"He knows nothing about the bombing"? How can you be sure about that?
I think CL has become a little over-excited....
If you just want to post blind opinion on the internet, then skip this post. If you want to find out a bit about it, read on.
This question is much he same as asking how can we be sure Megrahi wasn't involved in the plot to bomb the airliner, which is to say guilty as charged, because he was only ever found guilty of being mixed up in it, not planting the actual bomb. So, how do we know he wasn't mixed up in it?
The main reason is that the central plank of the case was that the bomb suitcase was smuggled on to flight KM180 leaving Malta on the morning of 21st December. This put Megrahi right in the frame because he was passing through that airport at that time, catching a different flight, and he was quite obviously up to something covert.
You'd think a small provincial airport might have rather lax security, but no. There was a tight system of bag checking and counting. Fifty-five bags went on that plane, each attached to a passenger. They were counted three times, and it always tallied. All the luggage was picked up by its owners at their destinations as expected. All the passengers were extensively investigated for terrorist connections and came up clean.
The investigators tried everything they could think of to break this evidence. Baggage handlers' private phone lines were tapped, you name it. All to no avail. In addition, in the years before the case came to court, Air Malta was successful in (I think) three civil actions against media organisations who published the allegation that the bomb had gone on at Malta. At the actual trial, the prosecution could present
no loophole at all by which that bag could have got on board.
So how come Megrahi was convicted? Because of some weird
with the baggage records at Frankfurt, that plane's destination. These records all mysteriously vanished almost immediately after the disaster. This was all the more surprising because Frankfurt was on high alert for exactly this occurrence - one warning about a suitcase with a bomb disguised as a radio-cassette player, and a separate one about a plot to bomb a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to New York. Requests from the Scottish police for Frankfurt baggage records got the runaround - lost, destroyed, don't exist.
Then, eight months after the disaster, the Germans suddenly produced a very limited extract from the records - a loading record for the Frankfurt/Heathrow feeder flight PA103A. They said they'd had it since February, after an IT technician handed it in, but they never explained either why they sat on it for so long, or what happened to the original records. The documentation was subject to interpretation, because flight of origin had to be inferred from time and place of entry to the system, but analysis showed a bag from KM180 being transferred to PA103A. Or rather, a bag
probably from KM180.
However, the inference wasn't watertight. A mistake in coding the baggage into the system or a coder forgetting to make a written entry, could give the impression of a piece of luggage coming from somewhere it didn't. It was accepted that such mistakes occasionally occurred at Frankfurt. Case closed, you'd think.
But no. The judges decided that although mistakes happened at Frankfurt, in such a huge operation, there was no evidence that any such mistake had happened in relation to the coding of the Malta luggage. It was quite difficult to show this of course, because most of the records were missing so a lot of assumptions were being made. On balance, they decided, there was no mistake, and the record really showed a bag from Malta. Therefore that blew a complete hole in the evidence from Malta that nobody had been able to shake, and the bomb had indeed been introduced there.
Yo may think I'm misreporting this, but I'm not. This is exactly what the judges decided. And this is where it gets interesting. One of the reasons given for the decision was that this interpretation was made more likely by the fact that Megrahi was at Malta when the plane took off, and there was other evidence against him.
That other evidence was principally that of Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothes packed round the bomb in the suitcase, a short while before the disaster. The purchase was made in a memorable, conspicuous manner (which is a bit odd in itself) and Tony remembered the sale. The problem was he remembered the items sold a lot better than the purchaser, or rather he remembered the purchaser's size and build, but not really his face. The initial description he gave was of someone taller, heavier built and older than Megrahi - complete with estimated chest, waist and collar sizes. His job was selling clothes, after all. In addition, enquiry into the date of this sale narrowed it down to two probable dates. By far the most likely for several reasons was 23rd November, but if you tortured the facts a bit you could possibly make a fit for 7th December.
The police, and then the judges, duly proceeded to torture the facts, and decided the date was 7th December. Which was handy, because Megrahi was on Malta on 7th December (he actually travelled there frequently). He was not there on 23rd November. When asked why they had preferred the December date, one of the detectives later said, really because Megrahi was there that day.
The holy grail was to get Tony to identify Megrahi as the purchaser of the clothes, but that proved an uphill struggle. There are lengthy take-downs of Tony's identification evidence produced by experts, but actually he never positively identified him. He said several times that Megrahi resembled the purchaser, but that he was too young.
The judges decided that even though Tony was uncertain, the purchaser was Megrahi - because he'd been on Malta the day of the purchase, and he'd been at the airport at the time the bomb bag went on KM180.
If you think I'm distorting this, go and read the court judgements. It's as I say. It's text-book circular reasoning.
The clothes purchase was the deciding factor for the court. Just being at an airport without having been seen to do anything at all out of the ordinary (and certainly not go air-side), wouldn't have been sufficient evidence to convict Megrahi, even if the nonsense of the baggage records was allowed to stand. However, if he had bought the clothes packed round the bomb - gotcha.
The Mata baggage records could never be made to show room for an unaccompanied bag, no matter how you tortured them. The balance of probabilities was obviously towards the "unlikely" coding mistake at Frankfurt rather than overt magic at Malta. When the appeal got started last year Tony Gauci's "identification" evidence was unravelling faster than a ball of wool in the paws of a kitten. What's left? Megrahi wasn't present when the bomb went into the baggage system, and didn't buy the clothes. Anything else that was brought up was beyond tenuous, in the realms of "six degrees of separation".
And just to complete the picture, pretty good evidence was presented to the court of a suitcase looking very like the bomb suitcase going into the relevant baggage container at
Heathrow, before the feeder flight from Frankfurt had even landed. The judges managed to handwave that evidence away by similar logical back-flip handstands.
Why a group of Law Lords chose to take that line, I have no idea. In their own words....
We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified.
Hel
lo, guys?
So no, I can't prove Megrahi had nothing to do with it. I simply see no credible evidence that he had. At the same time I see considerably more evidence that a group of Palestinian terrorists had the means, motive and opportunity to attack that airliner, and considerably more evidence indicating that the route by which the bomb was introduced was via Heathrow airport. Hence, I think Caustic Logic's statement is bang on the nail.
Rolfe.
