Pan Am Flight 103

A synthesis page at The How, Why and Who of Pan Am Flight 103 summarises the material in this page and other related pages..

Boeing 747-121 "Clipper Maid of the Seas" pictured at Frankfurt Airport in July 1986

Pan Am Flight 103 wreckage - Cockpit section

Crater and property damage in Lockerbie caused by aircraft wreckage

On 21 December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747-121 named "Clipper Maid of the Seas", was on a scheduled transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport when there was an explosion on board. The aircraft broke up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie (Map), killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. Eleven people in Lockerbie were killed by large sections of the plane which fell in and around the town, bringing total fatalities to 270.

Thirteen years later, on 31 January 2001, Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was convicted of involvement in the bombing and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland. His co-defendant, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was unanimously acquitted. Megrahi's appeal against his conviction in January 2001 was refused on 14 March 2002 by a panel of five Scottish judges at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

In June 2007, Megrahi was granted leave for a second appeal against his conviction, on the basis of evidence that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred. His appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal was abandoned by al-Megrahi in August 2009, just two days before the Scottish Government released him on compassionate grounds to return to Libya. The stated grounds for release were that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and was likely to die within three months.

Lockerbie Official Narrative

Colin Boyd former Lord Advocate

Full article: Lockerbie Official Narrative

In August 2001, Scottish Lord Advocate Colin Boyd presented what might be considered the definite statement of the Lockerbie Official Narrative at a conference of the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law (ISRCL): While admitting that "Politics and diplomacy were necessarily interwoven with this case from the start", there is no mention of Bernt Carlsson, UN Commissioner for Namibia, and the evidence presented at the trial is presented as the unvarnished truth. Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, was determined at the trial to be a member of the Libyan Intelligence Services and of being guilty of the bombing. The narrative is predictably self-congratulatory: "In conclusion, it seems to me to be absolutely right that the investigation of crime and the prosecutorial decisions which flow from that investigation must be taken independently of political influence... Political and diplomatic action secured the trial. The investigation of the case and the prosecution of the trial were driven by the evidence."

Lockerbie forensics: Dr John Cameron's damning report

Dr John Cameron, physicist and former Church of Scotland minister

At the beginning of 2003, former South African president Nelson Mandela asked the Western Christian churches to intervene in what Mandela described as "a clear miscarriage of justice" in the proceedings at Camp Zeist where Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had been convicted for the Lockerbie bombing. In July 2003, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Rt Rev Professor Iain Torrance, took up Mandela's challenge and appointed the Church of Scotland's leading scientist Dr John Urquhart Cameron to conduct a scientific examination of all the forensic evidence which had convicted Megrahi. As a result, Dr John Cameron produced a damning report on the conduct of the forensic experts and on the evidence led at the Lockerbie bombing trial.

Background to the report

Dr John Cameron explained the background to his report:

"Nelson Mandela decided to look at the evidence because he said there was a big problem with the forensic and that this was a miscarriage of justice. Mandela was a lawyer. He approached the Scottish Church and asked them to look into this, and I wrote a 4000-word report."

Dr Cameron continued:

"I first became involved in the Lockerbie case when Nelson Mandela asked the Church of Scotland to support his efforts to have Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's conviction overturned.

"As an experienced lawyer, Mandela studied the transcripts and decided there had been a miscarriage of justice, pointing especially to serious problems with the forensic evidence. I was the only research physicist among the clergy and was the obvious person to review the evidence to produce a technical report which might be understood by the Kirk.

"Scientists always select the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions to eliminate complicated constructions and keep theories grounded in the laws of science. This is 'Occam's razor' and from the outset the theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe seemed quite mad. I contacted everyone I knew in aviation and they all were of the opinion it was placed on board at the notoriously insecure Heathrow and that the trigger had to be barometric.

"The Maltese link is so tenuous, complex and full of assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the three forensic scientists involved – and that was a big problem. Megrahi is the only person convicted on their evidence whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.

"One of the UK's foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield, has long warned against our judiciary's gross over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said:

"Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake anyone can make is to believe its practioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading. There is, in fact, a kind of 'canteen culture' in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than seekers after truth."

The scientific evidence points to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine whose chief bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat, was arrested in Frankfurt in December 1988. In the boot of his car was a Toshiba cassette recorder identical to the one found later at Lockerbie with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay and a barometric switch.

Comment in The Guardian

A comment by "Marchmont" in The Guardian of 14 August 2009:

I saw a report the other day circulating in the Church of Scotland. Evidently in the summer of 2003, the Moderator of the General Assembly, the Rt Rev Iain Torrance, now the Principal of the Theological Seminary at Princeton University, asked his friend the Rev Dr John Cameron, a professional Physicist and the leading scientist among the Scottish clergy, to study the technical aspects of the Lockerbie trial. Torrance had heard many misgivings about a possible miscarriage of justice in particular from Robert Black QC and Dr Jim Swire. He also was disturbed that the UN observer, Dr Hans Köchler, had dismissed the verdict of out of hand.

In his report, Dr Cameron cast severe doubt on the credibility of the three key forensic scientists used by the prosecution during the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. In particular, he concluded that Alan Feraday should simply not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics (a view later endorsed by the Lord Chief Justice in 2005). Virtually all defendants against whom Feraday had given evidence in other trials have had their convictions quashed because of the inadequacy of his submissions.

Another of the scientists who gave evidence in the trial, Dr Thomas Hayes, was involved in the case of the Maguire Seven, imprisoned in 1976 for handling explosives shortly after the Guildford bombings. They also won their appeal after major flaws in his forensic science.

The third scientific "expert" was the FBI's Thomas Thurman who identified the fragment of circuit board as part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives and as manufactured by Swiss firm MEBO, which supplied the component only to Libya and the East German Stasi. This claim has since been proved to be completely untrue. Thurman also has a bad track record in the USA for doctoring scientific reports to help the prosecution and again convictions based on his evidence have subsequently been quashed. Lockerbie remains as his sole "victory".

Dr Cameron also received privately the opinion of his friend, Scottish Lord Advocate Peter Fraser who had run the prosecution, that the principal witness, Maltese shop-owner Tony Gauci, was "not the full shilling" - an understatement which Dr Cameron later described as being of truly sublime dimensions. This opinion was subsequently given by Lord Fraser to the Sunday Times.

Dr Cameron reported back to the Moderator that the conviction looked like a clear miscarriage of justice.

Torrance, a personal friend of Tony Blair wrote to the PM suggesting that Megrahi be transferred back to Libya and the legal mess cleared up. At the very least, the transfer would be seen in the Islamic world as an enlightened act of Christian charity. Blair's reply clearly showed that he was in no position to do so and that the American government wanted closure. He insisted that the verdict would have to remain in place and Megrahi remain in Barlinnie Prison.

Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing

This is the full "Forensic report on the Lockerbie bombing" by Dr John Cameron:

The international success of Anthony Zuiker’s US television series "Crime Scene Investigation" (CSI) led to a wildly inflated view of the reliability of forensic science. From the start the American police cautioned that the series gave members of the public an inaccurate perception of how crimes were solved. Of course, forensic scientists loved the show and delighted in their enhanced reputation though what actually happens in the real world is markedly different.

One of the UK’s foremost criminal lawyers, Michael Mansfield has long warned against over-reliance on forensic evidence to secure convictions. He said:

"Forensic science is not immutable and the biggest mistake that anyone can make is to believe that its practitioners are somehow beyond reproach. Some of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history have come from cases in which the forensic science was later shown to have been grossly misleading. There is, in fact, a kind of 'canteen culture' in forensic science which encourages officers to see themselves as part of the prosecuting team rather than investigators seeking the truth."

At first this did not seem to matter in the aftermath of the destruction Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. It was quickly established by air accident investigators that there had been an explosion in the forward cargo hold in the baggage container AVE 4041. Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase which appeared to have contained the bomb were recovered, together with parts of a Toshiba Bombeat radio cassette recorder in which the bomb had been concealed. There were also items of clothing which looked as if they had also been in the case. At this stage the forensic evidence appeared robust and no credible doubt has been raised in the years since the event that this was the method by which the plane was destroyed.

The police discovered that the baggage container AVE 4041 had been loaded with interline baggage at Heathrow. The baggage had been x-rayed by Sulkash Kamboj of Alert Security; an affiliate company of Pan Am. John Bedford, a loader-driver employed by Pan Am told police that he had placed a number of cases in the container before leaving for a tea break. When he returned he found an additional two cases had been added, one of which was a distinctive brown Samsonite case. Bedford said that Kamboj had told him he had added the two cases. When questioned by the police, Kamboj denied he had added the cases or told Bedford he had done so. This matter was only resolved at the trial when under cross examination Kamboj admitted that Bedford was telling the truth.

All the evidence at this stage pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC). Five weeks before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was apprehended in Germany. Haffez Dalkamoni, right-hand man to the group’s leader Ahmad Jibril, and the bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat were arrested while visiting electrical shops in Frankfurt. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Under German police interrogation, Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also admitted that Khreesat had built other bombs including a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches but he claimed to have no knowledge of its whereabouts.

The involvement of the PFLP-GC was consistent with what was assumed at the time to be the motive for the Pan Am atrocity. In July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet containing some 300 Iranian pilgrims, had been shot down over the Persian Gulf by the renegade US battlecruiser Vincennes. Not only did America refuse to apologise, the captain of the ship and his gunnery officer were decorated for their actions. This crass behaviour caused outrage within Iran and throughout the Middle East. Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged "in blood-splattered skies".

Soon the US Air Force Command was issuing warnings to its civilian contractors:

"We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion with mass casualties."

Later warnings were more specific:

"We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe."

Within weeks the CIA reported that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC had met government officials in Iran and offered his services. Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs to all European airports. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was

"imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff remain extra vigilant."

After the arrest of the PFLP-GC cell Heathrow received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities. In the aftermath of Lockerbie, all the Toshiba cassette bombs seized by the Germans were tested and found to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of the barometric timer employed is that it is not activated until the plane is airborne so the bomb will not go off on the ground if the flight is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes will elapse as the aircraft gains height and the air pressure drops enough to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie.

The clothing thought to have been in the suitcase with the bomb contained labels which allowed the items to be traced to a shop in Malta. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, was known to have visited Malta shortly before the atrocity. When first questioned the owner of the shop, Tony Gauci, described the purchaser of the clothes as a dark-skinned, 50 year old man over six feet in height – which fitted Abu Talb – and identified him from a photograph.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a memo on September 24th, 1989 which stated:

"The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister. The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad Jibril, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command leader, for a sum of $1m. $100,000 of this money was given to Jibril up front in Damascus by the Iranian ambassador to Syria, Muhammad Hussan Akhari for initial expenses. The remainder of the money was to be paid after successful completion of the mission."

A DIA briefing in December 1989 entitled "Pan Am 103, Deadly Co-operation" confirmed the American belief that Iran was the state sponsor of the bombing. It claimed that the PFLP-GC was "fast becoming an Iranian proxy" and that the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 to avenge the shooting down of the Iran Air Flight 655 airbus was the result of such Iranian and PFLP-GC co-operation. It specifically discounted Libya’s involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was "no current credible intelligence" implicating her. It stated:

"Following a brief increase in anti-US terrorist attacks after the US airstrike on Libya in 1986, Gaddafi has made an effort to distance Libya from terrorist attacks."

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait thereby putting at risk the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary. If Iraq was to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated with kid gloves and the Syrian regime must be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam’s invading army and the increasingly isolated Colonel Gaddafi gradually became the chief suspect on the Lockerbie bombing.

As a result of the change in overall narrative and the fact that there had been absolutely no Libyan activity in London, interest in Heathrow as the scene of the bomb planting suddenly ceased. Now the Maltese connection became crucial. Heretofore it had simply been assumed the clothes were purchased at a Maltese tourist shop in preference to the more regulated shops of Frankfurt or London. But there was a long standing connection between Malta and Libya which survived all the twists and turns of international diplomacy. In particular, it was one of the key conduits through which essential supplies could be transferred to Tripoli when Gaddafi’s behaviour had provoked yet another set of sanctions being imposed on his country.

The purchaser of the clothes in Tony Gauci’s shop in Malta now magically morphed from a non-Libyan giant in late middle age to a youthful, 5’ 7” tall Libyan in his mid-thirties. His name, it appeared was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines. Educated in the USA and Britain, he was also director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. A cosmopolitan figure with a wide range of international contacts it was rumoured that he was used by Libya to import essentials during periods of sanctions. The claim that he had suddenly changed into a terrorist bomber was met with derision at home and abroad. The idea that he and his colleague Khalifah Fhimah, the station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Luqa Airport in Malta, had somehow secreted an unaccompanied suit case onto flight KM180 was thought to be absurd.

The Maltese police also protested that this was a most unlikely scenario. They had questioned the senior airport baggage loader who was adamant that he always double-counted his luggage: once when it was finally gathered and again as it was physically loaded onto the plane. This extremely reliable official was absolutely certain that there were no unaccompanied cases in the luggage that he counted on to the flight. In fact, not only was there no evidence that the bomb had been put on board in Malta, but Air Malta had won a libel action in 1993 establishing that it was not!

The theory that the bomb entered the system in Malta as a piece of unaccompanied baggage and rattled around Europe before finding its way onto Pan Am 103 in London was widely ridiculed. The excellent screening at Frankfurt would have surely picked it up or, if not, it could well have been lost on the twilight zone of European baggage handling. But the greatest problem lay with the barometric trigger which would have caused flight KM180 to explode 38 minutes into the first leg to Frankfurt. This was the moment when the forensic scientists stepped up to the plate.

The two British scientists involved in the Lockerbie case were the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment’s Alan Feraday and Thomas Hayes. Charred material found some weeks after the bombing in woods near Lockerbie in mysterious circumstances had been sent for analysis to explosives laboratory at Fort Halstead in Kent. According to his later testimony Hayes teased out the cloth of one piece of the material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt. Within it he found fragments of white paper, fragments of black plastic, a fragment of metal and a fragment of wire mesh—all subsequently found to be parts of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 and its manual. Hayes testified that he also found embedded a half-inch fragment of circuit board.

The next reference to this famous circuit board fragment occurred when Alan Feraday sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification. In June 1990, Feraday and DCI Williamson visited FBI headquarters in Washington and together with Thomas Thurman, an FBI explosives expert, finally identified the fragment as being part of a timer circuit board.

Thurman’s involvement in identifying the fragment later proved highly controversial because in spite of his claim to be an "explosives forensic expert" he had no formal scientific qualifications whatsoever. He read politics at university and had somehow drifted into the FBI Labs. Worse was to follow when in 1997 the U.S. Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, issued a report stating that in other trials Thurman had "circumvented procedures and protocols, testified to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications and fabricated evidence." Numerous defendants had to be released and Thurman was fortunate not to be prosecuted himself. He was fired from the FBI labs and banned from acting as an expert witness in any other court case.

Thurman could not therefore give evidence at the Lockerbie trial and the Crown’s case would be further damaged when the testimony of his UK counterpart, Alan Feraday, was called into question. In three separate cases — where Feraday had been the expert witness — men against whom he gave evidence have had their convictions overturned. Like Thurman, Feraday was not actually a professional scientist and in 2005, after yet another successful appeal, the Chief Lord Justice said that "under no circumstances should Feraday be allowed to present himself as an expert witness in electronics."

By the time of the trial the career of Thomas Hayes was also over because a British Parliamentary inquiry had found he had conspired to withhold evidence in the notorious trial of the Maguire Seven. Sir John May had said:

"The whole scientific basis on which the prosecution was founded was in truth so vitiated that on this basis alone the conviction should be set aside."

Hayes jumped before he was pushed and by the time of the trial was working as a chiropodist.

As the argument for a Maltese connection and Libyan involvement progressed the tiny fragment of circuit board became increasingly important. Thurman now "indentified" it as part of a batch made by the Swiss manufacturer MEBO for the Libyan military. This was not the simple design thought to have been used in the Pan Am 103 bombing but a complex type of long timer. Edwin Bollier later revealed that he declined an offer of $4 million by the FBI to testify that the fragment was indeed part of the MEBO MST-13 timer. Fortunately one of his employees, Ulrich Lumpert, was prevailed upon to do so at the trial though later, in a sworn affidavit, he would admit he had lied. The other co-owner of MEBO, Erwin Meister, confirmed that MST–13 timers had been sold to Libya and helpfully identified Megrahi as a "former business contact".

All the ducks were finally in a line and the Anglo-American authorities indicted the two Libyan suspects in November 1991. Gaddafi was then ordered to extradite them for trial in either the United Kingdom or the United States. Since no bilateral extradition treaty was in force between any of the three countries, he refused to hand the men over but did offer to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.

In November 1994, President Nelson Mandela offered South Africa as a neutral venue for the trial but this was rejected by John Major. A further three years elapsed until Mandela’s offer was repeated to Major’s successor, Tony Blair, when the president visited London in July 1997 and again at the 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh in October 1997. At the latter meeting, Mandela warned that "no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge" in the Lockerbie case.

A compromise solution was eventually engineered by the legal academic Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University of a trial in the Netherlands governed by Scots law. Since this was in accordance with the New Labour government’s promotion of an "ethical" foreign policy, it was given political impetus by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. A special High Court of Justiciary was set up in a disused United States Air Force base called Camp Zeist in Utrecht.

In recent years no forensic-based case has caused greater concern than the Lockerbie trial and the prosecution has been widely accused of using the tactics of disinformation. The lead prosecutor was the highly controversial Lord Advocate, Colin (later Baron) Boyd who three years before had prosecuted DC McKie in another forensic disaster. The policewoman denied an accusation by Scottish Criminal Record Office (SCRO) fingerprint officers that she left her thumb print at a murder scene in January 1997. She was arrested in March 1998, charged with perjury but at her trial in May 1999 the SCRO fingerprint evidence was rejected out of hand and she was acquitted.

A senior Scottish police officer, James Mackay QPM, was appointed by the Crown Office to investigate the matter and he submitted his report to Boyd in October 2000. It found that the actions of the SCRO personnel amounted to "collective manipulation and collusion" and four of them were immediately suspended by the SCRO. With the Lockerbie trial in full swing Boyd was obviously reluctant to prosecute the officers involved and to great public indignation he allowed them to be reinstated. It would clearly have damaged his fragile case in the Lockerbie trial to have four of Scotland’s forensic scientists prosecuted for covering up acts of criminality. The finger-print scandal was only resolved in 2006 when the policewoman was awarded £750,000 compensation and Boyd was rightly forced to resign as Lord Advocate.

There were profound inconsistencies in much of the evidence presented to the trial. For instance, the entry of the discovery of the timer fragment was recorded at widely different times by UK and German investigators. The German police files indicate that fragments of the bomb timer were found on the shirt in January 1990. So the shirt collar could hardly have been examined nor the items of evidence extracted on 12 May 1989 as was claimed by Hayes at the trial. German documents also contain photographs showing a piece of the shirt with most of the breast pocket undamaged but the images presented to the trial were different.

It is also disconcerting that an additional page was inserted into the evidence log detailing the discovery of the Slalom shirt with particles of the bomb timer on it. The record of the discovery was inserted into a loose-leaf folder with the five subsequent pages re-numbered by hand – a procedure for which the scientist could offer no explanation at the trial. The prosecution’s evidence looked at times like a co-coordinated effort to mislead the court. Yet the Judges helpfully concluded that the compromised evidence log did not matter because "each item that was examined had the date of examination incorporated into the notes."

During the trial, MEBO engineer Ulrich Lumpert – whose evidence was crucial in connecting the famous fragment to the Libyan batch – caused consternation by adding that the fragment on display belonged to a timer that had never been connected to a relay i.e. had not triggered a bomb. This claim could not be countered by the prosecution because Hayes had inexplicably not thought it necessary to test the tiny timer fragment for explosive residue. However, given their conduct of the trial it came as no surprise that the three Scottish judges were untroubled by what should have been a disaster for the prosecution.

The lead judge was the veteran Lord Sutherland accompanied by an inveterate tribunal chairman, Lord Coulsfield, and the sentencing and parole expert Lord MacLean. They admitted the uncertainties in the testimony and the dangers inherent in "selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which do not fit". They also admitted it was possible they were "reading into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern and conclusion which was not really justified" but ploughed on regardless.

In the end, the judges accepted that the absence of a credible explanation of how the suitcase was placed into the system at Luqa airport was "a major difficulty for the Crown case". However they still managed to convince themselves that this was indeed what had happened. "When the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible." This statement was met with derision in Scotland and rightly dismissed as "inference piled upon inference".

The judges further accepted that the PFLP-GC were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period but found "no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime."

If most observers found this a very odd way of looking at the evidence, the final decisions of the judges provoked utter consternation. It appeared beyond any shadow of a doubt that the two accused were either both guilty or both not guilty but the Law Lords managed to find clear blue water between them. The judges were unanimous in finding the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. He was freed and he returned to Libya on 1 February 2001.

As for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi the judges said:

"There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment."

Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.

Huge doubts remain about the prosecution’s case and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in 2007 found prima facie evidence of a miscarriage of justice. It is clear from their report that the unreliability of the prosecution’s key witness Tony Gauci was one of the main reasons for the referral of Megrahi’s case back to the Appeal Court. Gauci had been interviewed 17 times by Scottish and Maltese police during which he gave a series of inconclusive statements and there was evidence that leading questions had been put to him. Gauci was clearly not the "full shilling" as Lord Fraser, Scotland’s senior law officer during the investigation, had admitted. And yet he was not entirely stupid. The Americans paid him $2 million for his revised identification and he now resides in comfortable obscurity in Malta.

The review commission also discovered that the prosecution failed to disclose a document from a foreign power which confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that the bomb timer was supplied to countries other than Libya. This document, passed to the commission by the foreign power in question, contained considerable detail about the method used to conceal the bomb and linked it to the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the investigation. Moreover, the Iranian defector Abolghasem Mesbahi, who provided intelligence for the Germans, had already told the prosecutors in 1996 that the bombing been ordered by Tehran, not Tripoli.

Scientists generally recommend selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest assumptions. Known as Occam’s razor, we use it to cut out crazy, complicated constructions and to keep theories grounded in the laws of science. The Maltese evidence linking Megrahi to the atrocity is so fragile, so complex and so full of unsupported assumptions it depends almost totally upon the integrity of the forensic scientists. It is therefore unfortunate that it would be difficult to find three more disreputable practitioners than Thurman, Hayes and Feraday. It should be a matter of deep concern that Megrahi is the only man convicted on the evidence of these three individuals whose conviction was not reversed on appeal.

There is also no credible evidence that the clothes from Tony Gauci’s shop found among the Lockerbie wreckage were really bought on the day stated in the trial. The sale seemed much more likely to have happened on a day when Abu Talb was on Malta and Megrahi definitely was not. It is also known that when the Swedish police arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they found some of the same batch of clothing in his flat in Uppsala. No explanation for that was forthcoming at the trial.

Finally, the behaviour of the chief prosecutor Colin Boyd, both in concealing the nefarious activity of his forensic scientists and withholding essential evidence from the defence, is utterly reprehensible. Together with lack of moral fibre shown by Lord Cullen and the Court of Criminal Appeal it has left a permanent stain on the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

Background

Geopolitical considerations

At the time of the attack

• UK-US relations with Libya were icy over alleged Libyan sponsorship of terrorism and its stubborn refusal to 'see things the West's way'.
• UK-US relations with Iran were slated for improvement following the cessation of the Iran Iraq war in which both sides had been armed by the West.
• On 3 July 1988 Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus A300 airliner en-route from Bandar Abbas, Iran to Dubai, UAE was brought down by a missile fired by the US Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, with the loss of 290 lives. The US government claimed that the Airliner had been mistaken for an attacking F14 Tomcat fighter.

At the time of the trial

• UK-US relations with Libya were being 'normalised' following Libya's agreement to extradite al-Megrahi for trial and its abandonment of its allegedly belligerent stance over previously core issues of policy on trade, oil and support for groups antagonistic to Western interests. The accommodation resulted in the lifting of UN trade sanctions against Libya which had progressively paralyzed its economy over the preceding decade.
• UK-US relations with Iran were close to all-time lows and deteriorating over the usual issues of Iranian refusal to 'see things the West's way'

The Trial

• Lockerbie: The Truth is finally coming out. - Post by Michael Meacher MP on his blog (since removed) and reposted on Robert Black's blog. It alleges bribery of the chief prosecution witness with the collusion of Strathclyde police and the US Authorities.

Personalities central to the investigation and prosecution case

1. Vincent Cannistraro - CIA task force officer in the brutal 1980s Iran-Contra campaign. Deployed a training manual of invasion and killing of Nicaraguan citizens and officials. Wrote "the anatomy of a lie" to cover up US government involvement in Nicaragua. In 1986 was commissioned by the US President to "Destabilize Libya and destroy the Gaddafi regime". Secretly worked to arm the Afghanistan Mujahadeen and Osama Bin Laden. His chief Admiral Poindexter chaired a top-level meeting - to which Cannistraro had access - to discuss the manufacture of evidence to destabilize the government of Yemen. Head of the CIA Lockerbie team, but did not attend the trial to give evidence.
2. Thomas Thurman - FBI Laboratory 'scientist'.
3. Alan Feraday - Former head of the forensic laboratory at Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead.
4. Dr Thomas Hayes - Over the 1970s and early 1980s progressed to head the RARDE forensic laboratory. His testimony was central to the Lockerbie verdict. Yet he and two colleagues conspired to with-hold evidence from the 1974 alleged IRA Maguire Seven trial which would have indicated innocence. The Maguires were freed on appeal after fifteen years in jail. This matter was exposed in the Lockerbie trial, but the judges trusted Hayes' word implicitly.

Two key elements in the al-Megrahi conviction

1. The identification of Al-Megrahi: In an extraordinary development in 2005, Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci was exposed as an unreliable witness by the man who in 1991 indicted Megrahi, former Scottish Lord Advocate Peter Fraser. In Fraser's words, Gauci was "an apple short of a picnic." And yet the judges trusted Gauci's contradictory and confused evidence, and ignored the fact that Gauci was on a promise of a multi-million dollar reward if Al-Megrahi was convicted. It is now documented and proven that Gauci was paid at least $2 million for his evidence, and his brother Paul $1 million.
2. The alleged bomb timer fragment: Was it planted to frame Libya for the crime? The fragment's label had been altered by unknown persons. And its finding and examination by Dr Thomas Hayes proved highly suspicious. A series of scientific tests in 2009 have proved that its survival two centimetres from the centre of a high explosive fireball was impossible.

Evidence withheld or not available at the time of the trial

• Former CIA agent, Robert Baer, CIA Middle Eastern specialist, worked on the early stages of the investigation. He has repeatedly claimed that, in 1989, there was "Grade A intelligence" held by America to prove that Iran requested and paid for the Lockerbie bombing. If Baer is correct, then the bomb timer fragment which pointed to Libya must have been planted.
• Lord Peter Fraser, Scotland's Chief Law Officer during the investigation and indictments, claimed in 1991 that witnesses would "prove the case beyond reasonable doubt." In 2005 he admitted to journalists that his chief witness Gauci was highly unreliable. Then in 2008, when questioned by a Times journalist, Fraser indicated suspicions that key evidence might have been planted with the knowledge of the CIA.
• Shukri Ghanem, Libyan Prime Minister 2003 - 2006, has said, on at least two occasions in radio and television interviews, that Libya was not responsible and it paid the $2.7 billion compensation with great reluctance and only "to buy peace and move forward."

Post-Trial developments

Statement by UN Observer at the Trial

On 23 August 2003, Dr Hans Koechler, the United Nations Observer at the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands (2000-2002), released a "Statement on the agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Libyan Jamahiriya on the remaining issues relating to the fulfilment of all Security Council resolutions resulting from the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie." The Statement concluded:

"17. The chapter of the Lockerbie investigation can only be closed when the full truth will have been established and when the question will have been satisfactorily answered why only a lone individual has been sentenced in a case that relates to a terrorist crime the commission of which required a vast and sophisticated operational network (most likely involving more than one country and/or terrorist organisation) and huge financial resources. An ambiguous declaration of "state responsibility" such as the one deposited with the UN Security Council does in no way answer the urgent and legitimate question as to personal criminal responsibility of individuals other than Mr Al-Megrahi (and eventually also from other countries) for the Lockerbie crime. A political deal such as the one concluded last week between the US, UK and Libya linking individual compensation with the lifting of multilateral and subsequently unilateral sanctions does not advance the cause of justice in the present case, but is part of the politics of national interest of the countries involved in the present dispute. The intelligence cooperation established between the three countries since September 11, 2001, in the area of counter-terrorism must not come at the expense of the search for truth in the Lockerbie case. The doubts and misgivings about the Lockerbie trial in the Netherlands will only disappear when a full investigation of the crime by an independent commission will have been undertaken. Up to this moment the undersigned will maintain his doubts about the Lockerbie verdict and will consider the judgment concerning Mr Al-Megrahi – on the basis of an Indictment that was substantially modified in the course of the trial and altered by the judges as part of the Verdict – as a miscarriage of justice."

Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission

On 23 September 2003 lawyers acting for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for a review of the case (both sentence and conviction), arguing that there had been a miscarriage of justice. On 1 November 2006, Megrahi was reported to have dropped his demand for the new appeal to be held at Camp Zeist. In an interview with The Scotsman newspaper of 31 January 2006, retired Scottish Judge Lord MacLean – one of the three who convicted Megrahi in 2001 – said he believed the SCCRC would return the case for a further appeal against conviction:

"They can't be working for two years without producing something with which to go to the court."

MacLean added that any new appeal would indicate the flexibility of Scots law, rather than a weakness:

"It might even be the strength of the system – it is capable of looking at itself subsequently and determining a ground for appeal."

In January 2007, the SCCRC announced that it would issue its decision on Megrahi's case by the end of June 2007. On 9 June 2007 rumours of a possible prisoner swap deal involving Megrahi were strenuously denied by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Later in June, The Observer confirmed the imminence of the SCCRC ruling and reported:

"Abdelbaset al-Megrahi never wavered in his denial of causing the Lockerbie disaster: now some Scottish legal experts say they believe him."

On 28 June 2007, the SCCRC concluded its four-year review and, having uncovered evidence that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred, the commission granted Megrahi leave to appeal against his Lockerbie bombing conviction for a second time.

In a statement dated 29 June 2007 Dr Hans Köchler, international observer at the Lockerbie trial, expressed his surprise at the SCCRC's narrow focus and apparent bias towards the judicial establishment:

"In giving exoneration to the police, prosecutors and forensic staff, I think they show their lack of independence. No officials to be blamed, simply a Maltese shopkeeper."

Alternative Possibilities

South African Apartheid Regime

President P W Botha ruled apartheid South Africa between 1978 and 1989 and was responsible for gross human rights violations, including all the violence that was sanctioned by the State Security Council (SSC), an executive organ of his apartheid regime. Such violence included using torture, abduction, arson and sabotage, and murdering those opposed to apartheid. An SSC subcommittee, chaired by 'superspy' Major Craig Williamson, targeted anti-apartheid groups and individuals.

From Chequers to Lockerbie

The distance by road from Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence in Buckinghamshire, to the site in Scotland of the Pan Am Flight 103 crash on 21 December 1988 is 310 miles. It took more than 4½ years for President P W Botha to complete his murderous journey from meeting Margaret Thatcher at Chequers on 2 June 1984 to the sabotage at Lockerbie.

The full article "From Chequers to Lockerbie" by Patrick Haseldine can be read here.

Highest profile Pan Am Flight 103 victim

Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson

Newspaper reports quickly identified Bernt Carlsson as the highest profile Pan Am Flight 103 victim.

The New York Times

The New York Times of Thursday, 22 December 1988 reported:

U.N. Officer on Flight 103

"Bernt Carlsson, who was a passenger on the Pan Am flight that crashed over Scotland, had served as chief administrative officer of the United Nations Council for Namibia since July 1987. He was on his way here for a ceremony on Thursday, at which accords providing for Namibia's independence are to be signed by Angola, Cuba and South Africa. The officer is, in theory, the United Nations' appointed governor for Namibia, the South African-ruled territory also known as South-West Africa. But because United Nations authority over Namibia is not recognised by South Africa, he is in practice the chief United Nations officer in charge of development programs intended to prepare Namibia for independence.

"Mr Carlsson, a 51-year-old Swedish diplomat, had been in London for a meeting with non-governmental groups, United Nations officials said. He telephoned his office from the boarding gate at Heathrow Airport before the flight to New York.

"From 1983 to 1985 Mr Carlsson served as a Swedish Ambassador at Large to the Middle East. He was General Secretary of the Socialist International, the world federation of socialist and social democratic parties, from 1976 to 1983. From 1983 to 1985, he was an Ambassador at Large and special emissary of Prime Minister Olof Palme to the Middle East and Africa. He also served as international secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and as Under Secretary of State for Nordic Affairs in the Swedish Foreign Ministry."

The Guardian

Bernt Carlsson's Obituary in The Guardian of 23 December 1988

Bernt Carlsson's Obituary appeared in The Guardian of 23 December 1988:

Key figure in Namibian peace process

"The death of Bernt Carlsson in the Lockerbie aircrash is a poignant tragedy within a tragedy. The UN Commissioner for Namibia was on his way to what should have been an occasion of unalloyed joy: the signing of the settlement in south-western Africa, after which his post would have come into its own.

"Mr Carlsson took up the assignment in July last year when it was still one of the most frustrating tasks the United Nations had to offer. The world body declared South Africa’s occupation of the former German possession of South West Africa illegal in 1966 and tried in vain to assert its authority in the territory thereafter.

"The UN Council on Namibia proved unable to shift or shame Pretoria out of the last colony in Africa, overrun by the South Africans in 1915, mandated to them by the League of Nations after the first world war and by the UN after the second. The Council was reduced to gathering information and wandering the world like a homeless family, "raising awareness" of the Namibian issue at its conferences. The Commissioner was no more than the impotent shadow-head of a transitional government in waiting.

"But within a year of Carlsson’s appointment the diplomatic log-jam began to shift. South Africa decided it could no longer afford the diplomatic, political, military and economic cost of its war in Angola. Namibia’s northern neighbour became a target in 1975 when it gave shelter to Swapo nationalists struggling to free Namibia. In hunting them South Africa soon became involved in an escalating conflict with their Angolan allies, supported by over 50,000 Cubans and huge quantities of Soviet munitions.

"Angola and Cuba, encouraged by the Kremlin as it shed foreign liabilities, also showed signs of war-weariness, joining the South Africans in talks chaired by the US and closely monitored by Moscow. It was time for Carlsson, who gave significant background support to the peacemaking effort, to dust off the UN plan for Namibian independence, as laid down in Security Council resolution 435 of 1978.

"Bernt Carlsson should therefore have been a guest of honour at yesterday’s signature ceremony in New York. Instead the dignitaries mourned the passing of one of a distinguished band of universally respected Swedish international envoys.

"Bernt Carlsson was born in Stockholm 50 years ago and went into the foreign ministry after graduating from the city’s university. In 1970 he was detached to become international secretary of the ruling Social Democratic party and special adviser to the late prime minister, Olof Palme, to whom he was very close. He went to the Socialist International in 1976 for a seven-year term as general secretary. He returned home in 1983 for two years as roving ambassador and special emissary of Mr Palme to the Middle East and Africa. His last position before he went to the UN was head of Nordic affairs at the foreign ministry. He was unmarried." (by Dan van der Vat)

Los Angeles Times

An Obituary to Bernt Carlsson, written by his friend Michael Harrington, was published in the Los Angeles Times on 26 December 1988.

Lost On Flight 103: A Hero To The Wretched Of The World

"It was not an accident that my friend Bernt Carlsson, the UN Commissioner for Namibia, was killed in the crash of Pan American World Airways Flight 103.

"Of course, it was a cruel and capricious fate that struck at Carlsson and his fellow passengers. But in Bernt's case it was part of a pattern - the kind of thing that might happen to a man who had spent his life ranging the Earth in search of justice and peace. And that life itself was emblematic of a Swedish socialist movement that has made solidarity with the wretched of the world a personal ethic.

"Carlsson was returning home to New York for the signing of the agreement on Namibian independence, the culmination of his most recent mission. Before that he was a roving ambassador. From 1976 to 1983 he had been the general secretary of the Socialist International when that organisation was reaching out to the Third World as never before.

"There had been so many flights, so many trips to the dangerous places like the Middle East and the front-line states of Southern Africa - even a brush with terrorism when Issam Sartawi, a Palestinian moderate, was murdered in the lobby of the Portuguese hotel at which the International was holding its congress in 1983. It was not inevitable that Carlsson be on a plane that, some suspect, was the target of fanatics, but it was not surprising - not the least because he came from a movement that made peace-making a way of life.

"I sometimes think that if these Swedish men and women did not exist, the world would have to invent them. So it was that the United Nations gave Carlsson's mentor, the late Olof Palme, the impossible task of negotiating an end to the Iran-Iraq War. And why, as I saw firsthand at a meeting in Botswana, the Swedish prime minister was deeply mourned in black Africa. I had joked with Palme after a visit to Dar-es-Salaam in 1976 that the typical Tanzanian must be blond-haired and blue-eyed because of all the Swedes I encountered in that city.

"It was Carlsson's friend and contemporary, Pierre Shori, who had played a major role in setting up the catalytic meeting in Stockholm between Yasser Arafat and five American Jews. I saw Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson in Paris on the day before that event, and he clearly regarded it as a serious governmental priority. Because the Swedish socialist commitment to peace-making sometimes requires criticism of the United States, there were those who said that its activists were "anti-American." When Palme was assassinated, practically every obituary remembered that he had marched with the North Vietnamese ambassador in a famous Stockholm rally against the American war; only one mentioned that, around the same time, the Swedish leader had publicly demonstrated in solidarity with the dissident communists of Czechoslovakia and against the Soviet invasion of their country.

"Bernt Carlsson, like Palme and his other comrades, opposed Washington's policies and yet he deeply admired Americans, particularly their egalitarian irreverence. I remember vividly when Carlsson and I were in Managua in 1981 on a Socialist International mission to defend the revolution against Washington's intervention. Our group was led by Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and former Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, which guaranteed that it was taken with the utmost seriousness by the Sandinistas.

"Carlsson was utterly firm in his opposition to American destabilisation. But then, to underline his commitment to democracy, he went to the offices of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and took out a subscription.

"This gentle, shy, soft-spoken man with a soul as tough as steel was the true son of a movement that has proved that the conscience of a small nation can affect the superpowers.

"In Jewish legend, a handful of the just keep the world from being destroyed. One of them died on Pan Am Flight 103, and many of them, like the blond-haired, blue-eyed people I saw in Dar-es-Salaam, seem to be Swedish."

"Finger of suspicion"

Former British diplomat Patrick Haseldine first suspected the involvement of the apartheid regime in the Lockerbie bombing when he heard South African foreign minister Pik Botha's interview with the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on January 11, 1989.

On that day Botha – along with other international representatives including UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar – was in Stockholm to attend the memorial service for Bernt Carlsson, UN Commissioner for Namibia. Botha told the BBC that he had been forced to make a last-minute change in his own booking on Pan Am Flight 103 because of a warning by an intelligence source that he (Botha) was being targeted by Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC).

Patrick Haseldine's letter to The Guardian of December 7, 1989

Using this information, which had not been reported elsewhere in the media, Haseldine wrote a letter to The Guardian on December 7, 1989:

Finger of suspicion

"Exactly one year ago, you published my letter suggesting that Mrs Thatcher might have a blind spot as far as South African terrorism is concerned.

"Fourteen days after publication, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky upon Lockerbie. Of the 270 victims, the most prominent person was the Swede Mr Bernt Carlsson – UN Commissioner for Namibia – whose obituary appeared on page 29 of your December 23, 1988 edition.

"I cannot be the only puzzled observer of this tragedy to wonder why police attention did not immediately focus on a South African connection. The question to be put (probably to Mrs Thatcher) is: given the South African proclivity to using the diplomatic bag for conveying explosives and the likelihood that the bomb was loaded aboard the aircraft at Heathrow (vide David Pallister, The Guardian, November 9, 1989) why has it taken so long for the finger of suspicion to point towards South Africa?

"Were police inquiries into Lockerbie subject to any political guidance or imperatives?"

P J Haseldine

(Address supplied)

Carlsson's "secret meeting"

Jan-Olof Bengtsson, political editor of Kvällsposten

Jan-Olof Bengtsson is the political editor of Kvällsposten newspaper in Malmö, Sweden, and a renowned investigative journalist. Mr Bengtsson's most important work - although perhaps the least publicised - is his series of three articles in Sweden's iDAG newspaper on 12, 13 and 14 March 1990. Never published in the English language, the iDAG articles featured Sweden's UN Commissioner for Namibia Bernt Carlsson who was the most prominent victim of Pan Am Flight 103 which was sabotaged over Lockerbie, Scotland on 21 December 1988. Bengtsson alleged that Commissioner Carlsson's arm had been twisted by the diamond mining giant De Beers into making a stopover in London for a secret meeting and into joining the doomed flight, rather than taking as he had intended a Sabena flight direct from Brussels to New York:

"Bernt Carlsson, UN Commissioner for Namibia, had less than seven hours to live when at 11.06am on 21 December 1988 he arrived in London on flight BA 391.

"Strictly speaking he was meant to fly directly from Brussels to New York in time for the historic signing of the Namibia Independence Agreement the day after. But Bernt Carlsson could not make it. He had a meeting. An important meeting with a 'pressuriser' from the South African diamond cartel, which was so secret that evidently not even Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, UN Secretary-General, knew anything about it. Here iDAG maps out the last 24 hours in the life of Bernt Carlsson.

"The memorial service in the Folkets Hus in Stockholm on 11 January 1989 for Bernt Carlsson gathered most of our Heads of Government, representatives of the Namibia independence movement SWAPO and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the UN Secretary-General.

"When he died in the Pan Am bombing, Bernt Carlsson was less than 24 hours away from the fulfilment of his dreams - the signing of the Namibia agreement in New York which would finally pave the way to a free and independent Namibia. This was supposed to be the climax of his career with the UN, a career that began in December 1986 when he was appointed Commissioner for Namibia. Bernt Carlsson had great support from SWAPO but much less so from South Africa because of that country's substantial economic interests in Namibia: an interest in gold, uranium but above all in diamonds.

"Javier Pérez de Cuéllar in his speech at the memorial ceremony on a cold day in January last year [1989] described the last 24 hours in the life of Bernt Carlsson:

'Bernt Carlsson was returning to New York following an official visit to Brussels where he had spoken to a Committee within the European Parliament about the Namibia agreement,' Pérez de Cuéllar began. 'He stopped briefly in London to honour a long-standing invitation by a non-governmental organisation with interests in Namibia.'

"Pérez de Cuéllar was wrong. True, Bernt Carlsson's trip to Brussels had been planned almost six months earlier. But his decision to return to New York via London was only made on 16 December 1988. The meeting in London was definitely not a long-standing invitation by Namibia sympathisers."

Lockerbie cover-up

Within a few weeks of those December 1988 newspaper reports, Bernt Carlsson's name would hardly ever be mentioned again by the mainstream media in the Lockerbie context. Bernt Carlsson had effectively become a "nonperson" - whose death was never properly investigated - and the Lockerbie cover-up was beginning:

Nelson Mandela accused

Pik Botha, apartheid South Africa's foreign minister

Three weeks after the Lockerbie disaster, the apartheid regime accused Nelson Mandela and the ANC of masterminding the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103. This amazing accusation was made on 11 January 1989 by South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha who had travelled to Stockholm in Sweden with other foreign dignitaries – including UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar – to attend the memorial service of United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, the highest profile victim of the 270 fatalities at Lockerbie. Interviewed by Sue MacGregor on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Pik Botha alleged that he and a 22-strong South African delegation, who were booked to fly from London to New York on 21 December 1988, had been targeted by the ANC. However, having been alerted to these ANC plans to kill him, Pik Botha said he managed to outsmart them by taking the earlier Pan Am Flight 101 from Heathrow to JFK, New York. Pik Botha's claim to have been booked to travel on Pan Am Flight 103 was later shown to be false.

President Botha quits

President P W Botha and Margaret Thatcher in 1984

On 18 January 1989, President P W Botha was reported to have suffered a mild stroke which prevented him from attending a meeting with Namibian political leaders on 20 January 1989. On 2 February 1989, P W Botha resigned as leader of the National Party (NP) anticipating his nominee – finance minister Barend du Plessis – would succeed him. Instead, the NP's parliamentary caucus selected as leader education minister F W de Klerk, who moved quickly to consolidate his position within the party. In March 1989, the NP elected de Klerk as state president but Botha refused to resign, saying in a television address that the constitution entitled him to remain in office until March 1990 and that he was even considering running for another five-year term. Following a series of acrimonious meetings in Cape Town, and five days after UN Security Council Resolution 435 was implemented in Namibia on 1 April 1989, Botha and de Klerk reached a compromise: Botha would retire after the parliamentary elections in September, allowing de Klerk to take over as president. However, P W Botha resigned from the state presidency abruptly on 14 August 1989 complaining that he had not been consulted by de Klerk over his scheduled visit to see president Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia: "The ANC is enjoying the protection of president Kaunda and is planning insurgency activities against South Africa from Lusaka," Botha declared on nationwide television. He said he had asked the cabinet what reason he should give the public for abruptly leaving office. "They replied I could use my health as an excuse. To this, I replied that I am not prepared to leave on a lie. It is evident to me that after all these years of my best efforts for the National Party and for the government of this country, as well as the security of our country, I am being ignored by ministers serving in my cabinet."

Thatcher visits Namibia

File:Rössing Uranium Mine.jpg

Rössing Uranium Mine

At the end of March 1989, Margaret Thatcher and the rising star in Conservative Research Department, David Cameron, visited apartheid South Africa. The past and future British Prime Ministers made a point of visiting the Rössing Uranium Mine in Namibia (illegally occupied by apartheid South Africa in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 435). In 1989, the Rössing mine was jointly owned by Rio Tinto Group and the Iranian Government, and was supplying uranium to develop Iran’s nuclear programme. Mrs Thatcher was so impressed with the Rössing Uranium Mine that she declared it made her "proud to be British", a sentiment echoed by David Cameron.

Pressure on UN's man

Guardian letter of 5 August 1991

Extract from Patrick Haseldine's letter to The Guardian of August 5, 1991:

Missing diplomatic links and the Lockerbie tragedy

"On April 1, 1989 Mrs Thatcher put pressure on UN Special Representative in Namibia, Martti Ahtisaari, to permit the South African Defence Force (SADF) to take action against SWAPO soldiers who were peacefully returning to Namibia to vote in the 1989 independence elections. As a result, as many as 308 SWAPO soldiers were killed - shot in the back according to former SADF major Nico Basson.

"Whether Mrs Thatcher could have persuaded UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, to agree to such treachery we shall never know since Mr Carlsson was assassinated four months earlier, on December 21, 1988.

"It may not be entirely coincidental that on the same day (July 25, 1991) as South Africa's Foreign Minister, Pik Botha, admitted the illicit funding of anti-SWAPO political parties in Namibia, BBC Radio Four's Today Programme carried an interview about the Scottish police investigation into the Lockerbie disaster, in which Mr Carlsson perished. According to the interview, the criminal investigation has just been concluded and we are now asked to believe that Libyan intelligence were responsible.

"In the light of Major Basson's evidence (detailed by Phillip van Niekerk's article, Guardian, July 27) and Pik Botha's admission, I think that, even at this late stage, the Scottish police should reopen their investigation and look for a South African connection to the Lockerbie tragedy.

Secret nuclear deal

It has recently been reported that Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron concluded a secret nuclear deal with the apartheid regime during their visit to South Africa in 1989.

Stateside silence

Ronald Reagan, the outgoing President, was still smarting after having his veto overridden in 1986 by the US Congress of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act which, inter alia, banned South African Airways from flying to the United States. Plus, according to Professor Francis Boyle's recent book, President Reagan had some old scores that he wanted to settle with Colonel Gaddafi.

Discussing Iran Air Flight 655 in the White House library: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

So, on 28 December 1988, when there was as yet no evidence of any country's culpability for the Lockerbie bombing and in one of the last acts of his Presidency, Ronald Reagan extended US sanctions against Libya and threatened renewed bombing raids on Tripoli and Benghazi. Vice-President George H W Bush had won the 1988 US presidential election easily defeating Democratic Party challenger Michael Dukakis (who would have branded P W Botha's apartheid South Africa a 'terrorist state') and was sworn in as US President on 20 January 1989.

Drawing upon his previous experience at the United Nations and as Director of the CIA, and maintaining his refusal to apologise for the US Navy's destruction of the Iranian Airbus in July 1988, President Bush Sr then arranged for Muammar Gaddafi to be 'fitted up' at the UN Security Council for the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103. According to British investigative journalist Paul Foot: "In mid-March 1989, three months after Lockerbie, George Bush rang Margaret Thatcher to warn her to 'cool it' on the subject."

British Blackout

Tiny Rowland, UK coordinator

Professor Robert Black QC

After years of sleuthing, Emeritus Professor of Lockerbie Studies Patrick Haseldine eventually identified British mining magnate, Observer newspaper owner and MI6 operative Tiny Rowland as the UK coordinator of the Lockerbie cover-up.

Haseldine alleges that Tiny Rowland recruited Emeritus Professor of Scots Law Robert Black to organise the British Blackout and to frustrate all of Nelson Mandela’s plans for Lockerbie justice.

In January 1992, Mandela outlined his blueprint for the Lockerbie trial:

• If no extradition treaty exists between the countries concerned, the trial must be conducted in the country where the accused were arrested;
• The trial should be conducted in a neutral country by independent judges;
• The trial should be conducted at The Hague by an international court of justice.

Five years later, President Mandela emphasised at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Edinburgh that "no one nation should be complainant, prosecutor and judge" in the Lockerbie case.

By 1999, the so-called "architect of the Lockerbie trial" had managed to blackout the whole Mandela blueprint. Professor Black:

• ensured that the Lockerbie trial was not held in a neutral country. Instead, he arranged for the trial to be conducted from May 2000 to January 2001 at Camp Zeist, a former US Air Force base in the Netherlands which, for the duration of the trial, became British territory;
• decreed that Scotland’s Crown Office would be the ‘complainant’ at the trial;
• arranged for Scotland’s Lord Advocate Colin Boyd to be the ‘prosecutor’ at the trial; and,
• insisted that – instead of ‘independent judges’ at the trial – all four Judges (Lords Sutherland, Coulsfield, MacLean and Abernethy) had to be from Scotland.

Although one of the two accused Libyans was found not guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, Haseldine alleges it was thanks to Professor Black that the other Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was found guilty.

Haseldine says:

.... so for the past 20 years, Professor Robert Black has been suppressing the truth about the Lockerbie disaster, thus delaying justice for the 270 victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and their relatives. Prof Black was supported in his attempt to blackout apartheid South Africa’s targeting of Bernt Carlsson on Pan Am Flight 103 by inter alia these assets of British intelligence:

John Ashton (Author, producer and researcher, see: The Maltese Double Cross; the 2001 book "Cover-up of Convenience" by John Ashton and Ian Ferguson; the 2012 book "Megrahi; You are my Jury" by John Ashton; the 2012 article "Was Libya really behind it?" with John Ashton; and a new book "Scotland’s Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters" that was published by Birlinn on 3 October 2013);

Ian Ferguson (Author, journalist and researcher, see: The Lockerbie Trial.com website of Professor Black and Ian Ferguson; and the 2009 film Lockerbie Revisited researcher Ian Ferguson);

Robert Forrester (Secretary of Justice for Megrahi campaign group);

Professor Andrew Fulton (see: "Former MI6 spy joins Armor Group to hunt down new business");

Dr Alan George (Middle East academic, recruited by solicitors Eversheds to reinforce the defence of Megrahi's co-accused Lamin Khalifah Fhimah);

Dr Morag Kerr (Deputy Secretary of Justice for Megrahi campaign group, see , her book "Adequately Explained by Stupidity? Lockerbie, Luggage and Lies" will be published on 21 December 2013 ); and,

Adam Larson (Associate of Dr Kerr and owner of The Lockerbie Divide website);

Patrick Haseldine concludes: "It is high time that this 'Blackout over Lockerbie' was illuminated and dispelled."

See also

On WikiSpooks

• The how, why and who of Pan Am Flight 103
• A MUST READ - File:The Framing of al-Megrahi.doc - An article by Gareth Pierce from the London Review of Books - September 2009.
• UN Report on the first Lockerbie case appeal Professor Hans Koechler Vienna 26 March 2002
• How Megrahi and Libya were framed for Lockerbie - Alexander Cockburn in "The First Post" July 2010
• Bomber, Bomber, Bomber - Steven Raeburn of "The Firm", a Scottish Lawyers Web Site
• The Lockerbie case and the corruption of justice - Dr Hans Koechler
• Release of the Lockerbie Prisoner - Dr Hans Koechler
• The Lockerbie case and the corruption of justice - Dr Hans Koechler
• The Syrian Connection - David Guyatt
• Lockerbie: Ayatollah's Vengeance Exacted by Botha's Regime - Patrick Haseldine
• Comments from Patrick Haseldine on Robert Black's Blog - 6 October 2009

External sites

• A 'MUST CONSULT' RESOURCE - The Herald, Scotland - Lockerbie archive - A substantial Establishment-sceptic resource.
• A 'MUST CONSULT' RESOURCE - - ohmynews - list of articles on the Lockerbie Bombing
• Scottish Law Reporter. Lockerbie pages
• Lockerbie - The evidence
• Flight From the Truth - The Guardian 27 June 2001
• Jim Swire's Web Site
• Facebook group: U.N. must investigate the targeting of Bernt Carlsson on Pan Am Flight 103
• Professor Robert Black's Blog
• Crown Fights to keep 48 pieces of evidence secret - Glasgow Herald 19 February 2010
• Questions remain over Lockerbie - Guardian letters 23 July 2010
• Lockerbie witness 'put up for reward'
• Lockerbie Bombing Case Faces U-Turn after Perjury Confession - Sofia News Agency 20 August 2007
• UN Claims Lockerbie Trial Was Rigged - Common Dreams 8 April 2001 from The Glasgow Herald
• WikiPedia - Pan Am Flight 103 page

Video

• Lockerbie Lies - A Youtube video featuring Professor Robert Black who was largely responsible for the setup of the Hague Trial and believes that Megrahi would be aquitted in any retrial.
• "The Lockerbie Bombing - Pan Am Flight 103" Al-Jazeera TV documentary featuring Professor Robert Black and Dr John Cameron.