Lockerbie: London Origin Theory

[Buncrana]

[...] I do not recall if I personally put any bags into the PA103 container that day. That is not to say I did not do so. Occasionally I might throw a bag straight from the x-ray machine into the container if it is not too far away and the bag is not too heavy.

And with the fact that PA103 was the only Pan Am aircraft left to deal with from 1400, AVE4041 in plain sight of both Parmar and Kamboj, and Bedford away for a break, the conditions might seem reasonable for Parmar to have done this. Or Kamboj. However, both either can't really remember if they might have did this, although Kamboj did say he wouldn't argue with Bedford if he said he had told him that he did do that.

The impression I get throughout the Heathrow statements from Alert Security and Pan Am handlers is that while knowing full well this was against their work policy, they virtually all reluctantly conceded that this happened ocassionally. Perhaps, more frequently than alluded to. Parmar admits that he isn't someone who was seen as particulary good at some of the other aspects his job might entail. So he been stuck on Security Duty of baggage to while away the time.


BTW, Taylor was a former Edinburgh Labour councillor and a Labour parliamentary candidate. I'm sure there was a small piece about Taylor in Paul Foot's 'Flight From Justice' piece which covered the sudden departure of Lord (now Baron) Hardie just before the case opened at Ziest.

 

[Rolfe]

So, what are you suggesting? Bedford said Kamboj told him he put the extra two cases in, but I suppose it might have been Parmar. Parmar wasn't called at Zeist. If Parmar put these cases there, what were they? And how does that action get the total number of cases in there to seven?

Anyway, you're being selective. In other statements Parmar said he wouldn't have put stuff in the container unless it was a lot busier than it was that afternoon. I don't rule out the possibility that one of them might have done that. But overall, the thrust of the statements is saying they didn't.

For another thing, my analysis is based solely on the position of the Bedford suitcase. It doesn't rely on Bedford having described the suitcase as a brown Samsonite, and it doesn't rely on the case having appeared mysteriously. If Sidhu didn't move that suitcase, then it was the bomb regardless of whether Bedford thought it was covered in pink polka-dots and Kamboj volunteered a full description of how he remembered placing it in the container, in his first statement.

As I said in that recent post, you can concoct a story that makes the suitcase innocent, if you allow that Sidhu was completely mistaken. Maybe the two front cases were McKee's. Or Hubbard's case and Bernstein's suit carrier. In that case, Kamboj or Parmar would have loaded them. But any way you slice it, it's special pleading of the highest order. It's reasoning more suited to a situation where you had CCTV footage showing the bomb definitely going on somewhere else. And you'd be scratching your head and saying, I don't know what the hell happened there.

But if Sidhu didn't move the cases, if you can't find really compelling evidence to insist that he was mistaken despite all these statements, the Bedford case was the bomb. Irrespective of who put it there. The rest is just speculation as to the most likely way it happened.

I guessed right about Taylor! Oh, doesn't he just look like a Tory fat cat. But Tony Kelly, Megrahi's last solicitor, is the brother of a Labour MSP. I just detect a bit of a pattern here. I have no idea what pattern it is though.

Rolfe.

 

[Buncrana]

I’m just exploring how that bag came to be just about perfectly positioned within AVE4041 and as we now know was never moved again. From the bombers point of view, a perfect job, without any hitch, completed. Did the bomber simply chuck the suitcase on the conveyor belt outside the shed as ‘Whytes’ baggage services did and, despite how close they now where to achieving their plan, hope nothing would be spotted at x-ray and it would, by chance, get placed in just the right position by Kamboj, Parmar or if they were doing their job to the letter, by Bedford?

Or did someone approach Parmar or Kamboj in person, give them the suitcase for x-ray, and then walk away and allow them to load it into 4041? Little wonder Kamboj and Parmar might like to suggest ‘oh no siree, that’s not our job’. (Except, er, well, sometimes we do exactly that, but not today, honestly…I think!)

Or were Kamboj or Parmar, as you say, being a cold December day, away from their posts keeping warm and playing cards, and was it possible someone could have went into the Interline shed, and put the suitcase into 4041 without them, or anyone else around the Interline area, noticing this at all? Because, whichever method the bomb suitcase that Bedford saw came to be so neatly positioned, it also seems to have required one of the suitcases Bedford loaded, McKee’s, to be lifted and moved from the back row to the front and laid on its side. That’s the five suitcases cases and two at the front that both Bedford and Sidhu saw, while only 6 were legitimately passenger baggage.

Seven suitcases as John Orr said had been identified; did he mean the six we now know were assigned a legitimate passenger plus a brown Samsonite no one was sure of but not to worry because most of the cases in that container were from Frankfurt and we (like to) think the bomb came from there.

None of this was explored or speculated, and neither workers were really pressed to think, and think hard, at the time or at Zeist, about what exactly occurred between about 1600 and 1700 that day. Mind you, given that Taylor was content to sit back and let the prosecution hopefully not make their case, and that every man and his dog was blithely assuming the bag was coming in on 103a via Malta, it shouldn’t be surprising. Like the FAI and Zeist; frustrating but not at all surprising.

I also think Parmar’s recollection of about 10 bags is him remembering, and including, the late bags that arrived at the interline shed after Bedford had taken 4041 across to the build-up shed. Both Kamboj and Parmar talk about 4/5 bags initially, which suggests, albeit tenuously, that perhaps neither put the brown samsonite bag there, and raises to chance that someone may well have simply waltzed into the Interline shed, carrying a brown Samsonite. And while nobody paid the slightest bit of attention, the culprit went up to 4041, pulled a bag out from the back row, put the brown Samsonite exactly where they wanted it and left unnoticed by anyone in the Interline shed.

On your kind invitation on Tuesday through in Edinburgh Rolfe, sadly I’ll not make it as I’m taking my younger brother to a hospital appointment late morning as he continues his treatment for cancer. I work close to where he lives, and by luck not far from the Beatson in Glasgow too where he gets the treatment, so I can pick him up and get to the hospital pretty easily. Hope all goes well on Tues though and obviously will check the Profs website for any updates.

 

[Rolfe]

Sorry, cross-posting. I'll get to the above post shortly.

If we consider our analysis of the luggage situation, the most important question is whether Sidhu moved the Bedford suitcase or not.

The only evidence at Zeist to that effect was that Crabtree agreed that sometimes baggage handlers would rearrange already-loaded luggage to get a better fit. No ****, Sherlock! (God this autocensor is ridiculous.) We hardly needed Crabtree to tell us that. I'm entirely prepared to believe there were no standing orders to the effect that suitcases placed in a baggage container must always be left exactly as they were originally placed. That gets us no further with what we needed to know, which is how often they tended to do move stuff, how likely it was that the baggage handler would feel the need to do it in that particular situation, and did the guy actually do it?

PA103 was scheduled to leave the stand at 18.00. PA103A was scheduled to get in to Heathrow at 17.20. In actual fact I believe it touched down at 17.36 that evening, and came on stand at 17.40. (The plane, like Maid of the Seas, footered around on the tarmac for 25 minutes at Frankfurt, then had to battle a 90 m.p.h. headwind to get to Heathrow.) That's tight. Everybody concerned agreed it was a rush job because McQuarrie didn't want to miss his slot, and they weren't joking.

I'm thinking about trying to get the official Met Office weather record for ground level at Heathrow at 17.45 that evening. Obviously it was dark, it must have been blowing a gale even if it wasn't 90 m.p.h. at that level, I think it was raining, and in late December it was probably pretty cold. You have 15 minutes to do a job, out-of-doors in these conditions, that you would normally have half an hour to complete. Just how fussy are you going to be?

Bedford said the extra two suitcases were placed as he would have placed them. He was an experienced loader who was used to placing suitcases where they ought to go, to save the work of having to move them again. The case in question was a full-sized hardshell suitcase, properly positioned. Even if a bigger suitcase (Patricia's was three inches wider than the bomb suitcase, for example) came off the rocket first, and even if you have a preference for a soft-shell on the bottom, do you actually care that much in these circumstances? The container gets wider as it goes up, so why not have the bigger case on the second level anyway?

Bear in mind we're not talking about "a bit of re-jigging within the base of the container", we're talking about actually lifting the Bedford suitcase out and laying it on the tarmac in order to put Patricia's suitcase in its place. Of course it's possible that this might have been done, but it never struck me as a particularly likely scenario. (Even less, what the court inferred, that all the Heathrow luggage was more or less randomly mixed with the Frankfurt stuff. I mean, why?)

It gets worse, really, because after inferring this unlikely scenario from Crabtree's noncomittal comment, the judges used it to dismiss what was a good point in favour of a Heathrow introduction. The defence argued that a terrorist would prefer to get the case into the container at Heathrow because they could place it in the best position, with the IED as close as possible to the skin of the plane. Which is what in fact happened. (And not even the defence noticed that the case had been packed in such a way as to facilitate this.) The judges rejected that point because, they said, the terrorists would have been aware that the tarmac loader would inevitably rearrange the luggage and the case could end up anywhere, so there would be no point even trying to put it where you wanted it in the interline shed. That struck me as completely unintuitive. Even accepting the possibility that someone might later decide to reposition the suitcase, isn't it obviously a better strategy at least to try to get it where you want it and take a chance on it staying there? (And I think that's what the right-hand case was about. Getting the arrangement right to minimise the chance of that happening.)

Simply reasoning from first principles, I'm totally struggling to see why Sidhu would have bothered to lift that suitcase out under these circumstances. My experience of airport baggage handling is limited, but I don't think I've ever seen a baggage handler move an already-positioned case. I remember watching a TV demonstration of drystane dyke building, and the builder said, "Once you've picked a stone up, put it in the wall and leave it there. If you keep picking stones up and putting them back down again, or moving them from one place to another, you'll exhaust yourself and you'll never get the job finished." I think loading luggage containers is the same sort of thing. If it's OK as it is, leave it. And Bedford said it was OK as it was.

Of course all that second-guessing could be wiped aside in a moment by Sidhu saying he remembered moving that case, for whatever reason. Or even his saying, "I often moved cases around in that situation and I don't really remember if I did it that time or not." But he didn't. He confirmed Bedford's assessment that the cases were already correctly positioned and he didn't need to move them. He said that to the police three times, with increasing emphasis each time. Then he stood up in the witness box (at Dumfries) after taking the oath and repeated it. He even specifically denied carrying out the exact action the Zeist court was tricked into inferring he had carried out.

What are we being offered to support the contention that, after all that, he must have move the case anyway? Nothing but the inconvenient fact that if he didn't, the prosecution case is utterly destroyed, as far as I can see.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I’m just exploring how that bag came to be just about perfectly positioned within AVE4041 and as we now know was never moved again. From the bombers point of view, a perfect job, without any hitch, completed.

Sometimes a plan comes together, and I think it did that day. Jibril's gang had failed on earlier occasions because the damage to the plane was sub-lethal, and I think they learned from their mistakes.

Did the bomber simply chuck the suitcase on the conveyor belt outside the shed as ‘Whytes’ baggage services did and, despite how close they now where to achieving their plan, hope nothing would be spotted at x-ray and it would, by chance, get placed in just the right position by Kamboj, Parmar or if they were doing their job to the letter, by Bedford?

I don't think so. If they'd done that, it would have been odd that the case stood out as appearing mysteriously when Bedford was on his break, because there would have been nothing mysterious about its appearance that way. And we'd need to postulate another legitimate case coming in at about the same time, and Kamboj just forgetting about the whole thing.

More importantly, it's clear from the Heathrow witnesses that nobody would have stopped the terrorist or terrorists going into the interline shed with a suitcase. Everybody agreed anyone wearing something that would blend in could go where the hell he liked and put anything anywhere he liked. Why would they pass up on that opportunity and leave the positioning of the case to chance?

Or did someone approach Parmar or Kamboj in person, give them the suitcase for x-ray, and then walk away and allow them to load it into 4041? Little wonder Kamboj and Parmar might like to suggest ‘oh no siree, that’s not our job’. (Except, er, well, sometimes we do exactly that, but not today, honestly…I think!)

I think the terrorists were prepared to do that if they had to. There was an excellent chance the radio disguise would pass the x-ray, given that Heathrow hadn't distributed the Autumn Leaves warning. I think the game plan if they couldn't find the container unattended was like this.

Terrorist wearing overalls of another airline's baggage crew comes up to the Pan Am station with the suitcase, with the implication that this is one for 103 that's been found among luggage for a different airline's flight. Maybe someone took it off the carousel by mistake, something like that.

He hands it to Kamboj or Parmar, who x-rays it. If they pass it, that's fine, because the terrorist (playing the part of the baggage handler) is in a position to take the thing and load it into the container. Kamboj and Parmar would probably expect him to do that. He might not risk rearranging other stuff in that situation, but he'd put it in the optimum position and scarper. If Kamboj or Parmar queried the x-ray, the terrorist wouldn't be in any personal danger, because after all it's not his luggage. He's got other work to do, and any problem with a suitcase with a Pan Am tag on it isn't his problem, so again he'd scarper, and he'd get away even if the bomb was subsequently detected.

I don't think Parmar or Kamboj would have covered up if that had happened. It wouldn't have been a breach of procedure, particularly, and they were generally quite upfront about the poor security round the place in general.

I think that was Plan B. I think if the terrorists hadn't managed to find the container unattended before about 4.30 or 4.45, they'd have done that.

Or were Kamboj or Parmar, as you say, being a cold December day, away from their posts keeping warm and playing cards, and was it possible someone could have went into the Interline shed, and put the suitcase into 4041 without them, or anyone else around the Interline area, noticing this at all? Because, whichever method the bomb suitcase that Bedford saw came to be so neatly positioned, it also seems to have required one of the suitcases Bedford loaded, McKee’s, to be lifted and moved from the back row to the front and laid on its side. That’s the five suitcases cases and two at the front that both Bedford and Sidhu saw, while only 6 were legitimately passenger baggage.

I think that's exactly how it was. I think that was Plan A, and they were lucky enough to get the opportunity to do it. I think the case was packed with the radio positioned down one side (marked on the outside), with the intention that it be loaded flat with that side as near as possible to the outboard face. The terrorist got a clear run because it was quiet, Bedford was away, and Parmar and Kamboj weren't guarding the container.

He found the container sitting with the back part fully occupied by a row of upright suitcases, and nothing on the front or lying flat. What to do? There were a number of options, but the case was packed in the expectation it would lie flat. If the terrorist considered trying to squeeze it into the back row to the left of Carlsson's case, he rejected that. He put it at the front, tilted up with the bomb side as far into the overhang part as he could manage. He then thought about the possibility of someone moving it to the right, and since nobody was paying a blind bit of attention, he pulled McKee's grey Samsonite out of the row at the back and positioned it beside the bomb suitcase so as to wedge that into the overhang. He also rearranged the row at the back to conceal the fact that there was now one suitcase fewer than there had been.

I think that last part must have been slightly more complicated, because Bedford's evidence puts Bernstein's two cases to the right of the Larnaca luggage, but the pattern of damage indicates that by the time the plane took off Bernstein's cases were to the left of the remaining two Larnaca cases, right next to Carlsson's. I can't really explain that, and I don't know if it's important. It's possible the terrorist got into a bit of a fankle when spreading out the back row, and/or changed his mind about which was the best case to use to wedge the bomb in place.

(There's another possibility the terrorists obviously didn't think of. Maybe they didn't know. The baggage handlers always put holdalls in the overhang part. If that bomb had been in a small, soft holdall, I'd have been just that little bit more inclined to believe it might have come through the regular baggage system. But it was in a full-size hardshell suitcase, probably the least likely thing to be put in the overhang in the normal way of things.)

Seven suitcases as John Orr said had been identified; did he mean the six we now know were assigned a legitimate passenger plus a brown Samsonite no one was sure of but not to worry because most of the cases in that container were from Frankfurt and we (like to) think the bomb came from there.

God knows what Orr was thinking. The truth was that they'd identified six cases that should have been in the container, and if they were admitting there had actually been seven then they were admitting there was an unidentified case there. Even if they didn't believe it was the bomb.

The only other possibility is that he was counting Hubbard's case, but I don't think so. Fuhl seems to have considered the possibility that Hubbard's case might have gone that route, but after puzzling about it for a bit he metaphorically shrugs his shoulders and says, well the Scottish cops want to treat it as Frankfurt luggage.

None of this was explored or speculated, and neither workers were really pressed to think, and think hard, at the time or at Zeist, about what exactly occurred between about 1600 and 1700 that day. Mind you, given that Taylor was content to sit back and let the prosecution hopefully not make their case, and that every man and his dog was blithely assuming the bag was coming in on 103a via Malta, it shouldn’t be surprising. Like the FAI and Zeist; frustrating but not at all surprising.

I can only speculate that Taylor was concerned the Heathrow staff might suddenly insist that they'd had the container under active surveillance the whole time, and that nobody could possibly have put anything in behind their backs. So he didn't ask them. Maybe he assumed it was up to the prosecution to prove the container was secure, not up to him to prove it wasn't. Maybe that would even have been true, in a normal trial.

Certainly, the prosecution quite conspicuously failed to elicit any such statement from Beford or Kamboj, and the tenor of the police statements is quite in the opposite direction. It looks as if the prosecution can't demonstrate that the container was secure, but by ignoring the issue the defence failed to emphasise it or capitalise on it.

I also think Parmar’s recollection of about 10 bags is him remembering, and including, the late bags that arrived at the interline shed after Bedford had taken 4041 across to the build-up shed.

That's a good point. Parmar said 10 to 12 cases, and there were actually 11 altogether if you discount the two they managed to lose from the late-arriving batch.

It's interesting reading their initial recollections. From memory, Kamboj remembered the Air Cyprus cases. He also remembered a maroon case (Bernstein's larger case was maroon). Parmar remembered that everything that wasn't Air Cyprus was BA (which is correct). He remembered there weren't any Pan Am online cases in for the plane (which again suggests the Hubbard case didn't come that way). Nobody mentions anything having a rush tag, with again suggests Hubbard's case didn't feature.

That amount of detail, even though they were at odds about the exact number of cases, suggests they really did remember that afternoon's work reasonably well when Dixon interviewed them. I wouldn't be at all surprised if all of them had been going over it in their heads since the 9 o'clock news on the 21st, whether or not they imagined it had any bearing on the crash.

Parmar in particular seems a conscientious chap, and I don't see anything evasive about Kamboj either. So I'm inclined to believe the "no Pan Am online" part, and the absence of a rush-tagged case, and that neither of them put anything in the container and then forgot about it - even if they couldn't in retrospect be completely certain.

Both Kamboj and Parmar talk about 4/5 bags initially, which suggests, albeit tenuously, that perhaps neither put the brown samsonite bag there, and raises to chance that someone may well have simply waltzed into the Interline shed, carrying a brown Samsonite. And while nobody paid the slightest bit of attention, the culprit went up to 4041, pulled a bag out from the back row, put the brown Samsonite exactly where they wanted it and left unnoticed by anyone in the Interline shed.

That is exactly what I think happened. And I think the security and normal procedures in the shed meant that it wasn't an especially difficult plan to pull off, even if the terrorists were a bit lucky that Bedford went off.

On your kind invitation on Tuesday through in Edinburgh Rolfe, sadly I’ll not make it as I’m taking my younger brother to a hospital appointment late morning as he continues his treatment for cancer. I work close to where he lives, and by luck not far from the Beatson in Glasgow too where he gets the treatment, so I can pick him up and get to the hospital pretty easily. Hope all goes well on Tues though and obviously will check the Profs website for any updates.

Oh dear, I didn't know about your brother. I'm sorry to hear that, and I hope he's making a good recovery.

So long as the petition stays before the parliament, we'll be content. Bob will certainly blog the result.

Rolfe.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Please forgive me if this has been covered upthread: overall this thread is simply packed with information and I don't necessarily want to devote a couple of evenings to reading it all.

During discussions of how the container was packed, how reliable is the information on which suitcase went where? Surely the handlers pack multiple containers a day, and it would not have been known until weeks or months after the fact that it was this container that had a bomb in it. So what are they relying on to know how the container was loaded, down the the order and placement of each suitcase within, when there's nothing to make this one container stand out among all the others they'd load as a natural part of doing their job?

My guess is hand-written or computer records of when each suitcase arrived. Based on that and the physical characteristics of the suitcases, I'm thinking the handlers would then say, "Well, I'd probably have put it here like this." And I suppose after doing the job for a while they'd work out patterns of loading based on size, shape, and weight.

Follow-on question: even if the container was loaded differently, would that negatively affect the idea that the bomb suitcase was loaded at Heathrow instead of coming in from Malta via Munich?

(I'll note here that the Heathrow injection is handily supported by the the timing of the explosion so shortly after take-off, which points to an altimeter based trigger rather than a timer set many hours before in Malta.)

 

[Rolfe]

I'm just off to the independence march, and I'll respond in more detail when I get back. However, the basics.

It was discovered that this container had been involved within a few days of the crash - probably over the Christmas weekend, and it was in effect announced to the press on 30th December. (The crash happened on 21st December.)

The crash dominated the news from 9pm the same evening, only four or five hours after the container was packed. The people who loaded it knew perfectly well which flight they had been dealing with. I don't think they needed any prompting to start going back over the events of that afternoon even before the police came calling (which they did by 30th December (Sidhu) and 3rd January (Bedford)).

There weren't many cases in the group loaded in the interline shed. Airline records showed who had arrived when, and Bedford, Kamboj and Parmar all remembered different things which were essentially correct about picking up that luggage and packing the container.

The eventual arrangement of these items was attested to by three people who saw the container in that condition - Bedford, Sahota and Sidhu. They all described the same arrangement. The only thing we need to know from Sidhu, really, is whether he moved any of these cases. Logically, it's unlikely he did, and he swore under oath he didn't.

More later.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh dear. All that fresh air and sunshine and gentle exercise. And general happiness and goodwill has an effect too. I'm zonked. My eyelids are drooping. Talk about this another day soon.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Please forgive me if this has been covered upthread: overall this thread is simply packed with information and I don't necessarily want to devote a couple of evenings to reading it all.

Please don't waste your time in that way! These Lockerbie threads may possibly be interesting for students of how these things are investigated on the internet, but as far as getting to the conclusions is concerned, they are very definitely the scenic route. Facts that were the subject of much speculation and guesses of varying accuracy have come to light quite recently, so you do best to skip the preamble.

During discussions of how the container was packed, how reliable is the information on which suitcase went where? Surely the handlers pack multiple containers a day, and it would not have been known until weeks or months after the fact that it was this container that had a bomb in it. So what are they relying on to know how the container was loaded, down the the order and placement of each suitcase within, when there's nothing to make this one container stand out among all the others they'd load as a natural part of doing their job?

We're talking about the last Pan Am flight to leave Heathrow on 21st December, which was in fact the only flight to leave after mid-day. The Pan Am operation in the interline shed became very quiet after the penultimate flight left, and most of the staff went home. Only Bedford, Kamboj and Parmar were left, with in fact very little to do.

The events we're interested in occurred between about 2 pm, when Bedford began collecting luggage for PA103, and 5.45, when Sidhu started to load the luggage from the feeder flight into the container Bedford had previously been dealing with.

Pan Am 103 fell out of the sky a couple of minutes past seven o'clock, that's little more than an hour after the end of the period in question. It first hit the airwaves about ten to eight, on the Channel 4 news, though as watching that seems to be a minority pursuit (it's how I heard of the disaster though - I'll never forget it), the BBC news at 9 pm is generally regarded as the moment the disaster became public knowledge. By the ITV News at Ten, they had actual pictures of the town in flames.

The effect of that was that the container was the last one these people had dealt with before they became aware of the disaster, and it was the only one they had dealt with that afternoon. Even if you don't suspect right away that you might have loaded a bomb on the plane (though I think it at least crossed Bedford's mind), it's human nature to think about these suitcases, and their owners, all dead wreckage in the Scottish fields.

My guess is hand-written or computer records of when each suitcase arrived. Based on that and the physical characteristics of the suitcases, I'm thinking the handlers would then say, "Well, I'd probably have put it here like this." And I suppose after doing the job for a while they'd work out patterns of loading based on size, shape, and weight.

Actually, that's not what happened. Adrian Dixon of the Met came to Heathrow to interview them fairly soon after the disaster. He didn't get in as quick as the German police - the Frankfurt baggage handlers' statements are mostly dated Christmas Day, believe it or not - but he spoke to Sidhu, the last man to see the container open, on 30th December, and to Bedford on 3rd January.

There are five people involved. Kamboj and Parmar, whose job was to note luggage for Pan Am outgoing flights on the carousel in the interline shed, pull it off and x-ray it; Bedford, whose job was to sort the screened luggage by flight and load it into the right container; Sahota, who was asked to check the container some time after Bedford left it but before Sidhu saw it, to see if there was enough room left for the Frankfurt luggage; and Sidhu, who added the Frankfurt luggage to the container.

They were all simply asked to recount everything they could remember about sorting and loading the luggage for that flight. As it was the only flight they were dealing with at the time, it wasn't as complicated as it might have been. There were only a few questions of the "do you remember if...?" variety, mostly asking people to say if they did or didn't recall something someone else had said. Very few leading questions were asked. The statements are all about trying to get the staff members to recall what they saw and what they did, without preconceptions.

Kamboj and Parmar each remembered specific things about the luggage for the flight that were correct when one looks at the details of the luggage as they were subsequently established. Kamboj remembered the CyprusAir flight I think, and he also remembered a large maroon case (one of Bernstein's cases was a large maroon one). He thought the maroon case was from the Cyprus flight though, when it was from Vienna. Parmar remembered that the other items were all from BA flights, which was correct. He also remembered that there was nothing from any Pan Am flights among the batch. This is all in accordance with the passenger records.

Bedford remembered "one or two" cases already there before 2 o'clock, which fits with Carlsson's case (arrived 11.06). He then remembered another "four or five" before he went on his break. Records show the Larnaca and Vienna flights together yielded five more items. He then produced the odd tale of the two extra suitcases appearing while he was on his break. He described the arrangement of the cases in the container as a row upright along the back and the two extra ones flat at the front.

Sahota confirmed Bedford's description of the arrangement of the cases, although he couldn't describe any of them.

Sidhu also confirmed the arrangement of the cases, and described the front two as "large, dark". Bedford said the one on the left was brown (later revised to maroon) and that it was a Samsonite hardshell. He said the other was "if not the same, then similar".

All this was done without anyone telling the baggage handlers what they should have handled. There was some discussion about the pattern of loading they would adopt when filling the container, but that was only in general terms. The items they actually described loading were from memory.

Follow-on question: even if the container was loaded differently, would that negatively affect the idea that the bomb suitcase was loaded at Heathrow instead of coming in from Malta via Munich?

Frankfurt, not Munich.

Yes. The explosion was low down on the left hand side at the front. There are only two viable candidates for the position of the bomb suitcase, and that is the position of Bedford's mysterious left-hand suitcase, or the one immediately on top of it. If there had been no luggage at the front at Heathrow (as the Frankfurt police appear to have been told originally), then it must have been a Frankfurt item. As it was, it was either Bedford's mysterious "brown (or maroon) Samsonite hardshell" (the bomb suitcase was later found to have been a bronze/brown Samsonite hardshell) or the one Sidhu put on top of it, from the Frankfurt flight.

On the other hand, if Sidhu had actually shuffled the Heathrow-origin items in randomly with the Frankfurt stuff, all bets would be off. He said he didn't, repeatedly and convincingly. The only reason for thinking he might have done it is that unless he did, the prosecution case was a heap of confetti.

(I'll note here that the Heathrow injection is handily supported by the the timing of the explosion so shortly after take-off, which points to an altimeter based trigger rather than a timer set many hours before in Malta.)

The judges ignored that. Somehow, it was quite reasonable that a criminal mastermind who could get an invisible suitcase levitated on to a plane he never went near, and leave no trace that he had done so, would openly buy traceable clothes to pack in the suitcase, and then set the timer so early that if the flight was delayed by less than 45 minutes, the explosion would occur harmelssly on the tarmac, with all that evidence right there to be picked up. I mean, a man who was trained as a flight dispatcher would never imagine that a plane might be 45 minutes late for any reason!

Or maybe they just heard about what another poster claimed in another thread.

Scots Law does not allow logical reasoning to be used to evidence a case.

That could explain rather a lot.

Rolfe.

 

[Buncrana]

Sorry for this long post, but sometimes, especially where Lockerbie is concerned, just a few lines doesn't quite do.

What ever became of the remnants of the fateful container AVE4041? I assume given these portions were central to the forensic evidence collected, and the investigation is still apparently 'live', evrything is kept securely somehwere.

Has the floor of AVE4041 been examined for, not just the obvious explosive damage undoubtedly sustained, but also microscopic specks of luggage that may have been blasted into it? I query this point because it struck me while reading through Hayes' evidence at Zeist, and when he seems particulary evasive and noncommittal around the questioning about the sections of 4041 sent for 'trace testing' on the 27/28th December. He is pressed on all these sections noted by him, given reference numbers and marked and sent for testing and then 'ticked' to mark this had been completed by another dept at RARDE conducted by D Douse.

However, all these reports and conclusions appear to have disappeared and Dr Hayes has, unsurprisingly, no recollection nor explanation of what these results were at the time or what became of the reports. Nearly 24 years later, would these AVE4041 sections, including specifically the base, 1) be still in a condition where remnants or microscopic elements could be determined? or 2) worthwhile at all in seeking such an examination of this section?

Is there any possibility that the base of AVE4041 could be subject to more detailed analysis than was possible in 1989?


I've also been wondering, did Armarjit Sidhu never think it odd that Sahota, Walker, Kamboj, Parmar and many of the others were all called to Zeist, but not him? Given how many statements he provided to the MET police in the aftermath, and the fact that he was one of the last 2 men to deal with 4041, it must have atleast struck him as slightly odd. Surely?

Heathrow security guard Ray Manly had realised, perhaps by chance but he does seem as though he was perplexed as to why he was never called to the court, and perhaps even had noticed as the trial had progressed there had been not one iota of a reference to his reported break-in at T3 just hours before PA103 had departed.

Apprehensive nervous tension must have rippled through the Edinburgh Crown office when Manly reappeared to tell the world what Zeist had inexplicably ignored. To their horror, would Sidhu, the man who collected 4041 from the build-up shed, checking the baggage contained and its positioning, raise his head too?

Hey, not to worry! Here's the Crown Office response to the fact that Manly's report was never disclosed to the defence or court.

“Even if the evidence about Heathrow had been heard by the trial court, it would not have reached a different verdict. The Crown was in the process of robustly defending the investigation and conviction when Mr Megrahi chose to abandon his second appeal.”

So, there we have it. This evidence would have been irrelevant to the verdict of the trial at Zeist, as it was at the first appeal, and any implied accusation of the suppression of such evidence is therefore immaterial.

On the contrary, Ray Manly’s evidence, while explicitly illustrating not only how lax security around Heathrow was, and had actually been circumvented by someone, it also implicitly illustrated how an unaccompanied suitcase containing a bomb could have been introduced to the secure airside area of Heathrow and ingested into the baggage loading assigned to AVE4041 and PA103.

All of which this actual evidence stood in stark contrast to any other enquiries made by investigators of Frankfurt, and even more so at Luqa in Malta, and how the bomb suitcase could have been introduced into the baggage system. Evidence of which, relied on by the judges to enable to convict, amounted to no more that a piece of paper bearing B8849 with an assortement of spurious interpretations and possibilities. None of which elicited the possible introduction method of such a device.

“It was accepted, for the purposes of this argument, that the effect of forensic evidence was that the suitcase could not have been directly in contact with the floor of the container.

It was submitted that there was evidence that an American Tourister suitcase, which had travelled from Frankfurt, fragments of which had been recovered, had been very intimately involved in the explosion and could have been placed under the suitcase spoken to by Mr Bedford.

That would have required rearrangement of the items in the container, but such rearrangement could easily have occurred when the baggage from Frankfurt was being put into the container on the tarmac at Heathrow.

It is true that such a rearrangement could have occurred, but if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Mr Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container..”

Somehow, this convoluted and unsubstantiated theory postulated by the Crown was allowed to not simply stand at Zeist, teetering precariously as it was, but astoundingly and shamefully represented enough evidence that the judges believed fitted a wider pattern enabling them to conclude beyond reasonable doubt of guilt.


Reading back through the squirming testimony of Dr Hayes at Zeist, his cross-eaxamination by Keen, and the summing up made by Taylor, in light of Sidhu's evidence makes for very interesting reading.

Q And we see a date at the top right-hand, which is 21 -- 26, rather --1/89?
A Yes, sir.

Q And this is a note of your examination of PI/911. And could I draw your attention to the writing that we see to the right-hand side of the drawing, where you describe the article as: "A severely distorted irregular-shaped sheet of rigid plastics," and go on to say: "Apparently the lower side of a suitcase, compressed and fractured in a manner suggesting it was in
contact with a luggage pallet's base and subjected to explosive forces from above."

Now, is that an observation that you made [2343] when you were examining this article in January of 1989?
A Yes, it was, sir.

Q And was that at quite an early stage in the course of examining articles?
A Yes, it was.

Q What was it about the item that suggested to you that it was in contact with the luggage pallet's base and subjected to explosive forces from above?
A On the assumption that it might have been part of the suitcase containing a bomb, firstly the residual size of the fragment, which is quite large, and also the fact it appeared to have been supported in some substantial way by a relatively immoveable surface.

Q If you assume that the -- this suitcase was not on the floor of the pallet but was on the next level up -- that is to say, on top of other luggage -- are you able to explain what you see
here on that basis?

A Yes, I am. Quite satisfactorily, to my own mind.

Q How would you do that?

A By considering that if a suitcase had [2344] resided beneath this one, then the surface of that suitcase, whether of a soft material or a hardshell material, could have similarly acted as a relatively immoveable surface if it, in turn, had been supported beneath, and in view of the tremendous speed of the detonation shock front.

Perhaps worth considering, but patently, had the statements and evidence of Sidhu been elicited to the court, Hayes' reconsidered conclusion is fatally undermined.

Question: The intimate contact with the section of the IED suitcase appears, according to your notes, to be with the suitcase which had the foam blue plastics with a cross-hatched design on it.
Answer: It does, sir.

Now, re-examination did not repair the position for the Crown. Day 17, page 2761, line 9, to 2763, line 17.

Question: I wonder if we could turn now to one or two particular matters that were raised with you in cross-examination, and if we could turn to your examination notes, that's to say Production 1497 at page 25. Can we have that on the screen, please. This is the item I think about which you were asked both in your course of going through the report and in [9840] cross-examination yesterday.
Answer: Yes, it is, sir.

And I think you agreed with the proposition that the patterning which was shown on the external face of this particular piece of the suitcase was consistent with contact with one of the other cases that was identified.
Answer: I did agree that, sir.

Question: And may we take it from that that you would conclude that this suitcase had been in contact with that other suitcase?
Answer: I did, sir.

Question: Just what the orientation of that contact would be would depend, I suppose, 3022 wouldn't it, on whether this surface -- And there then follows a passage which I don't think I need to read, and the question was then put in a different form: You had identified this as part of the surface of what you described as an IED suitcase?

Answer: I did, sir.

Question: And you've already identified how, explained how, you came to the conclusion that it was in contact with another suitcase.

Answer: Yes, I did, sir. [9841]

Question: From simply looking at that fragment, would you be able to say one way or another whether that particular surface of the suitcase was up the way or down the way as it was stacked, if it was stacked flat on its back?

Answer: Not from the examination solely of that fragment, no, sir.
And would you be able to say, therefore, whether the other case would be above it or below it in such a configuration?

Answer: Not necessarily so, sir.

But the submission I make in relation to that passage, lest it be thought to argue counter to the submission I make, is that the exercise there undertaken in re-examination is hollow and is incomplete, and it does not deal with the explanation given by Dr. Hayes in his examination in chief in relation to PI 911.

His position in examination in chief was in itself a refinement of his note, where he had suggested that PI 911 had the appearance of having been in contact with the base, and it was the explanation offered in evidence in chief for his no longer holding the view which he had expressed in the note.
In his contemporaneous notes, he had quite [9842] clearly stated, one, that the item had been in contact with the pallet's base; and two -- and I emphasise this -- was subject to explosive forces from above.
And he explained in evidence that he had had regard to the residual size of the fragment and that it appeared to have been supported in some substantial way by a relatively immovable surface.

Such immovable surface could have consisted of a suitcase residing beneath PI 911, if the supporting suitcase had in its turn also been supported beneath, plainly, by the base of the container.

In cross-examination, he confirmed that the American Tourister had resided beneath PI 911. The submission I make is that the scenario in evidence in chief is the one which Your Lordships should prefer. Dr. Hayes had clearly reflected on the issue. All that emerged in cross-examination was the identity of the supporting suitcase. The considered reasoning was not explained away by the patch-up re-examination.

Point 13. Could we go to Production Number 1114, please, Operator, and image 6. Your Lordships will remember that photograph. It was referred to by Bedford, and it shows that there was no room for a case which arrived from Frankfurt to [9843] be on the base of the container if the configuration of cases on the floor of that container remained undisturbed.

Now, the dimensions of the case at 4.2.14 should be noted. Production 181, page 38, under reference to PG 154, a steel rod, is 735 by 560 millimetres, which probably indicates a 29-inch suitcase. That's a big suitcase, and it reinforces the point, Your Lordships may think.

14. In order for the case which has been agreed to have come from Frankfurt to have been situated on the base of the container, there must have been a repositioning of at least some of the London interline cases represented in photograph 6 of Production 1114. That's still the photograph that Your Lordships have on the screen.

 

[Blue Mountain]

First, thanks for writing a detailed reply that summarises the current understanding of how the container was loaded.

<much snipped>
Yes. The explosion was low down on the left hand side at the front. There are only two viable candidates for the position of the bomb suitcase, and that is the position of Bedford's mysterious left-hand suitcase, or the one immediately on top of it. If there had been no luggage at the front at Heathrow (as the Frankfurt police appear to have been told originally), then it must have been a Frankfurt item. As it was, it was either Bedford's mysterious "brown (or maroon) Samsonite hardshell" (the bomb suitcase was later found to have been a bronze/brown Samsonite hardshell) or the one Sidhu put on top of it, from the Frankfurt flight.

Does that leave open the possibility the bomb could have come in from Frankfurt? If that's the case, is there additional information from Frankfurt which makes that scenario less likely?

ETA: The answer to my last question may be in the post immediately prior to this one. I'll admit I've only skimmed it.

 

[Rolfe]

First, thanks for writing a detailed reply that summarises the current understanding of how the container was loaded.

Does that leave open the possibility the bomb could have come in from Frankfurt? If that's the case, is there additional information from Frankfurt which makes that scenario less likely?

That's the part I find quite difficult to explain clearly. According to the forensics evidence, just looking at the position of the explosion within the container and accepting that it's impossible to be millimetre-accurate or to know exactly how the suitcases were placed to millimetre accuracy, the explosion was either inside the bottom suitcase in the stack or the one above it. It was also at the extreme left-hand side of that suitcase.

Before the Frankfurt luggage was loaded, there was a suitcase in the lower of the two positions, but not in the upper position. So, by that reasoning, unless the original Heathrow-loaded luggage was subsequently moved, the suitcase loaded at Heathrow was either the bomb suitcase itself or it was immediately underneath the bomb suitcase.

If that suitcase had been underneath the bomb, it would have sustained severe blast damage. It would also have contributed debris to the mix of blast-damaged suitcase fragments recovered on the ground and examined by the investigators in minute detail. That introduces two problems.

First, none of the six legitimate Heathrow items sustained damage consistent with its having been under the bomb. Second, the mix of blast-damaged suitcase debris did not contain any contribution from another innocent suitcase (even an unidentified one) which might have been loaded under the bomb at Heathrow.

Do you see where I'm going with this? If the luggage wasn't moved, and the bomb was a Frankfurt-origin item loaded on the second layer, the suitcase that was under it doesn't exist. It is impossible for the bomb to have been on the second layer, AND for the Heathrow-origin luggage not to have been moved. The two statements cannot simultaneously be true. If Sidhu didn't move that luggage, then the mystery item from Heathrow, the brown or maroon Samsonite hardshell Bedford saw in the container at 4.45 in the interline shed, was the bomb.

The difficulty for the Crown was that the original investigation had simply assumed that both these mutually exclusive propositions were true. The bomb was assumed to be on the second layer because that was what the forensics people were saying (mostly), and at the same time Sidhu's evidence that he hadn't move the Heathrow luggage was accepted as true. Nobody noticed that both could not be true.

The particularly embarrasing part is that this patently false assumption was the cornerstone of the reasoning used to conclude that the bomb came off the Frankfurt flight, then that it came from Malta, then to indict Megrahi and Fhimah, then to go to the UN and demand punitive sanctions against the Libyan population, and finally to justify setting up the three-ring judicial circus of the Scottish Court in the Netherlands.

Something has to give. Either Sidhu was grossly mistaken in his repeated assertions that he never touched the Heathrow-origin items, or the boffins' assertion that the bomb was on the second layer wasn't as definite as all that.

In my opinion it's bloody obvious the boffins weren't 100% sure. It's way too close to be absolutely certain. In contrast Sidhu seems quite certain, and he had no reason at all to lie, or to claim he was certain if he just didn't remember, and simple logic dictates that a baggage handler in a hurry, working outside after dark in late December in a howling gale, doesn't move any cases he doesn't really have to move.

If you decide however that Sidhu must have been mistaken and must after all have decided to lift the mystery case out of the container and replace it with a Frankfurt suitcase, then everything hinges on what he put on top of that Frankfurt suitcase. Did he just put the mystery suitcase back on top, or did he leave it lying on the tarmac and put another mystery suitcase, which also just happened to be a brown or maroon Samsonite hardshell and which happened to come down the rocket from the feeder flight at just that moment, on top?

That last possibility is the only one that leaves open the possibility that the bomb suitcase was among the luggage transferred from the feeder flight.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

.... is there additional information from Frankfurt which makes that scenario less likely?

There's a whole other thread on that. http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=155657

The evidence that the bomb came through Frankfurt airport is beyond tenuous. The evidence that it did so as an unaccompanied item carried on KM180 from Malta is frankly risible. The Frankfurt luggage records are such a mess that it's simply impossible to know what a good half-dozen of the items sent to the feeder flight through the automated transfer system were.

That's really a topic for the other thread though.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Sorry for this long post, but sometimes, especially where Lockerbie is concerned, just a few lines doesn't quite do.

Oh, tell me about it....

What ever became of the remnants of the fateful container AVE4041? I assume given these portions were central to the forensic evidence collected, and the investigation is still apparently 'live', evrything is kept securely somehwere.

Has the floor of AVE4041 been examined for, not just the obvious explosive damage undoubtedly sustained, but also microscopic specks of luggage that may have been blasted into it? I query this point because it struck me while reading through Hayes' evidence at Zeist, and when he seems particulary evasive and noncommittal around the questioning about the sections of 4041 sent for 'trace testing' on the 27/28th December. He is pressed on all these sections noted by him, given reference numbers and marked and sent for testing and then 'ticked' to mark this had been completed by another dept at RARDE conducted by D Douse.

However, all these reports and conclusions appear to have disappeared and Dr Hayes has, unsurprisingly, no recollection nor explanation of what these results were at the time or what became of the reports. Nearly 24 years later, would these AVE4041 sections, including specifically the base, 1) be still in a condition where remnants or microscopic elements could be determined? or 2) worthwhile at all in seeking such an examination of this section?

Is there any possibility that the base of AVE4041 could be subject to more detailed analysis than was possible in 1989?

We know they put it back together again, with the pieces tied to a wooden frame. There are photographs. This was the subject of a wrangle during the trial because in that condition it was too big to get it into the courtroom, and objections were raised to tampering with the wooden frame. As far as I know, the objections were over-ruled, but I don't know what came of the exercise. As I recall, Keen was submitting to the court that the actual production looked quite different from how it was made to appear in the photographs.

I imagine it still exists. I too would dearly love to know what an independent examination of the bits would reveal, especially the aluminium floor. If we ever get that independent inquiry, that's something that should be pushed for.

One of the (many) bizarre aspects of this is that it's clear the investigators were pushing the boffins to declare the bomb suitcase had been on the second layer pretty much from the beginning. They didn't want that Gift from the Gods that Bedford described to have been the bomb. That is the bit that is doing my head in.

I wonder how far it was massaged, at that point. This is RARDE we're talking about after all, ask the Maguire Seven about that. I wonder what a completely independent analysis of the debris would conclude about the position of the explosion, or the likelihood of the suitcase involved having been the one on the floor of the container?

That bit you noticed about the original analysis of those fragments being missing might be quite important. I wish there were more people working on this, because we could easily miss an important trick just because we can't process all the information. (Oh for the sort of group that was working on the Amanda Knox case!)

I've also been wondering, did Armarjit Sidhu never think it odd that Sahota, Walker, Kamboj, Parmar and many of the others were all called to Zeist, but not him? Given how many statements he provided to the MET police in the aftermath, and the fact that he was one of the last 2 men to deal with 4041, it must have at least struck him as slightly odd. Surely?

I've wondered that too. Though actually, neither Sahota nor Parmar were called. At one point I wondered if Parmar actually existed, because only Kamboj mentioned him, but his police statements are all there. (He's quite important to showing that the Hubbard suitcase didn't go through the interline shed.)

Heathrow security guard Ray Manly had realised, perhaps by chance but he does seem as though he was perplexed as to why he was never called to the court, and perhaps even had noticed as the trial had progressed there had been not one iota of a reference to his reported break-in at T3 just hours before PA103 had departed.

Apprehensive nervous tension must have rippled through the Edinburgh Crown office when Manly reappeared to tell the world what Zeist had inexplicably ignored. To their horror, would Sidhu, the man who collected 4041 from the build-up shed, checking the baggage contained and its positioning, raise his head too?

Manly must have been following the trial. Actually, Manly missed his big chance. If he'd been aware of the FAI, he should have come forward then. It's possible he wasn't even aware it had happened. If he had come forward earlier, things might have been a lot different.

We can't know what Sidhu's personal circumstances were in 2000-01. Was he still living in England? (In that context, note that Sandhu wasn't - he'd retired and moved abroad - but they took the trouble to track him down and get him into the witness box!) Was he following the trial? It wasn't well reported, and he could have had other things on his mind.

The other thing that strikes me is, how would he have known that he'd been seriously misrepresented? He gave evidence at Dumfries, and the Dumfries court concluded the bomb had come off the feeder flight. The Zeist court came to the same conclusion. Unless he'd actually read the judgement, or come across detailed discussion about the Bedford suitcase, he might simply have concluded that the Zeist court had reasoned in the same way as the Dumfries court. Not his problem.

Hey, not to worry! Here's the Crown Office response to the fact that Manly's report was never disclosed to the defence or court.

So, there we have it. This evidence would have been irrelevant to the verdict of the trial at Zeist, as it was at the first appeal, and any implied accusation of the suppression of such evidence is therefore immaterial.

You have to go to the best law schools to think of that one. In effect, the court accepted that Heathrow security was abysmal, and it was no part of the prosecution case that Heathrow was impregnable. So knowing there had been an actual breach in security would have made no difference!

They also hand-waved away the idea that the break-in might have been connected to the bombing in other ways which were pure imagination. If the terrorists had broken in at midnight, why not hit PA101 that left at midday? (Er, because the interline shed was a hive of activity at midday, but by 4.30 it was an almost-deserted backwater?) The baggage build-up shed was nearer the break-in location than the interline shed, so if the terrorists broke in there, why didn't they hit the build-up shed? (Er, because it was in the much quieter interline shed where this extraordinarily convenient container was sitting around all afternoon just waiting for odd bits and pieces to be loaded into it?)

It's as if the appeal judges were tasked with making the prosecution's case for them.

On the contrary, Ray Manly’s evidence, while explicitly illustrating not only how lax security around Heathrow was, and had actually been circumvented by someone, it also implicitly illustrated how an unaccompanied suitcase containing a bomb could have been introduced to the secure airside area of Heathrow and ingested into the baggage loading assigned to AVE4041 and PA103.

All of which this actual evidence stood in stark contrast to any other enquiries made by investigators of Frankfurt, and even more so at Luqa in Malta, and how the bomb suitcase could have been introduced into the baggage system. Evidence of which, relied on by the judges to enable to convict, amounted to no more that a piece of paper bearing B8849 with an assortement of spurious interpretations and possibilities. None of which elicited the possible introduction method of such a device.

Exactly. Three airports involved: Heathrow, Frankfurt and Malta.

• Malta, impressively secure procedures, with not only no evidence of a breach, but no real way to see how a breach could have occurred.
• Frankfurt, all a bit of a guddle and actually anyone with a US passport could have checked that bomb in, or anyone could have added an extra case to the stack of stuff waiting at the departure gate for the feeder flight, but no positive evidence that either of these things actuallty happened.
• Heathrow, worst security of all three airports, actual documented evidence of a break-in only hours before the disaster, and a clear description of a suitcase exactly matching the bomb suitcase appearing mysteriously in pretty much the exact position of the explosion.

So where do we decide the bomb was introduced, again? Oh that's right, Malta.

Somehow, this convoluted and unsubstantiated theory postulated by the Crown was allowed to not simply stand at Zeist, teetering precariously as it was, but astoundingly and shamefully represented enough evidence that the judges believed fitted a wider pattern enabling them to conclude beyond reasonable doubt of guilt.

And they call us conspiracy theorists?

Reading back through the squirming testimony of Dr Hayes at Zeist, his cross-eaxamination by Keen, and the summing up made by Taylor, in light of Sidhu's evidence makes for very interesting reading.

Perhaps worth considering, but patently, had the statements and evidence of Sidhu been elicited to the court, Hayes' reconsidered conclusion is fatally undermined.

I was discussing this part of Hayes's testimony with John Ashton, and I think they're all up a gum tree on that one.

Originally, Hayes saw the compacted plastic and decided it had been blasted against the floor of the container. Now wait a minute, the floor of the container was a single sheet of aluminium. That doesn't sound to me like something solid enough to have provided the resistance necessary to have compacted plastic in that way. But by that reasoning, the bomb suitcase was on the bottom layer.

Then he notices the foamy blue flecks, whch match Patricia's suitcase. When did he actually notice that? Because if he's then going to conclude that Patricia's suitcase was under the bomb bag, that completely contradicts the mantra (as it was at that time) that the Heathrow luggage wasn't moved. As far as I can make out, nobody introduced that idea until 1999.

In fact the evidence is entirely consistent with Patricia's suitcase being on top of the bomb bag. If you consider the set-up just as the explosion happened, underneath the bomb bag is only the single sheet of aluminium making up the container floor (and then a little way below that the flimsy aircraft hull itself). Above it is at least 100 kg of stacked suitcases.

Which of these is going to be the more solid surface, that's likely to result in the plastic of the suitcase lid being compacted?

I'd still love to know what was compacted into the other biggish bits of the bomb suitcase (the other side), and as you say, the container floor itself. As you pointed out, there is no second suitcase presented in a condition consistent with its having been on top of the bomb suitcase, if Patricia's was underneath it.

Rolfe.

 

[Buncrana]

You know, reading through Claiden’s testimony (never mind that Keen makes mincemeat of him in the witness box!) and then Cullis' and Michael Charles' (all AAIB and DERA), what struck me as somewhat perplexing and inconsistent throughout all their accounts is that there is no argument about the extent of damage to the vertical and angled lower container members, which includes sooting, pitting and general close proximity explosive damage, and the obvious ‘dishing’, peeling, distortion and tears on the base floor of the container.

However, the conclusions arrived at that due to the lack of the same blackened, pitting and sooting observed on the lower frames on the base itself, in all likelihood, according to them, indicates the floor did not experience intimate contact with the suitcase. Thus, as a result, conclusions are made that the base must have been shielded or protected by ‘something’ between it and the explosion. This ‘something’ quickly morphs, with no apparent or obvious definitive explanation, although with some outrageous leading of witnesses by the Crown, into specifically ‘another suitcase’.

Here’s the most blatant example.

[…] A The surface -- the sandbagged, the dished surface, the floor panel itself.

Q Yes.
A And in simple but broad terms, formed the view that that surface had been protected by
something from a blast, shall we call it, whereas the edge member had not.

Q And what did that understanding lead you on to?
A Well, again, it’s a very broad view, in [1512] that the first thought that came to mind -- and it’s very difficult to prove it from that alone, or prove it, indeed -- but the first thought was that that surface had been protected, and I presumed by a piece of baggage, part of a piece of baggage, or whatever, but something that did not allow the direct effects of an explosion to actually impinge upon that surface.

Q Well, if we assume, then, for the moment, that your first thought as to what the high explosive event was -- namely, an explosion -- was correct, and if we assume for the moment that the explosion occurred within a suitcase, were you able to come to a view as to whether or not the suitcase would be located directly on top of the floor of the container?

MR. KEEN: Don’t answer the question just yet, please.

[…]LORD SUTHERLAND: Whether or not the suitcase was located directly on top of the floor? That’s not a leading question.

MR. KEEN: Well, with respect, My Lord, it puts to the witness the issue that we are immediately concerned with. It does not ask him where he believes the suitcase was located.

LORD SUTHERLAND: The objection is repelled.
Carry on, Advocate Depute.

MR. TURNBULL: Thank you, My Lords.
Q Now, Mr. Claiden, I come to it again. If we ask you to assume that an explosion occurred within a suitcase, in looking to the matters you have told us about, were you able to come to a view as to whether or not the suitcase was located directly on top of the floor of the container?
A I did come to a view, yes.

Q And what was your view?
A Well, I took the view that there was quite a marked difference between the damage to the edge member and the damage to the nearest piece of the floor that we had to that edge member. And I reasoned -- reasonably, I thought -- that if a device -- an [1515] explosion had occurred within a suitcase placed upon the floor directly, I couldn’t see why we were getting such a difference in damage on the rail, and a few inches away we weren’t getting the same sort of damage on the floor. We were getting physical damage. The forces generated by such an event can’t just go away, even through anything. So I formed the opinion they were transmitted through something to form the sandbagging effect. Now, had it been in a suitcase placed directly on the floor, I think, I would have expected to seen more blackening, pitting, and shattering damage of the floor, and I don’t see that.

[…] Q “The IED” means what?
A Well, I came to know that as “the improvised explosive device.”

Q Thank you.
A Which is the terminology used by the forensic people.

Q Would you read on to the next paragraph, please. [1519]
A “Within container 4041, the lack of direct blast damage (of the type seen on the outboard floor edge member and lower portions of the aft face structural members) on most of the floor panel in the heavily distorted area suggested that this had been protected by, presumably, a piece of luggage.

AVE4041 Floor Section Reconstructed:

So, by a rather convoluted route, in the end, the Crown get what they were looking for the court to be presented with. Obviously Dr Hayes was still to provide the court latterly with the ideal candidate for this “something”, now “presumably, a piece of luggage”, as Ms Coyle’s blue tourister case that arrived from Frankfurt and was placed in this precise position. It was this bag that was to absorb the worst effects of the explosion and provided an element of shield for the base of 4041.

The big, huge, and gaping problem however for this whole postulated theory, not that anyone at Zeist were ever aware of, is that this would be on the condition of the necessary rearrangement of the luggage loaded by John Bedford. And while Walker, Crabtree and Bedford all admitted could happen, Sidhu, the actual baggage loader who would have did this, is absolutely certain this rearrangement did not happen.

The baggage was not rearranged in 4041 therefore the conditional is not satisfied.

So, what gives? Perhaps the originally thoughts of ‘something’ that had provided some element of protection to the base could be explained in some other manner. This brings me on to some of the the cross-examination of Claiden by Richard Keen.

Mr Keen:

Q If you have a suitcase containing an explosive device -- I believe it’s been referred to as an IED, an improvised explosive device -- at one end of the case, would you consider it possible for the detonation of the explosive to shatter the skin of the case in the immediate vicinity of the detonation? [1577]
A Yes, I think that would be very likely.

Q Would you also consider it possible that the remainder of the case might be torn apart by the overpressures created by the detonation?
A Well, I don’t know whether it would or wouldn’t, to be honest. I think there are probably an enormous number of variables in such a situation.

Q Indeed. Let us assume that one end of a suitcase is shattered by the detonation of an explosive. If, following the shattering of that end of the suitcase, the gas overpressurisation occurs, it may carry with it fragments, particles of hot gas, what might be termed in general “shrapnel,” at very high speeds and very high temperatures?
A I would think that’s quite likely.

Q And it is that which is capable of creating pitting in material such as aluminium alloy?
A I think any high-speed fragment or particle would -- if the speed were high enough and the energy level is high enough, would produce pitting and cratering.

Q Are you familiar with the process of explosive welding?
A As a concept.

Q As a concept? [1578]
A As a concept.

Q As a concept. Are you aware that in the context of explosive loading, it is sufficient to protect a metal from pitting that a surface as thin as cello-tape is placed on it?
A Well, we are delving into an area which is outside my expertise.

Q So the extent to which a detonation could create pitting is a matter outwith your own expertise?
A It’s -- in the context of the containers, it was the subject of specialist investigations which I was not tasked to do, or qualified.

Q It is conceivable, however, to you as an engineer, is it not, that if you have one end of a suitcase shattered by a detonation, there may follow high-speed hot particles which are capable of creating pitting in something such as the frame of the aluminium container?
A Well, I think it’s conceivable, yes.

Q If we look to the other directions in which the blast wave is going, is it equally conceivable that clothing packed in the suitcase would absorb those same high-speed particles, and that the [1579] remainder of the suitcase may well absorb those same high-speed particles, so that they do not find their way as far as the frame or flooring of the aluminium container?
A I think, just from experience, I would have to say that a suitcase full of clothing would act as a very good arrester for high-speed particles. Indeed, is that not the way that, perhaps, when the police test for bullets, they fire them -- and I’ve seen the test; they fire them into a long tube, cardboard in there, and lots of padding, lots of fibres, to actually catch a bullet in
that case. I think it’s the same sort of principle.

Q And that’s an example of the way in which fibres can arrest the movement of high-speed particles?
A Yes, apparently so.

Now obviously I could be accused of being selective, but if it was good enough for their Lordship’s and the Crown, then what the hell! And at least in my defence I am working on the basis of an actual brown Samsonite suitcase being bloody well seen in situ an hour before the explosion happened in that same undisturbed position!

Nonetheless, if anyone cares to read through the trial transcripts, which are available online, then I challenge them not to also conclude that in light of the highly unusual circumstances that will entail explosions in confined altering atmospheric conditions, assertions regarding spurious measurements that are not explicitly qualified, are undoubtedly open to doubt and debate. I would submit this to be precisely the situation with regards to the precise point of explosion and damage sustained in AVE4041.

However, where this balance is most certainly tipped in favour of determining where the explosion is most likely to have occurred, then the evidence of a brown Samsonite suitcase, ingestion unknown, and unaccompanied, last seen lying on the base, should be sufficient to conclude that this was, on balance, the primary suitcase.

Unless, the suitcase was moved, which we were all lead to believe it was. However, it wasn’t.

Moreover, there is another point that relates to something Rolfe picked up on some time ago. At the time, it seemed odd, perhaps simply an oversight by the investigators, but inconclusive as to any consequences to the bearing of the trial.


That is the orientation, loading and packing of the primary suitcase.

If the orientation and loading of the bomb within the Samsonite was to be as represented in the trial loading image, then the bag with items and bomb in this position may well assume and believe that at detonation, then the base of 4041 should experience at least some of the same damage sustained by the container frames.

The cross-members of AVE4041, where the aft and outboard faces that met the sloping member, were severely disrupted by the explosion, and exhibited clear evidence characteristic of intimate association with the bomb. Now, with the bomb in the position led by the trial loading suitcase, along the rear –spine - of the suitcase (or even along the handled edge) it might imply that at the moment of explosion the damage sustained by the container frame would be expected to be similar to the damage on the base – if the suitcase remained on the floor. No such similar damage to the floor was exhibited, instead showing ‘dishing’ and blasted downwards but lacking the same damage as the members.

Well, if the Toshiba Radio bomb were actually positioned somewhat differently, inside the primary suitcase, than that presented to the court, then could the clothing and other contents of the brown Samsonite provide the shield against the base of 4041 taking the brunt of the explosive damage while the cross members, being directly below and alongside the bomb, clearly showed the far more severe damage?

If we are to challenge this trial loading of the suitcase, and argue that the orientation and content placement within the primary suitcase was actually placed along and down one side of the suitcase, then perhaps that provides another argument that might suggest damage to the frame of 4041 given that the suitcase left side edge, were the bomb was precisely positioned, met these member sections in parallel. From this point however, everything is simply further speculation, for once PA103 pushes off the blocks at Heathrow, it is simply impossible to take account of movement of baggage caused by the handlers when adding the Frankfurt luggage, and thereafter what bumps, jolts and any other possible shifts, even if only inches, that might occur to luggage during loading, take off, turbulence and so on.

And, as it is, just as it should have been considered by the Zeist court with respect of the 10inches above the base, the damage suffered by the frames and bases, and therefore a second-layer detonation, these variables are open to different degrees of error and cannot be concluded with any certainty.

In conclusion, the trial loading of the suitcase and its contents, specifically the Toshiba Radio bomb placement, was likely incorrect. Together with the knowledge and evidence available that:

1/ A breach of airside security (not a door pushed open, or a broken window, but a substantial lock ‘cut’ by someone quite determined) at T3 Heathrow had been reported hours before 103’s departure.
2/ A suitcase was observed in a position almost exactly where the explosion occurred within AVE4041 between 1600 and 1700 on 21st Dec.
3/ This suitcase’s introduction into the container AVE4041 is unknown.
4/ The description of this bag, given on 9th January 1989 was of a brown or bronze hardshell Samsonite.
5/ Reconciliation of baggage and passengers at Heathrow showed no passenger in possession of such a bag, and thus was an unaccompanied bag.
6/ This brown Samsonite remained in that position and was not rearranged on the arrival of the Frankfurt luggage.
7/ Only remnants of one brown Samsonite were ever identified; of the primary bomb suitcase.
8/ Damage sustained by other Heathrow origin baggage is consistent with the arrangement of the baggage confirmed by Heathrow baggage handlers.
9/ Only one piece of baggage was confirmed to be in direct contact with the primary suitcase which is consistent with Ms Coyle’s bag being immediately above the bomb bag on the second layer with other Frankfurt origin luggage
10/ The explosion occurred 38 mins into flight which is consistent with a barometric timer device loaded at Heathrow.

 

[Rolfe]

Thanks for that, Buncrana. Some interesting points there.

I still can't get my brain round this. The single reason for ruling out the Bedford suitcase was the evidence that the bomb was on the second layer, not on the floor of the container. That's what Leppard was told, and I've never seen anything different suggested.

'Results of test number 4 clearly indicate that the case containing the IED was not in direct contact with the container floor, That is, the device was not in a suitcase directly in the bottom layer of passenger baggage.' [....]

The test results from Indian Head proved all-important to the Lockerbie investigators. They already knew from interviews with baggage handlers at Heathrow that only the first row of suitcases from the IED luggage pallet had been loaded at Heathrow. The remainder had been loaded at Frankfurt. The tests also meant that the mysterious brown Samsonite reported by the Heathrow baggage handler as being loaded on to the bottom layer could be ruled out: it was not the bomb bag. Kamboj was in the clear.

I also note he says that "the American report explained" that "the centre of the explosion was approximately 35 cm from the floor of the container almost directly above the longitudinal outward-facing frame member." That's the first "American" report I ever encountered that measured anything in cm rather than inches, so I think it must be the RARDE report from America. 35 cm is 14 inches. Hayes said in mid-January that it was 18 inches up. The final decision from the AAIB was 10 inches.

It seems that apart from the sketch in the BKA document dated 7th January which showed the explosion in the bottom layer, initial higher estimates were pushed down and down until they managed to stop the rot at 10 inches.

This is the entire reason for discounting the Bedford suitcase, that and Sidhu's evidence showing it had not been moved. Surely, they would have had to have been 100% certain of that before they took the decision to exclude Heathrow from the investigation? Leppard's account gives a rather different perspective, when discussing the BKA assertion (in a report dated 19th May) that if the bomb was a Khreesat special it must have been loaded in London.

At the Lockerbie Incident Control Centre, Orr was furious. As the Kamboj episode showed, there had always been the outside chance that a bag had been smuggled into the container at Heathrow. That possibility aside, Or had effectively ruled out Heathrow within three weeks of the bombing. Much to the relied of British security chiefs, the Met's Special Branch had long since stopped investigating the Heathrow theory.

Leppard isn't exactly gospel of course, but he had a hot-line into the inquiry and got a lot of things right (he's the only person ever to report the Bedford/Kamboj evidence before Zeist), and I suspect that analysis is close to the button. By May of 1989, the police had "long since" stopped investigating Heathrow.

It's not a picture of an investigation taking Bedford's evidence seriously. It's a picture of an investigation with a pre-formed opinion (dating back to nine days after the bombing, from other sources) which is really really hoping it can rule out Heathrow and eagerly clutching at evidence it can use to justify that.

And the one piece of evidence they have is the forensic evidence showing the height of the explosion. If that's not absolutely clear cut, then they have no business at all excluding Heathrow. If the explosion had been 2 or 3 feet up, then we wouldn't be having this conversation. But it wasn't. It was close enough to the floor to require fancy tests and mathematical modelling to try to get it one side or the other of the "Frankfurt line", that is the top of the layer of Heathrow-loaded luggage.

But they thought it was good enough. So how come at Zeist it's not a slam-dunk for the second layer? This was an incredibly important point, in 1989. Even if there was only a 5% chance the bomb suitcase had been on the bottom layer, they should have been following it up. But at Zeist what they produce is mainly waffle and opinion.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

As regards the position of the explosion, Buncrana, the case simply cannot have been packed as illustrated. I think that is an oversight, but it does indicate that they weren't putting as much thought into is as they should have been.

If the case was packed like that, it would have had to have been placed in the container with the handle facing to the right. That's the only way to get the IED far enough to the left to hit the lateral position of the explosion, which was said by the AAIB to be two inches into the overhang section. (RARDE had it bang on the junction with the overhang section and the BKA had it just within the main part of the container, but essentially it was right at the extreme left-hand side.)

One of the FBI chappies seems to have noticed that, because if you remember that FBI drawing we were looking at, that has the handle to the right. (It's also wildly out of scale with the suitcase shown far far too small.) However, the baggage handlers didn't load the suitcases with the handles to the side. The handles were always either front or back (or on top in the case of the row at the back). We know the bomb suitcase was actually loaded with its handle to the back, because that's the only way the lock could have ended up embedded in Michael Bernstein's suitcase. (We also know the Bedford suitcase was loaded with its handle to the back, because Bedford said so.)

It's actually very very weird that the explosion was so far to the left. I think that's why the investigators at one point thought the bomb suitcase might have been tossed into the overhang section, handle up, like a holdall. The baggage handlers said they might occasionally put a suitcase in there although it was usually reserved for holdalls. However, the pattern of damage to the container, and to the aircraft itself, doesn't really allow that. You only have to look at the AAIB diagram to see that. In addition, if that had been the position, the handle would have been blasted generally upwards, and nowhere near Michael Bernstein's case.

The radio must have been packed down the side. Even then, you really have to assume the suitcase was partly within the overhang section to get the explosion far enough to the left. This is something that really reinforces my (already very strong) belief that the thing was placed in the container by the terrorist himself.

If you're waving that thing goodbye at Luqa, why would you pack the case like that? It's just normal to pack an item like that centrally, as in the illustration. You do it without thinking, to balance the weight of the case across the handle. But suppose someone did that. It finally gets to Heathrow, and the rocket down to Sidhu who is loading the container. Not only does he chuck it in the left-hand pile, and it's low enough down that pile to be close to the skin of the plane (higher up doesn't cut it), he chucks it in the right way round to get the IED absolutely as far to the left as it's possible to go. I mean, look at it!

There really isn't a worse position for it to be, from the point of view of the people on the plane. The chances of that happening to be just the way Sidhu chucked the cases are pretty small.

The thing that intrigues me is, the investigators should have known this. They packed IEDs into suitcases for the Indian Head tests. They must have had to pack them to the side to get the explosions far enough left. So why did they show that exhibit with the radio packed across the bottom? Just an oversight, or not wanting to draw attention to the weirdness of it?

Actually, Robert said something really interesting that chimes with Pete2 pointed out a lot earlier in the thread when we were discussing the likelihood of Sidhu moving the Bedford suitcase. He quoted a poster on Bob Black's blog saying that baggage handlers often preferred not to have a hardshell on the bottom because they were much more likely to slide and shift in-flight. So maybe Sidhu did switch it for Patricia's canvas case. Robert said the same thing about hardshells, and pointed out the rounded edges of the bomb suitcase. He said that while we were of course correct that turbulence could shift the luggage a bit (and it was a very windy night), even banking would do it. He said that rounded corner together with the almost convex profile of the hardshell would make it very easy for the thing to slide up and into the overhang section.

I think he must be right. The investigators postulated that the bomb suitcase was on the second layer and pushed into the overhang by Sidhu. But it's obvious the baggage handlers didn't work like that, both from what they said and that mock-up above. They built vertical piles, dressing to the right. The bomb suitcase wasn't especially wide, and Sidhu would have placed a case like that flush against the second-layer case in the right-hand stack. There's no reason it would have protruded into the overhang in that way. The most likely way to get that is for a shiny smooth hardshell on the bottom to slide to the left and up a bit.

I just don't buy it that a terrorist would pack a case like that unless he expected to have control over where it was placed in the container.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I found the post Pete2 was referring to.

http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.co.uk...howComment=1331989327913#c3484700663611516957

It is entirely probable that the "Bedford" suitcase ended up on the second level of bags in the container, even if it started off on the base of the container. Some baggage handlers will always try to avoid having a hardshell suitcase on the floor of the container. This is because a hardshell tends to slide around on the aluminium base of the container, especially if, like the Samsonite in question, its sides are slightly convex. When laying cases on their sides many handlers prefer to place softsided cases (such as an American Tourister) on the bottom of the container as these models offer much more friction and therefore remain in place and allow easier loading of bags on top. I have personally witnessed hundreds of containers being loaded in this way. As a student in the 1970s I worked for two summer vacations as an Operations Research Assistant at for BAA at Heathrow and one of my jobs was to observe and report on baggage handling systems on Boeing 747 aircraft. While working airside at Heathrow I also on at least two occasions picked up suitcases which seemed to have fallen from loading trucks or off conveyor belts, and placed them where their luggage tag suggested they should go. It was, and remains, very easy for airside staff to move bags around the baggage system and to insert them into the system without any record being made.

Aku isn't Robert, because he posts there as "Quincey Riddle". Robert may have read it though, and put two and two together, which I didn't at the time. Now we know that Sidhu didn't move that case, this provides further support for the suggestion that it slipped to the left all by itself.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Here's a chapter-length exposition of the issues we've been discussing, if anyone wants to read it and provide feedback.

www.vetpath.co.uk/lockerbie/heathrow.pdf

Rolfe.

 

[CTB]

I've not contributed to a Lockerbie thread for many months now. This is not because I've lost interest.

I am still amazed that the revelation over PT35b has not reduced the entire issue of Megrahi's guilt ( or very least complicity of involvement ) to vanishing proportions. It's the very thing that pinned Libya, thereafter ANY Libyan who could be painted as dodgy, to the crime.

For anyone not in the know, the RARDE forensic scientist, Alan Feraday - who was not particularly meant to be working for the prosecution - noted ( using a pen in his own hand, guided by his own thoughts! ) that the only bit of evidence to have even been IN the suitcase could NOT have been IN the suitcase. Essentially, the prosecution argued that PT35b could only have been supplied by a Libyan intelligence agent. Unfortunately, the physical evidence said completely, coherently, explicitly the opposite. Oops. No worries, you can count on RARDE to lie. So they did.

Anyhoo, I'm only pointing this out because Rolfe, Buncrana, Caustic et al set up, and continue to provide, direct routes into the heart of a flawed investigation that led to, IMO, a flawed conviction. All the 'suitcase sandwich' ponderings reflect directly upon it.

I do not wish to derail this thread. MST 13 and PT35b are adequately covered elsewhere. I'm just hoping to encourage curious passers-by into delving a bit more into what I think is one of the UK's biggest ever investigative cock-ups. Yup, it gets boring. That's how conspiracies are conveniently covered.