case – well, the laws of physics look like they’re in a bit of trouble.

Putting it simply, both planks of the 1989 police reasoning cannot simultaneously be true. If Sidhu didn’t move the Heathrow-origin luggage, as was believed in 1989, then the Bedford suitcase (on the floor of the container) must have been the bomb, because there’s nothing else for it to be. If there is absolutely no wiggle-room at all for the bomb suitcase to have been on the floor of the container, then Sidhu must have moved the Bedford case – which demolishes the argument used in 1989 to exclude that case from being in the second layer, and again leaves the possibility of its being the bomb wide open.

The only brown Samsonite hardshell suitcase seen by any witness, which had appeared mysteriously in almost the exact position of the explosion, and which the police knew about less than three weeks after the disaster, was ruled out on  the basis on an absolute logical impossibility.

Once this paradox is identified, the crucial dilemma is clear. Which is less credible?  Sidhu’s statement that he didn’t move the Heathrow-origin luggage, or the forensic conclusion that the bomb suitcase had been on the second layer?  Because one of these is simply wrong.

Sidhu was absolutely consistent over three separate police statements that he definitely didn’t move that luggage. Then in the witness box in Dumfries, under oath, he emphatically and specifically denied having lifted out one of the original items and replaced it on a different layer. And there’s no reason why he should have done anything like that. The feeder flight was late, leaving him only 15 minutes for a job he normally had half an hour to complete; it was dark, cold, raining and blowing a gale; and the original items were already well positioned. Why on earth would he have started heaving cases he didn’t need to heave?

In contrast, the best estimate for the height of the explosion was ten inches above the floor of the container. The bomb suitcase was nine inches deep, but what’s the margin of error in that estimate anyway?  It’s also far from impossible that the stacked luggage shifted a few inches due to in-flight turbulence or even banking, moving the bottom suitcase into the position indicated. There were other factors of course, including an examination of the bashed-up and fragmented aluminium base of the container somewhat akin to Mystic Meg reading a palm, but it was all subjective opinion. The bomb suitcase certainly must have been either the case on the bottom of the stack or the one on top of it, and on balance the forensics boffins thought it was the upper one of the two, but that’s as far as it goes.

So what was the court’s decision on this point? That’s a tricky one. In actual fact the court at Camp Zeist was never made aware just how crucial an issue this was, and the bench merely accepted, “for the purposes of this argument” that the bomb suitcase had been on the second layer. How that came about, and John Bedford’s extraordinarily suspicious brown Samsonite hardshell came to be wafted airily to “some more remote corner of the container”, is a whole other article in itself.

But now here we are, in 2012. Megrahi’s second appeal (begun in 2009) centred mainly on the undermining of the eye-witness evidence said to have identified him as the man who bought the clothes packed in the suitcase with the bomb. While that argument was likely to have succeeded if he hadn’t dropped the appeal, it didn’t address the question of the route of the bomb suitcase. Did it fly from Malta, or was it introduced directly at Heathrow?

The ongoing Lockerbie investigation, paid for from our taxes, has been convinced that the bomb flew in from Malta since September 1989. It’s still convinced that Megrahi was “the Lockerbie bomber”, even if there is doubt about his having been the purchaser of the clothes. Why not? He was at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on to the Air Malta flight. He must have been involved! The ongoing investigation believes he didn’t act alone, though, and is determined to track down his supposed accomplices.

We’ve been hearing about investigations in Libya almost since the day of Gaddafi’s death. More than one Libyan official, anxious to curry favour with the Western powers, has claimed to have evidence of Gadaffi having ordered Megrahi to carry out the atrocity. All this has come to nothing. Now the investigators have turned their attention to Malta in the quest for the elusive “accomplices”, though what they imagine they’re going to find there after 24 years that the original investigation didn’t find in 1989-91 is difficult to understand.

When they find absolutely nothing on Malta, as they found absolutely nothing in Libya, is it too much to hope that some young, smart, entirely reconstructed detective might sit down and consider: could the reason we haven’t been able to find anything possibly be because we’re looking in the wrong place?

Megrahi trial and first appeal lawyers defend their performance

[I am grateful to both Richard Marquise and Frank Duggan for sending me the text of the following report published in The Times on 21 December. It was not referred to on this blog at the time because it did not, for some reason, appear on the newspaper website (to which I subscribe, albeit through gritted teeth given my reluctance to contribute to the Murdoch coffers). It reads as follows:]

One of the key lawyers involved in the Lockerbie case has broken silence to condemn critics of the Scottish justice system,  who claim that Libya was not responsible for  the atrocity.

Bill Taylor QC, who defended  the  convicted Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, argues that allegations claiming the attack was ordered by Iran rather than Libya were examined in detail at the time of the trial, and dismissed, because they did not stand up to detailed scrutiny.

“We did raise all of these other possibilities in the course of our defence,” he said. “They were examined in the greatest detail, and fully investigated, but they did not stand up.  It’s like all the theories in the Kennedy assassination. They  are simply doors that have to be opened, and investigated if you are defending – as  we did.”

Mr Taylor’s intervention comes on the 25th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, and follows a spate of conspiracy theories  aimed at undermining  the original verdict, which resulted in the conviction of al-Megrahi. The Libyan was imprisoned in Scotland, before being released and returned home  by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds in 2009.

Campaigners, led by Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the disaster, have long claimed that al-Megrahi was innocent, that Libya played no part in the bombing, and that the atrocity was ordered by Iran in retaliation for the downing of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in 1988.

However, lawyers involved at the time of the trial, who have not felt able to speak out in response, say that the Iran connection and other theories were subjected to rigorous scrutiny at the time, and failed to pass the standards required in a court of law.

In particular, the suggestion that the bomb was put on board at Heathrow rather than in Malta as the prosecution stated, was “tested to destruction” by the defence team, whose case would have been vindicated if it had stood up in court.

But it did not. They point out that those who now back the Heathrow theory have not been able to explain how clothes, purchased in Malta, were found in the suitcase in which the bomb was packed.

“If the suggestion is that the bomb was placed on board at Heathrow, how on earth did it occur to anybody to take a trip to Malta in order to buy some children’s clothing,  in order to take that clothing back to London to assemble a bomb?  It just doesn’t stack up,” said one member of the defence team.

Defence lawyers have always argued that  the identification evidence against al-Megrahi supplied by the Maltese shop-keeper Tony Gauci, was weak, and that if it had been tested in front of a jury, rather than being heard by three judges,  the Libyan would have been acquitted on those grounds.

The Scottish Crimninal Cases Review Commission, which examined the evidence in detail, concluded that this did constitute grounds for appeal. However, al-Megrahi returned to Libya before the appeal could be heard.

The evidence that he was involved in the plan to insert a bomb remains strong. At the time of the trial the prosecution sought to introduce additional evidence about the money he was paid by the Libyan government. Accounts totaling several million  dollars were found, which would have undermined al-Megrahi’s claim that he was only a low-level official. The evidence  was disallowed, because not enough time had been given to consider it.

Mr Taylor added  that the  decision by the  Libyan administration,  announced this week by the Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland, to appoint prosecutors to examine the evidence, undermined the  argument that Libyan was not involved in the outrage.  

He said: “If the bomb  was  planted in Heathrow or Frankfurt by people who were many  miles away in Libya, and of which the Libyans knew nothing, why is the new administration in Libya appointing two prosecutors,  who will be liaising  with the Lord Advocate in the discovery of any fresh evidence?”

[A commentary on this report will appear on this blog in due course. But in the meantime, for a rebuttal of the quite ludicrous assertion that the thesis of Heathrow rather than Malta ingestion of the bomb suitcase was “tested to destruction” by Megrahi’s defence team, readers are referred to Dr Morag Kerr’s book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies. An account of the performance of Megrahi’s then legal team during the Zeist trial and the first appeal can be found here.]

Lockerbie: Scene of the crime

[This is the headline over the fourth in Dr Morag Kerr’s series of articles for iScot magazine. It is to be found at pages 19 to 23 of the March 2016 issue. The following are excerpts:]

When Pan Am 103, Maid of the Seas, exploded over Lockerbie and crashed down on the Dumfriesshire market town, resulting in the biggest terrorist atrocity in the UK to date, it sparked a mystery which has been the centre of controversy for more than quarter of a century.

One thing is known, when the Boeing 747 began its journey from London on 21 December 1988 it was loaded from empty at Heathrow airport.  So, inevitably, the suitcase containing the bomb was put on board at Heathrow.  However, like almost everything else in this story it wasn’t quite that simple.  

While the bulk of the luggage had indeed been security checked in London, one batch was not.  Pan Am 103 had a feeder flight from Frankfurt that connected with the transatlantic flight at Heathrow, and it was carrying about 45 items of luggage that had been screened in Germany.  As pieces of blast-damaged aluminium were brought in from the fields over the Christmas weekend of 1988, it became clear that the explosion had been in the container holding this transfer luggage.

The reaction of the investigators seems to have been relief.  London’s flagship international airport was not responsible for the security breach that had allowed a bomb to destroy an aircraft and kill 270 people.  The news was headlined in the Times on Hogmanay.  The paper was confused about the change of aircraft at Heathrow, but the message was clear.  This was Germany’s responsibility.

There was more.  The German police themselves had reason to take the same view.  Only two months earlier they had arrested members of a Palestinian terrorist group, the PFLP-GC, who were found with improvised explosive devices designed to attack aircraft in flight. Most of these men had been released without charge, and it was feared they had regrouped and completed their mission.  Thus, by the end of the New Year holiday weekend, the investigation was on course.  The bomb had flown in on the feeder flight and the scene of the crime was Frankfurt.

Remarkably, this mindset remained unchanged as witness statements from Heathrow were collected and a rather different picture began to emerge.  On 31st December the baggage handler who had dealt with the transfer luggage (Amarjit Sidhu) stated that a number of suitcases were already in the container before he added the items from the Frankfurt flight.  On 3rd January the baggage handler who had dealt with the container earlier in the afternoon (John Bedford) confirmed this, and told a remarkable story.  He himself had loaded only a few cases along the back of the container, hinge-down-handle-up, before going for a tea break.  On his return he noticed two additional suitcases lying flat in front of these cases.  He said the x-ray operator Sulkash Kamboj told him he had loaded them in Bedford’s absence, but in his own statements Kamboj denied any knowledge of this.

On 9th January Bedford told the police that he remembered one of the extra cases being a brown Samsonite hardshell, and the other much the same.  It was already obvious that the explosion had occurred low down in the front left corner of the container, and by mid-January the forensic scientists were picking pieces of brown hardshell out of various other suitcases and finding larger pieces of the same case severely blast-damaged.  They had identified the bomb suitcase – a brown Samsonite hardshell.

The reaction of the investigators to this accumulation of information was extraordinary.  They ignored it.  While it was occasionally acknowledged that a Heathrow loading hadn’t been entirely ruled out, the investigation was going full steam ahead for Frankfurt.  Nobody, in January 1989 or later, made the slightest effort to figure out if the case Bedford described was legitimate passenger baggage.  Nobody attempted to match it to any of the luggage recovered on the ground. (...)

The judges declared that since the defence hadn’t proved the bomb was in the case Bedford saw, it could be disregarded, and chose to favour the Frankfurt route despite the missing data from that airport, the multiple unidentified items of transfer luggage, and the complete absence of an unaccompanied suitcase on Malta.

Nevertheless, huge questions remained unanswered.  What did Bedford see, if it wasn’t the bomb?  Could it have been legitimate passenger baggage?  Could it be matched to anything found on the ground?  Frustratingly, the information to allow this to be assessed wasn’t presented to the court.

To cut a long story short, the information was and is available, and it was finally analysed in 2012-13.  The key to the Crown’s abandoning of the theory that the luggage already in the container hadn’t been rearranged is the realisation that if the case Bedford saw had been under the bomb suitcase as the original investigation believed, it would inevitably have been blown to bits.  The search across Roxburghshire and beyond was thorough, and pieces of blast-damaged luggage were high priority.  Multiple pieces of the bomb suitcase and those surrounding it were recovered.  It beggars belief that nothing would have been found of the case that had been under the bomb.  But nothing was.

Set against this damning finding, all the prosecution had was the subjective opinions of the forensic scientists that the floor of the container would have shown “pitting and sooting” if the bomb had been in the bottom-level case.  However, that was shaky, as it had never been tested by experiment.  (Last year the experiment was finally done by an independent forensic institute, and sure enough, even with the bomb suitcase on the bottom, no pitting or sooting was seen.) (...)

Three baggage handlers who saw the container before the Frankfurt luggage was added were asked to reconstruct the loading as they remembered it.  All needed seven suitcases to make it look right, not six.  There was an extra, undocumented case in that container that afternoon, and it was the one lying to the front left, the one virtually bang on the position of the subsequent explosion, the one John Bedford described as a brown Samsonite hardshell.

Further evidence cements the conclusion that the bomb was in the suitcase on the bottom layer.  Although “pitting and sooting” were absent from the container floor itself, they were present on the section of the airframe under the floor, demonstrating that it was not protected by another intervening suitcase.  Examination of the two suitcases behind the explosion, which were loaded upright, shows the most severe damage right down at floor level, not halfway up the sides.  This really is “the picture that speaks a thousand words”.

The Lockerbie bombing was a crime that happened at Heathrow airport, at about half past four in the afternoon – not on Malta at nine in the morning.  At 4.30 pm on 21st December 1988 Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli.

Where does that leave the Lockerbie investigation, in 2016?  There are two Police Scotland investigations currently open – one operating on the assumption that the bomb was somehow smuggled on to KM180 on Malta and attempting to identify Megrahi’s alleged “accomplices”, the other looking at matters from an entirely different perspective.  Next month’s article will focus on the ongoing search for a resolution.

The real case for the Heathrow introduction

[This is the title of an article written by Dr Morag Kerr, author of Adequately Explained by Stupidity?, which she has very kindly allowed me to publish here.  It reads as follows:]

Since my book was published I have been invited to take part in a couple of radio and TV discussion programmes about the Lockerbie case, and in general it has been a frustrating experience.  My contention is that the bomb suitcase was introduced at Heathrow airport, around half past four in the afternoon, not at Malta in the morning as the Crown proposed.  I have very specific and absolutely incontrovertible evidence to prove that.

Of course that does, indirectly, demonstrate that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was not the man who put that suitcase on the plane.  He was provably in Tripoli at that time, which as it happens is well over a thousand miles from Heathrow airport.  What it does not do is give me some unique insight into who did plant the bomb.  And yet, that’s all the interviewers seem to want to ask me.  “Who do you think did it, Dr. Kerr?”

I have no freaking idea who did it.  I have read the same articles and watched the same documentaries as everyone else.  I might have an opinion based on that, but it would be no better informed than anyone else’s opinion formed on the same basis.  It is seriously not worth dragging me into Edinburgh to sit in front of a microphone or a TV camera to ask me that.

Who do I think did it?  Someone or someones who were at Heathrow airport on the afternoon of 21st December 1988, that’s who.  The rest is up to the police, assuming they can get their act together this time, 25 years after the event.  Ask me how I know the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, why don’t you?  That’s my contention, and that’s what might be worth hearing.

This is what the interviewers would hear, if they asked me the right questions.

The recovered blast-damaged suitcases in effect form the pieces of a large, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.  The forensic investigators assembledthese pieces individually, described them, photographed them, and even drew pictures of some of them.  What they did not do was solve the jigsaw.

This is very easy to do, using these descriptions, photographs and drawings, also taking into account the passenger and baggage movements into Heathrow that afternoon and the statements of the baggage handlers who interacted with container AVE4041 before it was loaded on to Maid of the Seas.  When the jigsaw is solved, the bomb turns out to have been inside a brown hardshell Samsonite suitcase, loaded in the bottom position in the left-hand front stack of suitcases.  The position where John Bedford reported seeing a brown hardshell Samsonite suitcase, almost an hour before the feeder flight from Frankfurt landed.

And that’s basically it.  More detail, for those deeply familiar with the details of the evidence (that’s you I’m talking to, Magnus Linklater and Bill Taylor) can of course be provided.

1.  The conviction depended absolutely on the assumption that a blue Tourister suitcase which was carried on the feeder flight was positioned on the floor of the container, immediately underneath the bomb suitcase.  However, the physical evidence of the recovered luggage demonstrates without any doubt that the Tourister was in fact positioned on top of the bomb suitcase.

I can be more specific.  Material from the Tourister was recorded as being blasted into and on to half a dozen of the other suitcases in the container, something which could not have happened if it had been blasted through the base of the container and away from the rest of the luggage.  Part of the Tourister was recovered entangled with parts of two other Frankfurt-origin suitcases, which again points to the same conclusion.  Most damningly of all, the case which was on top of the Tourister can be easily identified among the photographs of the recovered luggage, with material from both the Tourister and the IED itself plastered across its lid.

2.  The conviction depended absolutely on the assumption that the bomb suitcase was on the second layer of luggage in the container, not on the floor.  However, the physical evidence of the recovered luggage and the airframe under the base of the container demonstrate conclusively that there was no suitcase under the bomb suitcase -- the bomb was in the case on the bottom of the stack.

First, the condition of the bottom front corners of the two suitcases which were positioned upright, end-on, behind the bomb suitcase shows incontrovertibly that these corners were not protected by another suitcase at floor level.  Second, the pitting and sooting noted by the forensic investigators as being absent from the floor panel of the container is indisputably present on the parts of the airframe immediately under the floor panel.  Third, only one of the recovered suitcases was damaged in a manner consistent with its having been loaded flat against the bomb suitcase -- the blue Tourister.  The Tourister was on top of the bomb suitcase.  Despite numerous pieces of all the other items in the vicinity being recovered, there are no remains of a candidate for the “under the bomb” position.

3.  The conviction depended absolutely on baggage handler Amarjit Sidhu having rearranged the Heathrow interline luggage when he added the Frankfurt transfer luggage to the container.  Not only is it inherently unlikely that he would have done this, given the conditions under which he was working, he himself was quite clear in several police statements and again in the witness box at the Fatal Accident Inquiry that he did not do it.  There is not a shred of physical evidence to support the assertion that he was mistaken on this point.

The entire case focusses on this precise point: on the basis of the condition of the baggage container and the adjacent airframe components, the bomb suitcase must have been either the one on the bottom of the front left-hand stack of luggage or the one on top of it.  The former position was occupied by a suitcase loaded in the interline shed at Heathrow, and the latter by a suitcase transferred from the feeder flight.  The AAIB inspectors and the forensic investigators jumped to the wrong conclusion at an early stage in the investigation, based on only a small subset of the available information (the condition of the container itself).  The full dataset was never assembled and interpreted.  If it had been, it would have shown without doubt that this conclusion was wrong.

Is it really that simple?  Yes, actually, it is.  Months investigating Frankfurt, years investigating Malta, indictments against a couple of people who happened to be going about their business on Malta that morning, eight years of punitive sanctions against Libya which destroyed the economy and social cohesion of the country, a three-ring-circus of a trial in a specially-built court in the Netherlands, the conviction of one of the people who happened to be on Malta that day, his eventual release under circumstances that turned the Scottish government into an international hate icon, and UK and US support for the Libyan rebels in the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011 -- not to mention the x-ray operator at Frankfurt who was assumed to have missed the bomb suitcase transiting from the Malta flight apparently being hounded to his grave by the accusation.  All that, for want of someone having enough nous to spot and solve a jigsaw which was right there in front of them all the time.

Yes, I’m pretty stunned by this.  It’s almost unbelievable but it’s true.  Now get your heads round that, people, and stop asking me who I think did it.  That’s way beyond my pay grade.

"I will never understand your motives or your methods"

[In an email of 16 July 2015 addressed to Dr Jim Swire and me, Frank Duggan, President of the US Lockerbie relatives organization Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 Inc wrote: “Prof Black and Dr Swire. Even if you honestly believe that Gadhafi had nothing to do with the Lockerbie bombing, he certainly did enough to lead this list of monsters. I will never understand your motives or your methods.”

The “list of monsters” refers to the Evolution of Evil television series, particularly the programme Gaddafi: Mad Dog of the Middle East.

What follows is the text of Dr Swire’s reply to Mr Duggan, dated 17 July:]

Dear Frank,

I agree with your statement (copied below) that:-

" I (Frank Duggan) will never understand your (Jim Swire's et al) motives or your methods."

My motive is so simple and has been so many times stated that it is clear you are unable to understand that it is simply to know the truth - which includes as much of the truth about what my Government and yours really know as can be forced from their unwilling grasp.

That is my motive: what is yours in maintaining adherence to the story accepted by the Zeist court?

Where were you as the evidence unfolded? Were you there?

I was.

As for my methods they are to question those directly involved wherever possible and make an assessment upon what they say.

Therefore my motive in repeatedly meeting with Gaddafi and other Arab leaders was to see what they had to say and more significantly to try to persuade them to send the accused for trial under Scottish law.

Of course the likes of Nelson Mandela (did you ever meet him? - I did) were of far greater importance than we could ever hope to be, but at least we did our utmost to persuade the late Colonel to send them over.

Did you try to do that?

In the case of Gaddafi I decided that he was inscrutable and that I could never find out what he did or did not know. That is why if you review all that I have said, you will find that since the Zeist trial I have never claimed to know whether he was involved or not, only to being sure (largely courtesy of the Zeist trial evidence) that his man Megrahi was not involved.

I confess that before the trial I believed him to be involved and I wanted his men to be tried, in order to learn the truth. This was wrong in so far as all accused are entitled to a presumption of innocence, but my Government had told me that there was irrefutable evidence about Libyan involvement but none about any other country. I was naive and that is my excuse

As early as February 1989 I had been shown a detailed warning received by the UK Government from the West German BKA in October 1988. It showed that the PFLP-GC of Damascus had perfected bombs which were inert at ground level but, having no user adjustments except an arming plug, on sensing the drop in pressure as an aircraft climbs, they were committed to exploding around 35, plus or minus five, minutes following take off.

Such devices had to be infiltrated at the airport of take off of the target flight, in this case Heathrow: if inserted at Frankfurt they would explode over Europe before reaching Heathrow. All this was repeated with further details by Herr Gobel during the Zeist trial.

Perhaps you remember that the Lockerbie flight lasted 38 minutes from take off?

If you re-examine the evidence led by Mr Bedford, the chief baggage handler at Heathrow, you will see that he reported that two suitcases had been put into the Pan Am baggage container AV4041 with no known security clearance and in his absence, long before the Frankfurt flight had even landed, that no one would admit having put them there, and that one of them was a dark coloured hard sided 'Samsonite type' suitcase occupying the position where the origin of the explosion occurred.

Funny that, it fits the description of the primary suitcase containing the bomb and the court decided without justificatory evidence of any kind that in fact one of the late arriving cases from Frankfurt 'must' have displaced it, apparently using the circular argument that the bomb must have come from Frankfurt.

The point of origin of the explosion can be explored in the Air Accident Investigation Branch report 2/90.

You  might also like to read the book Adequately explained by stupidity? by Morag Kerr which details events at Heathrow.

Of course, the Scottish police/Crown Office had also known from February 1989 that the Heathrow airside security had been broken into 16 hours prior to Lockerbie, but for whatever reason they kept that concealed from the defence and the court.

As the trial progressed we learned that the identifying of Megrahi as the buyer of the famous Maltese clothing depended on the evidence of a man who knew that if his evidence convicted the Libyan he was in line for several million dollars.

Is that a sound basis for reliable evidence do you think?

Then there was the fact, as their Lordships themselves had to admit in their summary, that there simply was no evidence to show how Megrahi  was supposed to have got the bomb on board at Malta.

When I pushed for trial under Scottish criminal law, I believed that the task of the court was to prove a case 'beyond reasonable doubt'.

Do you believe that these proceedings reached that standard?

But of course you will say a fragment of circuit board proved that a long running timer sold to Libya had been used, not one of the cruder fixed run-time devices made in Damascus.

Do you know that that fragment was found by a UK forensic officer within the only Scottish police evidence bag whose label, the court heard, had been illegally tampered with? Could there be reasonable doubt about the authenticity of the bag's contents also?

Do you know that that same forensic officer told the court under oath that the fragment was "similar in all respects" to the boards in the timers owned by Libya?

Have you seen the dated report from him which shows that he knew before giving that evidence that the plating was incompatible?

Have you read the scientific academic reports which confirm that this plating difference could not have been caused by exposure to a Semtex explosion?

In this country we had a philosopher now commonly referred to as 'William of Occam' he was born in 1285 (rather before the Pilgrim Fathers got their act together I fear) in the little Surrey village of Occam.

His best known philosophical statement is nowadays currently rendered along the lines that 'The simplest explanation that fits the known facts is usually the correct one'.

Having studied all the available evidence as best I can I think the bomb was built by Marwhan Khreesat of the PFLP-GC, and put aboard at Heathrow with the dreadful consequences we all know.

William of Occam would no doubt have preferred that conclusion to the complexities of the Megrahi/Malta/Frankfurt scenario.

I am satisfied that the Megrahi/Malta story is nothing more than a fable, because there is far more evidence against it than for it, and that in this case it is wise to follow William's advice.

I wonder what your guess would be as to the origin of the fragment known as PT35b? The realisation that it really could not have come from one of the timers owned by Libya destroys the one anomaly which seemed to genuinely support the Malta hypothesis.

I have not been able to find out what happened between October 1988 when the Germans lost track of at least one of the PFLP-GC type bombs and December 1988 at Heathrow, nor have I been able to discover who broke into Heathrow airside.

I therefore have no idea whether Gaddafi himself was responsible in some way, and that is why I do not claim to know whether he was a guilty party. Study the records again.

You Frank say "Even if you honestly believe that Gaddafi had nothing to do with the Lockerbie bombing, he certainly did enough to lead this list of monsters", I have tried to explain that I do not know whether the late colonel was involved over Lockerbie or not. It looks likely that his right hand man Moussa Koussa probably at least knew of the plot, his body language suggested guilt when I met him, but that would make an even weaker case than the story I heard at Zeist, would it not.

I doubt I shall respond to your emails in future, there is no point if your eyes and ears are closed to fact based discussion, but there are two favours I would ask of you all the same.

1.) I have always been aware that our search for the truth has upset certain US relatives by disturbing what they see as their closure. Of course they would see this email as just 'Swire trotting out the same old arguments again' but it may none the less be upsetting for them to read. Some will have seeds of doubt in their minds aware that the constancy of our position could most easily be explained (though you say you cannot understand it yourself) by having the simplicity of truth; by being in other words correct. I have not found a way to avoid upsetting the US relatives, but if you have their real interests at heart, I think you should not make them read this, instead your time might be better spent in pondering for yourself some of the very real weaknesses of the case we heard at Zeist, perhaps following William of Occam's advice.

2.) I beg you not to encourage 'your' members to hate. The heading "EVOLUTION OF EVIL - Premiering 16th July 2015 on The American Heroes Channel" ... suggests incitement to hate. We have experienced the outpourings of some unfortunate relatives in the form of hatred, hatred for Arabs, hatred for Gaddafi, even hatred for those of us who seek the truth. This is what terrorists do, they thrive on hatred. Every time someone descends to hatred, the terrorists score again, for the consequence of harbouring hatred is destruction of the personal lives of those who harbour it.

No man is simply "AN EVOLUTION OF EVIL" we are all flawed and imperfect, but capable of both good acts and evil ones. I can tell you that Gaddafi was both inscrutable and cyclothymic, but in the running of his country he seems, albeit at terrible cost to his people, to have been rather more effective than the chaos that our Western actions have triggered. following his murder. I fear we do not have the luxury of simplification offered by describing individuals as either pure good or pure evil. The world and we ourselves are far more complex than that.

Of course those who do evil acts like Lockerbie must be brought before the law and agreed punishments administered if found guilty through valid evidence, but you might care to remember the axioms "judge not, that ye be not judged", or perhaps " Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee".

[The following are two emailed responses from Mr Duggan:]

1. Dr Swire: there is nothing new in your lengthy email, and no evidence to support any of your theories. Theories are not admissible in court without some proof.

Regards,

Frank Duggan

2. Dr Swire: attached is a review of Hurley's book which recounts the Channel 4 panel discussion we had in London. The moderator was certainly not impartial, but I was able to explain the warnings you have been talking about for 25 years. I would also note that you were defending the Libyans at this point, before the trial and before you had heard any evidence in court. It is not true that you went into that court with an open mind, and there are other family members who recall conversations with you as to the innocence of the Libyans. One family member said that you had all the arguments that had been prepared by Prof Black, who maintains to this day that no court would find the Libyans guilty.

Regards,

Frank Duggan

https://books.google.com/books?id=0TcZMd9TioYC&pg=PA390&dq=Frank+Duggan+Pan+Am+103&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIpoTkwNTixgIVDD4-Ch1Wwwe_#v=onepage&q=Frank%20Duggan%20Pan%20Am%20103&f=false