Top FBI scientist who was found wanting

THE charge of murder against the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing is based on purely circumstantial evidence, according to advocate depute Alistair Campbell QC, who has invited the three judges to return a guilty verdict.

"The evidence comes from a number of sources which, when taken together, provide a corroborated case both as to the commission of the crime and the identity of the perpetrators," he says.

However, the circumstances the prosecution relies on have been artificially frozen in time, to the period before November 1991 when the two Libyans, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, were first named in the indictments.

Much has happened since then. Four days after Syria and Iran were exonerated and the blame was heaped on Libya, the last western hostages in Beirut - Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland - were released. This circumstance has sparked a thousand conspiracy theories, all underpinned by America’s need to woo Arab states after the Gulf War. Most, of course, is unverifiable speculation. There is, however, at least one hard fact which cannot be denied, but which was nonetheless ignored in the prosecution’s presentation of the chain of incriminating circumstances.

It is the case of James Thomas Thurman, a senior FBI scientist who, 18 months after the bombing, identified a fragment of distinctive electronic circuit board as the link which implicated the Libyans and switched the whole direction of the police investigation away from Palestinian terrorists.

Thurman was feted on coast-to-coast television in the US as the man who cracked the Lockerbie riddle. But in 1997 he was at first suspended and then removed from his job at the FBI crimes laboratory after an internal investigation found him guilty of fabricating evidence to suit particular lines of inquiry, casting doubt on every case he had been involved in. Despite his seniority and his claimed expertise in explosives, it was discovered his only qualification was a degree in political science.

Thurman was listed as witness number 587 for the Camp Zeist trial but was never called to give evidence. Since the defence strategy is not to present any evidence to contradict the prosecution case, he will never now have the chance to give his side of the story in court.