New film will aid Jim Swire's 25-year quest for justice

[Today’s edition of Scotland on Sunday features an article headed Lockerbie movie will reveal truth of tragedy. It reads as follows:]

The father of a victim of Britain’s worst terrorist atrocity has expressed hope that a new film about the tragedy will aid his 25-year quest for justice.

Dr Jim Swire, a veteran campaigner who lost his daughter in the Lockerbie disaster, believes the movie could be the way the “truth dawns” for the public over the 1988 incident.

The film is set to be made by Jim Sheridan, the six-times Oscar-nominated director of the acclaimed In The Name Of The Father and My Left Foot.

Swire believes the project will help bring into the public domain evidence which he believes casts doubt over the conviction of the late Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who was found guilty in 2001 of murdering 270 people by blowing up Pan-Am Flight 103 in the skies above Lockerbie.

However, the decision to tell the narrative of Lockerbie through the central figure of Swire has been criticised by some US relatives of the tragedy, who believe Sheridan will be covering the “completely wrong story”.

Swire, 78, told Scotland on Sunday that although he felt “uncomfortable” about upsetting other families who take an opposing view to him over the circumstances surrounding the atrocity, he was compelled to “pursue the truth” in memory of his daughter Flora, who was 23 when she died.

Currently in the early stages of development, the drama has the working title of Lockerbie.

It comes as Swire and other relatives are preparing a presentation to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to request a third appeal to overturn Megrahi’s conviction, more than two years on from his death.

He will attend a meeting in Glasgow later this week with members of other families and lawyers to decide when they will submit the request.

Swire said: “The film is important because it brings into the public domain more of the truth about what really could have happened instead of a package of lies clearly supported by US sources.”

He added: “This may turn out to be the way by which the truth dawns for the general public.”

Those behind the production, he said, possess the “skills, humanity and resources” to create a film which will “respect the depths of the many human tragedies involved, but also make us rejoice that love and the human spirit cannot in the end be overcome by evil”.

Although details of the film are being kept under wraps, it is understood to focus on Swire’s search for justice and is based on an unpublished manuscript he has been working on for more than a decade alongside writer and researcher Peter Biddulph.

Richard Jeffs, a literary agent who has been assisting Biddulph, said: “It’s true to say that Peter Biddulph and Dr Jim Swire have worked extremely diligently for more than ten years to create a manuscript and we are still seeking to have it published.”

Those behind the film have been maintaining a low profile, mindful of the sensitivities surrounding Lockerbie. But after Sheridan confirmed his involvement in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, some US relatives expressed anger at the project.

Kathy Tedeschi, whose husband Bill Daniels was a passenger on Pan Am 103, said: “It kills me to think that they would go off and just tell some completely wrong story just because they like the way it sounds or there’s got to be another twist to it.

“There are too many people, like the FBI and Scotland Yard, who investigated this case, and I firmly believe they knew what they were doing and they got the right man.”

Swire said he accepted the film would upset some families who lost loved ones in Lockerbie but felt he could not abandon the project.

“I do feel uncomfortable about making them miserable by pursuing the truth, but that’s what I have to do in the name of my daughter,” he said. 

[An interesting article on the project can be found here on the Filmstalker website.]

"Hard to have confidence in the integrity of our law"

[What follows is excerpted from a review by novelist and journalist Allan Massie in today's edition of The Scotsman of Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph's book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father's Search For Justice:]

It is now more than 32 years since a bomb placed in the cargo hold of a Pan-Am flight exploded over Lockerbie 38 minutes out of Heathrow, and 270 people were killed. One of them was Dr Jim Swire’s 23-year-old daughter Flora. Ever since, he has devoted his life to trying to establish who was responsible for the crime. He has, by his account, written here with the collaboration of Paul Biddulph, been thwarted at every turn. Consequently, he has developed a deep distrust of the British and American governments and their secret services, and, sadly, a like distrust of the working of the Scottish justice system, both the courts and the police. (...)

Obviously it was an act of terror. But who were the terrorists? From the start the assumption was that it was not the act of a lone terrorist group like the Red Brigade in Italy or the Badaar-Meinhoff gang in West Germany, but had been planned or at least authorised by a hostile state – a state hostile to the USA. The two favoured candidates were Iran and Libya, both of which had recent reason to plan the atrocity.

Meanwhile, the British Government refused requests to hold a Public Inquiry. Dr Swire was, and still is, naturally indignant. Yet, though there were other murky reasons for this refusal, the stated one was good. Can you properly hold such an enquiry, with witnesses on oath, without compromising an ongoing criminal investigation and any subsequent trial?

The investigation eventually focussed on Libya, and then on identified suspects. Where could a trial be held? Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University proposed staging it a third country, but with Scottish judges and according to Scots Law. It seemed improbable that Libya would find this acceptable. With great courage, Dr Swire went to Libya himself, with a photograph of his murdered daughter, to make a personal appeal to the dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. Politics, and a desire to have economic sanctions lifted, persuaded Gaddafi to give way. Two suspects were therefore delivered to the Netherlands and the trial was underway.

As we all know, one suspect, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, the other not. Members off the bereaved American families expressed satisfaction, but, even as Dr Swire sat through the trial, his confidence in both the evidence offered and the verdict withered. This book tells us why. It tells, too, how he supported al-Megrahi’s appeals and requests for a re-trial, how he befriended him and called for his repatriation when he was diagnosed with cancer, and visited him in Libya before his death.

Though one distinguished Scots lawyer who observed the trial told me that on the evidence presented the only possible verdict had been delivered, an opinion which the Scottish courts have continued to uphold, it subsequently seemed clear that there were weaknesses it the Crown case and that the evidence of its chief witness was tainted and therefore cannot be thought reliable.

It is hard to read this book without concluding that Dr Swire is right, and that for reasons which are both understandable and shameful, successive British governments repeatedly obstructed the investigation and that they did so at the instigation of our American allies. That said, one has in any trial or account of an investigation to remember that things tend to be convincing when you are hearing only one side of the argument, one version of the story. This book recounts Dr Swine’s long and painful search for the truth about Lockerbie, and his version is persuasive. It is disturbing too because, if Dr Swire has it right, the Scottish judges who have now three times rejected appeals against the original verdict, have made it hard to have confidence in the integrity of our law. Lockerbie was a disaster; what caused it remains a mystery.

The Lockerbie Bombing, by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, Birlinn, 256pp, £14.99

Bernard Ingham on Lockerbie

[The following is an excerpt from a Yorkshire Post column written by Sir Bernard Ingham, Chief Press Secretary to Mrs Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister.]

[A]fter the IRA's present to me of a bomb-in-a book, and the Brighton atrocity, nothing quite shook me as did Lockerbie, the sad destination of Pan Am's Clipper Maid of the Seas and its 243 passengers and 16 crew en route from Heathrow to JFK.

The day began with the discovery of an IRA bomb gang in Clapham. It ended with us waiting for the Prime Minister's return from the Commons to No 10 to face, with her steely calm resolution, the possibility that the plane had been blown out of the skies. But by whom? After 24 hours, we still did not know or, precisely, the cause or the death toll.

That was not surprising, Bodies were scattered over the countryside. In Sherwood Crescent, where 11 residents were killed, we found a 150ft-long crater and houses vaporised where the wings had fallen, the black stink of kerosene polluting the air.

Three miles east of the town, we were taken to the nose cone of the plane in a field, surrounded by belongings and bodies, and the gruesome visible remains of two stewardesses frozen in death in the wreckage. It seemed an awful intrusion just to look, but there was no point in going unless we took in the full horror.

It was a very shaken and troubled party that returned to No 10, leaving Britain's smallest police force – the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary – leading Britain's largest criminal inquiry.

They eventually put Abdelbaset al-Megrahi behind bars, only for our contemptible politicians to release him after only eight years allegedly on compassionate grounds but really to oil the wheels of trade with Libya.

It is not that which unduly troubles me. I have grown used to Labour's perfidy. Incidentally, I do hope they don't make things worse by trying again to kid us it was all the governing Scottish Nationalists' doing.

Instead, I can never work out what manner of people can make a profession out of blasting jumbos out of the sky. What cause can possibly be enhanced by following up Lockerbie by flying jets into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon?

Who will benefit from the Taliban and al-Qaida murderously and repressively taking over Afghanistan as a base for more potential terrorist spectaculars?

These are the questions first posed by Lockerbie that every Islamic leader now has to answer. In our season of goodwill, their silence is deafening.

[The following comment comes from Peter Biddulph.]

I'm sending this to your email address, because I can never get the ID right on your blog site comment. (...)

Sir Bernard Ingram ends his piece about Islamists: "In this time of goodwill, their silence is deafening."

You and I - and countless others - recall another time of goodwill, Christmas 1988, when the Iron Lady sheltered behind the excuse of silence.

In the following extract, Lady Thatcher claimed to Tam Dalyell that she "knew nothing of Lockerbie". A fair interpretation of Sir Bernard Ingram's account of the event would be that in 1995 the Lady lied, and continues to lie, through her teeth.

[Extract from book Moving the World by Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph]

The Lady's not for Remembrance.
November 1993.

The Downing Street Years,[1] the official memoirs of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, became an immediate best seller around the globe. One day after the Lockerbie explosion, she walked upon the hillside where lay the crushed cockpit of Maid of the Seas. By the Church of Tundergarth Main she stood wrapped against the Scottish cold, around her across the hills and town streets and gardens two hundred and seventy bodies and bits of bodies.

Her memories regarding other happenings around the time of Lockerbie were interesting. While at the Rhodes European Council[2] of December 1988, she was invited by German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl to meet him at his home in the charming village of Deidesheim near Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland-Palatinat. During a subsequent visit in the spring of 1989, she remembered that "lunch was potato soup, pigs stomach (which the German Chancellor clearly enjoyed), sausage, liver dumplings and sauerkraut." They drove together to the great cathedral at Speyer, in whose crypt were to be found the tombs of at least four holy roman emperors. She recalled that as the party entered the cathedral the organ struck up a Bach fugue.

In July 1989, on a visit to the USA, she remembered standing in the heat of Houston, Texas, and remained untroubled in the hot sun.[3] The Americans had fitted underground air conditioning and blew cool air from below so that the assembled dignitaries would feel comfortable.

Among the important international events of 1990 she mentioned the restoration of relationships with the Syrians. She related that immediately after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, she and President Bush assembled their potential allies. Turkey was one of the first on the list, and soon came President Assad's Syria, whom she saw as a "less savoury ally" against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Indeed, three years earlier, just weeks after the April 1986 American bombing of Tripoli, the Syrian government had backed an attempt by a terrorist, Nezar Hindawi, to plant a bomb on an El Al aircraft at Heathrow. This too she recalls in some detail.[4]

Nine months after the night of the Lockerbie attack, she travelled to Siberian Russia on a stopover from Tokyo. Her plane refuelled at the frozen town of Bratsk. In her diary she recorded finding herself in a chilly barn-like building with local Communist Party leaders, engrossed in two hours of coffee and conversation regarding the intricacies of growing beetroot in a Russian climate. As she departed, firmly imprinted on her excellent memory was the request by Oleg, the KGB guard outside the door, who asked for a signed photograph. This she immediately provided, and then - equally quickly observed - a general request for more photographs.[5]

Yet that freezing Lockerbie hillside and town strewn with the remains of the dead; that first traumatic memorial service in the tiny church of Lockerbie; repeated pleadings by the bereaved for a personal hearing at Downing Street; revelations of international terrorism on a massive scale; German, Iranian, Syrian and Palestinian reputations questioned; the most severe peace-time attack on her nation since the Second World War[6] – all in some mysterious way were expunged from the Thatcher version of history. Among nine hundred and fourteen pages of tightly written text, hidden deep in the chronology, the reader would find but four simple words: ‘December 21 - Lockerbie bombing’.

Such an event demanded an entire chapter of its own. Yet in the main text not a word, not a whisper. Could it be that the Lady wished to erase the event from Britain's memory? That would have been a naive expectation, and Thatcher was not naive. We are left with but one conclusion. To use a word frequently employed by the Justices who would five years later come to a verdict on the Libyan suspects, we may draw an inference. The Lady had been got at. Her long-time friend America did not wish her memoirs to include the story of Lockerbie.

We on the British relatives' group sent her a respectful and polite letter, asking why her memoirs made no mention of our tragedy. She replied, regally: "We wish to add nothing to the text". This, from the comfort of her Chester Square home she presumed sufficient of a reply. By her silence in 1989 and since she persists in her insult to our dead. Her weakness in the face of American imperialism set in train a procedure that prevents - and will continue to prevent - an inquiry into the tragedy. Such would reveal too much of American covert activities and use of Pan Am - and now that Pan Am is no more, their successor carrier - for US intelligence work and "high risk" operations.

It would take another fifteen years before the truth would finally emerge and our suspicions be confirmed. In August 2009, the then retired Member of Parliament for Linlithgow and Father of the House Tam Dalyell revealed that in 2002, in a conversation with Thatcher, she claimed that she had not written about Lockerbie because she "knew nothing" of Lockerbie.

At the time of our 1989 series of meetings with Cecil Parkinson, there was only one British Cabinet colleague who could possibly have told Parkinson that he was forbidden to do something in his own department. That was Prime Minister Thatcher. Thus, when Parkinson came back to us to convey the cabinet refusal, it was clear who had imposed it.

"Fast forward thirteen years," said Dalyell. "I was the chairman of the all-party House of Commons group on Latin America. I had hosted Dr Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, between the time that he won the election and formally took control in Bogota. The Colombian ambassador, Victor Ricardo, invited me to dinner at his residence as Dr Uribe wanted to continue the conversations with me.

The South Americans are very polite. A woman, even a widow, never goes alone into a formal dinner. And so, to make up numbers, Ricardo invited me to accompany his neighbour Margaret Thatcher. I had not spoken to her, nor her to me, for seventeen years. I'd been expelled from the House of Commons for accusing her of a self-serving lie in relation to the Westland affair.

As we were sitting down to dinner, I tried to break the ice with a joke about a recent vandal attack on her statue in the Guildhall. I said I was sorry about the damage.

She replied pleasantly: 'Tam, I'm not sorry for myself, but I am sorry for the sculptor.' Raising the soup spoon I ventured: 'Margaret, tell me one thing - why in eight hundred pages...'

She purred with obvious pleasure. 'Have you read my autobiography?'

‘Yes, I have read it. Very carefully. Why in eight hundred pages did you not mention Lockerbie?'

She replied: 'Because I didn't know what happened and I don't write about things that I don't know about.'

My jaw dropped. 'You don't know? But, quite properly as Prime Minister, you went to Lockerbie. You witnessed it first hand.'

She insisted: 'Yes, but I don't know about it and I don't write in my autobiography things I don't know about.'"

Tam's honest conclusion was that Thatcher had been told by Washington on no account to delve into the circumstances of Lockerbie. And she'd complied. In one unguarded moment at a Chester Square dinner table she had revealed an abandonment of responsibility for the care of her citizens. Friendly obedience to a US administration for a British Prime Minister transcended everything, even the truth.


[1] Published by Harper Collins, November 1993.

[2] Pp 747-748.

[3] P 764.

[4] P 510.

[5] September 1989, p 792.

[6] It would later emerge that the bombing of Pan Am 103 accounted for 40% of all casualties in 1988 resulting from terrorism throughout the entire world.

Hard to have confidence in the integrity of our law

[What follows is a review of Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph's The Lockerbie Bombing which Press Reader attributes to The Scotsman of 11 December 2021. A version of this review (by Allan Massie) first appeared in The Scotsman on 13 May 2021.] 

It is now more than 32 years since a bomb placed in the cargo hold of a Pan-am flight exploded over Lockerbie 38 minutes out of Heathrow, and 270 people were killed. One of them was Dr Jim Swire’s 23-year-old daughter Flora. Ever since, he has devoted his life to trying to establish who was responsible for the crime. He has, by his account, written here with the collaboration of [Peter] Biddulph, been thwarted at every turn. Consequently, he has developed a deep distrust of the British and American governments and their secret services, and, sadly, a like distrust of the working of the Scottish justice system, both the courts and the police.

The investigation was a tortuous business, hampered, and indeed obstructed, by the tangled web and conflicting interests of the secret services. It was almost by chance that the criminal investigation became the responsibility of the Scottish Police and the Crown Office. If the bomb had exploded ten or 20 minutes later there would have been no dead in Lockerbie and no crime scene in Scotland.

Obviously it was an act of terror. But who were the terrorists? From the start the assumption was that it was not the act of a lone terrorist group like the Red Brigade in Italy or the Badaar-meinhoff gang in West Germany, but had been planned or at least authorised by a hostile state – a state hostile to the USA. The two favoured candidates were Iran and Libya, both of which had recent reason to plan the atrocity.

Meanwhile, the British Government refused requests to hold a Public Inquiry. Dr Swire was, and still is, naturally indignant. Yet, though there were other murky reasons for this refusal, the stated one was good. Can you properly hold such an enquiry, with witnesses on oath, without compromising an ongoing criminal investigation and any subsequent trial?

The investigation eventually focussed on Libya, and then on identified suspects. Where could a trial be held? Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University proposed staging it a third country, but with Scottish judges and according to Scots Law. It seemed improbable that Libya would find this acceptable. With great courage, Dr Swire went to Libya himself, with a photograph of his murdered daughter, to make a personal appeal to the dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. Politics, and a desire to have economic sanctions lifted, persuaded Gaddafi to give way. Two suspects were therefore delivered to the Netherlands and the trial was underway.

As we all know, one suspect, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, the other not. Members off the bereaved American families expressed satisfaction, but, even as Dr Swire sat through the trial, his confidence in both the evidence offered and the verdict withered. This book tells us why. It tells, too, how he supported al-Megrahi’s appeals and requests for a re-trial, how he befriended him and called for his repatriation when he was diagnosed with cancer, and visited him in Libya before his death.

Though one distinguished Scots lawyer who observed the trial told me that on the evidence presented the only possible verdict had been delivered, an opinion which the Scottish courts have continued to uphold, it subsequently seemed clear that there were weaknesses in the Crown case and that the evidence of its chief witness was tainted and therefore cannot be thought reliable.

It is hard to read this book without concluding that Dr Swire is right, and that for reasons which are both understandable and shameful, successive British governments repeatedly obstructed the investigation and that they did so at the instigation of our American allies. That said, one has in any trial or account of an investigation to remember that things tend to be convincing when you are hearing only one side of the argument, one version of the story. This book recounts Dr Swire’s long and painful search for the truth about Lockerbie, and his version is persuasive.

It is disturbing too because, if Dr Swire has it right, the Scottish judges who have now three times rejected appeals against the original verdict, have made it hard to have confidence in the integrity of our law. Lockerbie was a disaster; what caused it remains a mystery. 

RIP Archbishop Desmond Tutu

[I am saddened to learn of the death today at the age of 90 of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who was a convinced and long-time supporter of the Justice for Megrahi campaign. What follows is an article posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph's Lockerbie Truth website:]

Today's sad news about the death of former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu holds a feature common to much of the media in the UK and USA. 

The selective amnesia of certain media editors is clear: Effusively praise those issues in which Tutu agrees with your agenda, and ignore those in which he opposes.

And so it is, once again, with the campaign for an inquiry into the factors surrounding the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and subsequent trial.

On the 15th March 2015 we reported that a petition had been submitted to the Scottish Parliament by the Justice for Megrahi group of bereaved relatives. That petition was rapidly and publicly supported by prominent personalities around the world. The petition, even after six years, still runs current on the Scottish Parliament's agenda.

Among those signing in support of the petition was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He proved to be a strong supporter of the imprisoned Baset al-Megrahi and a South African colleague Nelson Mandela.  Mandela's support for al-Megrahi, too, remains ignored by the main British and US media. 

On 15th March 2015 we published the following post: [Names in alphabetical order].

Campaign for the acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi and an official inquiry into Lockerbie

A petition requesting that the Scottish authorities undertake a comprehensive inquiry into Lockerbie is supported and signed by the following world renowned personalities. All support the campaign for acquittal of Baset Al-Megrahi, who was in 2000 convicted for the murder of 270 people on Pan Am 103.

Kate Adie was chief news correspondent for the BBC, covering several war zones 

on risky assignments. Currently hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme 

From Our Own Correspondent.

Professor Noam Chomsky has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, 

and has authored over 100 books. In a 2005 poll was voted 

the "world's top public intellectual".

Tam Dalyell, former Member of British Parliament and Father of the House. 

An eminent speaker who throughout his career refused to be prevented 

from speaking the truth to powerful administrations.

 

Christine Grahame MSP, determined advocate of the Lockerbie campaign.

Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye magazine.

Father Pat Keegans, Lockerbie Catholic parish priest at the time of the tragedy. 

 Mr Andrew Killgore, former US Ambassador to Qatar. Founder of Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.

John Pilger, former war correspondent, now a campaigning journalist and film maker. 

Dr Jim Swire.

Sir Teddy Taylor, British Conservative Party politician, MP from 1964 to 1979. 

Desmond Tutu, former Anglican Archbishop of South Africa. 1984 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr Terry Waite. Former envoy for the church of England, held captive from 1987 to 1991

THE FULL LIST OF SIGNATORIES

Ms Kate Adie (Former Chief News Correspondent for BBC News).

Mr John Ashton (Author of ‘Megrahi: You are my Jury’ and co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Mr David Benson (Actor/author of the play ‘Lockerbie: Unfinished Business’).

Mrs Jean Berkley (Mother of Alistair Berkley: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Peter Biddulph (Lockerbie tragedy researcher).

Mr Benedict Birnberg (Retired senior partner of Birnberg Peirce & Partners).

Professor Robert Black QC (‘Architect’ of the Kamp van Zeist Trial).

Mr Paul Bull (Close friend of Bill Cadman: killed on Pan Am 103).

Professor Noam Chomsky (Human rights, social and political commentator).

Mr Tam Dalyell (UK MP: 1962-2005. Father of the House: 2001-2005).

Mr Ian Ferguson (Co-author of ‘Cover Up of Convenience’).

Dr David Fieldhouse (Police surgeon present at the Pan Am 103 crash site).

Mr Robert Forrester (Secretary of Justice for Megrahi).

Ms Christine Grahame MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament).

Mr Ian Hamilton QC (Advocate, author and former university rector).

Mr Ian Hislop (Editor of ‘Private Eye’).

Fr Pat Keegans (Lockerbie parish priest on 21^st December 1988).

Ms A L Kennedy (Author).

Dr Morag Kerr (Secretary Depute of Justice for Megrahi).

Mr Andrew Killgore (Former US Ambassador to Qatar).

Mr Moses Kungu (Lockerbie councillor on the 21^st of December 1988).

Mr Adam Larson (Editor and proprietor of ‘The Lockerbie Divide’).

Mr Aonghas MacNeacail (Poet and journalist).

Mr Eddie McDaid (Lockerbie commentator).

Mr Rik McHarg (Communications hub coordinator: Lockerbie crash sites).

Mr Iain McKie (Retired Superintendent of Police).

Mr Marcello Mega (Journalist covering the Lockerbie incident).

Ms Heather Mills (Reporter for ‘Private Eye’).

Rev’d John F Mosey (Father of Helga Mosey: victim of Pan Am 103).

Mr Len Murray (Retired solicitor).

Cardinal Keith O’Brien (Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church).

Mr Denis Phipps (Aviation security expert).

Mr John Pilger (Campaigning human rights journalist).

Mr Steven Raeburn (Editor of ‘The Firm’).

Dr Tessa Ransford OBE  (Poetry Practitioner and Adviser).

Mr James Robertson (Author).

Mr Kenneth Roy (Editor of ‘The Scottish Review’).

Dr David Stevenson (Retired medical specialist and Lockerbie commentator).

Dr Jim Swire (Father of Flora Swire: victim of Pan Am 103).

Sir Teddy Taylor (UK MP: 1964-2005. Former Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Winner).

Mr Terry Waite CBE (Former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury and hostage negotiator).

Lockerbie dramas

[The following is from an article in The Independent on Monday, 7 June:]

A controversial new play exploring a "rift" between the families of victims of the 1988 Lockerbie aircraft bombing has been condemned as "exploitative and irresponsible".

The Families of Lockerbie, which opens this week in Nottingham, portrays how three characters left bereaved by the bombing respond to the release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the only person to be convicted of the attack. (...)

Michael Eaton, the play's author, claims its characters are "wholly fictional creations" who represent the dominant opinions of families on either side of the Atlantic.

In the 20 years since the tragedy, bereaved families have expressed differing views on the case. While some British relatives have claimed that Megrahi was wrongly convicted, many American families are convinced of his guilt and have voiced their disgust over his early release.

Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter, Flora, died in the disaster, said: "I don't want to be dramatised. I think it is exploitative, and a responsible producer of the play would have taken the trouble to speak to the families. I suppose he might have found things which ran contrary to his theories." (...)

Eaton said: "What I'm interested in is the very different responses from the US and Scottish families. Twenty years ago they were unified. At the end of every report about Lockerbie we read a quote from the families, and I watched those comments get further and further apart.

"There were three responses: the first was about revenge; he did it and was found guilty and so should never be released. The second is people who thought that the prosecution didn't really have a case. And the third is: 'We weren't allowed to have our loved ones die in the bosom of our family, but that is no reason to deny this man that'."

The playwright is hoping that the production will tour the UK, and even the US. A spokesman for the US families voiced their fears about how an American character – Laura, the widow of a US Marine killed in the bombing – may be portrayed.

"The families are not full of anger or desperate for revenge," said Frank Duggan, president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103. "We are certainly not united in our view of his guilt, but no US family has said anything negative about another family."

A video posted on the internet featuring interviews with the actors has also sparked anger among the victims' families, after they referred to the bombing as a "crash".

Mary Kay Stratis, whose husband Elia G Stratis died in the bombing, said: "I would strongly suggest that the actors inform themselves and consequently their speech, and their acting portrayals, by understanding that they are portraying the family members of the victims of a mass murder."

[The following is from an article in today's edition of The Scotsman:]

The bombing of a passenger jet in the skies over Lockerbie killed 270 people and was the worst terrorist atrocity in the UK.

Now the tragedy is to be brought to the stage in a hard-hitting show at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The Scotsman can reveal.

The efforts of leading Scottish campaigner Jim Swire to find the truth about the bombing of the Boeing 747 will be the focus of a one-man play at one of the biggest venues, Gilded Balloon.

The show is based on an unpublished book that Mr Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the disaster, has worked on for years with author and Lockerbie researcher Peter Biddulph.

Written and performed by multi-award winning Fringe veteran David Benson, Lockerbie: Unfinished Business is billed as "a hard-hitting piece of political theatre with international relevance".

It will explore the conspiracy theories behind the blowing up of Pan Am flight 103 over the Dumfriesshire town on 21 December 1988, the impact of the disaster on Mr Swire's life and the continuing search for justice for the 270 victims. (...)

Mr Benson, previously best known for his portrayals of Kenneth Williams and Noel Coward, said he would not be attempting to impersonate Mr Swire, although the show would be told from his point of view.

He said: "I've had an interest in Lockerbie for some time and came across the website Jim and Peter have set up to try to get their manuscript for the book published, and contacted them through it.

"Peter had already been looking at getting some kind of play off the ground, but it's now a one-man show, which is really about Jim's dogged pursuit of truth and justice since 1988, and where that has taken him."

Mr Swire admitted he had had little involvement in the development of the play, and was concerned it could increase tensions between the families of the victims in Scotland and the US.

He added: "The book, which we're still hoping to get published, is a full account of the campaign, which is obviously being updated all the time.

"We are still trying to secure a public inquiry after all this time and that campaign is still going on with the new government at Westminster."

Mr Biddulph said: "Publishers are just too scared to take on the book for fear of being pursued by lawyers, so it's great that the play will be at the Fringe."

A response to Richard Marquise

[I am deeply grateful to Peter Biddulph for allowing me to post the following response written by him to Richard Marquise's recent broadcast and print contributions to Lockerbie lore.]

1. It would appear that Mr Marquise never handled the fragment [of circuit board allegedly from the MST-13 timer that allegedly detonated the bomb], never saw the fragment. All his forensic information appears to have come from Thomas Thurman, proven to be a manipulator of prosecution reports by the US Department of Justice in 36 out of the 52 Thurman cases that they investigated.

And yet Thurman too never saw the fragment or handled it. When challenged by journalists, he admitted that he had worked solely on photographs supplied by the Scottish police and Thomas Hayes. And the evidence he gave on US TV about identifying the fragment was given as a voice-over using photographs of a sample from the CIA's own laboratory in Langley, Virginia.

Thurman, by resigning and "leaving" the employ of the FBI avoided being a witness at the trial, and his claims and record regarding the fragment were never tested in court. All references to Thurman in the trial transcript took "a priori" that he was on the team who found the fragment that proved Libya did it. His questionable history was never challenged by the defence. Were they negligent?

2. Mr Marquise's senior FBI colleague Oliver Revell never saw the fragment, never handled the fragment. In a televised discussion in 1995 on UK Channel Four TV he claimed :

". . . And we were operating on the premise that [Iran] was the responsible party. But we simply could not bring to bear all of the information we had, and the evidence, and make it fit. And then when the item – the microchip – was found and was identified – and by the way it was through both RARDE and Tom Thurman of the FBI laboratory – independently – that we found the other connection, and then we started working on that." (My italics).

So, whatever might be said by the FBI now, their case in 1991 centred entirely upon the provenance of the fragment of the bomb said to have been found in July 1989 by Dr Thomas Hayes. Should Hayes' evidence be in any way suspect, the case would collapse.

Mr Marquise has claimed elsewhere that the retirement of the CIA's Vincent Cannistraro took place before the key evidence was found. He has said that to for us to say otherwise is wrong.

Well, it's not wrong. Cannistraro was busy as head of the Lockerbie team when Hayes claimed to have found the fragment. Cannistraro retired a year and a half later, in November 1990.

3. The chief identification witness, Tony Gauci, was exposed in 2005 by the very man who - in 1991 - helped with the indictments against Megrahi and Fhimah, former Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's own words, Gauci could not be trusted.

And now a Mr Clancy [Ronnie Clancy QC] of the Scottish Crown team has conceded in a recent Scottish High Court hearing in Edinburgh that even if Gauci's evidence is discredited, it would not significantly affect the prosecution case. A strange claim and admission indeed. Are they already conceding the case in total? [RB: What Mr Clancy said was that the Crown’s view was that there was sufficient evidence to justify Megrahi’s conviction even if Gauci’s evidence were discounted.]

4. Marquise's information regarding the British forensic tracing of the fragment came from Dr Thomas Hayes.

At the time of the trial, Hayes' record in the case of the IRA Maguire Seven (Guildford bombing) was never discussed in court. All that the judges heard was an oblique reference to "deliberate falsehoods" told by his former colleague and supervisor Dr Higgs in another IRA case, that of Judith Ward.

Since Hayes had not been part of that particular Higgs episode, he could - and did - deny all connection or knowledge of that particular Higgs conspiracy. The trial then moved on without further comment or question.

And yet Hayes was central to a Higgs conspiracy in another IRA trial, that of the Maguire Seven, in which the Hayes and Higgs were proved by Parliamentary investigation to have conspired to with-hold evidence that might assist the defence case.

But since the Maguire Seven story was not rehearsed in the Lockerbie trial, none of this could be considered by the Lockerbie judges.

I believe that if Hayes' history in the case of the Maguire Seven had been examined in court, his testimony in the case of Lockerbie would have been discredited in the same way as that of Majid Giaka, the double CIA and Libyan agent.

In his book Scotbom, and since, Mr Marquise gives the impression that American investigation was led and controlled by the FBI. In fact it was controlled overall by the CIA, and by certain people with much blood and lies on their hands. Among the White House team around that time were people proven by declassified documents to understand well the technique of the manufacture of evidence to destabilise Middle Eastern governments. These documents are now freely available. But nobody - including the media in both countries - seems to care any more. It's old news, unwelcome news. People die, so what? Life must go on etc.

All of this, naturally, never came to the attention of the Lockerbie judges. Hopefully the second appeal will offer a long overdue opportunity for the true back-story of Lockerbie to emerge.

If Mr Marquise wishes to challenge any of the above, I will gladly supply the document dates and references with appropriate quotations. I will also arrange for sections of the film and television records to be put on the web. And I will ensure that relevant sections of the trial transcript are also put on the web. People can then judge for themselves where this story might go over the next six months.

Lockerbie: The movie

[This is the headline over a report published today in the Scottish edition of The Sun.  It reads in part:]

A dramatic movie about the Lockerbie disaster is set to be made.

Producers have signed up campaigner Dr Jim Swire, who lost 23-year-old daughter Flora in the terror atrocity.

Lockerbie Productions Inc are also said to have won agreement from Peter Biddulph, who runs the Lockerbie Truth website with Dr Swire, 75.

Last night an insider said: “It’s possible Dr Swire will be portrayed in the film.

“There are plans for a moving scene with him laying flowers at his daughter’s grave.”

Producers are said to have travelled to the Cannes Film Festival to stir interest in the project at the same time as Libyan bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi died from cancer. (…)

New Yorker Peter Lowenstein, 78, who lost son Alexander, said: “People who make films about events like Lockerbie are often wackos but if this is a carefully considered look I think there would be a place for that.”

In 1998 ex-Lockerbie councillor Marjory McQueen slammed the idea but yesterday said: “If someone wants to make a film let them.”

Scottish police trying to prevent publication of SCCRC report

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

One of the important features of the Lockerbie case is that a three year investigation (2004-2007) by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission proved that a miscarriage of justice occurred.   The SCCRC discovered that the two principal identification  witnesses (the CIA's Majid Giaka and Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci) were secretly paid huge amounts, each receiving $2m for their evidence. The police concealed these payments from the judges and defence. 

Even as this webpage is being updated, the Scottish police are trying to hide this fact from public scrutiny.  In a briefing note unearthed by the SCCRC inquiry, on 15th May 2007 DI Dalgliesh advised his colleagues "The SCCRC's statement of reasons is likely to question the integrity of Gauci's evidence ... there is a real danger that if the SCCRC's statement is leaked to the media, Gauci could be portrayed as having given flawed evidence for financial reward..."

So now we know why desperate attempts are being made behind the scenes to prevent publication, using the specious excuses of "protect our human rights, protect our personal data etc etc".  

Only an inquiry by an independent senior judge can restore confidence in a legal system today widely regarded as untrustworthy and tainted.  

The two key elements of the conviction of al-Megrahi are:

1. The identification of Al-Megrahi: In an extraordinary development in 2005, Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci was exposed as an unreliable witness by the man who in 1991 indicted Megrahi, former Scottish Lord Advocate Peter Fraser.  In Fraser's words, Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic."  The judges had trusted Gauci's confused evidence, unaware of the existence of several other contradictory statements kept secret by the police.  The police also failed to reveal that another witness had proof that Al-Megrahi was not the culprit. The police also kept secret the US offers of unlimited rewards to Gauci if Al-Megrahi was convicted.  It is now proven that Gauci received $2 million and his brother Paul $1 million.

2. A fragment of a printed circuit board:  Found by Dr Thomas Hayes, its label had been altered by unknown persons' and the entry concerning that finding  in Hayes' notebook remains to this day highly suspicious.

To re-establish the reputation of Scottish justice it is imperative that an independent inquiry take place into the undisclosed evidence and its effect upon the course of the trial. 

Binyam Mohamed torture summary parallels Lockerbie secrecy

[I am grateful to Peter Biddulph for drawing my attention to the following item on his and Jim Swire's Lockerbie website.]

Britain's so-called "democracy" reeks with the stench of the transatlantic relationship. Under threats from US officials who are "not pleased" by a decision by British judges, David Miliband is keeping secret US - UK connivance in the torture of Binyam Mohamed. For Miliband the exposure of evil takes second place to the convenience of US intelligence agents and their government. In al-Megrahi's second appeal, documents relating to the fragment of the Lockerbie bomb were kept secret by Miliband for the same reason. Truth remains less important for Miliband than "cooperation in intelligence matters".

We have always maintained that the two key elements of the conviction of al-Megrahi are:

1. The identification of al-Megrahi: In an extraordinary development in 2005, Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci was exposed as an unreliable witness by the man who in 1991 indicted Megrahi, former Scottish Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's words, Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic." And yet the judges trusted Gauci's contradictory and confused evidence, and ignored the fact that Gauci was on a promise of a multi-million dollar reward if al-Megrahi was convicted. It is now documented and proved that Gauci was paid at least $2 million for his evidence, and his brother Paul $1 million.

2. The alleged bomb timer fragment: Strong doubts surround the fragment and the CIA background under which it emerged in [Kielder] Forest. Was it planted to frame Libya for the crime? The fragment's label had been altered by unknown persons. And its finding and examination by Dr Thomas Hayes proved highly suspicious.

Now more than ever it is imperative that an independent inquiry take place, to examine events before and after the night of the bombing. The opportunity for a second appeal is lost, but the demand for the truth in this affair remains.