It was a bloody terrible summing up by Taylor. Gibberish, gibberish, witter, witter, non-sequitur, then "true statement". You gotta show your working, as they say, and his working was crap.
I've been trying to contemplate a scenario where this was simply mega-incompetence, although it's pretty strained. It comes down to the dissemination of the crucial parts of Bedford's evidence into the inquiry as a whole - or the lack of such dissemination. Who was the gate-keeper?
The German investigators knew about the Bedford suitcase, because they were supplied with original-text copies of all the Heathrow statements. They had these translated into German, and then someone went through them all and prepared a German-language precis of what each witness had said. Reading that was the first place I noticed Bedford's statement that he had loaded the cases left to right as they arrived. I need to go check the date on that document - I don't know how long it took them to get all that done and then analyse the information it contained.
I do know it was October before Helge Tepp approached the Lockerbie inquiry and said, hey guys what did that brown Samsonite Bedford saw at Heathrow turn out to be? This was well after the row they had about the airport of introduction, relating to the operation of the Khreesat bombs, which happened in May. I suspect they didn't know about the Bedford case then, or they would have raised it in that context. Once the BKA had been severely put in their place on that subject in May, was anyone going to listen to a re-approach on the same matter in October?
Harry Bell gave Helge Tepp the brush-off in November - in effect he fobbed him off with a non-answer. However, this was by then past the crucial September date when they became convinced of a Malta loading. I think after they saw tray 8849 and KM180 and Tony Gauci's purchase leger, there was no hope of anyone retracing their steps to consider Heathrow.
It's likely though that the point of no return for the Heathrow loading was a lot earlier than that. They
should have followed up the goings-on in the interline shed pretty much immediately - certainly during January. The further they got from that point, the harder it would be to go back and admit there was a lead they neglected and frankly they'd been plumb wrong.
On 16th February Paul Channon told the press the bomb came from Frankfurt. On 28th March John Orr told a joint case conference that "on the balance of probabilities" the bomb had come in on the feeder flight. It seems to have been a fixed idea as early as that, and it would have been difficult even then to say, look at Bedford's evidence why don't you?
We know Orr was convinced of a Frankfurt loading before any of the Heathrow witnesses were even interviewed, by the end of 1988. I think he didn't know at first that there had been any Heathrow interline luggage in AVE4041, and thought it only contained Frankfurt luggage. He was probably pretty pleased by that because it narrowed things down very conveniently, and removed culpability from British soil, and removed a very big reason for turning the case over to the Met.
That wasn't an unreasonable position at the time, given what he knew. He
should have revised that position drastically the minute he heard about Bedford's evidence. He didn't. So my question is, what happened to Bedford's evidence and who knew?
Bedford was interviewed by Adrian Dixon about four times during January, and supplementary interviews with Kamboj and Parmar were carried out to corroborate his account (of course in Kamboj's case it didn't corroborate). However Dixon was only the note-taker, and had nothing to do with the case. His job was just to get the statements and send them to Lockerbie, just as was done with Manly at the end of the month. I don't think Dixon even thought about the implications of the evidence he was hearing. Not his job. Those uppity Jocks had told the Met to eff off, after all.
The statements were just raw data arriving at Lockerbie to be processed. We know how that was done as regards the Manly statement, because Patrick Shearer told Jim Swire in an email. Manly was interviewed on 31st January. "Mr Manly's statement was passed to the police incident room at Lockerbie and was registered on the HOLMES system on 2 February 1989. This statement and those from other witnesses identified At Heathrow were considered by enquiry officers at the time in the context of a range of emerging strands of evidence."
Of course Bedford's statements should have been part of these emerging strands of evidence, but there's no sign that they were. This is all that Shearer says about it. We know Manly was never even re-interviewed, so it seems his statement was just entered into Holmes and forgotten.
The thing is, the detectives weren't running around with full-text copies of all the statements. (Though I have seen detectives do exactly that in other cases, but obviously they weren't in this one.) There must have been some sort of summary document where someone pulled out the salient points of the statements, for convenience. Just like the Germans had. But, I suspect, a lot shorter.
Who produced this summary, and what were his criteria about what he should be including in it? I think that might be the question to ask someone.
I had been envisaging Orr or someone senior looking at the full contents of Bedford's statements and actively deciding to suppress the information. I don't know if that's credible, though. I'm wondering, is it possible that a low-rank officer was asked to go through the statements and pull out the important information - and that he was told the information wanted was the position and layout of the interline luggage, no more than that?
If Orr was already convinced of a Frankfurt loading by late December, before he found out about the Heathrow interline luggage, he may already have been in "rule-out" mode. "Oh, there were a few cases already in there? Can you go through the statements and give me a report on exactly where these cases were placed?" And PC McPlod has done
exactly that, and no more?
So the detectives were only told about a row at the back and two flat at the front. And RARDE were only told that as well, if even that. So nothing to cause any particular suspicion about that left-hand one at the front. While in Frankfurt we have this terrorist gang making bombs to target aircraft....
So the mood music becomes more and more pro-Frankfurt. Hayes's original estimate of the explosion height was 18 inches, and then 14 inches. And these German cops are
-ing
annoying. Just tell them it's all their fault and make sure they know it.
At some point the full content of Bedford's evidence must have become known. He gave the statement about the case actually being maroon in February 1990. Was that a preliminary statement in respect of the up-coming FAI? They certainly knew about it by the time of the FAI itself, in October 1990.
I just wonder, was there a point when
anyone thought, "oh crap, that was the bomb and we missed it and we can't go back there now!" It's possible there wasn't, if the revelation didn't occur until after September 1989, and everyone was so buoyed up by how extremely clever they had been to track down Tony Gauci and get a description of one of the terrorists from him, and a lot of them had spent weeks and months digging at Luqa airport.
Well, it's an odd-numbered day....
Rolfe.
, Yes...............what is in the eight boxes on John Ashtons ceiling?
