The legacy of Lockerbie: A good week for conspiracy theorists

The legacy of Lockerbie: A good week for conspiracy theorists

What really drove the release of 'bomber' Abdelbaset al-Megrahi? Compassion – or politics and trade deals? Was he even guilty? David Randall investigates

Sunday, 23 August 2009

It's a very long time since conspiracy theorists had a week as good as this one. The saga of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was already murky enough, but now, to the doubts about the evidence against him, the alleged multi-million payouts to the prime prosecution witness, and the far-from-told story of US and British intelligence involvement, we can add suggestions of secret talks and trade deals, and the possibility that his release was not done in the name of compassionate justice, but that of oil, financial services and hotel-building.

This weekend, suspicious minds don't have to seek very far for the material to construct explanations other than the official ones. There is the meeting in 2007 between Colonel Gaddafi and Tony Blair, then still Prime Minister. Oil and gas deals mingled with the fate of Megrahi (then yet to be diagnosed with cancer), according to the Libyans. There's the meeting between Gaddafi's son and Peter Mandelson in the inevitable setting of a Rothschild villa. The Duke of York, batting for Britain as ever, is involved. There may have been, say some sources, many more meetings between British and Libyan officials – something which, one might think, a simple release on compassionate grounds would not warrant. There are British business leaders now openly rubbing their hands together at the suddenly revitalised opportunity for UK banks, oil interests, security contractors, and stores to move in on Libya's considerable available funds.

And then, underpinning all these, is another conspiracy, the one it all started with – the fact that some group of people somewhere conspired to blow up Pan Am flight 103, and succeeded. Today, 21 years, millions of words of testimony, countless investigations, and a trial on neutral territory under Scottish law later, we are really none the wiser about who murdered Flora Swire, Theodora Cohen, Richard Monetti, Alistair Berkley, Bill Cadman and 265 other victims of Britain's worst terrorist atrocity. And so, given all that is now emerging, doubters of the official line ask: do our governments even want to know who planted the bomb? Do they, perhaps, think that a can of worms is best left unopened in the cause of pacifying former pariah states?

These, then, are the over-heated speculations that have bubbled up in the absence of hard, reliable facts, of which there has always been a shortage in this case. The situation, until last autumn was this: Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Airlines based in Malta, and tied to his country's intelligence services, had been convicted in 2001 on circumstantial evidence of planting the bomb which brought down the American plane over the Scottish village of Lockerbie in December 1988. An appeal was being prepared, and the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had examined the evidence against Megrahi and found six grounds for a possible miscarriage of justice. The result of this could well have been the release of Megrahi, and avid calls for a re-opening of the case – the 2003 acceptance by Libya of responsibility for the bombing not withstanding.

But Megrahi had been feeling unwell, and in September last year he was taken from HMP Greenock to Inverclyde Royal Hospital for tests. A month later, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Meanwhile, the appeal process ground on, getting into court on 28 April this year in Edinburgh. A day later, a prisoner transfer agreement between the UK and Libya, negotiated by Tony Blair as part of thawing relations between the two countries, came into force. The Libyans duly made an application for Megrahi to be moved to a Libyan jail, thereby handing the hottest of legal potatoes to the Holyrood government.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-legacy-of-lockerbie-a-good-week-for-conspiracy-theorists-1776203.html

Thank you Indianagreen for compiling these few articles that speak the truth regarding what did not happen. It will be harder to know exactly what did happen, but it is quite clear that this man was a patsy.

return for oil contracts no doubt. No mention in the MSM. They're talking about Blair but no word about McCain and his bunch. Doesn't anyone else think it's strange that McCain just happened to be in Columbia just before the victims were released, he was in Georgia just before they attacked the Russians and now he's in Libya just be for the Lockerbie bomber is released. The guys a one man State Department.