Rumours at the time suggested Flight 103 was being used for drug smuggling. The claim is that US Intelligence knew about it which is why they were in Lockerbie so quickly. It’s even been suggested a body was spirited away. It’s claimed there was a lot of tampering with the evidence. ibid.
What if Flight 103 was targeted not as an attack on America but to assassinate a group of rival spies instead? At least six of the victims were US Intelligence agents, which is too much of a coincidence for some ... One of the victims was a military intelligence officer called Major Charles McKee. He was running a secret mission to Lebanon. ibid.
A witness said that he saw the co-defendants at Malta Airport on the day of the bombing. He claims he saw the two men with the bomb-bag. But the trail judges had doubts about much of his evidence because the witness was in the pay of US Intelligence. ibid.
Did national governments conspire to hide who really bombed Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie? Conspiracy s1e5: The Lockerbie Plot, History 2019
December 1988: A bomb exploded on board a Pan Am 747 as it was flying over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In total 270 people died. It remains Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack. ibid.
The DEA were supposedly running a controlled drug route between Frankfurt and Detroit through Heathrow. Stewart Nicol, journalist
There was a rumour that the arms for hostages deal was in the air. Stewart Nicol
Early on in the police investigation into what had happened they came up with what was then a very credible line of inquiry that the flight had been targeted purely and simply to get rid of McKee. An indication as to just how correct this story was was that they offered me as the author of the story an interview with anyone I felt I was able to share the secret of the source with, including the then prime minister Mrs Thatcher. David Johnston, journalist
The official version is just downright wrong; Libya had nothing to do with it. Tam Dalyell, former MP
A police sergeant came to me to say that he was very uncomfortable that there were so many Americans sort of ruffling round searching for things in a way that would be quite unacceptable in a British murder investigation. Tam Dalyell
Had it been known in the United States that the government knew enough to pull the VIPs off – the Moscow Embassy, the South Africans, the servicemen – and left the youngsters, the students, to travel to their death, the American public would have been furious that the government could have done any such thing. Tam Dalyell
Colonel Gaddafi paid compensation because he desperately wanted to get back into the international trading circuit and have sanctions lifted. Tam Dalyell
I’m angry at the injustice of it. I also don’t understand how those judges ever arrived at that conclusion which will be proved unsafe one day. Tam Dalyell
I think it’s highly unlikely that one group of CIA officers would try to assassinate another group of CIA officers and kill lots of civilians in the process. David Shayler
Six miles above the people of Lockerbie there’s an explosion aboard 103. Days that Shook the World: Black September/Lockerbie, BBC 2003
A three-hundred-foot fireball engulfs the town. ibid.
There were twelve children under the age of ten on board. ibid.
It’s also Britain’s worst miscarriage of justice. The wrong man was convicted. And the real killers are still out there. John Ashton, investigator
Using the labels police traced the damaged clothing back to a clothes shop in Malta called Mary’s House. Lockerbie - The Lost Evidence, BBC Scotland 2012
The dying man [Megrahi] who has always protested his innocence feels evidence was hidden from him. ibid.
If it was dry on December 7th [purchase of brolly from shop] that couldn’t have been the day the clothes were bought ... Before December 7th there was no evidence Megrahi was in Malta. ibid.
Tests raise doubts that the fragments matches the timers sent to Libya. ibid.
The hysteria over the release of the so-called Lockerbie bomber reveals much about the political and media class on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Britain. From Gordon Brown’s ‘repulsion’ to Barack Obama’s ‘outrage’, the theatre of lies and hypocrisy is dutifully attended by those who call themselves journalists. ‘But what if Megrahi lives longer than three months?’ whined a BBC reporter to the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond. ‘What will you say to your constituents, then?’
Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he ‘pays’ for his ‘heinous crime’: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose ‘compassion’ allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to ‘face justice from a higher power’. Amen.
The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as ‘a babbling brook of bullshit’. Such eloquence summarises the circus of Megrahi’s release.
No-one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of ‘strategic interests’.
‘The endgame came down to damage limitation,’ said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, ‘because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.’ New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft – he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.
The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, ‘discovered’ in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was ‘transferred’ through two airports undetected to Flight 103.
A ‘key secret witness’ at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused, al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted), loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a ‘protected witness’. The defence exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyan’s conviction, up to $4m as a reward.
Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in ‘neutral’ Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a ‘mass of conflicting evidence’ and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page ‘opinion’, wrote Foot, ‘is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice’.
Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the ‘architect’ of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to ‘low-key’ the disaster after their intelligence services had reported ‘beyond doubt’ that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group, contracted by Tehran, as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr ‘for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer’.
Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a ‘coalition’ to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. ‘Like lazy and overfed fish’, wrote Foot, ‘the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and open warmongering against Libya’. The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US defence intelligence agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be the centrepiece of Megrahi’s defence.
In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. ‘The commission is of the view,’ said its chairman, Graham Forbes, ‘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 words ‘miscarriage of justice’ are entirely missing from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that ‘higher power’. What a disgrace. John Pilger, article September 2009, ‘Lockerbie: Megrahi was Framed’