culprits of lockerbie

7/27/2019 Culprits of Lockerbie

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Culprits of Lockerbie 1 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-oldPan American World Airways Boeing 747-121, Clipper

Maid of the Seas, took off from London Heathrow boundfor 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 crewsacrificed but falling debris from the disintegrating jet killedeleven people on the ground.

Although it was not immediately clear that a bomb had brought down the aircraft terrorism was of course stronglysuspected from the outset, in particular because variousradical organisations wasted little time in claimingresponsibility. An initial CIA assessment gave mostcredence to a boast by the “Guardians of the IslamicRevolution” that they had taken revenge for the loss of anIranian airliner earlier in the year. We shall return to thattopic later but for the moment it can be stated that for atleast twelve months after Lockerbie elements within the

Government of Iran, in association with an extremistPalestinian terror group, were widely regarded by theWestern intelligence community as the prime suspects.

However, some time in 1989 or 1990 attention began toshift towards Libya. A comprehensive analysis of thereasons for that change of focus is beyond the scope of thisstudy although they are discussed briefly towards the end.They have been explored in particular in two well-knownaccounts of the case (Paul Foot, Lockerbie: The Flight from

Justice, London: Pressdram, 2001; John Ashton and IanFerguson, Cover-Up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal

of Lockerbie, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2002). There wascertainly no lack of grounds for attributing motive toColonel Gaddafi’s regime. His confrontation with the USAduring the 1980s had culminated in the 1986 American

bombing raid on Tripoli and Benghazi, launched from basesin Britain. It left dozens of military and civilian casualtiesand would have induced a powerful urge for revengeagainst the United States and the UK – including a very

personal motive on the part of Gaddafi himself, who, it wassaid, had lost an adoptive baby daughter in the raid.

After a three-year joint investigation by the FBI andDumfries and Galloway Constabulary (described by theLord Advocate as the UK’s largest criminal inquiry led byBritain’s smallest police force) warrants were issued in1991 for the arrest of two Libyan nationals, Abdelbaset AliMohmed al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhima, bothallegedly officers in the JSO, the Libyan secret service.Protracted negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi eventually ledto 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 incompensation to each of the families of the victims, and,eventually, the handing over of the two suspects to theScottish authorities. On 5 April, 1999, they were flown tothe Netherlands, which as part of the negotiations had beenagreed as a neutral venue for their trial by an ad hoc three-member panel of Scottish judges sitting without a jury. At

the end of their nine-month trial in January 2001 Fhimahwas acquitted but al-Megrahi was convicted of murder andgiven life, to be served in Scotland, with a minimumrecommendation of 27 years. His appeal against convictionwas dismissed in March 2002, when he was transferred to aScottish prison, and his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible in July 2003.

Following two highly critical reports by Hans Köchler,the UN observer at the trial and appeal, al-Megrahi appliedin September 2003 to the Scottish Criminal Cases ReviewCommission for his conviction to be reviewed. In June 2007the Commission referred his case to the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal on the ground of a possible miscarriage of

justice, although Köchler criticised the Commission’s 800- page report for exonerating police, prosecutors and forensicstaff, choosing instead to place all the blame on “a Malteseshopkeeper” (http://i-p-o.org/koechler-lockerbie-referral-29June2007.htm). In the wake of the SCCRC decision itwas suggested that if the appeal were successful Libyacould have claimed back the billions in compensation

payments (see The Scotsman, 28.06.07). Asked if Libyawould seek repayment of compensation moneys ColonelGaddafi’s son Saif al-Gaddafi replied ominously that he didnot 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 into2010. He was now reported to be suffering from advancedstage prostate cancer and, having been given three monthsto live by a single specialist and the appeal having beenwithdrawn, the Scottish Minister of Justice granted himcompassionate release from prison on 20 August, 2009. InAmerica in particular the decision was met with predictableanger aggravated as it was by the airport carnival whichgreeted 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 thatthe Brown government had strived mightily to secureMegrahi’s release (see diverse media reports, 7 February,2011).

To disgruntlement and embarrassment in equal measureal-Megrahi remains alive at the time of writing. Mustafa

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Abdel-Jalil, Gaddafi’s justice minister who resigned in protest against his leader’s handling of the popular uprisingin the Spring of 2011 (and is now head of the Benghazi

National Transitional Council), claimed that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out on Gaddafi’s personal order andthat al-Megrahi was involved (Ian Black and Peter

Beaumont, “Gaddafi ordered Lockerbie bombing – exminister,” The Guardian, 23.02.11; see also The Sunday

Times, 27.02.11). In the words of the draft of a forthcomingarticle by Robert Forrester–

“Following weeks of protesting that he hadirrefutable proof that Colonel Gaddafi had put Mr al-Megrahi up to doing his Lockerbie dirty work, Abdel-Jalil . . . finally revealed all on April Fool’s Day.Apparently, Gaddafi had footed Mr al-Megrahi’s legal

bills whilst the prisoner languished at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Well, that’s it then, clear and incontrovertibleevidence that Mr al-Megrahi bombed 103! If this is the

standard of proof that satisfies Mr Abdel-Jalil, aformer judge, one wonders how much the predicamentof the long suffering Libyan people might improveunder the West’s new found rebel friends.”

This was followed by the defection to the UK of MoussaKoussa, Gaddafi’s foreign minister. Described as having

played a leading role in the Lockerbie bombing he hasalways denied Libyan involvement (Guardian, 31.3.11).Although Prime Minister David Cameron announced that hewould be available for questioning by the Dumfries andGalloway police (media, 31.3.11; 1.4.11) it has been widelyreported that HMG were in a dilemma. They were clearly

wary of “cosying” up too closely to a suspected terroristorganiser whom the Libyan rebels say they want to put ontrial. At the same time they want to keep him onside as avaluable source of intelligence on the extent to whichGaddafi’s support is ebbing away and how his remaininghenchmen might be encouraged to desert. No doubt to thatend, it was stressed that the police were merely seeking toquestion him as a “witness” (eg Evening Standard ,01.04.2011). Following Gaddafi’s final overthrow, captureand death it was reported that Dumfries and Galloway

police officers were to be dispatched to Libya in pursuanceof further inquiries into Libyan culpability for thedestruction 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 theevidence in the case against al-Megrahi, the basis uponwhich the judges purported to justify his conviction and thethinking which caused him to be released.

Lockerbie has not been short of conspiracy theories butto understand why al-Megrahi’s conviction represents agrave 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. Theissues are complex and would fill a book (and have done,repeatedly) but without going down all sorts of blind alleysthe minimum amount of detail necessary for a sufficientgrasp of the issues can conveniently be expounded here.(For more, readers should peruse the various sources listedat the end of this study.)

However, before embarking on an analysis of the trialevidence it will be helpful to examine the inception of theatrocity and the identity of the perpetrators. Let it be statedhere loudly and clearly that Libya had absolutely nothing todo with the destruction of Pan Am 103. So who was to

blame? Who were the true culprits?

II. THE T RUE CULPRITS

1. The road to Lockerbie: the inception of vengeance

By the end of 1987 the United States was lendingunashamed support to Iraq in its war against Iran and asIranian power was beginning to crumble so was its hostilityintensifying against the “Great Satan,” the patron of itsancient Babylonian adversary. With the US maintaining astrong naval presence in the Gulf to protect oil shipmentsout of Kuwait clashes with Iran were inevitable. On 3 July,1988, a helicopter from the Aegis class guided-missilecruiser Vincennes drew fire in international waters from

three Iranian fast patrol boats and half an hour later theship’s radar spotted approaching aircraft judged to beIranian F-14 Tomcats. That assessment was aided by the

perceived symbolism involved in attacking an Americanwarship on the eve of Independence Day and the decisionwas made to aim a surface-to-air missile at the approachingaircraft. The result was catastrophe. The target turned out to

be an Iran Air Airbus A-300 taking the short hop on flight655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. Not only had it beenmissed off the “do not shoot” registry but its transponder code, speed, heading, location and altitude had all beenmisread. The Airbus went down with all 290 passengers andcrew and although President Regan sent a written apology

via Swiss intermediaries the US Navy’s claim that the ineptmissile launch had been a legitimate measure of self-defence coupled with the award to the responsible air-warfare coordinator of a navy medal for “heroicachievement . . . under fire” only served to turn the originalassessment on its head: absurdly, the Iranians claimed thatthe destruction of flight 655 had betokened a celebration of July the Fourth (see, eg , Roger, C., “Sea of lies: The insidestory of how an American naval vessel blundered into anattack on Iran Air flight 655 at the height of tensions duringthe Iran-Iraq war – and how the Pentagon tried to cover itstracks after 290 innocent civilians died,” Newsweek , July 131992, http://www.newsweek.com/id/126358; Ashton andFerguson, above, chap. 2). The Americans feared retaliationlike for like: the destruction of a fully laden American

passenger plane departing from somewhere in Europe, withits concentration of American military personnel andestablished presence of Middle Eastern terrorist cells.

Considering that Libya was ultimately blamed for theLockerbie bombing it is ironic that it was precisely in themonths leading up to the atrocity that Colonel Gaddafi hadresolved to end the American–led stranglehold on Libyawith a decision to abandon his regime’s 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 perfectfurther opportunity to gain credibility and prestige bysupporting Arafat’s diplomatic offensive.

This therefore was most definitely not the moment for

Gaddafi to be involved in blowing American commercial

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airliners out of the sky. But indirectly he did have aconnection 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 suchPalestinian terror organisations as Ahmed Jibril’s Syrian-

based 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 themoment was ripe to displace the increasingly discreditedArafat 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 murkyworld of Middle East intelligence gathering it emerged thatJibril had made a deal with elements within the Iraniangovernment (notably Interior Minister Ali-Akbar Mohtashimi-Pur) by which the PFLP–GC would receive amulti-million dollar bounty for carrying out the reprisalattack, an attack for which Iran lacked the know-how but

which in any event its government had no wish to bedirectly 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 inGermany the W. German Federal Criminal Police Office – the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) – mounted an operation

dubbed Herbslaub (“Autumn Leaves”) involving round-the-clock surveillance and telephone tapping of 16 suspectedmembers of the PFLP-GC across six cities. One of the

participants in the negotiations with Iran had been afounder-member of the PFLP-GC and Ahmed Jibril’s right-hand man, Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni. On 5 October, 1988,he was tracked entering West Germany, apparently to takecommand 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 policeobserved included Abassi’s younger brother Ahmed, whowas 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-GC’s master aeroplane bomb-maker from theearly 1970s, Marwan Khreesat, flew into Frankfurt fromAmman, accompanied by his wife.

In fact Khreesat had at some stage been enlisted byJordan’s intelligence service, the Mukabaret , otherwiseknown as the General Intelligence Directorate, and wasapparently acting on their behalf as a plant. In November 1989 he was interviewed at Mukabaret headquarters inAmman by FBI agents Edward Marshman and James“Tom” Thurman, and the account he gave of his activitiesrecorded in a pro forma “FD301” report was generally notinconsistent with the BKA Autumn Leaves records. We

shall return to Thurman later. The defence sought to callKhreesat as a witness at Camp Zeist but Jordan refused tosanction 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 Marshmaninstead.

The familiar course of the Autumn Leaves operation has been summarised in diverse narratives (see eg Ashton andFerguson, 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-passing-magic-touch-and-rest.html).

On 18 October, according to Khreesat’s FBI narrative,he and Dalkamoni bought two Ultrasound radios and aSanyo computer monitor at a second-hand shop. The BKAlog shows that on that same day Dalkamoni telephonedsomeone in Damascus whom he called “Abed” and told himthat 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 hehad “made some changes to the medicine” and that it wasnow “better and stronger.”

Also on that day, the BKA log states, Dalkamoni met upwith 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 totake delivery of “three black tins with lids,” “gloves” and“paste.”

On 22 October, the log records, the two men drove toFrankfurt and visited two electrical stores, although it is notrecorded if they made any purchases. On the way back to

Neuss, Khreesat told the FBI, Dalkamoni left Khreesat atthe zoo. Picking him up an hour later he told Khreesat that aman whom Khreesat named only as Abu Elias and who

Dalkamoni had previously told him would be coming toGermany, had just arrived (FD301, p.2). Khreesatconjectured that Dalkamoni had met up with Abu Elias after dropping him off. It is interesting to compare this accountwith the BKA log, which states that at 2 pm Dalkamoni metup with “the same stranger that he met on 18 October.” Thiswas presumably the big-eared man in his early thirties but if he was Abu Elias he had clearly not “just arrived” inGermany. He was subsequently identified as one RamziDiab.

Khreesat stated that he had previously met Abu Elias inDamascus and in Yugoslavia, where he, Khreesat,apparently received his assignment to the German cell and

where Dalkamoni “introduced” Abu Elias as the cell’s“expert in airport security” who knew “all the details” onhow to smuggle bombs on to targeted aircraft (FD301, pp.5and 10). He said that at no stage did they actually come faceto face in Germany.

On Dalkamoni and Khreesat’s return to 16 Isarstrasse anumber of boxes were carried in containing various items of equipment and devices including what Khreesat referred toas the “fifth device,” a Toshiba radio-cassette player.

Next day, 23 October, as Khreesat stated in a call toAmman on 24 October monitored by the BKA, he startedwork on bomb-making at 16 Isarstrasse. According to theFBI record (FD301, p.22) it was on that day – 23 October – that Dalkamoni came into the workroom with the fifthdevice and asked him to solder together two wires. Khreesatrelated to the FBI that the Toshiba device had some strangemodifications, some involving cardboard, and he told

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Dalkamoni of his doubts about its quality. The barometric pressure trigger was clearly visible beneath the cassetterelay and its conversion into a bomb would have been fairlyobvious, he said. Also on 23 October Dalkamoni received acall from Damascus, similarly intercepted, when he reportedthat 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, screwsand 1.5 volt batteries. As already mentioned, the BKA logstates that later in the day Khreesat telephoned Amman toreport that he had started work the day before and neededanother two or three days before he could return home.

We now come to what is perhaps the potentially mostimportant passage in the FD301 record of Khreesat’s FBIinterview. Shortly after lunch time Khreesat was workingon bombs in the workroom at 16 Isarstrasse when hedecided 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 thefifth device had disappeared from the workroom, whichonly he and Dalkamoni ever used.

According to the FBI interview record, it was next day,the 25th, that Khreesat telephoned his case officer inAmman 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. Khreesatadvised that he had assumed that the fifth device went toAbu Elias, as related above”: pp.23-24). It remains unclear if this was the same call referred to in the BKA log ashaving been made on 24th, when Khreesat reported he wasnearly ready and needed only two or three more days. But it

is curious that the BKA do not appear to have monitoredany call in which the handover of a device is mentioned.

Later on the 25th Khreesat and Dalkamoni called in atDüsseldorf airport where they picked up and discussedtimetables (including Pan American ones).

The alert sounded by Khreesat was conceivably the cuefor police action, taken in a frantic effort to recover themissing bomb. The day following the call to Amman, 26October, the BKA swooped and made numerous arrests.Khreesat and Dalkamoni were seized while out inDalkamoni’s car, just as Khreesat was emerging from atelephone call box. Hidden under a blanket in the car policediscovered 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 barometrictrigger which clearly showed it was designed to destroy anaircraft in flight. If Khreesat is to be believed (and withoutcorroboration his word can hardly be taken as gospel) hetold the BKA “that they should have waited one more dayto make the arrests, as Dalkamoni was on the way to meetAbu Elias when they were arrested” (an anticipated meetingvariously referred to in FD301, at pp.2, 7, 22 and 23). Hewas clear in stating that the Toshiba which Dalkamoni hadspirited away on 24 October was not the one found in thecar two days later.

When the police searched 16 Isarstrasse they foundanother F-453D with holes already drilled and various itemsof bomb-making equipment. They also found airlineluggage tags and timetables. The following April – after

Lockerbie – the BKA raided an associated address andfound three further completed bombs, two fitted into theUltrasound radio tuners and one in the Sanyo monitor. Itturned out the devices had been in 16 Isarstrasse at the timeof the original search but had been missed. There were thusfive completed bombs in all, hence Khreesat’s reference to

the missing one which probably went to Abu Elias as the“fifth device.”

On the assumption that Khreesat was telling the FBI thetruth the fifth device was never recovered. Moreover, AbuElias escaped the net and was never arrested. On the other hand, it remains an unanswered question why, if Dalkamonihad indeed gone to Frankfurt to meet Abu Elias on 24October, presumably being tailed by the BKA, they failed tonote him meeting Abu Elias and handing over the Toshibaradio cassette player.

Following the arrests and the seizing of the F-453D fromDalkamoni’s car an alert was sent out to airlines warningthat an attempt might be made to smuggle a bomb

concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player on to anairliner. (The warning led to an order being issued toFrankfurt 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-rayoperator Kurt Maier firmly asserted in evidence at the 1992

New York trial of the action for negligence brought againstPan American World Airways that he had not called hissupervisor because none of the relevant items of luggagewhich passed through his machine had contained a radio-cassette 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 thesuspected cell members who had been rounded up in the

Autumn Leaves raids were swiftly released. These includedKhreesat who – after Lockerbie – was discharged by a judgefor “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 assettherefore 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 FBImust have been handed over to Abu Elias has been thesubject of much conjecture and debate. Khreesat told theFBI men that in 1985 he had gone to Syria to improvise fivealtimeter bombs of the kind he had been making since 1970(as to which see further below). These particular five werehoused in Toshiba F-453D Bombeat models. Going intoconsiderable detail on the later history of the five devicesKhreesat said they were for demonstration only and indifferent 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 remainingtwo, 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 thefour barometric pressure triggers (together with their associated delay timers) which had been removed from the1985 demonstration Toshiba bombs were delivered back tohim for incorporation into a new batch of bombs. Threewere fitted respectively into the two Ultrasound radios and

the Sanyo monitor bought second-hand on 18 October andseized by the BKA in April 1989. The fourth was installed(or re-installed) in the ex-1985 F-453D which the BKAfound in Dalkamoni’s car on the day of the round-up. TheF-453D found at 16 Isarstrasse with holes already drilledwas presumably one of the five 1985 models. That left thefifth device.

It should be mentioned here that Dalkamoni told theBKA that Khreesat had brought with him from PFLP-GCheadquarters in Damascus a Toshiba radio-cassette player containing two clocks and two barometric pressure switchesand that Ramzi Diab had handed him a similarly equippedToshiba radio-cassette player when they met in Frankfurt on

October 18 (see Ashton and Ferguson, p.51-52). Khreesatdid not mention these to the FBI. If they were additional tothe five devices he did mention what are the odds that oneof 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 FBIagents that the Toshiba radio cassette player housing thefifth device, which had been delivered to 16 Isarstrasse on18 October, was not in a “new box”; he did not know whereit had come from but he thought Abu Elias might havehanded it to Dalkomoni while he, Khreesat, was at the zoo

(FD301, p.21). From a catalogue shown him by the FBIagents he identified it as a Toshiba RT-F453D, but bronze

in colour . By the time of the FBI interview the RoyalArmaments Research and Development Establishment(RARDE) were claiming to have established from some bitsof black plastic that the bomb had been housed in a ToshibaSF16 stereo radio-cassette player, most of the productionrun of which had been shipped to Libya. (Reliance was also

placed on a Toshiba PCB fragment and part of the frontcover 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 forgivenfor wondering if Khreesat was hedging his bets here. If the

fifth device was housed in a bronze Toshiba it could nothave been the fatal bomb (he and his collusive FBIinterrogators might have imagined). On the other hand (theymight 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 absenceof bronze fragments could either be explained away by their having been fused with the remains of the bronze Samsonitesuitcase which carried the fatal bomb or because the fatalToshiba had not been bronze.

Could the identification of the Toshiba as an SF16 have been the reason why, according to the agents, Khreesatmaintained he had never used a stereo model and could nottherefore be responsible for building the device which

brought down Maid of the Seas? Could he have beenintending to imply that with two speakers there wasinsufficient 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 somany stereo models been obtained if Khreesat was notgoing to use them? Perhaps they had been purchasedwithout consulting Khreesat and had then been discarded asunsuitable. But there is directly contradictory evidence of

what Khreesat told the agents. He was interviewed byDefence solicitors in June 2000 and on that occasionadmitted to using both mono and stereo models, anassertion he also incidentally appears to have made to theCIA, 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. Tocover for the possibility that the fifth device had ended upas the fatal bomb he went as far as he no doubt supposed he

plausibly could in disavowing it as his handiwork. Tellingthe 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 deviceresponsible 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, theSanyo monitor and the F435D found hidden in Dalkamoni’scar. The fifth device, he professed to claim, he did not build.It will be recalled he claimed that when it was handed tohim on 23 October he noted its “strange modifications . . .some involving cardboard” and the visible barometric

pressure trigger. The bomb had apparently been built bysomeone else, he was saying, and he was merely beingasked by Dalkamoni to solder two wires together. Thatcurious request seems to hark back to two of the 1985devices, which “needed two wires to be connected.” Whywould someone else – Abu Elias possibly – have made a

poor effort to assemble a Toshiba disguised bomb when theexpert Khreesat had been brought to Germany explicitly for the purpose of building bombs and was on hand to constructone properly? Why would Khreesat be requested simply tosolder two wires together to complete the job? Why, toquote The Lockerbie Divide blogger (“Just a Passing MagicTouch,” above), would they have needed Khreesat’s “token

touch”? The gang were hardly dependent on his expertisefor such an elementary task.

One conceivable answer to this odd puzzle is that it maytie in with the desire on Khreesat’s part – and that of theFBI men – to demonstrate that his government controllerswould 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 bombhappened to be the one which destroyed Pan Am 103 therewould have been the strongest of motives for both Khreesatand his controllers to show that he had been authorised to

build lethal bombs only under the most pressing conditionsof necessity. Thus, it could be argued that he would havehad little choice but to build a lethal bomb in order tomaintain his cover because a relevant gang member had

possessed the technical knowledge to rumble theincorporation 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 hisJordanian control to disable any bombs he improvised hewent on to assert that this had proved to be impossible “asAbu Elias would probably know it.” By suggesting that thefifth device was probably constructed by Abu Elias,

Khreesat perhaps cunningly hoped he could float the ideathat Abu Elias had just about sufficient knowledge to detecta built-in spoiler. At the same time, by making out that AbuElias’s handiwork was amateurish he preserved the raison

d’être 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 thestory was liable to unravel. It was assuredly a leaky vessel.If Khreesat had been brought in because of his bomb-making expertise whereas Abu Elias was an airport securityexpert and not a bomb-maker why might Khreesat ever have supposed he could not hoodwink him? The excuse

seems implausible and if it won’t wash it would follow thathe, or his controllers – probably both – had been reckless inthe extreme, that they knew it, and that they felt numbed byembarrassment and shame at the realisation that it wasKhreesat’s 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 expertwas killed attempting to test one of his bombs in 1989. Buta decade later he must have forgotten what he was supposedto have told the FBI and, equally, must have forgotten aboutthe death of the bomb disposal man (or at least believed thatthe old story would never be resurrected). Implausibly, hetold the defence solicitors he had carefully designed bombs

that would not explode.Khreesat’s 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 hissuggestion that Abu Elias had sufficient technical know-how to spot a sophisticated disabling feature. Indeed, thevery heart of Khreesat’s suggestion that Abu Elias was theamateruish maker of the fifth device is capsized by theinherent inconsistency that a man who can only build a poor excuse for a bomb will possess that degree of specialistknowledge.

The inference which may reasonably be drawn from theaccumulation of improbabilities and inconsistencies in

Khreesat’s story is that he was indeed the maker of the fifthdevice and that he knew it to be the fatal bomb. How far hisFBI interrogators (or collaborators) knew it too can only beconjectured.

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 itis of some importance to digress shortly on what might have

become of Abu Elias, the mystery expert on airport securitywho disappeared with the lethal bomb concealed inside aToshiba radio-cassette player? Who was he and where is he

now? The FD302 report of Khreesat’s November 1989interview by the FBI agents states–

“Khreesat advised that he did not tell the Germansanything about Abu Elias. Khreesat never saw AbuElias in Germany but was told by Dalkamoni that AbuElias had arrived. Khreesat told the Germans that theyshould 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 atface value the preparation of the composite would suggesthe was being equally circumspect with them. If he hadrevealed the man’s true identity, there would have been noneed to prepare a composite because it would have beeneasy to acquire a photograph. The fact is he knew very wellwho Abu Elias was.

So who was the mysterious Abu Elias? Of his existence

there can be little doubt. Why else would Khreesat havecalled his control in Amman. But what of the man’s name?Was it real or an alias (if the pun can be forgiven)? The Abu

preface is merely an informal soubriquet common inArabic, a sort of nickname, meaning “father of.” He would

be father of Elias.Rumours and reports as to the man’s true identity have

been in circulation for many years. Not long after theindictments of al-Megrahi and Fhima were announced in

November 1991 the PLO released a report to theinternational press describing the 1988 deal between Iranand the PFLP-GC and claiming that the bomb whichdestroyed Pan Am 103 was built by one Khaisar Haddad,

also known as Abu Elias, a blond blue-eyed LebaneseChristian member of the PFLP-GC (see Roy Rowan, “WhyDid 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 , NewYork: Bloomsbury, 1993.) During the Zeist trial in 2000 itcame to light that Mobdi Goben, the PFLP-GC’s “co-ordinator” for Yugoslavia in 1988 who had played a

prominent role in assisting the German cell, had made adeath-bed confession – referred to in the trial as the “GobenMemorandum” – 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 bea Syrian national who had acquired US citizenship and thathe was known to the FBI and CIA. They further stated thatthe man had denied being Abu Elias but did not reveal howthey had discovered his identity, nor how they knew he hadmade such a denial. Evidence was later submitted to theScottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) andsubsequently passed over to the Scottish Court of Appealfor the purposes of al-Megrahi’s second appeal to the effectthat Abu Elias was in fact Jibril’s nephew. Within days of the initiation of the appeal process it was reported in a masscirculation British Sunday newspaper, possibly for the firsttime, that the man believed to be Abu Elias was Jibril’snephew and that he was living near Washington DC under an alias which the newspaper could not “divulge” (seeDerek Lambie, “Finger of blame for Lockerbie pointed atAmerican citizen,” Sunday Express, July 8, 2007,




http://www.express.co.uk/posts/ view/12732/Finger-of- blame-for-Lockerbie-pointed-at-American-citizen). One journalist who has long been deeply involved ininvestigating the Lockerbie bombing has disclosed to theauthor that Abu Elias’s mother is, or was, Ahmed Jibril’ssister.

In the light of the revelation that Abu Elias may have been Jibril’s nephew it can now be seen that Khreesat mayhave given an early clue suggesting this in his FBIinterview. Of the five 1985 F-453D bombs he built in 1985he told the FBI that in 1987 one of them was “shown” to

Abu Elias. But intriguingly he also said that one hadapparently been kept intact for Jibril “to show his nephew.”It rather sounds as if he might have been talking about thesame showing.

Three days after al-Megrahi’s release (August 20, 2009)the UK Sunday Express revealed that the paper’s Scottishcounterpart had tracked down the man suspected of beingAbu Elias to his home in Virginia near Dulles airport,

Washington DC, pointing out the irony that it was only afew miles from the Lockerbie memorial at Arlington

National Cemetery (Ben Borland, “‘I’ll reveal true identityof 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 theman, whom the paper continued not to name, was employed

by the US government as a schools engineer, had his ownFacebook page and that when confronted by thenewspaper’s representatives denied being Abu Elias or having any involvement with the atrocity, claimingmistaken identity or malice. The journalist referred to aboveindicated to the author that when interviewed by Fhima’s

solicitor, Eddie McKechnie, at the time of the trial the mangave a similar denial.

The article further revealed that Scottish National MSPChristine Grahame, a campaigner for al-Megrahi’s release,was believed to be considering naming the man in theScottish Parliament chamber. On 2 September, 2009, duringthe debate on al-Megrahi’s compassionate release, she did

precisely that, naming him as one Basel Bushnaq(http://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?gid=2009-09-02.19051.0). 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 telephonenumber are given quite openly on Google (21051 ThoreauCourt, Sterling, Virginia, telephone number, 001-571-926-9231). He apparently describes himself as a Bosnian fromthe 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 bythe Israelis in 1973 in retaliation for the 1972 MunichOlympics massacre.

The original source of the allegation that Basel Bushnaqis Abu Elias is not known to the present author. If they areone and the same person it would clearly be a matter of thedeepest concern if the US authorities know it and are giving

shelter to the man who was and remains the prime suspectfor 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 infact Abu Elias. In Israel Versus Jibril Samuel Katz revealedthat in late 1983 Israeli commandos infiltrated Beirut and

“kidnapped Marwad Bushnaq, better known by his nom deguerre of Abu A’Ali, a senior PFLP-GC officer and, mostimportant, Ahmed Jibril’s nephew (p.105, citing “Enough isEnough,” Time Magazine, August 14, 1989, p.20, and theIsraeli daily evening newspaper Ma’ariv, May 21, 1985,

p.15). The nom de guerre Katz cites sounds suspiciouslysimilar to Abu Elias. It seems most unlikely that if Bushnaqwas indeed the nephew’s real surname he would havesought shelter in America using the same surname butdisguising it with a new forename. It ought to be easyenough to settle the matter by comparing his appearancewith that of the man the Israelis took prisoner. They surelyhave their former prisoner’s 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 withthe description and photographs of Ramzi Diab, the big-eared man whom Dalkamoni may have met on the sameoccasion (24 October, 1988, in Frankfurt) as Khreesat toldthe FBI Dalkamoni had met Abu Elias. If Ramzi wasactually Abu Elias that would hardly mean he could nothave been the bomber since he was swiftly released fromBKA custody. It is reported that he eventually returned toDamascus where, suspected of being an Israeli agent, hewas probably liquidated on Jibril’s orders (Katz, p.217).

5. An elaborate red herring: the Interfor report

Much has been written about the alleged existence of a dealmade between certain agents in the CIA and a Syrian basedfaction by which in return for assistance in securing therelease 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 firmcommissioned in 1989 by lawyers representing PanAmerican World Airways and the United States InsuranceGroup it was suggested that the protected drug route used

Frankfurt airport, which employed Turkish Islamicfundamentalist baggage handlers. A mule would check in aclean suitcase which one of the complicit handlers wouldswitch with an identical bag containing a heroin shipment.The Interfor report claimed that Ahmed Jibril had managedto get one of the handlers to switch a clean bag with a bagcontaining not heroin but the fatal bomb. The courier involved was said to be a Lebanese American named KhalidJaafar, a member of a clan from the Bekaa Valley who werealleged to be involved in heroin production. Jaafar was enroute to Detroit and two holdalls identified as his wererecovered from the crash site. Pan Am documentationshowed that he had checked in two items on PA103A, the

feeder flight from Frankfurt, but Jaafar’s father toldinvestigators that his son had only travelled with two carry-on bags. A witness who was queuing up for passport controlclose to Jafaar (Yasmin Siddique) remembered him as

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/%20view/12732/Finger-of-blame-for-Lockerbie-pointed-at-American-citizen


http://www.express.co.uk/%20posts/view/122299/-I-ll-reveal-true-identity-of-bomber%25%2020UK%20NEWS



http://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?gid=2009-09-02.1%209051.0


http://www.channel4.com/news/article.jsp?id=%203329%20697&time=181158















appearing very nervous but she was uncertain whether or not he had any bags with him. On the basis of this evidencein isolation of any other factors there might have been atheoretical possibility that he checked in two other unaccounted for items, one of which was switched for aclone bag containing the bomb. But the Interfor report was

plainly wrong for the same reason that the Crown werewrong in contending that the bomb came from Malta. It isabsolutely certain that the suitcase containing the bombwhich brought down Pan Am 103 did not come from Maltaor Frankfurt. The reason for expressing such confidencewill shortly become clear.

6. Warnings

Although the bomb seized by the BKA on 26 October wasconcealed in a Toshiba RT-F453D single speaker model theauthorities had decided by the end of April 1989 that theradio-cassette player used for the Lockerbie bomb was a

Toshiba RT-SF16 stereo model, also called a BomBeat . Thesignificance of the difference will be discussed later, whenwe return to the story of Marwan Khreesat. What exactly hetold the BKA and who exactly might have been in on theexchanges may be interesting questions but what isimportant 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 theHouse of Commons about the BKA discovery and thatinformation about it had been passed to his departmentwhich “issued a warning by telex on 22 November 1988 toUK airports and airlines pointing to the possible existenceof other such devices.” On 19 December, 1988, Mr

Channon told Parliament, the Department of Transportdrafted a warning circular but sadly it was “not sent out because of the need to obtain reproduction photographs incolour.” Channon also made reference to a telephone callreceived by the US Embassy in Helsinki on 5 December,1988 warning that a Finnish woman would attempt tosmuggle a bomb on to a Pan American airliner fromFrankfurt bound for America. However, Mr Channonexplained, he and the American ambassador to Finland hadtogether discounted the call as a hoax. Nonetheless, theauthorities appear to have been in possession of sufficientspecific information to have initiated an immediate upgradein 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 PFLP-GC 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 onsuspicion of terrorism. When the police searched his flatthey found a selection of brand new items of clothing someof which were traced to a Maltese manufacturer who hadalso supplied clothes to Mary’s House, a boutique in Sliemaon the island of Malta owned and run by a Mr AnthonyGauci. This was regarded as highly significant becauseclothing in the Samsonite holding the bomb had also beentraced to Mary’s 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 aPFLC cell there to send a Toshiba radio cassette bomb byan Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. The article contained AbuTalb’s photograph. In the following week’s 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 notedthat Abu Talb had been positively identified as the man who

bought the clothes from the shop in Malta and that he wasabout to be extradited to Britain to stand trial for theLockerbie bombing. In the event, Abu Talb was notextradited because the investigators decided to move awayfrom blaming Iran and the PFLP and to cast the blameinstead on Libya. Abu Talb was called as a witness for theCrown at the trial in 2001 and we return briefly to discusshis evidence later. III. SUMMARY OF THE CASE AGAINST AL-MEGRAHI

1. Membership of the JSOIt had been part of the Crown’s 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 CIAinformant, that al-Megrahi had then moved to the Centre for Strategic Studies. Much of Majid’s evidence – in particular his contention that al-Megrahi had access to explosives andhad previously discussed destroying a British airliner – wasrejected by the court as not credible, but they accepted hisevidence of al-Megrahi’s continued membership of theLibyan secret service.

2. The Samsonite suitcase bomb

The remains of the bronze Samsonite hardshell suitcasewhich had contained the bomb, some identifiable remains of what was said to be the Toshiba radio-cassette player inwhich the bomb had been housed, and the blast-damagedremains of clothing which had been in the Samsonite, wereamong the huge quantity of evidential material swept up inthe fingertip search across the open country aroundLockerbie and the nearby hillsides. In due course theclothing was proved to have been purchased in Malta. Itwas discovered that al-Megrahi had visited Malta briefly onDecember 20 and 21 (using a passport under the alias of

Abdusamad) and flew out from Malta’s Luqa airport on themorning of the 21st, returning to Tripoli. To link him withthe bomb the Crown contended, and the court accepted, thatthe Samsonite bag had been “ingested into the system” atMalta’s Luqa airport from where, on 21 December, it wascarried as unaccompanied baggage on Air Malta flightKM180 to Frankfurt. There, the Crown contended, it wastransferred to the Boeing 727 operating Pan Am feeder flight PA103A to Heathrow where it was loaded on to thedoomed aircraft.

The Crown relied on certain documentation relating tothe automated baggage recording system in service atFrankfurt 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, fullinvestigation during the trial of working practice atFrankfurt 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 fromanother flight (possibly from Warsaw). Such a possibilitywas supported (a) by inquiries which accounted for allrecorded 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 (sothat no loader knew in advance to which aircraft they would

be assigned).The implication of assuming that the terroristshad nonetheless managed to smuggle the suitcasecontaining the bomb onto the aircraft is that they hadconcealed their method so well that no trace of it was ever discovered by a single-minded and determined investigationcovering all practicable possibilities. But such anassumption would surely fly in the face of an inquiry whicheffectively eliminated any realistic possibility that anunrecorded rogue bag could have been and was secreted onto KM180.

The result was that the Crown were at a complete loss tooffer any feasible explanation as to how those proceduresmight have been subverted so as to permit the suitcase to besmuggled aboard. The trial court acknowledged thisobstacle for the Crown: “If therefore the unaccompanied

bag was launched from Luqa, the method by which that wasdone is not established by the Crown. The absence of anyexplanation of the method by which the primary suitcasemight have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crown’s case” (para 38). Accordingly theyacquitted Fhima, who had been implicated primarily

because he was employed as Libyan Arab Airlines stationmanager at Luqa, was a close associate of al-Megrahi

having travelled to Tripoli and returned with him on 20December, and because of certain entries in his work diaryfrom which the Crown sought to infer that he had obtainedluggage tags from the airport and given them to al-Megrahito attach to the Samsonite.

However, the court chose to conclude nonetheless thatthe perpetrators had managed in some unspecified,unexplained and ingenious way – although one presumablyshort of the diabolic – to get the bag on to KM180 at Luqa.They reached this finding by reference to certain evidencein the case (in particular the evidence relating to proceduresat Frankfurt) and by ignoring other evidence, alsoconsidered later.

3. The Toshiba radio-cassette player and the MEBO

electronic timer

The case for the prosecution was that a minute searchconducted on the ground around Lockerbie producedsufficient fragments of evidence to show that the bomb wasan improvised Semtex device housed in a Toshiba RT-SF16stereo radio-cassette player. The model shared the name

BomBeat with the RT-F453D (the type seized by the BKAfrom Dalkamoni’s car). Three-quarters of the productionrun 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-13electronic timer manufactured by the Swiss companyMEBO, a number of which had been supplied to the Libyanmilitary. However, some MST-13 timers had been supplied

to other end users (notably to the East German Stasi) andthis fact coupled with the seizure of the Semtex bombdisguised in a Toshiba radio cassette recorder had beenseized by the BKA from suspected members of the PFLP-GC supported the formal defence denunciation, under theScottish justice system, of that organisation as the culprits.

The details relating to all this evidence are discussedlater.

MEBO’s owner, Edwin Bollier, had close associationswith the Libyan military and secret service and although thecourt dismissed much of his evidence indirectly suggestiveof Libyan involvement in the bombing they did accept fromhim that al-Megrahi had associations with JSO personnel.

4. Al-Megrahi’s two visits to Malta

As already mentioned, al-Megrahi appears originally tohave fallen under suspicion because he was discovered tohave been present in Malta on 20 and 21 December, 1988,

using a “coded” passport in the name of Abdusamad issuedunder the authority of the Libyan Government. He departed back to Tripoli from Luqa at roughly the same time asKM180 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 bothvisits he stayed at the Holiday Inn, Sliema, where he waswell known. He had used the alias passport previously,including when staying at the hotel in 1987. As former headof airline security he was well-known at Luqa and couldhardly conceal his presence there. On 20 December heclaimed a Libyan Arab Airlines discount from the hotel inhis own name and had entered the name of the hotel on his

landing and departure cards, from which his true identitycould easily have been established. In short, the coded passport was palpably a most unworthy instrument bywhich 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 thatthe reason for this is that it was destroyed by al-Megrahi’swife because she suspected that he had been using it toconduct 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 Crown’s case also containeditems of clothing which were traced to Mary’s House, inSliema, on the island of Malta. The police first approachedthe owner, Anthony Gauci, on 1 September, 1989, almostnine months after Pan Am 103 was blown up. He purportedto remember selling the clothing to a Libyan on a datewhich the court found to have been Wednesday, 7December, 1988, coinciding with al-Megrahi’s three-dayvisit to the island. The issue over the purchase of the clothes

proved to be the most crucial and contentious element in thetrial. Without it there was no case against al-Megrahi. It has

been reported that Gauci was paid $2 million for hisassistance (Severin Carrell, “Fresh doubts on Lockerbie

conviction.” The Guardian. 3.10.07). It is assumed any payment was ex post facto acknowledgment of the personalrisk he must have felt in assisting the investigation and mayor may not be relevant in any analysis of his reliability. But

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Lockerbie/Story/0,,2182343,00.html







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 al-Megrahi had been instrumental in getting it on board. Nor did they find that he brought bomb components to Malta on20 December and they rejected the Crown’s contention thathe had access to explosives in Malta. But they found that hewas involved as some sort of accessory on the basis of a

package of assumptions: (i) the MST-13 timer was a typewhich had been supplied, though apparently notexclusively, to the Libyan military/JSO; (ii) al-Megrahi wasa member of the JSO; (iii) he bought the clothes in thesuitcase from Mary’s House on 7 July; (iv) using a false

passport for unexplained purposes he made a flying visit toMalta on 20 December, returning to Tripoli next day at

virtually the same time as KM180 flew out; (v) althoughthere was no evidence as to how the bag could have been

placed on board KM180 at Luqa the Frankfurt evidence wasconsistent with the possibility that it was.

The court’s thinking seems to have boiled down to amost unjudicial circularity of assumptions. Having regard toal-Megrahi’s 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 al-Megrahi (a) was the purchaser of the clothes on 7December, (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 tothe purchaser and his brief presence in Sliema on 7December?

Oh, because the bomb had flown from Luqa on 21December when al-Megrahi was at the airport (and he wastherefore “connected” with planting it). But wait. Howcould they be sure it had started on its way from Luqa onthe 21st? Ah, because he was found to have bought theclothes (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 anevidential 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 whatis to be proved as a component of the would-be proof; inlayman’s idiom: begging the question. A fundamentalcorruption of basic logic thus intellectually bankrupted thewhole exercise. It was nothing short of an evidentialfeedback loop.

The circle will be broken if either or both of two

propositions are not proved, or better still dis proved. In thefirst place it can be shown that the fact that there is noexplanation as to how it could have been smuggled aboardKM180 is entirely consonant with other evidence showing

conclusively – as a stand-alone fact – that it did not arrive atHeathrow from Malta via Frankfurt, but that, contrary to thecourt’s judgment, it must have originated at Heathrow – thatis ingested into the system there.

The other factor which will break the circle isdemonstrating the unsoundness of the finding that al-

Megrahi was the purchaser of the clothes. If that finding iswholly unsustainable the circle is broken and the other components prove nothing. The case against al-Megrahidepends therefore on the question whether there is asubstantial 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 Gauci’sevidence as to the identity of the purchaser of the clothes.The key proposition implicit in Gauci’s evidence is that inspite of the lapse of ten months before he was first

approached by police he remembered the sale of theclothing in the suitcase and that was why he was able toremember and describe the purchaser. But if his assertionthat he had a true memory of the sale (rather than areconstructed, contrived one), is not plausible, he would nothave a memory of the purchaser. However, even if he didhave some memory of the sale it would not necessarilyfollow that he could have had a vivid memory of the

purchaser. So it is proposed to look briefly at the secondquestion first.

At no stage did Gauci purport to make a positiveidentification of al-Megrahi as the purchaser. At its highesthe 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 thecustomer’s age as around fifty (13.09.89; 25.09.89;10.09.90). In his statement of 1.09.89, Gauci described thecustomer as six foot or more with a big chest and largehead, as not fat but having a big stomach. On 25.09.89 hegave 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 theadjustment may be explained in part of course by his havinghad sight of al-Megrahi on the identification parade atCamp Zeist, Holland, on 13 April, 1999, there is another factor. When interviewed by the SCCRC he stated that herecalled someone reading him an article about the Lockerbiecase in the Il Torca newspaper for 7 March, 1999, in whichit was noted that the description he had given to policecontrasted with al-Megrahi, who was not well-built, not sixfeet tall (in fact he is only 5’7”) 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, thatthe customer was Libyan as distinct from some other NorthAfrican country. It may be that Libyans were the mostcommon Arab group to visit Malta and in particular Mary’s

House, but his assumption seems never to have beenexplored. (See psychological assessment of Gauci’sevidence by Professor David Canter of the University of Huddersfield International Research Centre for Investigative Psychology, commissioned by Taylor &Kelly, al-Megrahi’s solicitors, completed October 2006 butnever served on the Crown Office, available on-line from2009 via http://www.davidcanter.com, p.61.)

(c) Sketch and photo composite of the purchaser

On 13 September, 1989, Gauci assisted in the constructionof a police sketch and a composite photograph. Self-evidently the accuracy of such sketches and photographic

composites will vary and an unworthy construct cannonetheless blend itself into the witness’s mental image of the person and reinforce the original distorted memory. Anumber of research projects have demonstrated thataccuracy of selection from a photographic array will tend todecrease significantly following participation in the makingof a sketch or composite (cited by Prof Steven E. Clark of the University of California, Riverside, Report on

Identification Procedures: Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-

Megrahi v. H.M. Advocate, 18.12.08, p.19; reportcommissioned by Taylor & Kelly and served on the CrownOffice; 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 isthe 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 terroristAbu Talb was found in possession of clothes which weretraced back to Mary’s 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 theclothes. His portrait can also be viewed athttp://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 madeon 10 September, 1990, he said the hair style andappearance 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 articledated 5 November, 1989, featuring Abu Talb’s picture

captioned “Bomber”) Gauci told police, “I think the photograph printed in the newspaper may have been theman who bought the clothing. He looks like him. . . . Thatwas the name, Abu Talb. All I can say about the photograph

printed in the newspaper is that I think the man looks thesame as the one who bought the clothing.”

On 10 September, 1990, Gauci was shown a photographalbum. At trial DCI Henry Bell stated that Abu Talb’s

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 albumcontaining Abu Talb’s picture. In any event he continued toassert that the photograph in the Sunday Times (depictingAbu Talb) was similar to the man who bought the clothing.He also said that the picture of a man named SalemMohammed Abdel Hady Taha looked “similar” but was notold enough.

Having since September 1989 been asked by police tolook at photographic arrays on several occasions Gauci wasfirst invited to examine an array including al-Megrahi on 15February, 1991. Referring to the 12 men shown (with al-Megrahi 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). Hewas therefore asked to look at all the photographs carefullyand to try and allow for any age difference (seeminglyinnocuous instructions which Clark shows can lead to asignificantly 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 Talb’s photograph.Precisely when in relation to the fetching of the newspaper he gave his opinion remains uncertain but what he said wasthat al-Megrahi was similar to the man who bought theclothing. The eyebrows, nose, chin and face were the same,

but he was too young by ten years or more. “It’s been a long

time now and I can only say that [number 8] resembles theman who bought the clothing, but it is younger . . . I canonly 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 phraseologysuggests the newspaper might not yet been brought to himwhen he made the remark Maltese police security branchInspector Scicluna told the SCCRC in 2004 that he had thenewspaper in front of him at the same time as the array.

DCI Bell noted that Gauci, having made his statementabout 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 explicitfeedback or simply by observing the reaction of police, that“this one mattered” and that they believed he had picked theright man (p.33). He observes that such feedback mayincrease confidence in the selection, especially where thewitness appreciates the importance of his evidence and isanxious to be of assistance, with the consequently increasedrisk 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 eyewitnesscertainty and identification accuracy,” (2002) 87 Journal of

Applied Psychology, 112-120). The antidote, which alsoguards against pre-decision cueing, would have been a“double blind” procedure, in which the identity of thesuspect is not known to an investigator administering theviewing of the array, now best practice.

http://www.davidcanter.com/


http://www.megrahimystory.net/


http://www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/photoid.pdf



http://www.vetpath.co.uk/%20lockerbie/%20photoid.pdf










On 9 April, 1999, three days before Gauci flew toHolland with Mario Busuttil, a Maltese police officer, hehanded the officer the December 1998 edition of Focus

magazine containing an article on the Lockerbieinvestigation and, pointing to a photograph of al-Megrahi,said in Maltese “Dans hu,” which translates as “That’s

him.” Whatever reliance the Crown may have placed on thisit remains unclear whether he meant any more than that the

photograph depicted the man he had previously picked outas resembling the purchaser of the clothes.

The Camp Zeist ID parade On 13 April, 1999, eightdays after al-Megrahi was handed over by the Libyans,Gauci participated in an identification parade at Camp Zeistin 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 likeexactly is the number 5.” He then altered the words “it is” to“I saw him,” so the whole now read “Not exactly the man Isaw 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 statedthat he had picked out somebody as “resembling” the

purchaser, adding that “his hair was different, not so fulland was receding. He seemed narrower.” He mentioned thatal-Megrahi “seemed very nervous at the parade” and thismay 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 the12 men present to participate as foils only seven werechosen but eight of the twelve would have been in their 20sin 1988 and one would have been 14. Given that Gauci hadstated (15.2.91) that al-Megrahi (36 years old in 1988) was

too young (the purchaser being about fifty), selecting foilswho would have been that much younger still was absurd.Of the three remaining foils, one, although al-Megrahi’sage, was a Dutch policeman, so presumably of differentethnicity. One, though older, was much too short (5’3” – 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 al-Megrahi’s photograph and was asked to recall his havingsaid “Dans hu.” He was then asked if he could see the manwho bought the clothing and he replied, “He is the man onthis side.” He then instantly watered it down with the

qualification: “He resembles him a lot.” The invitation toGauci to make an identification was of course a classic“dock identification” procedure, seemingly only allowed inthis 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-Megrahi’sguilt, 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. Eventhen, the Crown failed to achieve the unequivocalidentification they were no doubt looking for.

Why the court plumped for al-Megrahi The literalityof the statement “he is the man on this side” was thenfurther diminished when he was shown Abu Talb’s

photograph. About him, too, remarkably, Gauci stated “Heresembles him a lot” and repeated this for emphasis. At first

blush this qualifier, coupled with the history of the

resemblance competition between the two suspects, oughtfinally to have put paid to the identification issue. But other circumstantial evidence induced the court to plump for al-Megrahi as the likely candidate and, in effect, to make afinding 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-Megrahiwas in Malta staying at the Sliema Holiday Inn coupledwith his visit to the island on 20 and 21 December, when,they found – in the teeth of evidence pointing to thecontrary – that the Samsonite bag had begun its journeyfrom Luqa. That will bring us shortly to the crucial issue of Anthony Gauci’s memory of the sale.

(e) Prior exposure to suggestive media coverage

In addition to the Il Torca (7.03.99) and Focus articles therewas of course considerable media coverage of the Lockerbiecase between 1991 and 2000 with al-Megrahi’s image being

frequently touted around (see the extensive list in Prof Clark’s report, p.4 and see also p.21). Of particular note aretwo Maltese TV broadcasts and two Maltese newspaper articles just over one week before the Camp Zeistidentification parade (ibid ). It is hard to exaggerate thesuggestive impact which all this material must have had onGauci. Citing a landmark study by Elizabeth Loftus andothers (Loftus, E.F., Miller, D.G., and Burns, H.J.,“Semantic integration of verbal information into a visualmemory,” (1978) 4 Journal of Experimental Psychology:

Human Learning & Memory, 19) Clark (p.33) makes thetelling point that by the time he saw the photograph hismemory of the actual event would have been weakest,

because it must have faded over time, whereas the “post-event” input would have been strongest, because it wasrelatively recent. His subsequent responses at the ID paradeand at trial would have been based in part on his memory of the photograph he had picked out on 15 February 1991 andon the subsequent media material, including, prominently,the Focus picture. In other words, eleven years after theevent he was likely to be remembering the image of a facehe had, in 1991, judged to be similar reinforced by repeatedmedia depictions, rather than making a judgment based

purely on an uncontaminated memory of the purchaser’sappearance in 1988.

(f) The al-Megrahi photograph in the original photospread

It is important to point out that when the police first askedGauci to look at the photospread of faces which included al-Megrahi (on February 15, 1991) they had in their possessiontwo photographs of him. These, too, can be viewed athttp://www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/ photoid.pdf ). Oneappears to have been a colour portrait later used in the 1991indictment and subsequent “wanted” posters, whichalthough 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 Czechimmigration records. Blurry and noticeably puffier than al-Megrahi’s longish face it is otherwise practicallyunrecognisable as al-Megrahi apart from some passingresemblance around the eyes. The distorted width of theface corresponds more to that in the constructs. Why the

police elected to use it instead of the colour portrait is open

http://www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/%20photoid.pdf







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-Megrahiwas overruled by senior officers “for fear of tainting thefirst identification.”

The decision is elemental in assessing the validity of hissubsequent statements regarding al-Megrahi’s resemblanceto the purchaser of the clothes at his shop. If, on the 15February, 1991, he said that aside from the question of agethe purchaser resembled that photograph (which bears littleresemblance to al-Megrahi), it must follow (especiallyhaving regard to the non-resemblance of the constructs toal-Megrahi) that the person he remembered at that stagecould scarcely have been al-Megrahi! The fact that at CampZeist Gauci picked out al-Megrahi demonstrates almostconclusively hat he must have been swayed by thesuggestive 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 Gauci’s memory of selling the clothes

We now turn to the question of Anthony Gauci’s memory of the sale of the clothes to the man the Crown alleged was al-Megrahi.

(a) General: the sale details remarkably recalled

Anthony Gauci was first interviewed by police on 1September, 1989, some 9 months after the alleged purchaseof the clothes. He was presented with articles from theaircraft 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 (incourt he said two pairs and added they were striped); a size42 Harris Tweed men’s jacket which had been in the shopfor about five years; two pairs of trousers; a blue babygro(subsequently described as pink, later reverting to blue)with a lamb’s face on the front (description changed towhole body in statement of 4 October, 1989); a black umbrella; and a red and large size black tartan cardigan (incourt he said two). For the first time at trial he said the man

bought two pullovers. In his original statement he said hethought 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, theamounts paid and the appearance of the customer – because,unusually, the man had shown no particular interest inchoosing 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 oneand when asked the colour replied blue. When the man

picked out a pair of men’s trousers Gauci says he asked himthe size. He answered “more or less my size” without doingwhat Gauci said Libyans normally oddly did, which is to

put their elbow into both sides of the trousers. It was, hesaid, “as if anything” he suggested the man should buy hewould take, an assertion which, as Canter notes, hardly

bears close scrutiny, implying as it does that Gauci offeredthe man random or inappropriate goods (p.38).

Canter makes the compelling argument that in thecontext of numerous other sales both beforehand and duringthe intervening 10-month period, with purchases doubtlessinvolving many different combinations of goods, andcustomers expressing many varying levels of overt interestin their purchases, the behaviour would need to have been

remarkably unusual to be memorable (pp.43-44). With nofocus in the interviews on these comparative factors nodiscernible reason had emerged as to why the particular salecould 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 ahandicap in determining the extent to which Gauci wasrelying 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 thanthose back home may buy a selection of clothing thinkingthat 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 thesignificance of that episode until nine months afterwards itwould have been invested with no emotional impact of thedegree necessary to render it memorable for him. Even tooffer information on payments without any explanation of their significance raised questions as to how much thewitness was trying to help by providing details of which hecould hardly have been sure. Thus, his purported memory of the details was “incompatible with what we know aboutmemory processes” (see Canter, pp.25 and 38).

Canter argues persuasively that in the absence of any

clear and compelling explanation of why the reportedcombination 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 Gauci’s reasons for professing toremember the episode seem utterly contrived, if not whollyfanciful. But it hardly needed Canter’s take on the obviousto underline this point. It is difficult to understand why theinvestigators, the Crown Office and the judges completelyfailed to see it for themselves!

Canter’s contention that there was little in Gauci’saccount of the sale to justify the supposition that it wouldhave been authentically memorable contrasts starkly with

Ashton and Ferguson’s assumption to the contrary (see p.359). In their view the purchaser had done just abouteverything possible to draw attention to himself short of “prancing round naked” (p.359). Indeed, their assumptionthat the behaviour was memorable formed the basis of their suggestion that it may have been deliberately aimed atincriminating Libya:

“He had chosen a small shop, in which he was theonly customer, and had bought a random collection of clothes without bothering to try them on. He had thenasked for them to be wrapped and, just in case theshopkeeper had not had a proper look at him, returnedfor the clothes in a taxi. The bombers had then left allthe labels in the clothes, increasing the risk of the trailleading back to the island. It was surely not beyond therealms of possibility that they had used a Libyan proxy




to buy the clothes and thereby lay a false trail back toTripoli.”

(b) Specifics: evidence and inconsistences as to the day of

the clothes purchase

Quite apart from the general point about the fundamentalimplausibility of Gauci’s assertion that nine months after what must have been a wholly unmemorable transaction heactually remembered the sale, its details and the purchaser,the prosecution faced the considerable problem of hisinconsistency and apparent confusion regarding theapproximate date relative to Christmas 1988 which he gavefor the sale of the clothing (see Canter, pp.30, 36-37 and87). It was established that the sale took place after 18

November, 1988, because a fragment of a pair of tartanYorkie brand trousers found with the suitcase, bore an order number which showed delivery to Mary’s House on thatdate. But beyond that nothing was certain.

General approximations of the date in priorstatements In his dealings with the police Gauci gavevarious approximations for the date of the sale: some timein 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 dateof purchase. However, he then stated – for the first time – “slightly before Christmas it was. I don’t remember theexact date, but it must have been about a fortnight beforeChristmas, but I can’t remember the date.”

Christmas lights: statements The late narrowing down

of the date to a fortnight before Christmas was clearlyinduced by a confusion with his earlier use, as a reference point, of the approximate date when the shop’s Christmasdecorations went up. In his statement of 19.9.89 he placedthis “about 15 days before Christmas” and said that they“were not up” when the man bought the clothes. On10.9.89, 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 Ihave already said.”

Christmas lights: trial However, on being asked at thetrial, how long before Christmas the lights were put up heinitially contradicted his earlier statements, saying that the

lights “were on already.” Having agreed that hisrecollection at the time of his statements was better than itwas now and on being reminded that he had told the policethat the sale was made before the decorations went up hereplied that he did not know but, seeming to take refuge insome sort of perceived compromise, said he believed theywere “putting up the lights.” This was an entirely newdeparture but he attempted to attribute his confusion to the

possibility that the lights were on when police investigatorscame to collect him for interview. However, it was on19.9.89 that he first told police there had been no Christmasdecorations up at the time of the purchase, so there couldhave been no question of Christmas lights being up when

the police came to collect him for that interview and so noquestion of any confusion at that stage. Thus, when he wasasked in cross-examination if when he made that statement

he believed that there were no Christmas decorations upwhen the man bought the clothes, he conceded “Maybe.”

Christmas lights: date now known Although the policewere unable to discover from local inquiries when exactlythe Christmas lights went up in the neighbourhood the thenMayor of Sliema, later Maltese High Commissioner to the

UK, has since stated that he presided over the switching onof the lights on 6 December. So if Gauci’s originalstatements were correct and the lights were not in fact on atthe time of the purchase, the date could not have been 7December, when al-Megrahi was on the island.

Reference to “midweek” In his statement of 1.9.89Gauci said he could not remember the day of the week butthought it would have been a weekday. On 19.9.89 he saidhe was “sure it was midweek.” On 10.9.90 he repeated hecould only say it was a weekday. In evidence-in-chief heclearly stated he had no idea what day of the week it was

but in cross-examination when asked by reference to hisstatement what he meant by “midweek” he replied it was

not a Saturday and he did not want to say it was a Friday, ananswer 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” andstayed with it when asked if the term could be applied to thethree middle weekdays. (It has already been mentioned that7 December fell on a Wednesday.) It is almost a truism thatwitnesses often feel the need, when pressed, to appear to bemore certain than they are. One wonders also if Wednesdaymight have been planted in his mind during one of his manyinterviews and unconsciously retained.

Televised football In his 1.9.89 statement Gauci said hewas alone in the shop on the afternoon of the sale as his

bother Paul had gone home to watch a televised footballmatch. He suggested that Paul might be able to identify thedate and day from the game but no evidence was led aboutany televised football matches Paul had watched. At thetrial, for the first time, Gauci said that Paul had arrived andhe had asked him to keep an eye on the shop while he,Anthony, took the purchases out to the taxi. He explainedthat Paul “must have been watching football, and when hecomes late, that is what usually happens, so I think that waswhat happened that day.” In a joint minute it was agreedthat football had been broadcast on Italian TV channels on

Wednesday, 23 November and 7 December, 1988. Paulmade a statement to police on 19 October, 1989 in which hereferred to a list of UEFA matches the police had shownhim and he professed to work out that on the basis that therewere two games played during the afternoon of 23

November and only one on the afternoon of 7 November “Iwould say that the 23 November 1988 was the date inquestion.” At a time when Abu Talb was the prime suspectthis tied in neatly with the Palestinian’s presence in Maltaon that date. Paul later made a statement revising hissupposition and giving instead the 7 December, whichcorresponded of course with the presence in Malta of al-Megrahi – by that time the main suspect. However, for whatmust be fairly obvious reasons he was not called as awitness.

Rainfall At trial Gauci adopted his 1.9.89 statement thatit was raining when the man left the shop and he opened the




umbrella (one of the items purchased), and his 21.2.90statement that when the man returned the umbrella wasdown 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 thatlight 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 awitness and cited his daily log to show a light one-minuteshower on the morning of Wednesday, 7 December, 1988,

but no rain in Sliema between 6 and 7pm, although he couldnot exclude a few drops of rain “here and there . . . a ten per cent probability” but that it would be insufficient to wet theground. On Wednesday, 23 November, 1988, recordsshowed light intermittent rain in Sliema from noon onwardswith 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) It was midweek, by which Gauci meant aWednesday.

(ii) Paul had been watching football on the date of the purchase and this would have been either 23

November or 7 December (both Wednesdays).(iii) The records of rainfall did not rule out 7

December as the date of purchase.(iv) Although it remained unclear whether or not

the Christmas lights were up on the day of purchase this was not inconsistent with Gauci’s“rather confused” recollection that the date of

purchase was about the time the lights were

being put up.(v) This was consistent with Gauci’s memory thatthe date was about two weeks before Christmas

(vi) The date was therefore 7 December, 1988.

Putting that inference together with the other evidence thecourt found that it was al Megrahi who bought the clothesand that he did so in the knowledge that they were to beused in construction of the bomb.

(c) Strained inferences

The court’s reasoning was palpably defective. As to (a),Gauci’s explanation of his use of “midweek” to mean

Wednesday was hesitant and very belated. As to (b), thetrial court misconstrued the terms of the joint minute tomean that it was agreed only that matches were broadcast atcertain 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 defencesubmission on this point but dismissed its materiality,

presumably because 23 November remained a potentiallyviable (and exculpatory) date for the purchase. (On the other hand, it could have been another Wednesday, or, for thatmatter 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 notremember the date, having repeatedly insisted to them thatthe Christmas lights were not up, he suddenly remembers, atthe trial – twelve years after the event – that it was about

two weeks before Christmas and the lights were up,expediently altering this to “putting up the lights” whenconfronted with his earlier position. Yet picking aboutamongst the debris of his confusion and inconsistency thecourt 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 interpretedfootball minute and the slim-possibility-of-a-brief-rain-shower evidence.

The result? Hey presto! Wednesday 7 December: thevery date al-Megrahi happens to be in Malta. So because al-Megrahi supposedly resembled the purchaser (as did AbuTalb) – though by no stretch of imagination either the policesketch or the photofit – he must have been the purchaser, aconclusion reinforced in the trial court’s mind by hisundisputed presence in Malta on 21 December and their arbitrary finding that in spite of evidence pointing to thecontrary, which they acknowledged was sound, the bag hadthat day been loaded onto KM180 at Luqa. Even if the date

had been 7 December, al-Megrahi’s presence in Sliemawould 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 themselvesinherently defective the combination can hardly make upthe deficit. Circumstantial evidence? More like ChicoMarx’s “the party of the first part” routine, an exercise inquite 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 thecase there are a number of uncertainties andqualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem tofit together and ignoring other parts which might notfit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflictingevidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really

justified” (para 89).

(d) Self-contradiction on the mens’ shirts

Another topic which strongly indicated Gauci’s unreliability

was his evidence about the purchase of shirts. Wheninterviewed by police on 30 January, 1990, Gauci wasshown a blast-damaged piece of grey shirt with a “Slalom”label on the pocket and a complete grey Slalom shirt. Hesaid he had had such shirts in stock for about two or threeyears, in beige, in grey and in sky blue. He was also showna blast-damaged piece of blue and white striped cloth andstated that he had “a small stripe like that; it is on a girl’sshirt, a Slalom one I think.”

However, he was adamant (“for sure”) that he did notsell any shirts to the man he had sold the other items. On

being interviewed on 10 September, 1990, he stated thatabout 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 lightdenim (texture) material shirt” and he remembers that hesold the officers shirts “like these.” Yet in spite of his clear




assertion in January 1990 that he remembered that in late1988 he did not sell any shirts to the man, he now, inSeptember 1990, remembered that the man who bought theclothing did also buy “a Slalom shirt and a blue and whitestriped 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” (didhe 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 howthis could “act as a prompt” to reinstate a memory of sellingshirts to the man, where previously he had explicitly anddistinctly remembered not selling him any (p.27).

Canter argues (p.26) that showing the witness fragmentsof blast-damaged clothing was in effect to ask leadingquestions and constituted poor interview technique.According to modern best practice, involving the cognitivemethod of confining an interview to the asking of openquestions, he should simply have been invited to provide a

description of any clothes he remembered selling the man. Itmay be observed that although initially when shown thefragments he emphatically remembered not selling the manany shirts the combination of the leading form of questionand an undoubted unconscious desire to assist the policehaving regard to the gravity of the allegation may haveworked 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 shotthrough with deficiencies apparent on the face of the record.

But quite apart from those defects, the prosecution wasinherently vitiated by the fact that, so far as is known, noaudio-recordings (let alone video recordings) were made of any of the police interviews with Gauci. So the world willnever know for certain what subtle influences might haveinduced Anthony Gauci to recall an incident which bothcommon sense and psychological principles seem to dictatehe would have been unlikely to remember. This manifestlack of transparency is one which continues to pose a veryserious problem for criminal justice, one which the presentauthor and his long-time collaborator, Anthony Heaton-Armstrong, 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 Gauci’s firstinterview it is a shortcoming which of itself and withoutmore would have diminished greatly the safety of al-Megrahi’s conviction.

IV. ESTABLISHING THE DESCRIPTION OF THE

IMPROVISED BOMB

1. The process of identification

It has been too widely reported for dispute that within hoursof the destruction of Pan Am 103 numerous personnel in USGovernment service were engaged across the crash site in

various unexplained activities not necessarily connectedwith assisting in the regular police and AAIB investigation.These included the FBI forensic investigator James “Tom”

Thurman. (For a detailed account see Ashton and Ferguson,op cit , chap 1.)

Air Accident Investigations Board experts swiftlyidentified 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 beentrapped – or stuffed – in the fold, fell out. Pressed in withthe lump he found the “browny coloured” fragment of a

printed circuit board (PCB) bearing the white printedcharacters “L106” and perpendicular to them the whitenumbers “101.” As it had the “potential to be associatedmaybe with a device” Claiden photographed both sides,sealed it in a plastic jar and handed it to the police. It wasforwarded to the Royal Armament Research andDevelopment Establishment where scientist Allen Fereday

took charge of it under exhibit designation AG/145. Hetestified 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 bethought to be curious that a blast which destroys almostevery trace of the electrical appliance housing the bombmerely succeeds in delicately peeling the lacquer off thePCB fragment.) Among the aggregate Fereday foundanother piece 5 x 5mm marked “02” and some fragments of white plastic.

Still in January, he travelled to Germany where hecompared the L106 fragment with the PCB in the seizedToshiba 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 tentativelyidentified the fragment as originating from a Toshiba RT-8016 or RT-8026 stereo radio-cassette player, the plastic

bodies of both of which were white. However, visitingToshiba’s HQ in Japan at the end of April he decided that ithad come from an RT-SF16, a stereo model also bearing the

BomBeat name. It was similar to the RT8016/8026 exceptthat 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 disintegratingaircraft across to the North Sea. Sixty miles from LockerbieGeoff and Gwendoline (Decky) Horton found strewn acrosstheir farm numerous personal effects from the plane,Christmas cards written by children on board, letters and thelike, which they described as all “quite harrowing.” They

put their finds in a polythene bag and handed it to a policeofficer. In court Mrs Horton claimed she rememberedseeing an 8 by 8 inch sheet of paper which related to a radioor something electrical but she said nothing about the name“Toshiba.” In a later TV interview she did mention havingseen that name but by then she could well have beeninfluenced unconsciously by the knowledge that what she

was supposed to have found were the remains of the frontcover of a Toshiba manual. In court she was presented withan exhibit consisting of an assembly of fragments of part of the front cover of a Toshiba SF16 manual. Only “IIBA” was

http://www.davidwolchover.co.uk/






visible of the name but “SF16” and BomBeat” were visible(for a photograph see http://locerebiedivide.blogspot.com/, under “Primary Evidence: Toshiba Owner’s Manual”).

Mrs Horton stated that she did not recognise the exhibit:whatever she had found had been more or less intact. TheCrown’s 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 toachieve its complete incineration. There was a record thatthe manual cover had been photographed before it was sentto the Metropolitan Police for fingerprint testing but MrsHorton was never shown that photograph. The suggestionmay be that there was little difference in its visible state.Brian Walton, the officer to whom the Hortons had handedthe bag of paper items they had found claimed to recollectthe front cover, describing it as having “tiny bits of singeingon some of the edges of the pieces.” Without being tooliteral his answer seems to confound the proposition that it

had been dismembered by testing. As he also stated that atthe time it had no significance for him it seems somehowdoubtful that he actually had any memory of it but wasresponding to an expectation. If it was indeed torn across inat least two places, almost in three separate pieces it seemsunlikely that Mrs Horton would have remembered it as anintact page.

Allen Fereday returned to the UK from visiting ToshibaHQ in Japan at the beginning of May 1989, bringing withhim a boxed up SF16 and at least one SF16 instructionmanual. Then by another one of those curious coincidenceswhich set the Lockerbie case apart, and in a reversal of themore 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, themanual cover allegedly found by the Hortons was receivedand assimilated at RARDE. It was followed by thediscovery 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 Owner’s Manual”for a review of the chronology, details and odditiessurrounding the designation of exhibit reference numbers.)

In the wake of the “Autumn Leaves” revelations the proven use of a Toshiba radio-cassette player for theLockerbie bomb seemed to implicate the PFLP-GC,

although the alleged discovery of evidence pointing to theuse of an SF16 subsequently went some way to letting thatorganisation off the hook. Marwan Khreesat, the Frankfurtcell’s 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 anSF16 or other stereo model. We have already discussed thatclaim 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 whichcountry three-quarters of the production run of that modelhad been shipped. This seemed to be reinforced by thecontention that the bomb was triggered by an electronictimer.

V. ELECTRONIC TIMER OR BAROMETRIC TRIGGER ?

1. Implicating Libya with an electronic timer

As previously mentioned, in the first few months after thedestruction of Pan Am 103 the gravamen of suspicion

focused on the PFLP-GC. That organisation was known tohave developed expertise in building and plantingimprovised bombs on civil airliners and the hallmark of thetypical PFLP-GC device was the barometric pressuretrigger, which would work automatically when the planehad reached a certain altitude. A mere two months beforeLockerbie police had arrested members of the West Germancell in possession of a completed bomb equipped with justsuch a trigger.

For reasons which remain notoriously unclear but whichsensitive guesswork can intelligently conjecture, the processof attributing blame shifted to Libya, a change of directionlargely initiated by American investigators. Lying at theheart of the change was the question whether or not the

bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was operated by analtitude sensitive trigger characteristic of PFLP-GC devices.

The case against al-Megrahi and therefore against Libyawas predicated on the supposition that the bomb in asuitcase which destroyed the Pan Am jetliner had originally

been introduced into the baggage system at Malta, that ithad been flown to Frankfurt, transferred on to a Pan Amfeeder flight bound for Heathrow, where it was loaded on tothe doomed plane. To prove this theory it was obviouslyessential to show that detonation must have been by meansof an electronic timer, with the time to detonation set inMalta before the bomb was smuggled into the system manyhours beforehand. If this could be demonstrated it wouldmean that the method of detonation was quite different fromthe barometric-pressure-controlled Toshiba device seizedfrom the PFLP-GC in Germany and would tend to pointaway from that terrorist group’s responsibility. Theinvestigators thought they could prove the use of such atimer: allegedly found in the neck of the blast-damagedremnant of a Slalom shirt forensically linked to theSamsonite hardshell suitcase which had contained the bombwas Zeist trial Crown exhibit PT35b. This was thefingernail 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. Allfifteen of the production run had been supplied to theLibyan military, in addition to five prototypes, but three

prototypes had also been supplied to the Stasi, the EastGerman intelligence agency which had close links with boththe 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 aswere those in the production run and an independent expertfound 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 andthe Autumn Leaves evidence were used as the basis of the

formal defence denunciation, under the Scottish justicesystem, of the PFLP-GC as the perpetrators.

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2. The inherent (and decisive) advantage of the

barometric trigger

The possibility that the evidence of the discovery of thefragment was concocted has been the subject matter of almost endless rumour, innuendo and debate. At the Zeisttrial the defence adopted a low key policy of casting doubt

as to its provenance without making any explicitallegations. But in the end the contention that PT35bactually came from the aircraft bears little serious inquiry.The most powerful indication of what method of triggeringthe bomb the terrorists employed will depend on anexamination of the inherent pros and cons of the one againstthe other. It is an examination which will show the inherentimprobability of the use by the terrorists of an electronictimer.

Successful destruction of an airliner obviously dependson the ability to ensure that the aircraft is in flight when the

bomb detonates. Given the vagaries of delay andcancellation endemic in airline timetabling, a stand-alone

timer operated bomb can rarely, if ever, be guaranteed todestroy an aircraft in flight. To address this problem Jibriland Khreesat devised the altitude sensitive barometrictrigger. When the pressure inside the vacuum chamber fellto about 950 millibars – the normal air pressure at 2,500 feet

– it would activate the timer which in turn would detonatethe Semtex. Although aircraft are pressurised, including theluggage holds, the pressure maintained is significantly lessthan that at sea level. The first use of this method by thePFLP-GC, in 1970, destroyed a Swissair plane flying fromZurich to Tel Aviv. This and subsequent incidents led tothe installation at some airports (including Frankfurt) of vacuum chambers in which suspect luggage could besubjected to lowered atmospheric pressure under controlledconditions. Any explosion would damage only the chamber and its contents. In response Khreesat introduced a simplecapacitor-type time delay which required the lowered

pressure to be maintained for at least 30 minutes beforedetonation. 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 inOctober, 1988, and April, 1989.

Tests conducted by BKA experts showed that althoughthe 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 50minutes after takeoff. Pan Am 103 had been in the air for 38 minutes when the bomb exploded. One prominentcommentator 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 bombseized by the BKA will cause an explosion in the region of 38 minutes after take-off on a standard ascent, and theexplosion of the Pan Am 103 bomb after exactly that timeinto the flight, that they . . . ignored it (Foot, op cit , p.25).

By contrast with the barometric trigger, the MST-13 is asimple countdown timer. The time can be set exactly towithin 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 leftHeathrow on time, but it could easily have been otherwisefor an evening departure from one of the world’s busiest

airports during the immediate pre-Christmas holiday rush.Indeed, the flight almost lost its departure slot twice, thesecond time because of the late arrival of PA103A, thefeeder flight from Frankfurt. Given the scope allowed by anelectronic timer for setting a detonation time long into aflight over the Atlantic the terrorists would hardly have

chosen instead to incur the cumulative risk of delay and arelatively harmless detonation on the tarmac or, if the planedid happen to leave on time, bringing it down over landusing a bomb wrapped in brand new easily-traced clotheswith their labels still attached.

The relatively small amount of Semtex contained in theradio-cassette player had a catastrophic effect only becauseof the outboard positioning of the suitcase in the baggagecontainer. Leaving the positioning of the bomb to chance(which is implicit in the notion that it was sent from Maltawith an electronic timer and no accomplice intervention atHeathrow) 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 andmight have allowed the crew to make an emergencylanding. In the early 1970s there were two such luckyescapes following the planting of bombs by the PFLP-GC.For that very reason, it would have been logical to delayignition until the plane was calculated to be well into itsAtlantic crossing and beyond the possibility of its beingable to return to or reach any convenient airfield. In other words, deliberately setting an early time for the explosionwould have been incompatible with not being able tocontrol the positioning of the bomb in the container atHeathrow (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 possiblemeant that this could not be left to chance but would haverequired terrorist intervention at Heathrow. By a process of irrefutable logic this demonstrates conclusively there wasno 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 Heathrowthere would have been no point whatsoever in using anelectronic timer. A barometric trigger would have been theonly reasonable choice.

If flown in from Frankfurt it would have had to be primed at Heathrow by an accomplice plugging in the mainswitch, in which case there would have been little point

sending it from Malta, where security was tight, or evenFrankfurt, where a watch for Toshiba housed bombs was inforce. By contrast the best airport to introduce the bag intothe system was undoubtedly Heathrow, where security wasnotoriously lax, with hundreds of airside passesunaccounted for. As already mentioned, Heathrow is alsothe 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 baseshere be used in the 1986 raid on Libya? Quite apart from thefact that even in our populous island most land remainsopen countryside (with the prospect of doing no more than“scaring a few sheep,” as it has been put) the short answer isthat the usual “Great Circle” route was west over the IrishSea and neutral Ireland, the country whose IRA “freedomfighters” Gaddafi had been actively assisting with supplies




of Semtex and armaments throughout the 1980s. In fact theflight was only diverted northwards because of bad weather.In any event, such a motive would hardly have outweighedthe delay risk factor or the possibility of a safe emergencylanding.

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-GCdevices. As an aside it may be wryly amusing to refer to theclaim made to camera by Ahmed Jibril in AllanFrancovich’s 1994 documentary The Maltese Double Cross

(ref: 37 mins of 2hrs 35 mins) that the barometric pressuretrigger was for use in destroying Israeli army bases on thetops of mountains. No mountains in Israel or nearby (noteven the celestially proximate summit of Mount Sinai) areanything like as high as the 10,000 feet needed to activatethe 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 castcase (Ashton and Ferguson, p. 235). The well known “trialloading” photograph exhibited at Zeist shows the interior of a Toshiba radio-cassette player loaded with explosivematerial and an MST-13. The photograph perfectlyillustrates the two specific reasons why the use of such atimetable would have been wholly unsuitable. First, in

preparing the trial loading technicians had to remove thetimer from its metal casing in order to fit it in to the body of the Toshiba. The effect of this would have been seriously toundermine its reliability. Second, the Toshiba is shown withthe 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 wouldhave made the device particularly vulnerable to detection. Itwould have been very easy to spot when passed through anx-ray machine. By contrast, the pressure switch and simpledelay timer used in PFLP-GC devices were much morecompact and would easily have fitted into a radio-cassette

player without removal of its components. It shouldadditionally be observed that removed from the relative

protection of the diecast casing the PCB would have beeneven more likely to have been totally obliterated by theSemtex 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-damagedneck of a Slalom shirt was picked up off the ground in opencountryside over twenty miles from Lockerbie. The expertsconcluded it had been in the suitcase carrying the bomb.When the shirt neck was first examined by Dr ThomasHayes at the Royal Armaments Research and DevelopmentEstablishment (RARDE) laboratory on 12 May 1989, hefound PT35b somehow wedged in the material. Accordingto 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 cameabout after enlarged photographs of the fragment wereforwarded by Scottish police to FBI headquarters in

Washington DC. On 15 June, 1990, FBI forensicinvestigator James Thurman professed to identify it as partof a MEBO MST-13 electronic timer. When, soonafterwards, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamsonof the Dumfries and Galloway constabulary and Mr AllenFereday 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 andrecently passed over to the FBI (Ashton and Ferguson,

p.305). In fact, the Togo timer PCB was double-sidedwhereas PT35b was single-sided. Moreover it may wellhave been manufactured not by MEBO at all but by anAmerican company [ibid , pp.269-273].

For the record it should be noted that two reportsinconsistent with this account appeared in print during theearly 1990s. In one, it was Thurman himself who found thefragment in the shirt collar (Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau

– Inside Today’s FBI , London: Macmillan, 1994). In a

second account, the fragment was found in a field by aScottish worker in April 1990 (Mark Perry, Eclipse – the

Last Days of the CIA, Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 1992).These were almost certainly journalistic misunderstandingsof semi-official briefings. It is unlikely Thurman wouldhave 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 searchof the crash site environs (points made by Ashton andFerguson, pp.168-169).

Prior to Lockerbie the US authorities were alreadycognisant of Libyan involvement with the MST-13 timer. InFebruary 1988 Senegalese police had arrested two Libyan

agents in Dakar on a stop-over to the Ivory Coast and seizedat least one MST-13 timer in their possession. A CIAoperative based in Dakar gave evidence at Zeist that he had

been made fully aware of the incident, having beensummoned to the airport and informed of the situation. Theagents were released in June but reports conflict on whathappened to the timer or timers (Ashton and Ferguson,

pp.169-170). According to Mark Perry ( Eclipse) all seizedmaterial 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 Hicks’sreference to “devices that had been recovered” (The FBI:

Insider the World’s Most Powerful Law Enforcement

Agency: London: Corgi, 1994). This tallies with thestatement of Sunday Times investigative journalist DavidLeppard in his book On the Trail of Terror: The Inside

Story of the Lockerbie Investigation (London: JonathanCape 1991) that photographs and control samples wereobtained from Senegal by the Scottish police.

Various commentators have noted that during thesummer of 1990 the CIA had completed an intelligenceassessment on whether PT35b matched the Senegal timer or timers. It is unclear whether this was before or after Thurman’s purported identification of the fragment,whether, in other words, the CIA were induced to preparethe 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 wereworking in conjunction with him. In any event, according to




Leppard the Scottish police travelled to Senegal in August1990 after being informed of the CIA assessment and thematerial they brought back was immediately forwarded toDr Hayes, who promptly and triumphantly confirmed thematch under the microscope. Perry puts Hayes’s matchmuch later, in October. If he is right and the Scottish

officers only came back from Senegal with photographswhat else might Hayes have had available to make thematch? The Scottish team had originally tried to visit theMEBO offices in early September 1990 but it was not untilmid November 1990 that, delayed perhaps by secretAmerican obstructiveness (see Zeist transcript, 8 June,2000, pp.3004-3005; Ashton and Ferguson, p.275) DCIWilliamson 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; Ashtonand 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 anintuitive leap or whether, on the other hand, a determinationwas 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 sucha timer. Even if, between the CIA and the FBI the pennyhad not yet dropped about the Senegal timers whenThurman professed to identify PT35b (a most unlikelynotion) American intelligence was for a very long timesecretive, not to say coy, about the fact that from a veryearly stage in the inquiry they had been in possession of information pointing to the use of an MST-13. In the wordsof Ashton and Ferguson (p.305)–

“For nine years the British and American governmentshad insisted that the Lockerbie investigators hadfingered Libya as the result of straightforwarddetective work.”

But then it emerged only during the trial for the first timethat no more than two weeks after the destruction of PanAm 103 Edwin Bollier, the MEBO company’s director, hadwritten to the CIA reporting that MEBP had sold MST-13timers to Libya.

5. A legion of doubts on the documentation relating to

the fragment PT35b

Going hand in glove with the general implausibility of theidea that the bomb was operated by an electronic timer andthe curiosity of the fact that the investigators were clearlyfocusing on the use in the bomb of an MST-13 18 months

before PT-35b was identified as a component there are a raftof problematical issues relating to the discovery anddocumentation of the fragment. Some at least of these didnot leave even the otherwise insouciant judges entirelyuntroubled. 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 throughthe word “cloth” and writing “debris” alongside it someonehad gone to some trouble to overwrite each letter in anapparent attempt to obliterate or disguise the previous word.

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 theexhibit was produced in court. DC Thomas Gilchrist, one of the two Scottish police officers who assumed responsibilityfor 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 hehad been asked to make the alteration, an assertion hardlyconsistent with professing a blank memory. Asked why hemight have made the change, his explanation, according tothe judges, was “at worst evasive and at best confusing.” Hewas also unable to explain why the collar had not beenlogged 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 tohave 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 52-56and the dates were out of sequence. Hayes was unable tooffer any credible explanation, describing it as “anunfathomable mystery.” He was unable to explain why anexhibit 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 nomateriality.”

A further curiosity relating to the fragment is that inSeptember 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 beendiscovered were not forwarded. That too was not consideredto be of any significance.

In May 1989, when the collar was allegedly firstexamined, the RARDE team were desperately trying (withsome success) to find pieces of the Toshiba radio cassette

player’s PCBs in order to get a better identification on it.Toshiba radio cassette player PCBs were brown but thefragment was green so it might conceivably have been partof the bomb circuitry itself. Yet Dr Hayes merely made anote of a “fragment of green circuit board” and supposedlyfiled it away in the basement until September.

The fragment was never tested for explosive residue. Inother circumstances the reasons cited for this by AllenFereday at the trial might have been understandable: itssmall size, the relative cost and effort involved, and its self-evident involvement in the explosion, having allegedly beenfound inside blast damaged clothes. But given the enormous

potential significance of the find and the huge geopoliticalissues and juridical questions which were likely to arisefrom it such excuses sound more suspicious than lame.Certainly when it came to trekking around Europeconsulting electronics firms for help in identifying thefragment the Dumfries and Galloway police were unsparingof expense. James Thurman, the FBI investigator who

played such a pivotal role in bringing forward the evidencewhich 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 fragmentin the collar and was responsible for laboratory work on it,left RARDE under a cloud in the autumn of 1989 when itwas revealed that he had given what was later judicially

described as wholly misleading evidence relating to thealleged detection of explosive traces on the hands of the“Maguire Seven” defendants. The work of Allen Fereday ina number of high profile cases has been criticised judicially.(For an informative summary of the criticisms of Hayes andFereday in other cases see Ashton and Ferguson, pp.196-203.)

6. Miraculous survival of two chips and a scrap of paper

We now come to what may be the single most compellingquestion mark hanging over the timer fragment, as well asover the 10 x 6mm PCB fragment which supposedly led to

the identification of the Toshiba RT-SF16 BomBeat radio-cassette player. From the “trial loading,” that is thesimulated 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 fragmentwould have come from a point on the intact PCB located nomore than 1 inch from 450 grams of Semtex with only air

between. The timer PCB fragment would have been nomore than 2 inches away, again separated from the Semtex

by air. Yet rather than being reduced to at bestunrecognisable slivers, although far more probably just dustalong with the rest of the PCB, what supposedly survivesfrom 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, thewhite printed characters still perfectly legible, when noother substantial pieces of the PCB of which it formed a

part were found during the painstaking fingertip searchconducted around Lockerbie seems to defy the naturalorder. That two such signposting pieces, each neatly

providing evidence of the particular device from which it issaid to have come, should have survived in this way canonly be described as a double miracle. (However, the

science and method of an attempt to validate common senseexperimentally has been roundly criticised as unsound: seehttp://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/2010/01/evidence-reconsidered-ied-fragment .html.)

And then we have the cover of the SF16 manual. It wasa remarkably robust piece of paper. Not only had it, in thewords of Dr Hayes, “survived a close-range explosioninvolvement,” 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 survivedthe buffeting and drenching of a 90 mph gale which carriedit from nearly 31,000 feet aloft to its landing place 60 milesfrom Lockerbie where it lay on soaking wet grass all night

long and into the next afternoon. It ought to have been papier-mâché. But it was the clue which identified theToshiba model. So now we have a triple miracle. But thiswas perhaps only to be expected in a case abounding with –

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 relatingto 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 whichturned out to be of major significance to this enquirydespite its miniscule size may not initially have beengiven the same meticulous treatment as most other items, we are nevertheless satisfied that the fragmentwas extracted by Dr Hayes in May 1989 from theremnant of the Slalom shirt found by DC Gilchrist andDC McColm.”

8. The critical lie which time forgot

So far in this section we have dwelt mainly on theauthenticity of the physical evidence of the timer fragmentPT35b, although we have touched upon some aspects of relevant witness credibility. However, we now come to anaspect of witness credibility which at least as compellinglyas any other factor in the case conducive to doubt may besufficient in itself to drive a coach and horses through thecredibility of the story of the fragment’s provenance. It isthe account James Thurman himself caused to be given – inthe 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 casingand supporting a “thumb switch” consisting of discsnumbered around the edge by which a delay in hours andminutes could be set. Of particular importance is the factthat 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 photographsreveal the now familiar “finger pad” element, resemblingthe numeral “1”, and two parallel tracking lines. This wasall Thurman would have had to go on in any quest todiscover the fragment’s identity. But, almost miraculously

according to him, he succeeded. That it was either a feat of brilliant detective work or an elaborate charade to divertattention from Iran and the PFLP-GC and on to Libya iscentral to the identity of the perpetrators. From where theinspiration came to Thurman that the fragment was from aMEBO MST-13 is obscure. The big question is whether theFBI’s awareness of the existence of, and connection toLibya, of MST-13 timers occasioned or led to the discoveryof PT35b. To be less oblique, is it not at least conceivablethat 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? Inshort, was the evidence of the finding of PT35bmanufactured? If nothing else, Thurman’s behaviour

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strongly suggests this was not merely conceivable but was probable. Why?

Indictments against al-Megrahi and Fhima were issuedsimultaneously by the U.S. State Department and theScottish Crown Office on 14 November, 1991 (seeA&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 programmeanchored by Peter Jennings featured Thurman in its four and a half minute “Person of the Week” slot (airedoriginally from 5:53 to 5:57 pm; clip available on DVD loanfrom 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 Scottishinvestigators “found something they didn’t know what tomake of” and so the task of trying to identify it was passedon 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. Itwas no bigger than a finger nail. In terms of theinvestigation it was enormous.” The camera cut to Thurmanexulting “When that identification was made of the timer Iknew we had it.” The next shot was of a still displayed atthe State Department press conference the previous day. Itwas the photograph of another piece of printed circuitry

bearing the partially erased but otherwise unmistakeablelegend “MEBO” and Jennings continued:

“This tiny piece of an electronic timing device withthe Swiss manufacturer’s name MEBO partiallyrubbed off was what ultimately led investigators to the

Libyans who bought it, the ones now accused of beingresponsible for blowing up Pan Am 103.”

Finally, the camera cut back to Thurman conveying hisfeelings on the making of the identification: “Absolute,

positively euphoria [ sic]. Just euphoria. I can’t describe itany more than that. I was on cloud nine.”

Although editorial responsibility for the feature and itscontent were clearly not Thurman’s he must necessarilyhave been involved very closely in its compilation. Thefeature was about him, the producers would have beenlargely dependent on his input and it is difficult to believehe would not have been significantly instrumental in

procuring the way the material in particular on theLockerbie investigation was presented as he wished them to

be portrayed. The feature was, after all, occasioned by theindictments. He would have appreciated only too clearly theimpact of the narrative in the context of running together the

picture of the fragment from the wreckage and that of theitem 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 seemedto have been a breakthrough of which Sherlock Homeshimself would have been proud. It looked like the smokinggun for which the investigators had been searching.

But to paraphrase the commentators Ashton andFerguson in a more general context, “the only smoke wasthe 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

MST-13 mother board and was alleged to be the onlyremains of such a timer recovered from the crash site. The

photograph of the section of PCB with the MEBO letteringwas a section of the daughter board from an MST-13. To beabsolutely clear about this, no part of a daughter board froman 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 programmehad come remains uncertain: whether from a timer whichhad been seized in Senegal, from the Togo timer or fromone supplied by, or otherwise taken from, the MEBOCompany itself. Even if the wrong photograph had by somechance been inadvertently selected to be shown at the StateDepartment press conference and on the TV programmethere could be no mistake about the matter of lettering. The

photographs of PT35b which were exhibited at the Zeisttrial had the fragment magnified fifty times and showedclearly 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 tracedthe origin of the fragment from the characters “MEBO”when he knew all along that these were not carried on thefragment PT35b but on a different circuit board altogether,one which had nothing whatsoever to do with thedestruction of Pan Am 103.

As matters turned out, then, this was no master sleuth inhis prime, just Mr Arthur Daley of Minder fame. What onearth possessed Thurman to beget such a stunt? Was it justself-aggrandisment and chutzpah, or was there somethingmore to it? To seek an answer it is important to appreciate

that he must have known he could never mount a plausibleclaim to have traced the fragment’s origin merely from thefigure “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. Fewwould ever have believed a story of making the connectionto MEBO (though the CIA were reputed to beexperimenting with the notion of developing “remotevision”). Suspicions would inevitably be raised that theauthorities had already latched on to the convenient idea of claiming that the bomb maker had used a MEBO MST-13timer instead of – far more probably – a barometric pressuretrigger. 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 theauthorities already knew about Libya and MST-13 timersand that they then just happened to discover a fragmentfrom such a timer.

But what of the contrary idea that the very paucity of clues afforded by the fragment argues in favour of theauthenticity of the evidence that it was found among thedebris. If they were going to plant a fragment from a MEBOtimer, it might be asked, why not simply produce one fromthe daughter board bearing the “MEBO” insignia? But amoment’s thought will raise a similar objection. Who would

believe that either? The survival of a piece of fibre board insome sort of conflagration proof cocoon no more than twoinches from a “thousands degree Semtex Supernova,” as ithas been so graphically described (“The Lockerbie Divide”website) might have seemed difficult enough to accept. That

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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 devicewhich 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 couldhardly be run in court he was almost certainly not lookingthat far ahead. He probably calculated that Gaddafi wouldnever countenance surrendering the two accused men andthat the possibility of a trial was too remote to worry about,too remote to waste the opportunity for him to bathe in thelimelight 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 possibilityof 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. Inother words, his immediate and primary concern was toavert any suspicion that the investigators had started with adecision to assert that the bomb employed a MEBO MST-13 timer and had worked backwards to concoct the findingof a fragment from such a device. In the short run, when theneed to focus upon Libya was felt in some quarters to be

paramount, his charade might serve to pre-empt any suchsuggestion. He would have been less concerned about the

possibility of some commentators raising their eyebrows

about the fragment surviving incineration, let alone withtell-tale lettering still visible. If by some remote chance inthe fullness of time a trial did become a reality he probablycalculated his public mendacity would have been longforgotten.

In any event he was plainly cunning enough to cover his back in case it were ever suggested that he had inspired afalsehood to be told on screen. Describing on “Person of theWeek” his response when the fragment which becamePT35b was referred to him for investigation Thurmanexplained–

“At that point we finally had something tangible to

start looking at and trying to compare items that wemay have had here in the unit and other informationthat 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 withthe PCB bearing the MEBO legend, because the FBIalready had a complete timer in their inventory. To head off a rejoinder that even then it would have been like finding aneedle in a haystack the “other information” was back-up:doubtless a reference to the tip-off from Bollier. But heknew he could never hope to blame the misrepresentationon the filter of editorial misunderstanding. In a clip from his“Person of the Week” interview which was not televised butwhich was incorporated in The Maltese Double Cross he isdepicted holding up an enlarged photograph of the daughter

board bearing the partially visible “MEBO” legend andexplaining (ref: 1 hr 6 mins of 2 hrs 35 mins)–

“A magnification of that circuit board, which is here – you can see it’s a very large magnification – has, er,a partially obliterated marking and through

investigation we determined that this actually is M-E-B-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 seeif they had made this board. And they said ‘no,’ thatthis was not their identification. So the last thing thatwe determined, which was the right thing actually andthat it was MEBO. We had some inkling that that waswhat it was from the beginning but we didn’t want tosay okay that it was MEBO to exclude anything elsetill we were absolutely certain.”

This makes it clear beyond peradventure that he was

instrumental in procuring the editorial misrepresentation. Itwas his illusion. Moreover the idea that Thurman’s teamwent through some sort of charade, ignoring their “inkling,”

punctiliously exploring the possibility that “EB” might have been “58” and seeking various manufacturers for assistancewhen 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 Thurman’s reminiscences upon whichthe feature drew betrayed a curious doubt about the date onwhich the fragment was supposed to have been discovered.As already mentioned the official line was that it was foundin 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 beennoted. On “Person of the Week” Peter Jennings stated, incontradistinction to the official line, “that Scottishinvestigators had found it a year and a half after theexplosion. That in fact was when Thurman said he hadidentified it as part of an MST-13 timer. The error couldhave been editorial but it is noteworthy that in another clipfrom the Thurman’s interview which was not televised onPerson of the Week but which was shown on The Maltese

Double Cross (ref: 1.03 mins of 2 hrs 35 mins) he seemedstrangely uncertain of the year he was talking about (eventhough it was only the previous year)–

“Essentially on June 15th of 1989 [pause], 1990[another pause], yeah 1990, erm, was the day I madethe identification. And I knew at that point what itmeant. And because, if you will, I’m an investigator aswell as a forensic examiner I knew where that wouldgo, that at that point we had no conclusive proof of thetype 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 Khreesat’s curious1988 FBI Amman interview. He left the FBI in 1997 shortlyafter it was proved he had massaged evidence in a verylarge number of unrelated cases. (For more detail seeAshton and Ferguson, p.203.) He was not called as a




witness at Zeist. No wonder. The questions the defencemight 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 atMalta’s Luqa airport precluded the Crown from offeringany explanation as to how the Samsonite suitcase bombmight have been smuggled aboard KM180 to Frankfurt.

Nonetheless so, the court found that the bag had come fromLuqa, mainly because of the circular reasoning theyemployed but also because such records as were availablefrom Frankfurt were on the face of it consistent withKM180 being the source of a possibly unaccompanied itemof interline baggage transferred to Pan Am feeder flightPA103A. But the ambiguous nature of those records wasalso compatible with the very real possibility that the itemcould 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 theFrankfurt connection might be important, even before theremains of the 747’s relevant baggage container werediscovered. The German police spent Christmas Day at theairport interviewing baggage handlers and other staff andwithin a week of the destruction of Pan Am 103 allelectronic baggage records and some crucial paper recordsfor that day had been removed together with routine

backups. No copies or backups were left behind. TheFrankfurt police told the investigators that the records weremissing, or lost, or had been destroyed. If that situation had

continued there would have been no basis for connectingthe bomb with Malta.

However, on the evening after the downing of Pan Am103, Bogomira Erac, a software specialist in the airport

baggage department, had printed off a computer recordrelating to 103A. She had done so out of curiosity butseeing 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 lateJanuary. Initially they apparently saw nothing of significance in it either but then, unexpectedly, in August1989, they sent it to Lockerbie HQ with the relevantworksheet of an airport staffer named Koca who had codedthe baggage from KM180, and some explanatory notes. Itwas this which potentially established the connection withMalta.

The normal procedure for handling baggage from a particular arrival was that it would all be delivered to acoding station where each item would be placed on its owntray, coded by reference to the tray and then either sent tothe carousel for collection by the passenger or forwardedinterline to a connecting flight. Baggage was normallyexpected to be delivered to a coding station for processingone flight at a time. The Erac print-out showed that at 13.07on December 21 the item on tray number B8849 was

processed at coding station 206 (reference S0009) for interline transfer to PA103A. Koca’s worksheet showed thathe had started coding bags from the Malta flight at 13.04

but his handwriting for the end time was indistinct and waseither 13.10 or 13.16. Reading the Erac print-out and

Koca’s worksheet in combination the prosecution argued,and the judges accepted, that the item on tray B8849 musthave come from KM180.

On the face of the documentation it certainly could have

come from KM180 as unaccompanied interline baggage butfor a number of reasons the assumption that it must have

done was unjustified. Whereas the time on the print-out wasautomatically applied by the computer, the time Koca gaveon his worksheet would have been taken from his ownwatch which was obviously not linked to the embeddedcomputer time. Moreover, although the coders weresupposed to enter the times on their worksheetscontemporaneously this was the time of the pre-Christmasrush and it came as no very great surprise to learn that busystaff might well wait for a lull in which to catch up on their

paperwork. The worksheet times could therefore haveamounted to no more than a rough retrospective estimate.Without any explanation Koca himself was never called bythe 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 fellwithin the time slot on Koca’s worksheet. On that basisalone, given the exactitude on timing required for aninference that the item on tray B8849 had come fromKM180 there could be no such irresistible inference.Coupled with the real possibility of retrospective estimationit would only have taken a relatively small difference

between the computer clock and Koca’s watch or the clock on the wall (if there was one in his line of sight) for theinference to be invalid.

Other flights had arrived and were unloading at broadlythe 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 mindthe potential discrepancy between Koca’s watch or the wallclock and the computer clock. One such was a flight fromDamascus, most of the bags from which had gone to codingstations 202 and 207 and it was suggested by the defence asa possibility that some of the remaining baggage from thatflight might have gone to 206 during the time slot straddling13.07. The appeal court were able to demonstrate in detaildecisively why that supposition was misconceived but therewas a second entry on the Erac print-out, similar to trayB8849, 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 atFrankfurt were supposed to make a separate entry on thecoding sheet for stray or single bags it was shown that whenin a hurry they often failed to wait for this to be done andinstead would simply toss the odd bag on a convenientwagon the contents of which were set to be coded and itwould be processed with that wagon. The coder was onlyinterested in the destination of the item and so long as thatwas correctly entered the luggage would be correctlydelivered and the source was of little concern. The baggagehandlers were not pressed about this during the trial, thedefence no doubt fearing that the witnesses would flatlydeny contravening instructions while the Crown weredoubtless afraid they might cheerfully agree it happened allthe time!




There was no independent proof that the tray 8849 itemwas unaccompanied. It was only considered to be such

because (a) inquiries showed that all the known luggage onKM180 had ultimately been collected by passengers, (b) no

passenger on KM180 transferred to PA103A and (c) it hadcome 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, aswas famously suggested by leading counsel for al-Megrahi.Frankfurt records also gave no hint whether it was destinedfor the transatlantic flight or for collection at Heathrow. Itmay never have gone on PA103 at all. Two-thirds of theluggage on the feeder flight did not. A discrepancy in the

baggage tally for interline luggage destined for PA103Asuggests that it may even have ended up not going toHeathrow on that flight.

But if it did go on board PA103A at Frankfurt it wouldhave had to pass through the x-ray screening process whichall interline luggage destined for that flight had to undergo.

This fact alone irrevocably destroys the basic premise onwhich the Crown and the Judges relied, the premise that thesuitcase containing the radio-cassette player bomb wasflown from Malta on the morning of December 21, 1988,was interlined at Frankfurt on to PA103A and taken toHeathrow. In assessing this bald fact the judges were ledinto making an error which might aptly be described asLockerbie’s smoking gun of injustice but which appears tohave been almost entirely overlooked in the criticalliterature.

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, theCrown relied exclusively on the notes of his January 1989interview (conducted in English) by U.S Federal AviationAdministration investigators (Zeist Production 1792; Zeisttranscript, pp.1866-7). The notes record that if “he foundsomething unusual . . . he would call his supervisor if necessary,” and that “he could say without question thatthere was no explosives” [ sic] in any of the bags. But thenotes also purport to attribute to him the odd notion that anexternal plug on an electrical device “clears his doubt aboutany explosive device.” The judges accordingly observedthat Maier’s “description of what he looked for does not

suggest that he would necessarily have claimed to be able todetect explosives hidden in a radio cassette player.” Sincethis declaration evidently formed the basis of their findingthat Maier must have let the bomb through it is clear thatthey misconceived the nature of his duty in the context of the “Toshiba warning,” in force at Frankfurt. That duty wasnot to “detect explosives” in a radio-cassette player but tolook 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 thetrial of a civil action for damages brought against Pan Amand its insurers. But, incredibly, the judges at Camp Zeistwere never told about that evidence and therefore that on

being closely cross-examined on his FAA interview, he hadinsisted that if he had seen a radio-cassette player he wouldhave called his supervisor and would have done so for thevery good reason that in view of the Toshiba warning those

were his specific instructions (see http://www.American- buddha.com/trialoct.19b.jpg, transcript J.A. 1099-1100).The crucial point he was making was that in accordancewith those instructions he would have called the supervisor regardless of his personal opinion of what made a radio-cassette player suspicious. That he would have followed his

instructions is supported by the fact that he was described asa 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 thequality of the US court’s German-English translation, it isarguable that any uncertainty is more likely to haveoriginated from the interview, which was conducted inEnglish, a language Maier plainly found difficult else hewould hardly have needed an interpreter for court. Incontrast with the court video record the interview notes didnot 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 noreference to Maier himself having done so. For the sake of completeness it ought to be mentioned that at the trial heexplained in cross-examination that although he did notwear his glasses, he only needed them for reading and notfor his job: ibid , J.A. 2967, 3379-80.

Because the Zeist judges relied exclusively on the notesand remained blissfully unaware of his sworn courtroomtestimony they were precluded from making a validassessment 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 O’Neil, loadmaster for PA103A on 21 December, that as well as being x-rayed, allinterline luggage was checked to ensure the relevant

passenger was on board before it was loaded. This was notnecessarily precluded from further undermining theCrown’s case by the fact that at the 1991 Fatal AccidentInquiry Pan American claimed that they were permitted toomit the baggage reconciliation procedures because theywere x-raying everything. That they were entitled to such anexemption was in fact disputed at the Inquiry but simplearithmetic suggests that the airline’s assertion that

everything was x-rayed may have been unjustified. Thenumber of passengers boarding PA103A at Frankfurt fromother airlines was said to be 48. Even if some were onlytaking carry-on luggage they must between them havechecked in a good deal more than the thirteen items which

passed through Maier’s x-ray machine. Yet there was noevidence that any other staffer x-rayed interline items goingon 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 accountedfor as late arrival luggage which, according to some of theevidence, might not go through the automated system.” So

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in one conjectural and perfunctory sentence the judgesdisposed of the numerous gaps in the record. All in all, inthe words of Paul Foot (op cit , p.24)—

“There was no evidence that an unaccompanied bagwent on the plane at Malta – but lo and behold therewas, as far as the judges were concerned, plenty of evidence that an unaccompanied bag arrived fromMalta at Frankfurt.”

2. Heathrow: certainty of the bomb’s London origin

We now come to the reason why we can be certain that theLockerbie bomb was smuggled into the system at Heathrowand did not come by air from Frankfurt.

As already mentioned, AAIB experts swiftly identifiedthe blast-damaged portable luggage container AVE4041 inwhich the bronze-coloured Samsonite hardshell suitcase

bomb had been loaded for the flight. “Tins,” as suchcontainers are colloquially known by airport loaders, are

fitted with casters and consist of three side walls at rightangles 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 container’sheight. Above that level the front is open for loading.

The investigators established that AVE4041had beenassigned at Heathrow to take the “interline” baggage for Pan Am 103 (that is transit baggage arriving at Heathrow onother airlines) as this accumulated during the afternoon inthe Pan Am interline baggage shed after delivery there. Itwas then driven out on to the tarmac (at location K-16) toawait further loading with the transatlantic luggage from theFrankfurt feeder flight as and when it arrived.

What should have been decisive evidence came fromJohn Bedford, the baggage handler whose job it was to loadthe container with interline baggage items as they weredelivered to the interline shed and x-rayed. He recalled thaton the afternoon of 21 December he had been in theinterline baggage shed loading a number of interline itemsof baggage for Pan Am 103 upright across the rear of the

portable luggage container AVE4041. He then left the shedwhile he took an extended tea-break with his supervisor lasting roughly half an hour. When he returned he saw thattwo items had been added to the handful of luggage itemshe 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 thefeeder flight from Frankfurt, which touched down at 5.30

pm, half an hour after Bedford finished his shift, pullinginto the gate at 5.37 pm. Bedford described one of the twoadditional items as a “maroony-brown” hardshell suitcase,the type Samsonite make. He volunteered this informationat his first police interview on 3 January, 1989, although heno doubt realised its ominously potential significance assoon as he heard about the fate of Pan Am 103, at which

point it would probably have embossed itself on hismemory – perhaps painfully so. The description could nothave come from the investigators because the bomb carrier was only identified as an antique-copper- or bronze-coloured Samsonite hardshell several weeks later. The“maroony-brown” bag was very close to the position whichthe experts concluded the antique copper or bonze-coloured

Samsonite hardshell carrying the bomb was located in thecontainer when it exploded.

The interline baggage in the container when it was takenout on to the tarmac included items belonging to three USGovernment officials on their way home from postings inLebanon. It has long been conjectured that the officials were

connected in some way with the supposed CIA protecteddrugs route, a topic which is beyond the scope of thisarticle. But more tellingly for present purposes is the factthat the two bags belonging to Major Charles McKee weregrey Samsonite hardshells and two bags belonging to afourth doomed American, a State Department official basedin Nicosia by the name of Daniel O’Connor, may have beenfound in a Heathrow baggage room.

For reasons which remain obscure the significance of Bedford’s crucial evidence quickly came to be overlooked

– or sidelined – by the investigators. On March 28, 1989,Chief Superintendent John Orr told the Lockerbieinvestigators co-ordinating committee that “the first seven

pieces of luggage in . . . container [AVE4041] belonged toInterline passengers and the remainder was Frankfurtluggage . . . and enquiries to date suggest that on the

balance of probabilities the explosive device is likely to beamongst the Frankfurt baggage items” (Lockerbie Incidentcontrol 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 whichmay be computed by reference to the photograph of acontainer identical to AVE4041that Bedford had been askedto load during the first week of January 1989 in areconstruction of the loading of AVE4041 as he

remembered it. Although at the trial Bedford counted nineitems in the photograph (apart from the two additions) itseems there were actually eight, making a total of ten withthe two mysterious additions. Orr’s statement curiouslydrew not on Bedford’s description but on a figure of four or five bags originally in the container casually estimated bySulkash Kamboj,one of the two the two security guardsresponsible for x-raying the luggage in the interline shed,

plus the two bags noticed by Bedford. But at the very leastcarelessly Orr lumped in the two mysterious bags with theordinary interline items and that failure of claritysubsequently came to form the basis of the 1991 FatalAccident Inquiry report. While the arrangement of the

luggage as described by Bedford was incorporated into thereport, his assertion about the unexplained and mysteriousappearance of the two “maroony-brown” Samsonite type

bags, was omitted. The Sheriff holding the Inquiry simplyaccepted the proposition urged on him by the investigatorsthat the bomb carrying Samsonite had come from Frankfurt.

In his police interview on January 9, 1989, Bedford toldthe police that Sulkash Kamboj, the x-ray operator, had toldhim that after running the bags through the x-ray he had putthem in the container. To the police Kamboj consistentlydenied having put them in the container; it was not his job todo so he maintained, and he repeated this at the FatalAccident Inquiry. In evidence in chief at the trial heaccepted that x-ray operators might sometimes – andexceptionally - help out airline staff with loading and sincehe now had no specific memory of the events of the fatalday he rather hesitantly conceded that he “would not quarrel




with” Bedford’s assertion. However, on being referred incross-examination to his much earlier statements (when hismemory of the events would have been much better) hereiterated his firm denial of having loaded the two bags inthe container in Bedford’s absence. It may have been hismomentary concession which led the court to prefer

Bedford’s account, although they were probably influencedas much by the perception that if he had wanted to lie tocover up for his neglect he could have done so about theappearance of the two cases in the suitcases altogether. Onthe other hand, it is by no means inconceivable that he couldhave had a conscience and an anxious desire to help theinvestigation at the same time as wishing to avoid blame for disastrous neglect.

It is difficult to reach any firm conclusion as to whoseaccount may have been true. If the two suitcases had x-raysticky tape around them Bedford would naturally haveassumed Kamboj (or his fellow x-ray operator Parmar) hadx-rayed them and helpfully put them in the container. In that

case he would have had a good enough reason for notconsulting Kamboj about them, although curiously he wasnot asked at the trial if he had noticed whether theydisplayed x-ray tape. So it is likely he would only haveconsulted Kamboj if the cases did not display tape, in whichcase he would surely have queried Kamboj’s assurance by

pointing to the absence of tape and they would probablyhave resolved the problem by x-raying them just to be onthe safe side. They would both have been sure to recall suchan episode. On this reasoning Bedford more likely than notdid not consult Kamboj. But if Bedford was saying Kambojhad volunteered that he had loaded the two cases it may bequeried why, on the assumption that the cases displayed x-

ray tape there would have been any need to make such anannouncement. It would have been obvious. In fact, there isno need to question Bedford’s honesty. He may haveassumed Kamboj had loaded the bags and had a falsememory 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 awitness, no reference was made to any statement from himand nothing appears to be known about him. Despite theconflict of evidence between Bedford and Kamboj they bothattested to the chaotic, insecure conditions in the shed andairside at Heathrow generally in which “anybody” couldapproach a container with luggage and slip in another bag.

No one disputed it. It should be added that Pan Am’sHeathrow terminal and that of Iran Air were adjacent andthey shared tarmac space.

The explosion blasted a 20-inch (0.51m) hole in the leftflank of the forward fuselage, causing instant cataclysmicdecompression and within three seconds the shock waveshad severed the cockpit section from the rest of the aircraft.What is of critical importance is that the bomb suitcaseended up in the precise position where it would causemaximum damage, that is, close to the fuselage skin in anoverhang section of the container designed to hug thecurvature of the hull and lying flat with its handle inwardsand 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 correctorientation, that is not centrally in the suitcase but to itsextreme outboard side. This is a very non-intuitive way to

pack such an item and strongly suggests that whoever wasdoing the packing was anticipating that the suitcase would

be placed in the container by someone who could and wouldensure 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 thecentre of the explosion. Only a small adjustment to its

placing, as might easily have happened when the Frankfurtluggage was being loaded in a hurry, would have put it inexactly that position. The likelihood that such optimum

positioning could have resulted by chance to a suitcasetravelling unaccompanied from Malta or even fromFrankfurt is incredibly slim. But determined andknowledgeable terrorists would hardly have left matters tochance. Only hands-on action by an accomplice atHeathrow 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 fromMalta, with the repeated, serious risk of interception, or even Frankfurt.

If one of the two “Samsonite type” suitcases Bedfordsaw 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 originallyestablished that no passenger on Pan Am 103 was carryinganything that could be described as a maroon or brownhardshell bag and none of the passengers whose luggagemight have ended up in the container AVE4041 had such a

bag. (Doubts expressed by Ashton and Ferguson, p.123, asto the cogency of the officer’s labours do not show that he

could have missed a bag.) At the same time, the onlysuitcase of that description recovered at Lockerbie was theone blown to pieces by the bomb inside it. So how did theCrown deal with what ought to have been an end to anynotion that the bomb had come from Frankfurt?

First – extraordinary as it may seem – they adopted thesimple ploy of sweeping Henderson’s inquiries under thecarpet. He had been called to testify at the 1991 FAI inorder to show that the bomb bag must have beenunaccompanied rather than carried by an unwitting mule or suicide bomber. He repeated that evidence at the 1992 civilaction in the US. His findings also meant that the SamsoniteBedford described could not have been legitimate passenger

luggage either. But this appears not to have been noticed bythe Sheriff, who was content to go along with the Crown’sheavy hints that it “would not seek to discourage a findingthat the bag containing the device came to Frankfurt as aninterline bag.” However the trial at Camp Zeist was adifferent matter. With defence lawyers closely scrutinisingthe evidence it appears to have dawned on someone that theBedford bag could not simply waved aside. The neatsolution was to avoid calling Henderson and to make noreference 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 theSamsonite suitcase seen by Bedford was no more thanordinary 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 wasopen to them to ask the witness who had helped Sidhu loadthe container (Sandhu) questions about the loading. Theychose neither course. Instead, they were quietly content torely on the answer to a question asked by counsel defendingFlimha (al-Megrahi’s acquitted co-accused) of the witness

whose job it had merely been to load the already closedcontainer on to the aircraft (Crabtree). He gave evidence

before Sandhu and agreed with the trite suggestion thatloaders might move bags around within the base of acontainer to make for a better fit, a “bit of re-jigging.” (Thequestion seems to have been intended to establish the

possibility that the case seen by Bedford might have beenmoved slightly and was indeed the bomb carrier.)

The ten interline cases Bedford counted before theFrankfurt baggage had arrived consisted of eight cases

placed upright (ie with their handles up) on the floor andacross the back of the container and the two mysteriouslyadded 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 hadcome from Vienna via Frankfurt, had been under the bomb

bag. For reasons which are canvassed later this seemsunlikely but even supposing their assumption was correct itsimplications 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 thecontainer (as there was no space remaining to slide it aside),replace it with the Coyle bag, place an almost identical bagcarrying the bomb on top of the Coyle bag and then put theoriginal Samsonite (which Bedford had seen) somewhere

else.That was exactly what the judges impliedly determined

had happened. To do so they obligingly picked upCrabtree’s generalised acquiescence to the suggestion put tohim and ran with it, forming bricks out of straw to constructan 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 byMr Bedford might have been placed at some more remotecorner of the container.” This is a very different propositionfrom that put to Crabtree. But in the light of their findingthat the bomb had come from Frankfurt (on its way fromLuqa) their implied conclusion in effect could only have

been that Sidhu had carried out six actions. He must have:-

(a) decided when he saw Coyle’s case coming off theconveyer 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 asoft-sided case on the floor instead of a hardshellseem unnatural);

(b) accordingly, removed Bedford’s case from thefloor;

(c) placed Coyle’s navy-blue bag where the Samsoniteseen by Bedford had been;

(d) instead of then doing what would have been mostnatural, that is putting the Bedford Samsonitestraight back on top of Coyle’s bag, he placed on itan identical suitcase carrying the bomb which just

happened to be coming off the conveyer at thatmoment from the Frankfurt flight;

(e) by horrible chance placed it so that the side alongwhich the radio was packed was protruding into theoverhang of the container; and

(f) 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 awayfrom those 25 bags which showed direct blast damage andwhich were the only bags to be examined forensically indetail or else put it with the last few bags surplus to thecontainer’s capacity which were loose-loaded into the bellyof 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 intheir conjecture – that the bag Bedford had seen mustsimply have vanished – they appear conveniently to have

gone along with the Crown’s lame explanation that not allitems of luggage were recovered. But what exactly mightsuch a suggestion involve?

When the 747’s fuel laden wing assembly fell onSherwood Crescent it caused an inferno which consumedaircraft debris, houses, victims on the ground and a number of passengers. Whether any suitcases disappeared into theflames is unknown but hundreds of suitcases littered thehillsides around Tundergarth some miles away, suggestingthat the great bulk of the luggage fell well away fromSherwood Crescent. The Winterhope reservoir was searched

by police divers so any luggage would also have beenrecovered from the water.

For the Bedford suitcase to have gone into the flameswould have taken the conjecture into an even moreattenuated order of coincidence. Not only did an innocent

bag distinct from, but identical to, that carrying the bombmysteriously appear in the container in Bedford’s absence(with Iran Air next door). Not only did he notice themysterious bag in almost the optimum position for doingmaximum damage (had it been a bomb). Not only did anidentical bag carrying the bomb just happen to come downthe conveyer at the very moment after the Bedford bag had

been lifted out to be make room for the Coyle bag. Not onlywas the new identical bag laid on top of the Coyle baginstead of the Bedford bag and the Bedford bag placed

somewhere else. Not only did Derek Henderson’s thoroughinquiries miss the fact that a passenger was travelling with aclone of the bomb bag. But, if the implied thinking of the

judges is to be believed, added to all those coincidences wehave yet one more. While the dismembered parts of thecontainer and most if not all of the luggage that must have

been in it were found dispersed over a very wide area andrecovered, the innocent clone of the bomb bag just happens

by remarkable chance to fall into the inferno of SherwoodCrescent.

Sidhu’s imagined exercise in unhurriedly andfastidiously rearranging the baggage as if he had all the timein the world to make a perfect fit hardly squares with thelate arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt and the factthat he had less than 15 minutes to load the container withluggage accompanying the 49 passengers who were bookedthrough to New York from Frankfurt before Maid of the




Seas was due to leave the gate. Indeed, in cross-examinationSandhu admitted it was a “rush job.”

In fact, the court’s finding that the bomb suitcase was ontop of the Coyle bag seems inherently doubtful. TheSamsonite was nine inches deep. The Tourister case, beingon the large side, could have been ten inches deep. Peter

Claiden, the AAIB expert estimated that the explosion wasten inches from the floor of the container and two inchesinto the overhang section. Dr Thomas Hayes of the RoyalArmament Research and Development Establishment(RARDE) stated that allowing for the Semtex being packedin the radio-cassette player the explosion could not have

been right up at the edge of the case. So the ten incheswould be too high for the bomb bag to have been resting onthe horizontal section of the container floor and also it couldnot then have protruded into the overhang part. While onthe other hand the second layer could account for the two-inch 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 asolution 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 Sidhuneed only have pushed the case noticed by Bedford aboutsix inches to the left (to fit in something small to its right)for the sloping part of the floor to have pushed the left-handside of the case two or three inches upwards. With theToshiba 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-inchdistance from the container floor estimated by Claiden. Thevarious articles of clothing in the Samsonite, whichincluded a tweed jacket, could have shielded the container floor. (For a scale blueprint of the container in situ in theaircraft, showing the bomb suitcase in this dislodged

position see Lockerbie: London Origin Theory, JREFforum, 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 whereBedford had observed it to be lying – to achieve not quitethe position the terrorist intended but if anything a slightly

better position and the one at which the bomb in factexploded seems a far more credible and measured

proposition than the series of outlandish coincidencesimplied by the court’s finding. But in the end WilliamTaylor’s eminently reasonable submission was simplyignored.

It beggars belief that al-Megrahi’s conviction could have been sustained on the basis of such manifest improbability.Would the same judges have acquitted a defendant becausethe chance that DNA was not his was “only” a billion toone?!

The fact remains that John Bedford’s sighting, beforethe 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 inwhich the bomb was set off, rules out any question of the

bomb having come from Frankfurt in an identical suitcase.

Common sense and pure logic decrees that it must have been one of the two mysterious bags Bedford saw whichcarried 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 before00:35 on 21 December, 1988, a padlock had been cutthrough “like butter” on a door giving access to the Pan Am“baggage build-up area” at Heathrow. This had not beendisclosed to the defence prior to the trial, supposedly

because the police had lost the original report. The defenceargued that this further weakened the proposition that thesuitcase had started its journey in Malta. The appeal courtdismissed the new evidence as mere “coincidence,” acharacterisation which surely takes the biscuit consideringhow the judges resorted to coincidence upon coincidence to

justify dismissing the exculpatory impact of the undisputedBedford evidence.

The break-in implied by the cut padlock, and in particular the failure to disclose it before trial, has furnishedan understandable belief on the part of many of those whohave campaigned against al-Megrahi’s conviction, that itsupports the contention that the suitcase was ingested intothe system at Heathrow. However, for reasons which aresuggested later, in the view of the present writer the courtmay well have been correct: the break-in could well have

been no more than coincidence. It will be argued that themost 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 thescenario envisaged in “Exploding Lockerbie”, part 2 (175CL&JW, at p.448, col 2).

4. Improbability that the bomb was flown from

Frankfurt?

Reinforcing the Heathrow origin of the bomb is thedifficulty of explaining how a suitcase containing a radio-cassette player could have got past Maier’s x-ray screeningat Frankfurt and circumvented the reconciliation procedureattested to by O’Neil.

For the reasons which were given earlier, it is almostinconceivable 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 destroyit half way across the North Atlantic. Simple logic dictatesthat they used a barometric trigger.

The main problem for the terrorists in sending a bombfrom Frankfurt equipped with a barometric trigger with adelay timer is that it would have had to be primed atHeathrow 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 hewould have needed to be present on the tarmac with theloaders if he was not actually one of them. He would havehad to find a moment to open the suitcase, rummage aroundin it for the radio cassette player, taking care not to disturb

its carefully arranged position within the bag, plug in themain switch and close the suitcase. He would have had todo all this without being noticed by the loaders or, as thecase might be, the other loaders. And as if that were not

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.%20php?t=165824









enough he would then have to contrive to be the one who placed it in the optimum position in the container. He wouldhave had to accomplish this under the pressure of the “rush

job.” If he was not a loader it is impossible to envisage howhe could have managed any of this. There is no suggestionthat either Sidhu or Sandhu was an accomplice, but even if

one or other was a terrorist could he really have actedwithout the other noticing? The risk of challenge anddiscovery 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 wouldit have been to take the completed bomb to London by railor 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 accomplicesof the PFLP-GC based in Sweden, eg Mohammed AbuTalb). The main switch could be plugged in at leisure and

the suitcase taken to Heathrow where it could have beenintroduced into the interline shed. In “ExplodingLockerbie,” part 2, it was suggested that the terrorist mighthave gained access to the loading area around midnight, cutthe padlock to the interline shed using a pair of bolt cutters

perhaps left by a confederate working for the neighbouringIranair, and then stowed the suitcase somewhere in the shed.The terrorist would then withdraw to a safe distance for thenight and discreetly observe the airport during the morningfor signs that the broken padlock had triggered extravigilance. Once reassured, the terrorist could take advantageof the notoriously lax security to use one of the hundreds of airside passes which were unaccounted-for to reach the PanAm baggage build-up area without carrying anything soincriminating as a Semtex-laden suitcase, then retrieve itfrom its hiding place and so look like any other baggagehandler dealing with a stray item. He would then merelyhave to wait for Bedford to take his tea-break and thencarefully position it in the container out of sight of any

prying eyes. The chances are Bedford would never noticethe extra bag. Very possibly, it was suggested, Kamboj wasalso absent or in a part of the shed with no view of thecontainer.

However it is now suggested (as it was in “A Postcripton Lockerbie”) that it is more likely that the terrorists

eschewed such “cloak and dagger” stratagems as breakinginto the shed in order to accomplish the loading. One possibility that might be canvassed is that after Bedford leftfor his tea-break the terrorist delivered the bomb bag to theshed in the normal way, via the external conveyor which, onthe evidence, was not supervised. It would then have been x-rayed and the terrorist might then have come round into theshed, picked up the bag and placed it in the container. Butwhat seems more probable is that after Bedford left for histea-break a terrorist confederate came sauntering into theshed masquerading as an airline worker. Having perhapsretrieved 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 weredelivering 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

precisely why Abu Elias, the PFLP-GC’s airport securityexpert, chose Heathrow rather than Frankfurt to smuggle the

bomb into the system.) Consistent with UK non-dissemination Kamboj testified (as did Bedford) that he wasunaware of the warning. Accordingly, he conceded inevidence, he could well have let through a bag containing

such a machine. X-ray sticky tape would have been appliedand the terrorist would then have placed “his” bag in thecontainer, arranging its position to lethal effect, either noticed or not by the x-ray operators. This would have beenan inherently more natural action than that a terrorist, actingthe part of a casually visiting airline worker, might“helpfully” have picked up and loaded an x-rayed bag whichhad come in via the conveyor and which apparently hadnothing to do with him. As stated in the main article,Bedford and Kamboj both testified that security was so laxat Heathrow airside that anyone masquerading as an airlineworker and equipped with an airside pass, could enter theshed unchallenged and handle baggage.

In evidence Kamboj claimed, like Bedford, that he tooleft the shed for a snack (though he did not say when). Inevidence Bedford said that only Kamboj was in the shedwhen he went off for his tea but Kamboj said Parmar wasusually there with him and finished when he did. In fact theneat method conjectured above would not have required theshed to be left unattended by the x-ray staff at all. On thecontrary, 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 coincidencethey could well have been on the right track. There wouldhave been nothing especially unusual about a cut padlock at

Heathrow in the 1980s when, as anyone familiar withcriminal practice from that decade and earlier will know,allegations of conspiracy to steal by airport baggagehandlers at Heathrow were endemic.

(For a thoroughgoing forum on the smuggling of the bagairside 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 Bedford’s account is that inhis statement made to police on January 9, 1989, he

ostensibly stated that he noticed two hardshell bags lyingflat in the container additional to the eight or nine he hadloaded upright at the back, and that while one was maroony-

brown, the type Samsonite make, the other one was“similar” in colour. Yet only one approximating to thisdescription was ever identified: the dismembered remains of the antique copper or bronze-coloured Samsonite packedwith the bomb.

It is not inconceivable that what Bedford assumed weretwo additions in reality consisted of one addition – themaroony-brown Samsonite-type suitcase – and one of theoriginal 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 itssticking out like a sore thumb, as well as to wedge it in itslethal position and prevent it being easily dislodged.

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But we are still left with Bedford’s supposed descriptionof the second, seemingly added, hardshell Samsonite typesuitcase as one of similar (but otherwise unspecified) colour.In fact it is not difficult to explain this statement as incorrectwithout doing fundamental damage to the overall reliabilityof Bedford’s account. The description may have come about

as a result of the perennial problem of miscommunication between investigators and witnesses aggravated by theabsence of audio-recording.

On the other hand, Bedford’s “similar” colour for thesecond bag lying flat in the container could have been nomore than simple error. We know that of the four Americanofficials transferring to Pan Am 103 from Larnaca, Major Charles McKee was travelling from Lebanon with two greySamsonite bags, both of which would have been loaded intoAVE4041. Did the terrorist perhaps use one of these to layflat with the bomb bag? Was it perhaps the maroony-browncolour of the planted bomb bag which happened to catchBedford’s eye? Did he take less notice of the innocent bag

than he did the “maroony-brown” one and simply assume itwas a similar colour? It would not after all be for severalhours (when news of the disaster was coming in) that hewould begin trying to picture the details in his mind’s eye.

7. Necessary use of a radio-cassette player

There is one other important question which necessitatesconsideration. If the scheme had been to smuggle a bagcontaining the bomb into Heathrow airside, why wouldthere have been any need to go to the trouble of concealingthe bomb inside a radio-cassette player, with its limit on theamount of Semtex which could be used? Packing a suitcasefull of Semtex would have obviated the need to locate thesuitcase close to the hull because an unrestricted amountwould have been likely to destroy the aircraft wherever itwas stowed.

If the bomb was to be smuggled from the Continent or Scandinavia into Britain via a ferry route the possibility of acustoms search could hardly be ruled out and as soon as asuitcase was opened a large Semtex bomb would beinstantly obvious.

But more importantly, and very simply, the method of approach conjectured here would actually have depended onthe brazen presentation of the suitcase for x-ray,necessitating the use of a radio-cassette player.

VI. THE COMPELLING FACTUAL CONCLUSION

John Bedford’s recollection may require some imaginativeinterpretation and the Heathrow modus operandi mayinvolve a degree of conjecture. But the overall propositionoffers an altogether more plausible scenario than the notionof a Malta origin, with Libyan culpability, or Frankfurtorigin, with Ahmed Jibril arranging for a loader there to geta bomb bag into the system instead of a drugs bag. Theinvolvement of a CIA protected drug route (if ever therewas one) may have been a thrilling diversion in all theconspiracy-mongering but it was and remains a completeand utter red herring.

Khreesat’s assertions did not directly assist the two Zeistdefendants (who had called Marshman as a witness) but itsself- and CIA-serving nature was obvious. What wasimportant was that, if Khreesat was to be believed, a

Toshiba-concealed bomb had been given to Abu Elias andwas unaccounted for. But if the CIA was embarrassed bythe likelihood that it was a man working for their clientagency who had built the Lockerbie bomb while under their direction why was it necessary to contrive the curious (notto 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 Khreesat’s nose while hewas “in the shower,” or that he had merely handed it to AbuElias, was buried rather than passed on to the FBI? Theanswer is that Khreesat had already reported the incident tohis controller the next day and too many intelligenceofficials, German, Jordanian, Israeli and American,

probably already knew about it prior to Lockerbie for theincident 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 bombin the gang’s possession which was never seized. Therewere at least two others: the one Dalkamoni had told theBKA about, the Toshiba radio-cassette player bomb whichKhreesat had brought from Amman and the Toshiba radio-cassette player which Ranzi Diab (one of the men roundedup on 26 October) had handed him on 18 October 1988.

Neither was ever found (Ashton and Ferguson, pp.51, 52and 55). Three deadly devices was an awful lot of which tolose 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 hadnothing to do with Lockerbie it emerged from his evidencethat a terrorist gang financed by Iran and harboured by Syriawere at large in Germany in December 1988, making bombsdisguised in Toshiba radio cassette recorders to blow upairliners in flight. Abu Talb himself had been arrested in

possession of clothes traced back to the Maltesemanufacturers who had supplied Anthony Gauci’s shop. Hehad been in Malta between 19 and 26 October, 1988 andcould well have been there on 23 November, 1988, the datemuch more likely than 7 July to have been the date of

purchase. Yet the judges inexplicably found that while therewas a “great deal of suspicion” against “Abu Talb and his

circle” there was “no evidence to indicate that they hadeither the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft inDecember 1988.” In the wry words of the late journalist andtrial observer Paul Foot:

“No means, that is, beyond working with a bomb-maker who specialised in disguising explosive devicesin cassette recorders so that they could be smuggled onto aircraft. No intention except visits to airports andthe studying of aircraft schedules, including some fromPan 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 Khreesat’sCIA controllers must have experienced at the news aboutPan 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 haveended 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 tocut very little ice among the public they served. What actionmight they have contemplated? Within hours of the atrocity

numerous personnel in US Government service wereengaged across the crash site in various unexplainedactivities not necessarily connected with assisting theregular police or AAIB officials. In whose receptive ear might Khreesat’s controllers have whispered? In one of thelast acts of his presidency Ronald Reagan, a dyed-in-the-wool enemy of Colonel Gaddafi, extended sanctions againstLibya and threatened renewed bombing raids. The date was28 December, 1988, a mere seven days after Lockerbie,when there was as yet no evidence ostensibly pointing toLibyan culpability. Diversion of the finger of accusationaway from Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC certainly suitedthose in the US Government who were seeking the release

of American hostages held captive in the Lebanon and wasalso beneficial in gaining Iranian and Syrian support for thecoalition action against Iraq in the liberation of Kuwait. Butthat is another story (see eg Davina Miller “Who Knowsabout this? Western Policy towards Iran: the LockerbieCase,” University of Bradford Dept of Peace Studies, 2011).

It will have become apparent from the analysis of theevidence before the court offered here that wherever the

bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built the Samsonitehardshell bag in which it was packed could not have comefrom Luqa as an anonymous item of baggage on KM180, or from Frankfurt on PA103A. It should have been “as plain asa pikestaff” that it was smuggled into the system at

Heathrow and that any group was responsible it was thePFLP-GC, sponsored by Iran.

Quite why the judges lost sight of the wood for the treesis not a matter which warrants conjecture. That they did sois beyond doubt. When asked by Lord Maclean to confirmthat al-Megrahi’s Abdusamad passport was never usedagain after 21 December 1988 William Taylor QC said “wedon’t know that,” to which Lord Maclean riposted “Yes Ido” and gave the reference. The judge got the acerbic replyhe truly deserved: “Thank you. I am corrected. So Your Lordship has asked me a question to which Your Lordshipalready 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-MEGRAHI’S R ELEASE

There is little doubt that both the Scottish and UK governments recognised the persuasive force of thearguments presented by the defence, in particular the Clark report and one by Prof Tim Valentine of Goldsmith’sCollege, University of London, also served on the CrownOffice ( 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 Canter’s report his arguments were hardlynovel ones.

The totality of the defence case plainly and finally put paid to any basis for regarding Antony Gauci’s evidence asin the least bit reliable. Yet both HMG and the Scottishgovernment found themselves in a deep quandary. Although

the Libyans had handed over al-Megrahi in 1999 they had been under considerable pressure to do so; al-Megrahi andFihma had obviously been treated by them as expendable.But now, with al-Megrahi terminally ill and Gaddafi havingre-established his international credentials, the Libyans hadregained sufficient confidence to demand that al-Megrahi be

allowed to come home to die. Realpolitik decreed that thetwo British governments could ill afford to ignore thoseenormous financial pressures implicit in the Libyan

position. They knew the case against al-Megrahi personallywas built on sand. The problem was that the appeal wastaking its time and even if al-Megrahi survived until the endof the proceedings there was by no means any guaranteethat the appeal judges would depart from the position of the2001 trial judges or those who had heard the originalappeal. The weaknesses in Gauci’s evidence were alreadywell understood at the time of the trial and the Canter reporthad only spelt out the obvious in excruciating detail. As thetwo governments wryly viewed the scenario, it was entirely

likely that the judges would stubbornly refuse toacknowledge that two previous tribunals had been soobviously wrong.

And yet there was an undoubted problem if the Scottishgovernment simply cut the Gordian knot and ordered theCrown Office to drop its resistance to the appeal, rather thanclinging on to the forlorn hope that the judges might do the

job for them. If after so many years maintaining that al-Megrahi was guilty the Scottish government (withWhitehall behind them) at the eleventh hour now suddenlydid an about face and pre-empted the court’s decision bothgovernments would inevitably be condemned as in thrall toLibyan 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 andclearly smacking of giving in to Libyan economic pressure.

From the point of view of squaring conscience (freeing aman against whom there was little evidence of guilt) and of realpolitik (satisfying Libyan demands and therebyfacilitating trade opportunities to the obvious advantage of the British public) the perfect solution was the compromiseone of granting compassionate release: the demands of Justice could therefore be camouflaged, or masked, with“Mercy.”

It will doubtless be suggested that the conjecturesadvanced here derive purely from behind the fevered brow

of the present writer, with no inspiration from any externalsource. Some readers will either know for themselves,others will hardly be surprised to learn, that unattributedtidings in the above terms have been distinctly notedtrickling out of Holyrood and from Whitehall andWestminster into the Temple and ever since al-Megrahi’srelease. According to the not-wholly-unreliable legal-

political grapevine, the Brown and Salmond governmentsknew the case against him was twaddle. They just couldn’tsay so. However, nothing will be revealed by DavidCameron’s decision to have all the papers published. Thereasons were never minuted.

VIII. THE PRESENT OFFICIAL STANCE OF THE

GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND




Along with the judges the cabinet members of the presentScottish Government must also know the truth aboutLockerbie. In the face of a hostile and gullible America ithas to be acknowledged how courageous they were torelease al-Megrahi ostensibly on compassionate grounds in2009. Sadly, but for perhaps understandable reasons, they

have felt hitherto unable to go the whole hog and admit theyknow he was an innocent scapegoat (hence the title of theabove article “Masking Justice with ‘Mercy’”). Thus theycontinue to throw away good Scottish taxpayers’ moneyafter bad on a preposterous expedition by Dumfries andGalloway police officers to Libya (see The Guardian, 8December, 2011). Although with some sense of guilt, theauthor therefore recently embarked on a one-man-campaignof aggravating their discomfort.

Emailing the Scottish Government on 1 August 2011 heinvited them to acknowledge that al-Megrahi’s convictioncould no longer be sensibly sustained. On 30 August, anameless spokesperson responded with the stock reply that

“[i]t would not be appropriate for Government to cast doubton the decisions taken by judges who have listened to all theevidence and reached a decision in a case. . . . [T]heScottish Government do not doubt the safety of theconviction of Mr Al-Megrahi.” Wasting no time in makinga further nuisance of himself, the author replied on 2September, observing that–

“for the Scottish Government to declare that they ‘donot doubt the safety of the conviction of Mr Al-Megrahi’ appears to be a very different propositionfrom tactfully abiding by a studied silence on themerits. . . . [T]he self-effacing sentence ‘it is not for

us to cast doubt’ on such and such is qualitativelyquite different from avowing ‘we do not doubt’ thatX is the case. On its most natural meaning the latter implies that the Government have formed a rationalview of the case after due consideration of therelevant facts. . . . It is difficult to believe that onsuch a vexed issue as Lockerbie some at least of theScottish body politic have not made some effort toget to grips with the case details.”

Against the background of those observations the author setout a series of detailed questions asking for chapter andverse on the decision-making process according to which

the cabinet determined that they believed in the safety of theconviction. Initially no response was forthcoming and it wasonly when the author in another publication (The Jewish

Chronicle, 30 September, 2011) accused the ScottishGovernment of stonewalling that any response wasengendered. However, the spokesperson declined to rise tothe bait and the author subsequently sent a modified inquiry.Assuming the cabinet’s faith in the conviction to have beenvicarious, that is to say based on the judges’ view of thefacts, the author asked this time for details of the decision-making process by which the cabinet chose withoutconsideration of the facts to adopt the judges’ viewvicariously. Needless to say this has engendered noresponse to date.

In fact the notion that simple protocol precludes theScottish Government from stepping on judicial toes iscompletely unfounded. Any consideration of their

prevarication and obfuscation on facilitating a generalinquiry into the case suggests they are only too well awareof the powers they actually hold.

In 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases ReviewCommission (SSCCRC) authorised Mr al-Megrahi’s secondappeal against conviction. However, the newly elected

minority SNP Government quickly ushered through astatutory instrument which effectively banned publication of the Commission’s statement of reasons without the consentof 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 al-Megrahi (see “Masking Justice with ‘Mercy’”, above) to

block publication. Then, in the run-up to Scotland’s May2011 Election, the party professed to declare that theywould remove the ban, but they eschewed the swift use of another statutory instrument to do the job. Instead, theychose to follow the time-consuming route of primarylegislation and moved the Criminal Cases (Punishment and

Review) (Scotland) Bill, a measure which would allowinformants to block publication under the pretext of data

protection. However, as the Committee of Justice for Megrahi (JFM) argued before the Justice Committee of theScottish Parliament on 7 February, 2012, s.194K(4) of theCriminal Procedure (Scotland)Act 1995 explicitly providesthat where SCCRC disclosure is permitted by a StatutoryInstrument (inter alia) such disclosure “is not prevented byany 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 fromthe 2009 statutory instrument and to drop from the Billthose clauses which created the obstacle to publication of the Statement of Reasons. In spite of their having beenforced neatly into a corner it is anticipated that theGovernment will find some equally facile stratagem for avoiding the issue.

Similarly indicative of the SNP’s protective attitudetowards the reputation of the Zeist judges is their CriminalProcedure (Legal Assistance, Detention and Appeals)(Scotland) Act 2010, rushed through under the puzzlingguise of emergency legislation on the very day JFM

officially lodged petition no. 1370 calling on Parliament toorder an inquiry into the case. In giving the courts wide

powers to reject applications for leave to appeal s.7effectively nullifies the SCCRC’s power to act as anindependent arbiter. The discretion to review al-Megrahi’sconviction judicially lies therefore entirely in the hands of that very judiciary who found him guilty in the first placeand went on to uphold the conviction on appeal. At thesame time, Lord Advocate Frank Mulholland issued theominous warning that the abolition of double jeopardyenacted just before the May 2011 Election (mirroring the

power under the English Criminal Justice Act 2003 to retrycertain defendants previously acquitted) could well be usedto seek the re-trial of Lamin Fhimah, al-Megrahi’s acquittedco-defendant.

While Alex Salmond’s government continue to trot outthe reiteration of their faith in the safety of al-Megrahi’s




conviction they profess to keep an open mind on thesubject, claiming to support an inquiry with broader international sponsorship: in effect a reference to the United

Nations. Adopting such an approach is a posture Salmondand company can afford to make, secure in the knowledgethat it is never going to happen. Unless and until Scottish

independence is attained this would have to involveWhitehall 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 mattersrelating to the Lockerbie bombing. Although the GeneralAssembly is not bound by the resolution its powers of inquiry are much more limited than those of the SecurityCouncil, having no power to compel citizens of any member state to attend as witnesses or to compel member states tosurrender up documentary or other evidential material. Ittherefore enjoys less investigatory power than do ordinaryofficial Scottish tribunals of inquiry. But even if the Scottish

Government did seek to initiate a relatively toothlessinquiry of the sort open to the General Assembly the ideathat Mr Salmond might go cap-in-hand to HMG with arequest to petition the UN on his country’s behalf is a drollone, to say the least. Yet if he overcame those qualms and if he persuaded HMG to petition the UN on Scotland’s behalf,the establishment of a General Assembly inquiry wouldrequire a two-thirds majority resolution and it would be aforlorn hope they might ever surmount that hurdle, giventhe inevitable perception that Scotland – a country with noUN mission – remains itself responsible for, and ought to bedealing with, the failure of its justice system to dealadequately with the problem instead of trying to pass the

buck.On 9 November, 2010, the Scottish Parliament

considered the JFM Committee’s petition 1320 and foundthat the Salmond Government was in error in claiming tohave no power or remit to open an inquiry into the Zeisttrial. Not only did they cite two previous occasions when anexecutive decision was made to set up an inquiry into

judicial judgments but they drew the Scottish Government’sattention to its powers under the Inquiries Act 2005. Withthe SNP government engaging in such hoopla the Scottish

people might understandably be wondering if anindependent Scotland would be entirely safe in the hands of the party’s current leadership.

VIII. CURRENT IMPLICATIONS OF DEMONSTRATING THE

WEAKNESS OF THE CASE

1. Libya

There is little doubt that al-Megrahi’s conviction is the onlysolid link between the atrocity and the Gaddafi regime.Even then, Gaddafi’s payment of billions of dollars incompensation is not necessarily evidence of any more thanhis acquiescence, under US pressure, to shed Libya’s pariahstatus. The payment was explained as an acknowledgmentof “responsibility” but there was an implied caveat that it

was in the sense that the Libyan government was the officialemployer of “rogue” elements in the secret service whowere neither instigated nor authorised to carry out the

bombing. Even with the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime

there is likely to be a continued stigma attaching to Libya,which the Libyan people and their new government musthave a keen interest in shedding.

2. Extremists of Palestine

It is clear that on any detailed and balanced scrutiny of theevidence as it emerged from the trial the PFLP-GC remainas strongly as ever the leading contenders for suspicion of guilt (whether or not commissioned and funded by Iran). Itwas assumed that the PFLP-GC cultivated strong links withHezbollah, an organisation closely allied to Hamas. In lateSeptember 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 bestrengthened if the American public at large knew that itwas Palestinian terrorists who almost certainly killed 270mainly non-Jewish US and UK citizens on British soil andthat 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 InvestigationBranch 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, 28June 2007.Documents prepared for al-Megrahi’s abandoned secondappeal, available at www.megrahimystory.net

Selected commentaryAshton, J. and Ferguson, I., Cover-up of Convenience: the

hidden scandal of Lockerbie, Edinburgh: MainstreamPublishing, 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.







The author is a barrister and Head of Chambers Emeritus at7 Bell Yard, Temple Bar, London WC2A 2JR.

Much of the text of this monograph has been adapted fromthe author’s 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 willalso be carried in “Lockerbie: The True Culprits,” vol 176.