Questions Remain in the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie Trial

By Andrew I. Killgore

Scottish law permits three verdicts: guilty, not guilty, and not proven. The Scottish court sitting at Camp Zeist near Amsterdam in the Netherlands spent 75 pages saying that Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was guilty of planting the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. Any fair reading of that verdict, however, simply shouts: not guilty.

Al-Megrahi’s lawyers are now in the process of appealing to the Scottish Criminal Law Review Commission on the basis of a miscarriage of justice: that the defense lawyers did not provide their client with an adequate defense. A glaring deficiency was their failure to call to the stand an Israeli who was responsible for advising Pan Am on security arrangements.

There had been allegations of a break-in of Pan Am facilities at Heathrow Airport, which might have provided the opportunity for placing a bomb aboard Pan Am 103. Yet the Court failed to question Isaac Yeffet (formerly with Israel’s El Al Airlines), a citizen of Israel, whose responsibilities included advising Pan Am on security worldwide, including at Heathrow, from which Pan Am 103 departed on its ill-fated last flight.

Yeffet’s Alert Management Inc. employees had full run of Heathrow, from which they might have been expected to detect the unaccompanied bag bearing the bomb, if the prosecution’s claim that it originated in Valetta, Malta is correct. Or they might have prevented introduction of the bomb at London, as is the theory of Dr. Robert Black, professor of criminal law at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, mastermind of the unique legal arrangements for trying Al-Megrahi and his acquitted co-defendant under Scottish law in the Netherlands.

Black predicted in a recent speech that Al-Megrahi’s case would be accepted by the Review Commission and that he would be freed within two to three years. However the appeal turns out, Martin Cadman, who lost a son in the crash, is quoted in the London Sunday Telegraph of Feb. 4, 2001, as saying, “The appeal will hold us up for another year or so before we can have an inquiry into the truth of who is responsible and what the motive was.”

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.