Rolfe
Adult human female
I just got back to Richard Marquise's book, and dammit the photo has the odd highlight in the reproduction used there too! Surely, surely it can't have been in the production shown to Tony! I mean, it's practically waving its hand in the air shouting "pick me! pick me!"
I just checked the transcript, and it is exactly as you say. I don't know which photo is was that was in the magazine, but since Megrahi is wearing glasses in it, it's possible it was the one from 1992 that has sometimes been misattributed to 1999. That's a good likeness, and looks absolutely nothing like the photo in the photospread.
Dock identifications are ridiculous other than, as you say, checking that this is indeed the person we think we're talking about. (Like, you're not in the wrong court, are you?) Considering Megrahi and Fhimah look nothing like each other, and they were in the dock, it's not exactly an identification parade, is it? The witness knows who he's supposed to pick, it's just a question of agreeing. And even then, Tony had to be prompted shamelessly. It reads to me as if he was very uncomfortable with what he was doing. But then people will do things they're very uncomfortable with, if you offer them enough money.
If I'm reading the text correctly, it sems that the magazine photo shown then was the same one as was taken from Tony just four days before the identification parade exercise. It's interesting what he says about it. "His hair was much shorter and he didn't wear glasses." Megrahi's glasses are a bit off-on so that's neither here nor there, but I see no evidence that he had his hair shorter than that in the 1980s. Indeed, in the picture in the photospread, his hair is even longer (and again Tony says it's much longer than the customer's hair).
And does that 1992 photo look in any way like a man who could be described as about 50 years old? Or "dark-skinned"?
So, he has the magazine in April 1999, and he seems at that time to have had it for a few months. Well enough time to learn what the face looks like. (And he had other pictures too - his brother was collecting them.) Only four days after he gave the magazine to Inspector Busuttil, he picked Megrahi out of the ID parade (at which there was possibly only one plausible "foil" in any case).
Then he's shown the magazine again in court, and only about four minutes later he points to Megrahi in the dock, although only after much prompting.
IF there was other reliable evidence, we might at a push decide that it might have been Megrahi in that shop that evening. At a stretch. Although we'd have to conclude that Tony had been wrong about almost every aspect of the customer's appearance in his initial descriptions. And fortuitously picked out the "right" photo even though it was one that didn't resemble its subject at all.
But there isn't any other evidence. That was the only evidence connecting Megrahi to the crime. Everything else was only agreed to be significant because of the identification.
I'm just going to go away and cry, now.
Rolfe.
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