The Sunday Herald in Scotland has defied Scottish legal authorities and published previously undisclosed files on the 1988 Pan Am bombing, which killed 246 people in Lockerbie, Scotland. Back in 2009, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing, was released from prison on "compassionate" grounds, ostensibly because he was expected to die from prostate cancer within three months. (The real reason, according to a U.S. Senate report, had to do with lucrative Libyan oil contracts sought by British-based oil giant BP.) Whatever the case may be, he's still not dead yet!
The newly-released documents shed light on why Scotland decided to release al-Megrahi, who insists he is innocent to this day. The 800-page report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission was published on the Herald's website yesterday, and Scottish legal authorities said that while it was illegal to disclose the information, they would not press charges against the Herald's editors. Al-Megrahi also gave the Herald permission to publish the documents. The AP reports:
The files offer a more detailed explanation of the decision by the commission — which investigates potential miscarriages of justice — to uphold six points of appeal put forward by al-Megrahi ahead of planned appeal hearing in 2009... The files explain that the commission accepted some of al-Megrahi’s concerns over evidence that had not been passed to his defense team, including some classified intelligence files.
Al-Megrahi has questioned the testimony of a shopkeeper who identified him as having bought a man’s shirt in his store in Malta. Scraps of the garment were later found wrapped around a timing device discovered in the wreckage of the airliner. In the newly published document, the commission expressed concern that evidence that the shopkeeper had seen a magazine article linking al-Megrahi to the bomb plot was not passed to defense lawyers by the prosecution.
But forensic evidence still tied al-Megrahi to the store in Malta, and to the bombing, according to the report. "While the report shows that there were six grounds on which it believed a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, it also rejected 45 of the 48 grounds submitted by al-Megrahi, and in particular it upheld the forensic basis of the case leading to Malta and to Libyan involvement,” says Alex Salmond, head of Scotland’s semiautonomous government.
