Pan Am 103 bombing – neither Megrahi nor Malta played any part
Those who now make such vitriolic attacks on Scotland should stop to think how fragile the evidence for Megrahi’s guilt is. DR JIM SWIRE, whose daughter died in the tragedy, deconstructs the Lockerbie case
I entered the Lockerbie trial court convinced that I would see the conviction of those responsible for my daughter’s murder along with 269 others. I emerged at the end convinced that neither the accused, nor Malta or Air Malta, had played any part in the atrocity.
The evidence from Malta was unconvincing: it was not proven that the clothes found among the Lockerbie wreckage from Tony Gauci’s shop were really bought on the day stated. This seemed more likely to have happened on a day when a man called Abu Talb was on your island, but Megrahi definitely was not. We knew from other sources that when the Swedish police had arrested Abu Talb for a different terrorist offence they had found some of the same batch of clothing in his Swedish flat. No explanation for that was available under the prosecution. Talb was an affiliate of the Syria-based PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command) terror group, and of Iran.
We also knew that Mr Gauci had been shown a picture of Talb by his brother Paul and positively identified him as the buyer. Only under repeated pressure from the Scottish police did he reluctantly accept that Megrahi’s picture might have been of the buyer.
Mr Gauci should not be blamed for his uncertainty, he did say in court that identifying Megrahi as the buyer might cause trouble in his family; he had confidently told Paul that Talb had been the buyer.
No evidence was led by the prosecution as to how Megrahi was supposed to have breached security at Luqa. The court commented that this was a major problem for the prosecution.
German forensic experts explained a type of IED (improvised explosive device) which they had found prior to Lockerbie. These contained an air-pressure sensitive switch: when exposed to the falling air pressure in a climbing aircraft the switch would turn ‘on’ 7 minutes after the plane left the tarmac. That started a timer running and all the timers they had found ran for 30-35 minutes. Then the bomb would explode. The Lockerbie aircraft flew for 38 minutes after leaving Heathrow. Such a device could never have been flown in from Malta or Frankfurt, for though stable indefinitely at ground level, they would always explode around 40 minutes after take off.
The prosecution sought to bolster their case by introducing a fragment of a more sophisticated digital timer, alleging that one of those had been used instead, but the circumstances surrounding its finding suggested very strongly that it should never have been relied upon as genuine evidence.
But after the verdict had been reached, a security guard from Heathrow airport came forward. He had discovered a nocturnal break-in at Heathrow at Terminal 3, adjacent to where the bags for Pan Am 103 were loaded that evening of 21 December 1988. He wanted to know why his evidence had been ignored until after the verdict had been reached. We all need to know that too.
If the Heathrow intruder had brought in one of this type of IED in a suitcase, he could have left it with Iran Air staff, whose facility was close to the area where the PA103 bags were loaded that evening, with a message to put it in a Pan Am baggage container that evening. This was precisely the scenario for which these IEDs were designed.
You may say that to claim that this break-in was the real route by which the IED got aboard PA103 is speculation. You would be right, it is, because the issue could not be discussed during the trial since the break-in was unknown to the court until after the verdict, but it now makes a far simpler and more credible explanation than the prosecution case.
No one will admit why this evidence had lain concealed for 12 years.
The Metropolitan police had interviewed the security guard promptly, and he had entered the break-in details in the Heathrow log as soon as he found them.
It would be almost incredible if Mrs Thatcher’s government did not know, since the Metropolitan police and Heathrow knew what had happened just under their noses at our most prestigious airport. It would be almost equally incredible if the Scottish investigating police did not know.
Two years after the two Libyans had been indicted over Lockerbie, Lady Thatcher published her book ‘The Downing Street Years’. In it she claimed that because of the air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986, which she had co-sponsored with US President Reagan, Gaddafi had been left unable to mount further major terrorist attacks. When I wrote to ask her how she could say this in view of the indictments, she claimed to have “nothing to add to the text”.
I then wrote to the Lord Advocate of Scotland to ask whether Scotland’s Crown Office had known about the break-in during the 12 years of concealment, they replied that the Crown Office had not known.
Are we to believe that a scenario which occurred at the airport from which the Lockerbie aircraft took off, and which perfectly fitted the use of a PFLP-GC type bomb, which were known to have been available to terrorists linked to Iran, had been in some way ‘overlooked’?
Britain and the US whose intelligence services/investigators were working closely together on this dreadful case need to explain this issue. We need a fully empowered inquiry. We have been seeking that for 20 years.
Those who now make such vitriolic attacks on Scotland from America should stop to think how fragile is the evidence for Megrahi’s guilt. It is sad to think that President Obama’s new administration has not yet checked out the facts before joining in.
Jim Swire is one of the founding members of the ‘Justice for Megrahi’ campaign
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