It’s official, and I’m allowed to talk about it now. This morning the application for a new appeal against the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the Lockerbie bombing was submitted to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission at the commission’s Glasgow headquarters. The signatories to the application are 20-odd close relatives of the victims of the Pan Am 103 crash, and six of Megrahi’s close family.
http://ift.tt/1kz1vBz
There’s a long way to go, though. First the SCCRC have to establish that it’s even appropriate for them to look at the material, considering the time that has elapsed and that a previous appeal was abandoned by the appellant. Then they have to decide whether the material submitted to them (and anything else they may find out for themselves) shows a reasonable probability that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. If it gets that far the appeal judges themselves are allowed to disagree with the SCCRC about the appropriateness of the referral, and throw it straight out without hearing the case. Only if they accept that the referral was appropriate does it actually get into court.
After that, the court hearing itself should be the easy bit!
If it doesn’t get to court because the Scottish authorities decide they don’t want to rock the boat, this has interesting ramifications. First, it goes against the public stance of the Scottish government, who have said that they would welcome a new appeal as the only way to resolve this long-standing and contentious issue. And second, it would open the way for an appeal outside Scotland under European human rights legislation.
Main grounds of appeal are fourfold.
This appeal goes further than the previous one, in that it includes clear grounds which demonstrate Megrahi to be factually innocent, rather than merely being concerned with demonstrating that the case against him was implausible and laden with reasonable doubt. If it is proved that the bomb was in a suitcase seen at Heathrow airport by three different people well before the connecting flight it supposedly travelled on from Malta landed, this damns the original police inquiry as having been catastrophically off the rails from the very earliest weeks of the investigation.
It also damns the entire international brouhaha that has happened since, from the pressure on Libya to admit guilt, through the farcical trial at Camp Zeist, the conviction of an innocent man, the extortion of billions of dollars in compensation from Libya, the shenanigans surrounding the deal in the desert and the compassionate release, to the use of Lockerbie as part of the justification for intervening in the Libyan civil war to overthrow Gaddafi.
There are some words to describe this debacle, but the auto-censor would get the lot.
Rolfe.
http://ift.tt/1kz1vBz
There’s a long way to go, though. First the SCCRC have to establish that it’s even appropriate for them to look at the material, considering the time that has elapsed and that a previous appeal was abandoned by the appellant. Then they have to decide whether the material submitted to them (and anything else they may find out for themselves) shows a reasonable probability that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. If it gets that far the appeal judges themselves are allowed to disagree with the SCCRC about the appropriateness of the referral, and throw it straight out without hearing the case. Only if they accept that the referral was appropriate does it actually get into court.
After that, the court hearing itself should be the easy bit!
If it doesn’t get to court because the Scottish authorities decide they don’t want to rock the boat, this has interesting ramifications. First, it goes against the public stance of the Scottish government, who have said that they would welcome a new appeal as the only way to resolve this long-standing and contentious issue. And second, it would open the way for an appeal outside Scotland under European human rights legislation.
Main grounds of appeal are fourfold.
- That Megrahi was not the man who bought the clothes packed in the bomb suitcase. (This was the central plank of the appeal that was abandoned.)
- That the bomb suitcase was not introduced into the baggage system at Malta airport (where Megrahi was that morning) but at Heathrow airport, London (where he most definitely wasn’t).
- That the fragment of printed circuit board (PT/35b) alleged to have come from one of a small batch of electronic timer units made especially for the Libyan military was not from a PCB made by the manufacturer of the Libyan timers.
- That many pieces of evidence which could have been very helpful to the accused were not disclosed to the defence. This includes the “secret intelligence document” David Miliband slapped a Public Interest Immunity certificate on in 2008, and documents concerning the metallurgical analysis of the PCB fragment which would have allowed the defence experts to realise it wasn’t from one of the Libyan instruments at the time of the original trial.
This appeal goes further than the previous one, in that it includes clear grounds which demonstrate Megrahi to be factually innocent, rather than merely being concerned with demonstrating that the case against him was implausible and laden with reasonable doubt. If it is proved that the bomb was in a suitcase seen at Heathrow airport by three different people well before the connecting flight it supposedly travelled on from Malta landed, this damns the original police inquiry as having been catastrophically off the rails from the very earliest weeks of the investigation.
It also damns the entire international brouhaha that has happened since, from the pressure on Libya to admit guilt, through the farcical trial at Camp Zeist, the conviction of an innocent man, the extortion of billions of dollars in compensation from Libya, the shenanigans surrounding the deal in the desert and the compassionate release, to the use of Lockerbie as part of the justification for intervening in the Libyan civil war to overthrow Gaddafi.
There are some words to describe this debacle, but the auto-censor would get the lot.
Rolfe.
via JREF Forum http://ift.tt/1nmlzGg
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