Megrahi: You are my Jury

The Scottish Review has recently published the following article by me under the headline The Crown case against Megrahi is about to sink without trace

Next week, 11 years after his conviction, all the important primary evidence concerning the so-called Lockerbie bomber will, for the first time, be made public. My book ‘Megrahi: You are my Jury’ will reveal crucial new facts, never available to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s trial court, many of which were withheld from his lawyers.

The Crown case was already holed below the waterline; now it should sink without trace. In its absence, those who assert Megrahi’s guilt will cling to two lifeboats: the first is that, regardless of the latest revelations, he was a senior agent of the Libyan intelligence service (the JSO), and therefore must have been involved in terrorism; the second is that Libya has admitted that it carried out the bombing. It’s time to scuttle these boats too.

The senior intelligence agent claim rests entirely on the testimony of Majid Gaika, an acquaintance of Megrahi’s, who was formerly a low level JSO agent and LAA’s deputy station chief at Malta’s Luqa airport. Giaka also claimed that Colonel Gaddafi was a freemason. He didn’t specify the rank – Grand Wizard of the Tripoli lodge perhaps?

At Megrahi’s trial it was revealed that Giaka had been a paid CIA informant since four months before Lockerbie and that the agency considered him so unreliable that it had threatened to stop paying him. It was not until three years later, when desperate for asylum in the US, that he finally implicated Megrahi in the bomb plot. In their 80-page opinion, the trial judges described much of his evidence as ‘at best grossly exaggerated, at worst simply untrue’, and noted: ‘Information provided by a paid informer is always open to the criticism that it may be invented in order to justify payment, and in our view this is a case where such criticism is more than usually justified’. Yet, perversely, they accepted his unsubstantiated claim that Megrahi was a senior JSO agent.

It cannot, of course, be proven that Megrahi was not an agent, however, in the 20 years since he was first charged with the bombing, no credible evidence has emerged to support the claim. The original indictment alleged that his company, ABH, was one of a number of JSO cutouts used for terrorist procurement, but, at the end of the trial, the Crown amended the indictment, dropping the wider conspiracy claims.

There is ample evidence to substantiate Megrahi’s claim that ABH was a legitimate trading company, dealing mainly in aircraft spares for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA). He admits that he sometimes travelled on a false passport, but insists that it was issued to give him cover when he was buying spare parts for the airline’s US-made aircraft, in breach of US sanctions (in contrast to his original passport, which gave his occupation as flight dispatcher, the false one gave it simply as ’employee’). Crucially, he kept it for 11 years after the bombing and handed it over to the police before the trial – hardly the actions of an intelligence agent, let alone a terrorist.

The documents in question were in fact a US state department press release, issued when Megrahi was first indicted 18 years earlier. Had there been any evidence to substantiate the claim, it would have been used at his trial, but,
of course, there wasn’t.

Following his return to Libya, the Sunday Times ran two articles which apparently bolstered the intelligence agent claim. The first, on 29 November 2009, claimed: ‘The Lockerbie bomber was implicated in the purchase and development of chemical weapons by Libya, according to documents produced by the American government’. The documents in question were in fact a US state department press release, issued when Megrahi was first indicted 18 years earlier. Had there been any evidence to substantiate the claim, it would have been used at his trial, but, of course, there wasn’t. The second article, from 20 December 2009 claimed that, at the time of his conviction, Megrahi had £1.8 million in a Swiss bank account. A great story, but, as the book explains, completely untrue.
More recently, ITV’s ‘Tonight’ programme broadcast an interview with Libyan official Ashur Shamis, described as an adviser to the country’s new interim prime minister, who claimed: ‘[Megrahi] is an employee of Libyan security, there is no doubt about it – of external security – and if he was told to do something he would have done it’. The programme failed to mention that Shamis hadn’t lived in Libya since 1973. Not that he was unfamiliar with intelligence agencies: in 1981 he was one of the founders of the CIA-backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya and in 1985, at the height of the US government’s covert campaign against the Grand Wizard (which has been documented by, among others, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward), became chair of its National Congress.

What, then, of the other lifeboat – Libya’s ‘admission of guilt’? In 2004 the regime formally accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the victims’ relatives. Here too Shamis had something to say: ‘[Gaddafi] paid all this money to cover up himself…If he had no role, he wouldn’t have paid a penny, he wouldn’t have paid a penny’. As well as being illogical – how could ‘admitting’ a crime amount to a cover up? – this was a blatant distortion of the truth. Libya accepted responsibility primarily in order to rid itself of crippling UN sanctions, which had been imposed after Megrahi and his co-accused Lamin Fhimah were first charged 12 years earlier. The corresponding UN security council resolutions allowed the sanctions to be lifted only if the country admitted responsibility and paid compensation.

In February 2004 the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, told the BBC that his government continued to protest its innocence, adding ‘We feel that we bought peace. After the sanctions and after the problems we faced because of the sanctions, the loss of money, we thought it was easier for us to buy peace and this is why we agreed on compensation’. The Grand Wizard’s son Saif al-Islam later said: ‘we wrote a letter to the security council saying we are responsible for the acts of our employees…but it doesn’t mean that we did it in fact. I admit that we played with words – we had to. What can you do? Without writing that letter we would not be able to get rid of sanctions’.

If only our own leaders had been so open about the grubby politics that have plagued Megrahi’s case.

The Crown Office today issued this press release, which states:

Today the Lord Advocate, Frank Mulholland QC, and the Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, Pat Shearer, together with Scottish prosecutors and Scottish and US law enforcement met with the UK families of the Lockerbie victims in London.

The families were advised that a formal request has been drawn up and sent to the new Libyan Government requesting access to Libya for police officers and prosecutors to examine information and documents relating to lines of enquiry.

Assuming the Libyan government grants the request, it will not be the first time that the police and prosecutors have been to Libya. In November 1999 a police team, led by Senior Investigating Officer Tom McCulloch, conducted investigations in Tripoli and in June 2000 a 10-strong team of police officers and procurator fiscals spent two weeks interviewing 60 potential defence witnesses.

During the November trip a Libyan court handed over the file relating to Abdelbaset’s false passport, which was in the name of Abdusamad. According to the head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation, Richard Marquise, only then were the prosecutors able to prove that he was the same Abdusamad, who, according to records from Malta, had travelled from Tripoli to Malta on the afternoon of 20 December 1988 (the day before the bombing) and left on the morning of the 21^st. In his memoir, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation, Marquise writes:

The file for Abdusamad contained only one document, a letter from the Libyan Intelligence Service to the Passport Office. This single piece of correspondence requested a coded (false) passport for Megrahi and requested it to be in the name of Abdusamad. When the presiding magistrate heard this in court, he slapped his forehead as if to say, ‘I cannot believe anyone could have left this in the file all these years.’

Oh really? If the passport was used to cover his role in mass murder, why would the Libyan authorities have bothered keeping any kind of file? And, more importantly, why would Abdelbaset have kept the passport for more than 10 years before handing it in when he arrived for trial in Holland? Marquise writes: ‘No one would have guessed Megrahi would bring his false passport to the trial with him.’  No one who believed him to be guilty, certainly, but it could also be viewed as the action of someone with nothing to hide.

One well-informed source to whom the current investigators should be speaking is Mohamed al-Alagi, who was the interim government’s first justice minister. As a former member of Abdelbaset’s Libyan defence team, he is familiar with the case and, as leading anti-Gadafy figure, he will surely be happy to help uncover evidence of the old regime’s involvement in the bombing.

Today’s Daily Mail, carries an article by Graham Grant, headlined Megrahi’s memoirs ‘will protest his innocence’. The article is below in italics, with my comments in normal typeface.

The Lockerbie bomber is set to heap fresh embarrassment on the Scottish Government by protesting his innocence in ‘deathbed memoirs’ to be  published next week.

The book should certainly embarrass the government, or, at least the Crown Office.

To avoid a public backlash, profits from sales will be handed to charities – with the convicted terrorist himself receiving none of the cash. However, it has emerged that one of the first beneficiaries is likely to be a group which has publicly backed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi’s fight to clear his name.

MOJO Scotland has indeed publicly backed Abdelbaset, however, since there is another group that campaigns on his behalf, Justice for Megrahi, MOJO Scotland does not actively campaign for him. Much of its focus is on helping wrongly convicted former prisoners.

The move will raise fears that the  Libyan – freed by Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill in August 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer – will indirectly profit from a boost to the campaign to prove his innocence.

Relatives of those killed in the December 1988 atrocity last night claimed any profits should go instead to those affected by the attack.

Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am 103 – which represents the  families of the Americans who died – said: ‘Why not give this money to the people of Lockerbie, or give it to the people who helped the victims’ relatives?

‘At the very least it would have been less contentious to give it to charities which haven’t actively supported him.’

However, he added: ‘Victims’ relatives in the U.S. wouldn’t accept five cents from him and they know the whole book is really nothing more than a fraud.’

There are two things that readers should know about Frank Duggan. Firstly, he did not lose anyone in the bombing, rather he is a Republican activist and Washington lobbyist. Secondly, when, in August last year, CNN filmed Abdelbaset ill in bed at home, Duggan said he didn’t believe it and was certain that he was with Gadafy. Presumably, along with Elvis and Lord Lucan.

As for the fraud allegation, Duggan’s powers of clairvoyance are clearly, once again, failing him. If he had read the book, he would know that almost all of the evidence it contains was assembled by the police and the Crown. Unfortunately for Abdelbaset, and those who wish to know the truth about Lockerbie, it was not revealed at his trial.

Megrahi, who will turn 60 on April 1, has worked on the book with English author John Ashton since his release from Greenock Prison in Renfrewshire.

Edinburgh-based publisher Birlinn is to unveil Megrahi –  You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence on Tuesday next week and is planning to donate all the profits to charity.

The Mail has learned one of first recipients of the cash will be the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO), which has publicly supported Megrahi and believes he is innocent.  Its project co-ordinator, John McManus, has said Megrahi should never have been convicted, calling him a ‘political pawn.’

A MOJO spokesman said ‘in principle’ the Glasgow-based charity would be happy to accept the cash and the decision was likely to be ratified at a meeting tomorrow.

But last night Scottish Tory justice spokesman David McLetchie said: ‘The publication of a book written by Megrahi, the UK’s worst mass murderer, will only cause further heartache for the families of his victims. ‘It’s a bitter reminder that a man given a short time to live and let out of jail by the SNP is now authoring a book two-and-a-half years later, which further demonstrates the folly of this decision.’

No Scottish politician has a more neandertal approach to Megahi’s case than David ‘Taxi for Mr’ McLetchie. As he should know, because it’s a matter of record, Abdelbaset did not author the book, I did. My recent correspondence with him can be read here and here.

The 496-page paperback, priced at £14.99, promises to present ‘conclusive new evidence’ to prove Megrahi was ‘an innocent victim of dirty politics, a flawed investigation and judicial folly’. In it, Megrahi will claim to reveal ‘how I came to be blamed for Britain’s worst mass murder, my nightmare decade in prison and the truth about my controversial release’.

 A BBC Scotland documentary to accompany the publication of the book will also be aired next Monday. Last night, a Birlinn spokesman insisted ‘no money will ever go to Megrahi’. Managing director Hugh Andrew added: ‘I absolutely defend our right to publish this book. It is not a statement on his innocence or guilt but he has the right to have his case in the public domain. A great deal more information has come to light since the trial.’

 Author Mr Ashton, who has invested much of his own money in the project, said: ‘On the advice of his lawyers, Abdelbaset opted not to give evidence at trial – a decision he regretted. The book presents the account that he would have given at trial and leaves it to the readers to judge.’

My investment in the project has been two and a half years of unpaid labour.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘We do not doubt the safety of the conviction of Al Megrahi, who was found guilty of an act of state-sponsored terrorism and did not act alone.’

Which conveniently ignores the fact that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case back to the appeal court on no fewer than six grounds, one of which was that the trial court judgment was unreasonable.

Today’s Sunday Express carries an article by Ben Borland, headlined ‘Rage at blood money’ from Megrahi book. Here is my response. The article extracts are in italics.

CHARITIES are being urged to refuse the Lockerbie bomber’s ‘blood money’ as the Sunday Express can today reveal the Libyan plans to give all the proceeds from his forthcoming memoirs to good causes.

Whoops, the article falls at the first fence. Abdelbaset was never in line to receive any of the proceeds, because it is not his book – it’s mine. He does not have a contract with the publisher and never has had.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi has been working on the autobiographical book with English author John Ashton ever since his controversial release from prison in August 2009. Edinburgh-based publisher Birlinn is to unveil Megrahi – You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence on February 28 and is planning to donate all the profits to charity.

True, although it’s unlikely that either Birlinn or I shall make a profit.

But last night Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theodora was among the 270 victims of the 1988 PanAm bombing, urged charities to turn down any offer of cash from Megrahi.

“I don’t think that anyone should accept money from that man,” she said. “I don’t think any charity should take a dime, they should not be encouraging this kind of thing.

“I think it would be despicable and an insult to the people who died if a charity took money from this.”

Some charities have been supportive of Abdelbaset and at least one has publicly stated his innocence.

Birlinn’s managing director Hugh Andrew confirmed that no charities had been approached so far, although victim support organisations in Britain and the United States may be given first refusal.

Mrs Cohen, who sent back £3.1million in compensation from the Gaddafi regime, describing it as “blood money”, said the plan was an attempt to “validate Megrahi’s actions”.

Speaking from her home in New Jersey, she said: “It is a whitewash. If a charity accepts money then it implies they are accepting the verdict of the book and it puts a kind of validation on Megrahi’s actions, so that would be deplorable.

The book is not a whitewash in any sense. At Abdelbaset’s insistence, it presents the case for the prosecution as well as the defence and invites readers to reach their own judgement.

“I don’t want to come out against publishers and people have a right to decide what they want to read. But if any charity is offered money from this I would urge them to turn it down.”

The new book promises to present “conclusive new evidence” to prove Megrahi was “an innocent victim of dirty politics, a flawed investigation and judicial folly”.

In it, Megrahi will claim to reveal for the first time “how I came to be blamed for Britain’s worst mass murder, my nightmare decade in prison and the truth about my controversial release”.

However, Mrs Cohen dismissed the claims as “self-serving” and also criticised Mr Ashton, who worked for Megrahi’s defence team and has written extensively about the Libyan’s innocence.

She said: “I don’t think he can be in any way an objective person, given his very close ties to the former Libyan regime. It is just another part of the campaign to pretend that Megrahi didn’t do it.

I worked alongside Abdelbaset’s legal team for three years, during preparations for his second appeal. The appeal was funded, ultimately, by the Libyan government. We were not instructed by the government and had minimal contact with its officials. Both my books on Lockerbie describe Gadafy as a brutal dictator.

“Why should we believe anything that Megrahi says? If he had anything to reveal, he should have revealed it at the trial.

It’s a fair point: on the advice of his lawyers, Abdelbaset opted not to give evidence at trial (a decision he regretted, although it’s debatable that the outcome would have been any different if he had decided differently). The book presents the account that he would have given at trial and leaves it to the readers to judge. Moreover, it presents a great deal of evidence that the court never heard, much of which was concealed from the defence by the Crown.

“It won’t bring my daughter back but it would help if there were no more of these things which are self-serving and only cause confusion.

Abdelbaset and I are acutely aware of the anguish that the book might cause the Lockerbie victims’ relatives who believe him to be guilty.  We simply wish them and the wider public to know all the important evidence that was available to us, most of which has previously been concealed from the relatives and was not aired at his trial.

And also, if he is so damn sick how is he able to help write a book?”

The answer is, with great difficulty. As I have written elsewhere on this blog, the writing process was very arduous. If Abdelbaset was guilty, then he would surely not have spent so many of his last days cooperating with an author.

Megrahi was reckoned to be just three months away from dying of  prostate cancer when he was freed by Justice Secretary Kenny Mac-Askill 30 months ago.

 Wrong. No one said Abdelbaset had three months to live, rather they said three months was a realistic prognosis.

 At the time, eight years into a 27-year sentence, he was part-way through an appeal granted after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled that his conviction may have been unsafe.

Hugh Andrew, Birlinn’s managing director, yesterday defended his decision to publish the 59-year-old father of five’s memoirs.

He said: “We will make the offer to various charities and I understand perfectly well that some may not wish to receive money, it is entirely their call.

“It would be inappropriate for us to make any profit out of this book and we are not seeking to make any. Megrahi himself will receive no money at all.

“I absolutely defend our right to publish this book. It is not a statement on his innocence or guilt but he has the right to have his case in the public domain.

“A great deal more information has come to light since the trial.”

Brighton-based Mr Ashton co-wrote Cover-up of Convenience: The Hidden Scandal of Lockerbie in 2001 and worked on The Maltese Double Cross television documentary, which infamously alleged a CIA drug smuggling connection to the atrocity.

 At least those bits are true – well done Ben Borland.

Twelve months ago, a few days after the start of the Libyan revolution, I posed the following question on Professor Robert Black’s Lockerbie blog: ‘What’s the betting that, sometime in the next few weeks, the following happens: 1) In the burned out ruins of a Libyan government building, someone finds definitive documentary ‘proof’ that Libya and Megrahi were responsible for Lockerbie; and/or 2) A Libyan official reveals, ‘we did it’.’

Within a day the second scenario had materialised. The newly defected justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who was soon to become head of Libya’s National Transitional Council, declared to the Swedish newspaper Expressen ‘I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order on Lockerbie.’[i]  More high-profile defectors followed suit, including the ex-interior minister Abdel Fattah Younes (who was later killed by suspicious revolutionaries) and the ex-ambassador to the UN Abdul Rahman al-Shalgham.

Six months on from the fall of the Gadafy regime, not a single piece of evidence has emerged to back up these defectors’ claims. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: if, as I believe, the bombing was not commissioned by Gadafy, then such evidence never existed; and, if Gadafy was involved, then the evidence was probably shredded years ago.

In the absence of evidence, what are we to make of the defectors’ claims? The first thing to note is that all have been remarkably vague. To my knowledge, so far only Jalil has expanded on the allegation. He did so in an interview with the Sunday Times, published on 27 February last year, under the headline ‘Lockerbie bomber ‘blackmailed Gadaffi for release’’. In it he claimed that Abdelbaset had blackmailed Gadafy into securing his release by threatening to expose the Colonel’s role in the bombing, and had ‘vowed to exact ‘revenge’’ unless Gadafy complied.[ii] This was both ludicrous and illogical. Abdelbaset depended upon the government to fund his appeal and look after his family in Tripoli. As his response to the revolution demonstrated, Gadafy didn’t take kindly to those who challenged him. And wasn’t it already accepted that Gadafy was responsible for the bombing? After all, Libya had paid compensation to the victims. How could Abdelbaset expose something that had already been exposed? And, if Abdelbaset only cared about his freedom, why, after returning to Libya, would he bother spending so much of his remaining time on a book? (It should also be noted that Jalil told the Sunday Times that Abdelbaset was not the man who carried out the planning and execution of the bombing, but was involved in facilitating things for those who did. This was, perhaps, a nod to the fact that the evidence against Abdelbaset was very weak – something which, as justice minister, he must have been well aware of.)

When, a few weeks after the article, Jalil was asked on BBC Newsnight about the evidence of Gadafy’s involvement, he ‘revealed’ that Gadafy had supported Abdelbaset and paid for his legal case.[iii] This was not even a revelation, let alone evidence. Was this the best Jalil could offer?

The ex-interior minister, Younes, was less explicit than Jalil, which was surprising, given that he had been close to Gadafy for 47 years and was described by some as the Colonel’s number two. Asked by the BBC’s John Simpson if Gadafy had personally ordered the bombing, he replied, ‘There is no doubt about it, nothing happens without Gadafy’s agreement. I’m certain this was a national governmental decision.’[iv] In an online article Simpson claimed that Younes ‘maintains that Col Gaddafi was personally responsible for the decision to blow up the Pan Am flight’,[v] but in the broadcast section of the interview he appeared to be expressing a firm belief, rather than certain knowledge. Surely, if Gadafy had ordered the bombing, Younes must have known all about it.

Shalgam’s claim of Libyan involvement was still less credible, as he had previously declared that the country was not responsible for the bombing.[vi] No doubt this was why, when questioned by the Arabic newspaper al-Hayat, he gave the vague answer: ‘The Lockerbie bombing was a complex and tangled operation … There was talk at the time of the roles played by states and organisations. Libyan security played a part but I believe it was not a strictly Libyan operation.’[vii]

The most intriguing defector was the ex-foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa. He too had previously denied Libyan responsibility for Lockerbie,[viii] yet, shortly after his arrival in the UK in March 2011, it was reported that he would be would be willing to tell the British authorities about the country’s involvement in the bombing. The claim was made by a UK-based Libyan acquaintance, Noman Benotman, who reportedly helped to coordinate the defection.[ix] Benotman’s role was itself interesting. A former leader of the anti-Gadafy islamist terrorist organisation the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, he had renounced violent extremism and become a leading figure in the counter-radicalisation think-tank Quilliam.[x] He remained opposed to Gadafy yet was apparently friendly with man described (by Shalgam) as the ‘black box’ of the Gadafy regime,[xi] who had once tried to have him extradited to Libya.

Koussa was eventually interviewed about Lockerbie by the Scottish police,[xii] and shortly afterwards had his assets unfrozen and was allowed to leave the country. He is now living in a luxury hotel in Qatar, whose government was the most supportive of the Libyan rebels among the Arab states, although the new Libyan government continues to regard him with extreme suspicion.[xiii] David Cameron insisted that Koussa had not been offered immunity from prosecution,[xiv] while behind the scenes Whitehall spinners were busy downplaying his role in terrorism. A ‘senior government source’ briefed the Daily Telegraph that Koussa was not in London at the time of the 1984 murder outside the embassy of WPC Yvonne Fletcher (as if that cleared him of responsibility) and added ‘seeing him as the mastermind behind Lockerbie doesn’t make any sense in terms of his career. He might, however, possess some useful information about such cases.’[xv]

The obvious problem here was that for years sources in Whitehall and Washington had been privately briefing the media that Koussa was Libya’s terrorist-in-chief and the probable mastermind of Lockerbie. The day after the defection the CIA’s Vincent Cannistraro, who had previously worked on the US government’s covert campaign to unseat Gadafy, part of which involved spreading disinformation, told CBS news: ‘Moussa Koussa was personally responsible for the actual organization of [Lockerbie].’[xvi] It was, in short, inconceivable that the Libyan government could be guilty of the bombing and Koussa be innocent.

So why wasn’t he arrested? There were two obvious explanations. The first was that, in its desperation to overthrow Gadafy, the UK government was prepared to make a pact with the most notorious devil in his inner circle. The second was that the government was well aware that neither he nor Gadafy had anything to do with Lockerbie and that he had simply called their bluff. A third explanation, which doesn’t preclude the other two, was that Koussa was a long-time MI6 asset. Former foreign secretary Jack Straw confirmed in a BBC Radio 4 interview that Koussa had been ‘a key figure’ in the 2003 negotiations with the Libyan government over weapons of mass destruction. Straw then went further: when put to him that Koussa had had ‘exceedingly close contacts at a very sensitive level with – what shall we call them for the sake of argument? – ‘British officials’ for the best part of a decade’, he answered, ‘Yes, if not more.’[xvii] The Daily Telegraph went further still, stating: ‘As head of Libya external intelligence, Mr Koussa was an MI6 asset for almost two decades.’[xviii] If true, this was not only breathtaking, but might also account for much of the disinformation surrounding the case. Even if it were not true, the affair exposed the ugly reality of the government’s approach to Lockerbie.

The most recent ‘Gadafy did it’ claim, appeared in an ITV Tonight programme, broadcast last month. The documentary followed the admirable Dr Jim Swire to Tripoli as he attempted to uncover information about the bombing. Its denouement was an interview with Ashur Shamis, described as an adviser to the Prime Minister, who told Dr Swire there was no doubt that Gadafy was personally involved in the planning and execution of the bombing. He added: ‘Regardless of what Megrahi did or did not do, that [sic] is a small fish. He is an employee of Libyan security, there is no doubt about it – of external security – and if he was told to do something he would have done it.’ Gadafy, he said, ‘paid all this money to cover up himself … If he had no role, he wouldn’t have paid a penny, he wouldn’t have paid a penny.’[xix] This was, of course, nonsense: the Gadafy regime had paid compensation to the Lockerbie victims, reluctantly, because it was the only way to rid the country of harsh UN sanctions – a point made publicly by Shalgam in 2004. If the programme’s producers had checked Shamis’s background, they would have discovered that he hadn’t lived in Libya since 1973 and therefore had no first hand knowledge of the inner workings of the Gadafy regime. In 1981 he was one of the founders of the CIA-backed National Front for the Salvation of Libya and in 1985, at the height of the US Government’s covert campaign against the Gadafy regime, became chair of its National Congress.[xx]

The programme claimed that Dr Swire ‘is now persuaded that Gadafy was probably behind his daughter’s murder.’ In fact, as he subsequently told the Times, he found Shamis unconvincing. He explained: ‘I found Tripoli percolated with the desire to pin everything imaginable under the sun on the defunct Gaddafi regime, because the people are so delighted to have got rid of him … Mr Shamis certainly believes al-Megrahi was guilty. I tried to make plain that if you look at the evidence that it is not at all likely.’[xxi]

Thankfully, not all the influential voices in the new Libya are as badly informed as Shamis. The first interim justice minister, Mohamed al-Alagi, a former head of Libya’s human rights association who was involved in Abdelbaset’s case, has stated publicly that Abdelbaset is innocent.[xxii]

I still expect that ‘evidence’ will emerge from Libya to support Abdelbaset’s conviction. The case against him is now so damaged, that only such concoctions can save it.

Dear Mr Ashton

I find it ironic to say the least that I should now be branded as a conspiracy theorist re the release of Megrahi from jail when those who protest his innocence are not slow in concocting their own when it comes to his conviction. All I will say is that no one said that he could survive for well over 2 years and had that been made clear many of those who swallowed the MacAskill line out of humanitarian concern would have had second thoughts. Quite how you can be so certain about the content of these unpublished reports I don’t know.

The referral by the SCCRC may have been on 6 grounds as you compute them but you omit to mention the 45 grounds which the Commission rejected. Moreover the Commission did not say that the judgement was unreasonable. It did say that there was no reasonable basis for its conclusion about the purchase of items on a particular day which was a factor in the finding of guilt but not the only one.

However none of this will ever be adjudicated upon in a criminal court not least because Megrahi withdrew his appeal. The Bill is accordingly a pointless waste of time.

Yours sincerely

David McLetchie

Dear Mr McLetchie,

I did not brand you a conspiracy theorist, but merely pointed out that there are conspiracy theorists who believe that Mr Megrahi was not as ill as various doctors had stated. It is wrong to label as conspiracy theorists all those who cast doubt on his conviction. You should note that his grounds of appeal did not make a single conspiracy allegation in all its 320 pages.

It was made clear by the doctors who examined him that, to quote the medical report released by the Scottish Government, ‘It is very difficult to be precise on matters of prognosis for any disease and Mr Megrahi’s condition is no different.’ It stands to reason that, while they considered it unlikely, none of them would have ruled out the possibility of him surviving for over two years.

The number of grounds rejected by the SCCRC is irrelevant as appeals are not adjudicated on the basis of the number of grounds advanced and rejected. Six is a large number of grounds on which to refer any conviction.

Your statement: ‘Moreover the Commission did not say that the judgement was unreasonable. It did say that there was no reasonable basis for its conclusion about the purchase of items on a particular day which was a factor in the finding of guilt but not the only one’ appears to miss the point that if Mr Megrahi did not buy the clothes on the date in question then the case against him collapses, regardless of the other factors. The Commission’s report states: ‘in the absence of a reasonable foundation for the date of purchase accepted by the trial court, and bearing in mind the problems with Mr Gauci’s identification of the applicant, the Commission is of the view that no reasonable trial court could have drawn the inference that the applicant was the purchaser.’ It therefore came as close as it could to saying that the verdict, as well as the conclusion re the date of purchase, was unreasonable.  By the way, I am certain of the report’s contents because I have read it, along with the 23 volumes of appendices.

In earlier emails I drifted away from the specific issue at hand, which is whether or not Mr Megrahi is trying to block disclosure of the material held by the SCCRC.  If, as you allege, he is, then the only reason for doing so would be if the material contained information that undermined his case. The SCCRC considered all the material in detail and none of it persuaded them not to refer the case. It therefore stands to reason that he has nothing to fear from its release, which rather puts to bed your allegation.

The current bill is a pointless waste of time. On that, at least, we are agreed.

Yours sincerely,

John Ashton.

The reports to which I was referring and of which you cannot know the contents are the unpublished medical reports whose release is blocked by Megrahi.

I shall bear your other points in mind but I am pleased to note we are in accord re the merits of the Bill.

Yours sincerely

David McLetchie

Dear Mr McLetchie

I do have some, possibly all, of those reports and believe that they add nothing to what is already known.

Yours

JA.

Modern politics is the art of convincing the public that black is white. There is no finer illustration of the maxim than this press release, just issued by the Scottish Conservatives, headlined Megrahi is blocking release of Lockerbie papers. It states:

Evidence given to the Justice Committee this morning has raised doubts over the effectiveness of the SNP Government’s planned legislation to release documents detailing the reasons behind the release of Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi. Sir Gerald Gordon QC, a member of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), said that the publication of details would be hampered by data protection laws. Meanwhile, founding member of the Justice for Megrahi campaign, Dr. Jim Swire, confirmed that Megrahi would not consent to the release of certain information during his lifetime. Scottish Conservative Justice Spokesman, David McLetchie MSP said: “Sir Gerald Gordon’s comments underline that this Bill will prove ineffective and the SNP Government should stop wasting parliamentary time in pandering to the Megrahi lobbyists. The fact is that Megrahi himself would block the release of all the evidence by refusing his consent, as was acknowledged by Dr. Swire and other campaigners today. Accordingly, having dropped his appeal in order to get out of jail courtesy of Kenny MacAskill, it appears he now only wants a partial release of information at least so as long as he is still alive. That is not my idea of justice.”

The statement follows the justice committee hearing on Tuesday 7 February, in which Mr McLetchie also asserted that Abdelbaset had consented only to the partial release of information on his case.  The true position is that Abdelbaset has consented to the release of all the information for which that consent would be required, providing all the other relevant individuals and organizations also consent. His position is that all the Lockerbie evidence should be made public and that he has nothing to fear from the truth.

Yesterday I had the following email exchange with Mr McLetchie.

Dear Mr McLetchie,

During the justice committee meeting yesterday you stated that Mr Megrahi had consented only to the partial release on information on his case. This is not true. The true position was contained in a statement, dated 30 June 2010, and posted on the website http://www.megrahimystory.net/   For your convenience, the statement read as follows:

It has recently been wrongly reported, that Mr Al-Megrahi refused to give his consent for the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to release documents relating to him, referred to in the Commission’s Statement of Reasons on his case, and its appendices, that he and his lawyers provided, either directly or indirectly, to the Commission.

The true position is that Mr Al Megrahi, through his Libyan Lawyer, made it clear to the Commission in a meeting on April 12th 2010 that he was happy for the documents to be released, providing all the official bodies that provided documents to the Commission agreed to the release of all of those documents. These bodies include the police, the Crown Office, the Foreign Office, and the intelligence service, or services, which provided the secret documents referred to in Chapter 25 sources of the Statement of Reasons.

Mr Al Megrahi’s position has always been, and remains, that all information relating to the case should be made public.

I trust that you now stand corrected and will not make any further misleading statements on the subject.

Yours sincerely

John Ashton

Dear Mr Ashton

Thank you for this. However I see no logic in the Megrahi position. Why does he attach conditions to the release of information requiring his consent? Surely he should set the standard if he wants to clear his name otherwise you arrive at a position which puts him in control and where he can always claim that no matter how much is released by other parties there is always more that has not been disclosed by them thereby justifying his own refusal. Incidentally why does he refuse consent to the release of all the medical reports which were the basis for his release?

Yours sincerely

David McLetchie

Dear Mr McLetchie,

Thank you for your reply.

Mr Megrahi attached that condition, because it was the only lever available to him – albeit a very weak one – with which he could push for full disclosure of all the evidence held by the Crown and the other relevant agencies. In the 10 years between his surrender to trial and his return home, the Crown consistently withheld key evidence, some of which was uncovered by the SCCRC and some of which was handed over, after a long legal struggle, to his lawyers prior to his second appeal. Much of this evidence was exculpatory and it is scandalous that it was never disclosed to the defence prior to his trail. He was rightly outraged by this.  

The release of his medical records would not and could not carry any jeopardy for him. He refused to consent to their release for the same reason that anyone else might: they contained sensitive information about him and his illness. Since the records have no bearing upon his conviction, he was, and remains, entitled to privacy.

Your sincerely,

John Ashton.

Dear Mr Ashton

Thank you for that explanation which I think justifies my claim that Megrahi is now trying to play the partial release game – the very conduct of which he accuses the prosecution.

If he wished to establish the truth as he sees it he should have proceeded with his appeal which would have put in the public domain both  the Statement of Reasons and the accompanying appendices and there  would be no need for this Bill. Moreover if he wishes to convince sceptics like me about the circumstances of his release and the claim of 3 months to live then he should have consented to the release of the medical reports at the outset. Indeed if I had been MacAskill I would have insisted upon it in order to justify my decision. We have excellent palliative care services in Scotland which would have been at his disposal.

Yours sincerely

David McLetchie

Dear Mr McLetchie,

Mr Megrahi has stated that he is prepared to consent to the release of all the evidence for which that consent would be required. The Crown and the other relevant parties have made no equivalent statement. That is a highly significant difference. There is no game playing on his part; he wants all the evidence to be made public, including that which is not favourable to him.

It is a matter of public record that he abandoned his appeal because he believed that it would help him to gain compassionate release. He didn’t want to do so, but felt he had no choice. It is nonsense to suggest, as some have, that, in abandoning his appeal, he was also abandoning his claim of innocence.  

No one claimed that he had three months to live, rather the government received medical advice that three months was a realistic prognosis. It is well known – and was well known, and widely canvassed, at the time of his release – that it is virtually impossible to give accurate prognoses for those suffering advanced prostate cancer. The only purpose that would be achieved in releasing the records would be to silence the conspiracy theorists who believe that he was never as ill as was claimed. Why should a terminally ill man pander to such idiocies?  

Your scepticism would be better directed towards the guilty verdict that was brought against Mr Megrahi and towards the conduct of the Crown Office. Regarding the former, might I remind you that:

1. The UN trial observer described the verdict as ‘incomprehensible’
2. Following a four year investigation, the SCCRC referred the case back to the court of appeal on no fewer than six grounds
3. One of those grounds was that the trial court judgment was unreasonable – stunning rebuke, given that Mr Megrahi was tried by three very senior judges, rather than a lay jury.

Regarding the conduct of the Crown, the SCCRC discovered that a number of items of crucial exculpatory evidence had been withheld from Mr Megrahi’s defence team. Taken together, these facts, which are all a matter of public record, paint a very disturbing picture, yet, with the exception of a couple of MSPs, the Scottish Parliament has turned a blind eye. Mr Megrahi’s conviction and the machinations surrounding it are an almighty scandal, which is one day going to jump up and bite the Scottish criminal justice system very hard. At that point you and your fellow MSPs will have to decide where you stand. You would be wise to start considering that decision now.

Yours sincerely,

John Ashton.

As readers will note, I veered slightly away from the specific issue at hand, which is the disclosure of the material relating to Abdelbaset that’s held by the SCCRC. By stating that Abdelbaset is seeking to block disclosure of that material, Mr McLetchie implies that Abdelbaset has something to fear from its release – a bizarre suggestion given that the SCCRC referred his case to the appeal court on six grounds.  I shall make this point to Mr McLetchie, should he respond to my last email.

Megrahi: You are my Jury will finally be published this Spring. When I began writing it two and half years ago, I believed it would be on sale within six months.  I completed a rough first draft in four months, during which time I visited Abdelbaset four times in Tripoli. Despite being in great pain, he was determined to contribute as much as he could. We usually sat together for two hours, twice a day, while he checked the manuscript for accuracy and I interviewed him about his personal recollections.

He was insistent that I should present the case for both the prosecution and defence, and not avoid the awkward evidence that the Crown would have raised at trial, had he opted to give evidence. (He regretted not doing so, although it’s doubtful that the trial outcome would have been any different if he had testified.)

After a further visit in March 2010, his health took a turn for the worse. The book was close to completion, but for months he was too ill to receive me. I eventually saw him in September, but our time was limited to two short meetings. In March 2011 he gave his blessing for Birlinn to publish, but by then the Libyan revolution was in full spate, so it was decided to delay completion until Gadafy had left power.

Many books have been written about Lockerbie. What makes this one important – and different – is that I’ve had access to a huge amount of primary evidence, most of it previously undisclosed. This includes all the documents ever provided to Abdelbaset’s lawyers by the Crown and everything that the lawyers themselves uncovered. While I’ve not seen all the evidence that the Crown holds  – when Abdelbaset returned to Libya we were still awaiting further disclosure – I have a lot that they don’t, including the very powerful material that would have been used at his second appeal.

For the record, I wasn’t paid to write the book, either directly or indirectly, and received only a small advance from Birlinn.