Rolfe
Adult human female
I remember reading Fairweather's opinion in a newspaper article. I have no especial reason to doubt him on that, and note very clearly that Megrahi's "injured innocent" position may well be mostly simulated. I accept that there's a big difference in the way we react emotionally to someone who is completely blameless all round being banged up for something they didn't do (take Sally Clark for example), and someone who has other stuff in their past but who simply didn't commit this crime (maybe Barry George, though there's not the slightest reason to believe he ever actually murdered anyone).
However, as I've also pointed out, it's always much much easier to frame someone who already has a history. The Maguire Seven were petty criminals living in a squat. The Birmingham Six had some IRA connections. Barry George was a weirdo stalker with fantasies about the SAS and previous convictions for sexual assault. Even Sally Clark appears to have had a bit of a drink problem. Many, many of the collected cases of miscarriage of justice have involved people with a criminal record or other dodgy past being targeted for framing.
Megrahi was framed because he was boarding a flight at Malta, at the same time as another flight was departing for Frankfurt, which would have connected to PA103. That's about it. There were probably hundreds of people passing through Malta airport, going about their normal business, at that time. Why Megrahi, then? Because he was a Libyan security officer and was travelling under an assumed name. Bingo.
I have absolutely no idea what sort of a person he is or was, or what he may or may not have been guilty of in the past. Unlike Jibril, and Talb, and Khreesat and others, he has no previous convictions and has never been linked in person to any terrorist act. While I accept that Fairweather's assessment of his character may be correct, I also note that we have no evidence at all apart from the fact of his being a JSO officer in the 1980s (which is disputed, but I certainly accept it) to blacken his name. Thus, while acknowledging the possibility that he may be guilty of who knows what else, I put that aside, because there is no evidence, and Fairweather's character assessment, however astute, is not a lot to go on.
Most of what I have seen from people like Frank Duggan and Brian Flynn, to support their assertion that there is "an enormous amount of evidence" that Megrahi carried out the Lockerbie bombing, is in the same category as the evidence Barry George was originally convicted on. Things that might have been relevant if there had also been evidence to connect him to the actual crime, but without that, nothing but tenuous inference and innuendo.
There are much worse things happening in the world than a Libyan being wrongly imprisoned in a Scottish prison for ten years, whatever his past. This isn't about Megrahi as a person, it's about the integrity of the Scottish criminal justice system. If Megrahi could be convicted on that series of leaps of unsupported inference that constitute the Zeist judgement, what might happen to any of us who have the misfortune to find ourselves in front of a Scottish judge? There's a reason Iain McKie is connected to the Justice for Megrahi campaign - his own daughter, a police officer, was framed in a similar way because it was politically expedient.
I feel very sorry for the Lockerbie families, who obviously need some sort of answers on all this. However, convicting someone who by any rational reading of the evidence actually appears to have had an alibi for the crime on that day, just because it's possible to cobble together a wildly implausible case against him, isn't it.
Rolfe.
However, as I've also pointed out, it's always much much easier to frame someone who already has a history. The Maguire Seven were petty criminals living in a squat. The Birmingham Six had some IRA connections. Barry George was a weirdo stalker with fantasies about the SAS and previous convictions for sexual assault. Even Sally Clark appears to have had a bit of a drink problem. Many, many of the collected cases of miscarriage of justice have involved people with a criminal record or other dodgy past being targeted for framing.
Megrahi was framed because he was boarding a flight at Malta, at the same time as another flight was departing for Frankfurt, which would have connected to PA103. That's about it. There were probably hundreds of people passing through Malta airport, going about their normal business, at that time. Why Megrahi, then? Because he was a Libyan security officer and was travelling under an assumed name. Bingo.
I have absolutely no idea what sort of a person he is or was, or what he may or may not have been guilty of in the past. Unlike Jibril, and Talb, and Khreesat and others, he has no previous convictions and has never been linked in person to any terrorist act. While I accept that Fairweather's assessment of his character may be correct, I also note that we have no evidence at all apart from the fact of his being a JSO officer in the 1980s (which is disputed, but I certainly accept it) to blacken his name. Thus, while acknowledging the possibility that he may be guilty of who knows what else, I put that aside, because there is no evidence, and Fairweather's character assessment, however astute, is not a lot to go on.
Most of what I have seen from people like Frank Duggan and Brian Flynn, to support their assertion that there is "an enormous amount of evidence" that Megrahi carried out the Lockerbie bombing, is in the same category as the evidence Barry George was originally convicted on. Things that might have been relevant if there had also been evidence to connect him to the actual crime, but without that, nothing but tenuous inference and innuendo.
There are much worse things happening in the world than a Libyan being wrongly imprisoned in a Scottish prison for ten years, whatever his past. This isn't about Megrahi as a person, it's about the integrity of the Scottish criminal justice system. If Megrahi could be convicted on that series of leaps of unsupported inference that constitute the Zeist judgement, what might happen to any of us who have the misfortune to find ourselves in front of a Scottish judge? There's a reason Iain McKie is connected to the Justice for Megrahi campaign - his own daughter, a police officer, was framed in a similar way because it was politically expedient.
I feel very sorry for the Lockerbie families, who obviously need some sort of answers on all this. However, convicting someone who by any rational reading of the evidence actually appears to have had an alibi for the crime on that day, just because it's possible to cobble together a wildly implausible case against him, isn't it.
Rolfe.
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