Secret witness casts doubt over Lockerbie conviction

Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
Friday October 12, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Lawyers for a Libyan man covicted of killing 270 people in the Lockerbie bombing have found a new witness who casts doubt on the reliability of the main prosecution witness in the case.

Lawyers acting for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi told an appeal court hearing in Edinburgh yesterday that this new, unnamed witness raised fresh questions about the credibility of Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper whose evidence was pivotal in the Libyan's conviction in 2001 for blowing up Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.

Mr Gauci's testimony at the trial in Camp Zeist in the Netherlands has already come under attack from the Scottish criminal cases review commission (SSRC). It announced in June that it feared al-Megrahi was the victim of a miscarriage of justice and sent his conviction to the appeal court.

Maggie Scott QC, al-Megrahi's appeal lawyer, told three appeal judges yesterday there were substantial doubts about the forensic evidence at his trial, the quality of his defence in 2001, the sufficiency of evidence against him and the prosecution's failure to disclose key evidence which was uncovered by the SCCRC and also supplied by the Maltese government.

As the Guardian disclosed last week, the Libyan's lawyers also believe Mr Gauci was offered a $2m (£980,000) reward from the US government, payable after al-Megrahi's conviction, raising further doubts about his testimony.

It also emerged yesterday that two secret documents, which are understood to contradict prosecution claims that the Pan Am jet was blown up using a Swiss-made timer, did not - as was widely believed - come from the US intelligence services.

Jim Swire, the Lockerbie campaigner whose daughter Flora died in the bombing, and Professor Robert Black, the legal expert who devised the scheme to try al-Megrahi at a neutral venue, the Netherlands, were surprised at the prosecution's disclosure.

They said the documents could instead either have come from security services in Germany, Switzerland or possibly Israel. Critics of al-Megrahi's conviction believe it more likely the bomb contained a different type of timer, planted by a Syrian-backed terrorist cell which was broken up by German police.

The lord advocate, Elish Angiolini, has been given until December 21 - the 19th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing - to produce the classified documents or explain why they are being withheld.

Dr Jim Swire (jim@swirefamily.net)