Gerry Conlon, Ann Maguire, Dr Thomas Hayes and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over an article published today on the Lockerbie Truth website of Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph.  It reads as follows:]

It is today reported that Gerard Conlon has died.

In 1974 the alleged IRA bomber Paul Hill, three of his colleagues (Gerard Conlon, Patrick Armstrong, Carole Richardson), plus all seven of the family of Ann Maguire were found guilty of the bombing, or association with the bombing, of an army barracks in Guildford. All served fifteen years imprisonment for their crimes. Gerard Conlon's father Guiseppe died in prison.

The public hue and cry for revenge appeared satisfied. Fortunately for the eleven convicted men and women, several public campaigns conducted before and during the trial to bring back hanging proved unsuccessful.

What Britain had experienced was yet another phase of legal history where public prejudice, legal stupidity or laziness, and sleight of hand by the police and their forensic services merged to a "group think" of public hysteria based on uninformed prejudice.

After serving fifteen years in prison, some in solitary confinement, the remaining ten were released on appeal. At the opening of the appeal, the prosecution lawyers were deeply embarrassed to have to admit that their prosecution case at the trial had been totally without foundation. 

Sadly for all eleven convicted, all was too late; their families had been destroyed and lives ruined by a corrupt and inadequate system of justice. 

In today's BBC report concerning Gerard Conlon, which can be read here, the BBC says blandly "They were convicted and jailed for handling explosives, based on scientific evidence which was later entirely discredited".  

Few people today are aware that that "scientific" evidence was in part provided by Dr Thomas Hayes, a Higher Scientific Officer at the Royal Armaments and Research Defence Establishment (RARDE).

Hayes was never disciplined for his actions. Indeed, he was soon to be promoted to head of department. His career would in time merge into the Lockerbie investigation and trial. Here is part of an account of his appearance at Kamp Zeist, alongside his colleague Allan Feraday:

THE LOCKERBIE TRIAL

Day 15: 5 June 2000

Dr Thomas Hayes was formerly head of the Forensics explosives laboratory at the British Royal Armaments Research and Defence Establishment (RARDE). He would prove a central figure in the prosecution case.

At the time of the trial he was aged fifty-three, having retired from his RARDE post ten years earlier just as the joint Scottish police and FBI investigation into the Lockerbie attack was reaching its climax.

As a bachelor of science honours in chemistry, a master of science in the faculty of forensic science, a doctor of philosophy in the faculty of forensic science, a chartered chemist, and a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, we might expect an outstanding memory. 

And yet he seemed reluctant to tell the court when he'd resigned in order to commence a radically new career as a chiropodist. When did he start work at Fort Halstead? "In July 1974." And when did he leave? “The exact date of my leaving is a little circumspect, but I believe it was in 1990." 

He actually resigned in 1989, a year that for him may have been circumspect, but was, in relation to the Lockerbie trial, most significant. For he possessed an uncomfortable history in relation to another major terrorist event, namely the alleged IRA bombing involving members of the Maguire family - The Maguire Seven. [RB: See Guildford Four and Maguire Seven.] 

In that trial Hayes and two of his colleagues were aware of evidence consistent with the innocence of the accused, decided among themselves that this evidence be not declared, and did not mention it during the trial. 

The first of the three was Douglas Higgs, Principal Scientific Officer and head of department; second was Walter Elliott, a Senior Scientific Officer; and the third was Hayes, at that time a Higher Scientific Officer.

During the trial, results of tests for traces of nitro-glycerine on skin and fingernails of the Maguire family were firmly maintained by the three scientists to be positive and decisive. Unknown to the court, however, the three had performed a second set of tests plus a series of experiments. Both tests and experiments indicated a negative result and an innocent means of contamination, and this information was recorded in their forensic notebooks. 

It was only through a Parliamentary inquiry by a senior judge, Sir John May, beginning in September 1989 and concluding in July 1990 that the matter was exposed.  

Sir John discovered that the notebooks of the three scientists had been deliberately concealed from the court, and cross-examination of witnesses for the prosecution therefore severely hampered. 

His main conclusions include the statement: "...  the whole scientific basis upon which the prosecution [of Ann Maguire and six members of her family] was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the Court of Appeal should be invited to set aside the convictions." [1]   

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[1] Rt Hon Sir John May, Interim Report on the Maguire Case, 12 July 1990, and Second Report on the Maguire Case, 3 December 1992. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc8990/hc05/0556/0556.pdf

[An outline of Justice for Megrahi's allegations of forensic scientific misconduct in the Lockerbie case can be read here (allegations 5, 6 and 7). A further related allegation has since been lodged with Police Scotland.]

“It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent"

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James that was published on the World Socialist Web Site on this date in 2009:]

Leading British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce has stated that, in her opinion Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man accused and convicted of the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was framed.

Pierce has a long track record of defending those caught in the British legal system’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. Her clients have included the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and Judith Ward, all of whom were Irish people accused and wrongly convicted of IRA bomb attacks in the 1970s. More recently Peirce has taken up a number of high profile cases of individuals accused in the so-called “war on terror”, including the Tipton Three and Moazam Begg, held illegally by the US government in Guantánamo Bay. She has represented the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead by British police in Stockwell underground station in 2005.

Writing in the September edition of the London Review of Books, Peirce, of the law firm headed by Benedict Birnberg, summarises some of the most concerning, and well known, aspects of the entire Lockerbie disaster in which 270 people died, and the subsequent investigation.

She points to the advance warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights from London, the role of the FBI and others who flooded the crash site, the lack of security on the site and tampered evidence, including moved bodies. She notes the initial trajectory of the investigation, which pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) acting on behalf of Iran having used a barometric bomb to bring down the 747. She also notes that a barometric bomb, one triggered by changes in air pressure, would have exploded only after PA 103 reached a certain height—some 38 minutes into the flight from Heathrow—precisely when the plane disintegrated.

She reviews the subsequent change in focus from Syria and Iran to Libya, which was in line with US foreign policy objectives at the time. Firstly, then US President George Bush, senior, instructed then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to keep the Lockerbie investigation “low key” to assist hostage negotiations underway in Beirut. As a result, rather than a judicial inquiry and prosecution, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) with no powers of subpoena was held.

Then, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, Iran and Syria both assisted the US invasion of Iraq. It was at this time that the focus of the Lockerbie investigation was shifted. Vincent Cannistraro, the architect of the Reagan administration’s CIA campaign of destabilisation against the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gadhaffi, was brought out of retirement to head the new line of investigation.

Peirce writes, “It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the cooperation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on ‘identification’ evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy”.

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Llamen Khalifa Fhimah, were handed over by the Libyan government in 1999. The trial opened at a converted US airbase in the Netherlands in 2000. The indictment against Megrahi read that an MST 13 bomb timer was made in Switzerland, by MEBO AG, and sold exclusively to Libya. Identification of the timer rested on the efforts of Thomas Hayes and Alan Feraday of the Royal Armament and Development Establishment (RARDE), along with Thomas Thurman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In 1997, following an investigation by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, Thurman was barred from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich described Thurman as “circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in...therefore fabricating evidence”.

Thomas Hayes claimed that on May 12, 1989, he found a fragment of circuit board in the collar of a shirt later traced to a Maltese shop. The fragment itself had been found in January 1989 by British police investigating the crash site.

Peirce states, “Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful”.

“Hayes”, Peirce continues, “played his part in the most notorious of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper”.

Hayes’s information regarding this crucial piece of Lockerbie evidence was also flawed. Despite having carefully documented every other piece of evidence he found, Hayes had made no drawing of this particular item and had not assigned it a reference number on discovery. He had not carried out a test for explosives. Hayes said he had “no idea” when the pagination of his notes recording findings had been altered to include an additional page, and it was an “unfathomable mystery” as to why the alterations should have occurred.

Following an investigation into RARDE by Sir John May, Hayes resigned and is now reported to be working as a chiropodist.

Pierce then turns to the visual identification of Megrahi.

“Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard”.

Pierce notes the numerous failings in the evidence provided by Gauci, his initial identification of Abu Talb, of the PFLP-GC, and reiterates the suggestion that Gauci was “handsomely rewarded” for his services.

She describes the verdict delivered in 2001 by three experienced judges, upheld later by five appeal court judges as “profoundly shocking”, and makes the following devastating assessment:

“Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial”.

Peirce concludes that there is “pressing need to investigate in details how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case—the death of justice—and who should be found responsible”.

Subsequent to Peirce’s comments, more revelations have emerged about the crucial piece of MST 13 circuit board. Following a Freedom of Information request raised by Scottish Nationalist Member of the Scottish Parliament Christine Grahame, the Scottish Crown Office has confirmed that evidence item PT-35, the piece of circuit board found by Hayes, was taken for examination to both Germany and the US. Graham claimed that this was done with the knowledge of the then chief prosecutor, Lord Fraser of Carmylie, who recently told a Dutch television company that he was unaware of the fragment’s movements.

Megrahi was released by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny Macaskill in August, allegedly on humanitarian grounds. It occurred at a time when the Libyan government had made clear that, if the terminally ill Megrahi had been allowed to die in Greenock prison, British oil contracts would have been imperilled. In addition, Megrahi had agreed to drop a long delayed appeal against his conviction in order to secure his release.

The release triggered outrage from the US in particular and was attacked by President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the head of the FBI, and the US Joint Chief of Staff amongst many. Commentary went as far as suggesting that the so-called “special relationship” between British and US imperialism, and Scotland in particular, was imperiled.

All this has been forgotten. On September 21, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly informed the world that the US had “deep abiding ties with Scotland”. Kelly continued, “We are very close allies, and I don’t think we’re looking to punish anybody per se. There’s no tit for tat here”.

Three weeks later, speaking before a meeting with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Clinton stated, “I have a special relationship with the prime minister. And of course, I think it can’t be said often enough, we have a special relationship between our countries”.

What was said between the two regarding Lockerbie is not clear, but the meeting came immediately prior to the British government’s decision to send an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan. Brown has subsequently ruled out a public inquiry into the bombing, while the Scottish government have denied they had the power to hold an authoritative inquiry in the first place.

Clinton also called in the Libyan government, speaking for 15 minutes en route to Egypt with Libyan Foreign Minister and former intelligence chief Musa Kusa. According to US Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley, the two talked of “Sudan, Darfur, cooperation about terrorism and the possibility of advancing our relationship”.

Crowley claimed that Megrahi was not discussed, lamely stating that “the Libyans understand our concerns about Megrahi very, very well”.

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a long and detailed article -- 6500 words -- by Gareth Peirce in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It is an utterly devastating critique of the Lockerbie trial and what led up to it and flowed from it. Anyone interested in the Lockerbie affair needs to read and digest it in full. The following are extracts.] Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. (...) [A] number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends. Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police. (...) Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution. In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket. All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. (...) It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found. (...) That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit. Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army. The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. (...) The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links. Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years. On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’. (...) There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive. (...) No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes. Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? (...) To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars. That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained. Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’.

There was only ever an illusion of a trial

What follows is an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009.

The framing of al-Megrahi

[This is the headline over a long and detailed article -- 6500 words -- by Gareth Peirce in the current issue of the London Review of Books. It is an utterly devastating critique of the Lockerbie trial and what led up to it and flowed from it. Anyone interested in the Lockerbie affair needs to read and digest it in full. The following are extracts.]

Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process. (...)

[A] number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police. (...)

Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution.

In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket.

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. (...) It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found. (...)

That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army.

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated. (...)

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’. (...)

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive. (...)

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? (...)

To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars.

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’.

Crown misinformation

[What follows is a commentary by Peter Biddulph on the Crown's response to Dr John Wyatt's findings as disclosed in the recent Newsnight segment.]

The recent Crown statement regarding the John Wyatt tests needs to be exposed for what it is: - an attempt to confuse the uninformed with carefully placed words such as "fragments of circuit boards" and "fragment".

The statement includes:

1. "It was reported in the BBC Newsnight Programme [6th January 2010] that tests carried out by Dr Wyatt suggest that the fragment was unlikely to have survived the mid-air explosion and that the radio used in his tests 'totally disintegrated' and 'went into tiny, tiny bits'. In fact, extensive explosive tests were carried out in the United States in 1989, some time before the fragment PT35B was extracted by forensic experts, as part of the Lockerbie investigation. …."

COMMENT: The Indian Head tests took place in April 1989, three weeks before the bomb "fragment" was discovered for the first time by Dr Thomas Hayes on 12th May 1989.

At the time of the Indian Head tests, neither Thurman or Feraday were aware of the existence of the Hayes fragment, nor of its possible link to an MEBO MST-13 timer board.

They were not tests of the survivability of any kind of bomb trigger timer board, but to establish the location of the primary suitcase and the amount of explosive used.

No mention has ever been made by Thurman or Feraday to fragment survivability testing as part of the Indian Head tests.

2. The Crown statement continues: "After a number of test explosions, a detailed search was made and circuit board fragments … were all recovered in a condition which was consistent with the debris recovered in relation to the Lockerbie disaster."

COMMENT: An aircraft body contains many printed circuit boards. Test explosions of any part of an aircraft body will therefore produce many circuit board fragments.

Note the use of the terms "consistent with" and "fragments". An uninformed reader - including an uninformed journalist such as Dave Cowan of STV, or even an uninformed lawyer - will naturally conclude a link to the next Crown paragraph:-

3. "The forensic evidence placed before the court included evidence about the appearance of 'the fragment.' And the fact that when it was recovered, it was embedded within a fragment from a blast-damaged grey Slalom brand shirt, which had been found in Newcastleton, Roxburghshire on 13th January 1989 ..."

COMMENT: The fragment was not found on 13th January 1989. The shirt collar containing it was found on that day and entered on the evidence log by DC Gilchrist under the identification "CLOTH".

It would take another four months before the fragment was discovered, well after the completion of the Indian Head tests. It was found by Dr Thomas Hayes on 12th May 1989.

At the trial, under cross-examination, Hayes insisted in reply to two specific questions from Richard Keen QC that it was embedded deep within the shirt collar, and that the police could not have been aware of it prior to his finding.

CONCLUSION

The Indian Head tests, as far as the Hayes fragment is concerned, are an irrelevance.

Either the writers of the Crown statement haven't done their homework, or they've been seriously misled by FBI misinformation. Probably a combination of both.

Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury

[This is the headline over a long article by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer that was published on the Global Research website on this date in 2007. The whole article is well worth reading. The following are excerpts from six of its fourteen sections:]

The Lockerbie Affair has taken yet another extraordinary twist. On Friday, August 31st, I received from Edwin Bollier, head of the Zurich-based MeBo AG, a copy of a German original of an Affidavit.

The document is dated July 18th 2007 and signed by Ulrich Lumpert who worked as an electronic engineer at MeBo from 1978 to 1994. I have scrutinized the document carefully and concluded that I have no reason to doubt its authenticity or the truthfulness of its content.

Lumpert was a key witness (no 550) at the Camp Zeist trial, where a three Judges panel convicted a Libyan citizen of murdering 270 persons who died in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

In his testimony, Lumpert stated that: “of the 3 pieces of hand-made prototypes MST-13 Timer PC-Boards, the third MST-13 PC-Board was broken and [he] had thrown it away.”

In his affidavit, certified by [notary] Walter Wieland, Lumpert admits having committed perjury.

“I confirm today on July 18th 2007, that I stole the third hand-manufactured MST-13 Timer PC-Board consisting of 8 layers of fibre-glass from MEBO Ltd. and gave it without permission on June 22nd 1989 to a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case,” Lumpert wrote. (The identity of the official is known.)

“It did not escape me that the MST-13 fragment shown [at the Lockerbie trial] on the police photograph No PT/35(b) came from the non-operational MST-13 prototype PC-board that I had stolen,” Lumpert added.

“I am sorry for the consequences of my silence at that time, for the innocent Libyan Mr. Abdelbaset Al Megrahi sentenced to life imprisonment, and for the country of Libya.”

In just seven paragraphs, the Lumpert affidavit elucidates the longstanding mysteries surrounding the infamous MST-13 timer, which allegedly triggered the bomb that exploded Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie on December 21st 1988.

The discovery of the MST-13 timer fragment

In the months following the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, someone discovered a piece of a grey Slalom-brand shirt in a wooded area located about 25 miles away from the town. According to a forensics expert, the cloth contained a tiny fragment – 4 mm square – of a circuit board. The testimony of three expert witnesses allowed the prosecutors to link this circuit board, described as part of the bomb trigger, to Megrahi.

There have been different accounts concerning the discovery of the timer fragment. A police source close to the investigation reported that it had been discovered by lovers. Some have said that it was picked up by a man walking his dog. Others have claimed that it was found by a policeman “combing the ground on his hands and knees.”

At the trial, the third explanation became official. “On 13 January 1989, DC Gilchrist and DC McColm were engaged together in line searches in an area near Newcastleton. A piece of charred material was found by them which was given the police number PI/995 and which subsequently became label 168.”

The alteration of the label

The officer had initially labelled the bag ‘cloth (charred)’ but had later overwritten the word ‘cloth’ with ‘debris’.

The bag contained pieces of a shirt collar and fragments of materials said to have been extracted from it, including the tiny piece of circuit board identified as coming from an MST-13 timer made by the Swiss firm MeBo.

“The original inscription on the label, which we are satisfied, was written by DC Gilchrist, was “Cloth (charred)”. The word ‘cloth’ has been overwritten by the word ‘debris’. There was no satisfactory explanation as to why this was done.”

The judges said in their judgement that Gilchrist’s evidence had been “at worst evasive and at best confusing”.

Yet the judges went on to admit the evidence. “We are, however, satisfied that this item was indeed found in the area described, and DC McColm who corroborated DC Gilchrist on the finding of the item was not cross-examined about the detail of the finding of this item.” (...)

The new page 51

According to documents obtained by Scotland on Sunday, the entry of the discovery is recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. Moreover, a new page 51 has been inserted in the record of evidence.

During the Lockerbie investigation, Dr Thomas Hayes and Allan Feraday were working at the DERA Forensic laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent.

Dr Hayes was employed at the Royal Armament Research Development Establishment (RARDE). In 1995, RARDE was subsumed into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). In 2001, part of DERA became the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).

Dr Hayes testified that he collected the tiny fragment of the circuit board on May 12th 1989. He testified that the fragment was green. (Keep in mind that the board stolen from Lumpert is brown.) His colleague, Allan Feraday, confirmed his story at the Zeist trial.

The record is inserted on a loose-leaf page with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand. Dr Hayes could not provide a reasonable explanation for this rather strange entry, and yet the Judges concluded that: “Pagination was of no materiality, because each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes.”

The argument of the Court is illogical as the index number Dr Hayes gave to the piece is higher than some entry he made three months later.

And there is more. In September 1989, Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of the piece and wrote in the attached memorandum that it was “the best he could do in such short time.” So, are we supposed to believe that it takes forensic experts several months to take a Polaroid picture?

Dr Hayes could not explain this. He merely suggested that the person to ask about it would be the author of the memorandum, Mr Feraday.

This however was not done. At the young age of 43, Hayes resigned just a few months after the discovery of the timer fragment.

Based on the forensic Dr Hayes had supplied, an entire family [The Maguire Seven] was sent to jail in 1976. They were acquitted in appeal in 1992. Sir John May was appointed to review Dr Hayes forensic evidence.

“The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution in [the trial of the alleged IRA Maguire Seven] was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone, the Court of Appeal should be invited to set aside the conviction,” said Sir John May.

In the Megrahi’s case, Dr Hayes did not even perform the basic test which would have established the presence of explosive residue on the sample. During the trial, he maintained that the fragment was too small while it is factually established that his laboratory has performed such test on smaller samples.

Had he performed such test, no residue would have been found. As noted by Lumpert, the fragment shown at the Zeist trial belongs to a timer that was never connected to a relay. In other words, that timer never triggered a bomb.

Allan Feraday’s reputation is hardly better. In three separated cases,where men were convicted on the basis of his forensic evidence, the initial ruling was overturned in appeal.

After one of these cases in 2005, a Lord of Justice said that Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics.

According to forensic scientist, Dr Michael Scott, who was interviewed in the documentary The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie, Feraday has no formal qualifications as a scientist.

The identification of the MeBo timer

Thomas Thurman worked for the FBI forensics laboratory in the late 80’s and most of the 90’s. Thurman has been publicly credited for identifying the fragment as part of a MST-13 timer produced by the Swiss company Mebo.

“When that identification was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it,” Thurman told ABC in 1991. “Absolute, positively euphoria. I was on cloud nine.”

Again, his record is far from pristine. The US attorney General has accused him of having altered lab reports in a way that rendered subsequent prosecutions all but impossible. He has been transferred out the FBI forensic laboratory.

“He’s very aggressive, but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of FBI management,” says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who filed the complaints that led to the Inspector General’s report.

“We’re not necessarily going to get the truth out of what we’re doing here,” Whitehurst concluded.

The story shed some light on his formation. The report says “Williams and Thurman merit special censure for their work. It recommends that Thurman, who has a degree in political science, be reassigned outside the lab and that only scientists work in its explosives section.” (...)

The modification of the MST-13 timer fragment

Forensic analysis of the circuit board fragment allowed the investigators to identify its origin. The timer, known as MST-13, is fabricated by a Swiss Company named MeBo, which stands for Meister and Bollier.

The company has indeed sold about 20 MST-13 timers to Libyan military (machine-made 9 ply green boards), as well as a few units (hand-made 8 ply brown boards) to a Research Institute in Bernau, known to act as a front to the Stasi, the former East German secret police.

The two batches are very different but, as early as 1991, Bollier told the Scottish investigators that he could not identify the timer from a photograph alone. Yet, the Libyans were indicted in November 1991, without ever allowing Bollier to see the actual fragment, on the ground that the integrity of the evidence had to be protected.

But in 1998, Bollier obtained a copy of a blown-up photograph that Thurman had shown on ABC in 1991. Bollier could tell from certain characteristics that the fragment was part of a board of the timers made for East Germany, and definitely not one of the timers delivered by him to Libya.

In September 1999, Bollier was finally allowed to see the fragment. Unlike the one shown by Thurman on ABC, this one was machine-made, as the one sold to Libya. But, from the absence of traces of solder, it was obvious that the timer had never been used to trigger a bomb.

“As far as I’m concerned, and I told this to [Scottish Prosecutor Miriam Watson], this is a manufactured fragment,” Bollier says. “A fabricated fragment, never from a complete, functional timer.”

The next day, Bollier was shown the fragment once more. You may have already guessed that it now had the soldering traces. “It was different. I’m not crazy. It was different!” says Bollier.

Finally, at the trial, Bollier was presented a fragment of a circuit board completely burnt down. Thus, it was no longer possible to identify to which country that timer had been delivered. As he requested to explain the significance of the issue, Lord Shuterland told him that his request was denied.

How did the Judges account for all the mysterious changes in the appearance of the fragment? They simply dismissed Bollier as an unreliable witness.

“We have assessed carefully the evidence of these three witnesses about the activities of MEBO, and in particular their evidence relating to the MST-13 timers which the company made. All three, and notably Mr Bollier, were shown to be unreliable witnesses. Earlier statements which they made to the police and judicial authorities were at times in conflict with each other, and with the evidence they gave in court. On some occasions, particularly in the case of Mr Bollier, their evidence was self contradictory.” (para 45)