Observations on Lockerbie

What goes around comes around. Following news that the conviction of the former Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing had been referred back to the appeal court, the BBC News website summarised what it called "the awkward questions". Was the evidence at Megrahi's trial contaminated by the American or British authorities? Was Libya implicated out of political expediency?

The report may have struck a chord with NS readers. "The unanswered questions about Flight 103" was our 17 April 2000 headline on a 2,000-word feature, written by Colin Smith. The questions - raised before Megrahi's trial in Holland - were identical to those now being posed.

Which raises more questions. Why were most newspapers apparently convinced before 1991 that another person, from another country entirely, had been responsible for the bombing? Why were they equally convinced of Megrahi's guilt for the next 13 years? And why, over the past three years, have worms of doubt increasingly invaded the collective press mind?

Smith, the former Observer correspondent who wrote our report, has an intimate knowledge of terrorism and the Middle East.

Lockerbie came just five months after a US warship shot down an Iranian civil aircraft, killing 290 people. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, almost everyone believed, was Iran's revenge, with assistance from its ally Syria. One man in particular - an Egyptian-born Palestinian called Mohammed Abu Talb, by then serving life imprisonment in Sweden for another, minor bombing - was thought responsible.

Then, late in 1991, the US justice department produced ("like a rabbit out of a hat", as Smith put it) a Libyan agent who had defected. He "revealed" a Libyan plot, involving Megrahi and an accomplice, later acquitted.

Smith smelled a rat. In 1991, Syria had joined the first Gulf war coalition against Iraq, while Iran remained neutral. Was this a thank you from the US and Britain to their new allies? Smith and the NS were not alone in thinking so. Many relatives of the Lockerbie victims, including Jim Swire, their UK spokesman, continued to blame Iran. After Megrahi's conviction, the case for his innocence was taken up by other journalists, notably the late Paul Foot in Private Eye. But, for most papers, the only issue was whether the "mass murderer" was enjoying too much luxury in prison.

If you were of a very suspicious mind, you might have smelled more rats. The agreement by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi to hand over the two suspects was clearly linked to the US's subsequent suspension of trade sanctions and Britain's restoration of diplomatic relations. Since 2004, Gaddafi has been even more of a good boy. He became Tony Blair's new best friend and he renounced nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Iran gets wickeder, allegedly planning a nuclear programme and arming terrorists in Iraq. Syria is in the doghouse for supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It really is terribly convenient for the US and British authorities that the blame now shift back to Iran and Syria and away from poor, misunderstood Libya.

However, the judicial process is inviolable. So is Her Majesty's Press. And we shouldn't believe in conspiracy theories anyway. All the same, the Megrahi affair is a reminder that most of what you read in the press about terrorism - including what you currently read about Iranian wickedness and who "masterminded" which bombings in Britain - comes from the intelligence services, the police, or government officials. It is admirably democratic of them to share their thinking with us, betraying, albeit behind various cloaks of anonymity, their sometimes bewildering switches of opinion. Journalists on daily and Sunday papers (even, God bless him, the Sunday Times's investigative king David Leppard, who, in a rare double, "revealed" the guilt of both Talb and Megrahi) cannot ignore what our democratically accountable public servants tell them. They can't always be saying you shouldn't believe it.

As for those folk on the NS and Private Eye, they're subversives, and they only print the stuff that undermines the establishment - improbable stuff like the CIA spiriting people away for torture, or Saddam Hussein getting rid of his weapons of mass destruction, or the British and US governments framing an innocent man. Still, every now and again, they may just turn out to be right.

Peter Wilby, editor of the NS from 1998 to 2005, writes a media column for the Guardian. His NS column, The Thinking, returns next week

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