The genesis of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[According to the official version of events, the debris that contained the fragment of circuit board that became PT35b and which linked the bomb to Libya was retrieved from the Pan Am 103 crash site on this date in 1989. What follows is taken from paragraph 13 of the Opinion that accompanied the Lockerbie trial court’s verdict:]

On 13 January 1989 DC Gilchrist and DC McColm were engaged together in line searches in an area near Newcastleton. A piece of charred material was found by them which was given the police number PI/995 and which subsequently became label 168. The original inscription on the label, which we are satisfied was written by DC Gilchrist, was "Cloth (charred)". The word 'cloth' has been overwritten by the word 'debris'. There was no satisfactory explanation as to why this was done, and DC Gilchrist's attempts to explain it were at worst evasive and at best confusing. We are, however, satisfied that this item was indeed found in the area described, and DC McColm who corroborated DC Gilchrist on the finding of the item was not cross-examined about the detail of the finding of this item. This item was logged into the property store at Dextar on 17 January 1989. It was suggested by the defence that there was some sinister connotation both in the alteration of the original label and in the delay between the finding of the item and its being logged in to Dextar. As we have indicated, there does not appear to be any particular reason for the alteration of the label, but we are satisfied that there was no sinister reason for it and that it was not tampered with by the finders. As far as the late logging is concerned, at that period there was a vast amount of debris being recovered, and the log shows that many other items were only logged in some days after they had been picked up. Again therefore we see no sinister connotation in this. Because it was a piece of charred material, it was sent for forensic examination. According to his notes, this item was examined, initially on 12 May 1989, by Dr Hayes. His notes show that it was found to be part of the neckband of a grey shirt, and when the control sample was obtained it appeared similar in all respects to the neckband of a Slalom shirt. It was severely explosion damaged with localised penetration holes and blackening consistent with explosive involvement. Embedded within some of the penetration holes there were found nine fragments of black plastic, a small fragment of metal, a small fragment of wire, and a multi-layered fragment of white paper (subsequently ascertained to be fragments from a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual). There was also found embedded a fragment of green coloured circuit board. The next reference to that last fragment occurs in a memorandum sent by Mr Feraday to CI Williamson on 15 September 1989 enclosing a Polaroid photograph of it and asking for assistance in trying to identify it. Again the defence sought to cast doubt on the provenance of this fragment of circuit board, for three reasons. In the first place, Dr Hayes' note of his examination was numbered as page 51. The subsequent pages had originally been numbered 51 to 55, but these numbers had been overwritten to read 52 to 56. The suggestion was put to Dr Hayes that the original pages 51 to 55 had been renumbered, the original page 56 had been removed, and that thus space was made for the insertion of a new page 51. Dr Hayes' explanation was that originally his notes had not been paginated at all. When he came to prepare his report based on his original notes, he put his notes into more or less chronological order and added page numbers at the top. He assumed that he had inadvertently numbered two consecutive pages as page 51, and after numbering a few more pages had noticed his error and had overwritten with the correct numbers. Pagination was of no materiality, because each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes. The second reason for doubt was said to be that in most cases when a fragment of something like a circuit board was found in a piece of clothing, Dr Hayes' practice was to make a drawing of that fragment and give it a separate reference number. There was no drawing of this fragment on page 51, and the designation of the fragment as PT/35(b) was not done until a later date. Finally it was said that it was inexplicable that if this fragment had been found in May 1989 and presumably photographed at the time, his colleague Mr Feraday should be sending a memorandum in September 1989 enclosing a Polaroid photograph as being "the best I can do in such a short time". Dr Hayes could not explain this, and suggested that the person to ask about it would be the author of the memorandum, Mr Feraday, but this was not done. While it is unfortunate that this particular item which turned out to be of major significance to this enquiry despite its miniscule size may not initially have been given the same meticulous treatment as most other items, we are nevertheless satisfied that the fragment was extracted by Dr Hayes in May l989 from the remnant of the Slalom shirt found by DC Gilchrist and DC McColm.

[RB: Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s website devoted to PT35b can be accessed here.]

Lockerbie: Bomb trigger or clever fake?

[This is the headline over part three of Dr Morag Kerr’s series of Lockerbie articles. It appears at pages 15 to 19 of the February 2016 edition of iScot magazine. The previous two instalments are referred to on this blog here and here. The February instalment reads in part:]

(...) Once the first pieces of blast-damaged baggage container were brought in on Christmas Eve, the police knew they were dealing with mass murder.  Every piece of debris recovered, down to the smallest rag or scrap of suitcase, was logged with the precise location where it had been found.

The item designated PI/995, which became a crucial clue and a nexus for numerous conspiracy theories, was logged as being picked up near Newcastleton, twenty miles east of Lockerbie, on 13th January 1989.  It proved to be a scrap of shirt collar, burned by close proximity to the explosion.  Much has been written about the provenance of this item, and in particular the scanty and problematic documentation of its most significant feature – a 1 cm square fragment of fibreglass printed circuit board found embedded in the cloth and dubbed PT/35b.

This fragment is at the centre of a confused and confusing mess of renumbered pages, inconsistent dates and general muddle which have led many people to speculate that it was actually a retrospective plant.  These suspicions are heightened by the absence of any record during 1989 of a serious forensic investigation of the item, although the RARDE scientists were obsessing over other pieces of circuit board at that time.  PT/35b apparently sat in a side-room, unremarked, despite a photograph dated May 1989 in which it seems to sit there shouting “look at me, I’m a freaking great CLUE!”

However, detailed examination of the suspect documentation doesn’t categorically prove that any of it was inserted retrospectively.  The examination notes in question, written by forensic scientist Dr Thomas Hayes, are so scrappy, disorganised and unprofessional that it’s impossible to prove anything either way.  While pages 50 and 51 look very much like interpolations (PI/995 is described on page 51), there are many other equally obvious interpolations – it seems to have been the way he worked.  Not only that, the nature of the documentation is such that if he had wanted to add the reference to PT/35b retrospectively he could simply have substituted a single re-written page and nobody would have been any the wiser.

One thing seems reasonably certain.  The scrap of collar really did fall out of the sky, with the shirt it was part of being extremely close to the explosion.  The careful logging of the recovered debris shows four separate parts of that same shirt recovered from widely separated locations which form an almost perfect straight-line continuation of the “southern debris trail”.  While PI/995 itself was found in a field, PK/339 was recovered high on a steep hillside in the depths of the Kielder Forest.  One piece was found fifty miles from Lockerbie, near Otterburn in Northumberland.  This all fits perfectly with the known distribution of the falling, wind-swept debris, and the effort that would have been required to fake it is mind-boggling.

Was PT/35b, the infamous printed circuit board fragment, actually lodged in the cloth at that time?  It’s impossible to say, but at the moment it has not been proved that it wasn’t.  What has been proved is something altogether different, something entirely unsuspected during the years when the defence teams were poring over the forensic notes and wondering if certain pages might have been added at a later date.

The serious attempt to find out what the fragment was began in earnest after it was finally handed over to the Scottish detectives in January 1990.  Physical and chemical analysis was carried out at the University of Strathclyde.  Policemen patiently telephoned and visited manufacturers of electronic components and suppliers of raw materials.  Nothing earth-shattering transpired.  The raw materials were unremarkable, used in millions of gadgets and gizmos worldwide.  A detailed report dated September 1990 catalogues the effort, and notes one particular feature that seemed anomalous.  Printed circuit boards have a coating on the circuitry, known as ‘tinning’, applied to make the components easier to solder.  In mass manufacturing this coating is almost always a tin/lead alloy, however PT/35b had a coating of pure tin, applied in such a way as to suggest this had been done by a method known as electroless plating, used by amateurs making only a few boards as a hobby.

This didn’t help though, and PT/35b’s origins remained elusive.  Finally, in June 1990, the Scottish police allowed the FBI to become involved.  Success was almost immediate, with no need for further analysis.  With the help of a CIA agent, the fragment was matched visually to a circuit board from an electronic timer known as an MST-13 made by a Swiss firm called MEBO.  Inquiries in Switzerland revealed that only twenty of these timers had been produced, as a special order for the Libyan armed forces.

This was the main breakthrough of the investigation, the cause of the switch in direction from Iran and the PFLP-GC to Gaddafi’s Libya as the prime suspects.  It also provided the perfect answer to a conundrum that had plagued the investigators since early 1989.  How had one of the PFLP-GC’s devices travelled on three flights before blowing up, when the triggers used by that group were altitude-sensitive?  The MEBO devices were count-down timers capable of being set to go off days in advance, irrespective of altitude.

The Lockerbie investigators set off to hunt Libyans, and apparently never looked back.

Belatedly, the forensic scientists at RARDE did what they should have done in 1989, and carried out their own physical and chemical analysis of the fragment.  These tests were overseen by Allen Feraday, and his notes dated 1st August 1991 record the same findings as the tests done in Scotland the previous year.  The coating on the circuitry was pure tin.

There was a complication, though.  The investigators by now had samples of the MEBO-produced boards for comparison, and Mr. Feraday analysed these too.  They were different.  They had the usual alloy coating seen on mass-manufactured products.  His notes reveal some puzzlement.  He recorded some tentative suggestions, but the conundrum was never resolved.  The visual match with the MEBO boards was perfect, right down to an oddity in the tracking caused by the Letraset of the template not having been cut quite flush.  The metallurgy discrepancy was put to one side.

The matching of PT/35b to the unique batch of timers supplied to Libya was central to the prosecution of Megrahi and Fhimah in 2000-01.  With the timer off the table, proof that Lockerbie was a Libyan operation would have been absent, and the prosecution would have been in all sorts of trouble.  So how was the metallurgy discrepancy dealt with in court?

It wasn’t.  Mr. Feraday’s original notes weren’t disclosed to the defence, and the matter was covered by having him read out the relevant section of his fair-copy report written some months later.  In that, there was no mention of any discrepancy.  The report read “... it has been conclusively established that the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects to the area around the connection pad for the output relay of the ‘MST-13' timer.”

Similar in all respects?  No, it wasn’t.

None of the independent scientists who had carried out testing on the fragment were called to give evidence.  The matter wasn’t brought up with the production manager from the company which had made the boards for the MST-13 timers.  The fact that the composition of the coating showed that PT/35b had been made by a completely different process from the MEBO instruments was never highlighted.

Further investigation carried out by Megrahi’s defence team in preparation for his second appeal revealed that the company which made the PCBs for the MST-13 timers had never used an electroless plating technique.  All the instruments supplied to Libya by MEBO had the usual lead-alloy coating on the circuitry.

PT/35b did not come from a timer sold to the Libyan armed forces, as claimed by the prosecution.

In that case, what was it?  Nobody knows.  The visual match between the fragment and the boards from the MEBO timers is striking, indicating that they all originated from the same template. (...)

Who made it, and why?  Did it fall out of the sky that December night, or was it somehow added to the rest of the debris recovered from the shirt collar at a later date, its dodgy provenance concealed behind the smokescreen of the disorganised forensics notes?  If we knew any of that, we might be a lot closer to solving the mystery of the Lockerbie bombing, still impenetrable after more than a quarter of a century.

Tom Thurman "identifies" the dodgy timer fragment

[It was on this date twenty-five years ago that the FBI’s James ‘Tom’ Thurman, so he says, identified the fragment of circuit board PT/35b as coming from a MST-13 timer manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO. The circumstances are narrated in chapter 4 of John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, especially at pages 62 to 66. The account that follows is taken from a long article entitled Thurman’s Photo Quest on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide:]

What we have in Thurman's case, with or without the actual piece of evidence, was the crucial identification. And one point that's consistent throughout is that he held a photo only when he found the match. The question at hand is how long it took him to find it and to determine its meaning vis-a-vis who carried out the bombing.

Tom Gets a Green Light

On the 10th of January 1990 new Senior Investigating Officer Stuart Henderson (who replaced John Orr) presented at a meeting of investigators in the UK. He did not openly mention the circuit board fragment PT/35(b), an amazing find UK investigators had been puzzling over for four months. But off to the side, he told FBI chief investigator Richard Marquise about it, Marquise says in his 2006 book SCOTBOM.  [p58] He expressed interest in helping find a match, but Henderson insisted on going it alone. “This decision cost us six months,” writes Marquise.

It was at a later conference in Virginia, on 11 June, when Marquise relates how the Scots finally made their puzzlement known to all, having blindly checked 55 companies to no avail. Given the opening, special Agent Thurman “approached Henderson and asked if he could take photographs of PT-35 and attempt to identify it. Henderson, who believed the Scots had done all they could do, agreed.” [p60] This passage is (...) rather ambiguous. It seems to read that Thurman, in Arlington, was allowed to snap a pic of evidence SIO Henderson had there with him. Then perhaps it means he took some of the prints they had brought.

Either way, he walked away with a picture or pictures of this crucial and curious evidence, a half-inch square, perfectly readable, mammoth of implausibility. The "forensic explosives expert" didn't balk at it, just ran with it. Or crawled, as he suggests.

"Months, Literally" or 2-4 Days?

A 1991 Miami Herald article, based on interview with Thurman, reported that he had “meticulously compared the picture of the fragment to hundreds of other devices,” a lengthy-sounding process. Affirming this, Thurman himself told the adoring program Air Crash Investigation in 2008:

“I spent, uh, months, literally, looking through all about the files of the FBI on other examinations that we had, uh, conducted over many many many years. […] After a period I just ran out of leads. And at that point I said, okay now we need to go outside the physical FBI laboratory.”

And it was there, in a CIA facility, that he found the long-sought answer.

But Marquise said “what Thurman did yielded fruit within two days.[…] Henderson and his colleagues were on an airplane headed back to Scotland” when Thurman set to work. They had barely settled back in at home before his efforts “would turn Henderson around quicker than he ever imagined,” putting him back stateside, along with electronics fiend Alan Feraday, within 24 hours of the discovery. [p60]

Further evidence against Thurman’s "months" claim is his own well-memorized “day that I made the identification,” recalling it as one would a wedding anniversary: June 15 1990. He had four days tops to get this grueling season of cross-checking out of the way after the 11 June conference (perhaps a multi-day event) where Marquise has him first learning of the thing.

Who He Ran To

What Thurman did, Marquise sums up, is know where to look. He took the photo to a CIA explosives and timers expert code-named John Scott Orkin (real name unknown - he testified under this name at Camp Zeist). [p60] Thurman mentions him only as an unnamed "contact" in the 2008 ACI interview.  From the vast photo files on hand, "Orkin" helped locate an obvious fit with the blow-up of PT/35(b). If you were Tom Thurman and knew about John Orkin, would you waste even one afternoon scrounging in the FBI's files, or go right to him?

Nothing I've seen specifies this match-up was achieved in only one visit on a single day, but that makes the most sense, as does starting right there. That would give us no more than "hours, literally" to describe the search duration. And either way we're at the point of days at most.

The matching circuit board was found in a timer confiscated in the African nation Togo in 1986. This device, assembled in a small plastic case, was physically available for Thurman to look at. He was given permission to take it apart and examine the main board inside. Upon confirming again the obvious similarities, “within a few minutes, literally, I started getting cold chills,” he told Air Crash Investigation.  He's also described as declaring "I have you now!" [p60] and other variations. In a 2010 interview, he said "I could not believe it under any circumstances, and it was there."

That he got these chills only after getting access to the CIA’s special stores is noteworthy, and the Agency is right to claim much of the credit, as they have in places. An AFIO newsletter from just after the Zeist verdict purred that “the CIA’s most important contribution in helping secure the conviction” was “when a CIA engineer was able to identify the timer […] shifting the focus of the probe from a Palestinian terrorist group to Libya.”  (This report's oblique reference to the CIA's less brilliant offering, Giaka, is also worth a read.)

As the overall story tells it, this was clearly a collaborative CIA-FBI effort, via Thurman and "Orkin", that neither side can claim sole credit for. And without this coming together, we're to infer, the naming of this planted piece of Libyan black magic would be delayed or impossible for both Scottish and American investigators. The power of cooperation, between intelligence and law enforcement, and across the Atlantic - a running theme of the 103 investigation - is nicely illustrated here.

[Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer is currently engaged on his PT35B blog in a meticulous exploration of all the evidence about the identification of this fragment.]

Slalom shirt as dodgy as the timer fragment?

[What follows is taken from an article published on this date in 2011 in the Scottish edition of the Sunday Express:]

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted on the basis that he bought clothes from Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, including a grey men’s Slalom shirt. The clothing was then packed in a suitcase with the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103, killing 270 on December 21, 1988.

The charred remains of the shirt were crucial to the prosecution, as a forensic scientist found a piece of circuit board from the bomb embedded in the collar which first led investigators to Libya, and ultimately Megrahi.

However, it has now emerged that clothing manufacturers in Malta told Scottish police in January 1990 that the shirt recovered from the crash site was in fact a boy’s size.

Campaigners have stepped up calls for an inquiry after the claims surfaced in a documentary broadcast on Thursday by Arab TV network Al Jazeera but seen by only a handful of Scottish viewers.

In it, Scotland’s former Lord Advocate also accepted that Gauci, the main prosecution witness, was paid $2million to give evidence against Megrahi.

Scottish private investigator George Thomson tracked down shirt manufacturers Tonio Caruana and Godwin Navarro in Malta. They recalled being shown a fragment of shirt by DC John Crawford and telling him, independently of each other, that it was a boy’s shirt.

Speaking to the Sunday Express yesterday, Mr Navarro, 76, said: “I stand by my statement. I believe it is a boy’s shirt because of the size of the pocket and the width of the placket, where the button holes are.”

Retired Strathclyde Police superintendent Iain McKie, now a campaigner against miscarriages of justice, said: “The fact that the witnesses say it was a boy’s shirt and not an adult shirt seems to me quite critical.”

He said that if it was a boy’s shirt, then it cannot be the same one purchased from Gauci by the man he later identified as Megrahi – destroying the “evidence chain”.

Supt McKie said the latest claims added weight to calls for the Scottish Government to set up an independent inquiry into Megrahi’s conviction.

He added: “The whole chain of evidence has been totally and utterly shattered. It is looking more and more like the police came to a conclusion and then looked for evidence.”

The programme, Lockerbie: The Pan Am Bomber, also alleged that a piece of the shirt had been altered, as it is clearly a different shape in two police photographs. (...)

[George Thomson] said: “In January 1990 they realise that what they have is a fragment of a boy’s shirt, while Gauci is saying he sold a gents’ shirt.

“The reason for people saying this is mainly down to the size of the pocket and lo and behold the next thing a fragment of the pocket has been removed.”

Discovery of dodgy timer fragment

[What follows is excerpted from an article published in 2007 by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer:]

The Discovery of the MST-13 Timer Fragment

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

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

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

The Alteration of the Label

The officer had initially labeled the bag "cloth (charred)" but had later overwritten the word "cloth" with "debris."

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

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

The judges said in their judgment that Gilchrist's evidence had been "at worst evasive and at best confusing."

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

The discovery of the dodgy circuit board fragment

[It was on this date in 1989 that the fragment of circuit board that was used to link the Lockerbie bomb to a MST-13 timer and hence to Libya was discovered among material that had been collected in January. Here is what Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer says on his PT35B website:]

Fragment of circuit board is found in PI/995 by Dr Hayes on 12 May 89, according to page 51 of Dr Hayes notes. The police production logs for PT/35 record it as having been found by Dr Hayes at RARDE on 12 May 1989. In his evidence (p2608) Hayes said he had no memory of finding the timer fragment independent of his notes. In his chapter 8 Crown precognition (“CP”), Hayes said his recollection was that he worked alone when carrying out examination of debris, but that he occasionally called Allen Feraday in when something of interest was found. Feraday in his chapter 8 CP referred to the discovery of PT/35 and PT/2 and said that he remembered when this was done. He stated that although Hayes was carrying out the examination, he thought Hayes invited him in to see the pieces embedded in PI/995 before Hayes removed them. He stated that Hayes knew he would be interested in what Hayes found, and he therefore remembered that PT/2 and PT/35 were extracted from PI/995. In his chapter 10 CP Feraday does not specifically mention his memory of PT/35’s extraction. He states that initially the main concern was with the pieces of cassette recorder manual that were found in PI/995, as they appeared to support the identification of fragments discovered earlier, and it was only at a later stage that the potential significance of PT/35(b) became clear.

New blog devoted to dodgy timer fragment PT35(b)

[I am delighted to report the appearance of a new blog by Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer. It is entitled PT35B and will be devoted to material about the dodgy timer fragment. Dr De Braeckeleer is the author of (amongst other Lockerbie-related pieces) the magisterial 174-part series on OhmyNews entitled Diary of a Vengeance Foretold. The first item on his new blog reads as follows (illustrations and references omitted):]

On 21 December 1988 Pan Am flight 103 fell out of the sky. All 259 passengers and crew members died. Eleven residents of Lockerbie were killed.

A strong westerly wind spread the debris over two trails stretching from the south of Scotland through the north of England and out into the North Sea.

On 28 December 1988, Michael Charles, Inspector of Accidents for the AAIB, announced that traces of high explosive had been found on two pieces of metal. On that date, a criminal investigation was officially launched. The crime scene covered about 845 square miles.

On 13 January 1989, Detective Constables Thomas Gilchrist and Thomas McColm found a fragment of charred clothing in search sector I, near Newcastleton. This piece of charred grey cloth was bagged, labelled “Charred Debris” and given a reference number: PI/995.

On 17 January 1989, it was registered in the Dexstar log.

On 6 February 1989, PI/995 was sent to the Forensic Explosives Laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent for forensic examination.

On 12 May 1989, Dr Thomas Hayes examined PI/995. Inside the cloth, Dr Hayes found fragments of paper, fragments of black plastic and a tiny piece of circuitry. Dr Hayes gave to these items the reference number PT/35 as well as an alphabetical suffix to each one of them. The fragment of the circuit board was named PT/35(b).

In June 1990, with some help from the FBI, Allen Feraday of the Explosives Laboratory was able to match PT/35 (b) to the board of  a Swiss timer known as a MST-13 timer.

Two MST-13 timers had been seized in Togo in September 1986. BATF agent Richard Sherrow had brought one of these back to the US. Two Libyan citizens were caught in possession of an other MST-13 timer in Senegal in 1988.

An analysis of the Togo timer led the investigators to a small business named MEBO in Zurich. The owners of MEBO told the investigators that these timers had been manufactured to the order of two Libyans: Ezzadin Hinshiri, the director of the Central Security Organisation of the Libyan External Security Organisation and Said Rashid, the head of the Operations Administration of the ESO.

On 14 November 1991, the Lord Advocate and the acting United States Attorney General jointly announced that they had obtained warrants for the arrest of Abdelbasset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah.

On 27 November 1991, the British and United States Governments issued a joint statement calling on the Libyan government to surrender the two men for trial.

On 21 January 1992, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 731 calling on Libya to surrender Megrahi and Fhimah for trial either in the United States or in the United Kingdom.

On 31 March 1992, the Security Council passed resolution 748 imposing mandatory sanctions on Libya for failing to hand over Megrahi and Fhimah. On 11 November 1993, the Security Council passed resolution 883 that imposed further international sanctions on Libya.

On 31 January 2001, a Court found Megrahi guilty and Fhimah not guilty.

On 28 June 2007, the SCCRC announced that Megrahi may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Accordingly, the SCCRC decided to refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

On 25 July 2009, Megrahi applied to be released from jail on compassionate grounds. On 12 August 2009, Megrahi applied to have his second appeal dropped. Megrahi was granted compassionate release for his terminal prostate cancer. On 20 August 2009, Megrahi was released from prison and returned to Libya.

Today we know that PT/35(b) is a forgery. We also know that at least one witness was well aware that PT/35(b) could not have been part of the MST-13 timers delivered to Libya and that this witness deliberately withheld  this information from the court. At this point, one can reasonably infer that this so-called evidence was planted.

How do we know that PT/35(b) is a forgery? Who could possibly have committed such a crime and for what possible motives? Where, when and by whom was this forgery fabricated? These are some of the questions that this blog intends to discuss and will hopefully answer.

The dodgy timer fragment sees the light of day

It was (apparently) on this date in 1989 that Dr Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) discovered amongst Lockerbie debris a fragment of circuit board embedded in a shirt collar. This became PT35(b) -- the notorious dodgy timer fragment. The story of the discovery and how it was recorded is narrated an article headed Page 51 and its Environs on Caustic Logic’s blog The Lockerbie Divide. The dialogue between Caustic Logic and Rolfe in the comments following the blogpost is also a mine of information.

The dodgy timer fragment

22 June 1989:

“In his affidavit Mr [Ulrich] Lumpert implicitly admits having committed perjury as witness No. 550 before the Scottish Court in the Netherlands. He states (para 2) that he has stolen a handmade (by him) sample of an ‘MST-13 Timer PC-board’ from MEBO company in Zurich and handed it over, on 22 June 1989, to an ‘official person investigating the Lockerbie case.’ He further states (in para 5) that the fragment of the MST-13 timer, cut into two pieces for ‘supposedly forensic reasons,’ which was presented in Court as vital part of evidence, stemmed from the piece which he had stolen and handed over to an investigator in 1989.”

From The Lumpert Affidavit, posted on this blog on 29 August 2007.

22 June 1990:

“When interviewed for a Dutch TV documentary in 2009 [Richard Marquise] insisted that PT35b had never been taken to the US. This claim was echoed by the former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, and by [Scottish Senior Investigating Officer Stuart] Henderson. Henderson then amended his position, saying that the fragment had never been in ‘the control’ of the US investigators. He had chosen his words carefully, because the truth, as he must have known, was that PT35b was taken to the FBI forensic lab in Washington DC on 22 June 1990, in order to compare it with the MST-13 timer held by the FBI’s Tom Thurman; indeed, Henderson was one of the officers who took it there. It was strange that this fact could have slipped the minds of both the head of the FBI investigation and the chief prosecutor responsible for the Lockerbie indictments.

“The Washington visit was crucial, as it enabled Allen Feraday and the Scottish police to confirm that PT35b matched the MST-13 timer…”

From John Ashton’s Megrahi: You are my Jury, pp 165,66.

Further details can be found on Dr Ludwig de Braeckeleer’s PT35B website, particularly The Chronology of PT/35(b): 22 June 1990.