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Thursday, September 17, 2009

[mukto-mona] FW: Bin Laden Again: Queer Ways Of Some Misguided Persons



 

 

Bin Laden  Again: Queer Ways Of Some Misguided Persons

 

AFP has reported from Washington that Osama bin Laden has told Americans to rethink their policies, in a new message in which he links their support for Israel to the September 11 attacks in 2001, a US-based monitoring group said. Titled ‘Message to the American People,’ the video — released on Sunday by the As-Sahab media production branch of al-Qaeda — features a still image of bin Laden and an audio statement, said IntelCentre, based outside Washington.     Bin Laden said that among ‘some other injustices,’ US support to Israel motivated al-Qaeda to launch the September 11 attacks, IntelCentre reported.  He also stated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were driven by the pro-Israeli lobby in the White House and corporate interests. ‘If you think about your situation well, you will know that the White House is occupied by pressure groups,’ he said, according to IntelCentre.
   ‘Rather than fighting to liberate
Iraq — as Bush claimed — it (the White House) should have been liberated.’  If Americans want to end their confrontation with al-Qaeda, bin Laden continued, they must reconsider their attitude toward the Jewish state.  ‘Put the file of your alliance with Israelis on the discussion table,’ he stated, according to IntelCentre’s translation of the address. ‘Ask yourselves to determine your position: is your security, your blood, your children, your money, your jobs, your homes, your economy, and your reputation dearer to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy?‘If you choose your security and cessation of war, and this is what the polls have shown, this requires you to work to punish those on your side who play with our security,’ Bin Laden said. ‘We are ready to respond to this choice on aforementioned sound and just bases.’ Obama’s retention of US defence secretary Robert Gates and other individuals from the Bush administration is confirmation of the president’s weakness, the al-Qaeda leader said.  ‘It will become clear to you in days that all you have changed in the White House are faces,’ he is quoted by IntelCentre as saying.‘The bitter truth is that the neo-conservatives continue to cast their heavy shadows upon you.’ Bin Laden urged Americans to pressure the White House to cease the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and US support to Israel, rather than succumb to what he called ‘the ideological terrorism’ exercised by neo-conservatives.
   .
   IntelCentre said bin Laden typically releases such a statement annually around September or October. The last audiotape by the al-Qaeda leader was released on June 3. That audiotape aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel less than an hour after Obama landed in
Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s home country, at the start of a Middle East tour.
We have been hearing about such video and audio tapes for a long time. He had been threatening all
western and other Muslim democratic and constitutional governments . Al these have been rejected by the leaders of all Islamic movements. The present statement is mild but such advice from a person of such bad record would hardly work. At the moment we are not sure  who are doing this .It may also be creation of some intelligence agencies that are adept in doing this type of work. Most likely Mr Bin Laden is dead as recently told by President of Pakistan. Some believe he is too sick to be functional. In any case such bravado by such people has only harmed image of Islam and Muslims. These people go on talking in hyperboles but they can not do anything except terrorism, suicide bombing, killing civilian innocent people, bombing Masjids and hospitals. Their understanding of  Islam is too harsh and narrow, just opposite to the values of Islam and the conduct of the Prophet (sm).If they hear our voice, we call upon them not to spoil the image of Islam and Muslims further. Muslims are in no mood to listen to  them.

 



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[mukto-mona] An article in the daily star



An article in The daily Star about environment for your kind consideration.....
 
Thanks
 
Regards,
 
Ripan K Biswas
New York
 
 
 
Committed to PEOPLE'S RIGHT TO KNOW
Friday, September 18, 2009 11:25 AM GMT+06:00  
 
Editorial

WHENEVER I see the 70-foot-tall digital billboard outside Penn Station in Manhattan, New York, displaying the running total of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, I feel scared because the changing climate is pushing many natural systems towards critical thresholds and will alter regional and global environmental balances.

We are altering the environment far faster than the prediction of the consequences. Comparable climate shifts have happened before, but over tens of centuries, not tens of years. The unprecedented rapid change could accelerate the already high rate of species extinction as plants and animals fail to adapt quickly enough. For the first time in history, humans are affecting the ecological balance of not just a region but also of the entire world, all at once.

Almost every day we hear of yet another problem, like pollution, acid rain, global warming, the destruction of rainforests and other wild habitats, the decline and extinction of thousands of species of animals and plants....and so on. We have the economic, intellectual and technological know-how to head off this calamity and avoid the disruption and misery that inaction would entail. These range from energy saving measures and clean and renewable energy sources, to more efficient transport and better planning and management of our economies.

The solutions are probably numerous and, according to many economists, ecologists, and environmentalists, even affordable when compared with the cost of complacency. But forests and trees can play a central and pivotal role in slowing down and reversing some of the damage of climate change if we utilise and manage them properly. At the global level, trees and forests are closely linked with weather patterns and also the maintenance of a crucial balance in nature.

As trees offer numerous benefits for mankind, wildlife and the environment, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the "Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign," people, communities, business and industry, civil society organisations and governments are encouraged to make tree planting pledges with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide each year. In a call to further individual and collective action, Unep has set a new goal of planting 7 billion trees by the end of 2009. The campaign strongly encourages the planting of trees that are indigenous and appropriate to the local environment.

While the movement towards a deeper commitment to environmental protection through planting new trees and taking care of the existing ones is rapidly increasing all over the world, a 10 km stretch of Teknaf beach in southeastern Bangladesh has turned barren after over 30,000 jhau (tamarisk) trees were felled by a section of local influential people during September 7-13. The forest department and other law enforcement agencies remained silent spectators of the mindless tree felling.

This report surely doesn't match with the government's earlier declaration that says that the government is going to give over 700,000 acres of land for tree plantation through a national campaign this year as part of Bangladesh's Climate Change Strategy Action Plan, which was finalised by an inter-ministerial committee on August 26.

Although law enforcement agencies arrested over half a dozen people including a former forest guard on charges of felling the tress, and recovered about 7,500 felled trees, the damage done to the environment through denuding the land will bring irremediable natural calamity to the coastal life of Teknaf. As coastal forests act as bioshields, around half a million tamarisk trees were planted in 1995 on 700 acres of sandy beach on a stretch of about 10 km from Shahparir Dwip in Sabrang Union of the upazila to Baharchhara to protect the lives and properties of the people from erosion. But now this stretch will be at risk in any natural disaster like cyclone and tidal surge as it has become denuded land.

People who can no longer farm on eroding coastal land are moving inward to cities already crammed with jobless and desperate masses. Smaller than Illinois, US, Bangladesh has 152.6 million people, half the US population. Imagine what it will be like in 50 years, when the Bay of Bengal is predicted to cover 11 percent of Bangladesh's land. By some estimates, a one-meter sea level rise would submerge about one-third of Bangladesh's total area, uprooting 25-30 million people.

Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century, says Nasa. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that Bangladesh was on course to lose 17% of its land and 30% of its food production by 2050. Bangladesh has already begun to feel the effects of climate change as flood periods have become longer and cyclones cause greater devastation. As sea levels rise, the IPCC warned that 35 million refugees could flee Bangladesh's flooded delta by 2050.

"We have a short time to avert serious climate change. We need action and we need to plant trees. Countering climate change can take root via one billion small but significant acts in our gardens, parks, countryside and rural areas," said Achim Steiner, Executive Director of Unep, at the launching of the "Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign." The same call was made by President Bangladesh Zillur Rahman when he inaugurated the afforestation programme-2009 on June 25. "We have to plant trees to bring back the lost serene environment," he said. Globally, forest cover is at least one-third less of what it once was.

Trees provide not only environmental protection but also significant income and livelihood options for more than one billion forest-dependent people in the world. Trees provide a wide range of products such as timber, fruit, medicine, beverages and fodder, and services like carbon sequestration, shade, beautification, erosion control, soil fertility. Without trees human life would be unsustainable. Their beauty adds diversity to the world's natural landscape. Trees also play an important cultural, spiritual and recreational role in many societies. In some cases, they are integral to the very definition and survival of indigenous and traditional cultures.

While we need to plant and preserve existing trees and forests to restore the earth's forests cover and the expanding carbon sinks, and to lessen the impact of global warming, some influential people in Bangladesh don't hesitate to destroy the valuable trees and forests for their ulterior motives. And their illegal attempts repeatedly prove beyond any doubt the government's concern about the environment and greenery at the field level..

The longer the risk is ignored, the more drastic the consequences will be.



Ripan Kumar Biswas is a columnist for The Daily Star. E-mail: Ripan.biswas@yahoo.com
 



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Re: [mukto-mona] Fw: UK Nirmul Com news



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[mukto-mona] FW: Bangladesh Bank Governor on Regional Co-operation --Asia Post editorial dated 16.9.09



 

 

 

 

Bangladesh Bank Governor on Regional Co-operation: Any Practical Initiative is Welcome
 

UNB reported a few days back that the Bangladesh Bank governor, Atiur Rahman, has said barbed wire fencing and looking for transit facilities through smaller members are unlikely to be helpful in promoting South Asia regional integration.
   ‘Erecting barbed wire fencing along state borders with neighbors does not resonate
well with integration priorities,’ he told a 3-day conference on ‘Global banking: paradigm shift’ in Mumbai, India .The governor was delivering a special address on ‘Financial integration in South Asia — a few thoughts on how best to go about it’ while trying to show path towards South Asian financial and monetary integration. ‘There can be other feasible options for dealing with illegal movement of goods and people,’ he said, recommending harmonization of tariffs towards cross-border price parity, permitting limited border trade, streamlining of immigration procedures and so forth. He said there was ample scope of substantially scaling up and speeding up the ongoing SAARC initiatives with an explicitly announced longer-term goal of full economic and monetary union. This would be a long haul even in most favorable circumstances while care will need to be exercised, especially by the larger members, not to impede progress in integration with unhelpful policy steps guided by other concerns, he added.  Atiur said looking for transit facilities through smaller members to remoter regions of larger economies instead of further facilitating trade of these remoter regions with neighboring smaller economies might likewise raise concerns unhelpful in promoting integration.He said regional central banks in their deliberations in Asian Clearing Union and other forums were active in carrying forward regional cooperation and integration in various dimensions.  ‘Non-governmental people-to-people contact and consultation forums could likewise be active in explicitly articulating the longer-term aspirations for full regional integration for faster progress towards prosperity of the people of our region.’He said protracted SAFTA negotiations for lowering tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade have been beset with complications of existence of input and output subsidies on many produces, and with concerns of producers in negotiating countries about preserving their current and future market shares.  ‘There has been no announced strategy statement of SAFTA for systematically allaying these concerns,’ said the Bangladesh Bank governor.

 

We feel that, though some of the issues raised by the governor such as transit and border trade are quite complicated, even then the governor has raised some important issues. It is true that border fencing does not represent a good move.It has neither reduced smuggling nor cross-border movements. Even killing of Bangladeshis by BSF has not reduced. It is also true that SAFTA discussion has moved very slowly .The financial and market integration is long way off. These depend on improvement of political environment. We are no where near it. In some areas tensions are increasing. Still we would welcome any progress in trade facilitation in the region.

 



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Re: [ALOCHONA] BDR Tragedy, True Findings




Dear RAW agent and Indian super slueth Khundkar,

I did not write or prepare the report. It was sent to me anonymously through the email. If you have any questions or queries you can find the relevant information from ahmadashiqulhamid@yahoo.com

The report carries new information that was not in the Army or Government reports into the BDR mutiny. While there are certain errors and the language is somewhat emotional the report cannot be easily dismissed.

Regards

MBI Munshi


 

--- On Thu, 9/17/09, Robin Khundkar <rkhundkar@earthlink.net> wrote:

From: Robin Khundkar <rkhundkar@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [ALOCHONA] BDR Tragedy, True Findings
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, September 17, 2009, 3:43 PM

 

Dear General Munshi Sahib of the Pakistan Army Cyber Auxiliary International Corps

This article is indeed trash!!! Is this the best your communal hate filled fossilised mind can up with. A mixture half truths mixed with unverifiable speculation (only your fellow deviants will think this is some fantastic revelation). All in line with your previous writings. Should be sent to the garbage can forthwith. Just reading it has wasted 15 minutes of valuable time.

Robin Khundkar

-----Original Message-----
From: mimunshi
Sent: Sep 16, 2009 4:34 AM
To: alochona@yahoogroup s.com
Subject: [ALOCHONA] BDR Tragedy, True Findings

 

PEELKHANA CONSPIRACY

PROLOGUE

Entire Bangladesh is convinced that "Peelkhana massacre was the outcome of a long and deep-rooted conspiracy." But there is a mystery shrouding the background of Peelkhana carnage. Somehow or the other, people of Bangladesh do not still know the entire truth. This article endeavors to un-shroud the hidden truth. Purpose is not to vindicate anyone, the pure purpose is to erase the lies and bring the truth to the open. You are not required to believe whatever follows. It is totally up to your judgment. If you believe, you may pass it on to persons who may try to spread the message so that justice, the rarest phenomenon on planet earth, may see light in Bangladesh today, tomorrow or year after. If you don't believe this article, utter a curse and just put this article into trash and forget it.

FULL STORY

http://deshcalling. blogspot. com/2009_ 09_13_archive. html




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[ALOCHONA] Hocus-pocus may derail BDR massacre trial



Hocus-pocus may derail BDR massacre trial
 
M Shahidul Islam
 
Justice and law are distant cousins. In times when law and justice fail to connect, as seems to be the scenarios evolving now with respect to the prospective trial of the Peelkhana massacre of February 25-26, powerful emotions are bound to be unleashed by aggrieved parties, unless the usefulness of law meets the demand of justice.
   The recent decision of the government to conduct the trial in two different courts comes at the risk of (1) overruling the recommendations of two of the three investigation bodies, and (2) alienating the sentiments of the armed forces, who are the victims of those heinous crimes.
   The decision also leaves unanswered many vital questions, which should have been satisfactorily dealt with in order to ensure judicial fairness and the kind of political correctness deserved by such an unprecedented crime. Instead, what follows will indicate in a nutshell that the handling of this most sensitive affair has so far been anything but hocus-pocus.
   Justice demands sparing of innocents and convictions of all who had planned, aided and executed such a horrendous crime. That implies a venture beyond the conventional circle, the Peelkhana compound.
   It also seeks answer to some other questions: will the decision to conduct the trials under both BDR law (for rebellion and mutiny) and the penal code in Special Tribunals (for murder, rape and other criminal offences) meet the expectation of those, who are heirs of the victims?
   Last but not the least-will the justice system so devised address the most important concern of the nation? Who was behind this crime to destroy the nation?s armed forces?
   
   Unwarranted complications
   Critics say although the decision to refer the debate to the Supreme Court by the President apparently aimed at ensuring Constitutional correctness, it was otherwise. They say that despite the Constitution having stipulated in Article 35 ensuring of any trial under the laws existing at the time of commission of the crimes, the existing laws did allow the Army Act to be extended to the trial of the Peelkhana massacre, something the government managed to avoid by doing what it did so far in the most circuitous manner.
   The government is thus accused of biding its time and allowing destruction of vital evidence that could probe preponderantly the involvement of forces - other than BDR members - within and outside the country in commission of the crimes.
   Fear is also growing that the real intent in doing so is to keep the trial limited to the accused BDR members only, although the crime has had its tentacles spread beyond the BDR personnel by virtue of having stemmed from reasons and pretences that had serious political connotations and connections, and had matured over months prior to the occurrences of February 25-26.
   
   A radical departure
   Besides, two of the three investigation reports having recommended holding of the trial under the Bangladesh Army Act, and the Army Act having sufficed to try the accused of over 20 other rebellions that the nation had witnessed since Independence in 1971, a radical departure in this particular instance is bound to raise further suspicion unless the true masterminds of the crimes are brought to justice along with the accused BDR personnel.
   At the same time, the argument that the Army Act could not be applied to the BDR trials with a 'retrospective effect? by issuing a gazette notification under Section 5(1) of the Act remains a nebulous one in the context of the gravity of the crime, the interpretation it brooks, and the justice it demands.
   Not only Section 5(1) of the Army Act has the requisite mandate to apply it to any disciplined force by issuing a gazette notification -and the BDR is one of such forces - the naked time-wasting debate over interpretation of the words like 'prospective? and 'retrospective? is being considered by many legal experts as mere 'invention of convenience.?
   An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "after the fact") - also known as retroactive law - is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of acts committed, or the legal status of facts and relationships that existed prior to the enactment of that law. In reference to criminal law, it may criminalise actions that were legal when committed or aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe category than it was in at the time it was committed, or change or increase the punishment prescribed for a crime, by adding new penalties or extending terms. It may as well alter the rules of evidence in order to make conviction for a crime more likely than it would have been at the time of the action, for which prosecution occurs.
   That is one side of it, which the Amici Curie had used to the fullest extent. Conversely, another form of ex post facto law, commonly known as an amnesty law, may decriminalise certain acts or alleviate possible punishments (for example, by replacing death sentence with life-long imprisonment), retroactively. Although most common law jurisdictions do not permit retroactive criminal legislation, some exceptions are illuminating. In Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Co., 215 U.S. 349, 372 (1910) it was stated that, "Judicial decisions have had retrospective operation for nearly a thousand years." That means a court?s interpretation of law becomes retroactive each time a new precedent is applied to events that occurred prior to that judicial decision. In some nations that follow the Westminster system of government, such as the UK, ex post facto laws are technically possible due to the 'doctrine of parliamentary supremacy? allowing parliament to pass any law it wishes, any time.
   Contrasts, connivance and conspiracies
   This begs another relevant argument: Why did our government choose not to use the parliament if it thought laws were needed to be changed to try a mutiny as a mutiny, not with as outdated a law as the BDR Act, where the punishment is only seven years of imprisonment. The reasons are as much political as they are historic.
   The Indemnity Ordinance of 1975 was a retroactive law, which the last AL regime changed after coming to power in 1996 in order to facilitate trial of Mujib killers. Ironically, the 1975 Indemnity Ordinance was annulled without using the two- thirds votes in the parliament - as was required by law, which the AL did not have. Now the AL does have the two-thirds majority to change the existing laws, including giving retrospective effect to subsection 5 of the Army Act, if it is deemed necessary. But the government is pursuing the most dubious and circuitous way only to spare some people, whose direct and indirect involvement in the Peelkhana massacre has been unearthed by investigators.
   We have learnt from authentic sources about commission of other dreadful conspiracies and cover-ups that can no way be swept aside as insignificant. Earlier, one of the 'suspected politicians? was first made to be hospitalised within the country when the army investigators requested to interrogate him, and, later, he was sent abroad for treatment. The concerned politician only returned to the country upon being assured that he would not be interrogated.
   Likewise, another powerful politician was ordered by high-ups in the executive, and then heli-lifted to Sylhet two days prior to the Peelkhana rebellion to, according to sources, 'meet some foreign commandos? while the media report confirmed him being on a trip abroad at that time.
   Upon being exposed, the pilot of the helicopter died in a mysterious chopper crash along with a Major General while the concerned politician resigned from his post in a flurry of events, of which the public knows little as yet.
   Then there are other oblique utterances and wolf crying by responsible personalities within the government. It is one thing for the government not wanting to use certain segment of the Army Act in a retrospective manner.
   On September 16, the law minister said, "A decision has been taken to recommend issuance of a notification under Section 5 of the Army Act 1952 to apply the Act on the Bangladesh Rifles so that the BDR soldiers could be tried under the Act for any recurrence of rebellion and heinous crimes in future." Almost in tandem with this expressed fear of recurrence of such a crime, the PM said in the Parliament the same day, "BDR-type incident may happen elsewhere" and her loyalists should stand guard against that.
   These are not mere hyperboles or propaganda whippings. Insiders say these are the feedings from the intelligence outfits, and, despite that being the reality, the melodrama relating to the trial continues unabated.
   The referral of the matter to the Supreme Court and soliciting of opinions from a number of 'partisan? experts, many of whom even served in higher positions of the AL-led administrations in the past, is one of those dramatic exercises.
   
   Precedents ignored
   Such displays of stunts and theatrics notwithstanding, the lack of knowledge and expertise was quite noticeable so far in the manner the issue is being handled. For example, some of the Amici Curie argued that there was no precedent of retrospective application of law in the subcontinent.
   This is not true. In August 2007, a Delhi court ruled that the Domestic Violence Act of India could be applied retrospectively. The court opined that an abused woman could seek relief under India?s domestic violence law for atrocities perpetrated against her before the statute came into force.
   "The present enactment is mere expression of remedies, which had not been existing previously and are now made available," Delhi Metropolitan Magistrate, Nirja Bhatia said while ruling that the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 was to be given retrospective effect. The decision followed initiation of a complaint of alleged violations committed prior to the law being enforced on October 26, 2006. Judge Bhatia noted in the verdict, "The Act sought enforcement of existing rights that are guaranteed to citizens under the Indian Constitution."
 



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[ALOCHONA] london Rev of Books - The Framing of al-Megrahi



 

 

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce

London Review of Books

24 September 2009

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/print/peir01_.html

 

Gareth Peirce is a defence lawyer who has represented many men and women in their appeals against wrongful convictions made on the basis of disputed scientific evidence, misidentification and police malpractice.

 

It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi's original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process.

 

The devastation caused by the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, at the cost of 270 lives, deserved an investigation of utter integrity. Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights demands no less. Where there has been a death any inquiry must be independent, effective and subject to public scrutiny, to provide the basis for an attribution of responsibility and to initiate criminal proceedings where appropriate. But, in the absence of this, a number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi's trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

 

Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police.

 

Each aspect of every criminal investigation in Britain has to meet certain essential standards; where they are not met, these parts of the investigation should not in principle become the basis of a prosecution. There must be precise notes made of each physical exhibit found and by whom; its movements must be tracked; each time an exhibit is inspected, a record must be kept. The rationale is obvious: without a precise record, interference, contamination or simple mistakes could jeopardise a prosecutor's reliance on evidence that should be tangible and therefore potentially more convincing. For that reason, a crime scene must be sealed off until searches are complete.

 

Those engineering the destruction of a transatlantic airliner in mid-flight might have believed that it would be likely to happen over the sea. Instead, Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and its fall-out was scattered over an area too huge to cordon off. The first and most desperate searches were for the passengers: could any have survived? Volunteers included a police surgeon from Yorkshire who had driven to the site as soon as he heard the news; together with the local police, he and others searched non-stop for 24 hours. They found bodies, none showing any sign of life; the doctor labelled each of the bodies he found, more than 50 of them, noting the place of discovery. Once it was clear there were no survivors, a search for evidence of the cause of the explosion would begin.

 

Extraordinarily, however, distinct from the Dumfries and Galloway police, scores of men, some wearing no insignia, some the insignia of the FBI and Pan Am (it was noted at the time that many of these men were clearly not Pan Am staff), invaded the area. Lockerbie residents reported seeing unmarked helicopters hovering overhead, carrying men with rifles whose telescopic sights were pointing directly at them. And when, much later, items of baggage came to be married up with the passengers they had accompanied, there were disturbing signs of interference. The suitcase belonging to Major McKee (a CIA operative flying back to the US to report on his concern that the couriering of drugs was being officially condoned as a way to entrap users and dealers in the US) was found to have had a hole cut in its side after the explosion, while the clothes in the suitcase were shown on subsequent analysis to bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found.

 

Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution.

 

In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket.

 

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of barometric timers is that they aren't activated until the plane is airborne – the bomb won't go off on the ground if the plane is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes would elapse before the air pressure dropped enough as the plane gained height to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found.

 

Forensic scientists believed that the radio had been in a suitcase in which there were clothes whose label was traced to a shop in Malta. A search of the house of a man affiliated to the group that manufactured the Toshiba bombs produced clothes bought in Malta; it was established too that he had travelled to Malta before the bombing. And the owner of the Maltese shop from which the clothes were thought to have been purchased identified to his brother, without prompting, a newspaper photograph of that man as the person who had bought the clothes found in the suitcase with the bomb inside.

 

But the man who bought the clothes was not al-Megrahi, nor was he Libyan. The group making Toshiba radio cassette bombs had no connection at all with Libya. Neither the man nor the group was ever prosecuted for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. The fact that the explosion took place exactly when one would have expected it to if a Toshiba cassette bomb had been used was ignored: the bomb had not, the prosecution contended at al-Megrahi's trial, been triggered by a barometric switch in this way. The Lockerbie device, it claimed, was different from the devices made by the group. The difference was that it was a Toshiba cassette radio with one speaker rather than two. From a logically compelling case that seemed to point clearly in one direction the prosecution switched tack, but not at the beginning: not, in fact, until two years after the bombing, when the politics of the Middle East shifted and new allies had to be found quickly if the flow of cheap oil were to continue.

 

It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the co-operation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on 'identification' evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy. Fabrication demands outright dishonesty, but it isn't always necessary, or necessary in every aspect of an investigation: the momentum of suspicion, and a blinkered determination to focus on a particular thesis and ignore evidence pointing to the contrary, is a certain route to achieving the desired end. Al-Megrahi is reported as saying that he has evidence, which will be revealed on his death, that will prove his innocence. But it is clear even from the evidence that can be looked at today that his conviction was extremely disturbing.

 

For the first two years there was no mention at all of Libya. The investigation originally seemed to have clear evidence of a motive (tit for tat retaliation); evidence of the existence of a bomb intended to destroy airliners in mid-flight contained in the same brand of cassette radio discovered on the plane; and evidence implicating a Palestinian splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, which was prepared at the time to hire itself out to regimes that were known to be state sponsors of terrorism; Syria was one (somewhat earlier, Libya had been another), so was Iran.

 

Behind every crime there is of course a motive. For the initial prime suspect, Iran, the motive was brutally clear. In July 1988 a US battleship, the Vincennes, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, with 290 passengers, many of them pilgrims en route to Mecca. There were no survivors. By chance a television crew was on the Vincennes when the attack took place and images of triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship's commander and crew were awarded high military honours.

 

Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged 'in blood-splattered skies'. At the same time, US Air Force Command issued a warning to its civilian contractors: 'We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion – mass casualties.' Warnings became more specific: 'We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.' Within days, US intelligence was convinced that Iran meant business; and the CIA in due course acknowledged that it had intelligence that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC, had met government officials in Iran and offered his services.

 

Such a partnership would indeed have been ominous, since the activities of the PFLP-GC had since 1970 included planting bombs on planes – bombs built into transistor radios and detonated by a barometric pressure switch. It was in this context that the flood of warnings immediately preceding the disaster had obvious significance for the subsequent investigation. One of them read: 'team of Palestinians not associated with PLO intends to attack US targets in Europe. Time frame is present. Targets specified are Pan Am Airlines and US military bases.' Five weeks before this warning, a PFLP-GC cell had been arrested in Germany. The PFLP-GC was precisely a 'team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO'. Jibril's right-hand man, Haffez Dalkamoni, was arrested in Frankfurt with a known bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, as they visited electrical shops in the city. In the boot of Dalkamoni's car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Later US intelligence officials confirmed that members of the group had been monitoring Pan Am's facilities at Frankfurt airport. Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He said that a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches had been built. Although Dalkamoni was prosecuted in Germany, Khreesat was inexplicably released; it only later became clear that he had been acting throughout as an undercover agent for Jordanian intelligence, which is extraordinarily close to the CIA (the CIA played a central role in its creation). On Dalkamoni's account, other bombs made by Khreesat were at large somewhere, including the one built into a second Toshiba player.

 

On 9 November 1988 Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was 'imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff are to be extra vigilant'. Over the next three weeks the airport received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities. (A document giving information and advice was drawn up by the UK's principal aviation security adviser on 19 December, but there were problems obtaining colour photographs and delays in the Christmas post and most airlines did not receive it until the new year, weeks after the disaster.)

 

In March 1989, less than three months after the downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although such conversations are customarily regarded as not for attribution, the next morning's newspapers revealed that a cabinet minister had stated that those responsible for the Lockerbie bombing had been identified and would soon be arrested.

 

At precisely the same time, however, the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to keep Lockerbie 'low-key', to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political interest in the case and desire to identify who was responsible for the disaster disappeared. The victims' families demanded evidence that a proper inquiry was being conducted and in September 1989 Channon's successor, Cecil Parkinson, met the newly formed UK Families Flight 103. He promised them a full judicial inquiry. Thatcher countermanded this promise, and he returned to the relatives with an admission of total failure. 'Low-key' meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries.

 

As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later Parkinson took part in a television programme about another horrific disaster, the sinking of the Marchioness, in which he confirmed that it was Thatcher who had blocked a judicial inquiry. He remembered discussing with the Lockerbie relatives whether, 'because the security services were involved', a High Court judge could look into the security aspects and report privately to him: 'Because when you get into the Lockerbie business – how did we find out certain information, how did we know this, how did we know that? – you would have had to recall not only our own intelligence sources but information we were receiving from overseas. Therefore that had to be a closed area.' This suggested the real block.

 

Nevertheless, investigators had clearly remained confident that despite government diffidence a prosecution would soon be brought. Late in 1989 an imminent arrest once again seemed tantalisingly on the cards. The Sunday Times (known to enjoy detailed briefings from the police and security services) reported that the 'net was closing' on the Lockerbie suspects and stated categorically that the bombing had been carried out by the German PFLP-GC cell led by Dalkamoni under orders from Ahmad Jibril and with a bomb made by Khreesat. What was new was the suggestion that the bomb had first been put on a plane not in Frankfurt but in Malta. Clothes made in Malta, the report added, had been found in the suitcase in which police believed the bomb had been planted. A member of Dalkamoni's cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, had, it revealed, visited Malta. He was the man identified by the shop owner: the man who had clothes bought in Malta in his possession. The Sunday Times articles went on to predict that Abu Talb would be extradited at any moment to stand trial for the bombing.

 

The suggestion that the bomb was placed on a plane from Malta was made in an attempt to link the discovery of the Maltese clothes with the already existing evidence of the German group. As no passengers transferred from Air Malta to Pan Am 103A in Frankfurt, the feeder flight for Pan Am 103, it would have had to be an unaccompanied bag from Malta that carried the bomb. Two documents were said to have been discovered: a list of the stages followed by Frankfurt airport's automated baggage system which related to Pan Am 103, and a handwritten worksheet from one of the several stations from which baggage came into the system. As this was official information, it must have been given lock, stock and barrel by investigators to the journalist in question.

 

A fundamental objection to the last part of the new thesis was blindingly clear: if the intended target was an American aircraft, why risk a premature explosion triggered by the barometric switch by putting the suitcase on an Air Malta flight? The scientific underpinning necessary to support a counter-proposition was established during 1989 and 1990 and rested on two 'discoveries': a fragment of an entirely different type of timer in the remnant of a shirt collar and the matching of that fragment with the manufacturer's prototype. This timer, it was argued, could, once set, keep a barometric switch from detonating for days. It was in the development of this proposition that every safeguard fundamental to a criminal investigation came to be jettisoned.

 

That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

 

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein's invading army.

 

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he 'developed the policy towards Libya' which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi's house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation's approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated.

 

Years of protracted negotiations were to take place before the Libyan government agreed to release the two men to stand trial in a 'neutral country'. It was not until May 2000 that the two Libyan Airlines officials who had run the airline's office in Malta finally went on trial – in a purpose-built court outside Utrecht created from a mothballed air-force base – under Scots law, albeit before three judges rather than a jury. What did Gaddafi expect when he agreed to the extradition of the two men? That they would in due course be exonerated because they were innocent but that he would meanwhile reap the diplomatic benefit by having delivered them? The idea of their individual responsibility was anyway peculiar: as agents of a state where not a mouse squeaks without the say-so of Gaddafi, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were either ordered to do what it was said they did, in which case dealing with Gaddafi as a statesman then and now has been beyond hypocrisy – or the thesis was wrong.

 

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

 

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. 'I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.' This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

 

On 13 September 1995 the FBI's forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been 'circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence'.

 

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi's barrister in his closing speech as an 'illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match'. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges commented that Bollier's evidence was 'inconsistent' and 'self-contradictory'. Other witnesses, they found, had 'openly lied to the court'. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

 

Bollier had been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for the prosecution. But Dr Köchler, the UN's observer throughout the trial, recorded that Bollier had been 'brusquely interrupted' by the presiding judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently 'discovered'? After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of al-Megrahi's now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by Bollier's firm, stated in an affidavit to Köchler that in 1989 he stole a 'non-operational' timing board from MEBO and handed it to 'a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case'. Bollier himself told Köchler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to Libya.

 

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes's findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled 'cloth (charred)' by him, but then overwritten as 'debris' even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been 'found' by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive.

 

Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes's key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital fragment that information was either missing or had been altered, although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie investigation.

 

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had 'no idea' when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

 

Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes's colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: 'Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.' No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday's note continued: 'I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.' Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes' pagination was described by Hayes as 'an unfathomable mystery'. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? The new evidence of the former MEBO employee who stole a circuit board would of course have been ripe for analysis by the Court of Appeal, which has now been discharged from considering new evidence in al-Megrahi's lately abandoned appeal.

 

A secondary important proposition for the Crown to consider was that the suitcase was on the second layer of a luggage container on the aircraft – which meant that it must have come from Frankfurt. Examining the largest surviving fragment of the outside case of the Toshiba device on 25 January 1989, Hayes had considered its state consistent with its having been at the base of the container. This would have contradicted the Crown's position that the device was in a suitcase that had arrived last, as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt, and so was nearer the top. By the time he gave evidence at the trial, Hayes had revised his assessment of its position.

 

(Since the trial, evidence new to the defence but known from the start to the police has surfaced of a break-in at Heathrow in the hours before the disaster. The Fatal Accident Inquiry, which didn't have this knowledge, had made a finding in 1991 that Pan Am 103 was 'under constant guard at Heathrow'. Iran Air's hangar at Heathrow was next to Pan Am's.)

 

This isn't the first time we have heard of Hayes and Feraday. Among the many wrongful convictions in the 1970s for which RARDE scientists were responsible, Hayes played his part in the most notorious of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, 'fitted the description better' of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper. Both were convicted and imprisoned on this evidence, together with their parents and their uncle Giuseppe Conlon, who was to die in prison. All were later found to be innocent.

 

Although Feraday was often addressed by the prosecution as 'Dr' or 'Professor' when he gave evidence, he had no relevant academic qualifications, only a higher national certificate in physics and electronics some 30 years old. Dr Michael Scott, whose evidence has been preferred in appeals to that of Feraday, commented that 'the British government employed hundreds of people who were extraordinarily well qualified in the areas of radio communication and electronics. Alan Feraday is not qualified yet they use him. I have to ask the question why.' Feraday, like his US counterpart Thurman, has now been banned from future appearances as an expert witness, but he had already provided the key evidence in a roll-call of convictions of the innocent. A note of a pre-trial conference with counsel prosecuting Danny McNamee (who was wrongly convicted of involvement in a bombing in Hyde Park) provides a typical instance: 'F [Feraday] prepared to say it [a circuit board] purely for bombing purposes, no innocent purpose.' The implication here was that anyone who had involvement with this circuit board would have knowingly been involved in bomb construction. That, in common with many other assertions made by Feraday, was entirely false, but it resulted in McNamee's imprisonment for 11 years.

 

To discover that al-Megrahi's conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness's memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as '6'0''' (he was 5'8''), '50 years old' (he was 37), and 'hefty'; said that he 'had been to the shop before and after', 'had been there only once'; that he 'saw him in a bar months later'; that he 'will sign statement even though I don't speak English'; that al-Megrahi 'was similar but not identical', 'perhaps like him but not fully like him', and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was 'like the man in the Sunday Times' (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci's evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars.

 

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict 'incomprehensible' in view of the court's admission that Gauci's identification was 'not absolute'. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. 'The guilty verdict', Köchler wrote, was 'arbitrary, even irrational' with an 'air of international power politics' present 'in the whole verdict', which was 'based on a series of highly problematic inferences'. He remarked on the withholding of 'substantial information' ('more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework') and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his 'suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case'. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

 

Al-Megrahi's trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr K̦chler recorded at its conclusion that it was 'not fair' and that it was not 'conducted in an objective manner', so that there were 'many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning'. Since then, these doubts have not disappeared: on the contrary, the questions are graver, the doubts have grown and so has the strength of the evidence on which they are based. K̦chler's observations continue to have compelling relevance; he found the respect of the court, the defence lawyers included, for the 'shrouds of secrecy' and 'national security considerations' to be 'totally incomprehensible to any rational observer'. 'Proper judicial procedure,' he continued, 'is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services Рfrom whichever side Рsucceed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court.'

 

The term miscarriage of justice carries with it the inference of accident, but also of death. There is a pressing need to investigate in detail how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case – the death of justice – and who should be found responsible.



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