Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Claiden. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Claiden. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday 6 August 2014

Steering the Lockerbie investigation away from Heathrow

[What follows is a lightly-edited amalgamation of two comments posted today by Dr Morag Kerr (Rolfe) on the thread Police investigations in Lockerbie case "moved very quickly away from Heathrow".]

It is my belief that John Orr deliberately steered the investigation away from Heathrow from the very earliest days of the inquiry. That Times article [Disaster bomb was ‘placed on board Jumbo at Frankfurt’ The Times, 31 December 1988] which must have been written on 30 December didn't come out of nowhere. It has a startling amount of detail on the methodologies of the PFLP-GC as well as the headline that the bomb came from Frankfurt and not Heathrow.

It takes a very special sort of stupid to receive Bedford's 9th January statement describing a brown Samsonite hardshell in the container in the interline shed at Heathrow, and reports (the same month) from the forensic scientists that the bomb had been in a brown Samsonite hardshell, and do NOTHING to connect the two. I mean, Bedford described two suitcases which appeared while he was on his break, and then concentrated on "one of them", which he described in detail. The one on the left was in the correct position to have been the bomb, the one on the right wasn't. Nobody even asked him which of the two cases he was referring to as a brown Samsonite hardshell. (Only at the FAI [Fatal Accident Inquiry], in October 1990, did he answer that he was talking about the one on the left.)

On 2 February 1989 Ray Manly's statement was received at Lockerbie. It was entered into HOLMES and filed away as being of no interest whatsoever to the inquiry. In other words, Heathrow had already been discounted as early as that.

The "nonsense on stilts" at the March meeting about most of the damaged luggage being from Frankfurt so probably the bomb suitcase was too, has more than a whiff of deliberate obfuscation about it. Are we really supposed to believe that a senior detective heading an inquiry of this magnitude is that stupid? But who would dare contradict him?

It wasn't just Orr, though. Parallel with his ignoring of the Heathrow baggage evidence, we see the forensics officers unite as one to declare that the explosion had not been in the suitcase on the floor of the container. This wasn't just the RARDE experts (principally Feraday, but also Cullis and Hayes), but also the AAIB inspectors, principally Claiden and Protheroe. The first report containing this opinion was written by Peter Claiden and is dated April 1989.

Now, the explosion WAS in the suitcase on the floor of the container. That's incontrovertible, once you realise where PK/139 was positioned within the container. (Nobody even mentions PK/139 in any of the reports. It's just sitting there in a composite photo, mutely screaming "look at me", and nobody paid the slightest attention to it.) And PK/139 is just the single most blindingly obvious piece of evidence - multiple strands of evidence reinforce each other to show that there was no suitcase below the bomb suitcase.

So how come we have about six investigators from two different institutes, who were officially working separately on the case, lining up to ignore the bleedin' obvious, and declare a mystic knowledge that the recovered floor of the container would have looked different if the bomb had been in the bottom suitcase?

Not once in any of their reports is there any acknowledgement that the case on the bottom was from Heathrow, while the case on the second layer was from Frankfurt. All that vehemence to exclude the bottom case, and they don't even seem to know that by doing this they are absolving Heathrow. And yet, why bother making the distinction in the first place unless you know that the two cases have different provenances?

So, at the same time Orr was ignoring Bedford, Feraday and assorted hangers-on were insisting that the case in the position of the one Bedford saw wasn't the bomb. Quite independently, of course. And equally in defiance of the evidence in front of them. 

I think Orr probably used this forensic opinion later to justify ignoring the Bedford case, but that's retrospective, as he was ignoring it well before the opinion was reported.

So, if Orr was acting on instructions from on high, it seems quite plausible that someone in the forensics team (probably Feraday) was also receiving instructions to interpret the evidence in a way that would deflect from Heathrow. (I suspect Claiden's April 1989 report might have had a wee nudge from Feraday, although at the FAI he was at some pains to declare that the two teams who were examining the wreckage together - and probably eating lunch together and so on - didn't communicate at all.)

So, was one agency directing both Orr and Feraday in this? Seems likely. All to prevent BAA and Heathrow from being culpable in the loss of 270 lives, and to hell with whether the actual bombers were caught or not. So who?

Who privatised BAA in 1986? Who wrote stuff in her memoirs which pretty clearly indicated she knew full well that Gaddafi had not been behind the Lockerbie bombing? [RB: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 1993, page 449.]

Well, I'm speculating as to motive. However, I have an extremely strong sense of both arms of the investigation (police and forensics) being separately pressurised to deliver opinions that absolved the Bedford case. And it seems only logical that the same person or body was pressurising both groups.

I very much doubt if there was any US influence in this area at all. I think the Americans were frying entirely different fish. It smells home-grown to me. So, I go figure.

I think the Americans wanted to blame Libya and Gaddafi, but if it had been proved to have been the PFLP-GC they'd have had to accept that. At first the evidence pointing to the PFLP-GC appeared overwhelming, and they seem to have conceded the point. However, nobody could find any connection between the PFLP-GC and KM180 at Malta.

If you're looking for the right culprit in the wrong place, you're doomed to fail. The police failed, but never considered that was because they were looking in the wrong place. They ran into the sand. Which was a convenient moment for the US authorities to step in and resurrect the idea that maybe they should all have been looking for Libyans not Palestinians, and maybe if they investigated this Libyan guy they'd find something.

Saturday 19 July 2014

Second Lockerbie air accident investigator speaks about MH17

[Another of the air accident investigators involved at Lockerbie has been talking about the MH17 crash. What follows is excerpted from an article in today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph:]

The painstaking process of investigating the Malaysian Airlines disaster will be made immeasurably more complicated by the crash site’s location in the middle of a country on the brink of civil war, experts said.

The investigation will require scrupulous mapping of debris - to help give a clear picture of how and why the fuselage broke up - followed by recovery of every piece of wreckage and possible forensic examination for traces of explosives.

Peter Claiden, who was a senior engineer in the AAIB investigation into the 1988 Lockerbie disaster, said: “There really needs to be a proper, professional investigation if they want to secure evidence from the wreckage.

“It was difficult enough to achieve at Lockerbie so the problems facing investigators in what is effectively a war zone are very serious indeed.”

Mr Claiden, who was responsible for reconstructing part of Pan Am Flight 103 after it was blown up mid-air above the Scottish town killing all 259 onboard and 11 on the ground, said: “The first problem will be to try to identify how widespread the wreckage is.

“They will need to find the infrastructure to take away the wreckage and store it safely.

“If the aircraft was destroyed by a missile, in an ideal world you must get all that wreckage and reassemble it. Then you might get an idea of the origin of the disaster.”

Air accident investigators must sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to establish the cause of a disaster - as in the case of Lockerbie which became Britain’s largest ever murder inquiry.

Part of the fuselage of Pan Am Boeing 747 - which exploded above Lockerbie in December 1988 - was reconstructed in a hangar in Farnborough, Hants, by the AAIB, where it remained for 24 years while diplomatic and legal machinations wore on.

The reconstruction was essential in proving Flight 103 broke up mid-air after the detonation of Semtex high explosive concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder, which was contained in a Samsonite suitcase in the aircraft’s hold.

Fragments of the items, plus a long-delay electronic timer made by a Swiss firm, MEBO, were presented in the trial of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi held under Scottish law in Camp Zeist, the Netherlands, in 2000.

Sunday 10 July 2016

Megrahi convicted on evidence designed to prosecute Abu Talb

[What follows is taken from an item posted yesterday on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website:]

Armed with the intelligence on the PFLP-GC’s activities in Neuss in October and the FAA Warning, the Scottish investigators on the ground, assisted by their American friends, were in no doubt that they were looking for the remains of a copper Samsonite suitcase which would contain a semtex-based IED concealed within a Toshiba Radio. The radio would be enclosed in a cardboard box along with an instruction manual. They even knew that the explosives within the radio would be wrapped in Toblerone type wrapping foil.
In no time whatsoever they “found” what they were looking for. […]
AG145 - debris from the identification plate of the luggage container which Feraday was satisfied was from a Toshiba 8016 or 8026 but then he changed his mind later on. [RB: information about AG145 can be found here and here.] At trial however the air accident investigator Claiden testified that the fold in the identification plate which harboured the debris identified as originating from a Toshiba HAD NOT BEEN CAUSED AT THE TIME OF THE EXPLOSION
A black explosion-damaged cardigan with Toblerone foil violently impacted into its fabric was found and initially was described as originating from the bomb suitcase, but later the classification was changed as the emphasis moved away from the PFLP-GC.
Then, impacted into various items of clothing which Gauci later remembered selling to “a suspect”, originally Talb, the scientists found pieces of the cardboard box, the instruction manual and various pieces of plastics and mesh which Hayes claimed was from the IED Radio.
In relation to the detonation device a report was submitted from the Scottish police to the Lord Advocate asking for the detention of various suspects who had been involved with the PFLP-GC in Neuss. In that report the police assert time after time that the bomb had been triggered by a barometric device.
The net was finally closing and by a spectacular piece of detective work a pair of trousers from the bomb suitcase was traced via the manufacturers on Malta to Tony Gauci’s shop where he remarkably remembered selling a variety of clothes to a suspect, which had turned up in the bomb suitcase. To be fair to Tony however he did not make the whole thing up from nothing, he was shown a variety of photographs of items said to originate from the bomb suitcase and he picked them out.
The slight fly in the ointment however is that the police claimed to have been led to Gauci by a manufacturer’s label (Yorkie) attached to the trousers and by a Stamped Number 1705 on a pocket which was an order number for Gauci’s Shop. Unfortunately we now have a police document which indicates that when the trousers first came into the possession of the police there was no such label attached and the number 1705 apparently jumps from one fragment of trousers to another depending on what report or which police statement you chose to read.
Gauci went some way to identifying Talb as the purchaser of the clothing. However Gauci’s identification would have been bolstered by the evidence of a witness with a shop nearby who made a definite identification of Talb being in his own shop at the relevant time. This shopkeeper’s evidence has never been heard.
So sure were the police that Talb was their man, that they even fabricated evidence of a piece of clothing found in his home in Sweden and originally described as a pair of child’s kick-trousers with a size and a manufacturer into being a Babygro with penguins on the front; the same type of course as described in the shipment note lodged at court to prove the evidence of Gauci and his lamb/sheep Babygro he claimed to have sold to the man.
I could go on and on with discrepancies in the case but I want to make the point that Megrahi was in my mind convicted on evidence much of which was designed to prosecute Talb and all they had to do to was change the tentative identification by Gauci of Talb to Megrahi and introduce the small fragment of circuit board, PT35b.
That’s what makes this case so different. Megrahi was convicted on false evidence originally intended to be used against someone else and if any of that evidence was tested in court by a defence team properly briefed by defence investigators then Megrahi’s name would be cleared.
Baset [Megrahi] would be pleased if that were to happen because on his deathbed he asked me to not only try to prove his innocence but prove that he was deliberately convicted on false evidence.