Lockerbie: Innocent Abdulaset Ali al-Megrahi was looking for sex not murder in Malta
ABDULBaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person to have been convicted of murdering 270 in the Lockerbie bombing, may get another appeal.
Scotland’s Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill says:
“The Scottish government had no interest whatsoever in Mr Al-Megrahi’s appeal being abandoned. I had no involvement in Mr Al-Megrahi’s decision to drop his appeal against conviction — that was entirely a matter for him and his legal team… Scottish government officials were present throughout my meeting with Mr al-Obeidi [Libyan government minister]. At no time did I or any other member of the Scottish government suggest to Mr al-Obeidi, to anyone connected with the Libyan government, or indeed to Mr al-Megrahi himself, that abandoning his appeal against conviction would in any way aid or affect his application for compassionate release.”
Al-Megrahi has a new book out.
How latest defence is that he did go to Malta. But with a mind bent on sex not murder.
The BBC reports:
Prosecutors said the bomb which destroyed Pan-Am Flight 103 was in a suitcase loaded on the island. Previously secret documents, seen by BBC Scotland, detail the explanations of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, 59, for his presence on Malta….[The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission’s] 821-page report has never been published, but it has now been seen by BBC Scotland.
“As a Libyan Arab Airlines employee and as someone well known, both at Tripoli airport and at the airport in Malta,” he told the lawyers, “I could get away with not using a passport or an identification card at all, but simply by wearing my Libyan Arab Airlines uniform.
“This may sound ridiculous but it is true. If I wanted to do something clandestine in such a way that there would be absolutely no record at all of me going from Tripoli to Malta and back again, I could do it.”
A Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, identified Megrahi as the man to whom he sold clothes which were later found in a suitcase which had contained the bomb.
The SCCRC document says:
He told them he could not have sex with his wife.
“It was possible therefore that the reason for his visit to Malta on 20 December was to meet a woman for this purpose,” the SCCRC report said. “The woman in question was the same one that he had suggested he might have met during his visit to Malta on 7 December. He had had sexual relations with her on a number of occasions over several years, until 1989 or 1990.”
Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison in August, 2009. He had three months to live.
Maybe I am just getting too old to relish the challenge, but recent noises from the No 10 direction could hardly be more hostile, with David Cameron claiming that John Ashton’s book Megrahi: You Are My Jury is an insult to “the relatives” of the Lockerbie bomb victims – and that before he could possibly have read it: is he Prime Minister of the UK or the US?The inquiry route, as that proposed by the Justice For Megrahi campaign group, remains before the Holyrood justice committee. How else can we support JFM? My personal view is that there are sufficient material and powers within Scotland to unseat the Scottish verdict and that until that is done Whitehall, let alone the international arena, will remain obdurate…The relatives seek answers to the question of who did carry out the atrocity and why were they not prevented from doing so, rather than the simpler question of “was Megrahi guilty or not?” But the verdict is the obstruction that bars our progress, and the heavy lifting gear to get rid of that obstruction is within Scotland.The two entities needing to be in the cross-hairs are the Crown Office and the Dumfries and Galloway Police. Ashton’s book puts both of them on the back foot. Once the court proceedings at Zeist, in the Netherlands, are shown to have been corrupted – no matter by whom – it should be for Scotland to set aside her verdict. There is a scientifically verifiable divide between the fragment PT35b and the Mebo timers. Let us not waste time on wondering where the fragment came from and who made it. It appears the differences between the two types of circuit boards are scientifically irreconcilable. If that’s so and can be made to stand up in court, there is no other evidence of a timer used to enable the long journey from Malta to the skies over Lockerbie.With full analysis of the proven genuine fragment, the prosecution case collapses. Once that happens, Whitehall and the Americans ought to have to answer for their roles in all this, but that probably won’t happen in my lifetime.
Besides, it is wrong that an innocent man, Megrahi, and his family should remain under such overwhelming and unjustified blame a day longer. That also is evil and it has been done in the name of Scottish justice. Addressing the far greater evil of the murders themselves must follow the destruction of the verdict, surely?We shall all be guilty of failing to fight both those evils if we do not rise up in Scotland to overturn the verdict now…Sometimes it is hard also to resist the temptation to seek revenge against those who have misused the trust we placed in them to solve this case, but revenge was the fuel for Lockerbie, and to succumb to it would be to hand a further victory to those who murdered and those who have deceived. That cannot ever be right.
Posted: 5th, March 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
