Lockerbie: London Origin Theory

[Blue Mountain]

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.

I've read through it once, but I need to read it again to fully comprehend all the details. I'll do that either this evening (it's just after 8:0 PM here) or tomorrow.

 

[Rolfe]

I've read through it once, but I need to read it again to fully comprehend all the details. I'll do that either this evening (it's just after 8:0 PM here) or tomorrow.

Thank you - I'm genuinely grateful. It's a tricky concept to explain, and having someone who isn't very familiar with it take a look is very valuable.

It's funny, really, When I thought the Caruana case might be 8849, everybody was crawling all over it, utterly convinced this was The Answer. It was so easy to explain, everybody got it. They got it so well that I'm still having to choke off people who can't quite believe it turned out to be a bust. The enthusiasm was positively embarrassing.

Now, I think this really is it, and I can't raise any particular interest. I think that's because it's not easy to explain, and people just glaze over.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

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

Hey, no problem. The odd bump even if it's just a casual comment, is nice. This issue is so compelling and so topical that I find it hard to see why so few people are interested. If you compare it to similar criminology puzzles like the Amanda Knox thing, for example, which is still being dissected in excruciating detail a year after the convictions were to all intents and purposes quashed and the victims released.

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.

It was John Ashton's big moment, and the press completely blew it. The big reveal of that book was undoubtedly the metallurgy results. It was absolute dynamite. And what did the press do? They seized on the revelation that Megrahi had been seing a woman on Malta behind his wife's back to plaster headlines such as "Lockerbie bomber visited Malta for sex!" all over the place.

In fact the judges had refused to believe Megrahi's account of why he had visited Malta on 20th December 1988 (to have a business meeting with Vincent Vassallo regarding investing in MedTours, and to shop for carpets for the new house he was self-building). They said, if you had a good reason to go to Malta that day, then obviously we couldn't conclude you'd bombed the plane, but since you didn't, we can and we do. Skipping over the priceless illogic of that, and the fact that he'd already given the reasons for his journey, the "visiting a mistress on Malta" thing was in that context exculpatory. That point sailed right over the heads of the tabloid journalists.

Nobody made much of the metallurgy thing at all, which was just ridiculous. There is certainly an agenda at work here, and I'm not sure it's just about selling papers. I was talking to Marcello Mega (a free-lance journalist) about him maybe doing an article on the Bedford suitcase thing, and he said he'd give it a shot, but that the only articles newspapers want on Lockerbie these days are ones about how terrible to was to release the Lockerbie bomber when he had nearly three years to live, and it was all about oil deals.

ETA: Oooooh, look what popped up online while I was actually writing this!

Lockerbie bombing: Donald Trump was asked to back Megrahi release

Donald Trump was asked to back the decision to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from prison.

The US billionaire has revealed he was asked to support the Scottish government in the days following Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds.

He said he refused as he believed he would be criticised.

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.

I need to get my brain round that a bit better soon, because I promised to help John with an aspect of this. I'll probably bump the relevant thread. I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

If you remember, the first thing Feraday did with the fragment when he finally ran across it in September 1989 was to pass the matter over to Williamson in Scotland. I don't know how much analysis was carried out at RARDE at this stage but the main points being relied on are from independent university scientists whom I think were commissioned by the Scottish police.

The bulk of this work seems to have been done in the early months of 1990 - I'm not sure what if anything was happening between September and December 1989. It was at this time that the anomaly of the tinning was discovered - that's well before the discovery of the visual match to the MST-13 PCB - and it was discovered in Scotland I think.

It was realised at this point that this was a very significant finding. 70/30 tin/lead is the standard tinning material. What the hell was a PCB without the lead content doing in the wreckage? Nobody at that point seemed to have any doubt that it was a real finding, as opposed to an artefact.

Jim Swire seems to know more about this aspect than I do. As far as I understand him, he's saying that the coating wasn't 100% tin, and the main point was that it was lead-free. It was mostly tin with a few other elements in it. He seems to think getting the mass spectroscopy data might reveal where it was manufactured.

Apparently pure tin is a bust for tinning because it forms "whiskers" that cause short circuits. However, the lead content was considered undesirable for enviromnental reasons or something like that, and in the 1980s there were experimental processes to make lead-free tinning alloys. Lockerbie happened in 1988, which is bloody early in this time-scale, and the question arises, how did something like this get into the chain of evidence?

This whole question seems to have been sidelined when the visual match was made to the MST-13 board in June 1990. Who the hell cares what the lab analysis says, it's obviously one of these, innit?

Feraday (I think?) consulted a couple of academics who weren't really experts in this field, and they said, hey maybe the heat of the explosion vaporised off the lead. Two things wrong with that idea. One was that they never tested to see if that was what would happen in an explosion, and the other was that you can actually see a bit of lead solder still present on the "fingerpad" area, where a soldered wire has been torn off the board. If the explosion had vaporised the lead out of the tinning alloy, that blob would be no more.

Feraday's real sin was in the witness box at Zeist. He said the analysis of the fragment was "similar in all respects" to the control boards. And he doesn't get a pass on the word "similar", because he habitually used that form of words when he meant "identical". He should have explained about the metallurgy discrepancy, and then explained his explanation for it, and then the Crown could have brought in the experts who had come up with the "lead vaporised off" theory, and the defence could have tested it. He didn't. This is officially extremely naughty.

The defence finally figured this out in 2008. They commissioned tests to find out whether the lead would really vaporise out of a tin-lead alloy at these temperatures, and discovered that it didn't. They then contacted Thuring (who made the MST-13 circuit boards) to find out if they used the lead-free tinning process at all, to discover they didn't, and indeed had never had the manufacturing capacity to do so.

That information was passed to the defence team the very same day Megrahi was told he had advanced prostate cancer.

However, what does it mean? I don't think we can conclude that it means that the fragment didn't fall from the sky. Jim Swire is absolutely convinced that's what it means, but I don't see how we can be sure.

First, the SCCRC report seems to have passed photograph 117 (the red-circle photo) as kosher, meaning the fragment PT/35b was actually photographed on 12th May 1989. Given the extent of muddle and incompetence surrounding the Lockerbie investigation, I have a hard time believing someone was so on the ball that they had a complicated conspiracy to frame Libya up and running as early as that, to the point where they were planting evidence even before all the real evidence picked up on the ground had been examined.

Second, if you're the CIA and you've decided to leap into this investigation and plant a fake clue, you must know the thing is going to be analysed within an inch of its bloody life. Why in the sacred name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster would you use a rare and experimental tinning process on your fake plant, rather than the bog-standard normal stuff? It's senseless.

All we can say at the moment in respect of PT/35b is that it didn't come from one of the Thuring-manufactured MST-13 timers supplied by MEBO to Libya. Which, as you say, completely destroys the link to Libya which was crucial to the investigation. But nobody seems very interested in that.

It was because of PT/35b that the CIA supplied the names of suspicious Libyans to the Scottish police. It was solely on that basis that the police put Megrahi's unrecognisable passport photo in front of Tony Gauci (in February 1991) and induced him to pick it out as resembling the clothes purchaser. Then later the cops hit what they must have believed was the jackpot, when they discovered Megrahi had been at the airport when KM180 was checking in - they'd believed the bomb had been on KM180 since August 1989. And he was travelling under a false name. My God, I'd have been convinced I'd got the right man at that point too.

Now, of course, the Crown says, but he was at the airport when the bomb was smuggled on to KM180, and he bought the clothes in the bomb suitcase, so that's why he's guilty. Except he wasn't and he didn't.

What a bloody shambles.

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.

I really need to get back to PT/35b this week as a matter of urgency, so I'll go back to that thread. I wish we had some electronics experts participating in that.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm still trying to understand the police attitude to Bedford's evidence, and still failing miserably. It's almost as if the people who were figuring this out didn't know about it, or at least didn't know that the front two suitcases had appeared mysteriously, or that the left-hand one had been described as a brown Samsonite hardshell. The way they behave, they seem to believe the six (or seven) original items in the container are all just legitimate passenger luggage.

This was precisely what Baz was banging on about. In Leppard's book, Orr's comments about the Heathrow interline luggage imply exactly that - that everything in the container at five o'clock was passenger interline luggage. Baz was reading the book and metaphorically screaming at Orr that Bedford's evidence showed there was probably a rogue bag among these suitcases. Surely Orr knew? But he doesn't behave as if he does.

It wasn't a state secret though. The German police knew, because they were given all the baggage handlers' statements and had them translated into German. Someone produced a handy precis of this evidence, in German, and Bedford's evidence is right in there. Harry Bell knew, because he was consulted when the German poice came asking about it.

But none of the Scottish memos documents any discussion at all about Bedford's evidence. The only mention is that memo relating to Helge Tepp's inquiry as to what the Bedford case turned out to be. The person tasked with answering it didn't know what Tepp was talking about. He had to ask Bell, who did, but who then gave the query the brush-off.

Adrian Dixon took Bedford's statements, but Dixon was from the Met, and the Met weren't involved in the inquiry. All he had to do was take the statements and send them to Lockerbie. It wasn't his job to figure out what Bedford had seen. Once they were at Lockerbie, I wonder how many people got to know what Bedford had said. It was common knowledge that there were some suitcases upright in a row at the back and then two flat on the floor at the front. But I get the serious impression that the rest of the information about the ones at the front wasn't passed on. The people who did know (Bell, and...?) weren't talking about it.

The Germans had to be given all the statements, as raw data, and they noticed the importance of Bedford's evidence for themselves, by reading his statement. (Yes, even the Keystone Kops of Meckenheim spotted it, which shows how obvious it was.) Clearly, Tepp wondered why they'd heard nothing from the Scottish end about that aspect, so he asked. And was given the brush-off.

The Scottish investigators are behaving as if the left-hand front case is nothing special, and as if by eliminating all the legitimate passenger luggage from being the bomb, that will eliminate Heathrow as the possible point of introduction. They're happy to play the odds on the explosion height estimations. They're not especially suspicious of the floor-level case at all, so a "probably" on the second-level theory is good enough.

I think someone took the decision not to share the details of Bedford's evidence with the majority of the detectives working on that aspect of the case. I can't imagine why.

It also appears from what Leppard says that the Met hardly investigated the Heathrow angle at all. They supplied assistance with interviewing the Heathrow staff, which was probably quite a big job, but I don't see them doing anything else. Leppard reports, in relation to a discusion in May 1989, that the Met had "long since" stopped investigating Heathrow. He also says that Orr had to all intents and purposes ruled Heathrow out within three weeks of the bombing. (He puts in a bit about "apart from Bedford's mysterious case" there, but that looks like Leppard's own insertion, as if he himself can't imagine that Orr would have dismissed that so early.)

Bedford's first statement was dated 3rd January, which is 13 days after the bombing, but the really significant information is in his second statement, dated 9th January. 19 days after the bombing. Just under 3 weeks. At the very time Orr is allegedly deciding that his snap dismissal of Heathrow on 30th December was justified. About the point the Met ceased to be involved. It looks as if they took the statements and then buggered off to worry about the IRA or whatever their normal day jobs were.

Nobody comes back and asks Bedford for more detail about what he saw until February 1990. Long after they were already absolutely committed to the Malta theory. That's how important they thought it was.

You know, if you'd asked me three years ago where I thought the Lockerbie conspiracy had happened and how it was played out, this is the last aspect of the saga I'd have imagined would be implicated. What the hell was going on?

Rolfe.

 

[CTB]

ETA: Oooooh, look what popped up online while I was actually writing this!

Lockerbie bombing: Donald Trump was asked to back Megrahi release











Rolfe.

Yup, I spotted this and filed it straight into "Make Keech Up About Salmond"

Didn't Oor Donald and Big 'Eck have a falling out over windfarms?


Had I been asked 3 years ago what thoughts I had on the Lockerbie investigation I certainly wouldn't have thought that significant parts of the investigation seem to have avoided some pretty decent clues at Heathrow.

Bedford's suitcase is a stonewaller ie sounds like the right make, model and possibly a match for colour. It's in the right place,give or take a few inches.
Yet anytime we hear of our intrepid investigators they're off in the chaos of today's Libya looking for ? What exactly? Any Libyan in or around the London area on the night in question?

 

[Rolfe]

Yup, I spotted this and filed it straight into "Make Keech Up About Salmond"

Didn't Oor Donald and Big 'Eck have a falling out over windfarms?

I don't think it's made up, judging by the SG response, but it's just silly. It's supposed to have happened before they fell out of course.

Quite honestly, I doubt if there's a single news story, real or contrived, that the media don't sit down and figure how they can spin this against Salmond and/or the SNP. It's getting quite tedious. I mean, who the **** cares whether Salmond brown-nosed Trump in 2009? McConnell was right up the man's colon in 2006. They're politicians, what do you expect?

Had I been asked 3 years ago what thoughts I had on the Lockerbie investigation I certainly wouldn't have thought that significant parts of the investigation seem to have avoided some pretty decent clues at Heathrow.

I'm coming more and more to the belief that there was never any grand conspiracy to frame Libya in general or Megrahi in particular. They're all running around like the Keystone Kops, especially the BKA, and there's no sign of any organised interference. (Of course once they had identitied him as a realistic prospect for a conviction, then they framed him.)

I used to be pretty keen on the idea that PT/35b was a CIA plant, fabricated some time in the summer of 1989 (or maybe early September) and introduced into the chain of evidence then, with the provenance backdated to May and then January on the paperwork. Now that the SCCRC thinks 117 is kosher, I think that has to be quarantined until and unless there is a realistic suggestion that 117 could have been faked some way, provenance and all. Which isn't gong to happen.

I have no bloody clue what PT/35b is, and if the investigators were honest they would agree they haven't either. I think there's a good chance it really did fall out of the sky, but I've no idea at all what it means. I think the evidence that the bomb trigger was a Khreesat special is very strong, so if that really was part of a digital countdown timer, who knows what it was doing there.

But Heathrow? What the bloody blue blazes is that all about?

Bedford's suitcase is a stonewaller ie sounds like the right make, model and possibly a match for colour. It's in the right place,give or take a few inches.

Actually, the described make, model and colour are relatively immaterial. Even if that case had come off the carousel in the normal way and been placed there by Bedford himself, and he hadn't remembered what colour it was, the evidence still says it's the bomb.

We know the arrangement of the Heathrow-origin luggage to a high degree of certainty, because three different people described it in the same terms. A row upright across the back and two flat on the floor at the front. Nothing on top of the two front cases.

We know the Heathrow-origin cases weren't moved when the Frankfurt luggage was added.

We know the bomb suitcase was loaded flat, not vertically in the overhang or anything like that, because of the way the floor of the container was damaged and the handle of the suitcase being found embedded in Bernstein's case, and a large suitcase (Patricia's) being flat against it (which it couldn't have been if the bomb suitcase had been vertical in the overhang).

We know the explosion was in the bottom front left-hand corner of the container. It's surprisingly far to the left for an explosion inside a flat-loaded suitcase, and I'm surprised the investigation didn't remark on that. The bomb must have been packed right at the side and then that side of the case rammed into the overhang as far as it would go. What were the chances of that, eh?

From all that, we can say the bomb must have been in either the bottom case of the left-hand front stack, or the one on top of it. Beyond that, you're guessing and playing the percentages.

When the bomb went off, the explosion ripped apart the bomb suitcase and the suitcases in its immediate vicinity (including some holdalls in the overhang as well). This debris became a mix of randomly-scattered fragments found all over the countryside. The searchers were asked to look out for that sort of debris and draw it to the attention of the investigators, and as a result multiple fragments of even the most severely damaged items were recovered. There were 25 items of luggage altogether in this category, and they formed the group that were close enough to the bomb to be damaged by the explosion - that is, they were the stuff in the lower left-hand side of the container.

Of these 25 items (might have been 26 including the bomb suitcase, I'm not sure), all but the bomb suitcase itself were known identified Heathrow or Frankfurt-origin passenger luggage. Therefore there wasn't another unknown suitcase (or even two) in that part of the container.

None of the six legitimate Heathrow interline suitcases was positioned flat against the bomb suitcase. We know that because none of them was damaged in that way.

Only one legitimate suitcase was damaged in a way consistent with its having been flat against the bomb suitcase, Patricia Coyle's case. She travelled on the feeder flight and we can see her case on the Erac printout being coded with the luggage from her Lufthansa flight from Vienna.

I don't care if Bedford testified he put the mystery case in the container with his own fair hands. I don't care if he had a complete rush of blood the the brain and said he thought it was sky-blue and covered in pink stars. It was the bomb, and all the wiggling around "oh but it was an inch too far to the south-east" doesn't cut it.

But the fact is Bedford said he did not put that case there, and nobody else could be found who admitted to having put it their either. And Bedford said he thought it was a brown or maroon Samsonite hardshell. And the security in that shed was non-existent, and there had been a break-in only hours before that was never solved.

I mean, honestly. What the is going on?

Yet anytime we hear of our intrepid investigators they're off in the chaos of today's Libya looking for ? What exactly? Any Libyan in or around the London area on the night in question?

Don't forget they're now looking on Malta. Frank Mulholland says he's not giving up.
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/its-long-process-but-im-not-giving-up.html
Why weren't they doing all this from at least 2001, when Fhimah was acquitted? They weren't though.

They seem to have moved to Malta because they drew a blank in Libya.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120917/local/courts-hear-new-lockerbie-facts.437197
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120923/local/Lockerbie-probe-is-live-prosecutors.437965

I keep hoping, maybe, with all the advances in police procedure there have been in the past 20 years, and the old guard who have been so convinced they solved the case back in 1989 dying off, that some bright young thing will look at the evidence again and say, maybe the reason we can't find anything is because we're looking in the wrong place.

No, ain't gonna happen. It would be career suicide I'm afraid.

Rolfe.

 

[Buncrana]

I think this time, unlike the Caruana’s, you have got it! The analysis of the (complete) Heathrow evidence you have compiled is utterly compelling, and leaves no possible manoeuvre for a counter argument to be raised against the Bedford bag being the primary case.

It doesn’t matter if you say it might have been one of the Heathrow interline passengers luggage. This cannot be supported without special pleading of a parallel universe variety. It doesn’t even matter if you stubbornly adhere to the second level of baggage argument. This position in itself now raises other insurmountable problems.

Each alternate scenario leaves questions, and critical questions, that are unable to be rationally, or satisfactorily, explained.

Not least that if those who will determinedly and continually assert the explosion still must have taken place on the 'second layer of luggage', and with Ms Coyle’s below the bomb-bag, then which item of luggage – for there must have been one – was immediately above?

Container AVE4041 we know was stacked to the hilt by Sidhu with 45-50 items, and indeed couldn’t actually accommodate all the Frankfurt flight’s luggage. Sidhu remembers “about 10” items were still on the rocket as AVE4041 was closed up and sent up into PA103. However, no bag was ever identified or offered as a possible candidate immediately on top of the primary bag, as no other bag suffered damage that would be compatible with such an intimate placement.

Only one bag was presented, and indeed reflected by the damage sustained, as being immediately in contact with the bomb suitcase; Ms Coyle’s.

In light of what is now known, if the primary suitcase was only in direct contact with one other suitcase, then this inevitably and logically implies the other surface that the primary suitcase was in contact with was the a portion of the base or flooring section of AVE4041. This provides the plausible answer for Ms Coyle’s bag being the only other case ‘in intimate contact’ with the primary suitcase, being in contact and resting immediately above the bomb suitcase - not underneath or on the container floor, as asserted by the Crown.

Sidhu’s statements only serve to reinforce this conclusion, since he is categorical that the position of the bags, as seen by Bedford, and taking up all available floor-space, remained undisturbed as the Frankfurt luggage was loaded on top.

Now perhaps, just perhaps, as Ms Coyle’s bag, and the other 40 from 103A, were loaded on top of the brown Samsonite seen on the floor by Bedford, being a hardshell on an aluminium floor, from sheer weight of baggage being loaded on top, gradually slid or shifted to left side, just into the overhang, and one end or even just a portion of Ms Coyle’s soft Tourister case found its way inbetween the two hardshells laid flat on the floor, thus providing some small protection to the container floor.

As I said however, this would be no more than further speculation, 24 years after the fact, and one can never really know or calculate with any certainty any subsequent shifts that may have occurred within AVE4041 that may be typical with any 747 take-off and in flight bumps and shifts.

It is only rational to argue, and indeed conclude, from the best and all the evidence at hand. Notwithstanding some of the tenuous patterns that were accepted by their Lordships, Kamp Zeist was never afforded such an opportunity.

 

[CTB]

Only one bag was presented, and indeed reflected by the damage sustained, as being immediately in contact with the bomb suitcase; Ms Coyle’s.

In light of what is now known, if the primary suitcase was only in direct contact with one other suitcase, then this inevitably and logically implies the other surface that the primary suitcase was in contact with was the a portion of the base or flooring section of AVE4041. This provides the plausible answer for Ms Coyle’s bag being the only other case ‘in intimate contact’ with the primary suitcase, being in contact and resting immediately above the bomb suitcase - not underneath or on the container floor, as asserted by the Crown.

.

An excellent point.

 

[Rolfe]

I think this time, unlike the Caruana’s, you have got it! The analysis of the (complete) Heathrow evidence you have compiled is utterly compelling, and leaves no possible manoeuvre for a counter argument to be raised against the Bedford bag being the primary case.

It doesn’t matter if you say it might have been one of the Heathrow interline passengers luggage. This cannot be supported without special pleading of a parallel universe variety. It doesn’t even matter if you stubbornly adhere to the second level of baggage argument. This position in itself now raises other insurmountable problems.

Each alternate scenario leaves questions, and critical questions, that are unable to be rationally, or satisfactorily, explained.

There are three possibilities.

One is that Sidhu's evidence is correct, in which case the bomb suitcase was on the floor of the container, not the second layer, and the Bedford case is definitely the bomb. I think that is overwhelmingly the most likely possibility. I simply cannot see how the alleged "second-layer" evidence can be held to be strong enough to call Sidhu a liar.

Think about it. He said, "I took the container out to the 727 and positioned it at the bottom of the rocket so that bags could be put straight in." Somebody should have filmed someone doing this, in the dark in filthy weather, to see exactly what was being suggested. He wasn't putting anything on the tarmac, he was lifting the cases as they came to the end of the rocket and just guiding them to fall into place. I just can't imagine why he would have lifted any of the original cases out. I never could imagine it, even before I found Sidhu's statements.

Two is that Sidhu did move that case for some reason, and put Patricia's case in its place. Then simply put the Bedford case back on top, the same way round it was originally. If he wanted Patricia's case on the bottom, this is by far the most likely scenario. If he'd put the Bedford case aside on the tarmac, why would he leave it there rather than putting it right back in? Again, that makes the Bedford case the bomb.

Third is that Sidhu moved the case, laid it on the wet and windy tarmac until the container was more than half full, then put it somewhere else. He just happened to put another unaccompanied and undocumented brown Samsonite hardshell on top of Patricia's case instead, that came down the rocket at the right moment. Then this seventh Heathrow suitcase, which had no documentation showing it coming into Heathrow, was one of the few items in the container that vanished completely. And its owner never filed a lost luggage claim.

That's the option the judges chose, because it was the only one that allowed the prosecution case to proceed. It's the one that, as you say, is practically parallel universe special pleading.

But why did the original investigation go for it in the first place? It's insane. I would really like a timeline of the decision tree leading to this second-level conclusion. I really would.

Not least that if those who will determinedly and continually assert the explosion still must have taken place on the 'second layer of luggage', and with Ms Coyle’s below the bomb-bag, then which item of luggage – for there must have been one – was immediately above? <snip>

I spotted that the first time I started looking at the transcripts. I never saw any of the lawyers emphasise it. When every new fact you uncover points in the same direction, there comes a point where you have to face them. This isn't a detective story, it's something that really happened. Physics has to work. Paradoxes are not allowed.

Now perhaps, just perhaps, as Ms Coyle’s bag, and the other 40 from 103A, were loaded on top of the brown Samsonite seen on the floor by Bedford, being a hardshell on an aluminium floor, from sheer weight of baggage being loaded on top, gradually slid or shifted to left side, just into the overhang, and one end or even just a portion of Ms Coyle’s soft Tourister case found its way inbetween the two hardshells laid flat on the floor, thus providing some small protection to the container floor.

As I said however, this would be no more than further speculation, 24 years after the fact, and one can never really know or calculate with any certainty any subsequent shifts that may have occurred within AVE4041 that may be typical with any 747 take-off and in flight bumps and shifts.

I don't think so. I don't think Patricia's case could have got into that position. I think the bottom of the bomb suitcase was hard and slippery and convex, and the rounded edges made it easy for it to slip up into the overhang area. The first bank was in the wrong direction, but of course there was nowhere for the case to go to the right. Maybe when the plane straightened up, maybe when there was a bank in the other direction later, or maybe it was just turbulence due to the wind, but I think just as Aku said, that case slipped to the side, and ended up partly into the overhang section to the left.

I understand that textiles can act as a shield for fast sharp things remarkably well. In the middle ages they had textile jerkins that could stop arrows. Mediaeval kevlar. There was a tweed jacket in that suitcase. The RARDE people kept saying they had taken the clothes into account, but it's all a bunch of unknowns. Keen said a strip of sellotape could have been enough to do it.

Rolfe.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Rolfe, I've read your article again and have a few comments, but it will take time to organise them and format the post. Sorry, no time left to do that this evening (10:30 PM here), so I'll work at it tomorrow.

 

[Delscottio]

Rolfe, I've read your article again and have a few comments, but it will take time to organise them and format the post. Sorry, no time left to do that this evening (10:30 PM here), so I'll work at it tomorrow.

So have I (and this whole bloody thread). Before I comment I'll have to re-read to disgest in full - one quick comment though, which could be helpful for understanding.

Would it be feasible to do a flow chart of what you guys know / assume showing the "deadends" and why - just a simple chart with hyperlinks to your text for the fuller written reasons? Anyway I'll reread the article and try to formulate a response.

 

[Rolfe]

Rolfe, I've read your article again and have a few comments, but it will take time to organise them and format the post. Sorry, no time left to do that this evening (10:30 PM here), so I'll work at it tomorrow.

Thank you indeed. All feedback gratefully received.

So have I (and this whole bloody thread). Before I comment I'll have to re-read to disgest in full - one quick comment though, which could be helpful for understanding.

Would it be feasible to do a flow chart of what you guys know / assume showing the "deadends" and why - just a simple chart with hyperlinks to your text for the fuller written reasons? Anyway I'll reread the article and try to formulate a response.

My God, the whole thread??!! How could you do that to yourself?

I don't think a flow chart such as you suggest is really feasible. I'm hoping to do a number of chapters like that Heathrow one, and hopefully it will make some sort of sense when it's all together.

Meantime, you could try the Rupert Bear version, which like most of my stuff is a work in progress.

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

Rolfe.

 

[Delscottio]

Thank you indeed. All feedback gratefully received.




My God, the whole thread??!! How could you do that to yourself?

I don't think a flow chart such as you suggest is really feasible. I'm hoping to do a number of chapters like that Heathrow one, and hopefully it will make some sort of sense when it's all together.

Meantime, you could try the Rupert Bear version, which like most of my stuff is a work in progress.

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

Rolfe.

It wasted some time.. I started at the last page and couldn't make head nor tail so thought i'd get into it.

Cheers I'll have a look.

 

[Rolfe]

It wasted some time.. I started at the last page and couldn't make head nor tail so thought i'd get into it.

Would you like me to link you to the threads on the Frankfurt baggage records, the identification of the mystery shopper, the provenance of the alleged fragment of timer PCB, or a few more?



Rolfe.

 

[Delscottio]

Would you like me to link you to the threads on the Frankfurt baggage records, the identification of the mystery shopper, the provenance of the alleged fragment of timer PCB, or a few more?



Rolfe.

Erm no....

 

[jargon buster]

Dont Delscottio, its a trap, you will be lost forever.

 

[CTB]

So have I (and this whole bloody thread). Before I comment I'll have to re-read to disgest in full - one quick comment though, which could be helpful for understanding.

I had enough time last year to read this thread, a Frankfurt thread or two, the MST 13 thread, the transcript of the original Fatal Accident Inquiry ( FAI ), the Air Accident Investigation Branch ( AAIB ) report and most of the trial transcript from Zeist. I keep up to date on 'the latest' from Rolfe's ponderings here and from Robert Black's blog.

Would it be feasible to do a flow chart of what you guys know / assume showing the "deadends" and why - just a simple chart with hyperlinks to your text for the fuller written reasons?

Um, not really. Not from me anyway. I'm just Joe Schmoe with the organisational skills of a sponge in a blender.

The short of this thread is that the official version, ie the one that got Megrahi convicted, is that a suitcase containing a bomb started it's journey in Malta. This was then transferred onto a flight at Frankfurt destined for London. At London the bomb then made it's way to just before Lockerbie.
There is NO evidence for the Malta origin.
NO evidence that an unnacompanied suitcase was taken from a Frankfurt flight at London and loaded into PanAm 103.

There is evidence that a suitcase was placed aboard, pretty much exactly where it needed to be to do the utmost damage should it contain a bomb, at London Heathrow.

The interesting thrust of this thread, to me, is how the cops ignored the Heathrow baggage handlers' testimony.

Anyway I'll reread the article and try to formulate a response.

Sometimes a different angle on the same thing helps. Chap called Caustic Logic has a website with real value info and discourse on all the major 'themes' of Lockerbie. Worth checking out: http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/p/london-origin-theory.html


Please pick holes and ask questions.



ETA: The ID of the Mystery Shopper is a beezer! One for fans of especially bouncy kangaroo courts.

 

[Rolfe]

I was talking about some of this in the coincidences thread. The thing about coincidences is how we perceive their meaning.

Jawdropping coincidences happen with fair regularity. It's in the nature of the universe. Most of the time they are obviously meaningless, and are laughed off with a "you'll never guess...!" comment. But then sometimes they seem to be meaningful, and the human brain is hard-wired to believe in a causal connection. It's the way we think.

You see it all the time in alternative medicine. You can explain as patiently as you like that homoeopathic remedies are sugar pills, plain and simple, but this is of no use if the person you are talking to happened to have an illness go away just after taking them. (I once had that conversation with a vet, who gave homoeopathy credit for curing his acne - when he was 30 years old!)

Same thing in reverse with the antivax lobby. A teenage girl dropped dead a couple of hours after getting the papilloma virus vaccine. She had an undiagnosed tumour of the heart, I think it was, but it took a couple of days to ascertain that. In those two days, many people were convinced that the vaccine was deadly, and will never be unconvinced.

Look at the Lockerbie coincidences. I'm not talking about the carry-on with Khaled Jaafar and the heroin trail, or the CIA agents with the plans for the hostage rescue, or any of the other things about the plane that seem "interesting" but probably aren't. I'm talking about the coincidences linking Megrahi to the bombing.

The first one is the fact that one of the seven luggage trays at Frankfurt they couldn't identify was coded at a time and place suggesting it came from Malta - the place the clothes in the bomb bag were purchased. (And it was the most suspicious tray, being coded in V3 where they didn't re-book baggage.) The police simply couldn't believe that was a coincidence, no matter how little evidence there was to back it up, or how unlikely it was that terrorists would leave a trail like that. So they dug in on Malta and stayed there even when they could find nothing to confirm the theory.

Then the CIA suggested to them that Megrahi might be a possible suspect, on the basis of his connection to Bollier. Tony picking Megrahi's mug-shot wasn't a coincidence, that was just straightforward biassed photoidentity procedure. (And I positively would not rule out Crawford or one of them simply pointing Tony to the right photo.) But the next bit was.

After they had settled on Megrahi as the preferred suspect, they discovered he had been at the airport when KM180 departed, and he was using a passport in a false name.

Hell's bells, no wonder the police were and are convinced he did it. It's the same sort of coincidence that gets people swearing that homoeopathy cured their cancer. It is literally unbelievable. We are hard-wired to invest that sort of coincidence with enormous significance.

Even knowing the bomb didn't travel on KM180 in the first place, I feel the pull of that.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

The interesting thrust of this thread, to me, is how the cops ignored the Heathrow baggage handlers' testimony.

There are three things I desperately want to know about this investigation.

• Did PT/35b fall from the sky?
• Whose luggage was in tray 8849?
• Why did the police ignore Bedford's evidence in the first half of 1989?

And the greatest of these is the last one.

I was talking to an ex-cop who knows John Orr personally, and he says Orr was a very political operator, and he could imagine him steering the investigation away from Heathrow if he'd been tipped the wink to do that. I still have huge problems with that. This was the biggest mass-murdering terrorist hunt in British history, out-doing the IRA by an order of magnitude. How could anyone countenance turning away from what might have been the actual modus operandi and so letting the actual murderers escape, just to save BAA's blushes? It's the sort of conspiracy we usually sneer at when it comes from the truthers. I'd just love to be able to say, this too was incompetence.

But then I look at the actual evidence, and it's just too obvious. It's completely in-your-face. Helge Tepp spotted it, just from reading over the statements from Heathrow. If Bedford hadn't said he didn't load the extra cases, and he hadn't described the left-hand one, that case would still have been the bomb in the end, after the whole analysis was in. But I could certainly believe they failed to figure it out, or at least not until they were already committed to Malta.

But Bedford did testify that the case appeared mysteriously while the container was unattended, and he did describe it as a brown or maroon Samsonite hardshell. Of course that could be a wild coincidence too, but the thing about coincidences is that in this context you have to follow them up, and they never did.

They were given a clear, plain and obvious steer right to the bomb, within three weeks of the disaster. If there was any sign that they'd got excited about that, thought they might have cracked it, and then were disappointed when they reluctantly had to rule it out, I'd be less sceptical. There's nothing. It looks as if nobody told the people handling the baggage identification evidence about Bedford's statement.

Then, what about Manly? He reported a break-in into the baggage handling area, just hours before the disaster. Nothing was done. No extra security precautions were instituted. I don't imagine anyone could have afforded to have grounded all the planes that day till they ran a complete security check. Then Manly was interviewed by the Lockerbie investigation on 31st January 1989 - later than the other Heathrow staff. His statement was even entered into HOLMES.

Then it disappeared. Nobody ever saw it again. It wasn't with the rest of the bundle that was sent to the BKA. It wasn't raised at the FAI - if it had been, everything could have been so different. It was allegedly in the bundle of 14,000 witness statements supplied by the police to the Crown in 1999, when they started to construct their case against the two Libyans. However nobody's attention was drawn to it and even the Crown allegedly didn't know it was there. Because of that it was never disclosed to the defence.

My "I don't believe in coincidences" gene is playing up again. Was that statement accidentally lost? Or are we seeing a pattern of evidence pointing to bad security at Heathrow being buried at a high level in the Lockerbie inquiry?

My God, we need an independent public inquiry into this SO bad.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Chap called Caustic Logic has a website with real value info and discourse on all the major 'themes' of Lockerbie.

Be careful with Caustic Logic's blog. It's a fabulous resource, and it has all sorts of amazing stuff in there. But he bashed out posts when we weren't at all sure about stuff, and sometimes he speculated, and sometimes he posted stuff we know now isn't right. He's not maintaining the blog now at all, as he's move on to looking at modern-day events in Libya.

Just don't believe everything you read there. Some of it is superseded.

Rolfe.