Lockerbie: a perversion of justice............

I have just been reading a review by Jim Swire of a new book about Megrahi (‘Megrahi: You are my Jury; the Lockerbie Evidence’), and the miscarriage of justice at his trial. Dr Swire’s daughter was killed in the crash, and he has since devoted his life to devilling out the truth, including interviewing Gaddafi.

The initial suspect was a Syrian-Iranian terrorist group employed by Iran for revenge after the shooting-down of an Iranian airliner. But along came the Gulf war and it was necessary to keep Syria onside and Iran neutral, so Bush pressed Maggie to drop it.

Suspicion was heaped upon Libya. The US drew up indictments against 2 Libyans on the basis of evidence by  a defector highly paid by the CIA. This evidence was described as ‘a farrago of lies and fantasy’, and was thrown out by the judge.

The prosecution case rested on obfuscation and lies. The claim was that Megrahi placed a bomb on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt. It allegedly had a long-running timer that allowed it to traverse Frankfurt, be loaded onto 103, and timed to explode 38 minutes after leaving London.

The key piece of evidence was a circuit board for a bomb timer. But there was no forensic evidence that it had been involved in an explosion and there is deep suspicion that it was planted. The boss of the firm that made the board stated that he had been offered $4 million by the FBI to verify that it had been sold to Libya. An employee confessed at a Swiss enquiry that he had stolen a board and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. The two Maltese witnesses were paid $3 million by the US authorities (a very serious criminal offence).

Evidence of a break-in at Heathrow close to an Iranair office and the shed where the baggage for PanAm 103 was assembled, 17 hours before 103 departed, was withheld from the defence. The bomb had a pressure detonator set to go off at a certain altitude and therefore it must have been put on board at Heathrow, not Malta, as the prosecution claimed. Evidence to support this view showed that all baggage on the Air Malta flight had been accounted for.

Other prosecution evidence was fabricated.

The UN observer at the trial said that the only way ‘this incomprehensible verdict’ could have been reached was through ‘deliberate malpractice’ by the Scottish Crown Office and that ‘it was a consistent pattern during the whole trial that, as an apparent result of political interest and considerations, efforts were undertaken to withhold substantial information from the Court………Virtually all people presented by the prosecution as key witnesses were proven to lack credibility to a very high extent, in certain cases even having openly lied to the court’.  

Because of all this, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found evidence of a potential miscarriage of justice sufficient to grant a second appeal. The prospect of all the dirt coming out in the appeal hearing was enough to get Mehgrahi out of the country as quickly as possible.

So it does look as if Mehgrahi was stitched up like a kipper.