Megrahi dies

Will we ever know the truth about Lockerbie?

By New statesman Published 20 May 2012
New Statesman
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, September 2009 (Photo: Getty Images)

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer and the only person to be convicted for the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, has died at his home in Tripoli. He was 60 years old. Megrahi had been living in Tripoli since 2009, when he was freed from prison in Scotland on compassionate grounds.

Many, including some of the families of the victims of PanAm flight 103, have never been convinced of Megrahi's guilt. In the New Statesman in September 2009, shortly after Megrahi's release, John Pilger wrote:

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 ... “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 shopowner 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.

 

 
 

6 comments

Charles Norrie's picture

Thu, 2012-05-31 17:23 — Charles Norrie (not verified)

Mr Magrahi (sic, for that is how he spelled his name on the student card he filled in at Swansea) did not do Locerbie and he was chosen by the CIA to take the balme when they could not maintain the case against their preferred targets the PFLP GC or PPSF, because Syria was a silent ally in the first Gulf War, and the exercise was necessary for the French had got a real culprit in UT-772 and the CIA had in part carried out Lockerbie itself. That is a bold claim but provable.

IR655, the Iranian Airbus was downed on 3rd July 1988 with two main aims; to kill the head of the Iranian end of I-C and get the unelectable HW Bush into the White Hose in a khaki election.

The US has continued to try to deny IR655; the Iranians knew that they had done it, producing the body of an Iranian child, which the CIA tried to claim was Kuwaiti, changing the written record to do so. For the child was a kinswoman of Ahmad Beladi Behbehani, inferrably head of the Iranian end of I-C. Under Iranian traditional law that gave ABB the right to kill exactly the same number of US protected killers on a US aircraft, some 254, and if you do the sums right, that's what happened. The odds against that are 64,516:1. he Airbus was but three years old, the Maid of teh \seas a warehorse somwe 17 years old and a member of the US CRAF fleet.

So at Hethrow, T3 it was cynically loaded to the 254 mark, with somne US spooks required to make the plot work. And took off and exploded on time according to a plane hatched in Langley and largely executed out of Frankfurt where is where the CIA's Iranina office was.

All these facts are absolutely provable by the way and I can confirm them. Fr instance Sermour Hersh a noted US commentator on the CIA says the CIA's office was in Frankfurt, and Lra Marlowe reported on the death of the thre-year old Behbehani in a green party dress. Her story only emerged when Marlowe produced her collected pieces in a book three years ago.

The Iranian revenge code is only 2700 years old rather more than the less exalted US Consitution., and despite its age may still be called into play, if needed.

The bombing of Pan Am 103 was complex to ssy the least. 30 minutes after the Maid had reached the 6000' level, the IED in the forehold exploded destroying the secondary radar. Because the Iranians had souped up the IED, I suggest by about 1kg making it 1.4kg, the whole of the nose pf teh Miad was torn off and landed some 5 milkes away from the rest of the aircraft.

But its travails were not over. 7 seconds after the IED went off the CIA noted the absence of the secondary radra and began to denotae a pager bomb (there was a pager system in operation in the UK in 1988) and so seven seconds later a "package bomb" in the main cabin of the Maid exploded. This caused the horrendous injuries of most of the peoplke sitting there.

The pathologist attempted to claim that the bodoies had broken up by air friction but this is nonsense. Bodies reach terminal velocity and reach the ground intact, if dead. Similarly the AAIB tried to claim that the Miad had died up by Mach stem forces, another nonsense.

If the New Statesman wanted to carry this story in totality, I would be delighetd, and I charge no fee. Contact me on 02073599310 norriecb@gmail.com, Charles Norrie 15 Canonbury Grove London N1 2HR

billy webster's picture

Mon, 2012-05-21 07:57 — billy webster (not verified)

the man was not guilty. the evidence was practically non-existent and senior law specialists in scotland stated for the record that it was a complete miscarriage of justice. the real perpetrators are still out there but he was a great coup for the media, the government and for the secret services who probably carried out the attack to serve their own purposes

Vasant Sharma's picture

Mon, 2012-05-21 03:54 — Vasant Sharma (not verified)

If there are doubts about who was responsible for the bombing, the case must be probed afresh as the guilty should be punished and innocents absolved of the crime they are supposed to have committed. That is what will make the world safer for all of us- including those who are victims and those who are unjustly accused.

islamophobe's picture

Mon, 2012-05-21 01:54 — islamophobe (not verified)

one less r@@@head in the world

islamophobe's picture

Mon, 2012-05-21 01:53 — islamophobe (not verified)

one less r@@@head in the world

Davidaslindsay's picture

Sun, 2012-05-20 22:36 — Davidaslindsay (not verified)

Of course he did not do it, at least not on his own. But that was beside the point. The point was that these matters were for a court, perhaps including the High Court of Parliament under certain circumstances. Not for Executive fiat. Where would that end? He should have been released. Because he should never have withdrawn his appeal. But he did. (For that matter, he should have been tried by a jury. But he wasn’t.) So he has died legally guilty of 270 murders. People have died in prison, including of horrible conditions, while legally guilty of an awful lot less than that.

I wrote at the time of his release that the Scottish Justice Secretary had now called significantly into question the integrity and reliability of the Scottish justice system. That hardly seems like anything that a Scottish Nationalist should wish to do. It is certainly not anything that a citizen of the United Kingdom, within the fundamental documents of which Scots Law is specifically protected, should wish to do. Kenny McAskill, and with him necessarily Alex Salmond, seemed to have gone feral, doing something like this merely because they could.

But later, it turned out that they had done no such thing; that it had all been Gordon Brown all along, and that they had really only been doing as they had been told by Westminster and Whitehall. So much for this spirited assertion of Scottish autonomy, loudly applauded as such by what is frankly the rather credulous core vote of the SNP, although it is not as if such voters have anywhere else to go. Nationalistic sound and fury for strictly domestic consumption, but signifying nothing in practical terms, has characterised many of the most loyal and useful clients of Westminster and Whitehall for a very long time indeed, and it is habitually been their role to play the fall guy. The only person to come out of this at all well is David Cameron.

No serious person, by definition, thinks that Libya had anything to do with Lockerbie. But it is nevertheless worth repeating that the Americans were arming the IRA at exactly the same time as Gaddafi was, and, moreover, they were throwing almost incomparably more political weight behind that organisation, to incomparably more eventual effect. The present Coalition was as bad as Blair for sucking up to Gadaffi.

And the synthesis of Islamism and what passes for Socialism in lands unblessed by the synthesis of Radical Liberalism, Tory populism, Christian Socialism, Catholic Social Teaching and Distributism, and other such entirely non-Marxist influences, is in fact the position of numerous individual and collective seceders to David Cameron’s Conservative Party, one of whom is now a rising star of the 2010 intake to the House of Commons.

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