Mystery of Flight 103

[This is the headline over an article by Dara MacNeil published on this date in 1998 by An Phoblacht/Republican News. It reads as follows:]

On the night of 21 December 1988 a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am flight 103 flying from Frankfurt to New York. The plane was literally blown out of the air above Lockerbie in Scotland. All 259 people on board were killed.

Since November 1991, Britain and the US have publicly blamed Libya for the bombing. They allege two Libyan airline officials - Abdel Baset Ali Mohammed and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah - placed the bomb aboard the flight, on the orders of the Libyan government. Both have consistently demanded the pair be extradited to stand trial in either Scotland or the US.

Libya has refused to comply. Instead it offered to try the two suspects in Libya, a stance which is supported by international aviation law.

By way of response, Britain and the US employed their considerable muscle on the UN Security Council to have sanctions imposed on Libya.

In 1995, however, Libya made a dramatic concession. It indicated that both men could be tried in a neutral country - Holland was suggested - by Scottish judges, and under Scottish law.

Remarkably, both the US and Britain rejected the offer. Relatives of the 259 dead were perplexed and angered. For some, Britain and the US appeared not to want the case ever to come to trial.

Officially, the `mystery' of flight 103 remains unsolved. However, in a judgement delivered at the end of February the International Court of Justice signalled a possible end to the dispute. In an apparent rebuke to the stance taken by Britain and the US, the court ruled that it could decide whether the Libyan suspects could be tried at home, or abroad.

In doing so, the International Court of Justice has effectively relieved Britain and the US of sole responsibility for resolving the case of flight 103.

The decision was welcomed by the Flight 103 Association, a group composed of relatives of those killed at Lockerbie. The Association has been severely critical of the strange intransigence shown by Britain and the US on the issue.

There are many who suspect that the charges against Libya are fraudulent. They have been aided by the fact that the official version of events has repeatedly been found wanting. In addition, the case has thrown up a number of puzzling anomalies for which no satisfactory answer has ever been provided.

Some days after the disaster, as crash investigators sifted through the wreckage, a local farmer came across a suitcase filled with packets of white powder. He assumed they were drugs.

Relatives of the dead later discovered that the name on the suitcase did not correspond with any name on flight 103's passenger list.

Strangely, the farmer was never questioned about his find - which he reported to the police - at a subsequent crash inquiry. Official sources denied the drugs find.

Furthermore, volunteers helping to search the debris reported how they were warned to stay away from parts of the wreckage.

Some told how they had come across a large object that had been covered with a red tarpaulin. As they approached, they were warned off by armed men standing in the doorway of a hovering helicopter.

Similarly, a local farmer was also warned - by unidentified Americans - to stay away from an area of woodland on his own farm, a few miles east of Lockerbie.

In February 1989 a local reporter - with excellent police contacts - claimed the bomb on Flight 103 had been planted in the baggage of a team of US intelligence agents, on their way back from Beirut.

Immediately after his story was broadcast, the journalist was visited by senior police officers demanding to know his source.

He refused to disclose it. He was first threatened with prosecution and then, strangely, asked if he would reveal his source directly to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in the privacy of Downing Street. He refused that curious offer also.

In the months after the bombing it emerged that the authorities had received at least two separate warnings of a plot to bomb Pan Am flights. Both correctly identified the timeframe in which the attack was to occur. One of the warnings - telephoned to the US embassy in Helsinki - specifically mentioned a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York.

The warnings were considered serious enough for the US embassy in Moscow to post an alert on its staff noticeboard. And in 1989, a German newspaper alleged that then South African Foreign Minister, Pik Botha was alerted to the danger of taking flight 103. Botha and his party took an earlier Pan Am flight to New York that same day.

In 1995, British journalist Paul Foot revealed that US authorities had received notice of the plot a full ten days before the bomb aboard Flight 103 exploded. The informant had warned that Pan Am flights were among the intended targets of “teams of Palestinians not associated with the PLO.”

Foot also revealed evidence collected by German authorities which strongly suggested that the bombing of Flight 103 had been carried out by a group under the protection of Syria.

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Guardian on this date in 1999. Some of the "conspiracies" have since been comprehensively debunked. Others have not:]

Lockerbie conspiracies: from A to Z

A

is for Africa, South

Several pieces of evidence (see H and W) suggest that the authorities knew in advance that the Boeing 747 which blew up over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on December 21 1988 was in danger. The German newspaper Die Zeit claimed that the South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, intended to fly on Pan Am 103 but had been warned off. Mr Botha flew on an earlier flight, Pan Am 101, which, unlike flight 103, had special security checks at Heathrow. No one has been able to definitively confirm or refute the Die Zeit story.

B

is for bomb-maker

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see J, O and P) led to the arrest of bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat weeks before the Lockerbie disaster. Khreesat was released after a few days because of a lack of evidence. In April 1989 further German police raids resulted in the discovery of two more bombs designed by Khreesat specifically to blow up aircraft. Did he make the bomb which was placed on feeder flight Pan Am 103A before it left Frankfurt for Heathrow?

C

is for coffin

Two coach-loads of officials arrived at the disaster scene in the day after the crash. Many were plain-clothed Americans with no obvious affiliation. Among their baggage was a single coffin for which no explanation has ever been given. Labour MP Tam Dalyell later produced evidence indicating that the Americans had "stolen" a body from the wreckage. A local doctor identified and labelled 59 bodies and was then puzzled to find that the Americans had relabelled and tagged only 58 in the area where he had been working.

D

is for drugs

Lockerbie farmer Jim Wilson found a suitcase full of cellophane packets containing white powder among the debris in his fields. The suitcase was taken away, no explanation was given, and the authorities continued to insist that no drugs (apart from a small quantity of cannabis) had been found on the plane. But it was later discovered that the name Mr Wilson saw on the suitcase did not correspond with any of the names on the Pan Am 103 passenger list.

E

is for the Express

Ten days after the Lockerbie disaster, the Daily Express devoted its front page to exposing a Lebanese American called Khaled Jafaar whom it named as the "bomb carrier". The Express's sources were "the FBI and Scotland Yard". The Interfor report (see I) also named Khaled Jafaar as the bomb carrier.

F

is for fiction

It has been argued that talk of the CIA, cover-ups, bombs, timers and Maltese trousers (see M) is just entertaining fiction. Some observers believe that there was no bomb on Pan Am 103 and that explosive decompression or an electrical fault caused the Lockerbie disaster, as they caused other Boeing 747 crashes.

G

is for Garrick

Paul Channon, British Secretary of State for Transport, lunched five journalists at the Garrick Club three months after Lockerbie and told them, off-the-record, that the Lockerbie killers had been identified and would soon be arrested. Yet the two Libyans who came to be the prime suspects were not charged until November 1991. It seems likely that at that time Mr Channon was confident that the Lockerbie bomb was the work of the Palestinians (see P).

H

is for Helsinki

Sixteen days before the disaster, a man rang the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a bomb aboard a Pan Am aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the US. The 1990 US President's Commission report on aviation security said that "thousands of US government employees saw the Helsinki threat". Not a single US worker at the Moscow embassy took flight Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt, a standard and popular route home for Christmas. But the British Department of Transport had told Pan Am in December that British intelligence dismissed the threat as "not real".

I

is for Interfor

A report by Interfor, a New York corporate investigative company hired by Pan Am, suggested that a Palestinian gang (see P) had got the bomb on to the airliner at Frankfurt by exploiting a US intelligence deal (see U). In a bid to free American hostages in Beirut, American intelligence agents had apparently struck a deal with Syrian drug smugglers: in exchange for hostage information, the agents smoothed the Lebanon-US drugs route by relaxing security restrictions and allowing drug luggage to sail through customs. The terrorist gang simply switched the drug luggage for a bomb.

J

is for Ahmed Jibril

Ahmed Jibril was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC) (see P). He enjoyed the protection of the Syrian government. Intelligence agents reported that Jibril had been assigned by a furious Iran to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian airbus by a US warship in 1988 (which killed 290 people). The leader of Jibril's terrorist gang, Hafez Dalkamoni, was one of the Palestinians arrested in Operation Autumn Leaves (see O).

K

is for Kuwait

In 1990 Kuwait was invaded by Saddam Hussein. Anglo-American attitudes to the Middle East were transformed. Paul Foot and John Ashton argue that theories about Lockerbie are inextricably linked to this changing political situation. In 1989 intelligence-based evidence fitted snugly with US and British foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria, and the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988 with America and Britain continuing to be hostile to Iran and supportive of Iraq. The US and British governments were content with the prime Lockerbie suspects: a Palestinian gang (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. But in 1990, the impending Anglo-American war against Iraq necessitated neutralising Iran and winning the support of Syria. Britain's diplomatic relations with Syria were duly restored in November 1990 and the Gulf war commenced in 1991. Sure enough, the credibility of intelligence theories about the Lockerbie bombing being masterminded by the Iran- and Syria-backed Palestinian gang was soon dismantled.

L

is for Libya

In November 1991, the American and British governments charged two Libyan airline officials, Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, with planting the Lockerbie bomb. To justify the radical change in the investigation's focus away from the Palestinians, the US State Department said: "Fresh evidence undermined the initial theory linking the PFLP-GC (see P) to the bomb". This included evidence that the Lockerbie bomb's "sophisticated electronic timer" had been delivered from Switzerland to Libya. And, in contrast, the bombs discovered in the hands of the Palestinians in Germany (see B) had "relatively crude timers".

M

is for the Maltese connection

A series of Sunday Times investigative pieces reported that the Lockerbie bomb had first been put on a plane in Malta. The bombing had been carried out by the Palestinian group (see P), after a gang member, Abu Talb, visited Malta. He was identified by a Maltese boutique owner as the man who bought clothes later found in the bomb suitcase. A bag which ended up on Pan Am 103 was identified by a baggage handler as coming from an Air Malta flight. When a Granada TV documentary repeated the allegations, Air Malta sued Granada for libel. A hitherto unpublished document from Air Malta's lawyers demonstrated that there were no bags on the flight which went on to Pan Am 103 or 103A. Granada settled out of court.

N

is for not proven

Legally defined as "a criminal verdict, somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the consequences of which are that the accused is treated as if found not guilty". Britain and the US fear that if attention is paid to the conflicting conspiracy theories, the case against the Libyans in The Hague could only be "not proven".

O

is for Operation Autumn Leaves

Five weeks before the Palestinian warning (see I) was received, a German anti-terrorism campaign, Operation Autumn Leaves, arrested a "team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO" in possession of a bomb in a cassette recorder (see T) strikingly similar to the Lockerbie bomb. These Palestinians, including Hafez Dalkamoni (see J) and Marwan Khreesat (see B) had been arrested outside a flat in Neuss - two hours' drive from Frankfurt, from whose airport Pan Am 103's feeder flight had originated. They were released after five days because there was not enough evidence against them.

P

is for Palestinians

Operation Autumn Leaves led to the arrest of a gang associated with a splinter group of the Palestinian movement the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). Was Pan Am 103 blown up by a Palestinian gang, protected by Syria and paid for by Iran?

Q

is for Queen's English

The official air accident report concludes: "The detonation of an improvised explosive device led directly to the destruction of the aircraft". If it was a bomb why wasn't it called a bomb in plain English?

R

is for red tarpaulin

On the night of the disaster teams of rescue volunteers scouring the area discovered a large object under a red tarpaulin. As they approached it, they were warned off by gunmen in the doorway of a hovering helicopter. A local farmer, Innes Graham, was also warned by US investigators to stay away from a small wooded area a few miles east of Lockerbie.

S

is for the Swiss circuit board

A central piece of evidence which pointed to the Libyans (see L) was a tiny fragment of a circuit board found among the Lockerbie debris. This was traced to a firm in Switzerland which exported timers to Libya. Apart from the confusion over when and where the circuit board was found (reports vary between June and November 1990), the Libyan connection to the timers is not as clear-cut as investigators have claimed. The US state department maintained that all timers from the Swiss firm had been delivered to Libya, but a BBC radio programme later proved that the firm had provided identical timers to the East German secret police, the Stasi.

T

is for Toshiba

The German anti-terror campaign Operation Autumn Leaves (see O) discovered a Toshiba cassette recorder packed with semtex. Pieces of a similar model of recorder had been found in the wreckage at Lockerbie.

U

is for US intelligence

There have been several claims that the bomb was planted on Pan Am 103 by a crack team of US intelligence agents. A Radio Forth journalist reported the claim and, within an hour, was threatened with prosecution or, bizarrely, invited to disclose his source to the Prime Minister. The Interfor report (see I) also alleged that Major Charles McKee, the head of the US intelligence team, who was travelling on the plane, was shocked by his colleagues' deal with Syrian drug smugglers and was returning on Pan Am 103 to report them. The inference was obvious - Pan Am 103 was sacrificed by the intelligence community to get rid of Major McKee. But the Interfor report was greeted with widespread scepticism.

V

is for Vincent Cannistraro

In the early 1990s the Lockerbie investigation shifted from the Scottish Borders to the CIA base in America. The man in charge there was Vincent Cannistraro. Mr Cannistraro had worked with Oliver North in President Reagan's National Security Council and, Paul Foot and John Ashton argue, he "specialised in the US vendetta against Libya". Mr Cannistraro was part of a secret programme to destabilise the Libyan regime which culminated in the US bombing of Libya in 1986. He retired from the CIA in September 1990 but by then had helped lay the foundations for a completely new approach to the bombing investigation, in which the chief suspect was not Iran or Syria, but Libya.

W

is for warning

Three days before the Helsinki threat (see H), an intelligence source in the US state department's office of diplomatic security warned that a team of Palestinians, not associated with the PLO, was targeting Pan Am airline and US military bases in Europe. The comment attached to the message read: "We cannot refute or confirm this".

X

is for xenophobia

In 1989 Anglo-American intelligence services and politicians widely blamed the Lockerbie bomb on a Palestinian terror group (see P), backed by Syria and Iran. In 1990, (see K) Iraq became the Anglo-American Arab enemy number one in the run-up to the Gulf war; Iran became neutral and Syrian troops joined the Allied forces. Only Libya remained adamantly aligned with Iraq. Suddenly, coincidentally, the Lockerbie bomb was blamed on the Libyans.

Y

is for Yvonne Fletcher

PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, causing diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to be severed. The file on Yvonne Fletcher is still open and Britain continues to demand Libyan co-operation on the matter. The fairness of the trial of the two Libyan suspects could yet affect this case.

Z

is for Zeist

Camp Zeist is the former US air base in The Hague where the two Libyans are being tried under Scottish law. But even the conviction of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah seems unlikely to still the disquiet and conspiracies that continue to surround flight Pan Am 103.

Of Mandela, Shamuyarira and the Lockerbie affair

[This is the headline over a report published today on the website of the Zimbabwean newspaper The Herald.  It reads in part:]

Tributes to veteran nationalist, journalist and politician Nathan Shamuyarira who died on June 4 at the age of 85 underlined his diplomatic and political achievements at local, regional and international levels.

As tributes poured in, Shamuyarira was described as a remarkable and admirable politician who contributed immensely to the shaping and development of Zimbabwe’s media and foreign policy. (...)

In April, 1999, Nelson Mandela refused to take full credit for the Lockerbie breakthrough which resulted in Libya handing over two suspects of the PanAm bombing over Lockerbie in 1988 in which 270 people were killed.

Speaking to businessmen in Midrand, the anti-apartheid struggle leader said there were other people who played an important role in the negotiations, singling out former Zimbabwean Foreign Affairs Minister Nathan Shamuyarira.

“He is the person who came to me and said let’s talk and settle this issue,” Mandela was quoted as saying, adding that he then spoke to former American President George Bush and Saudi Arabia’s King Fahed.

“Without these two (Shamuyarira and King Fahed) I don’t think there would have been a breakthrough,” he said.

Mandela was not puffed up by the huge praise he got internationally for his role in the Lockerbie diplomatic effort.

He repeatedly shrugged off the praise.

Shamuyarira too, shrugged off the praise, only demonstrating his distinctive brilliance and unmatched determination to have the Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing tried in a neutral country.

In an interview in April 1999, Shamuyarira said there were a number of inconsistencies in the case that pointed to a political victimisation of Libya and if brought to court, such evidence would exonerate Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al–Amin Khalifa Fahima.

“I have evidence that convinced me and Presidents Mugabe and Nelson Mandela and other world leaders that the Libyans were not involved.

“It was on the basis of these inconsistencies that I asked the two presidents to seek a fair trial for the two men,” Shamuyarira was quoted saying then.

According to a news agency report, one of the factors Shamuyarira felt would work for the Libyans when their trial starts in the Netherlands was that some people scheduled to fly on the Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to New York on December 20 1988 were apparently warned that the flight was doomed and should change.

The plane blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland and killed 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground.

“One of these people is then South African foreign affairs minister Pik Botha who was scheduled to take that flight to New York. He and others were tipped off and changed flights.

“Whoever tipped them had prior knowledge of the bomb and if it were the Libyans, surely, the last person they would tip was Botha given the animosity between Libya and South Africa the,” said Shamuyarira who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1985 and 1995.

This earned Shamuyarira who initiated talks that the Libyan suspects be tried in a neutral country, wide acclaim and made him to become a true giant of Zimbabwean and African foreign policy. (...)

Late veteran politician Dr Stan Mudenge who was Foreign Affairs Minister in 1999 described the breakthough as an African Union triumph over western bullying.

“When you look back at the whole issue, one can rightly say Africa as a whole won a major battle over western bullying. Each one of us as Africans did their bit and we won,” Dr Mudenge said back then.

With the Lockerbie case, Shamuyarira showed that he was a formidable force of Pan African  diplomacy – an indefatigable champion in the cause of peace, who worked tirelessly for a better world through peaceful conflict resolution mechanism.

His energies devoted to finding a peaceful way forward for the Libyan case led to the suspension of the embargoes that had been put in place to force Tripoli to surrender the two men charged with blowing up Pan Am Flight 103.

Shamuyarira, who has been credited as the first person to initiate talks on the possibility of having the Libyans tried in a neutral country.

To some great measure, Shamuyarira’s pre-eminent role in the Lockerbie affair, forced Muammar Gaddafi, the deposed leader of Libya, who died on 20 October 2011, to ‘demote’ Pan Arabism as a plank of Libya’s foreign policy.

[I reproduce this because it pays tribute to an African politician who played a not insignificant part in resolving the Lockerbie impasse that existed in the late 1990s, not because it is in all respects accurate about the factual and political background, which it clearly is not. For example, the story about Pik Botha being warned off Pan Am 103 has been discredited. And the all-too common assumption that Gaddafi had the power to compel the two accused to surrender for trial whether they wanted to or not, is just simply false.  I was involved at the time in Lockerbie dealings with both the Libyan Government and the Libyan defence team headed by Dr Ibrahim Legwell. If the Libyan Government had had the power to deliver Megrahi and Fhimah to Zeist against their will, the pair would have been there long before April 1999. The Gaddafi regime had the power to prevent the suspects from voluntarily surrendering themselves for trial (eg by preventing them from leaving Libya). But that was as far as the regime’s power went. It had no power to compel them to stand trial at Zeist if they chose not to.  What impeded a resolution of the Lockerbie standoff for years was not the Libyan Government nor the Libyan defence team, but the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. It was on these governments that Mandela, Shamuyarira and others had to exert diplomatic and moral pressure to accept the solution that had long before been accepted by the Libyan authorities and the Libyan defence team. All this is explained here, for those interested in the true position.]

Dr Swire on "Pan Am 103: what really happened?"

[What follows is a response by Dr Jim Swire to some of the comments made by readers on the Pan Am 103: what really happened? thread.]

I must congratulate 'Rolfe' and Patrick Haseldine on the interesting set of comments re Pik Botha, Carlsson and Pan Am 103. At the same time I hope they will forgive me for pointing out that to us the relatives, this all falls into the category of 'speculation'.

That is so due to the flat refusal of successive UK governments despite our lobbying of every single Prime Minister since 1988 to allow any meaningful inquiry into the events leading up to the disaster. Had they fulfilled their legal obligation to provide such an inquiry, then hopefully much of this speculation would have reached at least the level of confidence given to those aspects of the disaster which were the subject of the Zeist court and inquiries.

Personally I entered the Zeist courtroom expecting to see the murderers of my daughter condemned and punished. The effect was the opposite, the evidence and the way in which it was derived and used, convinced me that neither Megrahi nor Fhimah were guilty as charged. But I was left with some relatively reliable information, compared with that derived from the best efforts of those people, may of them so well meaning, who previously had had no access whatever to any means of penetrating the official wall of silence, being obliged to speculate as a result of their (and our) exclusion.

As 'Rolfe' says, if it is true that Botha's party had reached London early, enabling the embassy 'on the spur of the moment' to book them on the earlier PA101, I see nothing suspicious in that, but as 'Rolfe' points out, if it is true that they were rebooked onto PA101 at the last minute, 'but some of their retinue could not get seats on that flight and thereupon returned to South Africa' that would be very, very interesting.

The logical speculation from that point would be that they must have known that PA103 was unsafe, for PA103 was only 2/3 full that night. 'Rolfe''s conclusion that such a development would constitute support for knowledge of a much more specific warning than those provided in the 'Helsinki' warning and other warnings already known to have been received would be valid. Patrick correctly confirms that not a single member of the Botha team was on PA103.

Why was PA103 only 2/3 full just before Christmas?

Is 'Rolfe' able to provide chapter and verse for his comment that 'instead of taking up their existing bookings on PA103 [they] just turned round and went home'?

The Zeist court had little to say about any regime's involvement, nor about those who might have been involved in the run up to the massacre itself. The nearest it came to that, for me, was the detailed account provided by the Germans of the PFLP-GC's technology, and of their known workshop on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria's capital city. They were making IEDs which however long they had lain about in an airport before being put aboard an aircraft, were still obligated to explode around 40 minutes following take off, without anyone in the relevant airport having to touch them, or even to open any container which they might be hidden in. An irrefutable fact is that my daughter's death occurred 38 minutes after her plane had left the Heathrow tarmac, just as would have been inevitable had one of these IEDs been used.

The court did not in my view exclude the use of this technology, far from it, it believed the prosecution's speculation - for that was all it was - that Megrahi (whose identification as 'the clothes buyer' was blatantly inadequate) had somehow while passing through Luqa airport penetrated security there (not supported by any evidence), to enable a profoundly unwise route of attack through 2 changes of aircraft, using a digital timer perfectly capable of being set to explode over mid-Atlantic.

Their Lordships were however operating under a severe Handicap, due to the suppression of vitally significant evidence (see below under DC Crawford).

Possible motivation was covered in terms of the past experiences of both Libya and Iran, at the hands of US military forces, but motivation for the assassination of Botha, Carlsson or the US McKee intelligence team was not established. The court's (the defence's actually) interest in Syria was snubbed by that country, leading to the inexplicable abandonment of their 'defence of incrimination' by the Megrahi defence team.

Since Megrahi's second appeal was stopped, his defence team have started to put some very interesting material on the web at and this is where investigating policeman Harry Bell enters the scene. Harry recorded in a diary written while on the island of Malta, how US official(s) was/were suggesting the payment of '$10,000 up front' with' $2,000,000 to follow, to Tony Gauci plus a payment of $1,000,000 to Gauci's brother Paul.

It is not clear to me whether Bell passed this on to the Crown Office, nor what his response was to the US agent suggesting it.

The astoundingly amateurish attitude attributed to DC Crawford, as to the significance of Carlsson in all this supports my worst fears as to the competence of the police force involved to cope with so great a disaster and investigation. If DC Crawford or his force really was prepared to write off the possible significance of Carlsson on the hearsay evidence of a single librarian, that says a great deal about the confidence we should have in other aspects of the investigation. The agreement to this decision by Stuart Henderson does little to reassure either, for Henderson has publicly claimed in front of a crowd of US relatives that he 'would like to wring the neck of anyone who disagreed with the police findings.' Do not these sound rather like the words of someone trying to defend something he knows to be indefensible?

Nowhere are doubts about the calibre of the investigating police more worrying than in the case of the Heathrow break-in. That occurred in the very early morning of 21/12/88 through the appropriate sector of Heathrow security to give access to where the PanAm containers were being loaded that evening. It was known to Heathrow through the night security file records on the morning of 21/12/88, and to the Met's special branch, who interviewed Manley, the night security guard in January 1989.

Yet the information about this break-in 'disappeared' for 12 years, till after the Zeist court had convicted Megrahi.

I wrote to the Crown Office to ask them if they had known about the break-in during these 12 years, and they denied knowing. They then made the disingenuous comment that the break-in didn't matter because the first appeal did know but did not overturn the verdict.

Think about their Lordships in the trial who said that the absence of evidence as to how Megrahi penetrated security at Luqa was 'a difficulty for the Crown', and compare that with what they were denied knowing - a fully documented break-in appropriate in time and position to the spot from which the fatal aircraft was actually loaded with its cargo. It seems pretty obvious to me that had they known they would have had to have found Megrahi not guilty, since Heathrow was strongly supported by evidence, whereas Luqa was not.

But glossing over the Crown's outrageous misrepresentation of the likely effect of the missing evidence upon the court's verdict, and assuming that they really didn't know during those 12 years, then it looks most likely that since the Met would surely have told the investigating Scots about it, the Scottish police probably failed to pass it on to the Crown Office.

What would be their motive for that? Well again we speculate, but the Heathrow evidence was desperately dangerous to the hypothesis that the device had come from Malta, simply because the clothing had. The annals of police investigations are full of instances where the driving hypothesis has destroyed the objectivity of the investigating force, and caused a tunnel vision where only matters that fit that hypothesis are considered.

Owing to the refusal to launch a properly empowered inquiry, it has been impossible thus far to probe the work of the Dumfries and Galloway police, nor indeed the Thatcher government's decision to put them in charge rather than the more experienced teams available in London.

In speculating about how much was known beforehand about the impending disaster, and by whom, we are discussing the worst fear that we have about this cruel business, the real possibility that our families were allowed to march on board an aircraft known by some of those who should have protected it to be doomed. To resolve that issue really would be a huge help in advancing our recovery from the loss of those we loved. Even if it turned out to be true, we would rather know the truth than be left any longer in such doubt, through the absence of a properly endowed inquiry.

Lest there be any doubt about it by the way our Fatal Accident Inquiry, though also denied knowledge of the Heathrow break-in, concluded that the disaster was preventable and that the aircraft was under the 'Host State Protection of the United Kingdom'.

I am a signatory to the appeal put out by JFM (Justice for Megrahi) to the UN for a UN based inquiry. The silence from them thus far is as dense as that from Whitehall has been for 21 years. The issues about which we speculate here appear more appropriate for a UN inquiry than simply a UK one, but the latter at least is obligatory under UK law.

Fortunately current ECHR legislation in this country entitles us as next of kin of the dead, to a suitably empowered inquiry.

Absent a fully supportive reply from Gordon Brown to our request for such an inquiry, for which we are still waiting, we shall have to see what Gareth Peirce and the UK justice system can do for us.