Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi was a Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am flight 103. He was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli, Libya, and a Libyan intelligence officer. On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was convicted, by a panel of three Scottish judges sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of the flight over Scotland on 21 December 1988. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was found not guilty and was acquitted.
Megrahi unsuccessfully appealed his 2001 conviction. In June 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted Megrahi leave to appeal his Lockerbie bombing conviction for a second time. Megrahi abandoned his second appeal in August 2009 as an ongoing appeal would have prevented him from being moved to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Scheme which was thought to be a possibility. He decided to drop his appeal two days before he was released on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government on 20 August 2009. Doctors had reported on 10 August 2009 that he had terminal prostate cancer. On his return to Libya, al-Megrahi was hospitalized, then allowed to leave on 2 November 2009, taking up residence in a villa in Tripoli. He died on 20 May 2012, 33 months after his release.
Charges, conviction and punishment
Background
An ethnic Magarha, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was born in Tripoli on 1 April 1952 to a poor family. Although little is known of his early life, in 1971, he spent nine months studying in Cardiff, Wales and in the late 1970s, he made multiple visits to the United States and the United Kingdom. Later, he was the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, and director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli. It was alleged by the FBI and the prosecution in the Lockerbie case that he was also an officer of the Libyan intelligence service, Mukhabarat el-Jamahiriya.Indictment and arrest
In November 1991, Megrahi and Fhimah were indicted by the US Attorney General and the Scottish Lord Advocate for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Libya refused to extradite the two accused, but held them under armed house arrest in Tripoli, offering to detain them for trial in Libya, as long as all the incriminating evidence was provided. The offer was unacceptable to the US and UK, and there was an impasse for the next three years.On 23 March 1995, over six years after the 1988 attack, Megrahi and Fhimah were designated as United States fugitives from justice and became the 441st and 442nd additions on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. This list offered a US$4 million reward from the US Air Line Pilots Association, Air Transport Association, and United States Department of State, and $50,000 from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for information leading to their arrest.
The parties eventually agreed on a compromise and a trial was held in the Netherlands under Scots law. The trial format was engineered by legal academic Professor Robert Black of the University of Edinburgh and was given political impetus by the British foreign secretary, Robin Cook.
Protracted negotiations with the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, and the imposition of UN economic sanctions against Libya brought the two accused to trial in a neutral country. Over ten years after the bombing, Megrahi and Fhimah were placed under arrest at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands on 5 April 1999. During his seven-year house arrest awaiting deportation and trial, Megrahi lived on a Libyan Arab Airlines pension and worked as a teacher.
Trial
The Scottish High Court of Justiciary at Camp Zeist was presided over by three senior judges and an additional, non-voting, judge. The two accused, Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, denied all charges against them. The full charges included the names of the murdered 259 passengers and crew of Pan Am Flight 103, and the eleven residents killed on the ground at Lockerbie in Scotland.Representing Megrahi were his solicitor, Alistair Duff, and advocates William Taylor KC, David Burns KC and John Beckett. Fhimah was represented by solicitor Eddie McKechnie and advocates Richard Keen QC, Jack Davidson QC and Murdo MacLeod. Both defendants also had access to a Libyan defence lawyer, Kamel Maghur, a former foreign affairs minister in the Libyan government.
Court proceedings started on 3 May 2000. The crucial witness against Megrahi for the prosecution was Tony Gauci, a Maltese storekeeper, who testified that he had sold Megrahi the clothing later found in the remains of the suitcase bomb. At the trial, Gauci appeared uncertain about the exact date he sold the clothes in question, and was not entirely sure that it was Megrahi to whom they were sold. Nonetheless, Megrahi's appeal against conviction was rejected by the Scottish Court in the Netherlands in March 2002. Five years after the trial, former Lord Advocate, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, publicly described Gauci as being "an apple short of a picnic" and "not quite the full shilling".
During the trial, the defence showed that Megrahi's co-defendant, Fhimah, had a watertight alibi, having been in Sweden at the time of the sabotage.
The judges announced their verdict on 31 January 2001. They said of Megrahi: "There is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the first accused, and accordingly we find him guilty of the remaining charge in the indictment as amended." Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 20 years before being eligible for parole.
The judges unanimously found the second accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, not guilty of the murder charge. Fhimah was freed and returned to his home at Souk al-Juma in Libya on 1 February 2001.
Megrahi was sent to Barlinnie Prison in Scotland to serve his sentence. In February 2005, he was transferred to HM Prison Greenock.
Appeals
Megrahi's appeal against his conviction in January 2001 was refused on 14 March 2002 by a panel of five Scottish judges at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. According to a report by the BBC, Dr Hans Köchler, one of the UN observers at the trial, expressed serious doubts about the fairness of the proceedings and spoke of a "spectacular miscarriage of justice".On 24 November 2003, Megrahi appeared at the High Court in Glasgow, in front of the three judges who originally sentenced him at Camp Zeist, to learn that he would have to serve at least 27 years in jail – back-dated to April 1999 when he was extradited from Libya – before he could be considered for parole. This court hearing was the result of the incorporation into Scots law of the European Convention on Human Rights in 2001, nine months after Megrahi's sentence was imposed, which required him to be told the extent of the "punishment part" of his life term. On 31 May 2004, he was granted leave to appeal against his 27-year sentence. The appeal against sentence was scheduled to be heard in Edinburgh by a panel of five Judges on 11 July 2006. However, the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal decided to postpone the July hearing to allow consideration of whether the appeal against sentence ought to be heard at Camp Zeist rather than in Edinburgh.
Judicial reviews
On 23 September 2003, lawyers acting for Megrahi applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for a review of the case, arguing that there had been a miscarriage of justice. On 1 November 2006, Megrahi was reported to have dropped his demand for the new appeal to be held at Camp Zeist. In an interview with The Scotsman newspaper of 31 January 2006, retired Scottish Judge Lord MacLean – one of the three who convicted Megrahi in 2001 – said he believed the SCCRC would return the case for a further appeal against conviction:MacLean added that any new appeal would indicate the flexibility of Scots law, rather than a weakness:
In January 2007, the SCCRC announced that it would issue its decision on Megrahi's case by the end of June 2007. On 9 June 2007, rumours of a possible prisoner swap deal involving Megrahi were strenuously denied by the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. Later in June, The Observer confirmed the imminence of the SCCRC ruling and reported:
Second appeal
On 28 June 2007, the SCCRC concluded its four-year review and, having uncovered evidence that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred, the commission granted Megrahi leave to appeal against his Lockerbie bombing conviction for a second time. The second appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal was abandoned in August 2009, as an impediment to the legal power to release him to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Scheme then operating in the United Kingdom. Ultimately, he was not released under this scheme but rather on compassionate grounds due to his ill health. There was in any event no requirement to drop his appeal against conviction.New information casting fresh doubts on Megrahi's conviction was examined at a procedural hearing at the Judicial Appeal Court in Edinburgh on 11 October 2007:
- His lawyers claimed that vital documents, which emanated from the Central Intelligence Agency and related to the Mebo timer that allegedly detonated the Lockerbie bomb, were withheld from the trial defence team.
- Tony Gauci, chief prosecution witness at the trial, was alleged to have been paid $2 million for testifying against Megrahi.
- Mebo's owner, Edwin Bollier, claimed that in 1991 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.
- Former employee of Mebo Ulrich Lumpert swore an affidavit in July 2007 that he had stolen a prototype MST-13 timer in 1989, and had handed it over to "a person officially investigating the Lockerbie case".
Prior to Megrahi's second appeal, another four procedural hearings took place at the High Court of Appeal in Edinburgh between December 2007 and June 2008.
In the June 2008 edition of the Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm, the UN Observer at the Lockerbie trial, Professor Hans Köchler, referred to the 'totalitarian' nature of Megrahi's second appeal process saying it "bears the hallmarks of an 'intelligence operation. Pointing out an error on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's website and accusing the British government of "delaying tactics" in relation to Megrahi's second Lockerbie appeal, UN Observer at the Lockerbie trial Dr Hans Köchler wrote to Foreign Secretary David Miliband on 21 July 2008 saying:
The FCO corrected the error on its website and wrote to Köchler on 27 August 2008:
On 15 October 2008, five Scottish judges decided unanimously to reject a submission by the Crown Office to the effect that the scope of Megrahi's second appeal should be limited to the specific grounds of appeal that were identified by the SCCRC in June 2007.
In January 2009, it was reported that, although Megrahi's second appeal against conviction was scheduled to begin on 27 April 2009, the hearing could last as long as 12 months because of the complexity of the case and volume of material to be examined. At a preliminary High Court hearing in Edinburgh on 20 February 2009, Megrahi's Counsel, Maggie Scott QC, was informed that a delegation from the Crown Office was due to travel to Malta to "actively seek the consent for disclosure" of sensitive documents that could determine the outcome of the second appeal.
Scottish ministers denied in April 2009 they had clandestinely agreed to the repatriation of Megrahi before the start of his second appeal on 28 April.
Kenny MacAskill announced in May 2011 that the re-elected SNP Government would seek to change Scots law to allow publication of the SCCRC report, which can presently be blocked by any party that provided evidence to the review. Nevertheless, The Herald published this report online in March 2012.