Appeal against conviction ‘must be pursued in interests of justice’ as man convicted of Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi dies in Tripoli

Abdelbasset al Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in December 1988 in what became known as the Lockerbie Trial has died at his home in Tripoli after a long battle with prostate cancer. Mr Megrahi was released from detention in Scotland after a decision was taken by Scotland’s Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill in 2009 to free him on compassionate grounds after medical reports confirmed Mr Megrahi’s cancer was at an advanced stage, giving him only three months to live.

Mr Al-Megrahi was tried at a special court set up under Scottish jurisdiction in the Netherlands in 2001, Camp Zeist, by a panel of Scottish judges without any jury. Many questions remain about the safety of the conviction of Mr Al Megrahi, given the sheer amount of evidence withheld by Scotland’s Lord Advocate & Crown Office, and admissions testimony from witnesses against Mr Megrahi were bribed paid for their appearances & testimony at the trial.

While there are those within the justice system & legal establishment who hope any chances of a potential appeal against the unsafe conviction will now disappear, many legal observers feel an appeal must be pursued in the interests of justice, given the impact the Lockerbie case has had on the credibility of the Scots justice system, raising significant questions as to whether Scots justice can ever be trusted again.

UPDATE 23 May 2012 :
Further coverage of reaction to the death of Mr Al Megrahi can be viewed at the following links and on Professor Robert Black’s Lockerbie Case website The Lockerbie Case

In a selection of articles, Scotland’s Herald Newspaper reports further reaction including calls for an inquiry into the case : Dalyell supports Megrahi inquiry demands, Lockerbie families vow to force public inquiry, One of the longest live investigations, Megrahi: The Herald dossier, The holes in the case: Six grounds for a potential miscarriage of justice, So many questions are still to be answered after Megrahi's death

BBC News reports :

Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi dies in Tripoli

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted over the 1988 Lockerbie bombing above Scotland which killed 270 people, has died at his home in Libya.

Megrahi, 60, was convicted by a special court in the Netherlands in 2001.

He was freed from Scottish jail in 2009 on compassionate grounds because of cancer, stirring controversy when he outlived doctors' expectations.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron said it was a day to remember the 270 victims of "an appalling terrorist act".

Mr Cameron, who is in Chicago for a Nato summit, said Megrahi should never have been freed,

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond also said Megrahi's death was an occasion to remember the victims of Lockerbie.

He said Lockerbie was still a live investigation and that Scottish prosecutors had never believed Megrahi was the only person responsible.
Relatives' anger

Megrahi's release sparked the fury of many of the relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster. The US - whose citizens accounted for 189 of the dead - also criticised the move.

But others believed he was not guilty of the bombing.

Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died at Lockerbie, called Megrahi's death a "very sad event".

"Right up to the end he was determined, for his family's sake... [that] the verdict against him should be overturned," said Dr Swire, who is a member of the Justice for Megrahi group.

Died at home

His brother Abdulhakim said on Sunday that Megrahi's health had deteriorated quickly and he died at home in Tripoli.

He told the AFP news agency that Megrahi died at 13:00 local time (11:00 GMT).

Megrahi's sister told the Libyan Wal news agency that his funeral would take place at Tripoli's main cemetery on Monday, following early afternoon prayers.

The BBC's Rana Jawad says Libyans have mixed views on Megrahi's guilt

Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, always denied any responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.

It remains the deadliest terrorist incident ever to have taken place on British soil.

All 259 people aboard the plane, which was travelling from London to New York, were killed, along with 11 others on the ground.

Investigators tracing the origins of scraps of clothes wrapped around the bomb followed a trail to a shop in Malta which led them, eventually, to Megrahi.

He and another Libyan, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, were indicted by the Scottish and US courts in November 1991.

But Libya refused to extradite them. In 1999, after protracted negotiations, Libya handed the two men over for trial, under Scottish law but on neutral ground, the former US airbase at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

Cameron: "Today is a day to remember the 270 people who lost their lives in an appalling terrorist act"

Their trial began in May 2000. Fhimah was acquitted of all charges, but Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison.

He served the first part of his sentence at the maximum-security prison at Barlinnie, in Glasgow, but was transferred in 2005 to Greenock prison.

He lost his first appeal against conviction in 2002 but in 2007, his case was referred back to senior Scottish judges. He dropped that second case two days before he was released.
No extradition

Last August, after the fall of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, Megrahi was reported to be "in and out of a coma" at his home in Tripoli.

There have been calls for him to be returned to jail in the UK or tried in the US.

But shortly after they toppled Col Gaddafi, Libyan rebel leaders said they would not extradite Megrahi or any other Libyan.

The BBC's Scotland correspondent James Cook says Scottish and American officials have been to Tripoli, trying to persuade the new Libyan government to grant visas to detectives from Dumfriesshire.

They are still searching for the answers to the questions of who ordered the bombing and who else was involved, our correspondent says, but it is not clear whether the Libyans will co-operate.

However, a spokesman for the interim government in Tripoli, the National Transitional Council (NTC), told Reuters that that Megrahi's death would not end its investigations into Lockerbie.

"The Libyan government will continue to investigate the crimes committed by the Gaddafi regime using other witnesses," NTC spokesman Mohamed al-Harizy was quoted as saying.

Last September, it emerged that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had raised Megrahi's case in talks with Gaddafi in 2008 and 2009 in Libya, shortly before Megrahi was freed.

At the time, Libya was threatening to sever commercial links with Britain if Megrahi was not released.

But Mr Blair's spokesman told Col Gaddafi it was a case for the Scottish authorities and no business deals were discussed.

In his last interview, filmed in December 2011, Megrahi said: "I am an innocent man. I am about to die and I ask now to be left in peace with my family."

He had previously claimed he would release new information about the atrocity but little new has emerged.

Megrahi had rarely been seen since his return to Tripoli, but he was spotted on Libyan television at what appeared to be a pro-government rally in July 2011.

Tam Dalyell writes on the truths about Lockerbie which London & Washington don’t want to hear

This weekend’s Mail on Sunday saw a very interesting article from former Labour MP Tam Dalyell on what many don’t want to hear about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988.

The Mail on Sunday (Scottish edition) reports :

August 16 2009, The Mail on Sunday (Scottish Edition).

The truth about Lockerbie? That’s the last thing the Americans want the world to know.

By Tam Dalyell Former Labour MP for Linlithgow and former Father of the House of Commons.

WHY have US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her officials' responded to the return of Megrahi with such a volcanic reaction? The answer is straightforward. The last thing that Washington wants is the truth to emerge about the role of the US in the crime of Lockerbie. I understand the grief of those parents, such as Kathleen Flynn and Bert Ammerman, who have appeared on our TV screens to speak about the loss of loved ones. Alas all these years they have been lied to about the cause of that grief.

Not only did Washington not want the awful truth to emerge, but Mrs Thatcher, a few - very few - in the stratosphere of Whitehall and certain officials of the Crown Office in Edinburgh, who owe their subsequent careers to the Lockerbie investigation, were compliant.

It all started in July 1988 with the shooting down by the warship USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca - without an apology.

The Iranian minister of the interior at the time was Ali Akbar Mostashemi, who made a public statement that blood would rain down in the form of ten western airliners being blown out of the sky.

Mostashemi was in a position carry out such a threat - he had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1984 and had developed close relations with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley - and in particular terrorist leader Abu Nidal and Ahmed Jibril, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.

Washington was appalled. I believe so appalled and fearful that it entered into a Faustian agreement that, tit-for-tat, one airliner should be sacrificed.

This may seem a dreadful thing for me to say. But consider the facts. A notice went up in the US Embassy in Moscow advising diplomats not to travel with Pan Am back to America for Christmas.

American military personnel were pulled off the plane. A delegation of South

Africans, including foreign minister Pik Botha, were pulled off Pan Am Flight 103 at the last minute.

Places became available. Who took them at the last minute? The students. Jim Swire's daughter, John Mosey's daughter, Martin Cadman's son, Pamela Dix’s brother, other British relatives, many of whom you have seen on television in recent days, and, crucially, 32 students of the University of Syracuse, New York.

If it had become known - it was the interregnum between Ronald Reagan demitting office and George Bush Snr entering the White House - that, in the light of the warning, Washington had pulled VIPs but had allowed Bengt Carlsson, the UN negotiator for Angola whom it didn't like, and the youngsters to travel to their deaths, there would have been an outcry of US public opinion.

No wonder the government of the United States and key officials do not want the world to know what they have done.

If you think that this is fanciful, consider more facts. When the relatives went to see the then UK Transport Secretary, Cecil Parkinson, he told them he did agree that there should be a public inquiry. Going out of the door as they were leaving, as an afterthought he said: 'Just one thing. I must clear permission for a public inquiry with colleagues'. Dr Swire, John Mosey and Pamela Dix, the secretary of the Lockerbie relatives, imagined that it was a mere formality. A fortnight later, sheepishly, Parkinson informed them that colleagues had not agreed. At that time there was only one colleague who could possibly have told Parkinson that he was forbidden to do something in his own department. That was the Prime Minister. Only she could have told Parkinson to withdraw his offer, certainly, in my opinion, knowing the man, given in good faith.

Fast forward 13 years. I was the chairman of the all-party House of Commons group on Latin America. I had hosted Dr Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, between the time that he won the election and formally took control in Bogota. The Colombian ambassador, Victor Ricardo, invited me to dinner at his residence as Dr Uribe wanted to continue the conversations with me.

The South Americans are very formal. A man takes a woman in to dinner. To make up numbers, Ricardo had invited a little old lady, his neighbour. I was mandated to take her in to dinner. The lady was Margaret Thatcher, to whom I hadn't spoken for 17 years since I had been thrown out of the Commons for saying she had told a self-serving fib in relation to the Westland affair.

I told myself to behave. As we were sitting down to dinner, the conversation went like this.

'Margaret, I'm sorry your "head" was injured by that idiot who attacked your sculpture in the Guildhall.'

She replied pleasantly: 'Tam, I'm not sorry for myself, but I am sorry for the sculptor.'

Raising the soup spoon, I ventured: 'Margaret, tell me one thing - why in 800 pages...'

'Have you read my autobiography?' she interrupted, purring with pleasure.

Yes, I have read it very carefully. Why in 800 pages did you not mention Lockerbie once?' Mrs Thatcher replied: 'Because I didn't know what happened and I don't write about things that I don't know about.'

My jaw dropped. 'You don't know. But, quite properly as Prime Minister, you went to Lockerbie and looked into First Officer Captain Wagner's eyes.'

She replied: 'Yes, but I don't know about it and I don't write in my autobiography things I don't know about.' My conclusion is that she had been told by Washington on no account to delve into the circumstances of what really happened that awful night.

Whitehall complied. I acquit the Scottish judges Lord Sutherland, Lord Coulsfield and Lord MacLean at Megrahi's trial of being subject to pressure, though I am mystified as to how they could have arrived at a verdict other than 'Not Guilty' -or at least 'Not Proven'.

As soon as I left the Colombian ambassador's residence, I reflected on the enormity of what Mrs Thatcher had said.

Her relations with Washington were paramount. She implied that she had abandoned her natural and healthy curiosity about public affairs to blind obedience to what the US administration wished. Going along with the Americans was one of her tenets of faith.

On my last visit to Megrahi, in Greenock Prison in November last year, he said to me: 'Of course I am desperate to go back to Tripoli. I want to see my five children growing up. But I want to go back as an innocent man.'

I quite understand the human reasons why, given his likely life expectancy, he is prepared, albeit desperately reluctantly, to abandon the appeal procedure.