Merged al Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

[chillzero]

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.

I don't believe this answers my question.
How does it definitively exclude other scenarios, where, for example, the clothing was bought by someone else who had contact with (stayed at same address, perhaps as) the person who - later - put it in the suitcase, and onto the plane?

 

[Rolfe]

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.

I don't believe this answers my question.
How does it definitively exclude other scenarios, where, for example, the clothing was bought by someone else who had contact with (stayed at same address, perhaps as) the person who - later - put it in the suitcase, and onto the plane?

Sorry, I'm not following you. Who are these somebodies, and who stayed at what address along with who, and so on? You've completely lost me. What does this have to do with the evidence against Megrahi?

Megrahi was accused of being involved in the Lockerbie bombing by virute of having been the man who bought the clothes, and having been at the airport at about the time the bomb was determined to have been smuggled on to KM180.

However, the determination that the bomb was smuggled on to KM180 depended absolutely on the prior assumption that the man who bought the clothes was at the airport at the time.

So if he didn't buy the clothes, not only is that connection to the bombing a no-no, but it also makes the other connection disappear as well. If the man who bought the clothes was not at the airport at Malta that morning, there is no reason to conclude that the bomb travelled on KM180.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Actually, the starting point for all the circular reasoning is the assumption that the clothes were bought on 7th December 1988.

Tony Gauci didn't remember the date he sold those clothes, but they tried to narrow it down. Three important features were that his brother was watching football at the time, probably the UEFA cup, and that it was raining sufficiently heavily for the customer to have bought an umbrella, and that the Christmas lights were not yet lit.

The two likely dates for the football match in question were 23rd November and 7th December, with 23rd November perhaps slightly more likely because that was an evening match and the purchase took place about 7pm.

Meterological records showed light rain at around 7pm on 23rd November but no rain at all on 7th December.

The Christmas lights were lit in that part of town on 6th December.

The judges decided the purchase had taken place on 7th December.

No date was signficant for me at the time. Ultimately it was the applicant's [Megrahi's] presence on the island on 7th December 1988 that persuaded me that the purchase took place on that date.

The Commission formed the view that there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988.

Bell indulged in circular reasoning, deciding the purchase happened on 7th December because Megrahi was around that day, and then deciding that Megrahi was the purchaser because the purchase had happened on 7th December when he was around.

The court didn't actually do that. They appeared to pluck 7th December out for no readily apparent reason, when 23rd November looked a lot more likely on a number of counts. They then looked at Gauci's extremely shaky, tentative and contradictory evidence that Megrahi wasn't the purchaser but resembled him, and decided that since the purchase had happened on 7th December, and Megrahi was around that day, and anyway who could expect Tony still to remember what the purchaser looked like 12 years later, this all added up to a positive identification "beyond reasonable doubt".

They seem to have been assuming all the way through this that the bomb did indeed travel on KM180, so was loaded when Megrahi was at the airport, and so he was already a suspicious character in this respect. But then when they came to look at whether the bomb had actually travelled on KM180 (despite "considerable and quite compelling evidence that that could not have happened"), they used the "fact" that the man who bought the clothes was at the airport to come to the conclusion that it had.

I wish I was making this up but I'm not.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Getting back to where I was, I suppose the clothes are the next thing. It was these clothes that were the cause of the investigation focussing on Malta, and in the end concluding that the bomb had been loaded there.

That last conclusion is beyond tenuous though, and always was. The purchase of the clothes preceded the bombing by weeks. The terrorists could have acquired the stuff in Malta and taken it pretty much anywhere else in that time. In addition, the smuggling of the bomb on to KM180, if it happened, was so well-concealed that the method was never discovered. In fact, to any normal standards of evidence, it was proved that it didn't happen. If you have a plan that allows you to get a bomb on a plane without leaving any trace at all, are you going to pack it round with brand new, locally-manufactured, eminently traceable clothes you bought in a remarkably conspicuous manner in a small shop only three miles from the airport?

But still, those clothes. Ten items listed as being in the bomb suitcase, and when the cops first call on Tony Gauci nine months later he remembers a particular purchaser buying seven of these items, one evening a few weeks before the disaster. Just like that. 100% specificity and 70% sensitivity. He's either a natural at Kim's game, or there's some hanky-panky here.

I don't know what I think about that. There are some heavy rumours that the evidence was tampered with retrospectively so as to fit Tony's list of purchases. But that was never proved, and it's a bit difficult to get my head round that possibility. Maybe he was just good at Kim's game.

But how much do the clothes matter, really? They would matter if we could trace them to a particular person, but we can't. It quite obviously wasn't Megrahi who bought whatever items were bought that rainy evening Tony remembered. Abu Talb had a load of Maltese-manufactured clothes too, but he probably didn't buy them from Tony Gauci either. Maybe the bomb clothes were part of Abu Talb's clothes collection, and Tony just happened to stock similar items, and the rest was manipulation.

I have no freaking idea. Find the person who owned these clothes and you've found a member of the terrorist gang, I agree, but I see no reasonable prospect of identifying that person. So whether the purchase from Tony Gauci really was a terrorist stocking up for the operation, or whether it was some random unrelated memory massaged to appear significant, doesn't really matter so much. Whether the clothes came from Tony's shop, or from elsewhere, we don't know who bought them.

What they don't prove is that the bomb was loaded at Malta.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

LGR was talking about the timer fragment. This is an extraordinarily interesting item, first because its presence is anomalous per se, in relation to the timing of the explosion.

PA103 was scheduled to depart Heathrow at 18.00 GMT, and to atrrive at JFK at 1.40 GMT, a flight time of 7½ hours or so. First, bear in mind that the scheduled departure time of a flight is not the time it takes off. In evidence, it was stated that it would take between 15 and 25 minutes for a plane to get its wheels off the runway after pushing off from the gate, at Heathrow. (In fact the flight pushed off from the gate at 18.03, so keen to depart on time they left a passenger behind who was actually running to the gate, and its wheels left the runway at 18.25.)

Transatlantic routes vary from crossing Cornwall and skirting the south coast of Ireland, to the route PA103 took right up the length of England and Scotland and out over the Outer Hebrides. Most flights cross Ireland in fact, but there was nasty weather over Ireland that evening, so the more northerly route was being operated. This was nothing particularly unusual.

The point is that it would be over an hour's flying time before the flight could be expected to have left land behind and be over the open ocean, pretty much regardless of the route (which the terrorists almost certainly could not have predicted anyway). There are other bits of water of course, the Irish Sea and the Minch, but to be reasonably sure of missing land, you'd have to leave up to 25 minutes from the scheduled departure time to take-off, and then at least another hour's flying time. Probably an hour and a half if the most northerly route was in operation.

But that's hardly a problem, because after that you've got over three full hours, at least, of clear Atlantic before coming over land again on the other side. Again it's the most northerly route which covers most land at the other end, crossing Labrador and coming into NY from the north. But even then, with a flight up to time, it would have been about 23.30 GMT before the Canadian coast would have been crossed.

So, you have an electronic timer, and you can set it for any time you like. When do you choose? Me, I'd go for 22.00 to 23.00. There's no way the plane is going to be early enough to be over land at that time. But the important bit is, it gives the best possible insurance against it being late.

The digital timer would set the bomb off at the selected time no matter where it happened to be. If it happened to be still on the ground, not a lot would have happened. A bang, a hole in the side of the 747, some damaged luggage, and that would have been about it. No fatalities, probably no injuries.

This was Heathrow, in December. What were the chances of this plane being late? Fog, ice, snow, congestion, it all happens. In fact, the plane nearly missed its slot, twice. First because the feeder flight, which it was obliged to wait for, was 45 minutes late. As it was they rushed the passengers and their luggage across, but if it had been another 10 or 15 minutes late the slot would have been gone. Second, because of the inebriated Mr. Basuta, the luckiest man in known space. They got all the Frankfurt passengers on, and this bloody man still hadn't appeared. So they departed anyway. Without him, but with his luggage. (Which caused an almighty uproar when the plane fell out of the sky an hour later.)

But hey, this is airport departures we're talking about. What were the chances that plane could still have been sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow at 19.03 (which is when the bomb went off). Distinctly non-negligible, that's what.

On the other hand the chances of it still being on the ground at 22.00 or 23.00 are very low indeed - that's not late, that's a cancelled plane, which is a lot less common. While if the flight is up to time it's still right out over the ocean, some considerable way even from the desolate Canadian coastline.

So if you have a snazzy digital timer, why did you set it for 19.03, again?

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

So what's the alternative explanation for the 19.03 detonation?

That timing fits pretty exactly with a different sort of device, colloquially known as an ice-cube timer. They work on capacitance, and they can't be set to a particular time by the operator. The neato trick however is that these things were connected to a barometer or altimeter, measuring air pressure, and set so that they would never go off while the device was on land.

The way it worked was that the device would be set, and safe forever at sea level. However, as soon as air presure fell below a certain point, the ice-cube capacitor would start to charge. This air pressure would be reached inside a plane's pressurised cargo hold about seven minutes after take-off (because aircraft are never pressurised to sea level, rather to the equivalent of about 8,000 feet altitude).

The length of time which would then pass depended on the exact model of the capacitor, but 30 minutes (give or take) was a common setting. During that time, the capacitor would be charging from the battery it was connected to. When full capacitance was reached, the capacitor would discharge, closing the circuits and detonating the bomb.

PA103 blew apart exactly 38 minutes after its wheels left the runway at Heathrow, pretty much on the nail for an ice-cube barometric timer.

In this scenario the early detonation doesn't matter (although it does possibly mean there's going to be a lot of evidence lying around unless you're lucky enough to hit the Irish Sea), because it is impossible for the explosion to happen harmlessly on the tarmac, no matter how late the plane is.

However, there is one crucial restriction on this sort of device. They can't be flown in unaccompanied on a feeder flight, in the armed state. Try that, and the thing will simply blow up when the feeder flight reaches the right altitude and time. If such a device was used, it must have been loaded or at least armed at Heathrow itself.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

That's why the fragment of the electronic timer is anomalous. In the first instance, it has nothing to do with who planted the bomb. Even though most of these devices were sold to Libya, that was in 1986, and the things turned up in several different places during the following couple of years. Libya was arming half the world's terrorist groups at the time. And some of them went from MEBO to the East German Stasi.

The anomaly is that if you have an MST-13 timer, no matter who you are, you don't set it for 19.03. You take advantage of that long ocean crossing to time your explosion so that the plane disappears over the Atlantic, and all the evidence with it.

Or if you're of a particularly nasty bent, and you want it to come down on land, you set it for even later. 01.00 would see the plane over US soil, near New York. And again, if the plane was very late (or come in on a very southerly course), at least you'd get the ocean disappearance, not the Heathrow tarmac damp squib.

The one thing you don't do is set it so early that the least weather trouble, or a lost passenger, or a later feeder flight, or a mechanical problem, will cause the whole thing to abort.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

So is it just pure coincidence that the fragment of timer that was found has the most flaky provenance in the entire history of forensic science? I mean, so bad that if it isn't a plant, it would be a ruddy miracle?

The shirt collar was found in the big field behind Blinkbonny Farm on 13th January 1989, by DC Gilchrist. His evidence in court was described as "at best confusing, at worst evasive", and he gave the distinct impression he'd never seen the thing before. This came out because it was noticed in court that the label on the evidence bag had been altered, which was contrary to proper procedure, and he had no explanation for how that might have happened.

His team leader, who also signed the label, was a DC McColm, who was described by DC Crawford in his book as a lazy sod who liked his cosy office job and was hardly ever out looking for stuff, and also had a very cavalier attitude to the recording of the provenance of the finds coming in.

The collar was sent to RARDE in Kent, and next surfaces on 12th May, when Thomas Hayes examines it. He makes his notes on a loose-leaf page numbered 51, but pages following this, and indeed the sequence of dates on these pages, strongly suggest that this page 51 is a later interpolation.

He teases a surprisingly large number of pieces of debris from the cloth, including a "fragment of green circuit board", and takes a photograph of the collection. There is some reason to believe this photo may be a polaroid.

He then files the whole lot away and makes no further mention of it. Despite the fact that at this precise time at RARDE the forensics team were going mad trying to find more pieces of circuit board from the radio the bomb had been hidden in, to try to get a better identification on it. Much smaller and less distinctive circuit board fragments found at the same time are being hailed with cries of "Eureka!".

It vanishes again until 15th September, when it suddenly becomes the subject of a memo from Allan Feraday to the Scottish police, asking them if they can perhaps help trace the origin of this item. Oddly, despite the thing having been at RARDE since May, and having been photographed then, Feraday apologised for sending polaroid photos as "this is the best I can do in the time available".

This is odd behavious on Feraday's part, considering that when the Claiden circuit board chip was found earlier (the important piece of the radio) he personally visited electronics manufacturers in Germany and Japan in an effort to identify it.

DI Williamson sets to and tried to find out where the green fragment came from, and trails around many electronics manufacturers in his turn, to no avail. Which is slightly strange, because there is evidence of contact between the Lockerbie investigation and MEBO even before this time, but nobody seems to have suggested MEBO to Williamson.

Nothing happens for another nine months, until a meeting in June 1990 in the USA between the Scottish investigators and the FBI. At this meeting Tom Thurman of the FBI gets hold of a photo of the fragment and runs off to a mate in the CIA with it.

Thurman has given different accounts of what happened next. One account has him spending "literally months" hunting through a gadzillion files trying to find a match to the fragment. Except, we know from Marquise's account, and this is corroborated by Thurman on a different occasion, that it took less than 48 hours. In fact, Thurman and his pal Orkin (a pseudonym) seem to have known what it was immediately, but they nevertheless contacted another handful of electronics manufacturers "just to be sure" before fetching up at MEBO's door in September 1990.

Thomas Hayes was severely criticised by the May Inquiry into the Birmingham Six debacle for sexing-up and misrepresenting evidence that got these men falsely convicted as IRA terrorists. He left RARDE in the middle of the Lockerbie investigation just as this was coming out and re-trained as a chiropodist. He gave evidence at Zeist which is quite baffling in its evasiveness.

Allan Feraday kept his job, but was the subject of scathing criticism in court in relation to other cases, again in relation to over-stating the significance of evidence to get innocent defendants convicted, and for having no qualifications for the work he was doing. He was barred from giving evidence in explosives cases as an expert witness. He was not called to give evidence at Zeist.

Tom Thurman was also the subject of severe criticism in relation to fabricating evidence to secure convictions, and left the FBI as part of a bit of a clear-out of bad apples, as far as can be ascertained. He went into teaching. His degree was in policital science, not electronics. He was not called to give evidence at Zeist.

We have no conclusive evidence that the timer fragment was fabricated. The SCCRC say they looked into it, and don't think it was fabricated, but don't say what led them to that conclusion. On the other hand, what a dubious crew of chancers were involved in that part of the investigation!

If one was suspecting a fabrication, the evidence suggests this happened some time in the summer of 1989, which fits as far as time-scale goes with political developments and the cross-Atlantic traffic of the investigators. The suggestion would be that a sample circuit board was acquired, then broken up, scorched, whatever, and the shirt collar (which is also suspect being apparently the wrong size to fit with the rest of the evidence as far as I know) prepared with its inserts and put into the chain of the evidence some time before 15th September. Hayes then fabricated the paperwork to insert into the notes from May to make it look as if it had been found earlier, at a plausible stage in the investigation.

There's a lot of what comes out of MEBO that I don't believe. For example the stuff about the fragment being substituted during the inquiry is rubbish as can be seen by examining the various photos of it, and Lumpert's tale about scratching an M on the board also sounds like a fairy-story. On the other hand I take note that Lumpert's date of 22nd June 1989 for handing over a sample timer is bang on the nail for the time frame we would expect, if the fragment were indeed a plant.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh, and the radio manual wasn't found by an official searcher at all. It was picked up along with a couple of bags of stuff by a lady who lived in Morpeth, responding to a general appeal to the public to bring in anything people could find.

Yes, at Zeist the lady who found it did not identify the item shown in court as being what she had found. She remembered an almost-intact sheet of paper, "just a bit tatty round the edges". What was presented in court was in rags, almost torn through in several places, and with only just enough remaining for the exact make and model number of the radio to be legible.

Oddly enough, Feraday went to Japan to try to identify the radio, and it was there he found that radios of a particular model had been sold in bulk to a Libyan company. He returned with samples of that radio, and its manual. It was only after that that Mrs. Horton's page was identified and examined at RARDE. If it was her page, that is.

And we're supposed to believe that this piece of paper was within an inch or two of a brisant Semtex explosion, that vaporised much of what was around it and tore a child's Babygro wrapped round the box into unrecognisable shreds. And yet is wasn't burnt to a cinder but instead survived a fall from 31,000 feet in a force 9 gale, being blown over 60 miles across country, to land in Mrs. Horton's field for her to retrieve.

And exactly the part of the page remained, so that the make and model number could be read.

This was the only definite evidence that pinpointed the radio as the model sold in bulk to Libya.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Sorry, too many walls of text. I just felt like summarising the actual evidence, as an antidote to all the rubbish we've been subjected to recently, in the hope that some new people might be reading this thread.

Rolfe.

 

[chillzero]

And we're supposed to believe that this piece of paper was within an inch or two of a brisant Semtex explosion, that vaporised much of what was around it and tore a child's Babygro wrapped round the box into unrecognisable shreds. And yet is wasn't burnt to a cinder but instead survived a fall from 31,000 feet in a force 9 gale, being blown over 60 miles across country, to land in Mrs. Horton's field for her to retrieve.

And exactly the part of the page remained, so that the make and model number could be read.

This was the only definite evidence that pinpointed the radio as the model sold in bulk to Libya.

Rolfe.

Sounds similar to the passport found at Ground Zero in NY.

 

[zooterkin]

Well, I'm convinced that, at the very least, the conviction was unsound.

 

[Rolfe]

Well, I'm convinced that, at the very least, the conviction was unsound.

That's about the size of it, and is exactly the position of Justice for Megrahi. Uniquely, because of the absence of a jury, we have a written record of the reasoning which led the judges to bring in a guilty verdict.

Opinion of the Court

I have never in my life (OK, outside the witterings of homoeopaths) seen such a perverse and irrational document. Unsubstantiated inferences, implausible explanations that support guilt preferred to probable explanations that support innocence, and circular reasoning that would give a dervish vertigo. Rather than approaching the evidence disinterestedly, or (perish the thought) from the position of "innocent until proven guilty", every paragraph seems to have been written from the standpoint of "how can we possibly bring in a guilty verdict against this guy?"

A very senior Scottish advocate has said of this exercise,

1. I could not and still cannot understand how the Court could hold, on the evidence of Gauci, that Megrahi made the purchase of the clothing. Without Gauci's evidence, which at its height was that Megrahi resembled the purchaser, there was no case.
2. Their finding that the purchase was made on 7 December bordered upon the perverse.
3. Their finding about the unaccompanied baggage fell within the same category.

Let me quote from Dickson on The Law of Evidence at Section 98. In speaking of inferences to be drawn in cases of circumstantial evidence he says: "It is not enough that his guilt [the accused] be a rational and probable inference as well as the most probable of several inferences from the circumstances. It must also be the only rational hypothesis which they will bear."

If that is still the law then how on earth could the Court have drawn so many adverse inferences against the accused when there were other explanations and explanations that were just as likely?

There's a story in legal circles that the "unanimous" verdict was a fudge. One judge wanted to acquit both men, and another wanted to convict both (I don't know about the third). The decision to acquit one of the "conspirators" and convict the other, even though it was completely impossible to see how the convicted man could have done it on his own, is thus said to be a trade-off, to get the unanimous verdict the political situation demanded.

Considering that there was zero evidence against Fhimah (once the invented evidence of the CIA stooge who was bribed to lie in court was excluded), I really, really want to know what the judge who wanted to convict him was smoking. He makes Lord Denning look like a bleeding-heart liberal.

Then there's the first appeal.

Opinion of the Appeal Court

Legal experts agree that Megrahi's advocate screwed up and brought the appeal on the wrong grounds. Thus, on strict legal terms, it was bound to fail. However, the appeal judges scale even greater heights of sophistry than the trial judges in their attempt to support the original verdict. It is known that they had serious doubts about the situation, and enquired if it was possible to order a retrial, but the reply was that the peculiar circumstances of the Zeist set-up made that impossible.

So, they swallowed their obvious reservations, and basically said, it's not for us to substitute our opinion for that of the trial court on these matters. Now if you'd appealled on different grounds that might all have been so different, but you didn't, so tough.

The problem is, this perverse conviction stands in the way of any attempt to find out what the hell happened. Any request for an investigation or an inquiry runs slap into the declaration that we know how it was done and who did it because the guy was found guilty and jailed.

Meanwhile, I fear, the guys who really did it are laughing themselves sick over all the international hoo-hah about "the Lockerbie bomber".

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Sounds similar to the passport found at Ground Zero in NY.

Chillzero, I simply cannot understand why you chose to quote, selectively, that tiny part of what I posted.

That post wasn't part of my reply to you. It was directed to LGR, who brought up the question of the radio manual page, but had several of the details of its finding wrong.

I did try to reply to your original question, and then again to your follow-up comment, even though that didn't make any sense to me. Perhaps it would help if you looked at the quote above from Len Murray, because he makes exactly the same points.

I know about the passport found at Ground Zero. Are you trying to imply that the Horton manual page is no less plausible than that? Seriously? Including the strange happenings in the Zeist court-room, where Mrs. Horton was asked to identify the fragment as the item she found in her garden, and in effect said no, she didn't recognise it as it was presented to her? The discrepancies were never resolved and everyone just carried on as if she'd said yes, she was absolutely sure it was the same item.

However, this is rather missing the point. As I said, I don't understand why you chose that particular matter to focus on. While it's an oddity, and something worth looking at if one has any suspicions about the probity of the investigation (and I have plenty), it's in no way central to the doubts about the conviction of Megrahi.

I can do no better than to quote Len Murray again.

1. I could not and still cannot understand how the Court could hold, on the evidence of Gauci, that Megrahi made the purchase of the clothing. Without Gauci's evidence, which at its height was that Megrahi resembled the purchaser, there was no case.
2. Their finding that the purchase was made on 7 December bordered upon the perverse.
3. Their finding about the unaccompanied baggage fell within the same category.

Megrahi didn't buy these clothes. It is perverse in the extreme to imagine he did. Gauci's original description of the purchaser was of someone completely different - taller, older, darker-skinned and more heavily built. Even after the most shameless prompting and heavy hints about eyewatering amounts of money (the Gauci brothers were given $3 million after Megrahi was convicted), the best Tony could manage was to say Megrahi wasn't the man in the shop but "resembled him a lot".

The evidence in relation to the rain and the Christmas lights essentially excluded 7th December, which was the only day Megrahi could possibly have been in Tony Gauci's shop. This shifts the possibility of Megrahi being the purchaser out of "highly unlikely" and into "impossible".

And there was no evidence there was any unaccompanied baggage on the Malta-Frankfurt flight, and very very good evidence to say there wasn't, so Megrahi wasn't even present when the bomb was smuggled into the airport baggage system.

That's it. There was no other evidence connecting Megrahi to the bombing (again once the perjured evidence of the paid CIA stooge who was given US citizenship and a new identity in California to lie about Megrahi and Fhimah to the court was excluded).

After taking that on board, it is instructive to realise that there is evidence to suggest that prosecution misconduct didn't stop at bribing witnesses, but may have extended to fabricating evidence. However, even if the Horton manual fragment, and the MST-13 timer fragment, the Erac printout and the Maltese clothes are completely on the level, there is still no case against Megrahi.

Rolfe.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Sounds similar to the passport found at Ground Zero in NY.

Several difference leap immediately to mind.

A passport is made of strong, heavy paper, with a heavy cover, as opposed to being made entirely with regular, flimsy paper of the sort appliance manuals are made of.

The 9/11 passport in all likelihood was in the pocket of a hijacker in the front of one of the planes that hit the WTC towers and would thus have been amongst the first bits of debris to be ejected out the far side of the tower in advance of the fuel explosion. It was not strapped to the plane's fuel tank, or inside a case with high explosive.

The 9/11 passport was discovered and catalogued promptly.

The 9/11 passport was not vital to any theory of the days's events. If it had not been found, we'd have exactly the same conclusions today as to what occurred.

There are no apparent contradictions between the statements of the people who found the passport and its current state. The people who found it did not claim to have found a slightly damaged passport, only to see it turn up in court torn and burned almost beyond recognition.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Ok, I'm going to write a summary of what, from my totally virgin reading of this thread with no previous interest in Lockerbie CT's, seems to be the basics.

Megrahi was in the Maltese airport one day.

He (possibly) looked like some guy who bought clothes from a store.

The rest of the evidence given by the clothing store owner described rain and christmas lights, neither of which were present when Megrahi was on Malta.

That was ignored by prosecutors who insisted it must have been Megrahi who bought the clothes.

There was no evidence any unaccompanied luggage left Malta, and Maltese security protocol makes it a virtual impossibility.

There was an anomaly at Frankfurt which was assumed to be an unattended from Malta.

There was a suitcase spotted in Heathrow that looked like and was in the same place as the bomb.

This was ignored by investigators.

Megrahi was nowhere near Frankfurt or Heathrow when Pan Am 103 left.

That about sum it up?

 

[Rolfe]

Mark, I'm tempted to nominate that post.

Yes, that's about it.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Actually, I missed out my favourite bit of non-reasoning from the Opinion of the Court.

The evidence in regard to what happened at Frankfurt Airport, although of crucial importance, is only part of the evidence in the case and has to be considered along with all the other evidence before a conclusion can be reached as to where the primary suitcase originated and how it reached PA103.

It can, however, be said at this stage that if the Frankfurt evidence is considered entirely by itself and without reference to any other evidence, none of the points made by the defence seems to us to cast doubt on the inference from the documents and other evidence that an unaccompanied bag from KM180 was transferred to and loaded onto PA103A.

So, first we point out that the Frankfurt evidence has to be considered in the light of all the other evidence when trying to decide where the bomb suitcase got on the plane. Not arguing with that, Sherlock.

Presumably, that means you consider the extremely ambiguous and questionable nature of the Erac printout, which (if it's legit at all, remember this is another piece of evidence with extraordinarily flaky provenance) might just reflect a coding anomaly, of which there were admitted to be plenty at Frankfurt.

Then you consider it in the context of the evidence from Malta itself, where there is "considerable and quite convincing evidence that [an unaccompanied suitcase getting on board KM180] could not have happened."

And you consider it in the context of the evidence from Heathrow, which records a suitcase answering to the description of the bomb bag, which was shown not to belong to any legitimate passenger, in almost the position of the bomb bag, before the Frankfurt flight had landed. And you think about the appalling security standards at Heathrow, and Bedford's tea break, and the 38-minute explosion matching the timing expected of a barometric device that would have had to be loaded at Heathrow, and the fact that only at Heathrow could the terrorist have had any chance of influencing the position of the case in the container - and the case was in pretty much the worst possible position as regards damaging the plane with that amount of Semtex.

But hey, we don't do any of that. We reverse smartly and decide to consider the Frankfurt evidence in isolation after all, even though we just said we couldn't really do that.

So we consider the Frankfurt evidence in isolation. And we say, hey, it's more likely that any given tray as recorded is what it appears to be, rather than a coding anomaly. Well, no kidding Sherlock. You reckon that coding anomalies account for a relatively small minority of all luggage recorded in the Frankfurt system.

It is therefore decided, like that, that the entry in question MUST have been something that came off the Malta flight. Therefore it was unaccompanied baggage. And because there was no evidence of any unaccompanied luggage at the other end, it must have been a really criminal plot. And there was a suspicious Libyan there at the time and we've decided this guy bought the clothes in the bomb bag. So obviously, that was the bomb bag.

That really is it. That quoted paragraph is the reasoning they used to determine the Frankfurt records showed an unaccompanied bag from Malta. Well, that and (when challenged about the Warsaw bag) the observation that the man who bought the clothes from Tony Gauci was at Malta when the flight in question departed. And once they'd decided that, this allowed them to say, well, it doesn't matter there was no evidence of an unaccompanied bag at the Malta end and a lot of evidence there was no such thing, we already decided it was there. And it allowed them to say, well bugger me we have no idea what the hell it was Bedford saw, but we've already decided the bomb came in from the Frankfurt flight, so I guess the case he saw just vanished somewhere.

Look, I'm honestly not making this up. This really is the chain of "logic" employed. I think this is why I'm so aerated about it all. It's an offence against reason itself.

Rolfe.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Mark, I'm tempted to nominate that post.

Yes, that's about it.

Rolfe.

Holy crap that's one poorly done investigation.

I'm assuming this was more down to desperately wanting to find someone guilty rather than actual malice against Megrahi/Libya?


^{(Nom away, always happy to get one :D )}

 

[Rolfe]

Well, that's a whole other can of worms. Above a certain level in the investigation, there seems to have been more interest in not getting the "wrong" (that is, embarrassing) result than actually solving the crime.

The UK side was extremely keen that the bomb should not have originated at Heathrow. They thought, on day 9, that the baggage container involved ruled out Heathrow, and rushed out a statement to that effect. They then held that line with some quite surreal mental back-flips, even as more and more evidence trickled in suggesting it could well have been a suitcase smuggled into Heathrow.

The Frankfurt side seems to have been hiding something quite substantial. The evidence suggests that all the baggage records were removed and "lost" within a few days of the disaster, either by the police themselves or with the connivance of the police. This may have been related to the fact that the US DEA were running a controlled drugs delivery operation through Frankfurt airport to Detroit, and one of their known couriers was on PA103. It may also be related to the fact that a Frankfurt terrorist cell was known to be building bombs with barometric detonators, to bring down aircraft. That cell had been infiltrated by US assets, but was still engaged in some pretty lethal operations. Or maybe not. Frankfurt is a black hole of cover-up, and the only thing that ever emerged from it was the Erac printout which very conveniently allowed the attention of the investigators to move to Malta.

The US side seems to have at first hoped it might be a Libyan operation, but then as more and more evidence emerged about the Palestinian group in Frankfurt and what they were up to, that hope became a lot fainter. There is evidence however that in March 1989 there was an agreement between Bush and Thatcher to call the dogs off the Palestinian suspects, with various reasons being advanced that probably aren't the whole story.

If there was any fabrication of evidence to point to Libya, it seems to have happened between April 1989 and September the same year. However, this evidence wasn't brought out at that time, but was allowed to sit in the background waiting for someone to put two and two together.

The actual investigation was ostensibly pursuing the Palestinian group right through until early autumn 1990. However, the early months were hindered by the Heathrow-Frankfurt stalemate. The recovery and forensics operations were going full steam ahead, but the detectives were at war - the Brits said the bomb had come from Frankfurt and the Germans said it had been introduced at Heathrow. The Brits weren't investigating Heathrow because they believed Frankfurt was the key, and the Germans weren't investigating Frankfurt because - well, all the baggage records had been lost, for a start.

This changed in August 1989 when the Frankfurt police produced the Erac printout with the line suggesting a possible unaccompanied item from Malta heading for PA103A. This coincided with the forensics people identifying most of the blast-damaged clothing as being of Maltese manufacture. So everybody heaved a sigh of relief and started investigating Malta.

They spent a year trying to prove that the bomb had been smuggled on to KM180 from Malta to Frankfurt, and could find no evidence. They also tried very hard to get the clothes seller to identify one of the Palestinian gang as the clothes purchaser, which he did, in rather more definite terms than he later identified Megrahi. (Still probably wasn't him either though!) That year on Malta seems to have been fruitless - well, if the bomb was actually smuggled on board at Heathrow, that's not all that surprising.

Then in June 1990 the fragment of timer circuit board was identified and traced as an item (mostly) sold to Libya. Soon after that the first Gulf War was cooking up, when it was expedient to consign Libya to the Outer Darkness (and in any case some leverage against them was wanted to stop them supplying munitions to the IRA), but at the same time it was desirable to have Iran (who probably paid the Palestinian group to attack the airliner) on-side and allied.

This caused a sudden volte-face in which the investigators were instructed to stop looking at the Palestinians and go after Libya. Same (ridiculous) modus operandi, different perpetrator. It was discovered that a suspicious-looking Libyan (Megrahi) had been catching a flight for Tripoli at Malta at the same time KM180 departed. (This isn't all that unlikely, as Malta was Libya's gateway to the outer world and the place was crawling with Libyans. If it hadn't been Megrahi that day it would have been someone else.)

He, in common with probably 50% of the adult male population, vaguely resembled the description of the clothes purchaser (well, clean-shaven and with dark frizzy hair - not age, build, height or skin colour). The investigators changed tack and started trying to get an identification of Megrahi. That little lot is detailed elsewhere. It was never a confident identification though, and they couldn't have relied on it alone.

They spent some time trying to cook up a theory involving a mate of Megrahi's as well, and a travel agency the pair of them were setting up, and all of that disappeared in court for lack of evidence.

There would never have been enough evidence there to issue indictments, if it had not been for what the CIA did next, in July 1991. They had a Libyan informer on their books, a lowlife called Abdulmajid Giaka, who had been taking their money and producing nothing much in return for three years. When asked about Lockerbie he had been uninformative. They got hold of him and told him they'd cut him off without a penny (strand him in Malta in fact) unless he told them what they wanted to hear about Megrahi and his mate Fhimah, and the Lockerbie bomb. If he did that, they'd get him (and his pregnant wife) into the US witness protection programme and US citizenship.

Giaka obliged, coming out with a whole lot of stuff about seeing Megrahi and Fhimah at Malta airport with a brown Samsonite suitcase the day before the bombing. One has to ask, how did he know to talk about a brown Samsonite suitcase? (Look at Vincent Vassallo's evidence for a clue. He was specifically asked - by a Scottish cop - if he had seen either man with a brown Samsonite suitcase, and given heavy hints about life-changing amounts of money if he had. He refused indignantly and went to the Maltese cops about it.) From knowing nothing about Lockerbie at all, Giaka's evidence got more and more detailed and more and more incriminating. He was taken to the USA, given US citizenship, and a new identity.

That was what allowed the indictments to be issued. The US authorities "had a witness". On the basis of this, the UN was induced to impose punitive sanctions on Libya which lasted for eight years and allegedly caused thousands of deaths. Finally, a deal was brokered to bring the two accused to trial, and they surrendered voluntarily. (I have heard a claim that what tipped the balance at that point was an undertaking only to go after the two accused and not to try to implicate Gadaffi. It that's true, it has some interesting connotations for current events.)

However, the whole sordid tale of the bribery of Giaka came out in court. Although the prosecution tried to conceal this evidence, the court ordered it to be revealed, and that was the end of his evidence. The judges threw it out. Everybody expected two acquittals after that, because the evidence that remained was ridiculous.

However, the judges then bent over backwards to choose the most incriminating interpretation possible of all the remaining circumstantial evidence, even when these interpretations were quite fanciful, and reject the obvious interpretations, such as the bomb having gone into the container at Heathrow. All of this was based on the acceptance that Tony Gauci's confused and contradictory non-identification of Megrahi as the purchaser of the clothes was "beyond reasonable doubt". Tony Gauci and his brother then got $3 million and a new life in Australia.

And that's why this is in Conspiracy Theories, and from that point of view, rightly so.

Rolfe.