Lockerbie Revisited

Dark Elegy
a memorial to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing by Susan Lowenstein

On 21 December 1988, I was about an hour outside of Heathrow on a flight from the US to London when, at a few minutes past 7 pm, I saw a flash in the distance to the north. When the plane I was on had landed safely and we were disembarking, I heard one of the ground crew say something about a plane crash. I mentioned it to my friend who met me at the airport, but she had been on a bus down from Oxford and so had not heard anything about it. When we got back to her house in Oxford, we turned on the tv for the news. Almost straight away they were reporting that a bomb was suspected.

There was a 3 year joint investigation by the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the FBI which led to the issue of murder indictments in November 1991. It took sanctions against Libya and long drawn-out negotiations with Colonel Gaddafi before the two accused men were handed over for trial in the Netherlands in April 1999. In January of 2001, the trial came to an end with one conviction and one acquittal. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison. 14 months later, Megrahi’s appeal was refused and 16 months after that, his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive article which gives all of the details, including the Helsinki warning and the three possible motives for the bombing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103

Yesterday www.stopthelie.com listed a story from Scotland on Sunday of 28 August 2005, which begins:

A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.

The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

The article goes on to claim that the US and the UK had known all along that the perpetrators of the crime were not the Libyans:

The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.

Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.

A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.

"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made."

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005

I could not find anything more recent in The Scotsman specifically about the Lockerbie case. However, the case is mentioned in connection with questionable evidence-gathering practices by Scottish police, which were uncovered and then covered up at the time of the Lockerbie trial. And I have noted that in the article presented here, there is a reference to Iranian-backed terrorism. The Lockerbie case may be revisited after all.