Lockerbie: the Lie in the sky

The Lockerbie case is not yet over. Last week’s release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan secret agent convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, has once again brought the case into the limelight, giving rise to much debate.

Yet, the rightwing Western media have not seen the wood for the trees. Probably at the whipping command of the anti-Arab lobby, they tried to paint a villain out of Libya and gave prominence to angry remarks over the release of al-Megrahi. Statements by US President Barack Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other officials made front page stories. The media also published the outburst of relatives of the victims who died when a terrorist bomb blasted Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988. But these media outlets gave little or no space to articles that dealt with the merits and demerits of the case or to viewpoints which saw the case as a miscarriage of justice and the whole episode as a big extortion racket where Libya was forced to cough up US$ 2.7 billion to free the country from crippling sanctions.

The plan to fix Libya was drawn up in the murky world of dirty politics. This column sees the Lockerbie incident as a plan because the manner in which the Lockerbie trial was conducted lacked credibility. The plan that was drawn up in the backstreets of political skullduggery was so meticulous that it was impossible to separate the truth from falsehood. Part of the plan was to brand those who raised doubts as conspiracy theorists. But many of these theories that question certain unexplained events connected with terror incidents such as the Lockerbie bombing and the 9/11 terror attacks have still not been scientifically or logically disproved.

In the Lockerbie plan, the Western powers colluded to crucify Libya, like they joined forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. When the blast took place in December 1988, the immediate suspects were Iran, Syria and the Palestinian groups. Iran became suspect number one because the Pan Am blast was seen as retaliation for the downing of an Iranian civilian aircraft with 290 passengers and crew by a US warship. Incidentally, no one was prosecuted in this case. On the contrary, the captain of the ship was honoured for his heroic act. The wheels of global justice, it appeared, favoured the West with the UN also becoming a tool in the hands of the veto-wielding big powers.

Investigations carried out by German police into the Lockerbie bombing indicated the possible involvement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) based in Syria. Hence the suspicion is on Syria and its ally Iran.

But the real culprits could be someone else. It could be Israel or even the KGB, the intelligence arm of the Soviet Union. It is no secret that Israel had carried out several clandestine attacks and put the blame on the Palestinians or Arab and Islamic countries. After all, the motto of the Mossad, the intelligence arm of Israel, says is: “With clandestine terrorism, we will conduct war.” Thus it is naïve to rule out the involvement of countries or groups other than Syria or Iran.

Adding fuel to the doubts, Libya became the prime suspect only two years after the incident. To use the common legal jargon, Libya was framed.

Libya had to accept responsibility for the bombing because it had little option. Its primary aim was to bail itself out of the crippling UN sanctions imposed in 1992 at the behest of the Western powers. Accepting responsibility was a condition for the lifting of the sanctions.

In 2003, two years after al-Megrahi, was convicted by a Scottish court, Libya sent a note to the UN saying, “Libya, as a sovereign state, has facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects (al-Megrahi and his co-accused) charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials.”

It also agreed to pay compensation to the relatives of the 270 victims.

Tam Dalyell, a British Labour Party parliamentarian from Scotland and co-author of “Libya: The Struggle for Survival”, a book on the Lockerbie case, in an interview with the BBC in 2003 said Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was desperate to get back into the international fold. Dalyell reiterated his claim that al-Megrahi had been made a scapegoat to get the sanctions lifted. “We got not only the wrong man but the wrong regime,” he said.

His comments underscored the claim that the Lockerbie case was a miscarriage of justice and the truth lay hidden. The shenanigans, however, continue.

Although Britain said this week that the release of al-Megrahi was on humanitarian grounds as he was suffering from cancer, suspicion has deepened that it was linked to trade deals, especially oil-related ones. The release also came against the backdrop of al-Megrahi’s withdrawal of his appeal petition which was based on the grounds that the trial judges gave little notice to a wealth of evidence – running into 600 pages – that could have established his innocence.

Though these documents have not been made public, legal experts who followed the case say even material available in the public domain is enough to conclude that al-Megrahi was framed. As the Lockerbie case got underway, the then UN Chief Kofi Annan appointed Prof. H. Köchler as an international observer. The learned professor commenting on the verdict had this to say: “This was a classical case of a ‘Show Process’ from the time of the Cold War… like they had in the Soviet Union and East Germany before the Iron Curtain fell…This has been a political court case where the verdict already was decided upon in advance… It was a spectacular miscarriage of justice.”

Strangely, only a few western media outlets saw Köchler’s remarks as newsworthy.

Among those who saw the Lockerbie case as a miscarriage of justice was former South African President Nelson Mandela, who visited al-Megrahi in prison and declared that the man was innocent.

The acquittal of co-accused Lamin Khafilah Fhimah also made the case weak. The trial judges failed to take notice of the spurious attempts by the prosecution in coaching the main witness identified as Tony Gauci, a Maltese shop owner. Gauci claimed that al-Megrahi bought some clothes from his shop. He identified the clothes found in the wreckage but failed to pinpoint al-Megrahi at the first identification parade. Gauci, who was alleged to have been paid handsomely by his handlers, in his first statement claimed that al-Megrahi was a tall man. But al-Megrahi, whom Gauci identified at the second parade after his handlers showed him his photograph, was of average height.

There were also queries about how the explosives-laden suitcase managed to go through three airports – Malta, Frankfurt and Heathrow – in connecting flights. The prosecution failed to provide any evidence to explain this, say trial observers.

Journalist Paddy McGuffin in an article in the British Socialist newspaper Morning Star last week said ,”The claim that an explosive device was physically handled through three airports without suspicions arising is ludicrous.” He also says that investigators were told by a Heathrow airport security guard that a Pan Am baggage storage area at the airport had been broken into on the night of the bombing, indicating that the bomb could have been planted at Heathrow, but this vital evidence, given in a sworn affidavit, was withheld from the trial.

Independent observers also raised questions as to why the vital evidence gathered by German anti-terror officers was also ignored at the trial. They said German police arrested a Palestinian bomb maker with links to the PFLP, three weeks before the Lockerbie bombing. He was released due to lack of evidence, but in raids on his apartment months after the Lockerbie incident, detectives found two bombs specially made for targeting aircraft. Several Palestinians were arrested in these raids and a radio containing Semtex -the type of explosive used in the Lockerbie bomb – was also found.

Some western analysts say that the United States in 1990 diverted the investigation to target Libya and told the British government to stop probing Iran and Syria because the support of the latter two countries was necessary in the fight against Iraq during the first Gulf War. But others say the US knew who the real culprit was and did not want to come out with it.

McGuffin’s article also refereed to a 2007 report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on the al-Megrahi case to the High Court of Justiciary.  SCCRC chairman Rev Dr Graham Forbes said: “The commission is of the view, based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The full SCCRC report into the Lockerbie bombing has never been disclosed, however.

Should we say that justice has become a commodity in the hands of big powers?