Jim Swire responds to Frank Duggan's falsehood and fable accusation

[What follows is Dr Jim Swire’s response to Frank Duggan’s assertion that UK relatives are lying and promoting a fable when they refer to a member of  the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism saying: "Your government and mine know exactly what happened but they're never going to tell."]

I do not usually reply to statements in the media from Mr Frank Duggan, however he has recently very publicly accused me of lying, concerning an event which happened in the United States embassy, where Mr Duggan was present, acting as relatives' liaison officer over the Lockerbie case, I believe.

I was also present.

Mr Duggan now claims that an alleged remark to one of the British relatives was not made.

It is hard to understand how he would know that because the remark was made 'off the record', confidentially in an aside to the father of another British victim.

I know and trust that victim's father.

The remark made to him was "Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they're never going to tell.”

That is not the kind of remark which any bereaved parent is ever likely to forget, but Mr Duggan could not have overheard it; perhaps he also does not understand its implications for a bereaved family.

Perhaps whatever Mr Duggan does not hear does not happen?

[RB: Jim Swire here wrote a sentence about PCAST which I have omitted because it referred to the wrong PCAST. Dr Swire has now circulated a correction. In an email to me he says: 'In demonstration of the fallibility of my memory I must also point out that Google led me to the wrong use of PCAST.' I may add that I should be happy if my own memory were only as fallible as Dr Swire's.]

I do however owe Mr Duggan and others an apology: the meeting in the US embassy in London apparently took place in February 1990 not in 1989 as I had thoughtlessly previously claimed. Forgive the weakness of an old man's memory for dates, Mr Duggan, but these days there is always Google.

Those who wish to view Mr Duggan in action may like to dig out of the net the Channel Four showing of a film about Lockerbie called The Maltese Double-Cross, which was followed by a live on air discussion where again I was present, as was Mr Duggan and where I had to ask a Mr Buck Revell of the FBI (appearing by satellite) why his son had canceled his flight on Pan Am 103 instead of getting murdered like my daughter. Mr Revell is, I understand, no longer in the FBI. If I recall correctly he told us that his son had received an unexpected change of leave dates from the army. His son was not claimed to be a member of the staff at the US Embassy in Moscow, where warnings about a terrorist threat specific to Pan Am had been posted on a staff notice board well before the tragedy. [RB: I cannot find this particular discussion online. But another instructive media performance by Frank Duggan can be viewed here.]

We have always been mystified as to why the Pan Am 103 plane was 'only' 2/3 full just before Christmas.

I won't ascribe a date to that discussion group, in case my memory might again prove defective.

There was also a British near equivalent to this amazing revelation from PCAST. In her autobiographical book published in 1993 - two years after the two Libyans had been indicted over involvement in the Lockerbie disaster. Lady Thatcher wrote, speaking of the attack by the USAF on Tripoli in 1986, itself an alleged reprisal for a terrorist bombing of a German disco:

“It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined....the much vaunted Libyan counter attack did not and could not take place. Gaddafi had not been destroyed but he had been humbled.” (The Downing Street Years, pp 448-9)

I fear, Mr Duggan, we shall continue to seek the truth and since we are European citizens we have an inalienable right to that truth under the provisions of the ECHR. Please Google that.

Truth and justice scandalously lacking in Lockerbie case

[This week’s edition of the Maltese newspaper The Sunday Times contains an interview with designer Mike Ross concerning his involvement with the Malta production of Kenneth Ross’s play The Lockerbie Bomber.  It reads in part:]

The poster for The Lockerbie Bomber, opening at St James Cavalier on Friday, is nothing short of striking. Viewed from a distance, it is a question mark, the sign which best resonates with the investigative nature of the play. Up close, however, the question mark opens up into a timeline of the Lockerbie tragedy.

“I’d had the idea of making a visual timeline of the Lockerbie case for some time but never quite figured out how I wanted to do it,” says Mike Ross, who designed the poster with the assistance of Andrea Meli.

“I thought it might end up being a painting, because that’s also been much on my mind. The whole issue is so full of unanswered questions and the idea of creating a montage of images that told the story from the beginning to the present day in the shape of a question mark came to me. The eureka moment was deciding to place the crucial and controversial piece of forensic evidence, a minute fragment of printed circuit board from a bomb timer, as the dot at the end of the question mark. That’s when it all suddenly fell into place.”

The centrality of the question mark allows for the design to be fluid.

“I like the idea that this can be an ongoing work in progress, which evolves as new facts emerge and allows for visually representing new developments, as and when they happen. It currently ends with the deaths of Muammar Gaddafi and Abdelbaset al-Megrahi but the story is a long way from over. It’s done in such a way that it’s infinitely flexible, and elements can be removed and replaced as the true story unfolds, while always remaining a question mark, always having the same basic look,” Ross says. (...)

“I’m most of all an ideas man, and my most fulfilling work has always been conceptual. Opportunities that allow me to explore ways of communicating important messages are what I’m on the lookout for,” says Ross, who is now also considering going back to drawing, and perhaps sculpture and painting.

This ethos has taken him on the path of the Lockerbie trail, a theme which resonates with his Scottish upbringing, with his time spent in Libya as a teenager and his current sojourn in Malta.

“I’ve read the play several times of course, and from what I’ve seen of rehearsals, this is going to be a profoundly compelling experience. I can’t wait to be a part of it – which is the nature of theatre in the round. Graphic design is very often connected to written content.

“I believe passionately in truth and justice, both scandalously lacking when it comes to the Lockerbie case. I want the truth to come out instead of being covered up by successive lying UK and US governments,” Ross says.

He plans to take the theme further in an installation, which he is literally, in his own words, trying to get off the ground.

“It’s basically a three-dimensional version of the question mark, suspended from above and slowly rotating over a circular turntable, rotating at the same slow speed in the opposite direction. The surface of the turntable consists of the iconic image, seen from directly overhead, of the Pan Am 103 cockpit smashed into a field, which has become synonymous with the atrocity.

“On the edge of the turntable a quotation rotates with the words ‘your government and ours know exactly what happened… but they’re never going to tell’ – said as an aside, by a US senator to a bereaved father at a meeting at the US embassy in London,” Ross says of his upcoming project.

This, Ross hopes, will have a dramatic and sobering effect as viewers take in all the images and the names on the artwork.

“Above all, I hope it will be thought-provoking and make them want to find out more about what really happened. It is not what we’ve been told.”

The Lockerbie Bomber is being performed on Friday, Saturday and next Sunday and on November 8 at St James Cavalier at 8pm. Staged by DnA Theatre Promotions, the play features Manuel Cauchi, Alan Paris, Alan Montanaro, Denise Mulholland, Julia Calvert and Mikhail Basmadjian.

Megrahi was innocent, says Lockerbie victim's father, Martin Cadman

[What follows is taken from a report published today on the EDP24 website:]

For more than 20 years Norfolk man Martin Cadman has fought to uncover the true story behind his son Bill’s death in the Lockerbie disaster. Now Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted bomber, is dead - but in this interview published in the EDP in April, Mr Cadman and the author of a new book explain why they believe he was innocent.

As Martin Cadman prepared to leave a meeting at London’s US Embassy just over a year after his son’s death aboard Pan Am flight 103, a member of the American Presidential Commission drew him to one side. “Keep up the fight,” he said. “Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they are never going to tell.”

Since then he has kept fighting and today, more than 23 years after Bill Cadman and 269 other people were killed, Mr Cadman has a filing cabinet in the study of his Burnham Market home crammed with folders relating to the disaster and the subsequent investigation. Despite this dogged research, exactly what happened remains a mystery to him, though he has his suspicions. But one thing of which he is certain is that it did not involve Libya or Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man who was convicted for the Lockerbie bombing in January 2001 at a trial under Scottish law in the Netherlands, spent eight years in a Scottish prison and was released on compassionate grounds after his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer.

Now comes the publication of a book, co-authored by Megrahi, that presents new evidence seemingly undermining what many considered an already flimsy case for is prosecution, and this strengthens Mr Cadman’s view that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

“I don’t think that Megrahi or Libya had anything to do with it,” he said. “He has been made a scapegoat.” The bulk of Megrahi: You are my Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence is written by John Ashton, a Brighton-based author who has studied the case for 18 years and worked as part of Megrahi’s defence team between 2006 and 2009. Italicised passages written by Megrahi in the first person are interspersed through Ashton’s detailed analysis of the bombing and its aftermath. The book draws from a long-suppressed 800-page report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which was compiled in 2007 and would have featured in Megrahi’s second appeal against his conviction – but as is well known, he dropped his appeal and accepted a quicker release on compassionate grounds while remaining tainted with guilt as the convicted bomber.

Three major points emerge from the report and Mr Ashton’s own research. First, the most significant new evidence concerns the Toshiba cassette player that is believed to have been converted into an explosive device and stowed within a brown Samsonite suitcase in the luggage hold. This device featured a timer supposedly identical to those known to have been purchased by Libya from a company called Mebo, which purchased its circuit boards from a German firm called Thuring.

Mr Ashton said: “This is something that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission miss, and it relates to the forensics. The crucial forensic item in the case that really ties Megrahi and Libya in was this fragment of circuit board. We can demonstrate forensically that the prosecution claim that this originated from a timing device that was supplied to Libya is not true, because in the circuit boards in those timing devices, the copper circuitry was coated with an alloy of tin and lead. The Lockerbie one was coated with pure tin, which requires a completely different manufacturing process, and one that was not used by Thuring, the company that supplied those circuit boards.”

The second point concerns the Crown’s most important witness, a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci who, two months before the bombing, sold a man some clothes that were later used to wrap the tape-recorder bomb within the suitcase. In Mr Ashton’s words, Gauci’s initial “descriptions of the clothes purchaser all suggested the man was around 50 years old, 6ft tall and with dark skin, whereas Megrahi was 36, is 5ft 8in and has light skin”.

But in 1991, Gauci identified Megrahi as the man who entered his shop, selecting him from a line-up of photographs, and in 1999, he picked Megrahi out again, this time in person. “Before picking him out of the identity parade it turns out he’d had a magazine that featured Megrahi’s photo for months, so he would have been familiar with him. He’d had other newspaper and magazine articles as well, it turned out.”

The SCCRC report also established that he only gave evidence after asking for a $2m reward, and that the Scottish police persuaded the US Department of Justice to pay this sum, along with $1m for his brother, Paul. This fact was not disclosed to the defence during the trial, and would have been of great value as they sought to cast aspersions on the quality of Gauci’s evidence.

So if Mr Cadman, Mr Ashton and Megrahi are correct, who really was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing? Herein lies the third major aspect of the book’s case.

In July 1988, an American warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down Iran Air flight 655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai as it flew over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 passengers.

“This Iranian airbus was taking people to the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca,” said Mr Cadman, aged 87. “We never got an answer from the Americans as to why they shot down an innocent airbus.”

Instead of issuing an explanation or apology for the loss of innocent lives, the Ronald Reagan administration gave the USS Vincennes crew the Combat Action Ribbon. Five months after this attack, on December 21, 1988, came the Lockerbie bombing.

“It was a revenge thing, probably – Iran saying ‘we’re going to have the same number of yours as you killed of ours’,” said Mr Cadman. The investigators’ initial suspicion was indeed directed at Iran – specifically an Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). This group had splintered from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and had already massacred civilians in Israel and Europe. In particular, the focus was on one man, Mohammed Abu Talb, who was given a life sentence in 1989 for attacks on Jewish targets. He is believed to have been freed from prison in 2009, shortly after Megrahi.

Mr Ashton said: “The key things about this group are: one, they built bombs into Toshiba radio cassette players; two, they built bombs that were designed to blow up aircraft; and three, the cell was based in West Germany, which is where the flight began its journey. There was a feeder flight called Pan Am 103A, and the flight that exploded was Pan Am flight 103.

“Although some of the group were rounded up two months before Lockerbie, some of their bombs went missing and some of the personnel were not rounded up. There was a warning issued in December 1988... The State Department circulated a warning which said that a group of Palestinian militants were heading to Europe and were planning to target Pan Am.” Mr Ashton said that that warning’s existence was not revealed until seven years after the Lockerbie disaster. He added: “So those things combine to make me think they did it – and Iran, of course, had the motive.”

Bill Cadman and his girlfriend were among 259 people to have died in the aeroplane on December 21, 1988, along with 11 more at the crash site in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. Bill was 32 and building a successful career as a sound engineer responsible for the audio quality at West End musicals such as Les Miserables. He and his girlfriend were en route to America for Christmas. “They shouldn’t have been on the flight,” said Mr Cadman. “I think my son was trying to buy the tickets last minute, and he hadn’t got the money, but his girlfriend produced the money, otherwise they wouldn’t have been on the flight.”

Over the years he and his wife Rita, who now lives in a care home in Fakenham, had the support of a number of politicians such as Henry Bellingham, the Conservative MP for North-West Norfolk, and Tam Dalyell, the former Labour member for Linlithgow.

Both politicians had great respect for Mr Cadman – as does Mr Ashton. “I’ve dealt with Martin, he’s a very good man,” he said. “He’s been very dogged over the years. He deserves better than he’s got, all the relatives do. It’s only with the help of people like him that we keep all this on the agenda.”

Mr Ashton’s hope is that this book will result in a public inquiry in Scotland. “I think the chances of getting the people who really did it are very slight. The best we can hope for is a full inquiry. At the very least it needs to look into why all this evidence was withheld, but what we really need is the full inquiry which will answer the questions of Martin and others, which are: why were the warnings ignored, and what happened within the investigation that led to the PFLP-GC and Iran being dropped as suspects. And, on top of that, we need to get Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. There is a mechanism for doing that – an application could be made to the SCCRC, and his family are being encouraged to do that.”

However, he is sure that Megrahi will not live to see this happen. When Megrahi returned home to Libya to die, his arrival prompted scenes of joy that disgusted many Britons and Americans, not least the many victims’ relatives who believe that he is a murderer.

Megrahi’s heroic status in his home country, however, owed nothing to the idea that he had struck a murderous blow against an American airliner; instead he is seen as an innocent man who sacrificed his liberty for the sake of the nation’s economy. In 2003, Muammar Gadaffi accepted Libyan responsibility for the atrocity and paid compensation to the victims’ families in order to have crippling sanctions lifted – and at the same time let it be known that he was doing so as an economic tactic rather than a true acceptance of guilt.

Megrahi describes his release from prison in the book: “The decision provoked a carnival of political pointscoring, which kept the issue at the top of the news agenda for over a fortnight. The controversy was entirely founded on the assumption that I was the Lockerbie bomber. Very little of the media and political comment acknowledged that I had had an appeal pending and that the SCCRC considered the original verdict was ‘at least arguably one which no reasonable court, properly directed, could have returned’.”

Mr Cadman does not know whether he will see someone else convicted for his son’s murder. He is sure of one thing, however, after that conversation at the embassy.

“I remember that he said ‘There are some things that you will hear about that are right, but you won’t hear all of it. And no one here is going to tell you everything.’ And that is rather frightening. There are these few people who are in the know, and the rest of us who are not.”

Megrahi: You are my Jury – The Lockerbie Evidence, by John Ashton, is published by Birlinn at £14.99.

“They're never going to tell”

[On this date in 1990, members of President George [H W] Bush’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) met members of the families of UK Lockerbie victims at the US embassy in London. What follows is taken from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103:]

On 29 September 1989, President [George H W] Bush appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos, former Secretary of Labor, as chairwoman of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) to review and report on aviation security policy in the light of the sabotage of flight PA103. Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's Executive Assistant Director, was assigned to advise and assist PCAST in their task. Mrs Korologos and the PCAST team (Senator Alfonse D'Amato, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Representative James Oberstar, General Thomas Richards, deputy commander of US forces in West Germany, and Edward Hidalgo, former Secretary of the US Navy) submitted their report, with its 64 recommendations, on 15 May 1990. The PCAST chairman also handed a sealed envelope to the President which was widely believed to apportion blame for the PA103 bombing. Extensively covered in The Guardian the next day, the PCAST report concluded:

"National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism. The Commission recommends a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions."

Before submitting their report, the PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US embassy in London on 12 February 1990. Twelve years later, on 11 July 2002, Scottish MP Tam Dalyell reminded the House of Commons of a controversial statement made at that 1990 embassy meeting by a PCAST member to one of the British relatives, Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell." The statement first came to public attention in the 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie and was published in both The Guardian of 29 July 1995, and a special report from Private Eye magazine entitled Lockerbie, the flight from justice May/June 2001. Dalyell asserted in Parliament that the statement had never been refuted.

Twentieth anniversary of report of Presidential Commission

[The following account is taken from the Wikipedia article Pan Am Flight 103.]

On 29 September 1989, President [George H W] Bush appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos, former Secretary of Labor, as chairwoman of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (PCAST) to review and report on aviation security policy in the light of the sabotage of flight PA103. Oliver "Buck" Revell, the FBI's Executive Assistant Director, was assigned to advise and assist PCAST in their task. Mrs Korologos and the PCAST team (Senator Alfonse D'Amato, Senator Frank Lautenberg, Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, Representative James Oberstar, General Thomas Richards, deputy commander of US forces in West Germany, and Edward Hidalgo, former Secretary of the US Navy) submitted their report, with its 64 recommendations, on 15 May 1990. The PCAST chairman also handed a sealed envelope to the President which was widely believed to apportion blame for the PA103 bombing. Extensively covered in The Guardian the next day, the PCAST report concluded:

"National will and the moral courage to exercise it are the ultimate means of defeating terrorism. The Commission recommends a more vigorous policy that not only pursues and punishes terrorists, but also makes state sponsors of terrorism pay a price for their actions."

Before submitting their report, the PCAST members met a group of British PA103 relatives at the US embassy in London on 12 February 1990. Twelve years later, on 11 July 2002, Scottish MP Tam Dalyell reminded the House of Commons of a controversial statement made at that 1990 embassy meeting by a PCAST member to one of the British relatives, Martin Cadman: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened. But they're never going to tell." The statement first came to public attention in the 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie and was published in both The Guardian of 29 July 1995, and a special report from Private Eye magazine entitled "Lockerbie, the flight from justice" May/June 2001. Dalyell asserted in Parliament that the statement had never been refuted.

[And the following account is from the Canadian Attic blog.]

A US presidential commission issued a report on the December 1988 of a Pan American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland that had killed all 259 people aboard and 11 more on the ground. The commission said that it was not certain how the bomb was smuggled aboard the plane, but cited evidence that it was an unaccompanied suitcase loaded in Frankfurt, West Germany. The report said that the security system for US civil aviation "is seriously flawed and has failed to provide the proper level of protection to the traveling public." The commission called for greatly increased security at US airports, the creation of the post of assistant secretary of transportation for security and intelligence, and establishment of a national system for warning passengers of credible threats against airlines or flights.

Lockerbie families consider third al-Megrahi appeal

[This is the headline over a report (behind the paywall) in today’s edition of The Times.  It reads as follows:]

British relatives of Lockerbie bombing victims will consider making another appeal against the conviction of the only man found guilty of the atrocity.

Some members of the UK Families Flight 103 group will meet lawyers in the new year to discuss whether to apply to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), according to Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the bombing in December 1988.

“The intention of some members is to meet with lawyers in January and discuss the best options, the best way to get the truth,” he said. “It’s a disgrace that we have to wait 25 years to get the truth that should be available from our governments.”

The group will also consider whether an inquiry is the best route to get answers. Dr Swire is part of another group pursuing a long-running petition at the Scottish parliament calling for the Scottish government to open a full public inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Last December, Dr Swire said that the family of the convicted bomber could be risking their lives if they were to raise the prospect of a fresh appeal against conviction, possibly leaving it to victims’ families instead.

Dr Swire said that new evidence needed to be investigated, including allegations surrounding a break-in at Heathrow before the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people in the air and on the ground. “It’s clear following the evidence and the behaviour of certain governments that Megrahi wasn’t involved at all,” he said.

If successful, a new application to the SCCRC could start the third appeal into the conviction. Al-Megrahi lost his first appeal in 2002, a year after he was found guilty of mass murder and jailed for life.

The SCCRC recommended in 2007 that al-Megrahi should be granted a second appeal against his conviction. He dropped the appeal two days before being released from prison in August 2009 on compassionate grounds.

Details of six grounds for referral to appeal were published last year. Four of the reasons refer to undisclosed evidence from the Crown to al-Megrahi’s defence team.

The grounds cover evidence about a positive identification of al-Megrahi by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who said that he had sold clothes to a Libyan man. The clothes were linked to a suitcase loaded on to the aircraft, which was then linked to the bomb and eventually to al-Megrahi.

The SCCRC has raised concerns that evidence suggesting Mr Gauci had seen a magazine article linking al-Megrahi to the bomb had not been passed to the defence. Contradictions about the day al-Megrahi was said to have bought the clothes were also highlighted. The trial was told that they were bought on December 7 but the SCCRC said that Mr Gauci also thought it might have been November 29. [RB: The two dates that were canvassed as real possibilities were 23 November and 7 December.] 

Also of concern to the SCCRC was undisclosed evidence about Mr Gauci’s interest in rewards. The commission said that the defence should have been told that a substantial reward was on offer from the US Government.

This week, Frank Mulholland, QC, the Lord Advocate, announced that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the investigation into the bombing.

[A similar article appeared in yesterday’s edition of The Scotsman, along with an opinion piece by Dr Jim Swire which reads in part:]

Try to imagine what it is like to know that your daughter went, unaware of her danger, through the corridors of an airport which knew that its “secure” airside had been broken into, and knew that there was a high terrorist threat to US aircraft at the time and yet still decided not to investigate who had broken in or what his motive might have been. Then try to imagine that you have tried in every way you can think of for 25 years to get an inquiry into why Lockerbie was not prevented and how things could be improved for the future, and been blocked at every stage.

It also took us until 2012 to get official confirmation – in a letter to me from the former Chief Constable (Dumfries and Galloway police) Patrick Shearer – that the investigating police had had complete files about that break-in in their computer from February 1989. That letter also explained that the file had been passed to the Crown Office before the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had even started. Yet still the prosecutors failed to share their knowledge with the defence.

It is probable that the suppression of this break-in evidence was caused by blind adherence to the hypothesis that the bomb must have come from Malta because of some associated clothing that had indeed originated there. Once a force has formed a strong hypothesis, it takes an earthquake to convince it that other evidence, particularly if hostile to the favoured hypothesis, ought to be shared with the defence. That is a problem we see again and again in miscarriage of justice cases. (...)

The United Nations special observer to the trial (Professor Hans Koechler of Vienna) was in no doubt that it did not represent justice. How could it have done when the break-in information describing an obvious possible avenue for the introduction of the bomb at Heathrow was simply denied to the defence? There were other signs of something far more sinister: Early in 1990, we UK relatives were called to the US embassy in London. In an aside to one of us there, an American official said privately of Lockerbie: “Your government and ours know exactly what happened, but they’re never going to tell.”

Then, in 1993, the late Baroness Thatcher wrote of her support for the 1986 US air force (USAF) raid on Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi: “It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan-sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined…the much vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not and could not take place.” Yet two years before, in 1991, two Libyans had been officially blamed for the Lockerbie bombing. (...)

In the post-Snowden world, we all know how extensive is the reach, even among their own citizens, of US and UK intelligence gathering. What we do not know is what aspects of that intelligence are deliberately hidden from citizens who desperately need access to it in their grief, or indeed why any of it should be kept from them.

We relatives need the truth about who murdered our families and article 2 of human rights legislation guarantees our right to have it. While that truth is hidden, the true perpetrators are protected.

Next year, in the face of the blank refusal of governments to mount any meaningful inquiry, certain relatives will apply to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a further appeal against the Megrahi verdict. It is likely that some of us will also pursue other routes to force an honest inquiry out of obdurate governments; 25 years is too long, and we should not be opposed by our own elected governments.

If you look at terrible UK disasters – Northern Ireland and the IRA trials, the Hillsborough disaster and also Lockerbie, it is the denial of truth to the victims that is the common thread. So, indeed, there is a thread and that thread is truth.

[The announcement by the Lord Advocate that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the investigation into the bombing has been widely reported in the media.  Examples can be found here (BBC News); here (The Herald); and here (Dundee Courier).  It is also reported that US and UK investigators are to be allowed to question Abdullah al-Senussi, the Gaddafi regime’s security chief who is currently awaiting trial in Libya. Here are examples from ITV News and from the Libya Herald.

The recently-retired Director of the FBI, Robert S Mueller III, has expressed confidence that others will be charged in connection with the Lockerbie bombing. A report on the BBC News website contains the following:]

In a rare interview, to mark the 25th anniversary of the deadliest act of terrorism in the UK, Mr Mueller said he was confident the ongoing investigation would "continue to produce results".

"We have FBI agents who are working full-time to track down every lead, as we have since it occurred 25 years ago," Mr Mueller said.

"My expectation is that continuously we will obtain additional information, perhaps additional witnesses, and that others will be charged with their participation in this.

"We do not forget. And by that I mean the FBI, the US Department of Justice, we do not forget," he said. (...)

Mr [Frank] Mulholland, Scotland's lord advocate, said on Monday that Libya had appointed two prosecutors to work on the Lockerbie case.

He told the BBC that the Libyans would work alongside Scottish and American investigators and described this as a "welcome development' which he said would hopefully lead to progress in the case.

Robert Mueller said there had been progress since the revolution in Libya and he expected that to continue.

But he acknowledged that violence and instability in Libya was making things more difficult.

"The problem in Libya now is the government is struggling to maintain security and order and bring peace to the country," he said. (...)

Robert Mueller said he was open to new evidence but remained convinced "the proof was solid on Megrahi".

He said: "My expectation is there are others who may well be brought to justice as a result of continuing investigation by both ourselves as well as the Scottish authorities".

Mr Mueller has been involved with the Lockerbie case for more than 20 years.

He was assistant attorney general in the United States in 1991 when indictments were issued for the two Libyan suspects, Megrahi and Al-amin Khalifa Fimah. (...)

Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, freed [Megrahi] on compassionate grounds in August 2009 because he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

At that time, Robert Mueller wrote a scathing letter to Mr MacAskill in which he said his decision "gives comfort to terrorists around the world".

In his BBC interview, which he said would be his last, Mr Mueller was asked if he had reflected on this intervention.

"My letter still stands," he said.

[Mr Mueller has featured regularly on this blog. The relevant items can be found here.  By contrast, here are some very sensible comments from Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga died on Pan Am 103:]

A minister who lost his 19-year-old daughter in the Lockerbie bombing told ITV News the government are "looking in the wrong place" for the perpetrators after UK authorities were given permission to interview Muammar Gaddafi's former intelligence chief.

Reverend John Mosey said he was "very sceptical of any good" coming from the interview with Abdullah Senussi because the link between the 1988 disaster and Libya had been "blown out of the water."

He also added that the new Libyan regime are "desperate to pin it all on Gaddafi."

A clear-headed analysis?

[The following are two letters from today’s edition of the Sunday Herald:]

John Laverie may find it illuminating to peruse John Ashton's book Megrahi: You Are My Jury (Libya's gulag: questions linger, Letters, June 19). It contains a number of references to Moussa Koussa, former head of Libyan intelligence. Ashton states that Koussa was debriefed at an MI6 safe house in the spring of 2011 and shortly after was interviewed about Lockerbie by the Scottish police. He was then allowed to leave the country and his assets were unfrozen. Ashton suggests that one obvious reason for Koussa not being arrested was that the UK Government was well aware that neither he nor Gaddafi had anything to do with Lockerbie. A less obvious explanation was that Koussa was a long-time MI6 asset. On March 30, 2011, the Daily Telegraph stated: "As head of Libyan external intelligence, Mr Koussa was an MI6 asset for almost two decades."

In his book, John Ashton recounts the experience of Martin Cadman who lost his son Bill in the Lockerbie bombing. In February 1990, Mr Cadman was invited to the US embassy in London to meet the members of a presidential commission established to examine aviation security policy with particular reference to Lockerbie. At the end of the meeting Mr Cadman was taken aside by one of the commission's seven members who said to him: "Your government and ours know exactly what happened [regarding Lockerbie] but they are never going to tell." Alan Woodcock

I read John S Laverie's letter with particular interest as I had just finished Kenny MacAskill's book, The Lockerbie Bombing – The Search For Justice (Libya's gulag: question linger, Letters, June 19). MacAskill, who was Justice Secretary and responsible for making the decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds, brings clarity to a subject muddied by conspiracy theories – he covers the issues of rendition, the involvement of MI6 and the role of Moussa Koussa, and I thoroughly recommend the book to Mr Laverie and all those interested in a clear-headed analysis of the Lockerbie atrocity. Ian D Cochrane

[RB: Mr Cochrane’s view that Kenny MacAskill’s book brings clarity to the subject is a minority one. Reviews of the book can be found here and here and here and here.]

Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing: Fresh appeal launched to clear Megrahi

[This is the headline over an article by Steve James published today on the WSWS.org website. It reads in part:]

Relatives ... of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi have won the right to posthumously appeal his 2001 conviction for murder following a decision by the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC). (...)

The Lockerbie attack came only six months after an Iranair Airbus, IR655, was shot down in an unprovoked act of mass murder, by the US missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes. In that instance 290 passengers and crew were killed. At the time, most commentary and media coverage assumed that the Lockerbie atrocity was an act of revenge.

From the outset, however, it was apparent there was some level of foreknowledge or complicity on behalf of the US and British intelligence services. Warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights had been issued. PA103, flying just before Christmas, was half empty because of cancellations. On the crash site in Scotland, numerous reports emerged of unrecorded activity by the FBI, items of wreckage being removed under armed guard, and luggage interfered with.

In 1990, UK citizen Martin Cadman, whose son Bill was killed on the flight, attended a briefing at the US Embassy for relatives of victims of the attack. Cadman was, without prompting, told by an unnamed member of the US President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, “Your government and ours know exactly what happened and they are never going to tell.”

By 1991, around the time the Iranian government declared its neutrality during the US Desert Storm war on Iraq, the British and US authorities shifted responsibility for Lockerbie to Libya.

Pinning the blame on Libya served to isolate and pressure the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and provided a pretext for punitive economic sanctions, which undermined the North African country’s oil-based economy.

Magrahi’s trial, at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, was held under Scots law as part of a deal brokered by South African leader Nelson Mandela between the British and Libyan governments. Its purpose was to allow some veneer of legal process on the rapprochement between the two countries, as Gaddafi abandoned his former radical posturing and US and British imperialism eyed the country’s oil resources.

The trial, however, revealed extraordinary inconsistencies in the Scottish Crown Office case. Not least was that there was no proof that Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, had ever loaded a comparable suitcase in Luqa airport in Malta, no proof that any unaccompanied suitcase had travelled from Malta via Frankfurt to Heathrow, to be loaded onto PA103, and no explanation of how Luqa airport’s rigorous security was overcome.

Nevertheless, Magrahi was convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, later increased to 27.

In another of countless inconsistencies, Megrahi’s co-accused, Llamen Fhimah was set free. For his part, Gaddafi duly offered compensation to the attack’s victims without accepting Libyan responsibility. [RB: Libya accepted "responsibility for the actions of its officials" and nothing more.]

Megrahi had an initial appeal rejected in 2002, but the passage of time has only increased the perception that he was the victim of a politically motivated frame-up and show trial.

In 2007, the SCCRC authorised another appeal, reporting there was “no reasonable basis” to place Megrahi in Malta where he had been identified as allegedly purchasing clothing identified as being in a suitcase containing the bomb. However, in 2009 Megrahi, in prison in Greenock, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was allowed to return to Libya following an understanding reached with the Scottish government that his appeal should be dropped. Megrahi died in 2012, still protesting his innocence.

In 2011, 10 years after the trial, US, French and British imperialism launched a bloody neo-colonial war to overthrow Gaddafi. It ended with Gaddafi being hunted down and butchered. The country was pitched into a catastrophic civil war, which continues to this day.

This latest appeal was launched by Megrahi’s family and [supported by] the Justice for Megrahi (JFM) campaign. This includes relatives of several victims of the disaster such as Dr Jim Swire, who has steadfastly campaigned for the truth around his 23-year-old daughter’s murder on PA103.

JFM members include Robert Black, a lawyer and one of the architects of the original Camp Zeist trial. Another member is former police superintendent Iain McKie, whose daughter Shirley was the subject of a debacle which, in the end, discredited the Scottish Criminal Records Office entire finger-printing methodology. Shirley McKie was charged with perjury before finally being exonerated and compensated.

A SCCRC press statement reported grounds for allowing the new appeal. Referring to the identification of Megrahi as the purchaser of clothing in the bomb suitcase by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the SCCRC concluded that “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred because no reasonable trial court, relying on the evidence led at trial, could have held the case against Mr Megrahi was proved beyond reasonable doubt.”

The SCCRC statement found that the Crown failed to “disclose a statement and a police report” confirming that Gauci had photographs of Megrahi in his possession before he identified him. This “deprived Mr Megrahi a real chance of an acquittal.” The commission also found that “reward money to be paid to Mr Gauci under a scheme administered by the US Department of State” meant that “Mr Megrahi was denied a fair trial.”

Gauci was coached by the Scottish police and bribed by the US government—$2 million was eventually said to have been handed over.

The SCCRC rejected further grounds for appeal relating to:

The date on which Megrahi was identified as having been in Gauci’s shop in Malta

* Evidence emerged of the date at which Christmas lights were switched on in Sliema, Malta and which contradicts the prosecution claim that Megrahi made the purchases. Yet, the SCCRC “decided that the fresh evidence in question is not likely to have assisted Mr. Megrahi’s cause.” In a repeated theme, the SCCRC’s pointed to the fact that Megrahi’s defence team “chose not to lead it in connection with his appeal in 2002.”

The metallurgical characteristics of circuit board fragment PT/35(b)

* This fragment was claimed to be part of an MST-13 timer constructed by MEBO AG of Switzerland. The fragment appeared late in the investigation with records of its discovery apparently altered. PT/35(b)’s significance in the case against Megrahi is that it implicated the Libyan government, which had purchased 20 such timers.

Evidence emerged, and was available early in the investigation, to confirm that the MST-13 circuit board fragment could not have been part of the batch of timers sold to Libya, as the board’s soldering had different characteristics from control samples provided by MEBO. When this was made available to Megrahi’s original defence team, they again, for reasons unclear, declined to use it.

The SCCRC nevertheless found that “the decision by the defence team to proceed without investigating the metallurgy issue did not mean that Mr. Megrahi’s defence was not presented to the court.”

Suitcase ingestion at Heathrow

* This is most damaging to the entire case against Megrahi and was clearly explained in the 2013 book Adequately Explained by Stupidity? by JFM member, Dr Morag Kerr.

Kerr makes a detailed and methodical examination of the recorded progress of all items of luggage through Luqa, Frankfurt and Heathrow airports, their position in the luggage container AVE4041 at Heathrow airport, and their subsequent condition and location when discovered on the hills around Lockerbie. Her conclusion is that the bomb suitcase, a Samsonite Silhouette 400, was introduced in London prior to a feeder flight, PA 103A, arriving from Frankfurt carrying any luggage from Malta.

Kerr makes clear that, despite the vast and complex investigation, this suitcase has no known provenance and its owner has never been identified. It was noticed by several airline staff prior to and during transfer to PA 103. It appeared the day after a highly unusual break-in to the Heathrow luggage storage area adjacent to where AVE4041 was loaded.

The SCCRC agreed that “If accepted, this would fatally undermine the Crown case,” but claimed the allegation lacked information highlighted by Operation Sandwood—a four-year police inquiry into allegations of police criminality during the Lockerbie investigation made by JFM.

This counterclaim is not substantiated. Operation Sandwood concluded in 2018 that “no criminality” had been found. Its report has not been published, nor the basis of its findings released.

Learning of the news of the appeal being allowed, Megrahi’s youngest son, Ali, told The Times “If the world discovers the identity of the true bomber, it will have to accept that it was not my father. Those who lost their loved ones deserve to know the truth, who was responsible and why it happened.”