Below is an interview that I did last week for the Canadian Sun News Network.
The latest issue of Private Eye carries the following two short articles under the headline Phony forensics.
The last Eye’s revelations that the crown I had kept secret a report which undermined prosecution claims about the circuit board fragment used to convict Abdelbasset al-Megrahi of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has prompted justice campaigner Jim Swire to raise further questions. The fragment, said to be part of the bomb’s timing device, was said to have been found by scientists embedded in blasted shirt remains, and the evidence bag in which it was discovered had been altered by someone who was never identified.
Furthermore, the fragment had tested “negative” for explosive traces and there were discrepancies about how it was stored, tested and identified. It had been passed between UK scientists and the US investigators who came up with the “match” to timing devices supplied to Libya thus linking the country and Megrahi to the bombing, which killed 270 people, including Dr Swire’s daughter, Flora.
“Now that we know that it was always known that it could not have been part of a Libyan timer used in the bomb, where did it come from?” asked Swire. So far there is no indication that the Crown Office has chosen find out.
Nor, says Dr Swire, is it looking into the break-in at Heathrow 16 hours before the departure of PanAm flight 103. This information was also withheld from Megrahi’s trial – although it had been disclosed by the time of his appeal. As he told the Eye: “I would like to know why this myth about the fragment and Libyan bombs from Malta is still being used to conceal the truth, and why the real perpetrators remain free from ever being brought before any court for this crime against humanity.”
Earlier this year the Scottish newspaper the Herald confidently reported that two oft he leading lawyers involved in the Lockerbie case were about to become high court judges. It said that the judicial appointments board had recommended for the bench the former Lord Advocate Colin (now Lord) Boyd QC, who led the
prosecution of Megrahi, and Maggie Scott QC, who led Megrahi’s abandoned appeal, along with Michael Jones and David Burns. [JA note: in fact David Burns QC was also involved in the case, as he was the second senior counsel on Abdelbaset’s team.]
Lord Boyd was recently criticised by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for failing to disclose crucial information about a series of CIA cables referring to its Walter Mitty-like “star witness”, Abdul Majid Giaka, a so-called double agent, which completely undermined the witness’s credibility (Eyes passim). But guess who failed to make the judicial cut out of the four candidates? Only the troublesome Ms Scott. She declined to discuss the matter with the Eye.
The latest issue of Lobster magazine carries a review of Megrahi: You are my Jury by freelance writer Tom Easton.
Today’s edition of the Herald reveals the contents of the secret intelligence document referred to in chapter 25 of the SCCRC’s statement of reasons, under the headline How UK Government hid secret Lockerbie report. The non-disclosure of the document was one of the SCCRC’s six grounds for referring Abdelbaset’s case to the appeal court. The article reads as follows.
IT has been hidden, blocked and kept secret by the UK Government for more than 20 years, but The Herald can reveal for the first time the contents of the top-secret Lockerbie document that the UK tried to prevent us from publishing.
The highly classified document, which has never even been aired in public or shared with the courts, originally came from Jordan and indicates that a Palestinian terrorist group was involved in the bombing that killed 270 people – something the UK Government has vehemently denied.
The UK Government has gone to considerable lengths to prevent details of the document – which casts further doubt on the safety of the conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi – being published by The Herald.
It has threatened legal action to stop publication of the newspaper and asked the paper to sign up to a court-approved gagging order.
Our decision to publish details of the document, which was obtained by the Crown Office but never shown to the defence team, will prove highly embarrassing to the Crown, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Office of the Advocate General, whose lawyers have worked tirelessly to prevent it ever being even discussed in public.
The document incriminates the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) in the Lockerbie bombing.
The PFLP-GC were the original suspects in the investigation into the biggest terrorist atrocity ever to have been committed in mainland Britain. However, by 1991 police and prosecutors were entirely focused on Libya. Since then politicians and the investigating authorities have denied the possibility of their involvement, instead blaming the whole atrocity on Libya.
Repeated, high-level attempts to block the report indicate it is vital to unearthing the truth about the Lockerbie bombing. The UK Government arranged for the document to be covered by Public Interest Immunity on national security grounds. This prevented it from being shared with the defence but does not prevent publication by a newspaper.
A source said: “The document itself is historical and regimes have changed so it is hard to believe it presents any risk at all to national security. It originates from Jordan and incriminates the Palestinian terror group the PFLP-GC. The contents are very important but what makes them so much more significant is the lengths the UK Government and others have gone to in order to prevent anyone from seeing the document.
“This is the most remarkable piece of evidence. It does not rule out the Libyans but it does indicate that others were involved.
“It also shows the lengths the UK Government was prepared to go to in order to ensure that any evidence undermining their case against Libya would never see the light of day.”
It is thought the document could fatally undermine the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. He died of cancer last month without knowing the contents of this report.
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) team that investigated Megrahi’s conviction discovered the existence of the document during their four-year investigation which concluded in 2007. Their 800-page report explains that their investigative team were allowed to access the document in Dumfries police station but they were prohibited from removing the notes they made on it and the document itself.
The commission was only able to access the document after signing up to a special agreement not to divulge the contents and was told by the Crown that “a conclusion was reached that the documents did not require to be disclosed in terms of the Crown’s obligations”.
The SCCRC then ruled that the contents were sufficiently disturbing for a court to have believed the conviction could have been a miscarriage of justice. The failure to disclose the document was one of the six grounds on which the case was referred back for a fresh appeal in 2007.
To date, only the Crown, UK Government and SCCRC team know the contents of this closely guarded document.
Megrahi’s legal team pushed for disclosure of the document once it was revealed by the SCCRC. The Scottish courts were in the process of appointing special advocates and a special judge who would decide in secret whether the contents of the document could be disclosed when Megrahi dropped an appeal in 2009 in order to speed his return to Libya. He was released on compassionate grounds in August 2009 because he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer.
This new evidence and the fact it points to the guilt of non-Libyans will also prove embarrassing for the prosecution who failed to share the document with the trial court and who have subsequently argued that the investigation should focus on Libya alone.
A spokesman for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “The UK Government provided all relevant information on the Lockerbie bombing to the Scottish authorities, who considered it as part of the investigation which led to Megrahi’s conviction. Any suggestion of ‘hiding’ documents is simply incorrect.
“The Government entered into a dialogue with The Herald in line with its long-established practice, supported by successive governments, to seek to prevent publication of any material that could cause significant harm to the UK’s international relations and national security. We have consistently made clear that we sought to do this through dialogue rather than legal action”.
Chapter 25 of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s Statement of Reasons refers to material which the Crown had proactively disclosed to the Commission during its review of Megrahi’s conviction. The Crown claim they wanted to provide this information to Megrahi’s legal team during the second appeal and made this clear to the court, but this could not be done because of the UK Government’s Public Interest Immunity Certificate.
A spokesman for the Crown Office said: “The suggestion that the PFLP-GC was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing was fully considered by the trial court following the incrimination of this terrorist group by Megrahi during his trial and does nothing to undermine the Crown’s case that Megrahi acted with others in the bombing of flight Pan Am 103.
“All material which met the Crown’s disclosure obligations in relation to the PFLP-GC was properly disclosed to the defence before the trial and this was confirmed by the SCCRC’s investigation.
“The court concluded that the conception, planning and execution of the plot which led to the bombing was of Libyan origin. The court was, of course, only dealing with evidence, not matters of opinion or conjecture.”
The new edition of Private Eye carries the following article under the headline Justice short-circuited. The newly-revealed document to which it refers can be read here.
For 19 years prosecutors and investigators kept secret a detailed report about the most important forensic evidence recovered from the debris of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie – a fragment of timing device circuit board – which completely undermined their own case against Abdelbasset al-Megrahi.
That such crucial material, obtained by the Eye, was never disclosed before the Libyan was convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity on UK soil, should in itself be sufficient grounds for a public inquiry of itself. Added to the wealth of other evidence concealed from his trial (Eyes passim) the deeply flawed identification evidence “linking” Megrahi to the bombing, the use of a discredited Walter Mitty-type FBI informer as a “star witness”, and the fact that other material in the case still remains secret protected by “public interest immunity”, the stench of cover-up becomes overwhelming.
The 11-page document is a detailed summary of the forensic analysis of the circuit board, which reveals that police and experts were well aware, relatively early in the investigation, that there was something “very unusual” about the board. They had found that tracks on it were coated with pure tin, whereas the vast majority in manufacture have a tin/lead mix. This was a significant lead.
“Without exception it is the view of all experts involved in the PCB [printed circuit board] industry who have assisted with this enquiry that the tin application on the tracks of the circuit was by far the most interesting feature”, said the police report.
Scandalously this was never revealed at Megrahi’s trial and not disclosed to his defence lawyers until 2009 – a month before he was freed from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds to return to Libya, where he recently died.
The Crown’s case against Megrahi regarding the circuit board was always the opposite: namely, that the fragment was identical to circuit boards used in timers that were supplied to Libya by a Swiss company Mebo. But these were not remotely “unusual” as they had the common tin/lead mix.
Earlier this year writer and researcher John Ashton in his book, Megrahi: You are my Jury, revealed how the government scientist, Allen Feraday, who had told the trial that the circuit fragment was “similar in all respects” to the Mebo devices, had, in fact, overseen tests on the fragment and a control sample circuit board, (revealed in recently disclosed notebooks) which pointed up the differences between the two.
As this new document shows, the significance of such findings was known more widely. This raises questions about why the evidence remained buried for years and who exactly knew the Mebo timers were different.
The piece of board was discovered among parts of a man’s shirt recovered from the crash site. The shirt was in turn traced back to Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, who put Megrahi in the frame three years after the bombing, saying he resembled the man who had bought the clothing. (As Eye readers know Megrahi bore no resemblance to the man first described by Gauci to investigators, and it later emerged that the shopkeeper and his brother were handsomely “rewarded” by the FBI.)
The new material coupled, and the doubts about the veracity of the Gauci evidence, undermine the two main pillars of Megrahi’s conviction. And while the Libyans were not averse to state-sponsored acts of terrorism at the time of the bombing in 1988, it remains the case – as the late Paul Foot pointed out in an Eye special report, Lockerbie: The Flight for Justice, in 2001 – that the attack bore the hallmarks of a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist cell which had been caught red-handed with devices equipped to bring down planes.
The excuse for not holding a public inquiry is because the criminal investigation is continuing. So far investigators only seem to have travelled to Libya – no doubt to see if they can obtain new evidence that might somehow prop up the crumbling conviction.
Yesterday’s Inside Story programme on Al-Jazeera English featured a discussion on the Lockerbie case and its implications for Libya. I was interviewed along with Alan Mendoza of the neocon Henry Jackson Society and UK-based Libyan activist Mohamed Eljarh.
The Firm magazine has compiled an archive of its outstanding Lockerbie coverage. It’s in two parts, with part 1 available here and part 2 here. Hats off to the editor Steven Raeburn. No one has covered the case with such vigour.
Here are links to four of the interviews that I’ve done for the BBC since Abdelbaset’s death on Sunday. The times of my contributions are provided in brackets. Please note that the links will expire in a few days.
5 Live, Stephen Nolan show (1:06:25) This features a bit of a ding dong with Geoffrey Robertson QC, the once great human rights lawyer.
Radio 4, Today programme (1:53:25)
Radio Scotland, Call Kaye (00:29:00) Also features Jim Swire and Len Murray of the Justice for Megrahi campaign.
BBC2, Newsnight Scotland (06:40) Also features Lucy Adams of the Herald.
The following piece appears in today’s Daily Mail, with my by-line, under the rather overstated headline (not mine) I can prove the ‘Lockerbie bomber’ was INNOCENT
The death of Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, better known as the Lockerbie bomber, brought relief to relatives of the 270 killed in the 1988 outrage. The Libyan, however, always protested his innocence. Now an extraordinary new book, written by a member of his legal team, invites us to think the unthinkable . . .
This is what is supposed to have happened on the day of the Lockerbie disaster; what the prosecution argued, what they successfully persuaded three of Scotland’s most senior judges was indeed the case at Megrahi’s trial in 2000.
On the morning of December 21, 1988, Megrahi and his co-defendant Lamin Fhimah somehow smuggled a brown Samsonite suitcase on to Air Malta flight KM-180 from Malta to Frankfurt.
In that suitcase, the prosecution said, were clothes bought from a local shop by Megrahi on a previous visit to the island on December 7 and a bomb contained in a Toshiba RT-SF16 radio-cassette player, a model sold in its thousands in Libya.
Both men, it was alleged, were members of the Libyan intelligence service, the Jamahiriya Security Organisation, while the timer used in the Lockerbie bombing, the prosecution would claim, was one of just 20 supplied exclusively to Libyan intelligence.
Using legitimate luggage labels that Fhimah — who until recently had been station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Malta’s Luqa airport — had illegally obtained, the two men ensured the unaccompanied suitcase made its way to Frankfurt Airport, where it was loaded on to a flight to Heathrow, where it was put on Pan Am’s evening flight to New York, PA103.
At 7.03pm, 38 minutes into the flight and with the Boeing 747 at a height of 31,000ft, the bomb exploded over Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and crew and 11 residents on the ground.
It was Britain’s worst ever aviation disaster and our worst ever act of terror. However, in the early weeks and months of the massive investigation to find the culprits, Libya wasn’t even mentioned.
Almost from the outset, the finger of suspicion was being pointed, both privately by Western intelligence agencies and publicly by the world’s media, at Iran.
After all, it was less than six months since the American battle cruiser USS Vincennes, on patrol in the Persian Gulf, had shot down Iran Air flight 655, killing all 290 people on board, many of whom were travelling to Mecca on the annual Hajj pilgrimage.
The Americans claimed their ship believed itself to be under attack, President Ronald Reagan offered no apology and the Iranians swore revenge.
The deaths would be avenged ‘in blood-spattered skies’ warned Iran’s state radio, while President Ali Khamenei promised that his country, in its search for vengeance, would employ ‘all our might… wherever and whenever we decide’.
As a result, Western intelligence agencies and airport security teams were not only on full alert at the time PA103 was brought down, they also had a pretty good idea where any attack might come from.
In October 1988, just two months before the attack on Flight 103, West German police had raided two apartments in Neuss and Frankfurt occupied by members of the terrorist group the Popular Front for a Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PFLP-GC).
In Frankfurt, they found an extraordinary terrorist arsenal, including 5kg of Semtex, 6kg of TNT, 16 sticks of dynamite, 30 grenades and six automatic rifles.
They also found assorted airline luggage stickers and 14 airline timetables.
But it was in Neuss that the police made the most significant discovery — a fully functional bomb hidden inside a Toshiba radio-cassette player armed not just with a time-delay switch, but also a barometric pressure switch. In other words, the bomb had been designed to detonate in the unpressurised cargo hold of an aircraft.
Within days of the raid, West German police knew, after interrogating the bombmaker, that they hadn’t found all the PFLP-GC terrorists or, indeed, all the bombs.
So when Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie only two months later, the finger of blame couldn’t have pointed more firmly to Palestinian terrorists acting on behalf of — and probably being handsomely paid by — Iran.
So how is it that 23 years after Flight 103 fell out of the sky, the only man to be found guilty of the attack has been a solitary Libyan, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, a former head of airline security for Libyan Arab Airlines?
The short answer is that the West was desperate not to upset Iran any further at the time, not least because Western hostages were being held in Lebanon and Iranian influence might secure their release
Under Colonel Gaddafi, Libya had become the West’s favourite whipping boy, a state sponsor of terrorism that could be conveniently blamed — especially with the help of CIA-backed disinformation — for just about every terrorist outrage.
Within 18 months of the disaster, this suddenly and unexpectedly included Lockerbie, thanks to one extraordinary forensic breakthrough.
A tiny fragment of printed circuit board that had been found embedded in a piece of clothing recovered from the widely-scattered wreckage was matched by American investigators to an electronic timer that had been supplied exclusively to Libyan Intelligence.
And it’s here that the prosecution got so lucky that it almost defies belief.
For not only was the timer made by a small Swiss electronics company, Mebo, that just happened to share a building in Zurich with a trading company Megrahi was an investor in, but the clothing could also be traced to one particular shop in the Maltese town of Sliema, where the shopkeeper miraculously identified Megrahi as the man who had bought it.
This positive identification was central to the prosecution case, for it suggested Megrahi had bought the clothes and put them in the brown Samsonite suitcase that contained the Lockerbie bomb.
With astonishing powers of recall — even though he wasn’t interviewed by police until eight months after the disaster — the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, remembered that the clothes had been sold to a strangely behaved man. He particularly remembered the man buying an umbrella because it started to rain as he left the shop.
Gauci was also able to work out the likely date — it was just before the Christmas street decorations were put up, while his brother Paul was at home watching European football on TV.
By a process of elimination, he said that made it either the Wednesday of November 23 or December 7, with the difference being crucial. On November 23, there was no suggestion Megrahi was in Malta, but on December 7, by his own admission, he definitely was.
Extraordinarily, Gauci could even provide an accurate description of the man: 6ft-plus, well-built, clean-shaven, dark-skinned and about 50 years old.
The only problem was that Megrahi was 36 at the time, 5ft 8in and slightly built. And yet by the time of his trial, more than 11 years later, Gauci’s idea of what this strangely behaved man looked like had changed so much that he had no problem confirming that the man in the dock certainly resembled his mystery purchaser.
Despite the three judges admitting they weren’t totally convinced by this partial identification, in their summing-up they indicated they were convinced enough.
The Scottish judges accepted that it was Megrahi who bought the clothes on December 7, despite the fact that no evening rain was recorded at a local weather station just 5km from Gauci’s shop in Sliema, a town where meteorologists put the chances of it raining at no more than one in ten.
Would the judges have been so confident had they known the extent to which the shopowner and his brother Paul may have been ‘incentivised’ in their evidence by the prospect of financial reward.
Tony Gauci knew a reward was on offer and inquired about payment before he first picked out a photograph of Megrahi in February 1991. His brother Paul, who didn’t give evidence at the trial but was considered an important part of the case, frequently raised the subject with the police.
Between 2003 and 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission carried out a painstaking review of the Lockerbie evidence, in response to Megrahi’s application for a second appeal.
One of the most sensational items it unearthed was a letter written in 2002 by the senior investigation officer of the Scottish police team to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Terrorist And Violent Crime Unit after Megrahi’s first appeal had been unsuccessful.
In it, the senior investigating officer recommended that Tony Gauci — the most important witness against Megrahi — be paid $2 million and his brother Paul $1 million under the department’s Reward Programme (which they later were). He even urged the department to pay more, if that was within the scheme’s rules.
As the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission concluded, with what many would feel was some understatement, this financial payment ‘was capable of affecting the course of the evidence and the eventual outcome of the trial’.
Financial incentive also discredited another key witness at the original trial, Abdul Majid Giaka, who in 1988 was a low-ranking, 28-year-old Libyan Intelligence officer on secondment to Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta and, therefore — for a while, at least — a colleague of Megrahi’s.
The two men did not get on, as became clear the day Giaka entered the American embassy in Malta and asked to talk to a CIA officer.
It was August 1988, four months before Lockerbie, and what Giaka wanted was simple: in exchange for money and being relocated to the United States, he would supply the Americans with sensitive information about Libya.
Being junior and based in Malta rather than Tripoli, he began with his immediate colleagues, implicating Megrahi and the eventual co-defendant Fhimah in terrorist activities, and alleging that the former had brought a cache of explosives to the island as long ago as 1985.
For the first time, Megrahi was on the CIA’s radar.
But Giaka proved an unreliable double agent, and his CIA handlers soon lost patience with his constant demands for money and bizarre medical treatments (he wanted disabling surgery on his arm to avoid military service) and the conspicuous lack of useful intelligence in return.
By December 1990, however, with the Lockerbie investigation now focusing on Libya and Megrahi, the CIA realised it needed its useless Libyan informant rather badly. And Giaka, his career in the doldrums, needed money.
In July 1991, he was spirited out of Malta and taken on board the USS Butte in international waters, where he was interviewed by two FBI officers.
Once again he implicated Megrahi and Fhimah. Yet only now could he suddenly remember that towards the end of 1988 — almost three years earlier — he had seen Megrahi and Fhimah meeting one or two men who appeared to have recently disembarked from a flight to Malta from Tripoli.
Crucially, he claimed he could recall Megrahi and Fhimah removing a large brown Samsonite suitcase from the luggage carousel.
It would have been the most damning piece of evidence — the final piece of the jigsaw, as far as the FBI was concerned, linking the crucial suitcase not only with Megrahi but also placing it in Malta and, before that, Libya. And it would have been damning, but for a ferocious legal argument at the original trial.
The Crown, prosecuting, relied on a set of documents placed before the court detailing the CIA’s dealings with Giaka.
But some documents were missing, while others were heavily censored. This had everything to do with national security in the United States, the court was told, and nothing to do with the case against the defendants.
Only that wasn’t correct. When uncensored versions of the documents were eventually presented in the trial, it was discovered that most of the deleted material related to the CIA’s own doubts about their informant. In short, it knew he was a fantasist and a liar.
Giaka was completely discredited. Despite this, one of the most baffling aspects of the trial is that when the judges finally delivered their verdicts, Fhimah was found not guilty, while Megrahi was convicted. How could that possibly be, given Giaki’s evidence? Either they were both guilty if it was true, or both were not guilty if it was not.
In his report on the trial, the official United Nations observer, Professor Hans Kochler described the finding of only Megrahi being guilty as ‘incomprehensible’.
As Megrahi’s legal team prepared to attempt to overturn the verdict for a second time, one last, crucial piece of evidence was finally unearthed — evidence that would almost certainly have caused the case against him to collapse had it been known at the time of the original trial.
This evidence was never heard, because Megrahi was released in August 2009 on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer before it was due to be presented in court.
For years, a cornerstone of the evidence of Libya’s involvement in the Lockerbie outrage — and, therefore, of Megrahi’s — was that tiny fragment of printed circuit board which had been found in one of the items of clothing bought from the Gaucis. The Americans had matched it to a small consignment of timers that had been sold to Libyan intelligence.
But exhaustive forensic tests carried out on behalf of Megrahi’s defence team proved in 2009 that although the fragment of circuit board apparently came from the bomb’s timer, it did not actually match any of the timers which had been sold to Libyan intelligence.
The Libyans had been supplied with timers whose copper circuitry was covered in an alloy of lead and tin. But the circuitry on the fragment from the Lockerbie bomb was covered only in tin.
It is a tiny difference, but a crucial one. There was now no evidence that the Lockerbie bomb had a Libyan timer.
In the event, at the original trial the judges recommended that a man they had sentenced to life imprisonment, a mass murderer who had killed 270 people, serve a minimum sentence of just 20 years. Ever since, the Megrahi team has spent years trying — successfully, I believe — to prove the Libyan was never guilty.
And while as a member of that team I accept that I may be regarded as party pris, it is surely difficult to avoid the feeling that the evidence against Megrahi was unreliable and that an innocent man had been convicted of committing the worst terrorist atrocity in British history.
Megrahi: You Are My Jury — The Lockerbie Evidence, by John Ashton, is published by Birlinn, at £14.99.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Ali Megrahi, who has died aged 60, was known to the world as ‘the Lockerbie bomber’; an unrepentant terrorist and senior Libyan intelligence agent. To many who have studied the case, he was the victim of the most shocking miscarriage of justice of recent years. He was convicted in January 2001 for the murder of the 270 Lockerbie victims, a verdict described by the United Nations trial observer as ‘incomprehensible’.
The son of a customs officer, he was born in Tripoli in 1952, the third of eight siblings. Until the age of nine, his family shared their home with two others. His UNESCO administered school provided daily vitamin supplements, which helped fend off the chest problems that had plagued him as a young child.
After finishing school in 1970, the year after the revolution that bought Colonel Muammar Gadafy to power, he briefly trained as a marine engineer at Rumney Technical College in Cardiff. He hoped this would be a steppingstone to a career ship’s captain or navigator, but his eyesight proved too poor. His hopes dashed, he dropped out of the course and returned to Tripoli where he joined the state airline Libya Arab Airlines to train as a flight dispatcher. He completed his training and gained his dispatchers licence in the United States, and was subsequently promoted to become LAA’s chief dispatcher and then Head of Operations at Tripoli Airport. Keen to improve his education, he enrolled as a part time external student at the University of Benghazi to study geography. Having come top in his year, he was invited to join the teaching staff on the promise that he would he would be sent to the US obtain a master’s degree in climatology. When the promise failed to materialise, he opted to double his salary by returning to LAA. In 1986 he was temporarily appointed head of airline security, to oversee the transfer of personnel from the state intelligence service the JSO to security staff positions within the LAA (the JSO having previously been directly responsible for the airline’s security). During this assignment, which lasted less than a year, he was formally seconded to the JSO. Although he was generally described as a senior intelligence agent, he always insisted that the secondment was his only direct involvement with the JSO. At his trial the Crown was unable to produce any hard evidence to the contrary and the allegation rested solely on the testimony of an erratic Libyan CIA informant, Magid Giaka, who also claimed that Colonel Gadafy was a freemason.
His next job was part-time coordinator of the Centre for Strategic Studies, a small research institute, although his salary continued to be paid by LAA. At around this time he took advantage of his Government’s more relaxed attitude to private enterprise by becoming a partner in a trading company called ABH. He never denied that he was fairly well connected among Libya’s elite, and that he used these connections to his advantage in business. The company’s primary business was the purchase of spares for LAA aircraft. Since this activity was sometimes in breach of US sanctions, he was issued with a passport in a false name, which, unlike his regular passport, did not betray his airline background.
He maintained that it came as a complete surprise when, in November 1991, he and his former LAA colleague Lamin Fhimah were indicted for the bombing. The case was built around clothing from Malta, which he was alleged to have placed in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with a bomb concealed within a Toshiba radio-cassette player. Blast damaged fragments of clothing were identified by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who recalled a Libyan man buying them a few weeks before the bombing. More than two years after the event Gauci picked up a photo of Megrahi as resembling the purchaser. The purchase date was narrowed down to November 23rd and December 7th. On the latter date Megrahi stayed at the Holiday Inn hotel a few minutes away from Gauci’s shop.
A small piece of circuit board found within one of the clothing fragments was matched to timing devices made by a Swiss company called MEBO, which rented part of its Zurich office to ABH. Its owner Edwin Bollier claimed that only 20 such timers were made, all of which were supplied to Libya.
Documents from Frankfurt Airport appear to indicate that an unaccompanied suitcase was transferred to the doomed flight Pan Am 103 from Air Malta flight KM180. The night before the bombing Megrahi travelled to Malta using the passport. His LAA colleague Majid Giaka later claimed to have seen Megrahi and Fhimah walk out of Malta’s Luqa Airport with a brown Samsonite case. Megrahi returned to Tripoli from Luqa the following morning on a flight that departed around the same time as KM180. According to the Crown, he and Fhimah conspired to smuggle the suitcase onto KM180 during the overlapping check-in periods.
Interviewed by ABC Television shortly after the indictments were issued, he denied making the trip and his connection to MEBO, fearing that telling the truth might have given the US government an excuse to attack Libya, as it had five years earlier. The lies were to cost him dear, making him think better of giving evidence at his trial. Although this spared him a potentially torrid cross-examination, it also denied him the opportunity to introduce the wealth of evidence that supported his claims of innocence. This included proof of his sanctions busting activities and an innocent explanation for the false passport, which he willingly handed over to the Crown.
When held up to the light, the Crown case was found to be riddled with holes. Gauci consistently described the clothes purchaser as around 50 years old, at least six feet tall and dark skinned, whereas Megrahi was five feet eight inches tall, light skinned and, at the time of the incident, was only 36. The shopkeeper never made a positive identification of Megrahi and, on selecting his photo, said that he was at least ten years younger than the clothes buyer. Gauci was certain that it was raining when the man left the shop, yet, whereas rainfall was recorded at the relevant time on November 23rd, none was recorded on December 7th. The Libyan CIA supergrass Majid Giaka was revealed to be so unreliable that the Agency considered sacking him. He only implicated his former colleagues two and a half years after Lockerbie when, having fled Libya, he was desperate to gain asylum in the US. It could not have escaped his notice that a $4 million reward was on offer. Air Malta’s baggage security procedures were unusually strict and records appeared to prove that no unaccompanied bags were loaded onto KM180.
The Lockerbie trial judges accepted that the failure to explain how the bomb had been planted constituted “a major difficulty” for the Crown case, yet were nevertheless satisfied of Megrahi’s guilt. Equally perverse was their acquittal of Fhimah, as the Crown had insisted that Megrahi could not have acted without him. The judges declared Giaka to be unreliable and not credible yet accepted his uncorroborated claim that Megrahi was a JSO member.
Following the failure of his first appeal against conviction, from March 2002 he was held in isolation for three years in a specially created unit within Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison, dubbed Gadafy’s Café. In 2005 he was transferred to a low security wing of Greenock Prison, where he was placed among long-term prisoners who were nearing the end of their sentences. Although initially in trepidation about the move, he was soon accepted by staff and inmates alike, very many of whom believed him to be innocent. He was cheered by the support that he received from a number of highly respected public figures, most notably Nelson Mandela and Dr Jim Swire, who lost his daughter Flora in the bombing.
In 2007, following a four year review, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred his case back to the Appeal Court having identified six grounds of a possible miscarriage of justice. Notably, among these was that the original judgment was unreasonable. Another was the discovery that, prior to picking out Megrahi’s photograph, Tony Gauci had expressed an interest in being paid a reward and that subsequent to the conviction the US Government paid him at least $2 million.
Frequent holdups, many caused by the Crown, delayed the start of the appeal until April 2009, by which time Megrahi had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. He was convinced that the stress of his wrongful incarceration played a major part in the onset of the disease. Shortly afterwards he applied to Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to be released on compassionate grounds. Until the diagnosis he had always dreamed of clearing his name and returning to his family, but eventually he felt compelled between the two. Although not formally required to abandon the appeal in order to gain compassionate release, Libyan minister Abdelati al-Obedi told him that MacAskill had indicated that it would be easier to grant the application if he dropped the appeal.
By the time of his release, on August 20th 2009, best estimates suggested that he might have only three months to live. The fact that he survived for over two and a half years was doubtless down to the care and support that he received in Libya and the knowledge that every day that he lived as a free man was a tiny sliver of justice reclaimed.
Misreporting and misinformation haunted him until the end, including a rehashed, 18 year-old, unsubstantiated allegation that he had been involved in chemical weapons procurement. It was also claimed that, at the time of his conviction, he had $1.8 million in a Swiss bank account (the true amount was $23,000, a figure that had remained unchanged since 1993).
As one of the few British people who got to know Megrahi well, I can say that he was a warm and humorous man who, considering his predicament, was remarkably patient, and free of rancour towards those responsible for his conviction. He is survived by his wife Aisha and their five children.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, born on 1 April 1952, died 20 May 2012.
