Lockerbie lies and claptrap........

The US senators ‘investigating’ the Mehgrabi affair have come up with their report at last. From the accounts published here it seems as if they arrived at their conclusion at the beginning and then came up with a load of spurious claptrap, including a list of powers of the UK Government over the Scottish Parliament that do not exist. Needless to say, Tony Hayward gets a walk-on part. And it was all a piece of grandstanding by Alex Salmond, the Scottish Chief Minister. The Torygraph asserts that the only motivation was compassion.

Pull the other one. To me it stands out like a bulldog’s gonads that it was to avoid Mehgabi’s second appeal which might have revealed the truth. This is what I wrote at the time.

‘Lockerbiegate refuses to lie down. I have been reading an interview with Dr Jim Swire whose daughter was on the flight. He has spent 20 years devilling out the truth, including several interviews with Gaddafi. The initial suspect was a Syrian-Iranian terrorist group. But along came the Gulf war and it was necessary to keep Syria onside and Iran neutral, so suspicion was heaped upon Libya. The prosecution case rested on obfuscation and lies. Evidence of a break-in at Heathrow close to an Iranair office and the shed where the baggage for PanAm 103 was assembled 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, which implicated Mehgrabi.

‘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. It was not a jury trial. In short, Mehgrabi was fitted up. 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 Mehgrabi out of the country as quickly as possible. But it may come out anyway, because apparently Mehgrabi has handed over about 300 pages of evidence to his Scottish lawyer.

‘The case for the prosecution was that Mehgrabi loaded the bomb in Malta. This was technically impossible because it was detonated by a fuse set to go off at a predetermined altitude. The two Maltese witnesses were paid $3 million by the US authorities (a very serious criminal offence).

‘The UN observer at the trial 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’. So it does look as if Mehgrabi was stitched up like a kipper.

‘It will come of no surprise that there is to be a further police investigation into Lockerbie, but don’t hold your breath. The armchair experts are banging on about the advances in DNA detection in the last 21 years, but the fact that the Scottish local constabulary are handling the investigation when it is clearly one for MI6 does not exactly inspire confidence. It is now obvious that the key prosecution witness was totally unreliable and identified Megrabi only 13 years after the event. One of the investigating officers at the time has now said that they wished to interview 8 other suspects ‘but never had the opportunity’ (eh?)’.