Police chief: "Lockerbie evidence was faked"

MARCELLO MEGA

A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.

The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.

The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

The officer, who was a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, is supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent that his bosses "wrote the script" to incriminate Libya.

Last night, George Esson, who was Chief Constable of Dumfries and Galloway when Megrahi was indicted for mass murder, confirmed he was aware of the development.

But Esson, who retired in 1994, questioned the officer's motives. He said: "Any police officer who believed they had knowledge of any element of fabrication in any criminal case would have a duty to act on that. Failure to do so would call into question their integrity, and I can't help but question their motive for raising the matter now."

Other important questions remain unanswered, such as how the officer learned of the alleged conspiracy and whether he was directly involved in the inquiry. But sources close to Megrahi's legal team believe they may have finally discovered the evidence that could demolish the case against him.

An insider told Scotland on Sunday that the retired officer approached them after Megrahi's appeal - before a bench of five Scottish judges - was dismissed in 2002.

The insider said: "He said he believed he had crucial information. A meeting was set up and he gave a statement that supported the long-standing rumours that the key piece of evidence, a fragment of circuit board from a timing device that implicated Libya, had been planted by US agents.

"Asked why he had not come forward before, he admitted he'd been wary of breaking ranks, afraid of being vilified.

"He also said that at the time he became aware of the matter, no one really believed there would ever be a trial. When it did come about, he believed both accused would be acquitted. When Megrahi was convicted, he told himself he'd be cleared at appeal."

The source added: "When that also failed, he explained he felt he had to come forward.

"He has confirmed that parts of the case were fabricated and that evidence was planted. At first he requested anonymity, but has backed down and will be identified if and when the case returns to the appeal court."
The vital evidence that linked the bombing of Pan Am 103 to Megrahi was a tiny fragment of circuit board which investigators found in a wooded area many miles from Lockerbie months after the atrocity.

The fragment was later identified by the FBI's Thomas Thurman as being part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives, and manufactured by the Swiss firm Mebo, which supplied it only to Libya and the East German Stasi.

At one time, Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters.

The fragment of circuit board therefore enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the heart of the investigation. However, Thurman was later unmasked as a fraud who had given false evidence in American murder trials, and it emerged that he had little in the way of scientific qualifications.
Then, in 2003, a retired CIA officer gave a statement to Megrahi's lawyers in which he alleged evidence had been planted.

The decision of a former Scottish police chief to back this claim could add enormous weight to what has previously been dismissed as a wild conspiracy theory. It has long been rumoured the fragment was planted to implicate Libya for political reasons.

The first suspects in the case were the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), a terror group backed by Iranian cash. But the first Gulf War altered diplomatic relations with Middle East nations, and Libya became the pariah state.

Following the trial, legal observers from around the world, including senior United Nations officials, expressed disquiet about the verdict and the conduct of the proceedings at Camp Zeist, Holland. Those doubts were first fuelled when internal documents emerged from the offices of the US Defence Intelligence Agency. Dated 1994, more than two years after the Libyans were identified to the world as the bombers, they still described the PFLP-GC as the Lockerbie bombers.

A source close to Megrahi's defence said: "Britain and the US were telling the world it was Libya, but in their private communications they acknowledged that they knew it was the PFLP-GC.
"The case is starting to unravel largely because when they wrote the script, they never expected to have to act it out. Nobody expected agreement for a trial to be reached, but it was, and in preparing a manufactured case, mistakes were made."

Dr Jim Swire, who has publicly expressed his belief in Megrahi's innocence, said it was quite right that all relevant information now be put to the SCCRC.

Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the atrocity, said last night: "I am aware that there have been doubts about how some of the evidence in the case came to be presented in court.

"It is in all our interests that areas of doubt are thoroughly examined."
A spokeswoman for the Crown Office said: "As this case is currently being examined by the SCCRC, it would be inappropriate to comment."

No one from the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland was available to comment. 
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005
 
Editor's note: My thanks to Vigilius Hafnesius for posting this, but more to Sean McBride for providing it to him to do so. Since it seems clear that Libya didn't commit this crime, who did? For that information, click onto http://www.truedemocracy.net/td2_2/57a-panam103.html

Postscript:

This is sad because the Swiss timer was proven to be sold to East German Stasi, not Libya, not "and Libya."

This is a way of softening relations with Libya, the innocent patsy for Lockerbie, while leaving things gray and muddy, and even snatching back the timer circuit, now that we have discovered that it really points to CIA, Robert Booth Nichols, Michael Hurley, Monzer Al Kasser, David Lovejoy aka Luchoi (aka Robert Booth Nichols?), and the Iran-Contra CIA drugs operation, and a small amount of Iranian complicity in that context by throwing a little money to a CIA bomb operation so as to not let Palestinian bomb-maker know he was actually assassinating CIA-DIA agents for CIA and that was all. The Iranians could think they were getting a little payback for the Iranian airbus downing by a US guided missile frigate, but they knew they hadn't made or planted the bomb or chosen the target.

Editor's note: I am only adding this because it was taken from a book, Trail of the Octopus, that has been banned in the United States. I know that it was Iran that perpetrated this act because that culture does retaliate when it is betrayed if the perpetrator does not apologize, information that is corroborated by Pierre Salinger's article which documented my article that he published in The Georgetowner. The act that the US perpetrated was the blowing up of the Iranian Air Bus over the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1987 in which 290 Iranians lost their lives.

Bombing Pan Am 103 assassinated Gannon and McKee, who were US intel officers on their way to DC with evidence that CIA drug operations were blocking their Lebanon hostage rescue mission and endangering their agents, many of whom actually were assassinated because
of leaks caused by sloppy CIA drugs operations in Cyprus and Lebanon.

The bomb was placed on board by Monzer Al Kasser, a Syrian heroin CIA agent. Killing Gannon and McKee was also payback for their foiling of a million dollar cocaine swap for eastern European arms that Al Kasser was involved in along with Pat Robertson's son and Oliver
North, dark minions of Russell Opium Trust(ROT) and Vietnam's Real Chickens Home to Roost(Phoenix scared of life running into all entropy in all denialist hysteria i.e. "assassinate Hugo Chavez").

Goddard, Donald, with Lester K. Coleman, Trail of the Octopus, Bloomsbury, c1993, ISBN 0-745-1562-X

Chasey, William C., Pan Am 103, The Lockerbie Coverup, c1995, ISBN 0-9640104-1-0

Post PostScript:

Apparently, the Chief constable in Lockerbie, Scotland at the time of the PanAM 103 crash has just spilled the beans on the CIA.

According to his recent testimony, the CIA planted electronic parts traceable to Libya at the scene of the crash. Therefore, the alleged "terrorists" who were prosecuted and jailed in connection with PanAm 103 are innocent.

According to Ralph Schoenman's WBAI show on Tuesday August 30, 2005 at 5 pm NY time, the reason Panam 103 was bombed was because six deep cover operatives were on that flight who were "coming out of the cold" and were slated to testify about CIA drug smuggling operations.

You might ask, then, why did Gaddafi pay the reparations and make nice with England if he was innocent? Well, in the world of realpolitik it is sometimes better to do what you have to in order to get economic sanctions rolled back. Libya officially admitted guilt while it winked and said "No way" in unofficial circles.

Editor's note: Does the hackneyed phrase, "kill two birds with one stone" ring a bell with you? Could there have been two reasons, in other words, for this crime to have taken place?

Posted by Mark Urban on August 31, 2005 on cia-drugs listserv, a YahooGroups.com listserv.