NYTimes posted:

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, has died in Libya, family members told news agencies on Sunday, nearly three years after Scotland released him on humanitarian grounds, citing evidence that he was near death with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 60. .

The death of Mr. Megrahi, who always insisted he was innocent, foreclosed a fuller accounting of his role, and perhaps that of the Libyan government under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, in the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

A former Libyan intelligence officer who worked undercover at Libya’s national airline, Mr. Megrahi was found guilty in 2001 of orchestrating the bombing and sentenced to life in prison, with a 27-year minimum. But eight years later, after doctors said he was likely to die within three months, he was freed in 2009 under a Scottish law providing for compassionate release of prisoners with terminal illnesses.

Cheering crowds greeted his return to Libya, escorted by Colonel Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam in a grim propaganda coup. But his release infuriated many families of the bombing victims, touched off angry protests in Britain and the United States, and was condemned by President Obama and other Western leaders, including Britain’s Conservative opposition after Gordon Brown, then prime minister, waffled.

Critics charged that Mr. Megrahi’s release had been a part of Libyan oil and gas deals with Britain. A British cabinet official admitted that he and the prime minister had discussed Mr. Megrahi with Colonel Qaddafi’s son at a European economic conference, but denied there had been any deal for his release.

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, Mr. Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Colonel Qaddafi was overthrown and and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him, but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter of a century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians and Libyans.

The enigmatic Mr. Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.

Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was born in Tripoli on April 1, 1952. Little is known in the West of his early life. Besides speaking his native Arabic, he had a good command of English. In 1971, he studied in Cardiff, Wales, for nine months, then made four or five trips each to the United States and Britain in the late 1970s.

Mr. Megrahi and his wife, Aisha, were married in 1982 and had four sons and a daughter.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Colonel Qaddafi’s inner circle. Mr. Megrahi also was a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

American intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, Mr. Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America. On Dec. 21, 1988, Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 jumbo jet carrying 243 passengers and 16 crew members, took off from Heathrow Airport in Britain, bound for New York. Little more than a half-hour later, cruising at 31,000 feet over southern Scotland, the plane exploded. All 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground were killed.

The terrorists apparently intended the aircraft to fall into the sea. But because it took off late, victims and debris fell on land. Recovered evidence showed that the plane had been blown up by Semtex plastic and a Swiss timing device of a kind sold to the Libyan military. The bomb had been hidden in a Toshiba cassette player and placed in a brown Samsonite suitcase, with clothing that was traced to a merchant in Malta.

While they had no direct proof, investigators believed that the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, Mr. Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion. Mr. Megrahi lived under armed guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999 — the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Mr. Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found Mr. Megrahi guilty but acquitted Mr. Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of Mr. Megrahi.

Much of the evidence was later challenged. It emerged that Mr. Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Mr. Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Mr. Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Köchler, a United Nations observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” words echoed by Mr. Mandela. Many legal experts, authors and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling Mr. Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism. While denying involvement, Libya paid $2.7 billion to the victims’ families in 2003 in a bid to end years of diplomatic isolation.

Mr. Megrahi began serving his sentence at Barlinnie Prison near Glasgow, where toilets were buckets in cells. He was moved in 2005 to the smaller, more humane Greenock Prison in Inverclyde.

His first appeal was rejected in 2002. He dropped a second one to clear his repatriation to Libya. Doctors diagnosed his advanced cancer in 2008. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill released him on Aug. 20, 2009, and he flew home to a welcome that coincided with 40th anniversary celebrations of the Qaddafi revolution.

He outlived the colonel by seven months.

more info on the case here:
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer73.html
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/panam.htm

WilliamBlum posted:

If there's anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero's welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was "highly objectionable". His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were "outrageous and disgusting". British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "angry and repulsed", while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images "deeply upsetting." Miliband warned: "How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya's reentry into the civilized community of nations." 1

Ah yes, "the civilized community of nations", that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward. 2 No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an "accident". Why then give awards to those responsible?

Today's oh-so-civilized officials have known of Megrahi's innocence since 1989. The Scottish judges who found Megrahi guilty know he's innocent. They admit as much in their written final opinion. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigated Megrahi's trial, knows it. They stated in 2007 that they had uncovered six separate grounds for believing the conviction may have been a miscarriage of justice, clearing the way for him to file a new appeal of his case. 3 The evidence for all this is considerable. And most importantly, there is no evidence that Megrahi was involved in the act of terror.

The first step of the alleged crime, sine qua non — loading the bomb into a suitcase at the Malta airport — for this there was no witness, no video, no document, no fingerprints, nothing to tie Megrahi to the particular brown Samsonite suitcase, no past history of terrorism, no forensic evidence of any kind linking him to such an act.

And the court admitted it: "The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 is a major difficulty for the Crown case." 4

The scenario implicating Iran, Syria, and the PFLP-GC was the Original Official Version, endorsed by the US, UK, Scotland, even West Germany — guaranteed, sworn to, scout's honor, case closed — until the buildup to the Gulf War came along in 1990 and the support of Iran and Syria was needed for the broad Middle East coalition the United States was readying for the ouster of Iraq's troops from Kuwait. Washington was also anxious to achieve the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by groups close to Iran. Thus it was that the scurrying sound of backtracking could be heard in the corridors of the White House. Suddenly, in October 1990, there was a New Official Version: it was Libya — the Arab state least supportive of the US build-up to the Gulf War and the sanctions imposed against Iraq — that was behind the bombing after all, declared Washington.

The two Libyans were formally indicted in the US and Scotland on Nov. 14, 1991. Within the next 20 days, the remaining four American hostages were released in Lebanon along with the most prominent British hostage, Terry Waite. 5

In order to be returned to Libya, Megrahi had to cancel his appeal. It was the appeal, not his health, that concerned the Brits and the Americans. Dr. Jim Swire of Britain, whose daughter died over Lockerbie, is a member of UK Families Flight 103, which wants a public inquiry into the crash. "If he goes back to Libya," Swire says, "it will be a bitter pill to swallow, as an appeal would reveal the fallacies in the prosecution case. ... I've lost faith in the Scottish criminal justice system, but if the appeal is heard, there is not a snowball's chance in hell that the prosecution case will survive." 6

And a reversal of the verdict would mean that the civilized and venerable governments of the United States and the United Kingdom would stand exposed as having lived a monumental lie for almost 20 years and imprisoned a man they knew to be innocent for eight years.

The Sunday Times (London) recently reported: "American intelligence documents blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain's worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal." Added the Times: "The DIA briefing discounted Libya's involvement in the bombing on the basis that there was 'no current credible intelligence' implicating her." 7

If the three governments involved really believed that Megrahi was guilty of murdering 270 of their people, it's highly unlikely that they would have released their grip on him. Or is even that too much civilized behavior to expect.

One final note: Many people are under the impression that Libyan Leader Moammar Qaddafi has admitted on more than one occasion to Libya's guilt in the PanAm 103 bombing. This is not so. Instead, he has stated that Libya would take "responsibility" for the crime. He has said this purely to get the heavy international sanctions against his country lifted. At various times, both he and his son have explicitly denied any Libyan role in the bombing.

court docs can be found here:
http://www.asser.nl/default.aspx?site_id=36&level1=15246&level2=15248&level3=&textid=39704

Francisco_Danconia posted:

forgotten national hero dies slowly in his villa of prostate cancer immediately after the us kills a socialist leader and unleashes genocide on all remaining loyalists

pp...p...pablo naruto???

Noriega, friend.