Culprits of Lockerbie

Culprits of Lockerbie
WWW.DAVIDWOLCHOVER.CO.UK
CULPRITS OF LOCKERBIE: GADDAFI OR THE EXTREMISTS OF PALESTINE?

(This edition posted 8 March 2012)
David Wolchover
I. INTRODUCTION On Wednesday, 21 December, 1988, an eighteen-year-old Pan American World Airways Boeing 747-121, Clipper Maid of the Seas, took off from London Heathrow bound for New York JFK on Flight PA 103. At just after 7.00 pm, as the plane was cruising over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb concealed in a suitcase. Not only were the 243 passengers and 16 crew sacrificed but falling debris from the disintegrating jet killed eleven people on the ground. Although it was not immediately clear that a bomb had brought down the aircraft terrorism was of course strongly suspected from the outset, in particular because various radical organisations wasted little time in claiming responsibility. An initial CIA assessment gave most credence to a boast by the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution that they had taken revenge for the loss of an Iranian airliner earlier in the year. We shall return to that topic later but for the moment it can be stated that for at least twelve months after Lockerbie elements within the Government of Iran, in association with an extremist Palestinian terror group, were widely regarded by the Western intelligence community as the prime suspects. However, some time in 1989 or 1990 attention began to shift towards Libya. A comprehensive analysis of the reasons for that change of focus is beyond the scope of this study although they are discussed briefly towards the end. They have been explored in particular in two well-known accounts of the case (Paul Foot, Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice, London: Pressdram, 2001; John Ashton and Ian Ferguson, Cover-Up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002). There was certainly no lack of grounds for attributing motive to Colonel Gaddafis regime. His confrontation with the USA during the 1980s had culminated in the 1986 American bombing raid on Tripoli and Benghazi, launched from bases in Britain. It left dozens of military and civilian casualties and would have induced a powerful urge for revenge against the United States and the UK including a very personal motive on the part of Gaddafi himself, who, it was said, had lost an adoptive baby daughter in the raid. After a three-year joint investigation by the FBI and Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary (described by the Lord Advocate as the UKs largest criminal inquiry led by Britains smallest police force) warrants were issued in 1991 for the arrest of two Libyan nationals, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhima, both allegedly officers in the JSO, the Libyan secret service. Protracted negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi eventually led to the lifting of UN sanctions, acknowledgment by Libya of responsibility for the destruction of PA 103, renunciation of terrorism and the payment by Libya of $8 million in compensation to each of the families of the victims, and, eventually, the handing over of the two suspects to the Scottish authorities. On 5 April, 1999, they were flown to the Netherlands, which as part of the negotiations had been agreed as a neutral venue for their trial by an ad hoc threemember panel of Scottish judges sitting without a jury. At the end of their nine-month trial in January 2001 Fhimah was acquitted but al-Megrahi was convicted of murder and given life, to be served in Scotland, with a minimum recommendation of 27 years. His appeal against conviction was dismissed in March 2002, when he was transferred to a Scottish prison, and his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible in July 2003. Following two highly critical reports by Hans Kchler, the UN observer at the trial and appeal, al-Megrahi applied in September 2003 to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for his conviction to be reviewed. In June 2007 the Commission referred his case to the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal on the ground of a possible miscarriage of justice, although Kchler criticised the Commissions 800page report for exonerating police, prosecutors and forensic staff, choosing instead to place all the blame on a Maltese shopkeeper (http://i-p-o.org/koechler-lockerbie-referral29June2007.htm). In the wake of the SCCRC decision it was suggested that if the appeal were successful Libya could have claimed back the billions in compensation payments (see The Scotsman, 28.06.07). Asked if Libya would seek repayment of compensation moneys Colonel Gaddafis son Saif al-Gaddafi replied ominously that he did not know (Saif al-Gaddafi says Libyans are innocent of the Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772 bombings, Le Figaro, 7.12.07). Al-Megrahi was granted leave to appeal, which began in April 2009, but delays saw hearings likely to drag out into 2010. He was now reported to be suffering from advanced stage prostate cancer and, having been given three months to live by a single specialist and the appeal having been withdrawn, the Scottish Minister of Justice granted him compassionate release from prison on 20 August, 2009. In America in particular the decision was met with predictable anger aggravated as it was by the airport carnival which greeted al-Megrahi on his return home and the widely held belief that it was linked to UK trade prospects with Libya, specifically a BP oil deal. It has since been disclosed that the Brown government had strived mightily to secure Megrahis release (see diverse media reports, 7 February, 2011). To disgruntlement and embarrassment in equal measure al-Megrahi remains alive at the time of writing. Mustafa
Abdel-Jalil, Gaddafis justice minister who resigned in protest against his leaders handling of the popular uprising in the Spring of 2011 (and is now head of the Benghazi National Transitional Council), claimed that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out on Gaddafis personal order and that al-Megrahi was involved (Ian Black and Peter Beaumont, Gaddafi ordered Lockerbie bombing ex minister, The Guardian, 23.02.11; see also The Sunday Times, 27.02.11). In the words of the draft of a forthcoming article by Robert Forrester Following weeks of protesting that he had irrefutable proof that Colonel Gaddafi had put Mr alMegrahi up to doing his Lockerbie dirty work, AbdelJalil . . . finally revealed all on April Fools Day. Apparently, Gaddafi had footed Mr al-Megrahis legal bills whilst the prisoner languished at Her Majestys pleasure. Well, thats it then, clear and incontrovertible evidence that Mr al-Megrahi bombed 103! If this is the standard of proof that satisfies Mr Abdel-Jalil, a former judge, one wonders how much the predicament of the long suffering Libyan people might improve under the Wests new found rebel friends. This was followed by the defection to the UK of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafis foreign minister. Described as having played a leading role in the Lockerbie bombing he has always denied Libyan involvement (Guardian, 31.3.11). Although Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he would be available for questioning by the Dumfries and Galloway police (media, 31.3.11; 1.4.11) it has been widely reported that HMG were in a dilemma. They were clearly wary of cosying up too closely to a suspected terrorist organiser whom the Libyan rebels say they want to put on trial. At the same time they want to keep him onside as a valuable source of intelligence on the extent to which Gaddafis support is ebbing away and how his remaining henchmen might be encouraged to desert. No doubt to that end, it was stressed that the police were merely seeking to question him as a witness ( eg Evening Standard, 01.04.2011). Following Gaddafis final overthrow, capture and death it was reported that Dumfries and Galloway police officers were to be dispatched to Libya in pursuance of further inquiries into Libyan culpability for the destruction of Pan Am 103 (see The Guardian, December 8, 2011). Against the background of the continuing assumption of Libyan guilt over Lockerbie it is worth re-visiting the evidence in the case against al-Megrahi, the basis upon which the judges purported to justify his conviction and the thinking which caused him to be released. Lockerbie has not been short of conspiracy theories but to understand why al-Megrahis conviction represents a grave miscarriage of justice it is unnecessary to go further than to demonstrate why the inferential process which the judges purported to follow was fundamentally flawed. The issues are complex and would fill a book (and have done, repeatedly) but without going down all sorts of blind alleys the minimum amount of detail necessary for a sufficient grasp of the issues can conveniently be expounded here. (For more, readers should peruse the various sources listed at the end of this study.)
However, before embarking on an analysis of the trial evidence it will be helpful to examine the inception of the atrocity and the identity of the perpetrators. Let it be stated here loudly and clearly that Libya had absolutely nothing to do with the destruction of Pan Am 103. So who was to blame? Who were the true culprits? II. THE TRUE CULPRITS 1. The road to Lockerbie: the inception of vengeance By the end of 1987 the United States was lending unashamed support to Iraq in its war against Iran and as Iranian power was beginning to crumble so was its hostility intensifying against the Great Satan, the patron of its ancient Babylonian adversary. With the US maintaining a strong naval presence in the Gulf to protect oil shipments out of Kuwait clashes with Iran were inevitable. On 3 July, 1988, a helicopter from the Aegis class guided-missile cruiser Vincennes drew fire in international waters from three Iranian fast patrol boats and half an hour later the ships radar spotted approaching aircraft judged to be Iranian F-14 Tomcats. That assessment was aided by the perceived symbolism involved in attacking an American warship on the eve of Independence Day and the decision was made to aim a surface-to-air missile at the approaching aircraft. The result was catastrophe. The target turned out to be an Iran Air Airbus A-300 taking the short hop on flight 655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. Not only had it been missed off the do not shoot registry but its transponder code, speed, heading, location and altitude had all been misread. The Airbus went down with all 290 passengers and crew and although President Regan sent a written apology via Swiss intermediaries the US Navys claim that the inept missile launch had been a legitimate measure of selfdefence coupled with the award to the responsible airwarfare coordinator of a navy medal for heroic achievement . . . under fire only served to turn the original assessment on its head: absurdly, the Iranians claimed that the destruction of flight 655 had betokened a celebration of July the Fourth (see, eg, Roger, C., Sea of lies: The inside story of how an American naval vessel blundered into an attack on Iran Air flight 655 at the height of tensions during the Iran-Iraq war and how the Pentagon tried to cover its tracks after 290 innocent civilians died, Newsweek, July 13 1992, http://www.newsweek.com/id/126358; Ashton and Ferguson, above, chap. 2). The Americans feared retaliation like for like: the destruction of a fully laden American passenger plane departing from somewhere in Europe, with its concentration of American military personnel and established presence of Middle Eastern terrorist cells. Considering that Libya was ultimately blamed for the Lockerbie bombing it is ironic that it was precisely in the months leading up to the atrocity that Colonel Gaddafi had resolved to end the Americanled stranglehold on Libya with a decision to abandon his regimes sponsorship of international terrorism. In November 1988 Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), had renounced terror and Gaddafi saw this as a perfect further opportunity to gain credibility and prestige by supporting Arafats diplomatic offensive. This therefore was most definitely not the moment for Gaddafi to be involved in blowing American commercial
airliners out of the sky. But indirectly he did have a connection with Lockerbie, but not in the way which has been alleged for over two decades. By the second half of 1988 he had ceased to provide any financial support to such Palestinian terror organisations as Ahmed Jibrils Syrianbased Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, a radical splinter group of the original PFLP. Now desperately short of funds to maintain his operation, in particular his cells in Europe, and recognising that the moment was ripe to displace the increasingly discredited Arafat as the main hard line figure in the struggle for Palestine the PFLP-GC leader had been casting about for new and plentiful sources of oil money. From the murky world of Middle East intelligence gathering it emerged that Jibril had made a deal with elements within the Iranian government (notably Interior Minister Ali-Akbar Mohtashimi-Pur) by which the PFLPGC would receive a multi-million dollar bounty for carrying out the reprisal attack, an attack for which Iran lacked the know-how but which in any event its government had no wish to be directly responsible for committing (see generally Katz, Samuel M., Israel versus Jibril: the thirty-year war against a master terrorist, St Paul, Minn: Paragon House, 1993, chaps 10 and 11; see also see Ashton and Ferguson, above, pp.38 and 45). It was believed that members of the group based in Germany would take on the task. 2. Autumn Leaves Alerted that a major terrorist atrocity was in the offing in Germany the W. German Federal Criminal Police Office the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) mounted an operation dubbed Herbslaub (Autumn Leaves) involving round-theclock surveillance and telephone tapping of 16 suspected members of the PFLP-GC across six cities. One of the participants in the negotiations with Iran had been a founder-member of the PFLP-GC and Ahmed Jibrils righthand man, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni. On 5 October, 1988, he was tracked entering West Germany, apparently to take command of the cell there, and went to stay at the home of his brother-in-law Hashem Abassi, at 16 Isarstrasse in Neuss, a suburb of Dusseldorf. Other suspects the police observed included Abassis younger brother Ahmed, who was visiting from Sweden with two other Arab men. (Sweden was the base of another man later suspected of complicity, Mohammed Abu Talb.) Then, on 13 October, the PFLP-GCs master aeroplane bomb-maker from the early 1970s, Marwan Khreesat, flew into Frankfurt from Amman, accompanied by his wife. In fact Khreesat had at some stage been enlisted by Jordans intelligence service, the Mukabaret, otherwise known as the General Intelligence Directorate, and was apparently acting on their behalf as a plant. In November 1989 he was interviewed at Mukabaret headquarters in Amman by FBI agents Edward Marshman and James Tom Thurman, and the account he gave of his activities recorded in a pro forma FD301 report was generally not inconsistent with the BKA Autumn Leaves records. We shall return to Thurman later. The defence sought to call Khreesat as a witness at Camp Zeist but Jordan refused to sanction his attendance and under the relaxed rules of procedure agreed for the conduct of the trial much of the
interview record was read to the court by Marshman instead. The familiar course of the Autumn Leaves operation has been summarised in diverse narratives (see eg Ashton and Ferguson, above, passim; and in the blog The Lockerbie Divide, Just a Passing Magic Touch, and the Rest Unseen: Khreesat, Abu Elias, and the Fifth Device, April 15 2010, http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/2010/04/just-passingmagic-touch-and-rest.html). On 18 October, according to Khreesats FBI narrative, he and Dalkamoni bought two Ultrasound radios and a Sanyo computer monitor at a second-hand shop. The BKA log shows that on that same day Dalkamoni telephoned someone in Damascus whom he called Abed and told him that everything would be ready in a couple of days. Dalkamoni than handed over to someone he called Safi whom the BKA deduced was Khreesat and who said that he had made some changes to the medicine and that it was now better and stronger. Also on that day, the BKA log states, Dalkamoni met up with a man in his early thirties, 170 cm tall, slim build, bearded and described as having remarkably big ears. On 20 October the BKA log records Dalkamoni calling Khreesat from Frankfurt to tell him that he was about to take delivery of three black tins with lids, gloves and paste. On 22 October, the log records, the two men drove to Frankfurt and visited two electrical stores, although it is not recorded if they made any purchases. On the way back to Neuss, Khreesat told the FBI, Dalkamoni left Khreesat at the zoo. Picking him up an hour later he told Khreesat that a man whom Khreesat named only as Abu Elias and who Dalkamoni had previously told him would be coming to Germany, had just arrived (FD301, p.2). Khreesat conjectured that Dalkamoni had met up with Abu Elias after dropping him off. It is interesting to compare this account with the BKA log, which states that at 2 pm Dalkamoni met up with the same stranger that he met on 18 October. This was presumably the big-eared man in his early thirties but if he was Abu Elias he had clearly not just arrived in Germany. He was subsequently identified as one Ramzi Diab. Khreesat stated that he had previously met Abu Elias in Damascus and in Yugoslavia, where he, Khreesat, apparently received his assignment to the German cell and where Dalkamoni introduced Abu Elias as the cells expert in airport security who knew all the details on how to smuggle bombs on to targeted aircraft (FD301, pp.5 and 10). He said that at no stage did they actually come face to face in Germany. On Dalkamoni and Khreesats return to 16 Isarstrasse a number of boxes were carried in containing various items of equipment and devices including what Khreesat referred to as the fifth device, a Toshiba radio-cassette player. Next day, 23 October, as Khreesat stated in a call to Amman on 24 October monitored by the BKA, he started work on bomb-making at 16 Isarstrasse. According to the FBI record (FD301, p.22) it was on that day 23 October that Dalkamoni came into the workroom with the fifth device and asked him to solder together two wires. Khreesat related to the FBI that the Toshiba device had some strange modifications, some involving cardboard, and he told
Dalkamoni of his doubts about its quality. The barometric pressure trigger was clearly visible beneath the cassette relay and its conversion into a bomb would have been fairly obvious, he said. Also on 23 October Dalkamoni received a call from Damascus, similarly intercepted, when he reported that they were nearly ready. On 24 October, accompanied by Ahmed Abassi, Dalkamoni and Khreesat were tailed shopping in Neuss for various items including clocks and switches, glue, screws and 1.5 volt batteries. As already mentioned, the BKA log states that later in the day Khreesat telephoned Amman to report that he had started work the day before and needed another two or three days before he could return home. We now come to what is perhaps the potentially most important passage in the FD301 record of Khreesats FBI interview. Shortly after lunch time Khreesat was working on bombs in the workroom at 16 Isarstrasse when he decided to take a shower. While he was in the shower Dalkamoni knocked on the door to say he was leaving for Frankfurt. On getting back to work Khreesat saw that the fifth device had disappeared from the workroom, which only he and Dalkamoni ever used. According to the FBI interview record, it was next day, the 25th, that Khreesat telephoned his case officer in Amman to report his assumption that the fifth device had been handed over to Abu Elias. (FD301 records that he had prepared a device and given it to Abu Elias. Khreesat advised that he had assumed that the fifth device went to Abu Elias, as related above: pp.23-24). It remains unclear if this was the same call referred to in the BKA log as having been made on 24th, when Khreesat reported he was nearly ready and needed only two or three more days. But it is curious that the BKA do not appear to have monitored any call in which the handover of a device is mentioned. Later on the 25th Khreesat and Dalkamoni called in at Dsseldorf airport where they picked up and discussed timetables (including Pan American ones). The alert sounded by Khreesat was conceivably the cue for police action, taken in a frantic effort to recover the missing bomb. The day following the call to Amman, 26 October, the BKA swooped and made numerous arrests. Khreesat and Dalkamoni were seized while out in Dalkamonis car, just as Khreesat was emerging from a telephone call box. Hidden under a blanket in the car police discovered a Toshiba RT-F453D BomBeat single-speaker radio-cassette player. Its name was almost eponymous, considering what was found packed inside: 300 grammes of Semtex, a detonator and an altitude-sensitive barometric trigger which clearly showed it was designed to destroy an aircraft in flight. If Khreesat is to be believed (and without corroboration his word can hardly be taken as gospel) he told the BKA that they should have waited one more day to make the arrests, as Dalkamoni was on the way to meet Abu Elias when they were arrested (an anticipated meeting variously referred to in FD301, at pp.2, 7, 22 and 23). He was clear in stating that the Toshiba which Dalkamoni had spirited away on 24 October was not the one found in the car two days later. When the police searched 16 Isarstrasse they found another F-453D with holes already drilled and various items of bomb-making equipment. They also found airline luggage tags and timetables. The following April after
Lockerbie the BKA raided an associated address and found three further completed bombs, two fitted into the Ultrasound radio tuners and one in the Sanyo monitor. It turned out the devices had been in 16 Isarstrasse at the time of the original search but had been missed. There were thus five completed bombs in all, hence Khreesats reference to the missing one which probably went to Abu Elias as the fifth device. On the assumption that Khreesat was telling the FBI the truth the fifth device was never recovered. Moreover, Abu Elias escaped the net and was never arrested. On the other hand, it remains an unanswered question why, if Dalkamoni had indeed gone to Frankfurt to meet Abu Elias on 24 October, presumably being tailed by the BKA, they failed to note him meeting Abu Elias and handing over the Toshiba radio cassette player. Following the arrests and the seizing of the F-453D from Dalkamonis car an alert was sent out to airlines warning that an attempt might be made to smuggle a bomb concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player on to an airliner. (The warning led to an order being issued to Frankfurt airport X-ray operators to call their supervisor if they saw on the screen a radio-cassette player in any item of baggage. It was on the basis of that instruction that X-ray operator Kurt Maier firmly asserted in evidence at the 1992 New York trial of the action for negligence brought against Pan American World Airways that he had not called his supervisor because none of the relevant items of luggage which passed through his machine had contained a radiocassette player, from which it followed that the Lockerbie bomb could not have travelled from Frankfurt to Heathrow: see The Crucial Loose Ends, cited above, at p.510.) Although Dalkamoni was given a lengthy sentence for bombing German railway trains, in due course most of the suspected cell members who had been rounded up in the Autumn Leaves raids were swiftly released. These included Khreesat who after Lockerbie was discharged by a judge for lack of evidence in what was palpably an exercise in judicial collusion and flown straight home to Jordan, proving, if proof were needed, that he was, as he claimed, an agent of the Mukabaret, and a likely proxy asset therefore of the CIA. 3. The fifth device: the forlorn effort to distance Marwan Khreesat from the fatal bomb and ruminations on its provenance The story of the Toshiba bomb which Khreesat told the FBI must have been handed over to Abu Elias has been the subject of much conjecture and debate. Khreesat told the FBI men that in 1985 he had gone to Syria to improvise five altimeter bombs of the kind he had been making since 1970 (as to which see further below). These particular five were housed in Toshiba F-453D Bombeat models. Going into considerable detail on the later history of the five devices Khreesat said they were for demonstration only and in different states of completion before being disassembled. Two had been ready to arm, one had no barometric pressure device or associated timer (see below) and the remaining two, for some reason which he did not specify, needed only two wires to be connected (FD301, p.5).
Khreesat stated that following his arrival in Germany the four barometric pressure triggers (together with their associated delay timers) which had been removed from the 1985 demonstration Toshiba bombs were delivered back to him for incorporation into a new batch of bombs. Three were fitted respectively into the two Ultrasound radios and the Sanyo monitor bought second-hand on 18 October and seized by the BKA in April 1989. The fourth was installed (or re-installed) in the ex-1985 F-453D which the BKA found in Dalkamonis car on the day of the round-up. The F-453D found at 16 Isarstrasse with holes already drilled was presumably one of the five 1985 models. That left the fifth device. It should be mentioned here that Dalkamoni told the BKA that Khreesat had brought with him from PFLP-GC headquarters in Damascus a Toshiba radio-cassette player containing two clocks and two barometric pressure switches and that Ramzi Diab had handed him a similarly equipped Toshiba radio-cassette player when they met in Frankfurt on October 18 (see Ashton and Ferguson, p.51-52). Khreesat did not mention these to the FBI. If they were additional to the five devices he did mention what are the odds that one of them was the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103? Some effort seems to have been made by Khreesat, possibly with the assistance of his FBI interrogators, towards dissociating himself from the fatal bomb. The FD301 interview record has him telling the FBI agents that the Toshiba radio cassette player housing the fifth device, which had been delivered to 16 Isarstrasse on 18 October, was not in a new box; he did not know where it had come from but he thought Abu Elias might have handed it to Dalkomoni while he, Khreesat, was at the zoo (FD301, p.21). From a catalogue shown him by the FBI agents he identified it as a Toshiba RT-F453D, but bronze in colour. By the time of the FBI interview the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) were claiming to have established from some bits of black plastic that the bomb had been housed in a Toshiba SF16 stereo radio-cassette player, most of the production run of which had been shipped to Libya. (Reliance was also placed on a Toshiba PCB fragment and part of the front cover of an SF16 manual, both of which items are, evidentially, highly suspect: see Exploding Lockerbie, part 1, p.431, and see below further.) One might be forgiven for wondering if Khreesat was hedging his bets here. If the fifth device was housed in a bronze Toshiba it could not have been the fatal bomb (he and his collusive FBI interrogators might have imagined). On the other hand (they might have supposed) if, in spite of the black fragments, doubts remained, it could always be argued that use of a bronze Toshiba could never be proved because the absence of bronze fragments could either be explained away by their having been fused with the remains of the bronze Samsonite suitcase which carried the fatal bomb or because the fatal Toshiba had not been bronze. Could the identification of the Toshiba as an SF16 have been the reason why, according to the agents, Khreesat maintained he had never used a stereo model and could not therefore be responsible for building the device which brought down Maid of the Seas? Could he have been intending to imply that with two speakers there was insufficient room for the bomb components? Yet when the
BKA raided 16 Isarstrasse they noted 12 unmodified stereo radio cassette players which they left there. Why had so many stereo models been obtained if Khreesat was not going to use them? Perhaps they had been purchased without consulting Khreesat and had then been discarded as unsuitable. But there is directly contradictory evidence of what Khreesat told the agents. He was interviewed by Defence solicitors in June 2000 and on that occasion admitted to using both mono and stereo models, an assertion he also incidentally appears to have made to the CIA, in June 1989 (see Ashton and Ferguson, p.191), months before the FBI gained access to him ( ibid, p.265, citing Zeist trial transcript, 6 June, 2000). But Khreesat did not merely rely on the mono-stereo point in distancing himself from the Pan Am 103 bomb. To cover for the possibility that the fifth device had ended up as the fatal bomb he went as far as he no doubt supposed he plausibly could in disavowing it as his handiwork. Telling the FBI that he did not know what type of device was used to destroy Pan Am 103 he advised that he does not think he built the device responsible for Pan Am 103, as he only built the four devices in Germany which are described herein (FD301, p.37). These were the bombs in the two Ultrasound radios, the Sanyo monitor and the F435D found hidden in Dalkamonis car. The fifth device, he professed to claim, he did not build. It will be recalled he claimed that when it was handed to him on 23 October he noted its strange modifications . . . some involving cardboard and the visible barometric pressure trigger. The bomb had apparently been built by someone else, he was saying, and he was merely being asked by Dalkamoni to solder two wires together. That curious request seems to hark back to two of the 1985 devices, which needed two wires to be connected. Why would someone else Abu Elias possibly have made a poor effort to assemble a Toshiba disguised bomb when the expert Khreesat had been brought to Germany explicitly for the purpose of building bombs and was on hand to construct one properly? Why would Khreesat be requested simply to solder two wires together to complete the job? Why, to quote The Lockerbie Divide blogger (Just a Passing Magic Touch, above), would they have needed Khreesats token touch? The gang were hardly dependent on his expertise for such an elementary task. One conceivable answer to this odd puzzle is that it may tie in with the desire on Khreesats part and that of the FBI men to demonstrate that his government controllers would hardly have sanctioned him to construct a lethal bomb where there was any danger that it might slip out of his hands, as happened with the fifth device. If that bomb happened to be the one which destroyed Pan Am 103 there would have been the strongest of motives for both Khreesat and his controllers to show that he had been authorised to build lethal bombs only under the most pressing conditions of necessity. Thus, it could be argued that he would have had little choice but to build a lethal bomb in order to maintain his cover because a relevant gang member had possessed the technical knowledge to rumble the incorporation of a feature rendering the bombs inoperable.
That indeed is exactly what he suggested to the FBI agents. Having stated that he had previously been ordered by his Jordanian control to disable any bombs he improvised he went on to assert that this had proved to be impossible as Abu Elias would probably know it. By suggesting that the fifth device was probably constructed by Abu Elias, Khreesat perhaps cunningly hoped he could float the idea that Abu Elias had just about sufficient knowledge to detect a built-in spoiler. At the same time, by making out that Abu Eliass handiwork was amateurish he preserved the raison dtre of his assignment by the PFLP-GC that he was the bomb-making expert while Abu Elias was the specialist in planting them. It may have seemed to be him to be the perfect compromise. But in the nature of mendacity the story was liable to unravel. It was assuredly a leaky vessel. If Khreesat had been brought in because of his bombmaking expertise whereas Abu Elias was an airport security expert and not a bomb-maker why might Khreesat ever have supposed he could not hoodwink him? The excuse seems implausible and if it wont wash it would follow that he, or his controllers probably both had been reckless in the extreme, that they knew it, and that they felt numbed by embarrassment and shame at the realisation that it was Khreesats bomb which probably destroyed Pan Am 103. He could hardly claim that his bombs were other than lethal, as is attested to by the fact that a BKA bomb disposal expert was killed attempting to test one of his bombs in 1989. But a decade later he must have forgotten what he was supposed to have told the FBI and, equally, must have forgotten about the death of the bomb disposal man (or at least believed that the old story would never be resurrected). Implausibly, he told the defence solicitors he had carefully designed bombs that would not explode. Khreesats risible story that he was asked by Dalkamoni to solder together two wires of a bomb (the fifth device) ineptly put together by someone else is as implausible as his suggestion that Abu Elias had sufficient technical knowhow to spot a sophisticated disabling feature. Indeed, the very heart of Khreesats suggestion that Abu Elias was the amateruish maker of the fifth device is capsized by the inherent inconsistency that a man who can only build a poor excuse for a bomb will possess that degree of specialist knowledge. The inference which may reasonably be drawn from the accumulation of improbabilities and inconsistencies in Khreesats story is that he was indeed the maker of the fifth device and that he knew it to be the fatal bomb. How far his FBI interrogators (or collaborators) knew it too can only be conjectured. 4. Identifying Abu Elias, the missing PFLP-GC man the real Lockerbie Bomber? Before moving on to what is the main topic of this article it is of some importance to digress shortly on what might have become of Abu Elias, the mystery expert on airport security who disappeared with the lethal bomb concealed inside a Toshiba radio-cassette player? Who was he and where is he now? The FD302 report of Khreesats November 1989 interview by the FBI agents states
Khreesat advised that he did not tell the Germans anything about Abu Elias. Khreesat never saw Abu Elias in Germany but was told by Dalkamoni that Abu Elias had arrived. Khreesat told the Germans that they should have waited on emore day to make the arrests, as Dalkamoni was on the way to meet Abu Elias when they were arrested. Khreesat went on to help the agents make up a composite picture of Abu Elias which he described as a good likeness. He may not have told the Germans much about Abu Elias but was he any more helpful to the FBI officers? Taken at face value the preparation of the composite would suggest he was being equally circumspect with them. If he had revealed the mans true identity, there would have been no need to prepare a composite because it would have been easy to acquire a photograph. The fact is he knew very well who Abu Elias was. So who was the mysterious Abu Elias? Of his existence there can be little doubt. Why else would Khreesat have called his control in Amman. But what of the mans name? Was it real or an alias (if the pun can be forgiven)? The Abu preface is merely an informal soubriquet common in Arabic, a sort of nickname, meaning father of. He would be father of Elias. Rumours and reports as to the mans true identity have been in circulation for many years. Not long after the indictments of al-Megrahi and Fhima were announced in November 1991 the PLO released a report to the international press describing the 1988 deal between Iran and the PFLP-GC and claiming that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built by one Khaisar Haddad, also known as Abu Elias, a blond blue-eyed Lebanese Christian member of the PFLP-GC (see Roy Rowan, Why Did They Die? Time magazine cover story, April 27 1992; re-circulated in Goddard, D. and Coleman, L., Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie Insider the DIA , New York: Bloomsbury, 1993.) During the Zeist trial in 2000 it came to light that Mobdi Goben, the PFLP-GCs coordinator for Yugoslavia in 1988 who had played a prominent role in assisting the German cell, had made a death-bed confession referred to in the trial as the Goben Memorandum in which he identified Abu Elias as a close relative of Ahmed Jibril. In Cover-Up for Convenience (p. 288) Ashton and Ferguson revealed that they had discovered Abu Elias to be a Syrian national who had acquired US citizenship and that he was known to the FBI and CIA. They further stated that the man had denied being Abu Elias but did not reveal how they had discovered his identity, nor how they knew he had made such a denial. Evidence was later submitted to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) and subsequently passed over to the Scottish Court of Appeal for the purposes of al-Megrahis second appeal to the effect that Abu Elias was in fact Jibrils nephew. Within days of the initiation of the appeal process it was reported in a mass circulation British Sunday newspaper, possibly for the first time, that the man believed to be Abu Elias was Jibrils nephew and that he was living near Washington DC under an alias which the newspaper could not divulge (see Derek Lambie, Finger of blame for Lockerbie pointed at American citizen, Sunday Express, July 8, 2007,
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/ view/12732/Finger-ofblame-for-Lockerbie-pointed-at-American-citizen). One journalist who has long been deeply involved in investigating the Lockerbie bombing has disclosed to the author that Abu Eliass mother is, or was, Ahmed Jibrils sister. In the light of the revelation that Abu Elias may have been Jibrils nephew it can now be seen that Khreesat may have given an early clue suggesting this in his FBI interview. Of the five 1985 F-453D bombs he built in 1985 he told the FBI that in 1987 one of them was shown to Abu Elias. But intriguingly he also said that one had apparently been kept intact for Jibril to show his nephew. It rather sounds as if he might have been talking about the same showing. Three days after al-Megrahis release (August 20, 2009) the UK Sunday Express revealed that the papers Scottish counterpart had tracked down the man suspected of being Abu Elias to his home in Virginia near Dulles airport, Washington DC, pointing out the irony that it was only a few miles from the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington National Cemetery (Ben Borland, Ill reveal true identity of bomber, August 23, 2009 http://www.express.co.uk/ posts/view/122299/-I-ll-reveal-true-identity-of-bomber% 20UK%20NEWS). The article went on to state that the man, whom the paper continued not to name, was employed by the US government as a schools engineer, had his own Facebook page and that when confronted by the newspapers representatives denied being Abu Elias or having any involvement with the atrocity, claiming mistaken identity or malice. The journalist referred to above indicated to the author that when interviewed by Fhimas solicitor, Eddie McKechnie, at the time of the trial the man gave a similar denial. The article further revealed that Scottish National MSP Christine Grahame, a campaigner for al-Megrahis release, was believed to be considering naming the man in the Scottish Parliament chamber. On 2 September, 2009, during the debate on al-Megrahis compassionate release, she did precisely that, naming him as one Basel Bushnaq (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?gid=2009-09-02.1 9051.0). Subsequently Ms Grahame revealed on More4 TV News that the name was mentioned in SCCRC papers (Was Megrahi really the Lockerbie bomber? 2 September 2009, http://www.channel4.com/news/article.jsp?id= 3329 697&time=181158). Mr Bushnaq is a suburban activist for Middle East peace and his Virginia address and telephone number are given quite openly on Google (21051 Thoreau Court, Sterling, Virginia, telephone number, 001-571-9269231). He apparently describes himself as a Bosnian from the Mostar Lakisic clan, a self-portrayal reported on The Lockerbie Divide (http://lockerbiedivide. blogspot.com/ 2010/10/basel-to-basil-kubaissi-link.html, 7 October, 2010). The same posting reveals that his wife Raghad shared her maiden name (Kubaissi) with that of a prominent Black September, later PFLP, organiser who was assassinated by the Israelis in 1973 in retaliation for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. The original source of the allegation that Basel Bushnaq is Abu Elias is not known to the present author. If they are one and the same person it would clearly be a matter of the deepest concern if the US authorities know it and are giving
shelter to the man who was and remains the prime suspect for planting the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103. As it happens it ought not to be too difficult to establish this but the likelihood is that the Virginian Bushnaq is not in fact Abu Elias. In Israel Versus Jibril Samuel Katz revealed that in late 1983 Israeli commandos infiltrated Beirut and kidnapped Marwad Bushnaq, better known by his nom de guerre of Abu AAli, a senior PFLP-GC officer and, most important, Ahmed Jibrils nephew (p.105, citing Enough is Enough, Time Magazine, August 14, 1989, p.20, and the Israeli daily evening newspaper Maariv, May 21, 1985, p.15). The nom de guerre Katz cites sounds suspiciously similar to Abu Elias. It seems most unlikely that if Bushnaq was indeed the nephews real surname he would have sought shelter in America using the same surname but disguising it with a new forename. It ought to be easy enough to settle the matter by comparing his appearance with that of the man the Israelis took prisoner. They surely have their former prisoners photograph in their files and would no doubt be willing to make it available for comparison. It would incidentally be interesting to compare photographs of the nephew and the American Bushnaq with the description and photographs of Ramzi Diab, the bigeared man whom Dalkamoni may have met on the same occasion (24 October, 1988, in Frankfurt) as Khreesat told the FBI Dalkamoni had met Abu Elias. If Ramzi was actually Abu Elias that would hardly mean he could not have been the bomber since he was swiftly released from BKA custody. It is reported that he eventually returned to Damascus where, suspected of being an Israeli agent, he was probably liquidated on Jibrils orders (Katz, p.217). 5. An elaborate red herring: the Interfor report Much has been written about the alleged existence of a deal made between certain agents in the CIA and a Syrian based faction by which in return for assistance in securing the release of kidnapped American hostages in the Lebanon, shipments of heroin to North America on certain civil air routes would be unimpeded, or protected. In a report by the New York based Interfor private inquiry firm commissioned in 1989 by lawyers representing Pan American World Airways and the United States Insurance Group it was suggested that the protected drug route used Frankfurt airport, which employed Turkish Islamic fundamentalist baggage handlers. A mule would check in a clean suitcase which one of the complicit handlers would switch with an identical bag containing a heroin shipment. The Interfor report claimed that Ahmed Jibril had managed to get one of the handlers to switch a clean bag with a bag containing not heroin but the fatal bomb. The courier involved was said to be a Lebanese American named Khalid Jaafar, a member of a clan from the Bekaa Valley who were alleged to be involved in heroin production. Jaafar was en route to Detroit and two holdalls identified as his were recovered from the crash site. Pan Am documentation showed that he had checked in two items on PA103A, the feeder flight from Frankfurt, but Jaafars father told investigators that his son had only travelled with two carryon bags. A witness who was queuing up for passport control close to Jafaar (Yasmin Siddique) remembered him as
appearing very nervous but she was uncertain whether or not he had any bags with him. On the basis of this evidence in isolation of any other factors there might have been a theoretical possibility that he checked in two other unaccounted for items, one of which was switched for a clone bag containing the bomb. But the Interfor report was plainly wrong for the same reason that the Crown were wrong in contending that the bomb came from Malta. It is absolutely certain that the suitcase containing the bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 did not come from Malta or Frankfurt. The reason for expressing such confidence will shortly become clear. 6. Warnings Although the bomb seized by the BKA on 26 October was concealed in a Toshiba RT-F453D single speaker model the authorities had decided by the end of April 1989 that the radio-cassette player used for the Lockerbie bomb was a Toshiba RT-SF16 stereo model, also called a BomBeat. The significance of the difference will be discussed later, when we return to the story of Marwan Khreesat. What exactly he told the BKA and who exactly might have been in on the exchanges may be interesting questions but what is important for now is that the Germans shared their discovery with the British authorities. On 21 March, 1989, Secretary of State for Transport Paul Channon told the House of Commons about the BKA discovery and that information about it had been passed to his department which issued a warning by telex on 22 November 1988 to UK airports and airlines pointing to the possible existence of other such devices. On 19 December, 1988, Mr Channon told Parliament, the Department of Transport drafted a warning circular but sadly it was not sent out because of the need to obtain reproduction photographs in colour. Channon also made reference to a telephone call received by the US Embassy in Helsinki on 5 December, 1988 warning that a Finnish woman would attempt to smuggle a bomb on to a Pan American airliner from Frankfurt bound for America. However, Mr Channon explained, he and the American ambassador to Finland had together discounted the call as a hoax. Nonetheless, the authorities appear to have been in possession of sufficient specific information to have initiated an immediate upgrade in levels of security which, given the endemic laxity at Heathrow, was clearly warranted. 7. Gunning for the true culprits: the last hurrah With the spotlight of suspicion fixed firmly on the PFLPGC the investigators focused their attention on a Palestinian by the name of Mohammed Abu Talb, suspected of association with the PFLP and in Swedish custody on suspicion of terrorism. When the police searched his flat they found a selection of brand new items of clothing some of which were traced to a Maltese manufacturer who had also supplied clothes to Marys House, a boutique in Sliema on the island of Malta owned and run by a Mr Anthony Gauci. This was regarded as highly significant because clothing in the Samsonite holding the bomb had also been traced to Marys House. In an article in the Sunday Times for 5 November, 1989, it was asserted on the basis of information reportedly furnished by the investigators that
Dalkomoni and Abu Talb had gone to Malta to instruct a PFLC cell there to send a Toshiba radio cassette bomb by an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. The article contained Abu Talbs photograph. In the following weeks edition (Sunday Times, 12 November, 1989) it was reported that the Scottish police were about to travel to Sweden to interview Abu Talb in prison. On 5 December, 1989, the same newspaper noted that Abu Talb had been positively identified as the man who bought the clothes from the shop in Malta and that he was about to be extradited to Britain to stand trial for the Lockerbie bombing. In the event, Abu Talb was not extradited because the investigators decided to move away from blaming Iran and the PFLP and to cast the blame instead on Libya. Abu Talb was called as a witness for the Crown at the trial in 2001 and we return briefly to discuss his evidence later. III. SUMMARY OF THE CASE AGAINST AL-MEGRAHI 1. Membership of the JSO It had been part of the Crowns case that al-Megrahi had been an officer of the JSO, in charge of airline security, until 1987. The Crown alleged, on the strength of their witness Majid Giaka, himself a former JSO agent and a CIA informant, that al-Megrahi had then moved to the Centre for Strategic Studies. Much of Majids evidence in particular his contention that al-Megrahi had access to explosives and had previously discussed destroying a British airliner was rejected by the court as not credible, but they accepted his evidence of al-Megrahis continued membership of the Libyan secret service. 2. The Samsonite suitcase bomb The remains of the bronze Samsonite hardshell suitcase which had contained the bomb, some identifiable remains of what was said to be the Toshiba radio-cassette player in which the bomb had been housed, and the blast-damaged remains of clothing which had been in the Samsonite, were among the huge quantity of evidential material swept up in the fingertip search across the open country around Lockerbie and the nearby hillsides. In due course the clothing was proved to have been purchased in Malta. It was discovered that al-Megrahi had visited Malta briefly on December 20 and 21 (using a passport under the alias of Abdusamad) and flew out from Maltas Luqa airport on the morning of the 21st, returning to Tripoli. To link him with the bomb the Crown contended, and the court accepted, that the Samsonite bag had been ingested into the system at Maltas Luqa airport from where, on 21 December, it was carried as unaccompanied baggage on Air Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt. There, the Crown contended, it was transferred to the Boeing 727 operating Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to Heathrow where it was loaded on to the doomed aircraft. The Crown relied on certain documentation relating to the automated baggage recording system in service at Frankfurt airport which on the face of it was susceptible to the possible interpretation that an unaccompanied bag had been transferred from KM180 to PA103A. However, full investigation during the trial of working practice at Frankfurt revealed a state of affairs which allowed for the
real possibility that the item in question might well not have been transferred from KM180 but might have come from another flight (possibly from Warsaw). Such a possibility was supported (a) by inquiries which accounted for all recorded baggage on KM180 and (b) by detailed scrutiny, during the trial, of special security measures in force at Luqa, including examination of arrangements at check-in, control of the baggage area and random staff rostering (so that no loader knew in advance to which aircraft they would be assigned).The implication of assuming that the terrorists had nonetheless managed to smuggle the suitcase containing the bomb onto the aircraft is that they had concealed their method so well that no trace of it was ever discovered by a single-minded and determined investigation covering all practicable possibilities. But such an assumption would surely fly in the face of an inquiry which effectively eliminated any realistic possibility that an unrecorded rogue bag could have been and was secreted on to KM180. The result was that the Crown were at a complete loss to offer any feasible explanation as to how those procedures might have been subverted so as to permit the suitcase to be smuggled aboard. The trial court acknowledged this obstacle for the Crown: If therefore the unaccompanied bag was launched from Luqa, the method by which that was done is not established by the Crown. The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crowns case (para 38). Accordingly they acquitted Fhima, who had been implicated primarily because he was employed as Libyan Arab Airlines station manager at Luqa, was a close associate of al-Megrahi having travelled to Tripoli and returned with him on 20 December, and because of certain entries in his work diary from which the Crown sought to infer that he had obtained luggage tags from the airport and given them to al-Megrahi to attach to the Samsonite. However, the court chose to conclude nonetheless that the perpetrators had managed in some unspecified, unexplained and ingenious way although one presumably short of the diabolic to get the bag on to KM180 at Luqa. They reached this finding by reference to certain evidence in the case (in particular the evidence relating to procedures at Frankfurt) and by ignoring other evidence, also considered later. 3. The Toshiba radio-cassette player and the MEBO electronic timer The case for the prosecution was that a minute search conducted on the ground around Lockerbie produced sufficient fragments of evidence to show that the bomb was an improvised Semtex device housed in a Toshiba RT-SF16 stereo radio-cassette player. The model shared the name BomBeat with the RT-F453D (the type seized by the BKA from Dalkamonis car). Three-quarters of the production run of the SF-16 had been shipped to Libya. The Crown also relied on the fragment of a printed circuit board (PCB) identified as part of an MST-13 electronic timer manufactured by the Swiss company MEBO, a number of which had been supplied to the Libyan military. However, some MST-13 timers had been supplied
to other end users (notably to the East German Stasi) and this fact coupled with the seizure of the Semtex bomb disguised in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder had been seized by the BKA from suspected members of the PFLPGC supported the formal defence denunciation, under the Scottish justice system, of that organisation as the culprits. The details relating to all this evidence are discussed later. MEBOs owner, Edwin Bollier, had close associations with the Libyan military and secret service and although the court dismissed much of his evidence indirectly suggestive of Libyan involvement in the bombing they did accept from him that al-Megrahi had associations with JSO personnel. 4. Al-Megrahis two visits to Malta As already mentioned, al-Megrahi appears originally to have fallen under suspicion because he was discovered to have been present in Malta on 20 and 21 December, 1988, using a coded passport in the name of Abdusamad issued under the authority of the Libyan Government. He departed back to Tripoli from Luqa at roughly the same time as KM180 left for Frankfurt. These facts were not disputed, nor was an earlier visit made by him, from 7 to 9 December, when he had used a passport in his own name. On both visits he stayed at the Holiday Inn, Sliema, where he was well known. He had used the alias passport previously, including when staying at the hotel in 1987. As former head of airline security he was well-known at Luqa and could hardly conceal his presence there. On 20 December he claimed a Libyan Arab Airlines discount from the hotel in his own name and had entered the name of the hotel on his landing and departure cards, from which his true identity could easily have been established. In short, the coded passport was palpably a most unworthy instrument by which to conceal his identity. However, the court set store by the fact that it was never used again after 21 December, 1988. (The author has been told on excellent authority that the reason for this is that it was destroyed by al-Megrahis wife because she suspected that he had been using it to conduct a clandestine affair.) 5. Recent Maltese provenance of the clothes in the suitcase It has already been mentioned that the Samsonite suitcase carrying the bomb had on the Crowns case also contained items of clothing which were traced to Marys House, in Sliema, on the island of Malta. The police first approached the owner, Anthony Gauci, on 1 September, 1989, almost nine months after Pan Am 103 was blown up. He purported to remember selling the clothing to a Libyan on a date which the court found to have been Wednesday, 7 December, 1988, coinciding with al-Megrahis three-day visit to the island. The issue over the purchase of the clothes proved to be the most crucial and contentious element in the trial. Without it there was no case against al-Megrahi. It has been reported that Gauci was paid $2 million for his assistance (Severin Carrell, Fresh doubts on Lockerbie conviction. The Guardian. 3.10.07). It is assumed any payment was ex post facto acknowledgment of the personal risk he must have felt in assisting the investigation and may or may not be relevant in any analysis of his reliability. But
the manifest insubstantiality of his account of the sale of clothing and his evidence pointing to al-Megrahi as the purchaser is reason enough to disparage the conviction. 6. Putting it all together: petitio principii Although the trial court found that the Samsonite bag had been carried from Luqa on KM180 they did not find that alMegrahi had been instrumental in getting it on board. Nor did they find that he brought bomb components to Malta on 20 December and they rejected the Crowns contention that he had access to explosives in Malta. But they found that he was involved as some sort of accessory on the basis of a package of assumptions: (i) the MST-13 timer was a type which had been supplied, though apparently not exclusively, to the Libyan military/JSO; (ii) al-Megrahi was a member of the JSO; (iii) he bought the clothes in the suitcase from Marys House on 7 July; (iv) using a false passport for unexplained purposes he made a flying visit to Malta on 20 December, returning to Tripoli next day at virtually the same time as KM180 flew out; (v) although there was no evidence as to how the bag could have been placed on board KM180 at Luqa the Frankfurt evidence was consistent with the possibility that it was. The courts thinking seems to have boiled down to a most unjudicial circularity of assumptions. Having regard to al-Megrahis membership of the JSO and the supply of MST-13 timers to Libya they chose to find that the bag had been put on board KM180 on 21 December because alMegrahi (a) was the purchaser of the clothes on 7 December, (b) was in Malta on 21 December using a false passport with no explanation and (c) was, as they found, therefore connected, in some unspecified way with the planting of the bomb. How could they be sure he was the purchaser of the clothes on the basis of mere resemblance to the purchaser and his brief presence in Sliema on 7 December? Oh, because the bomb had flown from Luqa on 21 December when al-Megrahi was at the airport (and he was therefore connected with planting it). But wait. How could they be sure it had started on its way from Luqa on the 21st? Ah, because he was found to have bought the clothes (although the false passport was a factor, too). The argument was completely circular. The trial judges purported to apply the principle of circumstantial evidence, an exercise which, in contrast with smoking gun allegations, normally involves drawing together a number of disparate strands of fact, each in itself established, neutral, and capable of proving very little, but when woven into an evidential net around the accused may be so tight as to permit no escape from a judgment of guilt. But the actual principle they applied was petitio principii: assuming what is to be proved as a component of the would-be proof; in laymans idiom: begging the question. A fundamental corruption of basic logic thus intellectually bankrupted the whole exercise. It was nothing short of an evidential feedback loop. The circle will be broken if either or both of two propositions are not proved, or better still disproved. In the first place it can be shown that the fact that there is no explanation as to how it could have been smuggled aboard KM180 is entirely consonant with other evidence showing
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conclusively as a stand-alone fact that it did not arrive at Heathrow from Malta via Frankfurt, but that, contrary to the courts judgment, it must have originated at Heathrow that is ingested into the system there. The other factor which will break the circle is demonstrating the unsoundness of the finding that alMegrahi was the purchaser of the clothes. If that finding is wholly unsustainable the circle is broken and the other components prove nothing. The case against al-Megrahi depends therefore on the question whether there is a substantial case for contending that he was the purchaser. There is not. IV. WAS AL-MEGRAHI THE CLOTHES PURCHASER? We shall now turn to the matter of Anthony Gaucis evidence as to the identity of the purchaser of the clothes. The key proposition implicit in Gaucis evidence is that in spite of the lapse of ten months before he was first approached by police he remembered the sale of the clothing in the suitcase and that was why he was able to remember and describe the purchaser. But if his assertion that he had a true memory of the sale (rather than a reconstructed, contrived one), is not plausible, he would not have a memory of the purchaser. However, even if he did have some memory of the sale it would not necessarily follow that he could have had a vivid memory of the purchaser. So it is proposed to look briefly at the second question first. At no stage did Gauci purport to make a positive identification of al-Megrahi as the purchaser. At its highest he only ever asserted a resemblance. But the Crown case, upheld by the trial court, was that coupled with the other circumstantial evidence in the case this was sufficient to prove that al-Megrahi must indeed have been was the purchaser. How reliable, then, were his assertions of resemblance? 1. The assertions of resemblance (a) Inconsistencies in the physical description In a number of his statements to the police Gauci gave the customers age as around fifty (13.09.89; 25.09.89; 10.09.90). In his statement of 1.09.89, Gauci described the customer as six foot or more with a big chest and large head, as not fat but having a big stomach. On 25.09.89 he gave the height as just under six feet, well-built, not fat but with a 36-inch waist. At the trial, however, he described the customer as below six feet and of normal stature. While the adjustment may be explained in part of course by his having had sight of al-Megrahi on the identification parade at Camp Zeist, Holland, on 13 April, 1999, there is another factor. When interviewed by the SCCRC he stated that he recalled someone reading him an article about the Lockerbie case in the Il Torca newspaper for 7 March, 1999, in which it was noted that the description he had given to police contrasted with al-Megrahi, who was not well-built, not six feet tall (in fact he is only 57) and not fifty (he was 36). He would have known to whom this was a reference because the edition of 28 February also carried a photograph and Gauci said that he recalled seeing that one.
(b) Ethnicity It is not clear why Gauci assumed, or was led to state, that the customer was Libyan as distinct from some other North African country. It may be that Libyans were the most common Arab group to visit Malta and in particular Marys House, but his assumption seems never to have been explored. (See psychological assessment of Gaucis evidence by Professor David Canter of the University of Huddersfield International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology, commissioned by Taylor & Kelly, al-Megrahis solicitors, completed October 2006 but never served on the Crown Office, available on-line from 2009 via http://www.davidcanter.com, p.61.) (c) Sketch and photo composite of the purchaser On 13 September, 1989, Gauci assisted in the construction of a police sketch and a composite photograph. Selfevidently the accuracy of such sketches and photographic composites will vary and an unworthy construct can nonetheless blend itself into the witnesss mental image of the person and reinforce the original distorted memory. A number of research projects have demonstrated that accuracy of selection from a photographic array will tend to decrease significantly following participation in the making of a sketch or composite (cited by Prof Steven E. Clark of the University of California, Riverside, Report on Identification Procedures: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed alMegrahi v. H.M. Advocate, 18.12.08, p.19; report commissioned by Taylor & Kelly and served on the Crown Office; now hosted at http://www.megrahimystory.net,). The sketch and the composite can be viewed at http://www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/photoid.pdf. Strikingly, they look nothing like each other, which speaks volumes for their accuracy in depicting the purchaser. Equally striking is the fact that neither of them look anything like al-Megrahi. (d) Competing candidates for resemblance: Abu Talb and al-Megrahi When arrested in Sweden the suspected Palestinian terrorist Abu Talb was found in possession of clothes which were traced back to Marys House. He was known to have been present in Malta on 23 November, 1988, the date which the police originally favoured as the date of purchase of the clothes. His portrait can also be viewed at http://www.vetpath.co.uk/ lockerbie/ photoid.pdf and it can be seen that he too looks nothing like the sketch or photofit. On 2 October, 1989, Gauci was shown his photograph, freeze-framed from a TV broadcast. In a statement he made on 10 September, 1990, he said the hair style and appearance were similar but he could not identify the face. There is no record of the freeze-frame so it is impossible to judge how distinct the facial features were (Clark, p.38). On 5 March, 1990 (having been shown by his brother Paul six or eight weeks previously a Sunday Times article dated 5 November, 1989, featuring Abu Talbs picture captioned Bomber) Gauci told police, I think the photograph printed in the newspaper may have been the man who bought the clothing. He looks like him. . . . That was the name, Abu Talb. All I can say about the photograph
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printed in the newspaper is that I think the man looks the same as the one who bought the clothing. On 10 September, 1990, Gauci was shown a photograph album. At trial DCI Henry Bell stated that Abu Talbs picture was included but not identified by Gauci. However, the notes of interview are sketchy and actually make no mention of Gauci being shown the photograph album containing Abu Talbs picture. In any event he continued to assert that the photograph in the Sunday Times (depicting Abu Talb) was similar to the man who bought the clothing. He also said that the picture of a man named Salem Mohammed Abdel Hady Taha looked similar but was not old enough. Having since September 1989 been asked by police to look at photographic arrays on several occasions Gauci was first invited to examine an array including al-Megrahi on 15 February, 1991. Referring to the 12 men shown (with alMegrahi at Number 8) he said they were all of men younger than the man who bought the clothing. In fact, most were a good deal younger than al-Megrahi (see Clark, p.24). He was therefore asked to look at all the photographs carefully and to try and allow for any age difference (seemingly innocuous instructions which Clark shows can lead to a significantly increased risk of error: see pp.27-28 and 29, citing research studies). At some stage he asked to see the Sunday Times of 5 November, 1989, depicting Abu Talbs photograph. Precisely when in relation to the fetching of the newspaper he gave his opinion remains uncertain but what he said was that al-Megrahi was similar to the man who bought the clothing. The eyebrows, nose, chin and face were the same, but he was too young by ten years or more. Its been a long time now and I can only say that [number 8] resembles the man who bought the clothing, but it is younger . . . I can only say that of all the photographs that I have been shown [number 8] is the only one really similar to the man who bought the clothing, if he was a bit older, other than the one my brother showed me. Although this phraseology suggests the newspaper might not yet been brought to him when he made the remark Maltese police security branch Inspector Scicluna told the SCCRC in 2004 that he had the newspaper in front of him at the same time as the array. DCI Bell noted that Gauci, having made his statement about al-Megrahi, was visibly upset, worried that he would be targeted and concerned about any publicity. Prof Clark suggests that this shows he knew, whether through explicit feedback or simply by observing the reaction of police, that this one mattered and that they believed he had picked the right man (p.33). He observes that such feedback may increase confidence in the selection, especially where the witness appreciates the importance of his evidence and is anxious to be of assistance, with the consequently increased risk of mistaken identification (citing eg Bradfield, A.L., Wells, G.L., and Olsen, E.A. The damaging effect of confirming feedback on the relation between eyewitness certainty and identification accuracy, (2002) 87 Journal of Applied Psychology, 112-120). The antidote, which also guards against pre-decision cueing, would have been a double blind procedure, in which the identity of the suspect is not known to an investigator administering the viewing of the array, now best practice.
On 9 April, 1999, three days before Gauci flew to Holland with Mario Busuttil, a Maltese police officer, he handed the officer the December 1998 edition of Focus magazine containing an article on the Lockerbie investigation and, pointing to a photograph of al-Megrahi, said in Maltese Dans hu, which translates as Thats him. Whatever reliance the Crown may have placed on this it remains unclear whether he meant any more than that the photograph depicted the man he had previously picked out as resembling the purchaser of the clothes. The Camp Zeist ID parade On 13 April, 1999, eight days after al-Megrahi was handed over by the Libyans, Gauci participated in an identification parade at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Referring to number 5, al-Megrahi, Gauci initially said, Not exactly the man I saw in the shop. It is ten years ago but the man who look a little bit like exactly is the number 5. He then altered the words it is to I saw him, so the whole now read Not exactly the man I saw in the shop. I saw him ten years ago, but the man who look a little bit like exactly is the number 5. At his Crown precognition in Dumfries on 25 August, 1999, Gauci stated that he had picked out somebody as resembling the purchaser, adding that his hair was different, not so full and was receding. He seemed narrower. He mentioned that al-Megrahi seemed very nervous at the parade and this may well have caused him to draw attention to himself always a fundamental problem with live ID parades. Manifest unsuitability of the ID parade foils Of the 12 men present to participate as foils only seven were chosen but eight of the twelve would have been in their 20s in 1988 and one would have been 14. Given that Gauci had stated (15.2.91) that al-Megrahi (36 years old in 1988) was too young (the purchaser being about fifty), selecting foils who would have been that much younger still was absurd. Of the three remaining foils, one, although al-Megrahis age, was a Dutch policeman, so presumably of different ethnicity. One, though older, was much too short (53 ie 9 inches shorter than the original 6 foot or more estimate). That left only one suitable foil! (See Clark, p.24.) Trial In July 1990, during his evidence at the trial Gauci was shown the December 1989 Focus article with alMegrahis photograph and was asked to recall his having said Dans hu. He was then asked if he could see the man who bought the clothing and he replied, He is the man on this side. He then instantly watered it down with the qualification: He resembles him a lot. The invitation to Gauci to make an identification was of course a classic dock identification procedure, seemingly only allowed in this case because he had previously made a statement of resemblance. Yet to use as a prompt the Focus picture, carrying the clearest possible suggestion of al-Megrahis guilt, coupled with the reminder about his Dans hu remark, is about as blatant and breathtaking an example of leading the witness as one might dare to imagine. Even then, the Crown failed to achieve the unequivocal identification they were no doubt looking for. Why the court plumped for al-Megrahi The literality of the statement he is the man on this side was then further diminished when he was shown Abu Talbs photograph. About him, too, remarkably, Gauci stated He resembles him a lot and repeated this for emphasis. At first blush this qualifier, coupled with the history of the
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resemblance competition between the two suspects, ought finally to have put paid to the identification issue. But other circumstantial evidence induced the court to plump for alMegrahi as the likely candidate and, in effect, to make a finding that he was indeed the man who bought the clothes. This was essentially their finding that the sale almost certainly took place on 7 December, 1988, when al-Megrahi was in Malta staying at the Sliema Holiday Inn coupled with his visit to the island on 20 and 21 December, when, they found in the teeth of evidence pointing to the contrary that the Samsonite bag had begun its journey from Luqa. That will bring us shortly to the crucial issue of Anthony Gaucis memory of the sale. (e) Prior exposure to suggestive media coverage In addition to the Il Torca (7.03.99) and Focus articles there was of course considerable media coverage of the Lockerbie case between 1991 and 2000 with al-Megrahis image being frequently touted around (see the extensive list in Prof Clarks report, p.4 and see also p.21). Of particular note are two Maltese TV broadcasts and two Maltese newspaper articles just over one week before the Camp Zeist identification parade (ibid). It is hard to exaggerate the suggestive impact which all this material must have had on Gauci. Citing a landmark study by Elizabeth Loftus and others (Loftus, E.F., Miller, D.G., and Burns, H.J., Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory, (1978) 4 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory, 19) Clark (p.33) makes the telling point that by the time he saw the photograph his memory of the actual event would have been weakest, because it must have faded over time, whereas the postevent input would have been strongest, because it was relatively recent. His subsequent responses at the ID parade and at trial would have been based in part on his memory of the photograph he had picked out on 15 February 1991 and on the subsequent media material, including, prominently, the Focus picture. In other words, eleven years after the event he was likely to be remembering the image of a face he had, in 1991, judged to be similar reinforced by repeated media depictions, rather than making a judgment based purely on an uncontaminated memory of the purchasers appearance in 1988. (f) The al-Megrahi photograph in the original photospread It is important to point out that when the police first asked Gauci to look at the photospread of faces which included alMegrahi (on February 15, 1991) they had in their possession two photographs of him. These, too, can be viewed at http://www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/ photoid.pdf). One appears to have been a colour portrait later used in the 1991 indictment and subsequent wanted posters, which although not a recent image is recognisable as its subject. But used in the photospread was a black-and-white photocopy of a strange image retrieved from Czech immigration records. Blurry and noticeably puffier than alMegrahis longish face it is otherwise practically unrecognisable as al-Megrahi apart from some passing resemblance around the eyes. The distorted width of the face corresponds more to that in the constructs. Why the police elected to use it instead of the colour portrait is open
to conjecture but might this have been because the colour image was even less like the sketch/photofit than the black and white photocopy? A later suggestion that Gauci might be shown an up-to-date, recognisable image of al-Megrahi was overruled by senior officers for fear of tainting the first identification. The decision is elemental in assessing the validity of his subsequent statements regarding al-Megrahis resemblance to the purchaser of the clothes at his shop. If, on the 15 February, 1991, he said that aside from the question of age the purchaser resembled that photograph (which bears little resemblance to al-Megrahi), it must follow (especially having regard to the non-resemblance of the constructs to al-Megrahi) that the person he remembered at that stage could scarcely have been al-Megrahi! The fact that at Camp Zeist Gauci picked out al-Megrahi demonstrates almost conclusively hat he must have been swayed by the suggestive force of repeated exposure to good likenesses of al-Megrahi in the media during the intervening years, rather than a real memory of a short encounter with a stranger more than 10 years before. 2. Anthony Gaucis memory of selling the clothes We now turn to the question of Anthony Gaucis memory of the sale of the clothes to the man the Crown alleged was alMegrahi. (a) General: the sale details remarkably recalled Anthony Gauci was first interviewed by police on 1 September, 1989, some 9 months after the alleged purchase of the clothes. He was presented with articles from the aircraft wreckage and made a statement itemising the goods he had sold and describing the customer. He listed the purchases as follows:- three pairs of large size pyjamas (in court he said two pairs and added they were striped); a size 42 Harris Tweed mens jacket which had been in the shop for about five years; two pairs of trousers; a blue babygro (subsequently described as pink, later reverting to blue) with a lambs face on the front (description changed to whole body in statement of 4 October, 1989); a black umbrella; and a red and large size black tartan cardigan (in court he said two). For the first time at trial he said the man bought two pullovers. In his original statement he said he thought the man paid 56 Maltese pounds. On 30 January, 1990, he amended this to 77 pounds. He implied he remembered the sale the items sold, the amounts paid and the appearance of the customer because, unusually, the man had shown no particular interest in choosing the items he had selected. His behaviour was very strange, said Mr Gauci, because, referring to the babygro displayed on a rack, the man asked what age? When told one to two years, he said he would take one and when asked the colour replied blue. When the man picked out a pair of mens trousers Gauci says he asked him the size. He answered more or less my size without doing what Gauci said Libyans normally oddly did, which is to put their elbow into both sides of the trousers. It was, he said, as if anything he suggested the man should buy he would take, an assertion which, as Canter notes, hardly bears close scrutiny, implying as it does that Gauci offered the man random or inappropriate goods (p.38).
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Canter makes the compelling argument that in the context of numerous other sales both beforehand and during the intervening 10-month period, with purchases doubtless involving many different combinations of goods, and customers expressing many varying levels of overt interest in their purchases, the behaviour would need to have been remarkably unusual to be memorable (pp.43-44). With no focus in the interviews on these comparative factors no discernible reason had emerged as to why the particular sale could have stood out so starkly in either of these respects. No indication is given of the comprehensiveness of stock and sale records in the shop, which presents something of a handicap in determining the extent to which Gauci was relying on memory unassisted by documentation (Canter, p.44). With some justice Canter observes that many tourists who know the goods are more available or cheaper than those back home may buy a selection of clothing thinking that they could be gifts for an extended family without being clear exactly for whom each gift would be intended (Canter, p.39). Given that Gauci would have been unaware of the significance of that episode until nine months afterwards it would have been invested with no emotional impact of the degree necessary to render it memorable for him. Even to offer information on payments without any explanation of their significance raised questions as to how much the witness was trying to help by providing details of which he could hardly have been sure. Thus, his purported memory of the details was incompatible with what we know about memory processes (see Canter, pp.25 and 38). Canter argues persuasively that in the absence of any clear and compelling explanation of why the reported combination of clothing would be remembered it is hardly plausible that Mr Gauci would have a memory for a set of apparently random purchases acquired nine months previously (p.43). In short Gaucis reasons for professing to remember the episode seem utterly contrived, if not wholly fanciful. But it hardly needed Canters take on the obvious to underline this point. It is difficult to understand why the investigators, the Crown Office and the judges completely failed to see it for themselves! Canters contention that there was little in Gaucis account of the sale to justify the supposition that it would have been authentically memorable contrasts starkly with Ashton and Fergusons assumption to the contrary (see p.359). In their view the purchaser had done just about everything possible to draw attention to himself short of prancing round naked (p.359). Indeed, their assumption that the behaviour was memorable formed the basis of their suggestion that it may have been deliberately aimed at incriminating Libya: He had chosen a small shop, in which he was the only customer, and had bought a random collection of clothes without bothering to try them on. He had then asked for them to be wrapped and, just in case the shopkeeper had not had a proper look at him, returned for the clothes in a taxi. The bombers had then left all the labels in the clothes, increasing the risk of the trail leading back to the island. It was surely not beyond the realms of possibility that they had used a Libyan proxy
to buy the clothes and thereby lay a false trail back to Tripoli. (b) Specifics: evidence and inconsistences as to the day of the clothes purchase Quite apart from the general point about the fundamental implausibility of Gaucis assertion that nine months after what must have been a wholly unmemorable transaction he actually remembered the sale, its details and the purchaser, the prosecution faced the considerable problem of his inconsistency and apparent confusion regarding the approximate date relative to Christmas 1988 which he gave for the sale of the clothing (see Canter, pp.30, 36-37 and 87). It was established that the sale took place after 18 November, 1988, because a fragment of a pair of tartan Yorkie brand trousers found with the suitcase, bore an order number which showed delivery to Marys House on that date. But beyond that nothing was certain. General approximations of the date in prior statements In his dealings with the police Gauci gave various approximations for the date of the sale: some time in the winter of 1988 but could not remember the date (1.09.89); November or December (21.02.90); end of November (10.09.90). Date narrowed down at trial In evidence at the trial he could remember all the clothes sold but initially not the date of purchase. However, he then stated for the first time slightly before Christmas it was. I dont remember the exact date, but it must have been about a fortnight before Christmas, but I cant remember the date. Christmas lights: statements The late narrowing down of the date to a fortnight before Christmas was clearly induced by a confusion with his earlier use, as a reference point, of the approximate date when the shops Christmas decorations went up. In his statement of 19.9.89 he placed this about 15 days before Christmas and said that they were not up when the man bought the clothes. On 10.9.89, when asked to try to pinpoint the day and date of the sale he said he believed it was at the end of November 1988 and that there were no Christmas decorations up, as I have already said. Christmas lights: trial However, on being asked at the trial, how long before Christmas the lights were put up he initially contradicted his earlier statements, saying that the lights were on already. Having agreed that his recollection at the time of his statements was better than it was now and on being reminded that he had told the police that the sale was made before the decorations went up he replied that he did not know but, seeming to take refuge in some sort of perceived compromise, said he believed they were putting up the lights. This was an entirely new departure but he attempted to attribute his confusion to the possibility that the lights were on when police investigators came to collect him for interview. However, it was on 19.9.89 that he first told police there had been no Christmas decorations up at the time of the purchase, so there could have been no question of Christmas lights being up when the police came to collect him for that interview and so no question of any confusion at that stage. Thus, when he was asked in cross-examination if when he made that statement
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he believed that there were no Christmas decorations up when the man bought the clothes, he conceded Maybe. Christmas lights: date now known Although the police were unable to discover from local inquiries when exactly the Christmas lights went up in the neighbourhood the then Mayor of Sliema, later Maltese High Commissioner to the UK, has since stated that he presided over the switching on of the lights on 6 December. So if Gaucis original statements were correct and the lights were not in fact on at the time of the purchase, the date could not have been 7 December, when al-Megrahi was on the island. Reference to midweek In his statement of 1.9.89 Gauci said he could not remember the day of the week but thought it would have been a weekday. On 19.9.89 he said he was sure it was midweek. On 10.9.90 he repeated he could only say it was a weekday. In evidence-in-chief he clearly stated he had no idea what day of the week it was but in cross-examination when asked by reference to his statement what he meant by midweek he replied it was not a Saturday and he did not want to say it was a Friday, an answer which suggests he was probably thinking of Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, given that he had previously used the term interchangeably with weekday. However, after further prodding as to what he had in mind by the term he only then replied Wednesday, I think and stayed with it when asked if the term could be applied to the three middle weekdays. (It has already been mentioned that 7 December fell on a Wednesday.) It is almost a truism that witnesses often feel the need, when pressed, to appear to be more certain than they are. One wonders also if Wednesday might have been planted in his mind during one of his many interviews and unconsciously retained. Televised football In his 1.9.89 statement Gauci said he was alone in the shop on the afternoon of the sale as his bother Paul had gone home to watch a televised football match. He suggested that Paul might be able to identify the date and day from the game but no evidence was led about any televised football matches Paul had watched. At the trial, for the first time, Gauci said that Paul had arrived and he had asked him to keep an eye on the shop while he, Anthony, took the purchases out to the taxi. He explained that Paul must have been watching football, and when he comes late, that is what usually happens, so I think that was what happened that day. In a joint minute it was agreed that football had been broadcast on Italian TV channels on Wednesday, 23 November and 7 December, 1988. Paul made a statement to police on 19 October, 1989 in which he referred to a list of UEFA matches the police had shown him and he professed to work out that on the basis that there were two games played during the afternoon of 23 November and only one on the afternoon of 7 November I would say that the 23 November 1988 was the date in question. At a time when Abu Talb was the prime suspect this tied in neatly with the Palestinians presence in Malta on that date. Paul later made a statement revising his supposition and giving instead the 7 December, which corresponded of course with the presence in Malta of alMegrahi by that time the main suspect. However, for what must be fairly obvious reasons he was not called as a witness. Rainfall At trial Gauci adopted his 1.9.89 statement that it was raining when the man left the shop and he opened the
umbrella (one of the items purchased), and his 21.2.90 statement that when the man returned the umbrella was down because the rain had stopped. In evidence he said that just a few drops were falling. In his 10.9.90 statement (which he did not specifically adopt at trial) he added that light rain had just started when the man left the shop. There was little rain on the ground, no running water, just damp. Major Mifsud, the Luqa meteorologist, was called as a witness and cited his daily log to show a light one-minute shower on the morning of Wednesday, 7 December, 1988, but no rain in Sliema between 6 and 7pm, although he could not exclude a few drops of rain here and there . . . a ten per cent probability but that it would be insufficient to wet the ground. On Wednesday, 23 November, 1988, records showed light intermittent rain in Sliema from noon onwards with rain at 6pm. Abu Talb may well have been in Malta on November 23. Trial court findings on the purchase date As to the date of the purchase the trial court inferred that:(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) It was midweek, by which Gauci meant a Wednesday. Paul had been watching football on the date of the purchase and this would have been either 23 November or 7 December (both Wednesdays). The records of rainfall did not rule out 7 December as the date of purchase. Although it remained unclear whether or not the Christmas lights were up on the day of purchase this was not inconsistent with Gaucis rather confused recollection that the date of purchase was about the time the lights were being put up. This was consistent with Gaucis memory that the date was about two weeks before Christmas The date was therefore 7 December, 1988.
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two weeks before Christmas and the lights were up, expediently altering this to putting up the lights when confronted with his earlier position. Yet picking about amongst the debris of his confusion and inconsistency the court arbitrarily settles for the belatedly recalled two-week reference point and puts it into the mixture with his tentative suggestion of a Wednesday, the erroneously interpreted football minute and the slim-possibility-of-a-brief-rainshower evidence. The result? Hey presto! Wednesday 7 December: the very date al-Megrahi happens to be in Malta. So because alMegrahi supposedly resembled the purchaser (as did Abu Talb) though by no stretch of imagination either the police sketch or the photofit he must have been the purchaser, a conclusion reinforced in the trial courts mind by his undisputed presence in Malta on 21 December and their arbitrary finding that in spite of evidence pointing to the contrary, which they acknowledged was sound, the bag had that day been loaded onto KM180 at Luqa. Even if the date had been 7 December, al-Megrahis presence in Sliema would not make him the purchaser. Yet what is the justification for all this? The purported answer is circumstantial evidence squeezing proof from the combination of a number of innocuous ingredients. But if the ingredients are themselves inherently defective the combination can hardly make up the deficit. Circumstantial evidence? More like Chico Marxs the party of the first part routine, an exercise in quite breathtaking sleight of hand. Having regard to the actual thinking involved in the judgment of guilt there is some irony in the words of caution with which the judges admonished themselves: We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring other parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified (para 89). (d) Self-contradiction on the mens shirts Another topic which strongly indicated Gaucis unreliability was his evidence about the purchase of shirts. When interviewed by police on 30 January, 1990, Gauci was shown a blast-damaged piece of grey shirt with a Slalom label on the pocket and a complete grey Slalom shirt. He said he had had such shirts in stock for about two or three years, in beige, in grey and in sky blue. He was also shown a blast-damaged piece of blue and white striped cloth and stated that he had a small stripe like that; it is on a girls shirt, a Slalom one I think. However, he was adamant (for sure) that he did not sell any shirts to the man he had sold the other items. On being interviewed on 10 September, 1990, he stated that about three weeks earlier he had been cleaning boxes out in the shop and he remembered they had originally contained a [green] Slalom shirt and a blue and white light denim (texture) material shirt and he remembers that he sold the officers shirts like these. Yet in spite of his clear
(v) (vi)
Putting that inference together with the other evidence the court found that it was al Megrahi who bought the clothes and that he did so in the knowledge that they were to be used in construction of the bomb. (c) Strained inferences The courts reasoning was palpably defective. As to (a), Gaucis explanation of his use of midweek to mean Wednesday was hesitant and very belated. As to (b), the trial court misconstrued the terms of the joint minute to mean that it was agreed only that matches were broadcast at certain times on the two dates when in fact there was no basis for inferring that these were the only dates between 18 November and 21 December on which matches were broadcast. The appeal court agreed with the defence submission on this point but dismissed its materiality, presumably because 23 November remained a potentially viable (and exculpatory) date for the purchase. (On the other hand, it could have been another Wednesday, or, for that matter any other weekday, or even day of the week.) However, the real puzzle is (d) combined with (e). Having repeatedly stated to the police that he could not remember the date, having repeatedly insisted to them that the Christmas lights were not up, he suddenly remembers, at the trial twelve years after the event that it was about
assertion in January 1990 that he remembered that in late 1988 he did not sell any shirts to the man, he now, in September 1990, remembered that the man who bought the clothing did also buy a Slalom shirt and a blue and white striped shirt. This was repeated at trial. As Canter notes, Gauci seems to be implying in the second statement that cleaning boxes out in the shop (did he perhaps mean clearing them out?) jogged his memory, but while the boxes may have reinstated his memory for the shirts which they had contained it is difficult to see how this could act as a prompt to reinstate a memory of selling shirts to the man, where previously he had explicitly and distinctly remembered not selling him any (p.27). Canter argues (p.26) that showing the witness fragments of blast-damaged clothing was in effect to ask leading questions and constituted poor interview technique. According to modern best practice, involving the cognitive method of confining an interview to the asking of open questions, he should simply have been invited to provide a description of any clothes he remembered selling the man. It may be observed that although initially when shown the fragments he emphatically remembered not selling the man any shirts the combination of the leading form of question and an undoubted unconscious desire to assist the police having regard to the gravity of the allegation may have worked a delayed impact on him so that nine months later he now had a contradictory memory (see Canter, p.45). 3. Lack of transparency in the total interview process As we have seen, the case against al-Megrahi is shot through with deficiencies apparent on the face of the record. But quite apart from those defects, the prosecution was inherently vitiated by the fact that, so far as is known, no audio-recordings (let alone video recordings) were made of any of the police interviews with Gauci. So the world will never know for certain what subtle influences might have induced Anthony Gauci to recall an incident which both common sense and psychological principles seem to dictate he would have been unlikely to remember. This manifest lack of transparency is one which continues to pose a very serious problem for criminal justice, one which the present author and his long-time collaborator, Anthony HeatonArmstrong, have been focusing on in print for almost as far back as Lockerbie itself (see www.DavidWolchover.co.uk for a full biography.) Considering the length of time between the downing of Pan Am 103 and Gaucis first interview it is a shortcoming which of itself and without more would have diminished greatly the safety of alMegrahis conviction. IV. ESTABLISHING THE DESCRIPTION OF THE IMPROVISED BOMB 1. The process of identification It has been too widely reported for dispute that within hours of the destruction of Pan Am 103 numerous personnel in US Government service were engaged across the crash site in various unexplained activities not necessarily connected with assisting in the regular police and AAIB investigation. These included the FBI forensic investigator James Tom
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Thurman. (For a detailed account see Ashton and Ferguson, op cit, chap 1.) Air Accident Investigations Board experts swiftly identified the blast-damaged portable luggage container, AVE4041, in which the Samsonite suitcase bearing the bomb had been placed. On 17 January, 1989, Peter Claiden of the AAIB was reassembling the dismembered container when he picked up its folded data plate. When he flexed it a softish lump of what was later described as aggregated partly carbonised material, which had apparently been trapped or stuffed in the fold, fell out. Pressed in with the lump he found the browny coloured fragment of a printed circuit board (PCB) bearing the white printed characters L106 and perpendicular to them the white numbers 101. As it had the potential to be associated maybe with a device Claiden photographed both sides, sealed it in a plastic jar and handed it to the police. It was forwarded to the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment where scientist Allen Fereday took charge of it under exhibit designation AG/145. He testified that the obverse would have been lacquered green but that the lacquer was absent because the fragment had been delaminated in the blast. (It might incidentally be thought to be curious that a blast which destroys almost every trace of the electrical appliance housing the bomb merely succeeds in delicately peeling the lacquer off the PCB fragment.) Among the aggregate Fereday found another piece 5 x 5mm marked 02 and some fragments of white plastic. Still in January, he travelled to Germany where he compared the L106 fragment with the PCB in the seized Toshiba RT-F453D but found no match and in any case the plastic body of the 453 was black. Consulting Toshiba UK at the beginning of February Fereday then tentatively identified the fragment as originating from a Toshiba RT8016 or RT-8026 stereo radio-cassette player, the plastic bodies of both of which were white. However, visiting Toshibas HQ in Japan at the end of April he decided that it had come from an RT-SF16, a stereo model also bearing the BomBeat name. It was similar to the RT8016/8026 except that the plastic case was black. 2. The Toshiba Instructions Manual We now return to the night Pan Am 103 went down, when a 90 mph gale carried light debris from the disintegrating aircraft across to the North Sea. Sixty miles from Lockerbie Geoff and Gwendoline (Decky) Horton found strewn across their farm numerous personal effects from the plane, Christmas cards written by children on board, letters and the like, which they described as all quite harrowing. They put their finds in a polythene bag and handed it to a police officer. In court Mrs Horton claimed she remembered seeing an 8 by 8 inch sheet of paper which related to a radio or something electrical but she said nothing about the name Toshiba. In a later TV interview she did mention having seen that name but by then she could well have been influenced unconsciously by the knowledge that what she was supposed to have found were the remains of the front cover of a Toshiba manual. In court she was presented with an exhibit consisting of an assembly of fragments of part of the front cover of a Toshiba SF16 manual. Only IIBA was
visible of the name but SF16 and BomBeat were visible (for a photograph see http://locerebiedivide.blogspot.com/, under Primary Evidence: Toshiba Owners Manual). Mrs Horton stated that she did not recognise the exhibit: whatever she had found had been more or less intact. The Crowns explanation was that it had been dismembered and damaged through the laboratory testing process. It is perhaps curious that what has been described as a thousands-degree Semtex supernova (ibid) had failed to achieve its complete incineration. There was a record that the manual cover had been photographed before it was sent to the Metropolitan Police for fingerprint testing but Mrs Horton was never shown that photograph. The suggestion may be that there was little difference in its visible state. Brian Walton, the officer to whom the Hortons had handed the bag of paper items they had found claimed to recollect the front cover, describing it as having tiny bits of singeing on some of the edges of the pieces. Without being too literal his answer seems to confound the proposition that it had been dismembered by testing. As he also stated that at the time it had no significance for him it seems somehow doubtful that he actually had any memory of it but was responding to an expectation. If it was indeed torn across in at least two places, almost in three separate pieces it seems unlikely that Mrs Horton would have remembered it as an intact page. Allen Fereday returned to the UK from visiting Toshiba HQ in Japan at the beginning of May 1989, bringing with him a boxed up SF16 and at least one SF16 instruction manual. Then by another one of those curious coincidences which set the Lockerbie case apart, and in a reversal of the more usual process by which the discovery of certain evidence precedes the acquisition of control material for the purpose of testing it, within a very few days, on 11 May, the manual cover allegedly found by the Hortons was received and assimilated at RARDE. It was followed by the discovery of bits of black plastic and, amongst items of clothing, crumpled pieces of paper matching the manual brought from Japan. (See http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot. com/, under Primary Evidence: Toshiba Owners Manual for a review of the chronology, details and oddities surrounding the designation of exhibit reference numbers.) In the wake of the Autumn Leaves revelations the proven use of a Toshiba radio-cassette player for the Lockerbie bomb seemed to implicate the PFLP-GC, although the alleged discovery of evidence pointing to the use of an SF16 subsequently went some way to letting that organisation off the hook. Marwan Khreesat, the Frankfurt cells bomb-maker and double agent for the Jordanian Mukabaret who was arrested by the BKA on 26 October, 1988, told the FBI in late 1989 that he had never used an SF16 or other stereo model. We have already discussed that claim in some detail. At the same time establishing that the bomb was housed in an RT-SF16 BomBeat model also provided a basis for casting suspicions on Libya, to which country three-quarters of the production run of that model had been shipped. This seemed to be reinforced by the contention that the bomb was triggered by an electronic timer.
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V. ELECTRONIC TIMER OR BAROMETRIC TRIGGER? 1. Implicating Libya with an electronic timer As previously mentioned, in the first few months after the destruction of Pan Am 103 the gravamen of suspicion focused on the PFLP-GC. That organisation was known to have developed expertise in building and planting improvised bombs on civil airliners and the hallmark of the typical PFLP-GC device was the barometric pressure trigger, which would work automatically when the plane had reached a certain altitude. A mere two months before Lockerbie police had arrested members of the West German cell in possession of a completed bomb equipped with just such a trigger. For reasons which remain notoriously unclear but which sensitive guesswork can intelligently conjecture, the process of attributing blame shifted to Libya, a change of direction largely initiated by American investigators. Lying at the heart of the change was the question whether or not the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was operated by an altitude sensitive trigger characteristic of PFLP-GC devices. The case against al-Megrahi and therefore against Libya was predicated on the supposition that the bomb in a suitcase which destroyed the Pan Am jetliner had originally been introduced into the baggage system at Malta, that it had been flown to Frankfurt, transferred on to a Pan Am feeder flight bound for Heathrow, where it was loaded on to the doomed plane. To prove this theory it was obviously essential to show that detonation must have been by means of an electronic timer, with the time to detonation set in Malta before the bomb was smuggled into the system many hours beforehand. If this could be demonstrated it would mean that the method of detonation was quite different from the barometric-pressure-controlled Toshiba device seized from the PFLP-GC in Germany and would tend to point away from that terrorist groups responsibility. The investigators thought they could prove the use of such a timer: allegedly found in the neck of the blast-damaged remnant of a Slalom shirt forensically linked to the Samsonite hardshell suitcase which had contained the bomb was Zeist trial Crown exhibit PT35b. This was the fingernail size fragment of a printed circuit board (PCB) which bore marks supposedly identifying it as part of a Swiss manufactured MEBO MST-13 electronic timer. All fifteen of the production run had been supplied to the Libyan military, in addition to five prototypes, but three prototypes had also been supplied to the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency which had close links with both the MEBO company and the PFLP-GC. It was later revealed that the PCBs in the prototypes had been cut out with a hacksaw rather than machine cut as were those in the production run and an independent expert found that the PCB supposedly found in the shirt collar had been hand cut and was noticeably different in other respects (see Ashton and Ferguson, p.234). The Stasi connection and the Autumn Leaves evidence were used as the basis of the formal defence denunciation, under the Scottish justice system, of the PFLP-GC as the perpetrators.
2. The inherent (and decisive) advantage of the barometric trigger The possibility that the evidence of the discovery of the fragment was concocted has been the subject matter of almost endless rumour, innuendo and debate. At the Zeist trial the defence adopted a low key policy of casting doubt as to its provenance without making any explicit allegations. But in the end the contention that PT35b actually came from the aircraft bears little serious inquiry. The most powerful indication of what method of triggering the bomb the terrorists employed will depend on an examination of the inherent pros and cons of the one against the other. It is an examination which will show the inherent improbability of the use by the terrorists of an electronic timer. Successful destruction of an airliner obviously depends on the ability to ensure that the aircraft is in flight when the bomb detonates. Given the vagaries of delay and cancellation endemic in airline timetabling, a stand-alone timer operated bomb can rarely, if ever, be guaranteed to destroy an aircraft in flight. To address this problem Jibril and Khreesat devised the altitude sensitive barometric trigger. When the pressure inside the vacuum chamber fell to about 950 millibars the normal air pressure at 2,500 feet it would activate the timer which in turn would detonate the Semtex. Although aircraft are pressurised, including the luggage holds, the pressure maintained is significantly less than that at sea level. The first use of this method by the PFLP-GC, in 1970, destroyed a Swissair plane flying from Zurich to Tel Aviv. This and subsequent incidents led to the installation at some airports (including Frankfurt) of vacuum chambers in which suspect luggage could be subjected to lowered atmospheric pressure under controlled conditions. Any explosion would damage only the chamber and its contents. In response Khreesat introduced a simple capacitor-type time delay which required the lowered pressure to be maintained for at least 30 minutes before detonation. This also allowed the plane to climb higher before the explosion, making the system even more lethal. It was devices of this nature that were seized by the BKA in October, 1988, and April, 1989. Tests conducted by BKA experts showed that although the exact time of detonation was subject to a number of variables, the Khreesat bombs seized in Neuss would be expected to explode in a time window of around 35 to 50 minutes after takeoff. Pan Am 103 had been in the air for 38 minutes when the bomb exploded. One prominent commentator on the Zeist trial noted that the judges were so impressed by the amazing coincidence that barometric pressure triggers of the kind used in the bomb seized by the BKA will cause an explosion in the region of 38 minutes after take-off on a standard ascent, and the explosion of the Pan Am 103 bomb after exactly that time into the flight, that they . . . ignored it (Foot, op cit, p.25). By contrast with the barometric trigger, the MST-13 is a simple countdown timer. The time can be set exactly to within a few seconds, but wherever the device happens to be at that time it will explode, even if it is on the tarmac or a baggage store. Contrary to popular myth, PA103 left Heathrow on time, but it could easily have been otherwise for an evening departure from one of the worlds busiest
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airports during the immediate pre-Christmas holiday rush. Indeed, the flight almost lost its departure slot twice, the second time because of the late arrival of PA103A, the feeder flight from Frankfurt. Given the scope allowed by an electronic timer for setting a detonation time long into a flight over the Atlantic the terrorists would hardly have chosen instead to incur the cumulative risk of delay and a relatively harmless detonation on the tarmac or, if the plane did happen to leave on time, bringing it down over land using a bomb wrapped in brand new easily-traced clothes with their labels still attached. The relatively small amount of Semtex contained in the radio-cassette player had a catastrophic effect only because of the outboard positioning of the suitcase in the baggage container. Leaving the positioning of the bomb to chance (which is implicit in the notion that it was sent from Malta with an electronic timer and no accomplice intervention at Heathrow) would have meant that if the suitcase ended up being stowed mid-hold the bomb might well have failed to do sufficient damage to destroy the giant plane outright and might have allowed the crew to make an emergency landing. In the early 1970s there were two such lucky escapes following the planting of bombs by the PFLP-GC. For that very reason, it would have been logical to delay ignition until the plane was calculated to be well into its Atlantic crossing and beyond the possibility of its being able to return to or reach any convenient airfield. In other words, deliberately setting an early time for the explosion would have been incompatible with not being able to control the positioning of the bomb in the container at Heathrow (a topic covered in more detail later). With a relatively small quantity of explosive the need to position the suitcase as close to the fuselage hull as possible meant that this could not be left to chance but would have required terrorist intervention at Heathrow. By a process of irrefutable logic this demonstrates conclusively there was no point in sending the suitcase from Malta or Frankfurt, at both of which airports security was tight, to Heathrow, where it was lax. Since it had to be positioned at Heathrow there would have been no point whatsoever in using an electronic timer. A barometric trigger would have been the only reasonable choice. If flown in from Frankfurt it would have had to be primed at Heathrow by an accomplice plugging in the main switch, in which case there would have been little point sending it from Malta, where security was tight, or even Frankfurt, where a watch for Toshiba housed bombs was in force. By contrast the best airport to introduce the bag into the system was undoubtedly Heathrow, where security was notoriously lax, with hundreds of airside passes unaccounted for. As already mentioned, Heathrow is also the only place where the terrorists could have influenced the placing of the device in the container. What of the idea that the plan was actually to bring the plane down on British soil in revenge for letting US bases here be used in the 1986 raid on Libya? Quite apart from the fact that even in our populous island most land remains open countryside (with the prospect of doing no more than scaring a few sheep, as it has been put) the short answer is that the usual Great Circle route was west over the Irish Sea and neutral Ireland, the country whose IRA freedom fighters Gaddafi had been actively assisting with supplies
of Semtex and armaments throughout the 1980s. In fact the flight was only diverted northwards because of bad weather. In any event, such a motive would hardly have outweighed the delay risk factor or the possibility of a safe emergency landing. In short, it is abundantly clear that the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was detonated by a barometric pressure trigger of the kind used in typical PFLP-GC devices. As an aside it may be wryly amusing to refer to the claim made to camera by Ahmed Jibril in Allan Francovichs 1994 documentary The Maltese Double Cross (ref: 37 mins of 2hrs 35 mins) that the barometric pressure trigger was for use in destroying Israeli army bases on the tops of mountains. No mountains in Israel or nearby (not even the celestially proximate summit of Mount Sinai) are anything like as high as the 10,000 feet needed to activate the devices used by the PFLP-GC. 3. Manifest unsuitability of the MST-13 The MST-13 timer was contained in a 9 x 7 x 7 cm die cast case (Ashton and Ferguson, p. 235). The well known trial loading photograph exhibited at Zeist shows the interior of a Toshiba radio-cassette player loaded with explosive material and an MST-13. The photograph perfectly illustrates the two specific reasons why the use of such a timetable would have been wholly unsuitable. First, in preparing the trial loading technicians had to remove the timer from its metal casing in order to fit it in to the body of the Toshiba. The effect of this would have been seriously to undermine its reliability. Second, the Toshiba is shown with the recorder tape drive mechanism laid outside it, again because there was no room for both the specified quantity of Semtex and the MST-13. Leaving out the tape drive would have made the device particularly vulnerable to detection. It would have been very easy to spot when passed through an x-ray machine. By contrast, the pressure switch and simple delay timer used in PFLP-GC devices were much more compact and would easily have fitted into a radio-cassette player without removal of its components. It should additionally be observed that removed from the relative protection of the diecast casing the PCB would have been even more likely to have been totally obliterated by the Semtex blast two inches away (as to which see further below under sub-caption 6. 4. Chicken or the egg? discovery and identification of PT35b The official story presented at Zeist on the discovery of PT35b was this. On 13 January, 1989, the blast-damaged neck of a Slalom shirt was picked up off the ground in open countryside over twenty miles from Lockerbie. The experts concluded it had been in the suitcase carrying the bomb. When the shirt neck was first examined by Dr Thomas Hayes at the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) laboratory on 12 May 1989, he found PT35b somehow wedged in the material. According to evidence given at Zeist the Scottish police spent many months on inquiries into its origin within the printed circuit board industry. But the breakthrough supposedly came about after enlarged photographs of the fragment were forwarded by Scottish police to FBI headquarters in
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Washington DC. On 15 June, 1990, FBI forensic investigator James Thurman professed to identify it as part of a MEBO MST-13 electronic timer. When, soon afterwards, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson of the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary and Mr Allen Fereday of RARDE visited Washington they were shown a complete MST-13 which Thurman told them had originally been acquired from Togo by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 1986, handed on to the CIA and recently passed over to the FBI (Ashton and Ferguson, p.305). In fact, the Togo timer PCB was double-sided whereas PT35b was single-sided. Moreover it may well have been manufactured not by MEBO at all but by an American company [ibid, pp.269-273]. For the record it should be noted that two reports inconsistent with this account appeared in print during the early 1990s. In one, it was Thurman himself who found the fragment in the shirt collar (Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau Inside Todays FBI, London: Macmillan, 1994). In a second account, the fragment was found in a field by a Scottish worker in April 1990 (Mark Perry, Eclipse the Last Days of the CIA, Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 1992). These were almost certainly journalistic misunderstandings of semi-official briefings. It is unlikely Thurman would have taken a full year to identify the fragment after himself discovering it and equally unlikely that the shirt would have been found so long after completion of the fingertip search of the crash site environs (points made by Ashton and Ferguson, pp.168-169). Prior to Lockerbie the US authorities were already cognisant of Libyan involvement with the MST-13 timer. In February 1988 Senegalese police had arrested two Libyan agents in Dakar on a stop-over to the Ivory Coast and seized at least one MST-13 timer in their possession. A CIA operative based in Dakar gave evidence at Zeist that he had been made fully aware of the incident, having been summoned to the airport and informed of the situation. The agents were released in June but reports conflict on what happened to the timer or timers (Ashton and Ferguson, pp.169-170). According to Mark Perry (Eclipse) all seized material was returned to the Libyans but black and white photographs of the timer or timers were passed to the CIA by French intelligence. On the other hand, the author Ronald Kessler quoted FBI Assistant Director John Hickss reference to devices that had been recovered ( The FBI: Insider the Worlds Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency: London: Corgi, 1994). This tallies with the statement of Sunday Times investigative journalist David Leppard in his book On the Trail of Terror: The Inside Story of the Lockerbie Investigation (London: Jonathan Cape 1991) that photographs and control samples were obtained from Senegal by the Scottish police. Various commentators have noted that during the summer of 1990 the CIA had completed an intelligence assessment on whether PT35b matched the Senegal timer or timers. It is unclear whether this was before or after Thurmans purported identification of the fragment, whether, in other words, the CIA were induced to prepare the assessment as a result of his examination of the enlarged photographs of PT35b or whether they were already at work when he supposedly made the identification and they were working in conjunction with him. In any event, according to
Leppard the Scottish police travelled to Senegal in August 1990 after being informed of the CIA assessment and the material they brought back was immediately forwarded to Dr Hayes, who promptly and triumphantly confirmed the match under the microscope. Perry puts Hayess match much later, in October. If he is right and the Scottish officers only came back from Senegal with photographs what else might Hayes have had available to make the match? The Scottish team had originally tried to visit the MEBO offices in early September 1990 but it was not until mid November 1990 that, delayed perhaps by secret American obstructiveness (see Zeist transcript, 8 June, 2000, pp.3004-3005; Ashton and Ferguson, p.275) DCI Williamson and other officers were able to do so, and brought back two MST-13 timers and numerous circuit boards (Zeist transcript, 8 June 2000, pp.2945-2988; Ashton and Ferguson, p.274). One of the key questions which lies at the heart of establishing who perpetrated the atrocity of Pan Am 103 is whether the fragment was traced to an MST-13 timer by an intuitive leap or whether, on the other hand, a determination was made in the first instance to allege that such a timer had been used in the bomb, leading to the convenient discovery among the debris of a tiny fragment from such a timer. Even if, between the CIA and the FBI the penny had not yet dropped about the Senegal timers when Thurman professed to identify PT35b (a most unlikely notion) American intelligence was for a very long time secretive, not to say coy, about the fact that from a very early stage in the inquiry they had been in possession of information pointing to the use of an MST-13. In the words of Ashton and Ferguson (p.305) For nine years the British and American governments had insisted that the Lockerbie investigators had fingered Libya as the result of straightforward detective work. But then it emerged only during the trial for the first time that no more than two weeks after the destruction of Pan Am 103 Edwin Bollier, the MEBO companys director, had written to the CIA reporting that MEBP had sold MST-13 timers to Libya. 5. A legion of doubts on the documentation relating to the fragment PT35b Going hand in glove with the general implausibility of the idea that the bomb was operated by an electronic timer and the curiosity of the fact that the investigators were clearly focusing on the use in the bomb of an MST-13 18 months before PT-35b was identified as a component there are a raft of problematical issues relating to the discovery and documentation of the fragment. Some at least of these did not leave even the otherwise insouciant judges entirely untroubled. The following will give a flavour. The police exhibit label had originally been marked cloth, charred but the word cloth had been altered to debris. However, instead of meticulously striking through the word cloth and writing debris alongside it someone had gone to some trouble to overwrite each letter in an apparent attempt to obliterate or disguise the previous word.
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Thus, the C had been converted to a D; the L to an E; the small o to half a B; the T to R; and so on. The change was apparently unnoticed by anyone until the exhibit was produced in court. DC Thomas Gilchrist, one of the two Scottish police officers who assumed responsibility for having found the shirt, accepted that it must have been he who had made the alteration but professed no memory of having done so. However, he also positively denied that he had been asked to make the alteration, an assertion hardly consistent with professing a blank memory. Asked why he might have made the change, his explanation, according to the judges, was at worst evasive and at best confusing. He was also unable to explain why the collar had not been logged into the police property inventory until 17 January, 1989. Another witness with a curious memory gap was Dr Thomas Hayes, the RARDE scientist who was supposed to have discovered the fragment. He claimed to have no clear memory of having done so and relied on his notes, which dealt with the fragment on page 51. But the subsequent pages, originally numbered 51-55, were overwritten 52-56 and the dates were out of sequence. Hayes was unable to offer any credible explanation, describing it as an unfathomable mystery. He was unable to explain why an exhibit designated PT30 appeared after the entry for PT35b. By contrast with the matter of the overwritten label, the judges professed to dismiss these queries it as of no materiality. A further curiosity relating to the fragment is that in September 1989 Allen Fereday of RARDE sent a Polaroid photograph of the fragment to DCI Williamson in Scotland, with a note explaining that a Polaroid was the best I can do in a short time. There was no explanation as to why photographs taken at the time it was supposed to have been discovered were not forwarded. That too was not considered to be of any significance. In May 1989, when the collar was allegedly first examined, the RARDE team were desperately trying (with some success) to find pieces of the Toshiba radio cassette players PCBs in order to get a better identification on it. Toshiba radio cassette player PCBs were brown but the fragment was green so it might conceivably have been part of the bomb circuitry itself. Yet Dr Hayes merely made a note of a fragment of green circuit board and supposedly filed it away in the basement until September. The fragment was never tested for explosive residue. In other circumstances the reasons cited for this by Allen Fereday at the trial might have been understandable: its small size, the relative cost and effort involved, and its selfevident involvement in the explosion, having allegedly been found inside blast damaged clothes. But given the enormous potential significance of the find and the huge geopolitical issues and juridical questions which were likely to arise from it such excuses sound more suspicious than lame. Certainly when it came to trekking around Europe consulting electronics firms for help in identifying the fragment the Dumfries and Galloway police were unsparing of expense. James Thurman, the FBI investigator who played such a pivotal role in bringing forward the evidence which identified it as coming from a MEBO MST-13 timer, similarly undertook no test for residue and years later, in a
Dutch TV interview, he likewise cited budgetary reasons (Lockerbie Revisited, aired 27.04.09). Dr Hayes, who had supposedly discovered the fragment in the collar and was responsible for laboratory work on it, left RARDE under a cloud in the autumn of 1989 when it was revealed that he had given what was later judicially described as wholly misleading evidence relating to the alleged detection of explosive traces on the hands of the Maguire Seven defendants. The work of Allen Fereday in a number of high profile cases has been criticised judicially. (For an informative summary of the criticisms of Hayes and Fereday in other cases see Ashton and Ferguson, pp.196203.) 6. Miraculous survival of two chips and a scrap of paper We now come to what may be the single most compelling question mark hanging over the timer fragment, as well as over the 10 x 6mm PCB fragment which supposedly led to the identification of the Toshiba RT-SF16 BomBeat radiocassette player. From the trial loading, that is the simulated demonstration of how the bomb would have been packed in the BomBeat (exhibit PP8932; see eg Foot, p.4, for a photograph), it was established that the fragment would have come from a point on the intact PCB located no more than 1 inch from 450 grams of Semtex with only air between. The timer PCB fragment would have been no more than 2 inches away, again separated from the Semtex by air. Yet rather than being reduced to at best unrecognisable slivers, although far more probably just dust along with the rest of the PCB, what supposedly survives from each of the two PCBs is a piece of not insignificant size bearing features sufficient to allow identification of the particular device from which it came. That one signature piece could have been preserved in some sort of blast-proof, conflagration-proof, protective cocoon, with not even any pitting and, in the case of the alleged Toshiba chip, the white printed characters still perfectly legible, when no other substantial pieces of the PCB of which it formed a part were found during the painstaking fingertip search conducted around Lockerbie seems to defy the natural order. That two such signposting pieces, each neatly providing evidence of the particular device from which it is said to have come, should have survived in this way can only be described as a double miracle. (However, the science and method of an attempt to validate common sense experimentally has been roundly criticised as unsound: see http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/2010/01/evidencereconsidered-ied-fragment .html.) And then we have the cover of the SF16 manual. It was a remarkably robust piece of paper. Not only had it, in the words of Dr Hayes, survived a close-range explosion involvement, resulting from a blast of 450 grams of Semtex which incinerated most of the radio-cassette player to which it would have been adjacent, but it had survived the buffeting and drenching of a 90 mph gale which carried it from nearly 31,000 feet aloft to its landing place 60 miles from Lockerbie where it lay on soaking wet grass all night long and into the next afternoon. It ought to have been papier-mch. But it was the clue which identified the Toshiba model. So now we have a triple miracle. But this was perhaps only to be expected in a case abounding with
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indeed dependent on the most extraordinary coincidences. Lady Bracknell would have had a field day! 7. Insouciance of the Zeist judges In the event, while signalling some sense of unease relating to the evidence of the provenance of the fragment the judges were content not to let it disturb their equanimity: 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 1989 from the remnant of the Slalom shirt found by DC Gilchrist and DC McColm.
8. The critical lie which time forgot So far in this section we have dwelt mainly on the authenticity of the physical evidence of the timer fragment PT35b, although we have touched upon some aspects of relevant witness credibility. However, we now come to an aspect of witness credibility which at least as compellingly as any other factor in the case conducive to doubt may be sufficient in itself to drive a coach and horses through the credibility of the story of the fragments provenance. It is the account James Thurman himself caused to be given in the most public forum imaginable of the way in which he purported to have identified it as the remains of an MST-13 timer. Components of the MST-13 included a mother board, machined to make an exact fit inside the lid of the casing and supporting a thumb switch consisting of discs numbered around the edge by which a delay in hours and minutes could be set. Of particular importance is the fact that the mother board also supported a separate daughter board in the interior of the die cast box. The fragment itself measured about 9 mm square. Well-known photographs reveal the now familiar finger pad element, resembling the numeral 1, and two parallel tracking lines. This was all Thurman would have had to go on in any quest to discover the fragments identity. But, almost miraculously according to him, he succeeded. That it was either a feat of brilliant detective work or an elaborate charade to divert attention from Iran and the PFLP-GC and on to Libya is central to the identity of the perpetrators. From where the inspiration came to Thurman that the fragment was from a MEBO MST-13 is obscure. The big question is whether the FBIs awareness of the existence of, and connection to Libya, of MST-13 timers occasioned or led to the discovery of PT35b. To be less oblique, is it not at least conceivable that a decision was made to go through the motions of establishing a link between the bomb and Libya via the purported use of an electronic timer, instead of a barometric pressure trigger, before coincidentally and extraordinarily enough attention came to be focused on the fragment? In short, was the evidence of the finding of PT35b manufactured? If nothing else, Thurmans behaviour
strongly suggests this was not merely conceivable but was probable. Why? Indictments against al-Megrahi and Fhima were issued simultaneously by the U.S. State Department and the Scottish Crown Office on 14 November, 1991 (see A&F162). At a press conference that day the audience was shown a blown-up photograph of a piece of circuit board. Next day, the early evening ABC TV news programme anchored by Peter Jennings featured Thurman in its four and a half minute Person of the Week slot (aired originally from 5:53 to 5:57 pm; clip available on DVD loan from http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program. pl?ID=132218; see also A&F, 168 and 202). The feature related how among the hundreds of thousands of scattered pieces of wreckage Scottish investigators found something they didnt know what to make of and so the task of trying to identify it was passed on to Thurman in Washington DC. Over an enlarged still of the fragment which became Zeist exhibit PT35b Jennings intoned: It was a piece of plastic found in a bit of shirt. It was no bigger than a finger nail. In terms of the investigation it was enormous. The camera cut to Thurman exulting When that identification was made of the timer I knew we had it. The next shot was of a still displayed at the State Department press conference the previous day. It was the photograph of another piece of printed circuitry bearing the partially erased but otherwise unmistakeable legend MEBO and Jennings continued: This tiny piece of an electronic timing device with the Swiss manufacturers name MEBO partially rubbed off was what ultimately led investigators to the Libyans who bought it, the ones now accused of being responsible for blowing up Pan Am 103. Finally, the camera cut back to Thurman conveying his feelings on the making of the identification: Absolute, positively euphoria [sic]. Just euphoria. I cant describe it any more than that. I was on cloud nine. Although editorial responsibility for the feature and its content were clearly not Thurmans he must necessarily have been involved very closely in its compilation. The feature was about him, the producers would have been largely dependent on his input and it is difficult to believe he would not have been significantly instrumental in procuring the way the material in particular on the Lockerbie investigation was presented as he wished them to be portrayed. The feature was, after all, occasioned by the indictments. He would have appreciated only too clearly the impact of the narrative in the context of running together the picture of the fragment from the wreckage and that of the item with the MEBO lettering: the clearest possible suggestion that he had traced the provenance of the fragment from lettering on it . By all appearances it seemed to have been a breakthrough of which Sherlock Homes himself would have been proud. It looked like the smoking gun for which the investigators had been searching. But to paraphrase the commentators Ashton and Ferguson in a more general context, the only smoke was the variety associated with smoke and mirrors (p.268). For the PCB bearing the MEBO lettering photograph was not the fragment PT35b. The latter was a fragment from an
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MST-13 mother board and was alleged to be the only remains of such a timer recovered from the crash site. The photograph of the section of PCB with the MEBO lettering was a section of the daughter board from an MST-13. To be absolutely clear about this, no part of a daughter board from an MST-13 was alleged ever to have been recovered from the aircraft debris. From where exactly the piece of circuit board depicted in the second photograph on the programme had come remains uncertain: whether from a timer which had been seized in Senegal, from the Togo timer or from one supplied by, or otherwise taken from, the MEBO Company itself. Even if the wrong photograph had by some chance been inadvertently selected to be shown at the State Department press conference and on the TV programme there could be no mistake about the matter of lettering. The photographs of PT35b which were exhibited at the Zeist trial had the fragment magnified fifty times and showed clearly that on neither side did it bear the slightest trace of any letters. And yet to a prime-time audience of millions of American viewers Thurman had the breathtaking gall to promote the making of a representation that he had traced the origin of the fragment from the characters MEBO when he knew all along that these were not carried on the fragment PT35b but on a different circuit board altogether, one which had nothing whatsoever to do with the destruction of Pan Am 103. As matters turned out, then, this was no master sleuth in his prime, just Mr Arthur Daley of Minder fame. What on earth possessed Thurman to beget such a stunt? Was it just self-aggrandisment and chutzpah, or was there something more to it? To seek an answer it is important to appreciate that he must have known he could never mount a plausible claim to have traced the fragments origin merely from the figure 1 shaped finger pad and the parallel tracking lines. It would have been to find a needle in a haystack, even if the FBI happened to be in possession of a timer or two. Few would ever have believed a story of making the connection to MEBO (though the CIA were reputed to be experimenting with the notion of developing remote vision). Suspicions would inevitably be raised that the authorities had already latched on to the convenient idea of claiming that the bomb maker had used a MEBO MST-13 timer instead of far more probably a barometric pressure trigger. This would have led on inexorably to the suspicion that the finding of the fragment had been concocted a plant, no less because of the extreme coincidence that the authorities already knew about Libya and MST-13 timers and that they then just happened to discover a fragment from such a timer. But what of the contrary idea that the very paucity of clues afforded by the fragment argues in favour of the authenticity of the evidence that it was found among the debris. If they were going to plant a fragment from a MEBO timer, it might be asked, why not simply produce one from the daughter board bearing the MEBO insignia? But a moments thought will raise a similar objection. Who would believe that either? The survival of a piece of fibre board in some sort of conflagration proof cocoon no more than two inches from a thousands degree Semtex Supernova, as it has been so graphically described (The Lockerbie Divide website) might have seemed difficult enough to accept. That
the fragment should have survived with lettering might have been simply too much to swallow. It would simply have been too good to be true. (The same point holds good for the PCB fragment which was said to identify the device which concealed the bomb as a Toshiba SF16 radio-cassette player, most of the production run of which had gone to Libya.) So the probable answer is that Thurman felt compelled to take the calculated risk of riding two horses. Well aware, as he must have been, that a pretence of having traced the provenance of PT35b from non-existent lettering could hardly be run in court he was almost certainly not looking that far ahead. He probably calculated that Gaddafi would never countenance surrendering the two accused men and that the possibility of a trial was too remote to worry about, too remote to waste the opportunity for him to bathe in the limelight for a brief moment in time. In the short run the public would believe what he told them, that he was a brilliant sleuth (rather than a charlatan clairvoyant). Not only that, but he probably felt nervous about the possibility of any speculation in the media as to whether the discovery of the fragment might possibly have been led by a prior decision to prove the use of a MEBO timer. In other words, his immediate and primary concern was to avert any suspicion that the investigators had started with a decision to assert that the bomb employed a MEBO MST13 timer and had worked backwards to concoct the finding of a fragment from such a device. In the short run, when the need to focus upon Libya was felt in some quarters to be paramount, his charade might serve to pre-empt any such suggestion. He would have been less concerned about the possibility of some commentators raising their eyebrows about the fragment surviving incineration, let alone with tell-tale lettering still visible. If by some remote chance in the fullness of time a trial did become a reality he probably calculated his public mendacity would have been long forgotten. In any event he was plainly cunning enough to cover his back in case it were ever suggested that he had inspired a falsehood to be told on screen. Describing on Person of the Week his response when the fragment which became PT35b was referred to him for investigation Thurman explained At that point we finally had something tangible to start looking at and trying to compare items that we may have had here in the unit and other information that came to our disposal and trying to identify it. This was the oblique saving which would allow him if necessary to claim that he had said no more than that he had been able to connect the fragment from the wreckage with the PCB bearing the MEBO legend, because the FBI already had a complete timer in their inventory. To head off a rejoinder that even then it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack the other information was back-up: doubtless a reference to the tip-off from Bollier. But he knew he could never hope to blame the misrepresentation on the filter of editorial misunderstanding. In a clip from his Person of the Week interview which was not televised but which was incorporated in The Maltese Double Cross he is depicted holding up an enlarged photograph of the daughter
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board bearing the partially visible MEBO legend and explaining (ref: 1 hr 6 mins of 2 hrs 35 mins) A magnification of that circuit board, which is here you can see its a very large magnification has, er, a partially obliterated marking and through investigation we determined that this actually is M-EB-O. Initially we thought that it might be another number like M-5-80 and that was . . . a number of leads were sent out to electronic manufacturers to see if they had made this board. And they said no, that this was not their identification. So the last thing that we determined, which was the right thing actually and that it was MEBO. We had some inkling that that was what it was from the beginning but we didnt want to say okay that it was MEBO to exclude anything else till we were absolutely certain. This makes it clear beyond peradventure that he was instrumental in procuring the editorial misrepresentation. It was his illusion. Moreover the idea that Thurmans team went through some sort of charade, ignoring their inkling, punctiliously exploring the possibility that EB might have been 58 and seeking various manufacturers for assistance when all the time they had received a tip-off from MEBO is beyond belief. Incidentally, the Person of the Week feature and the video-recording of Thurmans reminiscences upon which the feature drew betrayed a curious doubt about the date on which the fragment was supposed to have been discovered. As already mentioned the official line was that it was found in the shirt collar in May 1989. Yet telling inconsistencies in the evidence relating to the date and place of the find of which only space precludes mention here have long been noted. On Person of the Week Peter Jennings stated, in contradistinction to the official line, that Scottish investigators had found it a year and a half after the explosion. That in fact was when Thurman said he had identified it as part of an MST-13 timer. The error could have been editorial but it is noteworthy that in another clip from the Thurmans interview which was not televised on Person of the Week but which was shown on The Maltese Double Cross (ref: 1.03 mins of 2 hrs 35 mins) he seemed strangely uncertain of the year he was talking about (even though it was only the previous year) Essentially on June 15th of 1989 [pause], 1990 [another pause], yeah 1990, erm, was the day I made the identification. And I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, Im an investigator as well as a forensic examiner I knew where that would go, that at that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer, I knew that we had it. In should not be forgotten that it was Thurman who played such a prominent role in Marwen Khreesats curious 1988 FBI Amman interview. He left the FBI in 1997 shortly after it was proved he had massaged evidence in a very large number of unrelated cases. (For more detail see Ashton and Ferguson, p.203.) He was not called as a
witness at Zeist. No wonder. The questions the defence might have asked him can only be imagined. V. THE CASE FOR INGESTION AT HEATHROW 1. Frankfurt As already mentioned the tight security controls in force at Maltas Luqa airport precluded the Crown from offering any explanation as to how the Samsonite suitcase bomb might have been smuggled aboard KM180 to Frankfurt. Nonetheless so, the court found that the bag had come from Luqa, mainly because of the circular reasoning they employed but also because such records as were available from Frankfurt were on the face of it consistent with KM180 being the source of a possibly unaccompanied item of interline baggage transferred to Pan Am feeder flight PA103A. But the ambiguous nature of those records was also compatible with the very real possibility that the item could have come off a flight from somewhere else. Some explanation of the Frankfurt evidence and its curious provenance is required. It was appreciated from the very beginning that the Frankfurt connection might be important, even before the remains of the 747s relevant baggage container were discovered. The German police spent Christmas Day at the airport interviewing baggage handlers and other staff and within a week of the destruction of Pan Am 103 all electronic baggage records and some crucial paper records for that day had been removed together with routine backups. No copies or backups were left behind. The Frankfurt police told the investigators that the records were missing, or lost, or had been destroyed. If that situation had continued there would have been no basis for connecting the bomb with Malta. However, on the evening after the downing of Pan Am 103, Bogomira Erac, a software specialist in the airport baggage department, had printed off a computer record relating to 103A. She had done so out of curiosity but seeing nothing apparently interesting in it put it away in her locker as a keepsake. She then went off on holiday for the New Year and only passed it to the German police in late January. Initially they apparently saw nothing of significance in it either but then, unexpectedly, in August 1989, they sent it to Lockerbie HQ with the relevant worksheet of an airport staffer named Koca who had coded the baggage from KM180, and some explanatory notes. It was this which potentially established the connection with Malta. The normal procedure for handling baggage from a particular arrival was that it would all be delivered to a coding station where each item would be placed on its own tray, coded by reference to the tray and then either sent to the carousel for collection by the passenger or forwarded interline to a connecting flight. Baggage was normally expected to be delivered to a coding station for processing one flight at a time. The Erac print-out showed that at 13.07 on December 21 the item on tray number B8849 was processed at coding station 206 (reference S0009) for interline transfer to PA103A. Kocas worksheet showed that he had started coding bags from the Malta flight at 13.04 but his handwriting for the end time was indistinct and was either 13.10 or 13.16. Reading the Erac print-out and
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Kocas worksheet in combination the prosecution argued, and the judges accepted, that the item on tray B8849 must have come from KM180. On the face of the documentation it certainly could have come from KM180 as unaccompanied interline baggage but for a number of reasons the assumption that it must have done was unjustified. Whereas the time on the print-out was automatically applied by the computer, the time Koca gave on his worksheet would have been taken from his own watch which was obviously not linked to the embedded computer time. Moreover, although the coders were supposed to enter the times on their worksheets contemporaneously this was the time of the pre-Christmas rush and it came as no very great surprise to learn that busy staff might well wait for a lull in which to catch up on their paperwork. The worksheet times could therefore have amounted to no more than a rough retrospective estimate. Without any explanation Koca himself was never called by the Crown as a witness and could not therefore be asked what the probabilities were. It followed that there was far from any guarantee that the coding time for tray B8849 fell within the time slot on Kocas worksheet. On that basis alone, given the exactitude on timing required for an inference that the item on tray B8849 had come from KM180 there could be no such irresistible inference. Coupled with the real possibility of retrospective estimation it would only have taken a relatively small difference between the computer clock and Kocas watch or the clock on the wall (if there was one in his line of sight) for the inference to be invalid. Other flights had arrived and were unloading at broadly the same time as KM180 and if baggage from any of those had gone to station 206 either immediately before or after KM180 it can easily be seen how they might in fact have been the source of the item on tray B8849 bearing in mind the potential discrepancy between Kocas watch or the wall clock and the computer clock. One such was a flight from Damascus, most of the bags from which had gone to coding stations 202 and 207 and it was suggested by the defence as a possibility that some of the remaining baggage from that flight might have gone to 206 during the time slot straddling 13.07. The appeal court were able to demonstrate in detail decisively why that supposition was misconceived but there was a second entry on the Erac print-out, similar to tray B8849, which appeared to have a Warsaw provenance. The investigators never followed up on it. Another factor which potentially undermined the argument for KM180 was that although baggage handlers at Frankfurt were supposed to make a separate entry on the coding sheet for stray or single bags it was shown that when in a hurry they often failed to wait for this to be done and instead would simply toss the odd bag on a convenient wagon the contents of which were set to be coded and it would be processed with that wagon. The coder was only interested in the destination of the item and so long as that was correctly entered the luggage would be correctly delivered and the source was of little concern. The baggage handlers were not pressed about this during the trial, the defence no doubt fearing that the witnesses would flatly deny contravening instructions while the Crown were doubtless afraid they might cheerfully agree it happened all the time!
There was no independent proof that the tray 8849 item was unaccompanied. It was only considered to be such because (a) inquiries showed that all the known luggage on KM180 had ultimately been collected by passengers, (b) no passenger on KM180 transferred to PA103A and (c) it had come from Malta on KM180 - thus begging the question! There was no record of the nature of the item on tray 8849. It could have been anything, golf clubs or a crate of wine, as was famously suggested by leading counsel for al-Megrahi. Frankfurt records also gave no hint whether it was destined for the transatlantic flight or for collection at Heathrow. It may never have gone on PA103 at all. Two-thirds of the luggage on the feeder flight did not. A discrepancy in the baggage tally for interline luggage destined for PA103A suggests that it may even have ended up not going to Heathrow on that flight. But if it did go on board PA103A at Frankfurt it would have had to pass through the x-ray screening process which all interline luggage destined for that flight had to undergo. This fact alone irrevocably destroys the basic premise on which the Crown and the Judges relied, the premise that the suitcase containing the radio-cassette player bomb was flown from Malta on the morning of December 21, 1988, was interlined at Frankfurt on to PA103A and taken to Heathrow. In assessing this bald fact the judges were led into making an error which might aptly be described as Lockerbies smoking gun of injustice but which appears to have been almost entirely overlooked in the critical literature. The error involved a serious misconception by the judges about the duty x-ray operator that day, Kurt Maier. He was unable to give evidence in person at Camp Zeist owing to serious illness (late stage rectal cancer accompanied by chronic alcoholism). In his absence, the Crown relied exclusively on the notes of his January 1989 interview (conducted in English) by U.S Federal Aviation Administration investigators (Zeist Production 1792; Zeist transcript, pp.1866-7). The notes record that if he found something unusual . . . he would call his supervisor if necessary, and that he could say without question that there was no explosives [sic] in any of the bags. But the notes also purport to attribute to him the odd notion that an external plug on an electrical device clears his doubt about any explosive device. The judges accordingly observed that Maiers description of what he looked for does not suggest that he would necessarily have claimed to be able to detect explosives hidden in a radio cassette player. Since this declaration evidently formed the basis of their finding that Maier must have let the bomb through it is clear that they misconceived the nature of his duty in the context of the Toshiba warning, in force at Frankfurt. That duty was not to detect explosives in a radio-cassette player but to look out for and report any radio-cassette player in luggage. This would have become apparent from what Maier asserted when he gave evidence in America in 1992 at the trial of a civil action for damages brought against Pan Am and its insurers. But, incredibly, the judges at Camp Zeist were never told about that evidence and therefore that on being closely cross-examined on his FAA interview, he had insisted that if he had seen a radio-cassette player he would have called his supervisor and would have done so for the very good reason that in view of the Toshiba warning those
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were his specific instructions (see http://www.Americanbuddha.com/trialoct.19b.jpg, transcript J.A. 1099-1100). The crucial point he was making was that in accordance with those instructions he would have called the supervisor regardless of his personal opinion of what made a radiocassette player suspicious. That he would have followed his instructions is supported by the fact that he was described as a careful and serious-minded employee (Zeist transcript, p.1848). He did not call his supervisor. Therefore none of the bags he screened contained a radio-cassette player. QED. It was and remains as simple as that. Although there was said to be some doubt about the quality of the US courts German-English translation, it is arguable that any uncertainty is more likely to have originated from the interview, which was conducted in English, a language Maier plainly found difficult else he would hardly have needed an interpreter for court. In contrast with the court video record the interview notes did not represent a verbatim minute and moreover, although the FAA investigator (Saunders) who was called at Zeist to produce the notes stressed that she and her colleague (Tiedge) had signed them, significantly she made no reference to Maier himself having done so. For the sake of completeness it ought to be mentioned that at the trial he explained in cross-examination that although he did not wear his glasses, he only needed them for reading and not for his job: ibid, J.A. 2967, 3379-80. Because the Zeist judges relied exclusively on the notes and remained blissfully unaware of his sworn courtroom testimony they were precluded from making a valid assessment of the totality of his evidence on the crucial point. It was an elementary and fundamental error of process that was completely avoidable, went to the heart of the allegation and proved catastrophic. Evidence was given by Roland ONeil, loadmaster for PA103A on 21 December, that as well as being x-rayed, all interline luggage was checked to ensure the relevant passenger was on board before it was loaded. This was not necessarily precluded from further undermining the Crowns case by the fact that at the 1991 Fatal Accident Inquiry Pan American claimed that they were permitted to omit the baggage reconciliation procedures because they were x-raying everything. That they were entitled to such an exemption was in fact disputed at the Inquiry but simple arithmetic suggests that the airlines assertion that everything was x-rayed may have been unjustified. The number of passengers boarding PA103A at Frankfurt from other airlines was said to be 48. Even if some were only taking carry-on luggage they must between them have checked in a good deal more than the thirteen items which passed through Maiers x-ray machine. Yet there was no evidence that any other staffer x-rayed interline items going on to the feeder flight. This broader potential hiatus in the physical checking of luggage does not seem to have been considered by the judges. But in any event they were untroubled by the possibility of discrepancies in the times and numbers of bags arriving at the relevant coding station since some of these could be accounted for by figures relating to other flights and the remaining discrepancy might be accounted for as late arrival luggage which, according to some of the evidence, might not go through the automated system. So
in one conjectural and perfunctory sentence the judges disposed of the numerous gaps in the record. All in all, in the words of Paul Foot (op cit, p.24) There was no evidence that an unaccompanied bag went on the plane at Malta but lo and behold there was, as far as the judges were concerned, plenty of evidence that an unaccompanied bag arrived from Malta at Frankfurt. 2. Heathrow: certainty of the bombs London origin We now come to the reason why we can be certain that the Lockerbie bomb was smuggled into the system at Heathrow and did not come by air from Frankfurt. As already mentioned, AAIB experts swiftly identified the blast-damaged portable luggage container AVE4041 in which the bronze-coloured Samsonite hardshell suitcase bomb had been loaded for the flight. Tins, as such containers are colloquially known by airport loaders, are fitted with casters and consist of three side walls at right angles to their rectangular base but with the fourth, or front, wall angled outwards to hug the curvature of the lower fuselage skin to a point just under half the containers height. Above that level the front is open for loading. The investigators established that AVE4041had been assigned at Heathrow to take the interline baggage for Pan Am 103 (that is transit baggage arriving at Heathrow on other airlines) as this accumulated during the afternoon in the Pan Am interline baggage shed after delivery there. It was then driven out on to the tarmac (at location K-16) to await further loading with the transatlantic luggage from the Frankfurt feeder flight as and when it arrived. What should have been decisive evidence came from John Bedford, the baggage handler whose job it was to load the container with interline baggage items as they were delivered to the interline shed and x-rayed. He recalled that on the afternoon of 21 December he had been in the interline baggage shed loading a number of interline items of baggage for Pan Am 103 upright across the rear of the portable luggage container AVE4041. He then left the shed while he took an extended tea-break with his supervisor lasting roughly half an hour. When he returned he saw that two items had been added to the handful of luggage items he had earlier loaded into the container, making a total of ten items. The two new bags had been placed flat on the base of the container. This was well before the arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt, which touched down at 5.30 pm, half an hour after Bedford finished his shift, pulling into the gate at 5.37 pm. Bedford described one of the two additional items as a maroony-brown hardshell suitcase, the type Samsonite make. He volunteered this information at his first police interview on 3 January, 1989, although he no doubt realised its ominously potential significance as soon as he heard about the fate of Pan Am 103, at which point it would probably have embossed itself on his memory perhaps painfully so. The description could not have come from the investigators because the bomb carrier was only identified as an antique-copper- or bronzecoloured Samsonite hardshell several weeks later. The maroony-brown bag was very close to the position which the experts concluded the antique copper or bonze-coloured
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Samsonite hardshell carrying the bomb was located in the container when it exploded. The interline baggage in the container when it was taken out on to the tarmac included items belonging to three US Government officials on their way home from postings in Lebanon. It has long been conjectured that the officials were connected in some way with the supposed CIA protected drugs route, a topic which is beyond the scope of this article. But more tellingly for present purposes is the fact that the two bags belonging to Major Charles McKee were grey Samsonite hardshells and two bags belonging to a fourth doomed American, a State Department official based in Nicosia by the name of Daniel OConnor, may have been found in a Heathrow baggage room. For reasons which remain obscure the significance of Bedfords crucial evidence quickly came to be overlooked or sidelined by the investigators. On March 28, 1989, Chief Superintendent John Orr told the Lockerbie investigators co-ordinating committee that the first seven pieces of luggage in . . . container [AVE4041] belonged to Interline passengers and the remainder was Frankfurt luggage . . . and enquiries to date suggest that on the balance of probabilities the explosive device is likely to be amongst the Frankfurt baggage items (Lockerbie Incident control Centre memo, cited in Leppard, D., On the Trail of Terror: the inside story of the Lockerbie investigation , London: Jonathan Cape, 1991, p.100). The total of seven bags mentioned by Orr contrasts with the total of ten which may be computed by reference to the photograph of a container identical to AVE4041that Bedford had been asked to load during the first week of January 1989 in a reconstruction of the loading of AVE4041 as he remembered it. Although at the trial Bedford counted nine items in the photograph (apart from the two additions) it seems there were actually eight, making a total of ten with the two mysterious additions. Orrs statement curiously drew not on Bedfords description but on a figure of four or five bags originally in the container casually estimated by Sulkash Kamboj,one of the two the two security guards responsible for x-raying the luggage in the interline shed, plus the two bags noticed by Bedford. But at the very least carelessly Orr lumped in the two mysterious bags with the ordinary interline items and that failure of clarity subsequently came to form the basis of the 1991 Fatal Accident Inquiry report. While the arrangement of the luggage as described by Bedford was incorporated into the report, his assertion about the unexplained and mysterious appearance of the two maroony-brown Samsonite type bags, was omitted. The Sheriff holding the Inquiry simply accepted the proposition urged on him by the investigators that the bomb carrying Samsonite had come from Frankfurt. In his police interview on January 9, 1989, Bedford told the police that Sulkash Kamboj, the x-ray operator, had told him that after running the bags through the x-ray he had put them in the container. To the police Kamboj consistently denied having put them in the container; it was not his job to do so he maintained, and he repeated this at the Fatal Accident Inquiry. In evidence in chief at the trial he accepted that x-ray operators might sometimes and exceptionally - help out airline staff with loading and since he now had no specific memory of the events of the fatal day he rather hesitantly conceded that he would not quarrel
with Bedfords assertion. However, on being referred in cross-examination to his much earlier statements (when his memory of the events would have been much better) he reiterated his firm denial of having loaded the two bags in the container in Bedfords absence. It may have been his momentary concession which led the court to prefer Bedfords account, although they were probably influenced as much by the perception that if he had wanted to lie to cover up for his neglect he could have done so about the appearance of the two cases in the suitcases altogether. On the other hand, it is by no means inconceivable that he could have had a conscience and an anxious desire to help the investigation at the same time as wishing to avoid blame for disastrous neglect. It is difficult to reach any firm conclusion as to whose account may have been true. If the two suitcases had x-ray sticky tape around them Bedford would naturally have assumed Kamboj (or his fellow x-ray operator Parmar) had x-rayed them and helpfully put them in the container. In that case he would have had a good enough reason for not consulting Kamboj about them, although curiously he was not asked at the trial if he had noticed whether they displayed x-ray tape. So it is likely he would only have consulted Kamboj if the cases did not display tape, in which case he would surely have queried Kambojs assurance by pointing to the absence of tape and they would probably have resolved the problem by x-raying them just to be on the safe side. They would both have been sure to recall such an episode. On this reasoning Bedford more likely than not did not consult Kamboj. But if Bedford was saying Kamboj had volunteered that he had loaded the two cases it may be queried why, on the assumption that the cases displayed xray tape there would have been any need to make such an announcement. It would have been obvious. In fact, there is no need to question Bedfords honesty. He may have assumed Kamboj had loaded the bags and had a false memory that Kamboj had actually said so. The missing element in the story is Parmar, the other guard who worked with Kamboj. He was not called as a witness, no reference was made to any statement from him and nothing appears to be known about him. Despite the conflict of evidence between Bedford and Kamboj they both attested to the chaotic, insecure conditions in the shed and airside at Heathrow generally in which anybody could approach a container with luggage and slip in another bag. No one disputed it. It should be added that Pan Ams Heathrow terminal and that of Iran Air were adjacent and they shared tarmac space. The explosion blasted a 20-inch (0.51m) hole in the left flank of the forward fuselage, causing instant cataclysmic decompression and within three seconds the shock waves had severed the cockpit section from the rest of the aircraft. What is of critical importance is that the bomb suitcase ended up in the precise position where it would cause maximum damage, that is, close to the fuselage skin in an overhang section of the container designed to hug the curvature of the hull and lying flat with its handle inwards and its spine outwards. Not only had the suitcase been placed in the correct (outboard) position in the container, but the bomb had been packed to ensure the correct orientation, that is not centrally in the suitcase but to its extreme outboard side. This is a very non-intuitive way to
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pack such an item and strongly suggests that whoever was doing the packing was anticipating that the suitcase would be placed in the container by someone who could and would ensure it went in that way round. Tellingly, the position John Bedford described one of the two mysterious suitcases to be in was only two or three inches from the position later determined to have been the centre of the explosion. Only a small adjustment to its placing, as might easily have happened when the Frankfurt luggage was being loaded in a hurry, would have put it in exactly that position. The likelihood that such optimum positioning could have resulted by chance to a suitcase travelling unaccompanied from Malta or even from Frankfurt is incredibly slim. But determined and knowledgeable terrorists would hardly have left matters to chance. Only hands-on action by an accomplice at Heathrow could have ensured the necessary control over the positioning of the bag, which was crucial to the capacity of the small amount of Semtex to cripple the plane. In that event it would have been wholly pointless sending it from Malta, with the repeated, serious risk of interception, or even Frankfurt. If one of the two Samsonite type suitcases Bedford saw was not the bomb suitcase, what was it and what became of it? Meticulous detective work by the Scottish policeman Det Const Derek Henderson had originally established that no passenger on Pan Am 103 was carrying anything that could be described as a maroon or brown hardshell bag and none of the passengers whose luggage might have ended up in the container AVE4041 had such a bag. (Doubts expressed by Ashton and Ferguson, p.123, as to the cogency of the officers labours do not show that he could have missed a bag.) At the same time, the only suitcase of that description recovered at Lockerbie was the one blown to pieces by the bomb inside it. So how did the Crown deal with what ought to have been an end to any notion that the bomb had come from Frankfurt? First extraordinary as it may seem they adopted the simple ploy of sweeping Hendersons inquiries under the carpet. He had been called to testify at the 1991 FAI in order to show that the bomb bag must have been unaccompanied rather than carried by an unwitting mule or suicide bomber. He repeated that evidence at the 1992 civil action in the US. His findings also meant that the Samsonite Bedford described could not have been legitimate passenger luggage either. But this appears not to have been noticed by the Sheriff, who was content to go along with the Crowns heavy hints that it would not seek to discourage a finding that the bag containing the device came to Frankfurt as an interline bag. However the trial at Camp Zeist was a different matter. With defence lawyers closely scrutinising the evidence it appears to have dawned on someone that the Bedford bag could not simply waved aside. The neat solution was to avoid calling Henderson and to make no reference to the result of his inquiries showing no passenger on 103 had travelled with a maroon or brown hardshell. This therefore opened up the possibility of a second such bag one carried legitimately - and the likelihood that the Samsonite suitcase seen by Bedford was no more than ordinary interline luggage. The Crown could have called as a live witness the actual baggage handler whose job it had been to load the Frankfurt
baggage into the container on the tarmac (Sidhu). It was open to them to ask the witness who had helped Sidhu load the container (Sandhu) questions about the loading. They chose neither course. Instead, they were quietly content to rely on the answer to a question asked by counsel defending Flimha (al-Megrahis acquitted co-accused) of the witness whose job it had merely been to load the already closed container on to the aircraft (Crabtree). He gave evidence before Sandhu and agreed with the trite suggestion that loaders might move bags around within the base of a container to make for a better fit, a bit of re-jigging. (The question seems to have been intended to establish the possibility that the case seen by Bedford might have been moved slightly and was indeed the bomb carrier.) The ten interline cases Bedford counted before the Frankfurt baggage had arrived consisted of eight cases placed upright (ie with their handles up) on the floor and across the back of the container and the two mysteriously added bags which were lying in front of them flat on the floor. Together, these ten cases covered almost all the floor area. The judges found that a large navy-blue canvas Tourister case belonging to a Patricia Coyle, which had come from Vienna via Frankfurt, had been under the bomb bag. For reasons which are canvassed later this seems unlikely but even supposing their assumption was correct its implications seem implausible. It would have meant that if the Samsonite bag Bedford had described was not the bomb bag, Sidhu would have had to lift it off the floor of the container (as there was no space remaining to slide it aside), replace it with the Coyle bag, place an almost identical bag carrying the bomb on top of the Coyle bag and then put the original Samsonite (which Bedford had seen) somewhere else. That was exactly what the judges impliedly determined had happened. To do so they obligingly picked up Crabtrees generalised acquiescence to the suggestion put to him and ran with it, forming bricks out of straw to construct an elaborate edifice of improbability. It is true that in giving judgment of guilt they used tentative language. Thus, if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Mr Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container. This is a very different proposition from that put to Crabtree. But in the light of their finding that the bomb had come from Frankfurt (on its way from Luqa) their implied conclusion in effect could only have been that Sidhu had carried out six actions. He must have:(a) decided when he saw Coyles case coming off the conveyer from the Boeing 727 on flight 103A that, perhaps because of its size, it had to go on the floor of the container (even though a decision to place a soft-sided case on the floor instead of a hardshell seem unnatural); (b) accordingly, removed Bedfords case from the floor; (c) placed Coyles navy-blue bag where the Samsonite seen by Bedford had been; (d) instead of then doing what would have been most natural, that is putting the Bedford Samsonite straight back on top of Coyles bag, he placed on it an identical suitcase carrying the bomb which just
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(e) (f)
happened to be coming off the conveyer at that moment from the Frankfurt flight; by horrible chance placed it so that the side along which the radio was packed was protruding into the overhang of the container; and waited until the container was almost full before placing the Bedford bag somewhere else.
Where? According to this conjecture he would either have put it in some remote corner of the container away from those 25 bags which showed direct blast damage and which were the only bags to be examined forensically in detail or else put it with the last few bags surplus to the containers capacity which were loose-loaded into the belly of the aircraft.. The problem with either option is that no brown Samsonite, apart from the bomb suitcase, was ever recovered. So to avoid the awkward absurdity implied in their conjecture that the bag Bedford had seen must simply have vanished they appear conveniently to have gone along with the Crowns lame explanation that not all items of luggage were recovered. But what exactly might such a suggestion involve? When the 747s fuel laden wing assembly fell on Sherwood Crescent it caused an inferno which consumed aircraft debris, houses, victims on the ground and a number of passengers. Whether any suitcases disappeared into the flames is unknown but hundreds of suitcases littered the hillsides around Tundergarth some miles away, suggesting that the great bulk of the luggage fell well away from Sherwood Crescent. The Winterhope reservoir was searched by police divers so any luggage would also have been recovered from the water. For the Bedford suitcase to have gone into the flames would have taken the conjecture into an even more attenuated order of coincidence. Not only did an innocent bag distinct from, but identical to, that carrying the bomb mysteriously appear in the container in Bedfords absence (with Iran Air next door). Not only did he notice the mysterious bag in almost the optimum position for doing maximum damage (had it been a bomb). Not only did an identical bag carrying the bomb just happen to come down the conveyer at the very moment after the Bedford bag had been lifted out to be make room for the Coyle bag. Not only was the new identical bag laid on top of the Coyle bag instead of the Bedford bag and the Bedford bag placed somewhere else. Not only did Derek Hendersons thorough inquiries miss the fact that a passenger was travelling with a clone of the bomb bag. But, if the implied thinking of the judges is to be believed, added to all those coincidences we have yet one more. While the dismembered parts of the container and most if not all of the luggage that must have been in it were found dispersed over a very wide area and recovered, the innocent clone of the bomb bag just happens by remarkable chance to fall into the inferno of Sherwood Crescent. Sidhus imagined exercise in unhurriedly and fastidiously rearranging the baggage as if he had all the time in the world to make a perfect fit hardly squares with the late arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt and the fact that he had less than 15 minutes to load the container with luggage accompanying the 49 passengers who were booked through to New York from Frankfurt before Maid of the
Seas was due to leave the gate. Indeed, in cross-examination Sandhu admitted it was a rush job. In fact, the courts finding that the bomb suitcase was on top of the Coyle bag seems inherently doubtful. The Samsonite was nine inches deep. The Tourister case, being on the large side, could have been ten inches deep. Peter Claiden, the AAIB expert estimated that the explosion was ten inches from the floor of the container and two inches into the overhang section. Dr Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) stated that allowing for the Semtex being packed in the radio-cassette player the explosion could not have been right up at the edge of the case. So the ten inches would be too high for the bomb bag to have been resting on the horizontal section of the container floor and also it could not then have protruded into the overhang part. While on the other hand the second layer could account for the twoinch protrusion into the overhang, the ten inches from floor to explosion would be a bit too low for the second layer. AAIB experts noted the absence of pitting in the container floor and concluded that there must have been something in between. William Taylor QC for Megrahi suggested a solution as to how these facts might be reconciled. Although a bag resting entirely on the horizontal part of the floor could not protrude into the overhang section Sidhu need only have pushed the case noticed by Bedford about six inches to the left (to fit in something small to its right) for the sloping part of the floor to have pushed the left-hand side of the case two or three inches upwards. With the Toshiba packed along that side, either on the top, or on the bottom if the case was placed upside-down in the container, this would have put it into more or less the exact position for the explosion to have been consistent with the ten-inch distance from the container floor estimated by Claiden. The various articles of clothing in the Samsonite, which included a tweed jacket, could have shielded the container floor. (For a scale blueprint of the container in situ in the aircraft, showing the bomb suitcase in this dislodged position see Lockerbie: London Origin Theory, JREF forum, eleven pages, http://forums.randi.org/showthread. php?t=165824, page 1. The possibility that Sidhu might in this way have pushed the bag Bedford had noticed slightly to the left of where Bedford had observed it to be lying to achieve not quite the position the terrorist intended but if anything a slightly better position and the one at which the bomb in fact exploded seems a far more credible and measured proposition than the series of outlandish coincidences implied by the courts finding. But in the end William Taylors eminently reasonable submission was simply ignored. It beggars belief that al-Megrahis conviction could have been sustained on the basis of such manifest improbability. Would the same judges have acquitted a defendant because the chance that DNA was not his was only a billion to one?! The fact remains that John Bedfords sighting, before the arrival of PA103A from Frankfurt, of a suitcase more or less identical to that in which the bomb was found to have been packed, in virtually the position in the container in which the bomb was set off, rules out any question of the bomb having come from Frankfurt in an identical suitcase.
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Common sense and pure logic decrees that it must have been one of the two mysterious bags Bedford saw which carried the bomb. 3. The cut padlock mystery Subsequently to the trial but prior to the appeal in 2002 it was disclosed that at some time in the two hours before 00:35 on 21 December, 1988, a padlock had been cut through like butter on a door giving access to the Pan Am baggage build-up area at Heathrow. This had not been disclosed to the defence prior to the trial, supposedly because the police had lost the original report. The defence argued that this further weakened the proposition that the suitcase had started its journey in Malta. The appeal court dismissed the new evidence as mere coincidence, a characterisation which surely takes the biscuit considering how the judges resorted to coincidence upon coincidence to justify dismissing the exculpatory impact of the undisputed Bedford evidence. The break-in implied by the cut padlock, and in particular the failure to disclose it before trial, has furnished an understandable belief on the part of many of those who have campaigned against al-Megrahis conviction, that it supports the contention that the suitcase was ingested into the system at Heathrow. However, for reasons which are suggested later, in the view of the present writer the court may well have been correct: the break-in could well have been no more than coincidence. It will be argued that the most effective way of smuggling the case into the container would have avoided a surreptitious night-time intrusion. The present writer therefore no longer subscribes to the scenario envisaged in Exploding Lockerbie, part 2 (175 CL&JW, at p.448, col 2). 4. Improbability that the bomb was flown from Frankfurt? Reinforcing the Heathrow origin of the bomb is the difficulty of explaining how a suitcase containing a radiocassette player could have got past Maiers x-ray screening at Frankfurt and circumvented the reconciliation procedure attested to by ONeil. For the reasons which were given earlier, it is almost inconceivable that the terrorists used an electronic timer to bring down the plane only 38 minutes into its flight where such a device would have given them the option to destroy it half way across the North Atlantic. Simple logic dictates that they used a barometric trigger. The main problem for the terrorists in sending a bomb from Frankfurt equipped with a barometric trigger with a delay timer is that it would have had to be primed at Heathrow by an accomplice plugging in the main switch. (At the same time the accomplice would have had to position the suitcase for optimum effect.) To that end he would have needed to be present on the tarmac with the loaders if he was not actually one of them. He would have had to find a moment to open the suitcase, rummage around in it for the radio cassette player, taking care not to disturb its carefully arranged position within the bag, plug in the main switch and close the suitcase. He would have had to do all this without being noticed by the loaders or, as the case might be, the other loaders. And as if that were not
enough he would then have to contrive to be the one who placed it in the optimum position in the container. He would have had to accomplish this under the pressure of the rush job. If he was not a loader it is impossible to envisage how he could have managed any of this. There is no suggestion that either Sidhu or Sandhu was an accomplice, but even if one or other was a terrorist could he really have acted without the other noticing? The risk of challenge and discovery would have been incalculable. 5. Conjectures of detail regarding a Heathrow ingestion There would have been no need to take such an absurd risk. Far simpler, far less hazardous and far more effective would it have been to take the completed bomb to London by rail or road and ferry. There would be no x-ray check at Ostend, Calais or Dover, nor any at Gothenberg or Harwich (assuming that it may have come via possible accomplices of the PFLP-GC based in Sweden, eg Mohammed Abu Talb). The main switch could be plugged in at leisure and the suitcase taken to Heathrow where it could have been introduced into the interline shed. In Exploding Lockerbie, part 2, it was suggested that the terrorist might have gained access to the loading area around midnight, cut the padlock to the interline shed using a pair of bolt cutters perhaps left by a confederate working for the neighbouring Iranair, and then stowed the suitcase somewhere in the shed. The terrorist would then withdraw to a safe distance for the night and discreetly observe the airport during the morning for signs that the broken padlock had triggered extra vigilance. Once reassured, the terrorist could take advantage of the notoriously lax security to use one of the hundreds of airside passes which were unaccounted-for to reach the Pan Am baggage build-up area without carrying anything so incriminating as a Semtex-laden suitcase, then retrieve it from its hiding place and so look like any other baggage handler dealing with a stray item. He would then merely have to wait for Bedford to take his tea-break and then carefully position it in the container out of sight of any prying eyes. The chances are Bedford would never notice the extra bag. Very possibly, it was suggested, Kamboj was also absent or in a part of the shed with no view of the container. However it is now suggested (as it was in A Postcript on Lockerbie) that it is more likely that the terrorists eschewed such cloak and dagger stratagems as breaking into the shed in order to accomplish the loading. One possibility that might be canvassed is that after Bedford left for his tea-break the terrorist delivered the bomb bag to the shed in the normal way, via the external conveyor which, on the evidence, was not supervised. It would then have been xrayed and the terrorist might then have come round into the shed, picked up the bag and placed it in the container. But what seems more probable is that after Bedford left for his tea-break a terrorist confederate came sauntering into the shed masquerading as an airline worker. Having perhaps retrieved the suitcase from the neighbouring IranAir marshalling zone he would have carried it into the interline shed he presented it to Kamboj for x-raying as if he were delivering a stray bag in an entirely normal way. On December 21, 1988, the German Toshiba warning had still not been disseminated in the UK. (This may be
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precisely why Abu Elias, the PFLP-GCs airport security expert, chose Heathrow rather than Frankfurt to smuggle the bomb into the system.) Consistent with UK nondissemination Kamboj testified (as did Bedford) that he was unaware of the warning. Accordingly, he conceded in evidence, he could well have let through a bag containing such a machine. X-ray sticky tape would have been applied and the terrorist would then have placed his bag in the container, arranging its position to lethal effect, either noticed or not by the x-ray operators. This would have been an inherently more natural action than that a terrorist, acting the part of a casually visiting airline worker, might helpfully have picked up and loaded an x-rayed bag which had come in via the conveyor and which apparently had nothing to do with him. As stated in the main article, Bedford and Kamboj both testified that security was so lax at Heathrow airside that anyone masquerading as an airline worker and equipped with an airside pass, could enter the shed unchallenged and handle baggage. In evidence Kamboj claimed, like Bedford, that he too left the shed for a snack (though he did not say when). In evidence Bedford said that only Kamboj was in the shed when he went off for his tea but Kamboj said Parmar was usually there with him and finished when he did. In fact the neat method conjectured above would not have required the shed to be left unattended by the x-ray staff at all. On the contrary, it would perhaps have been facilitated by their presence and co-operation. While it may have been extremely convenient for the appeal judges to find that the cut padlock was a coincidence they could well have been on the right track. There would have been nothing especially unusual about a cut padlock at Heathrow in the 1980s when, as anyone familiar with criminal practice from that decade and earlier will know, allegations of conspiracy to steal by airport baggage handlers at Heathrow were endemic. (For a thoroughgoing forum on the smuggling of the bag airside at Heathrow see Lockerbie: London Origin Theory , JREF forum, eleven pages, http://forums.randi.org/ showthread. php?t=165824.) 6. Two mysterious bags noticed by John Bedford A potential problem with John Bedfords account is that in his statement made to police on January 9, 1989, he ostensibly stated that he noticed two hardshell bags lying flat in the container additional to the eight or nine he had loaded upright at the back, and that while one was maroonybrown, the type Samsonite make, the other one was similar in colour. Yet only one approximating to this description was ever identified: the dismembered remains of the antique copper or bronze-coloured Samsonite packed with the bomb. It is not inconceivable that what Bedford assumed were two additions in reality consisted of one addition the maroony-brown Samsonite-type suitcase and one of the original bags which the terrorist removed from its upright position at the back of the container and laid flat near the bomb-carrying Samsonite in order to reduce the risk of its sticking out like a sore thumb, as well as to wedge it in its lethal position and prevent it being easily dislodged.
But we are still left with Bedfords supposed description of the second, seemingly added, hardshell Samsonite type suitcase as one of similar (but otherwise unspecified) colour. In fact it is not difficult to explain this statement as incorrect without doing fundamental damage to the overall reliability of Bedfords account. The description may have come about as a result of the perennial problem of miscommunication between investigators and witnesses aggravated by the absence of audio-recording. On the other hand, Bedfords similar colour for the second bag lying flat in the container could have been no more than simple error. We know that of the four American officials transferring to Pan Am 103 from Larnaca, Major Charles McKee was travelling from Lebanon with two grey Samsonite bags, both of which would have been loaded into AVE4041. Did the terrorist perhaps use one of these to lay flat with the bomb bag? Was it perhaps the maroony-brown colour of the planted bomb bag which happened to catch Bedfords eye? Did he take less notice of the innocent bag than he did the maroony-brown one and simply assume it was a similar colour? It would not after all be for several hours (when news of the disaster was coming in) that he would begin trying to picture the details in his minds eye.
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7. Necessary use of a radio-cassette player

There is one other important question which necessitates consideration. If the scheme had been to smuggle a bag containing the bomb into Heathrow airside, why would there have been any need to go to the trouble of concealing the bomb inside a radio-cassette player, with its limit on the amount of Semtex which could be used? Packing a suitcase full of Semtex would have obviated the need to locate the suitcase close to the hull because an unrestricted amount would have been likely to destroy the aircraft wherever it was stowed. If the bomb was to be smuggled from the Continent or Scandinavia into Britain via a ferry route the possibility of a customs search could hardly be ruled out and as soon as a suitcase was opened a large Semtex bomb would be instantly obvious. But more importantly, and very simply, the method of approach conjectured here would actually have depended on the brazen presentation of the suitcase for x-ray, necessitating the use of a radio-cassette player. VI. THE COMPELLING FACTUAL CONCLUSION John Bedfords recollection may require some imaginative interpretation and the Heathrow modus operandi may involve a degree of conjecture. But the overall proposition offers an altogether more plausible scenario than the notion of a Malta origin, with Libyan culpability, or Frankfurt origin, with Ahmed Jibril arranging for a loader there to get a bomb bag into the system instead of a drugs bag. The involvement of a CIA protected drug route (if ever there was one) may have been a thrilling diversion in all the conspiracy-mongering but it was and remains a complete and utter red herring. Khreesats assertions did not directly assist the two Zeist defendants (who had called Marshman as a witness) but its self- and CIA-serving nature was obvious. What was important was that, if Khreesat was to be believed, a
Toshiba-concealed bomb had been given to Abu Elias and was unaccounted for. But if the CIA was embarrassed by the likelihood that it was a man working for their client agency who had built the Lockerbie bomb while under their direction why was it necessary to contrive the curious (not to say facile claim) that he never used stereo Toshibas? Why could they not simply have ensured that the story of its being spirited away from under Khreesats nose while he was in the shower, or that he had merely handed it to Abu Elias, was buried rather than passed on to the FBI? The answer is that Khreesat had already reported the incident to his controller the next day and too many intelligence officials, German, Jordanian, Israeli and American, probably already knew about it prior to Lockerbie for the incident to be capable of suppression. Indeed, his report of the loss may well have been the chief reason why the BKA pounced. Moreover, it must have been widely disseminated that the Toshiba taken by Dalkamoni and presumed to have been handed on to Abu Elias was not the only improvised bomb in the gangs possession which was never seized. There were at least two others: the one Dalkamoni had told the BKA about, the Toshiba radio-cassette player bomb which Khreesat had brought from Amman and the Toshiba radiocassette player which Ranzi Diab (one of the men rounded up on 26 October) had handed him on 18 October 1988. Neither was ever found (Ashton and Ferguson, pp.51, 52 and 55). Three deadly devices was an awful lot of which to lose track. Mohammed Abu Talb, the original suspect, was called by the Crown as their witness, having been brought from prison in Sweden where he was serving a life sentence for terrorist acts. Although he purported to testify that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie it emerged from his evidence that a terrorist gang financed by Iran and harboured by Syria were at large in Germany in December 1988, making bombs disguised in Toshiba radio cassette recorders to blow up airliners in flight. Abu Talb himself had been arrested in possession of clothes traced back to the Maltese manufacturers who had supplied Anthony Gaucis shop. He had been in Malta between 19 and 26 October, 1988 and could well have been there on 23 November, 1988, the date much more likely than 7 July to have been the date of purchase. Yet the judges inexplicably found that while there was a great deal of suspicion against Abu Talb and his circle there was no evidence to indicate that they had either the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft in December 1988. In the wry words of the late journalist and trial observer Paul Foot: No means, that is, beyond working with a bombmaker who specialised in disguising explosive devices in cassette recorders so that they could be smuggled on to aircraft. No intention except visits to airports and the studying of aircraft schedules, including some from Pan Am (op cit, p.24). In Exploding Lockerbie (Criminal Law and Justice Weekly, (2011) vol. 175 JPN pp. 429-432, 445-449, at p.449) the author imagined the sinking feeling Khreesats CIA controllers must have experienced at the news about Pan Am 103: the dreadful realisation that a bomb which was probably improvised by their own proxy for the purpose of
maintaining his cover on their behalf might actually have ended up being used to bring down the Pan Am Jumbo Jet. With the loss of so many American lives the mea culpa of an admission to human error would have been guaranteed to cut very little ice among the public they served. What action might they have contemplated? Within hours of the atrocity numerous personnel in US Government service were engaged across the crash site in various unexplained activities not necessarily connected with assisting the regular police or AAIB officials. In whose receptive ear might Khreesats controllers have whispered? In one of the last acts of his presidency Ronald Reagan, a dyed-in-thewool enemy of Colonel Gaddafi, extended sanctions against Libya and threatened renewed bombing raids. The date was 28 December, 1988, a mere seven days after Lockerbie, when there was as yet no evidence ostensibly pointing to Libyan culpability. Diversion of the finger of accusation away from Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC certainly suited those in the US Government who were seeking the release of American hostages held captive in the Lebanon and was also beneficial in gaining Iranian and Syrian support for the coalition action against Iraq in the liberation of Kuwait. But that is another story (see eg Davina Miller Who Knows about this? Western Policy towards Iran: the Lockerbie Case, University of Bradford Dept of Peace Studies, 2011). It will have become apparent from the analysis of the evidence before the court offered here that wherever the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built the Samsonite hardshell bag in which it was packed could not have come from Luqa as an anonymous item of baggage on KM180, or from Frankfurt on PA103A. It should have been as plain as a pikestaff that it was smuggled into the system at Heathrow and that any group was responsible it was the PFLP-GC, sponsored by Iran. Quite why the judges lost sight of the wood for the trees is not a matter which warrants conjecture. That they did so is beyond doubt. When asked by Lord Maclean to confirm that al-Megrahis Abdusamad passport was never used again after 21 December 1988 William Taylor QC said we dont know that, to which Lord Maclean riposted Yes I do and gave the reference. The judge got the acerbic reply he truly deserved: Thank you. I am corrected. So Your Lordship has asked me a question to which Your Lordship already had the answer. The application of a sight more judicial cleverness and rather less too cleverness by half might have delivered a true verdict. VII. THE MOTIVE BEHIND AL-MEGRAHIS RELEASE There is little doubt that both the Scottish and UK governments recognised the persuasive force of the arguments presented by the defence, in particular the Clark report and one by Prof Tim Valentine of Goldsmiths College, University of London, also served on the Crown Office (Report on the eyewitness evidence in the case of al Megrahi v HMA, 19.12.08). Although they did not have the benefit of Dr Canters report his arguments were hardly novel ones. The totality of the defence case plainly and finally put paid to any basis for regarding Antony Gaucis evidence as in the least bit reliable. Yet both HMG and the Scottish government found themselves in a deep quandary. Although
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the Libyans had handed over al-Megrahi in 1999 they had been under considerable pressure to do so; al-Megrahi and Fihma had obviously been treated by them as expendable. But now, with al-Megrahi terminally ill and Gaddafi having re-established his international credentials, the Libyans had regained sufficient confidence to demand that al-Megrahi be allowed to come home to die. Realpolitik decreed that the two British governments could ill afford to ignore those enormous financial pressures implicit in the Libyan position. They knew the case against al-Megrahi personally was built on sand. The problem was that the appeal was taking its time and even if al-Megrahi survived until the end of the proceedings there was by no means any guarantee that the appeal judges would depart from the position of the 2001 trial judges or those who had heard the original appeal. The weaknesses in Gaucis evidence were already well understood at the time of the trial and the Canter report had only spelt out the obvious in excruciating detail. As the two governments wryly viewed the scenario, it was entirely likely that the judges would stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that two previous tribunals had been so obviously wrong. And yet there was an undoubted problem if the Scottish government simply cut the Gordian knot and ordered the Crown Office to drop its resistance to the appeal, rather than clinging on to the forlorn hope that the judges might do the job for them. If after so many years maintaining that alMegrahi was guilty the Scottish government (with Whitehall behind them) at the eleventh hour now suddenly did an about face and pre-empted the courts decision both governments would inevitably be condemned as in thrall to Libyan oil money. The Americans in particular would have been outraged, seeing such a decision as usurping the proper function of the judges, circumventing the justice system and clearly smacking of giving in to Libyan economic pressure. From the point of view of squaring conscience (freeing a man against whom there was little evidence of guilt) and of realpolitik (satisfying Libyan demands and thereby facilitating trade opportunities to the obvious advantage of the British public) the perfect solution was the compromise one of granting compassionate release: the demands of Justice could therefore be camouflaged, or masked, with Mercy. It will doubtless be suggested that the conjectures advanced here derive purely from behind the fevered brow of the present writer, with no inspiration from any external source. Some readers will either know for themselves, others will hardly be surprised to learn, that unattributed tidings in the above terms have been distinctly noted trickling out of Holyrood and from Whitehall and Westminster into the Temple and ever since al-Megrahis release. According to the not-wholly-unreliable legalpolitical grapevine, the Brown and Salmond governments knew the case against him was twaddle. They just couldnt say so. However, nothing will be revealed by David Camerons decision to have all the papers published. The reasons were never minuted. VIII. THE PRESENT OFFICIAL STANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND
Along with the judges the cabinet members of the present Scottish Government must also know the truth about Lockerbie. In the face of a hostile and gullible America it has to be acknowledged how courageous they were to release al-Megrahi ostensibly on compassionate grounds in 2009. Sadly, but for perhaps understandable reasons, they have felt hitherto unable to go the whole hog and admit they know he was an innocent scapegoat (hence the title of the above article Masking Justice with Mercy). Thus they continue to throw away good Scottish taxpayers money after bad on a preposterous expedition by Dumfries and Galloway police officers to Libya (see The Guardian, 8 December, 2011). Although with some sense of guilt, the author therefore recently embarked on a one-man-campaign of aggravating their discomfort. Emailing the Scottish Government on 1 August 2011 he invited them to acknowledge that al-Megrahis conviction could no longer be sensibly sustained. On 30 August, a nameless spokesperson responded with the stock reply that [i]t would not be appropriate for Government to cast doubt on the decisions taken by judges who have listened to all the evidence and reached a decision in a case. . . . [T]he Scottish Government do not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr Al-Megrahi. Wasting no time in making a further nuisance of himself, the author replied on 2 September, observing that for the Scottish Government to declare that they do not doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr AlMegrahi appears to be a very different proposition from tactfully abiding by a studied silence on the merits. . . . [T]he self-effacing sentence it is not for us to cast doubt on such and such is qualitatively quite different from avowing we do not doubt that X is the case. On its most natural meaning the latter implies that the Government have formed a rational view of the case after due consideration of the relevant facts. . . . It is difficult to believe that on such a vexed issue as Lockerbie some at least of the Scottish body politic have not made some effort to get to grips with the case details. Against the background of those observations the author set out a series of detailed questions asking for chapter and verse on the decision-making process according to which the cabinet determined that they believed in the safety of the conviction. Initially no response was forthcoming and it was only when the author in another publication (The Jewish Chronicle, 30 September, 2011) accused the Scottish Government of stonewalling that any response was engendered. However, the spokesperson declined to rise to the bait and the author subsequently sent a modified inquiry. Assuming the cabinets faith in the conviction to have been vicarious, that is to say based on the judges view of the facts, the author asked this time for details of the decisionmaking process by which the cabinet chose without consideration of the facts to adopt the judges view vicariously. Needless to say this has engendered no response to date. In fact the notion that simple protocol precludes the Scottish Government from stepping on judicial toes is completely unfounded. Any consideration of their
33
prevarication and obfuscation on facilitating a general inquiry into the case suggests they are only too well aware of the powers they actually hold. In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SSCCRC) authorised Mr al-Megrahis second appeal against conviction. However, the newly elected minority SNP Government quickly ushered through a statutory instrument which effectively banned publication of the Commissions statement of reasons without the consent of its informants. This would have allowed such interested parties as Mr Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who played the curious role as key witness in the case against alMegrahi (see Masking Justice with Mercy, above) to block publication. Then, in the run-up to Scotlands May 2011 Election, the party professed to declare that they would remove the ban, but they eschewed the swift use of another statutory instrument to do the job. Instead, they chose to follow the time-consuming route of primary legislation and moved the Criminal Cases (Punishment and Review) (Scotland) Bill, a measure which would allow informants to block publication under the pretext of data protection. However, as the Committee of Justice for Megrahi (JFM) argued before the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament on 7 February, 2012, s.194K(4) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland)Act 1995 explicitly provides that where SCCRC disclosure is permitted by a Statutory Instrument (inter alia) such disclosure is not prevented by any obligation of secrecy or other limitation on disclosure (including any such obligation or limitation imposed by, under or by virtue of any enactment). In other words, neither UK data protection legislation nor any other legislative or common law obligation of secrecy can be any bar to disclosure. The eminently sensible solution suggested by JFM was to dispense with the consent requirements from the 2009 statutory instrument and to drop from the Bill those clauses which created the obstacle to publication of the Statement of Reasons. In spite of their having been forced neatly into a corner it is anticipated that the Government will find some equally facile stratagem for avoiding the issue. Similarly indicative of the SNPs protective attitude towards the reputation of the Zeist judges is their Criminal Procedure (Legal Assistance, Detention and Appeals) (Scotland) Act 2010, rushed through under the puzzling guise of emergency legislation on the very day JFM officially lodged petition no. 1370 calling on Parliament to order an inquiry into the case. In giving the courts wide powers to reject applications for leave to appeal s.7 effectively nullifies the SCCRCs power to act as an independent arbiter. The discretion to review al-Megrahis conviction judicially lies therefore entirely in the hands of that very judiciary who found him guilty in the first place and went on to uphold the conviction on appeal. At the same time, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland issued the ominous warning that the abolition of double jeopardy enacted just before the May 2011 Election (mirroring the power under the English Criminal Justice Act 2003 to retry certain defendants previously acquitted) could well be used to seek the re-trial of Lamin Fhimah, al-Megrahis acquitted co-defendant. While Alex Salmonds government continue to trot out the reiteration of their faith in the safety of al-Megrahis
conviction they profess to keep an open mind on the subject, claiming to support an inquiry with broader international sponsorship: in effect a reference to the United Nations. Adopting such an approach is a posture Salmond and company can afford to make, secure in the knowledge that it is never going to happen. Unless and until Scottish independence is attained this would have to involve Whitehall and HMG have shown little inclination to risk transatlantic displeasure by questioning Libyan guilt. Moreover, in 2003 the UN Security Council passed a binding resolution to drop from its agenda all matters relating to the Lockerbie bombing. Although the General Assembly is not bound by the resolution its powers of inquiry are much more limited than those of the Security Council, having no power to compel citizens of any member state to attend as witnesses or to compel member states to surrender up documentary or other evidential material. It therefore enjoys less investigatory power than do ordinary official Scottish tribunals of inquiry. But even if the Scottish Government did seek to initiate a relatively toothless inquiry of the sort open to the General Assembly the idea that Mr Salmond might go cap-in-hand to HMG with a request to petition the UN on his countrys behalf is a droll one, to say the least. Yet if he overcame those qualms and if he persuaded HMG to petition the UN on Scotlands behalf, the establishment of a General Assembly inquiry would require a two-thirds majority resolution and it would be a forlorn hope they might ever surmount that hurdle, given the inevitable perception that Scotland a country with no UN mission remains itself responsible for, and ought to be dealing with, the failure of its justice system to deal adequately with the problem instead of trying to pass the buck. On 9 November, 2010, the Scottish Parliament considered the JFM Committees petition 1320 and found that the Salmond Government was in error in claiming to have no power or remit to open an inquiry into the Zeist trial. Not only did they cite two previous occasions when an executive decision was made to set up an inquiry into judicial judgments but they drew the Scottish Governments attention to its powers under the Inquiries Act 2005. With the SNP government engaging in such hoopla the Scottish people might understandably be wondering if an independent Scotland would be entirely safe in the hands of the partys current leadership. VIII. CURRENT IMPLICATIONS WEAKNESS OF THE CASE 1. Libya There is little doubt that al-Megrahis conviction is the only solid link between the atrocity and the Gaddafi regime. Even then, Gaddafis payment of billions of dollars in compensation is not necessarily evidence of any more than his acquiescence, under US pressure, to shed Libyas pariah status. The payment was explained as an acknowledgment of responsibility but there was an implied caveat that it was in the sense that the Libyan government was the official employer of rogue elements in the secret service who were neither instigated nor authorised to carry out the bombing. Even with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime
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there is likely to be a continued stigma attaching to Libya, which the Libyan people and their new government must have a keen interest in shedding. 2. Extremists of Palestine It is clear that on any detailed and balanced scrutiny of the evidence as it emerged from the trial the PFLP-GC remain as strongly as ever the leading contenders for suspicion of guilt (whether or not commissioned and funded by Iran). It was assumed that the PFLP-GC cultivated strong links with Hezbollah, an organisation closely allied to Hamas. In late September 2011 the United Nations is expected to consider the question of endorsing the recognition of a state of Palestine. Opposition by the United States is likely to be strengthened if the American public at large knew that it was Palestinian terrorists who almost certainly killed 270 mainly non-Jewish US and UK citizens on British soil and that Libya had nothing to do with the crime. Bibliography Primary documentation Report into the accident to Boeing 747-121, N739PA at Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland on 21 December 1988, Department of Transport, Air Accidents Investigation Branch aircraft accident report 2/90, 6 August 1990. Determination of the Fatal Accident Inquiry relating to the Lockerbie air disaster, 1 October 1990 to 14 February 1991, and Note dated 18 March 1991. Transcripts of the proceedings of the Scottish court at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, 3 May 2000 to 31 January 2001 Opinion of the High Court of Justiciary at Camp Zeist, case no. 1475/99, HM v. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. Opinion of the Appeal Court, High Court of Justiciary, appeal no. C104/01, appeal against conviction by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. 14 March 2002. Press release from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on the referral of the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi to the High Court of Justiciary , 28 June 2007. Documents prepared for al-Megrahis abandoned second appeal, available at www.megrahimystory.net Selected commentary Ashton, J. and Ferguson, I., Cover-up of Convenience: the hidden scandal of Lockerbie, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001. Emerson, S., and Duffy, B., The Fall of Pan Am 103: inside the Lockerbie investigation, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1990. Foot, P., Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice. London: Pressdram, 2001. Leppard, D., On the Trail of Terror: the inside story of the Lockerbie investigation, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. Marquise, R. A., Scotbom: evidence and the Lockerbie investigation, New York: Algora Publishing, 2001. Lockerbie: London Origin Theory, JREF forum, eleven pages, http://forums.randi.org/showthread. php?t=165824.
DEMONSTRATING
THE
The author is a barrister and Head of Chambers Emeritus at 7 Bell Yard, Temple Bar, London WC2A 2JR. Much of the text of this monograph has been adapted from the authors four articles in Criminal Law and Justice Weekly: Masking Justice with Mercy vol. 175, No 15, 9 April 2011, pp.221-228; Exploding Lockerbie, vol. 175, 16 and 23 July, 2011; A Postscript on Lockerbie, vol 175, No 35/36, 27 Aug/3 Sept, 2011, pp.509-510. Material will also be carried in Lockerbie: The True Culprits, vol 176.
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CULPRITS OF LOCKERBIE: GADDAFI OR THE EXTREMISTS OF PALESTINE?

7. Necessary use of a radio-cassette player

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