[This is the
heading over a letter from Dr Jim Swire published in today’s edition of The Herald. It reads as follows:]
In a villa,
within a high walled garden in Tripoli, Libya, there lies a man wracked by the
pain of widespread cancer, living out the last days of his life, cared for by
his wife and children.
His name is known around the world as
Megrahi, "the Lockerbie bomber".
He is what we would call middle
class. His work was as a part-time international entrepreneur, part time
employee of his State's airline, where his role involved the unusual task of
trying to obtain spares for that airline's Boeing airliners in the face of
international sanctions against his state. His work took him often to Malta
where he may have had a mistress. It also took him from time to time to Zurich.
Yes, he also had a state-issued
passport in a false name, to facilitate and conceal his journeyings and no
doubt his trysts. Later when both Abdelbasel Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, pictured,
and his family were confined to Tripoli, awaiting trial, (which he had
volunteered to attend, in order as he believed to clear his name), he arranged
for two of his children also to be issued with false passports so that they
could attend a children's festival in another country. Such were the mores of
his country, such were the uses of false passports.
The Scottish court at Camp Zeist was
told that an investigating Scottish policeman had kept a diary but he was not
told to go and get it from Glasgow. Yet we now know it
contained contemporaneous evidence that the Scottish investigators knew
the Americans were offering multi million dollar rewards "with $10,000 up
front" and that those who falsely identified Megrahi were also aware of
rewards long before they gave their evidence ("Six key points that cast doubt on Megrahi's guilt", The Herald, March 13).
We now know through the foresight of
Megrahi's latter-day defence solicitor (now Professor) Tony Kelly of Glasgow,that
it is not possible that the fragment found after the bombing could have come
from a genuine Zurich timer board. That is unassailable scientific fact.
I hope that anyone reading this
letter will consider the responsibility which Scotland carries for the failures
that emerged in the delivery of justice at Zeist. We were responsible for
failing to analyse "the fragment" fully, to discover whether it was
genuine or not. We seem also to have been responsible for failing to produce
evidence of the break-in at Heathrow which may have indicated a much simpler
solution than the premeditated, contrived, cruel and criminal perversion of
justice reached at Zeist.
It is time to lobby MSPs, to see if
we can lift the terrible burden of false incrimination against this individual
and his family, for which our court was in part responsible, before he dies. We
may only have days or weeks to do so if he is to be alive to hear of it. Surely
we owe that to him and to his family, currently cast as pariahs throughout the
world. We also owe the truth about all that is known about the real killers, to
the relatives of the victims.
We should remember the words of Nelson
Mandela when the Zeist trial was announced: "No one country should be
complainant, prosecutor and judge."
[The letter as published is an edited
version of two letters that Dr Swire submitted to the newspaper. With his permission I reproduce here the full
text of both.]
Letter 1
In a villa, within a high walled garden in
Tripoli, Libya, there lies a man wracked by the pain of widespread cancer,
living out the last days of his life, cared for by his still devoted wife and
children.
His name is known around the world as
Megrahi, 'the Lockerbie bomber'.
He is what we would call middle class, his
work was as part time international entrepreneur, part time employee of his State's
airline, where his work involved the unusual task of trying to obtain spares
for that airline's Boeing airliners in the face of international sanctions
against his State. His work took him often to Malta where he had a mistress, it
also took him from time to time to Zurich.
Ah yes, he also had a State issued
passport in a false name, to facilitate and conceal his journeyings and no
doubt his trysts. Later when both he and his family were confined to Tripoli,
awaiting trial, (which he had volunteered to attend, in order as he believed to
clear his name), he arranged for two of his children also to be issued with
false passports so that they could attend a children's festival in another
country. Such were the mores of his country, such were the uses of false
passports.
Feeling guilty over his
Maltese mistress, he admitted that he had lied to at least one prominent
international journalist as to the reasons for his own visits to Malta.
But the judges at his trial recorded that 'it was a serious problem for
the prosecution' that there was no evidence of any sinister action by this man
as he passed through Luqa airport on the day of the Lockerbie disaster,on his
way back to Tripoli.
Upon his eventual release from a Scottish
prison after ten years and the gathering intrusion of his fatal illness, he
recorded that he had no grudge against the people of our country, still less
against those who had cared for him in prison. Nor did he rail against
those who may really have been responsible for the terrible crime of which he
had been falsely accused for fear such accusations might themselves turn out to
be false..
For those who had deliberately contrived
his false conviction or born false witness against him for money, he warned of
the judgement they must one day face at least at the bar of history if they
believe they have no God.
But it was by means of the innate
provision for compassion built into our justice system that we in Scotland were
able to free him to die at home. This element of compassion was rightly
praised, compared with the judicial systems of America, with their death
sentences, and their brooding 'culture of vengeance' by the head of the
Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal O'Brien, immediately
following Megrahi's release to Tripoli.
I had the privilege of begging Kenny
MacAskill to free Megrahi, who I was sure by then had played no part in the
atrocity. Megrahi was dying, segregated from his family and innocent of this
dreadful crime. Kenny on the other hand had at least to maintain that he still
did believe Megrahi guilty, but we can now no longer hold such a belief with
integrity.
We have known for years that those who
identified this man as the buyer of objects from a Maltese shop were offered at
least two million American dollars, if they would give evidence identifying
Megrahi as the buyer. The Scottish court at Zeist was told that an
investigating Scottish policeman had kept a diary, he was never told to go and
get it from Glasgow. Yet we now know it contained contemporaneous
evidence that the Scottish investigators knew the Americans were offering
multi million dollar rewards 'with $10,000 up front' and that those who falsely
identified Megrahi were also aware of rewards long before they gave their
evidence.
The faltering giver of the
'identification' evidence, one apple short of a picnic or not, had been
bribed.
A central item of forensic
'evidence' found inside a Scottish police evidence bag, where the label had
been deliberately altered so as to alert the searching forensic officers to
contents other than just 'cloth', was a tiny piece of circuit board, carefully
crafted to mimic a piece of a timer supplied by a Zurich firm to
Libya. But there is now scientific confirmation that this key item could never
have been part of a Zurich/Libyan bomb timer. The patterns traced on the
fragment were near perfect copies of the real thing, but a human error
had allowed the fragment copy to be coated with pure tin, by a process
never ever used by Thuring, the Swiss manufacturers of the genuine boards, who
always used a tin/lead eutectic solder alloy instead.
With the demise of the authenticity of
this fragment the last shreds of support for the verdict against Megrahi and
the Malta story also died. A long running digital timer was necessary if
the bomb was to survive the time from Malta to Lockerbie.
The prosecution was warned by its forensic
officers, before the trial, of the difference between the circuit board
fragment 'PT35b' and the real timer boards, but failed to investigate.
Our SCCRC was also aware of this anomaly,
yet despite their special 53 page report on 'PT35b' they claimed to have found
nothing to show that it was not genuine.
We now know through the foresight of
Megrahi's latter day defence solicitor (now Professor) Tony Kelly of Glasgow,
that it is not possible that this fragment could have come from a genuine
Zurich timer board.
That is unassailable scientific fact.
It is now clear that others, outwith
Scotland were determined to pin this terrible crime upon Libya and chose
Megrahi as their scapegoat, using hi-tech subterfuge to create the illusion
that the bomb, through its timer could have survived the interval between
Luqa and Lockerbie. What a price Megrahi has paid for his adultery.
It still remains perfectly possible that
Gaddafi might have played a role in facilitating the atrocity for he had a deep
hatred against America for that country's attempt to assassinate him in 1986.
Perhaps if the current Lord Advocate persists in his plan to send investigators
to Libya, evidence will emerge from the fog that follows civil war there, but
many are those who would try to save their own skins by alleging the guilt of
others, not least Sennousi.
I hope that anyone reading these lines
will consider the responsibility which Scotland carries for the failures that
emerged in the delivery of Justice at Zeist. We were responsible for the
contents of that police evidence bag, we were responsible for analysing 'the
fragment' fully, to discover whether it was genuine or not, we seem also to
have been responsible for failing to produce evidence of the break-in at
Heathrow which may have indicated a much simpler solution than the
premeditated,contrived, cruel and criminal perversion of justice reached at Zeist.
Somebody created that clever deceitful
fragment, someone intended that our court should seem to incriminate Libya, but
surely our compassion, of which the Cardinal spoke in 2010 should now extend to
an immediate setting aside of the verdict against this man Megrahi, accompanied
by a profound apology.
One MSP, Christine Grahame (MSP) has long
realised the deception carried out here. Now that we all know that this was a
premeditated framing of Megrahi, it is time to lobby your own MSP,
to see if we can lift the terrible burden of false incrimination against this
individual and his family, for which our court was in part
responsible, before he dies.
We may only have days or weeks to do so if
he is to be alive to hear of it.
Surely we owe that to him and to his
family, currently cast as pariahs throughout the world.
We also owe the truth about all that is
known about the real killers, to the relatives of the victims.
Once we have done that we should be slow
to attribute individual blame for how this disastrous case was conducted,
instead we must urgently seek ways by which such a disaster can be avoided in
future, starting with the obligation of our prosecution service to share all
relevant information with the defence. Let us use the past with all its errors
to learn how to do things better in future. Our criminal system got this case
terribly wrong, we need to take transparent steps to minimise the chance of
repetition of this disgrace. That would be a real benefit for all of us to
extract from this whole miserable business.
Finally we might wish to consider what
role our increasingly independent country should adopt towards the
International Criminal Court, should a crime of international dimensions occur
in our land again. As we consider that question, we might remember the
words of Nelson Mandela issued in Edinburgh when the Zeist trial was announced.
Letter 2
Thanks to the book by Lockerbie defence
researcher John Ashton, we now have a clear account of how the conviction of
Megrahi was achieved.
It was not achieved because some alien
group wanted to pervert the course of Scottish justice, nor did it bear
any relationship to the simple needs of the relatives of those killed at
Lockerbie to know the truth as to who the murderers really were and why they
were not stopped.
It was achieved in order to pin the blame
specifically upon Libya, presumably in furtherance of perceived political
advantage for the country contriving the deceit.
We now know that the famous timer board
fragment PT35b was fabricated to match the circuit boards in a set of
professional timers sold to the Libyans in the days of Gaddafi.
The patterns traced on PT35b were near
perfect copies of those on the real Swiss/Libyan circuit boards, only human
error in treating the surface of the copper tracks on them has now revealed the
truth through scientific analysis. PT35b simply could never have been part of
one of the Libyan owned and Swiss made timers.
It must be clear to all who are
not 'blind because they do not wish to see', that the purpose of this
slight of hand was to incriminate Libya in this dreadful mass murder, using the
hapless Megrahi as scapegoat.
In Scotland we too are guilty by association.
Our prosecution authorities knew before the Megrahi trial had started
that the fragment had 'turned up' inside a Scottish police evidence bag with
its label clumsily altered. They knew of the anachronistic insertions in
the forensic record for PT35b. They knew that PT35b was not in
fact 'similar in all respects' to the circuit boards of the Libyan
timers, because the forensic officer who had made that claim had already
pointed out that in fact metallurgical differences existed.
Both our prosecution service, before the
trial, and later our SCCRC after the trial knew, (or at least had access
to, evidence which clearly showed) that in reality there were differences in
the metallurgical details between PT35b and the real Libyan circuit boards. Both
failed to investigate these differences, despite the SCCRC's special 53 page
special report on the fragment.
It took the detailed diligence and
foresight of Professor Tony Kelly of Glasgow (for Megrahi's defence), and John
Ashton his researcher, to reveal that the differences between PT35b and the
real Libyan boards were irreconcilable, and to show that even if the
fragment had really been in a Semtex explosion, this gap was unbridgeable.
In addition we neglected the far more
credible story, in view of PA103's flight time, that a Syrian pressure
sensitive bomb with their inevitable flight time of 35-45 minutes might have
been introduced at Heathrow, avoiding the detailed examination of exhibit
PI/1588 which may have been the remains of a pressure sensitive switch from the
wreckage field, and if so, pointing to Syria and Iran, not Libya. If that were
not fault enough, the evidence of the break-in to Heathrow airport 16 hours
before Lockerbie, investigated in January 1989 by the Met. was completely
denied to the Zeist trial court. Only last month (Feb 2012) Lord Advocate
Mulholland told us that he had still 'been unable to discover' why that
evidence was not made available at the trial.
The determination to use this trial as a
vehicle for deliberate deception, presumably in pursuance of international
political ends did not come from within Scotland. But the multiple failures by
our prosecution service responsibly to use the available material and share it
with Megrahi's defence did.
For more than a decade some of us, the
relatives, have realised that we are being denied the truth about what is
really known about this horrible slaughter. We have had to watch Scottish
justice twisting and turning to avoid blame for the way its manifest failures
contributed to a foreign based wicked and premeditated perversion of justice.
We were astonished by the defence position taken in Megrahi's first appeal in
Zeist and have squirmed in front of the deliberate delaying tactics exhibited
in Megrahi's second appeal in Edinburgh. Now we have learned that even our
SCCRC were not astute enough to realise the real origins of PT35b despite their
53 page special report on it.
In contrast to a declaration from 10
Downing Street made just before Ashton's book had even been launched or read,
that his book was 'an insult to the Lockerbie relatives', it throws light upon
a devious and profoundly dirty aspect of international politics, which on top
of our bereavemen,t has burdened us, like some noxious parasite for more than
23 years.
Is Scotland now man enough to investigate
these failures, outclassed though they were by the malevolent misuse of our
system by a foreign power? Justice delayed is justice
denied. Specially for Megrahi. In the end our system compounded the
insults heaped upon the memory of those who died.
It has never been our policy as relatives
to seek vengeance against individuals who failed us. Rather let us seek a full
inquiry as requested by the group 'Justice for Megrahi', to see how we can do
things better in future. We cannot change the past, but we can and must
learn from it. The people of Scotland too need to have faith in their justice
system restored, all the more so as they perhaps approach independence.
There is also a middle class Libyan dying
in great pain in Tripoli. It is thanks to the compassion built into our justice
system that this innocent scapegoat is back home. Perhaps if we hurry we can give
him the relief of knowing that his conviction was wrong, and that the incubus
is lifted from his family.
We have the power within Scotland to
remove this unjust verdict and issue an apology for the part our justice system
played in this dreadful miscarriage. How wonderful if our compassion, displayed
in allowing Megrahi home to his family could now extend to telling him at last,
before his disease finally claims him, that we acknowledge his innocence.
Finally we might wish to consider what
role our increasingly independent country should adopt towards the
International Criminal Court, should a crime of international dimensions occur
in our land again. As we consider that question, we might remember the
words of Nelson Mandela issued in Edinburgh when the Zeist trial was first
announced: 'No one country should be complainant, prosecutor and
judge'.
[Dr Swire also has a letter in today’s
edition of The Scotsman. It reads as
follows:]
My visit to Tripoli in December 2011
showed the interim government there already assuming Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed
al-Megrahi’s guilt, without any apparent knowledge of his case.
The atmosphere was one of a
determination to blame everything possible on the hated Gaddafi regime.
It would surely be best for truth and
justice if Abdullah Senoussi, Gaddafi’s head butcher, were to be arraigned in
front of the International Criminal Court (ICC), remembering Nelson Mandela’s
famous comment in Edinburgh when the Zeist trial was first announced, that: “No
one country should be complainant, prosecutor and judge.”
Bullies are usually cowards when
cornered. Senoussi will want to oblige with information blackening the Gaddafi
regime (except for his part in it all, of course).
Funny how he surfaced just after John
Ashton’s book had revealed beyond any doubt that the central forensic evidence,
(the alleged fragment of an exclusively Libyan timer), which the Lockerbie
court had relied on to implicate Malta and Megrahi, had been deliberately
fabricated to incriminate the Gaddafi regime.
Could there be any connection between
“extraordinary rendition” and Senoussi’s appearance? After all, it seems the UK
was providing information on selected UK citizens for “scourging” by Senoussi
and Co.
It would be almost poetic to reverse
the process and “render” him indirectly to the interim government.
What a pity that over the years the
US has tended to be antagonistic to the ICC.
