The Mammoth Book of New Csi (22 page)

Once the connection between Edwin Bollier of Mebo and Fhimah had been established, the Scottish police obtained permission to search Fhimah’s office in Malta. They found a diary where he reminded himself, on 15 December 1988, to “take taggs [
sic
] from Air Malta”. However, Air Malta issued a statement in 1989, denying that an unaccompanied suitcase could have been carried on Flight KM 180. All the passengers were identified and all the baggage was accounted for.

In November 1990, it was discovered that the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) often used Flight 103 to fly informants and suitcases of heroin seized in the Middle East back to the United States. Pan Am staff were used to loading these cases without the usual security checks. One of the DEA men involved in this operation, Detroit-resident Nazir Khalid Jaafar, was on board the downed flight and it was thought that he might have unwittingly put the bomb on board the plane. There was also a report that Pan Am’s baggage area at Heathrow had been broken into seventeen hours before the flight.

Although Scotland Yard concluded that the bomb had been planted by Iranians or groups sympathetic to Iran, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was told by US President George Bush Sr to keep the Lockerbie investigation “low key” to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding hostages in Lebanon. Soon after, Britain and the United States needed the backing of Syria and Iran during the First Gulf War. So it was decided that Libya was to blame. The theory put forward was that the attack was done in retaliation for the 1986 bombing of Libya by American planes that had taken off from bases in Britain. The United States and Britain asked the government in Tripoli to extradite Fhimah and al-Megrahi. But Colonel Gaddafi refused to send them aboard for trial.

In 1992, Britain and the United States went to the United Nations and asked for economic sanctions to be imposed on Libya, if Gaddafi did not hand over the two men. In late March, the United Nations Security Council gave the Colonel two weeks to hand over the suspects, or flights in and out of Libya would be banned and the country would be shunned as a diplomatic pariah. In response, Gaddafi threatened to cut off oil supplies to those countries supporting the resolution. There was a surplus of oil on the world market at the time so no one took any notice.

But, by 1998, Gaddafi was tired of being an international outcast. South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela flew to Tripoli and brokered a deal. In 1999, the two men were sent to the Netherlands where they went on trial in a special terrorist-proof military compound called Camp Zeist and were tried under Scottish law. The
Sunday Times
claimed that Colonel Gaddafi himself should have been on trial alongside his henchmen: it was he who gave the order, as the British government knew, but it remained silent because of lucrative contracts negotiated between the UK and Libya.

During the trial, 621 pieces of crime scene evidence were produced, the largest of which was the reconstruction of the aircraft. That was the only one not conveyed to the court. It remained at the Air Accident Investigation Branch premises at Farnborough in England.

On 31 January 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 people – 259 on the plane and eleven on the ground – largely on forensic evidence from the crime scene. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve at least twenty years before he was considered eligible for parole. The verdict found that he was “a member of the Libyan Intelligence Services . . . while acting in concert with others, formed a criminal purpose to destroy a civil passenger aircraft and murder the occupants in furtherance of the purposes of the . . . Libyan Intelligence Services”. Fhimah had an airtight alibi. He was in Sweden at the time of the sabotage. He was found not guilty and acquitted.

The judgment stated: “From the evidence which we have discussed so far, we are satisfied that it has been proved that the primary suitcase containing the explosive device was dispatched from Malta, passed through Frankfurt and was loaded on to PA103 at Heathrow. It is, as we have said, clear that with one exception the clothing in the primary suitcase was the clothing purchased in Mr Gauci’s shop on 7 December 1988. The purchaser was, on Mr Gauci’s evidence, a Libyan. The trigger for the explosion was an MST-13 timer of the single solder mask variety. A substantial quantity of such timers had been supplied to Libya. We cannot say that it is impossible that the clothing might have been taken from Malta, united somewhere with a timer from some source other than Libya and introduced into the airline baggage system at Frankfurt or Heathrow. When, however, the evidence regarding the clothing, the purchaser and the timer is taken with the evidence that an unaccompanied bag was taken from KM180 to PA103A, the inference that that was the primary suitcase becomes, in our view, irresistible. As we have also said, the absence of an explanation as to how the suitcase was taken into the system at Luqa is a major difficulty for the Crown case but after taking full account of that difficulty, we remain of the view that the primary suitcase began its journey at Luqa. The clear inference which we draw from this evidence is that the conception, planning and execution of the plot which led to the planting of the explosive device was of Libyan origin. While no doubt organizations such as the PFLP-GC and the PPSF [Palestine Popular Struggle Front] were also engaged in terrorist activities during the same period, we are satisfied that there was no evidence from which we could infer that they were involved in this particular act of terrorism, and the evidence relating to their activities does not create a reasonable doubt in our minds about the Libyan origin of this crime.”

Al-Megrahi’s first appeal was refused in 2002 and his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible. In 2003, Libya accepted civil responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to the victim’s families. However, Hans Köchler, the United Nations observer at the trial, called it a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”. He pointed to the role of intelligence services in the trial and stated that proper judicial proceedings could not be conducted under conditions in which extrajudicial forces are allowed to intervene. If the CIA had been able to dictate what was disclosed and what was not, as it seems they did, then the entire proceedings had been “perverted to a kind of intelligence operation, the purpose of which is not to search for the truth, but the obfuscation of reality”.

In 2007, after a three-year review of the case, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted al-Megrahi a second appeal against conviction. At a preliminary hearing in Edinburgh on 7 October, his lawyers claimed that vital CIA documents that relate to the Mebo timer that allegedly detonated the Lockerbie bomb had been withheld from the defence team at the trial. Edwin Bollier has said that the FBI offered him $4 million to testify that the timer fragment found near the scene of the crash was part of a Mebo MST-13 timer supplied to Libya. Tony Gauci had allegedly been paid $2 million to testify against al-Megrahi. And a former employee of Mebo, Ulrich Lumpert, swore an affidavit in July 2007 that he had given false evidence at the trial concerning the MST-13 timer. He claimed that he stole a “non-operational” timing board from Mebo and gave it to “a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case”.

There are doubts that if the MST-13 timer had triggered the explosion on board Flight 103, even a fragment of it would have survived. The UN’s European consultant on explosives, John Wyatt, told the BBC’s
Newsnight
programme that he had recreated the suitcase bomb that had destroyed the plane, using the same type of radio-cassette player, the explosives and timer circuit board, along with the same kind of clothes that were packed around it. When it was set off, the circuit board was totally obliterated, indicating that such a fragment could not have survived a mid-air explosion.

“I do find it quite extraordinary and I think highly improbable and most unlikely that you would find a fragment like that – it is unbelievable,” he said. “We carried out twenty tests, we didn’t carry out a hundred or a thousand, but in those twenty tests we found absolutely nothing at all – so I found it highly improbable that you would find anything like that, particularly at 10,000 feet when bits are dropping into long wet grass over hundreds of miles.”

Even Bollier has expressed his misgivings about the timer.

“The fragments kept changing,” he said. “The procurator fiscal showed me one fragment then the police showed me a fragment in two parts – one was green, one was brown. Later in the witness box I was shown a screen and the smaller piece was completely carbonized – you could not even see the colour. It had been manipulated, but when I tried to say that the judge cut me off.”

He says he made repeated requests to examine the fragment itself, in person. The Scottish authorities said no, citing “the need to protect the integrity of the evidence”, as police put it in a letter to Bollier. Instead, he was shown a blown-up photograph of the fragment. He noted the fragment’s unfinished edge and a white line with wavy edges that he says prove it was made by hand and not a machine.

“This fragment of PC board is from a prototype timer,” Bollier says, not part of the batch sold to the Libyans. “It was made by Mr Lumpert, an engineer here in our labs. Two of these PC boards eventually became complete timers, and these two I took to what at the time was East Germany.”

Finally, in September of 1999, with a trial approaching, the Scottish prosecutors who had refused for eight years to show Bollier the circuit board fragment suddenly invited him to Scotland. As Bollier tells it, a prosecutor, surrounded by four policemen, brought in the fragment in an unmarked plastic sleeve and placed it before him on a table. He says he’d brought his own magnifying glass – “I was surprised at how small it was.”

Bollier says the fragment, just 2 × 3 mm in size, was different from the one the FBI displayed on television back in 1991. This one, he claims, was machine-made, like the ones he sold to the Libyan government, but now had a new problem: it didn’t show traces of solder, which Bollier says should have been present if an electrical relay had ever been attached to the circuit board. In other words, he says, the fragment could never have been used in a bomb.

“As far as I’m concerned, this is a manufactured fragment,” Bollier says. “A fabricated fragment, never from a complete, functional timer.” Bollier insisted on making a written statement to that effect; the statement was signed by Scottish police witnesses.

The next day, Bollier says, prosecutors brought out the fragment again. This time, he says, it had the soldering traces one would expect on a used timer. The soldering points had apparently been added overnight.

“It was different,” he says. “I’m not crazy. It was different!”

But none of this evidence will be tested in court. The second appeal was dropped when al-Megrahi was released on humanitarian grounds in 2009. He was suffering from terminal cancer, it was claimed. However, he says that he has evidence that will clear him after he is dead.

O
N
30 J
UNE
2003, fourteen-year-old Jodi Jones was brutally murdered near her home at Easthouses in Scotland. Her naked body was found behind a wall along a well-known shortcut between Easthouses and Newbattle known as Roan’s Dyke, leading the police to suspect a local man had been responsible. Her throat had been cut and her body savagely mutilated.

Detective Superintendent Craig Dobbie, of Lothian and Borders Police, said Jodi’s murder was “one of the most violent crimes I have experienced in my twenty-eight years as a police officer”. Police said that Jodi suffered a “high level of violence” and there was evidence that she had put up “quite a struggle” with her attacker before she was overpowered. Detective Superintendent Dobbie said that it was possible that the killer was heavily bloodstained as a result of the attack.

That evening, Jodi had arranged to meet her boyfriend Luke Mitchell, also fourteen, after school. Meeting at St David’s High School in Dalkeith, the couple had started seeing each other in March and spent time together most nights and at weekends. Rebellious teenagers, they experimented with drugs, sex and alternative music. Jodi was a fan of Nirvana and they both wore baggy clothes. But Mitchell was fascinated by the darker side of youth culture. Although they were both underage, Mitchell admitted that they had sex just two days before Jodi’s murder. There was evidence that he was sexually involved with another girl, a fifteen-year-old, at the same time. Nevertheless, Jodi seemed happy with her first boyfriend and, in her diary, said that she loved him.

Roan’s Dyke path was around half a mile (800 m) long. Jodi lived around 300 yards (275 m) from the east end of the path; Mitchell about 600 yards (550 m) from the west end. The journey between their two homes took about fifteen minutes. Mitchell would sometimes collect Jodi from her house. On other occasions they would meet at the east end of the path. Jodi had been told by her mother that she was not to walk along the path on her own.

For much of its length, a high stone wall, which had fallen into disrepair, ran along the north side of the path. To the north of the wall was an area of wooded ground bounded by a park and a golf course. A number of gaps in the wall provide access to the wooded area. The first, as the path runs westwards from Easthouses, was marked by graffiti. The second gap forms a “V” shape in the wall and is about two-thirds of the distance from its eastern end. There are a number of bushes at this point and overhanging trees, which form a canopy over the path.

In statements to the police, Mitchell claimed that he saw Jodi at lunchtime on the day of the murder. She had taken the bus home after school and he had walked. He said he had not seen her alive after that point. He had returned home at around 4 or 4.05 p.m. and Jodi had texted him soon afterwards, asking if he was coming out. He had replied that he would do so later on, as he had to make dinner first. They made arrangements for Jodi to come down to the Newbattle area. At no time had they agreed to meet along the way, he said.