Merged al Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

[Rolfe]

Old news rewarmed.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-90663341.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-55546460.html

The Scottish prosecutors' office on Friday dismissed a published report that Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist found dead in Iraq this week, was behind the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, for which a Libyan has been convicted.

"We deal, and have dealt with, evidence not rumor or speculation, especially about allegedly dead terrorists," a Scottish Crown Office spokeswoman said on customary condition of anonymity.

The Arabic newspaper al-Hayat on Friday published an interview with Atef Abu Bakr, a former spokesman for Fatah-Revolutionary Council, the radical group headed by Abu Nidal, saying Abu Nidal told a meeting of the group's council …

That was nine years ago.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

Old news rewarmed.
Rolfe.

Hey if you can regurgitate the same old CTs for years, what's your problem with an article that may have been "rewarmed"?

~B

 

[Rolfe]

It's irrelevant and a distraction. It's playing politics in a volatile situation where individuals are manoeuvring for advantage and currying favour any way they think will work.

Megrahi still didn't buy those clothes, and there was still no bomb on KM180.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

It's irrelevant

Beg to differ with you on that one. It's quite relevent to the discussion.

and a distraction.

Perhaps you're correct there. I can see how it may be a distraction from your CTs.

It's playing politics in a volatile situation where individuals are manoeuvring for advantage and currying favour any way they think will work.

I can see how you would come to that conclusion as well, considering that's your M.O.

Megrahi still didn't buy those clothes, and there was still no bomb on KM180.

Sigh. How many times are YOU going to repeat THAT?

 

[Rolfe]

As many times as need be to remind you what the issue is. The issue of a court decision that stuff happened which in fact did not happen.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

As many times as need be to remind you what the issue is. The issue of a court decision that stuff happened which in fact did not happen.

Rolfe.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzz.....

 

[Bunntamas]

It was echoed by the former terror chief Atef Abu Bakr, who claimed last night in a separate interview that Megrahi was ordered by Col Gaddafi to help plan the attack as one of the dictator’s former spies.

So much for "old news rewarmed".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8350306/Megrahi-threatened-to-reveal-Gaddafis-role-in-Lockerbie-bombing-unless-he-was-released-it-is-claimed.html

 

[Rolfe]

Yes. Like I said, re-warmed. He's said it before and got the cold shoulder. He's trying it again with a little added spice.

You know, for someone who said,

Though I do I find Rolfe to be a "good" researcher - albeit sourced from nothing but rag media

You're remarkably keen on the gutter press yourself.

Rolfe.

 

[Bunntamas]

Yes. Like I said, re-warmed. He's said it before and got the cold shoulder. He's trying it again with a little added spice.

You know, for someone who said,




You're remarkably keen on the gutter press yourself.

Rolfe.

Well, that first story I posted, I originally noticed on your pal and fellow JFM committee member, R. Black's blog. So apparently he (and by close association you?) is rather keen on what you deem "gutter press" as well.

 

[Rolfe]

So much for "old news rewarmed".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...ing-unless-he-was-released-it-is-claimed.html

I think this, and the substantially different Jalil story, need examining in more detail now that the initial flurry of hysterical reporting has passed. Fortunately Ian Bell, who is one of the top investigative journalists in Scotland, has written an excellent article on the issues.

Lockerbie, Guilt and Gadaffi

In 2002, just after the Zeist proceedings concluded, Abu Bakr came forward with his story that the Abu Nidal group was responsible for Lockerbie. In that version, Abu Nidal had claimed responsibility on his deathbed.

As the Guardian had it at the time: “Nidal had said: ‘I will tell you something very important and serious. The reports which link the Lockerbie act to others are false reports. We are behind what happened.’ According to Bakr, Nidal then threat­ened anyone who leaked what he said with death.”

Bakr's line at that point was that the Zeist trial had got it entirely wrong, and that a completely different group was responsible. As I pointed out above, the Scottish authorities specifically rejected these allegations at the time.

Now, in 2011, Bakr is trying to position himself favourably in the post-Gadaffi world he can see coming. He chooses to regurgitate his previous story, but with an extra twist.

“I can assure you categorically that the two processes [making the bomb and destroying the plane] were the outcome of a partnership between the Abu Nidal group and the security of the Libyan Jamahiriya,” says Bakr.

Megrahi “may have played only a minor part” in the bombing.

For the first time, Megrahi is now implicated, but in a minor behind-the-scenes role. Which allows Bakr to declare that he knows Gadaffi ordered Megrahi to carry out the bombing. Which is what he knows the west wants to hear. Funny he left that bit out in 2002, when he was so busy declaring that actually, Megrahi didn't do it.

He's still saying Megrahi didn't do it, in fact - where "it" is what he was convicted of doing, being involved in the front-line operation of putting the bomb on the plane.

Jalil is actually telling a significantly different story. By his way of it the attack was a Libyan operation, and Abu Nidal doesn't rate a mention.

Al-Megrahi “was not the man who carried out the planning and execution of the bombing, but he was ‘nevertheless involved in facili­tating things for those who did’”.

Again, he confirms that Megrahi didn't do what he was convicted of doing, but assigns him some sort of back-office role. On this he builds a preposterous house of cards concerning Megahi blackmailing Gadaffi to get him to arrange for his repatriation to Libya, none of which actually fits with the facts of the case as they have become pretty widely known over the past four years.

I would like to quote part of an excellent post by Robert Forrester, Secretary to the Justice for Megrahi group, made on Robert Black's blog this morning.

http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2...howComment=1298945170679#c9199459519465241931

It is our contention that Mr al-Megrahi was convicted of the crime he was charged with by a standard which did not conform to that of beyond reasonable doubt. In other words, we believe that, based on the evidence presented by the crown, no reasonable court could have convicted him since the rationale employed was not in keeping with what a cross section of 15 lay jurors would perceive to be a credible conclusion to reach. It is as pure and as simple as that.

[This is] a matter which lies at the very core of our society and one which puts us apart from the law of the jungle and the lynch mob. If we decide to ignore it for the sake of political expediency, the preservation of reputations, the saving of money, or for whatever other reasons that are unconnected with the facts surrounding what took place at Zeist, we are inviting a return to the likes of the show trial. This is not a legacy which we wish to leave to our children and future generations. Our justice system symbolises our identity as a people. We neglect it at our peril.

This, in my opinion, gets to the very heart of the matter. If we say, oh well it doesn't matter that Megrahi was convicted on entirely spurious grounds of carrying out acts he did not in fact carry out, because rumour has it he was connected to the atrocity in some behind-the-scenes role, we undermine everything justice stands for.

If we lean towards the view that perhaps the reason for the Zeist judges' inexplicable torturing of logic and reason to bring in that conviction was that they had been told in private that Megrahi was believed to have been involved in a back-room capacity, then it gets even worse. We are endorsing a show trial, which as Robert says, leads to the law of the jungle and the lynch mob.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

The other question is, how credible are these stories now emerging of Megrahi being involved behind the scenes, even though he didn't buy the clothes and the bomb didn't travel on KM180?

First, we have to accept that there is precisely zero evidence for this. All we have is the unsupported word of a couple of Gadaffi's ex-goons trying to ingratiate themselves with the west in the post-Gafaffi world they see coming - and telling wildly different stories as it happens. Why, we might even imagine that they'd been given the nod that an allegation that Gadaffi ordered Megrahi to carry out the bombing would be just what the doctor ordered, and they proceeded to invent quite different stories to that effect, based on their existing knowledge or theories about the case.

But is it likely? Megrahi was probably a Libyan security official (never proved, but probably), and bombing planes is the sort of thing Libya did, let's face it.

My view on this hinges on the way the police investigation unfolded. If there had been reason to suspect Megrahi of involvement in the bombing for decent but unproveable reasons, and his presence at Malta airport that morning had been discovered, and then the bizarre fairy-tale of the bomb that was routed as unaccompanied luggage through three airports in the dead of winter, circumventing all security checks and escaping delay, misrouting or being lost, only to explode as planned quite ridiculously early in a 7½ hour flight, was concocted to frame him - yes, I could see the logic.

But that's not what happened. The investigation became convinced the bomb had been loaded at Malta and negotiated this ridiculous route only nine months after the disaster, a full year before any suspicion alighted on Megrahi. The reason this theory appealled to them so much is simple - it allowed them to ignore the possibility that the bomb had actually been smuggled through the shockingly lax security at Heathrow airport, which would have had appalling implications for the UK airline industry. It appealled to the Frankfurt authorities for much the same reasons, with a bit more besides.

At this stage, nobody was thinking about Megrahi at all. The investigators wasted a full year on Malta trying to prove that various Palestinian-associated individuals had done the dirty, and all they managed to do was prove that the dirty hadn't actually been done there at all, by anyone. That didn't stop them though.

A year later, in the autumn of 1990, the direction of the investigation was switched to Libya, for reasons that have been exhaustively discussed elsewhere. Then it was discovered that a suspicious-looking Libyan had been passing through the airport at Malta at the relevant time. There was no evidence at all that he'd done anything but catch his plane for Tripoli, and he didn't even have any checked-in luggage with him, but he became the prime suspect. The next year was spent fitting him and one of his buddies up for the crime.

However, the Malta loading of the device was dreamed up entirely separately from the culpability of Megrahi. He came under suspicion because he was in the right place to fit with the already-existing Malta ingestion theory, not the other way round.

So what's the chances that the investigators, looking for someone handy to fit up in respect of the already-decided Malta loading theory, just happened to alight on someone who was actually connected in a peripheral way to the plot - to put a bomb into the baggage container sitting at Heathrow before it was loaded onto the transatlantic leg of the flight directly?

There's no doubt that the Lockerbie affair attracts coincidences like jam attracts wasps. But this one is going a bit far for me.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

So if the detonator isn't genuine (and if I recall correctly it was found very late and wrapted up in Tony's famous shirt) then we don't have a clue what brought down the plane.

We don't even know if it was a bomb.

Since it's all gone a bit quiet, it might be worth expanding on this a bit.

There are separate threads on the "not-a-bomb" theories, and on the provenance of the timer (detonator) fragment, but they're long and convoluted. Some reasonable conclusions have been arrived at, however.

We know it was a bomb not because of the timer fragment (which as you say wasn't identified until very late in the proceedings) but because of the nature of the damage to the luggage container and the luggage inside it. This was picked up very early indeed, within the first week or two of the crash. The position of the explosion was pinpointed pretty accurately without any necessity for finding any part of the actual IED.

Various people have tried to cast doubt on this. Some propose a completely different explosion elsewhere in the aircraft, either as an alternative to the one in the luggage container, or in addition to it. One theory blames the crash on the failure of the cargo compartment door, but even he has to explain the state of the luggage container and the suitcases in proximity to the explosion as having been damaged by a "rather large shotgun" which was being illegally carried in someone's suitcase, loaded, and going off as a result of the decompression.

None of these ideas stands up to any scrutiny of the evidence, which was found by scores of perfectly honest ordinary Scottish coppers, mountain rescue teams and farmers in the days following the crash. You don't need to find any part of the IED to know approximately what went bang, and where it was located.

Others have suggested that the explosion would have vaporised the suitcase containing the bomb and everything in it, and thus the so-called "clues" are either plants or items in adjacent luggage which has been misinterpreted. Again, this doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. That's not to say that there couldn't have been any hanky-panky with what was found, it's likely there was, but the basics of the bomb being in some sort of radio, packed in a brown Samsonite suitcase along with some clothes, appear to be sound.

I'll do this in bits to reduce the "wall of text" accusations!

Rolfe.

 

[little grey rabbit]

If we have a deliberately planted detonator, which was fabricated by Mebo industries on the direct request of people acting for the British government and which we have both the manager of the firm and the employee who fabricated have sworn affidavits before a judge to that effect, we also have clothing that is miraculously traced to a store in Malta where the owner gives absurdly unbelievable testimony and is generally held by the Maltese as a liar, finally we have a toshiba cassette player manual which your "perfectly honest ordinary Scottish coppers, mountain rescue teams and farmers" have clearly, explicitly, repeatedly and with absolute confidence was found in an almost completely undamaged state and was subsequently singed and torn AFTER being handed over to police.......then you have 3 independent pointers to a culture of corruption in the British investigative agencies.

It would be difficult to contemplate what further evidence you would need to know the detonater-Libyan link was a lie. Every single piece in the chain collapses under the slightest examination.

Then your priority is to first isolate and stamp out this corruption. Starting with the people (ie police) who found the individual pieces of detonator, the people who interviewed the shop owner and the police who had custody of the toshiba manual. These are the criminals, although probably only the little fish.

It is pointless to play amateur detective on the web and gullibly spew out alternative scenarios. The only story of any interest is the corruption in the police force, its structure, its motives and who or what it protects.

Another good starting point of investigation would be these who claim to be seeking "Lockerbie Truth." In my personal experience of other such scenarios that such people are so infiltrated by informers etc, there are probably more snoops than genuine sceptics among them - and generally the loudest and most active among them are the most two-faced.

Excellent candidates for water-boarding in my opinion.

 

[Rolfe]

While I rather agree with the general thrust of what you're saying here, you have several specifics wrong, and you're putting rather a lot of trust in the MEBO personnel whom I'm afraid have been shown time and time again to be lying in their teeth.

Just take this one step at a time, OK?

Rolfe.

 

[little grey rabbit]

While I rather agree with the general thrust of what you're saying here, you have several specifics wrong, and you're putting rather a lot of trust in the MEBO personnel whom I'm afraid have been shown time and time again to be lying in their teeth.

Yes, but the police have been shown to be lying in their teeth as well - and through multiple sources.

MEBO have given a credible account of why they wrote their original letter - they were approached by the CIA - again this is a very credible explanation as the CIA were manipulating other evidence as well. Perhaps they weren't doing it in bad faith? Perhaps they were told "we know the Libyans did it but we need some solid physical evidence. Can you help us by cheating a little to make sure the true crooks go to jail." Then when all the other bits fell apart MEBO realised they had been duped.

Since the detonator was found so late and such a cloud of suspicion, that makes the affidavits sworn by MEBO directors and employees very credible. And then every other piece of evidence independent of MEBO is found flawed as well.

Just take this one step at a time, OK?

Rolfe.

But I am not interested in who brought down the plane. To me the issue of cynical police or intelligence deceit is the only story of interest. If it is not tackled we will just keep getting more and more terrorism. I assume either the CIA or MI5 ran the opeartion, but that will automatically be revealed if or when the corruption that planted false evidence in the first place is indentified and brought to justice. You just play the little fish against the big fish.

Oh and a generous use of waterboarding would be a good idea.

 

[Rolfe]

Indeed, certain members of the investigating teams have been shown to have been lying in their teeth, including some Scottish policemen. However, perhaps you haven't met Edwin Bollier? The rest of us have, and frankly it's completely impossible to tell when he's telling the truth and when he's lying. Which is a pity, because he probably does have some good information. However, a lot of it can be seen to be absolute porkies, especially a lot of what he says about the provenance of that timer fragment.

I'm not completely uninterested in who brought down that plane, but I agree, the story of police and intelligence deceit has to be teased out before any speculations can be advanced in that direction. The CIA ran the operation, in conjunction with the FBI. The Scottish police and the English forensics teams did as they were told, with the Scottish police priding themselves that they were in charge, and showing these ignorant colonials how it was done. I haven't heard of any direct involvement by MI5 or MI6, though it wouldn't actually surprise me in the slightest.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Back to that brown Samsonite suitcase, which is the key to the whole thing. It seems that this wasn't identified as being the bomb bag until about two months after the crash, however.

The first discovery was that the damaged container was the one which had been used to load luggage flown in on a feeder flight from Frankfurt. All other luggage had been security-screened at Heathrow, but not the Frankfurt stuff. This was because there was only a very short time between the feeder flight landing and the transatlantic flight taking off. Normal procedure was to park the two planes on adjacent stands, and simply run the luggage across the tarmac from one to the other. (On 21st December 1988 the feeder flight was 45 minutes late, and the transfer was done in a big hurry in only 15 minutes, but even if it had been on time the luggage would not have been screened.) Thus the responsibility for the security of the luggage in that container rested not with Heathrow airport but with Frankfurt.

Identifying this container as the location of the explosion led the UK authorities to announce on 30th December 1988 that the suitcase containing the bomb had not originated at Heathrow. They were very very keen on this conclusion, and stuck to it through thick and thin, in the teeth of accumulating evidence suggesting they were flat wrong about this.

On 3rd January 1989 the Heathrow loader responsible for that container was interviewed by the police. It transpired that the container hadn't been transferred ready-loaded from the feeder flight, but had been loaded on the tarmac with luggage that had been loose-loaded at Frankfurt. And that in fact it had been sent out on to the tarmac with some bags (probably about ten) already in it - luggage belonging to passengers transferring to PA103 from flights that had landed at Heathrow earlier in the day. Luggage it was Heathrow's responsibility to screen.

Oops.

The baggage handler (a Mr. John Bedford) gave detailed evidence about the luggage already in the container. He said he had loaded about eight bags across the back of the container, then had left it unattended to go on his tea break. When he came back there were two more bags lying flat at the front of the container, which he hadn't put there. The left-hand one was "a maroony-brown hardshell, the type Samsonite make". He asked his colleague the x-ray operator (a young chap called Sulkash Kamboj), and Kamboj told him he'd put the cases there after x-raying them.

Except - when Kamboj was interviewed, he denied all knowledge of this and said he hadn't put any cases into the container.

Nevertheless, at this stage the "brown Samsonite" description didn't mean anything to anybody, as the litter-picking exercise going on 400 miles to the north still hadn't brought in enough bits of the bomb bag to identify it. The assumption seems to have been that Bedford was telling the truth and Kamboj had just forgotten all about it.

The discovery that there had been some Heathrow-origin luggage in the container as well was a bit awkward, but the investigation managed to handwave that away. The Air Accident Investigation Board inspector studied the position of the explosion and put it at ten inches from the floor of the container, and about two inches to the left of the flat floor section of the container, into the overhang section shaped to fit into the curved plane fuselage. Strictly speaking, there was no suitcase in that position when Bedford last saw the container. Suitcases are on average about 9 or 10 inches deep, so ten inches was just about fudgeable to fit a suitcase on the second layer. Also, if Bedford's suitcases were flat on the floor, then the explosion was two or three inches to the left of the case he described.

It was therefore decided that the explosion must have been in a case laid on top of Bedford's "maroony-brown hardshell", thus, one of the cases unloaded from the feeder flight. This all seems to have been decided before the forensics people had identified the suitcase containing the bomb as - a brown Samsonite hardshell. As far as I can make out, the description of the case Bedford saw was forgotten about, dropped from the narrative, and not picked up on even when the bomb bag was identified as being something with an essentially identical description.

At this stage, probably late February and into March, the cops started trying to find out of the bomb bag had been checked in as legitimate passenger luggage. They started investigating the passengers to discover if anyone had such a case, and drew a blank. We have three separate statements from different members of the investigating team to the effect that none of the passengers owned or was carrying a brown Samsonite.

This was interpreted to mean that the bomb had been smuggled on as unaccompanied luggage. Fair enough. However, it didn't explain the bag Bedford saw, which was a brown Samsonite, which everyone was busy assuming was legitimate baggage belonging to one of the 15 passengers who had transferred to PA103 at Heathrow from earlier flights. Worse still, no other brown Samsonite was recovered on the ground at Lockerbie, other than the one blown to bits by the bomb inside it.

It was decided that Bedford's suitcase couldn't have been pushed 2 or 3 inches to the left and up, so it couldn't have been the bomb bag, and must have been underneath the bomb bag. Except no trace of it was found.

Well, that was the initial story, and the one that was told to the court in 1991. Somehow it flew, but mainly because that court hearing was minutely stage-managed, and the sheriff was essentially told, "we know the bomb came off the Frankfurt flight although we will not be showing you the evidence for that, so please just come to that conclusion, 'K?"

Ten years later, the story had changed completely - in fact it seems to have been changed within months of Sheriff Mowatt coming to the conclusion he'd been told to come to. The conclusion that the case Bedford saw had been under the bomb bag was revised, and instead one of the Frankfurt bags was allocated that position. Oddly, the only bag described as having been in actual face-to-face contact with the bomb bag. Which is a bit odd if the bomb bag was on the second layer.

Never mind that, the case which was in the position where Bedford saw his brown Samsonite was actually a navy blue Tourister from the Frankfurt flight. So, Bedford's case must have been moved when the Frankfurt luggage was being loaded!

Now you might think and I might think and anyone with half a brain might think fine, the obvious explanation is that Bedford's case was replaced directly on top of the blue Tourister, and slightly to the left, into the overhang section. And went bang 75 minutes later.

This is the case that was made by Megrahi's defence team at Zeist. It was rejected by the judges.

Crucially, the vital piece of evidence that was not presented to the Zeist court was that none of the passengers, and especially none of the 15 passengers from connecting flights whose luggage might have been loaded into that container at Heathrow, had a brown Samsonite. The policeman (Derek Henderson) who had reconciled the luggage and given evidence in 1991 was not called in 2000.

The judges decided, for no reason anyone could see, that Bedford's brown Samsonite had been legitimate luggage belonging to one of these 15 people (none of whom had such a suitcase), and had been moved "to some far corner of the container" during the tarmac loading (which was a mega-rush job done in 15 minutes which doesn't make massive shuffling of the cases very likely but never mind), and then was one of the few cases which were simply not recovered on the ground.

Thus leaving the way clear for the ridiculous Malta-Frankfurt-Heathrow unaccompanied suitcase theory, which is what the investigators wanted to prove (as it let Frankfurt and Heathrow airports off the hook), and which was necessary in order to convict Megrahi.

I'm not making this up you know. I wish I was.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Of course, Frankfurt wasn't happy about this at all. As soon as the British investigators started saying the bomb must have come from Frankfurt, they started saying no it bloody didn't, it was loaded at Heathrow. Proving it hadn't come from Frankfurt was a bit tricky though, since all the Frankfurt airport baggage records had vanished within days of the crash, from right under the noses of the German police who had already started their investigation. Oddly enough this has never been explained at all. Nobody has been held accountable and the police seemed oddly laid-back about the whole thing.

Relations between the two police forces were poisonous for months, and a complete stalemate. The Brits weren't investigating Heathrow because they knew the bomb had come in from Frankfurt, and the Germans were stonewalling. This went on until late August 1989, when the German police suddenly produced a small extract of the missing records, which they said they'd had since February, which seemed to show two items of luggage heading for the feeder flight PA103A, which could not be reconciled to passengers booked on that flight. One of these appeared to have come from Warsaw and the other from Malta.

Or maybe they hadn't at all. The Frankfurt system was so chaotic and poorly documented that it was just as likely they were stray cases from anywhere at all that had been slipped into the system at the same time as the luggage from Warsaw and Malta was being coded. And the full set of records that might have allowed investigators to make better sense of this was of course missing and was never found.

We have no idea what these items of luggage were. Nobody recorded that. Certainly, there's no sighting of a brown Samsonite at Frankfurt. And as I said, they could have come from anywhere really, and they could have been legitimate passenger luggage that was simply entered into the system in the "wrong" place because it had gone astray, and no separate note was made of that.

Never mind that, the cops decided that the entry for an item apparently having come from Malta must have been the bomb. They completely ignored the item which appeared to have come from Warsaw, and no more is heard of that.

This was a bit odd, because whatever that item was (and we certainly don't know that it was a brown Samsonite), it was x-rayed by the security operator at Frankfurt, a man called Kurt Maier, who was "a careful and conscientious operator", who had specifically been made aware of the possibility that someone might try to smuggle a bomb on board a US flight, disguised as a radio-cassette player, and he didn't spot anything.

But this was all highly convenient, because not only did it let Heathrow completely off the hook, it let Frankfurt airport off the hook as well. Maier wasn't a Frankfurt airport employee, he (like Kamboj) was empoyed by Alert Security, a subsidiary of Pan Am, who were entirely responsible for the screening of luggage going on to Pan Am flights.

The reason they were all so keen on the Malta theory is perfectly obvious. Responsibility for the bombing lay with whichever airport the bomb had started its journey at, and thereafter Pan Am (Kamboj or Maier). Blaming Malta was a really popular idea. And Malta seemed like a perfect choice because clothes manufactured on Malta had been found blast-damaged and apparently inside the suitcase with the bomb.

Rolfe.

 

[chillzero]

But really, if Megrahi didn't buy the clothes he didn't do it. It's that simple.

I don't understand why this is necessarily true.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh crikey, I was on a completely different train of thought here.

There was NO other evidence presented to link Megrahi to the bombing. Absolutely none.

There was strong evidence that the bomb suitcase was smuggled into the baggage container at Heathrow while John Bedford was on his tea break, as discussed above. The evidence that any item of unaccompanied luggage came through Frankfurt from Malta was gossamer-thin, again as discussed above. It depends entirely on the interpretation of that extract of the Frankfurt baggage records the German police produced nine months after the event, and which even if completely genuine in no way proved anything had made that journey.

This interpretation was flatly contradicted by the evidence from Malta. The airport there turned out to have a very good security set-up, unlike Heathrow, and all the baggage records were preserved as they should have been, unlike Frankfurt. These records showed that no unaccompanied luggage had travelled on KM180, the flight in question. The cops spent a year and more trying to break that "alibi", and completely failed.

In addition, although Megrahi was at Malta airport when KM180 departed, all he did was catch his flight for Tripoli, which left at about the same time. He was suspected because he was believed to be a Libyan security officer (probably true IMO, but never proved), and because he was using a "coded" diplomatic passport which had been issued to him in a false name.

What happened was that the court decided that since he was the man who bought the clothes, then everything else flowed from that. Since the man who bought the clothes was at Malta airport that morning, they concluded that the coding anomaly at Frankfurt airport was in fact an unaccompanied bag which had been carried on KM180 - even though there was cast-iron evidence that there was no unaccompanied luggge on KM180. They then concluded that even though there was no evidence as to what had been in that tray, and whatever it was had passed through the x-ray screening unremarked, it must have been the brown Samsonite with the bomb in it.

They then decided that this was so certain, they could hand-wave away the suitcase Bedford saw at Heathrow, as being some innocent piece of luggage belonging to a passenger which just by coincidence had occupied almost the position of the identical bomb bag when the container was first loaded, but which had been moved well away and then lost, to be replaced by this completely different brown Samsonite nobody ever saw at either Malta or Frankfurt.

This entire chain of reasoning is entirely dependent on Megrahi having been the man who bought the clothes. If he wasn't, then the entire house of cards falls apart. The Bedford suitcase becomes the obvious candidae for the bomb bag. That was smuggled into the luggage container at Heathrow, about four o'clock in the afternoon, when Megrahi was verifiably in Tripoli.

Rolfe.