TIMES ONLINE: The real scandal is the lost opportunity to uncover the conspirators behind the Lockerbie plot
The accusations would hurt any government, let alone one untested abroad. Alex Salmond’s administration has been accused of a political fix, a squalid commercial deal and a plot to protect its legal system. President Obama called the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi “highly objectionable”. The FBI was more devastating: Scotland had made a “mockery” of the Lockerbie families’ grief and given “comfort to terrorists around the world”.
But there is an indictment still more damning. In his cack-handed handling of the case, Kenny MacAskill, Scotland’s Justice Secretary, has now made it impossible to find out what really happened. There will be no judicial appeal. No court will ask the vital questions left unanswered by the trial in The Hague eight years ago. Who masterminded the atrocity? Who financed the bombers? Who else plotted the deaths of innocent passengers on Pan Am 103?
Lockerbie will remain, for ever, an unexplained horror. The answers instead will be supplied by conspiracy theorists and cranks. Lockerbie will become another Kennedy assassination, open to ever more outlandish explanations — except that this atrocity, unlike the killing in Dallas, will never be investigated at the highest judicial level.
The vacuum will be filled not only by bogus historians and those with a political axe to grind; history’s verdict will also, by default, be swayed by the only man convicted of the bombing who now claims new evidence would exonerate him. He has promised to write his memoirs. Even if he lives long enough to complete them, al-Megrahi alone will be unable to relieve the anguish of the victims’ families. Would he dare jeopardise his family by revealing all he knows?
Had his appeal gone ahead, at least his protestations could have been tested. He might have been cleared. Or his supposed innocence — now taking on a public plausibility — might have been definitely disproved. Instead, he will for ever remain in an absurd limbo, not innocent but somehow not wholly guilty.
A scandal is now swirling over the “deal” said to have been made to set al-Megrahi free. Did Muammar Gaddafi promise Gordon Brown lucrative energy contracts for British companies? Did Lord Mandelson discuss Lockerbie in his meetings in Corfu with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan leader’s son? Was there an understanding that the prisoner would be home in time for Ramadan and, more importantly, to join in the 40th anniversary celebrations of Gaddafi’s seizure of power? >>> Michael Binyon | Monday, August 24, 2009
