Lockerbie bomber granted right to appeal
Former Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi has been granted the right to a second appeal against his conviction for the Lockerbie bombing, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said today.
Al Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the murder of 259 passengers and crew on board Pan Am Flight 103, and 11 residents of Lockerbie.
The Commission, which carried out a three-year investigation, said: "The Commission is of the view, based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice."
The commission said it had identified six grounds where it believed "a miscarriage of justice may have occurred".
Chairman the Very Rev Dr Graham Forbes went on: "The place for that matter to be determined is in the Appeal Court, to which we now refer the case."
He also said: "This has been a difficult case to deal with.
"The commission's inquiry team have worked tirelessly for over three years.
"Some of what we have discovered may imply innocence, some of what we have discovered may imply guilt.
"However, such matters are for a court to decide."
Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died at Lockerbie, said the decision opened a "new chapter" in the quest for the truth for the victims' families.
He said: "In referring this case back to the Appeal Court today, we are entitled to assume that the SCCRC has collated all the evidence available to them to date and come to the conclusion that there was at least reasonable doubt that it supported the guilty verdict against Mr Megrahi adequately.
"Their decision today opens yet another chapter in our 18-and-a-half-year search for the truth. Though the question of the guilt or innocence of Mr Megrahi is only one part of what we need to know, for his sake it is the most urgent.
"But if today's SCCRC decision does indeed lead to the overturning of the verdict, we hope that at that point an immediate, independent and fully empowered inquiry into how the judicial failure came about would be launched and relentlessly pursued."
Mr Swire added that any evidence of "perversion of justice" should "cry out for identification of those responsible for the miscarriage of justice, and routing out and eradication of the underlying ethos that allowed it to happen."
The commission's announcement set out some of its main findings on why the case should go to the Appeal Court.
It found there was no "reasonable basis" for the original trial court's conclusion that various items of clothing were bought from a shop in Malta on December 7, 1988.
Although Al Megrahi had been proved to have been in Malta several times that month, evidence at the trial was that December 7 was the only date on which he would have been able to make the purchase.
The court's finding on the date - and its finding that Al Megrahi was the purchaser - were both important to the verdict against him.
"Because of these factors, the commission has reached the view that the requirements of the legal test may be satisfied in the applicant's case."
New evidence not heard at the trial related to the date on which Christmas lights were lit in the area of Tony Gauci's shop.
This evidence, taken with Mr Gauci's evidence at the trial and his police statement, indicated that the items were bought before December 6 - at a time when there was no evidence at the trial that Al Megrahi was in Malta.
In its 800-page report, the commission said additional evidence not made available to the defence indicated that four days before an ID parade at which he picked out Al Megrahi, Mr Gauci saw a photograph of the Libyan in a magazine article linking him to the bombing.
"In the commission's view, evidence of Mr Gauci's exposure to this photograph in such close proximity to the parade undermines the reliability of his identification of the applicant at that time and at the trial itself."
Other evidence, not made available to the defence, could in the view of the commission "undermine" Mr Gauci's identification of Al Megrahi as the purchaser and the court's finding on the date of the purchase.
The commission said it also applied an interests-of-justice test.
This included the commission considering statements Al Megrahi gave his legal team before the trial, and statements he gave the commission.
"Although there were a number of inconsistencies and contradictions in these accounts, the commission did not consider the contents of these statements justified the refusal of the case in the interests of justice."
The commission also took into account a letter by Libya to the UN Security Council in 2003 accepting "responsibility for the actions of its officials" in the "Lockerbie incident".
"As the commission did not view the letter as amounting to confirmation by Libya of the applicant's guilt, it did not believe that its terms justified refusing his case."
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