Rolfe
Adult human female
Uh, it kind of does, actually.
I don't think this is a case of "the Scots were dupes", or that this was done for business and oil deals. It was the Scottish government who released Megrahi, and they had no interest in BP oil deals. Not only that, the vitriolic hatred of the Labour party (UK government) for the SNP (Scottish government) would pretty much dictate that the UK government wouldn't even ask.
You're all forgetting about the appeal.
Megrahi didn't do it. He had a bloody alibi, for God's sake. He had a better alibi than I have for that day. Putting it simply, and leaving out the CTs because you don't need any CTs to see the miscarriage of justice in this case, the judges decided that because he had been identified by a Maltese shopkeeper as having bought some blast-damaged clothes that were found at the crash site, then somehow, who knows how, he must have smuggled the bomb into the aviation baggage system from where he happened to be that morning.
This despite a shed-load of evidence showing that he had no opportunity to smuggle anything past security that morning, and that in fact there was no unaccounted-for or unaccompanied bag on the flight in question. And that all the bags which transferred into the second feeder flight at Frankfurt (the route this unaccompanied bag was supposed to have taken) were x-rayed and no radios were seen in any of the suitcases. And despite some very suggestive evidence of a genuinely mysterious orphan suitcase having gone on to Maid of the Seas at Heathrow, before the Frankfurt flight landed.
It doesn't have to be a big conspiracy. They were desperate to get someone for this atrocity, and if that someone happened to implicate the pariah state of Libya rather than Iran, which could be awfully embarrassing in geo-political terms, then I guess that's a bonus. There was just enough coincidental and circumstantial evidence to convince the judges to make that huge leap of assumption and decide that somehow, God only knows how, Megrahi had spirited that bag on to KM180 at Luqa early that morning.
It very much hung on the identification made by the shopkeeper (Gauci) though. If that hadn't been there, then the rest of the evidence simply goes up in smoke. The trouble was, Gauci's evidence was wildly unreliable both as to the appearance of the purchaser and the day of the purchase. He was changing his story to suit what he figured the police wanted him to say - and then, relatively recently, it was revealed why. He was paid £2 million for his evidence, and his brother Paul, who coached him, was paid $1 million. The brothers are now living in luxury in Australia.
Take out that identification and not only don't you have a case, you have to look at the watertight evidence that no rogue bag went on to KM180, and realise that Megrahi actually had an alibi.
Megrahi applied for leave to appeal in 2002 or 2003, and the appeal didn't get underway until April 2009. There was an inordinate amount of foot-dragging, including a huge legal wrangle about some top-secret document or documents the defence wanted produced, which the government refused to release even after the court ordered them to be produced. They went to extreme and unprecedented lengths to keep this material under wraps, and nobody really knows what that was all about.
Once the appeal got started, some of the identification evidence was heard, then it was adjourned until November 2009 - even though the defendant was known to be terminally ill. Before that date was reached, of course, he was released and the appeal was withdrawn.
The reluctance of governments of all political colours to have this appeal go ahead is quite striking. Whether this is simply extreme reluctance to see Megrahi acquitted, and thus have to face all the criticism for not having solved the highest-profile Scottish case of all time, or whether it's anything to do with the top-secret documents that mustn't be seen by anyone at all costs, I have no idea.
I'm merely pretty sure that the release was all about getting the appeal withdrawn, so that everyone could go on fondly believing the case was solved, and nobody was going to have to disclose material they didn't want to disclose. The Justice Secretary visited Megrahi in prison one day, he withdrew his appeal the next, and the release was announced the day after that.
If that hadn't happened - well, November is seven months ago now. Who knows what we might now know about that incident that we didn't know before. But the appeal was stopped in August, before we got that far.
So everybody is happy. Megrahi gets to go home. This delights the Libyans as well as Megrahi himself, everybody can keep believing the case was solved, nobody is going to be embarrassed about all the compensation money that was paid on completely mistaken premises, nobody has to disclose embarrassing material, and the UK government gets its business deals and oil contracts.
Too bad if you would quite like to know who actually did bomb that plane.
Rolfe.
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