Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction



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(c) Identifying the Toshiba radio-cassette player in which the bomb was concealed

Discovery of physical evidence of the nature of the bomb housing On 17 January, 1989, Peter Claiden, senior inspector with the AAIB, was reassembling the dismembered remains of container AVE4041, when he picked up its misshapen identification data plate, which had become detached. When he flexed it a “softish” lump of what was later described as “aggregated partly carbonised material,” fell out of a fold. Pressed in with the lump were several fragments of printed circuit board (PCB), collectively designated AG/145. They included a “browny coloured” one, exhibit PT/30, bearing the white printed characters “L106” and “101.” As it had the “potential to be associated maybe with a device” Claiden photographed both sides, sealed it in a plastic jar and handed it to the police. Together with AG/145 it was forwarded to RARDE where, among the aggregate, explosives expert Allen Feraday found another 5 x 5mm fragment marked “02” and some fragments of white plastic.

AAIB expert’s serious doubts relating to provenance The PCB fragment, PT/30, formed the principal basis of the Crown’s supposition as to the nature and specification of the device in which the bomb had been constructed. Having regard to various queries and concerns which have been raised about the specification in particular of the electronic device in which the bomb was concealed it is rather significant that giving evidence at Zeist, Claiden was adamant that the fold in the plate was not caused coincidentally with or by the explosion, a firm opinion which was perhaps hardly surprising. Moreover, on the basis of the premise that the explosion was the cause of the aggregate becoming lodged in the fold he was at a loss to offer any suggestion as to its trajectory of travel beforehand. It is difficult therefore to avoid the suspicion that it got there by post facto human agency. It has already been mentioned that United States personnel with no known investigative function were present in and around Lockerbie from the word go. No doubt representatives of British intelligence services were similarly on hand.

A further query on provenance At Zeist Feraday testified that the obverse of PT/30 would have been lacquered green but that the lacquer was absent because the fragment had been “delaminated” in the blast. It might be thought to be curious that a blast which destroys almost every trace of the electrical appliance housing the bomb merely succeeds in delicately peeling the lacquer off the PCB fragment.

Dumfries and Galloway police are told of previous West German seizure of a Toshiba bomb designed to destroy an aircraft in flight Within a day or two of the bombing Dumfries and Galloway police had learnt of the fact that a little over two months earlier the West German Federal Criminal Police Office, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), had arrested a number of suspected members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command (PFLP-GC), a Syrian based terror group who were thought to be preparing to plant a bomb on an American commercial passenger aircraft (as to which see much more later). Among incriminating evidence seized by the BKA was a Toshiba RT-F453D radio-cassette player concealed inside of which they found a Semtex bomb operated by a barometric trigger, plainly showing it was designed to destroy an aircraft in flight. The Dumfries and Galloway police were hardly alone in noting that the radio-cassette player could almost have been chosen for the symbolism of the name of the family of models of which it was one – the “BomBeat” range (see, eg, memo by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell, 14 July 1989, cited in Ashton, Megrahi, p.43).

Comparison of PT/30 with the Toshiba seized by the West German Police In January (1989) Allen Feraday visited the BKA’s forensic laboratory in Wiesbaden where he compared PT/30, the “L106” fragment in AG/145, with the PCB in the single-speaker Toshiba RT-F453D seized by the BKA. He found no match with that model.

Toshiba RT-8016 or RT-8026 initially identified as the bomb carrier Visiting Toshiba UK on 2 February, Fereday was shown a selection of circuit boards used in some of the company’s electronic products and next day recorded that he was “completely satisfied that the fragments had originated from a Toshiba brand RT-8016 or RT-8026” stereo radio-cassette player, models similarly bearing the generic name “BomBeat.” The plastic bodies of both models were available in white, red or black but Fereday was certain the machine used for the bomb was white although there is nothing in the disclosed paperwork to suggest that he had sufficient white plastic fragments to sustain that conviction (Ashton, Megrahi, p.160).

Shift to the RT-SF16 Returning to Toshiba UK with DCI Bell on 14 February, Feraday was shown a sales distribution list with three other models of radio cassette player which used the same PCB circuit board as the RT-8016 and RT-8026. One was the RT-SF26 BomBeat stereo model two examples of which were supplied by Toshiba to the police on 20 March, and passed on to Fereday. At the end of April he visited Toshiba HQ in Tokyo with DCI Bell and FBI investigator James “Tom” Thurman where they were informed that a total of seven stereo models used the PCB in question. At the beginning of May 1989 Fereday returned to the UK from Japan, bringing with him a boxed-up RT-SF16 and at least one RT-SF16 instruction manual. The plastic body of the RT-SF16 was black.

Enter PK/689, post-testing remains of a Toshiba RT-SF26 instruction manual front cover We now turn to a piece of evidence on the basis of which the Crown sought to prove the make and model of the electronic appliance in which the bomb was concealed. When Maid of the Seas went down a 90 mph gale carried light debris from the disintegrating aircraft across to the North Sea. Sixty miles from Lockerbie Geoff and Gwendoline (Decky) Horton found strewn across the grass on their farm numerous personal effects from the plane, Christmas cards written by children on board, letters and the like, which they described as all “quite harrowing.” They put their finds in a polythene bag and handed it to a police officer, Pc Brian Walton. One of the items was alleged to be PK/169, the remains of a Tohiba RT-SF16 radio-cassette player instruction manual, which may have lent support to the proposition that that was the model used to conceal the bomb.

(d) Anomalies concerning the evidence relating to remains of a Toshiba radio cassette player user manual

The spectre of slanting the case against Libya As is shown later the choice of specification of the Toshiba radio cassette player used to conceal the bomb may have had a bearing on the question as to who might have been responsible for planting it. In turn this may have influenced the emergence of evidence pointing to a particular model and any anomalies in the evidence might support a suggestion of sinister drift in the investigation towards a particular choice of suspect. There were certainly no shortage of anomalies concerning the remains of one or more Toshiba radio cassette player user manuals found among the debris of Maid of the Seas. Whether they bore a sinister interpretation or were innocent can only be a matter of conjecture.

PK/689: said to be the Horton manual cover In court Mrs Horton claimed she remembered seeing an 8 by 8 inch sheet of paper. (Interviewed by al-Megrahi’s solicitor in 2003 she said it was rectangular and unfragmented.) In court she said it related to a radio or something electrical but she said nothing about the name “Toshiba.” In a later TV interview she did mention having seen that name but by then she could well have been influenced unconsciously by the knowledge that what she was supposed to have found were the remains of the front cover of a Toshiba manual. In court she was presented with an exhibit, PK/689, consisting of an assembly of fragments of part of the front cover of a Toshiba RT-SF16 manual. It had irregular torn edges and was about six inches across at its widest point. Only “IBA” was visible of the brand name but “SF16” and “BomBeat” were visible (for a photograph see http://lockerbiedivide. blogspot.com/, under “Primary Evidence: Toshiba Owner’s Manual”).When shown it by police Mrs Horton was said to have recognised it as the sheet she had found but in court she stated that she did not recognise it. She said that whatever she had found had been more or less intact. She remembered there was a drawing on its face, although none could be seen on the exhibit. The Crown’s explanation was that PK/689 was the remains of the sheet of paper found by the Hortons after undergoing the laboratory testing process. The item found by the Hortons was supposedly fingerprint tested but the fingermarks of neither of the Hortons nor that of the defendants were found on it, a result which was hardly inconsistent with the conditions which it had supposedly survived.

Curious evidence of the police officer who took charge of the Horton finds  Pc Walton, the officer to whom the Hortons handed the bag of paper items they had found, claimed to recollect the front cover of the instruction manual. He described it torn across in at least two places, almost in three separate pieces and had “tiny bits of singeing on some of the edges of the pieces.” Without being too literal his answer seems to confound the proposition that it had been dismembered and damaged by testing. Could the bomb have caused singeing – delicately as it were – without incinerating it? As he also stated that at the time it had no significance for him it seems somehow doubtful that he had any memory of it as distinct from merely responding to an expectation. He may well have been regurgitating an unconscious memory of PK/689 rather than the paper handed him by the Hortons. If it was indeed torn across in at least two places, almost in three separate pieces it seems unlikely that Mrs Horton would have remembered it as an intact page. He professed to recall print in foreign languages on the paper, although these were not visible on the exhibit.

Query regarding survival of the Toshiba instruction manual front cover Assuming the front cover had been in the bomb suitcase, it was a remarkably robust piece of paper. In the first place it had in the words of the RARDE joint report co-authored by scientist Dr Thomas Hayes and Allen Feraday, “survived a close-range explosion involvement,” resulting from a blast of (on the Crown’s case) 450 grams of plastic explosive which incinerated most of the radio-cassette player to which it would have been adjacent. More graphically expressed, it had survived a “thousands-degree Semtex supernova” (http://lockerbie divide.blogspot.com/, under “Primary Evidence: Toshiba Owner’s Manual”) which had failed to achieve its complete incineration. As if that were not enough it had survived the buffeting and drenching of a 90 mph gale which carried it from nearly 31,000 feet aloft to its landing place 60 miles from Lockerbie where it lay on soaking wet grass in driving rain all night long and into the next afternoon. It is certainly surprising that it was not unrecognisable papier-mâché.

Sales of the RT-SF16 to Libya When visiting Toshiba’s Tokyo HQ in late April 1989, Feraday, Bell and Thurman were told that whereas the RT-8016 and RT-8026 models were aimed mainly at the American and European markets the RT-SF16 and RT-SF26 were mainly sold in Asia and the Middle East. It is true that in the six months from October 1988 to March 1989 sales of the RT-SF16 to Libya reached 30,000, or three-quarters of world sales for that period. However, from its introduction in 1985 until October 1988, only 8,000 examples, or 11 per cent of the global total, had been sold to Libya. Nonetheless this was a still a significant figure.

Supposed discovery of the Toshiba manual front cover shortly after the investigators’ return from Japan with an RT-SF16 manual Armed with their completed picture about the different models using the same PCB as that from which thye fragment in AG145 had originated and about sales, and in possession of an RT-SF16 instruction manual the investigators returned from Japan at the beginning of May 1989. Then by another of those curious coincidences which set the Lockerbie case apart, and in a reversal of the more usual process by which the discovery of certain evidence precedes the acquisition of control material for the purpose of testing or identifying it, not two weeks later, on 11 May, the manual cover allegedly found by the Hortons was received at RARDE from the disused Dextar company warehouse in Lockerbie in which recovered personal effects were stored. On being received it was photographed but supposedly not examined until 16 May when it was again photographed.

Exhibit PT/35d: the wad of BomBeat manual pages found in the Slalom shirt neck The supposed arrival at RARDE of the Toshiba BomBeat user manual cover PK/689 not two weeks after the return of the investigators from Japan with a sample BomBeat manual was not the only curiosity as to timing relating to proof of the identity of the bomb container from adjacent manual remains. On 12 May, that is the very next day after the arrival at RARDE of the Horton exhibit and its being photographed, Dr Hayes claimed that he dissected exhibit PI/995, the neck from a Slalom brand of shirt which it was alleged had been in the primary suitcase, and removed from it a number of items. These included exhibit PT/35b, the fragment of a printed circuit board from an electronic clock timer which the Crown alleged had controlled the detonation of the bomb and which supposedly established the link to Libya. Its provenance played a key role in the trial at Zeist and is discussed in section V below. However, what is more pertinent for present purposes is that Hayes also claimed that he removed from the shirt neck exhibit PT/2, otherwise numbered PT/35d, a wad of paper. On being taken apart it was separated out into five constituent sheets, each of which was sketched front and back on the controversial page 51 of Dr Hayes’s notes (see V, 5, (c), (iii) for the issue of the re-pagination of the notes). Multiple language instructions were discernible on some of the sheets and it has already been mentioned that Pc Walton stated that the cover he had been handed by the Hortons bore text in foreign languages, although these were not visible on PK/689. Either they had been extinguished as a result of the testing process or he had been told about the print on PT/35d and perhaps had a false memory of seeing foreign text on the paper he had taken from the Hortons. On page 51 of his notes Hayes recorded that he had identified the ten sides as matching pages 3 to 12 of PT/1, the Toshiba BomBeat instruction manual brought back from Japan and used as a control sample. That the discovery of the PT/35d should have followed so closely upon the heels of the obtaining of the control sample manual from Japan is a curiosity on a par with the interval between the latter and the arrival of the putative Horton exhibit at RARDE.

Two photographs in the joint report The joint report included two photographs of PI/995:

Photo 116 depicted PI/995 together with three other fragments of grey cloth, supposedly from the same Slalom-brand shirt. (The largest, PK/1978, with a Slalom label on the breast pocket was shown to Anthony Gauci on 30 January, 1990.)

Photo 117, which examination of the photographic log indicates was taken on 22 May, was a close-up of the shirt neck after dissection together with PT/35b, PT/35d and the other items said to have been extracted from it on the same date (12 May, 1989).

The joint report stated, and Hayes reiterated in evidence at Zeist, that photo 116 was taken prior to the dissection, that is, on or before 12 May, 1989. However, some of the other shirt fragments were only received at RARDE and examined by Hayes significantly after that date. PK/1978, for example, was not examined until 10 October, 1989. The report, and Hayes’ evidence, had to be incorrect unless:



(a) PI/995 was in fact dissected and PT/35b allegedly extracted from it on a date later than 12 May, 1989 (with Hayes consciously backdating his notes for some reason), in which case his evidence of the date of the dissection and of the finding would have been seriously inaccurate; or

(b) photo 116 (not 117, as Ashton described it in Megrahi, at p.163, presumably in error) showed PI/1995 after (not prior to) dissection and the joint report was incorrect.

Either way Hayes gave evidence which was manifestly wrong, although the second possible error would have been rather less significant. Discovering among RARDE files a record indicating that photo 116 showed PT/995 after dissection the SCCRC felt bound to plump for the latter, concluding that Hayes had merely made an honest mistake. As to photograph 117, which according to the unchallenged photographic log was taken on 22 May, the veteran Lockerbie commentator Barry Walker has demonstrated with characteristic incisiveness that unless the non-dissected wad of paper shown in the photograph was a theatrical prop and not the actual wad found in the shirt neck, photograph 117 could self-evidently not have been taken after page 51 was written up (“Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil”, The Masonic Versus blog, http://e-zeecon.blogspot. com, version modified 14 November 2013, section captioned “SCCRC Statement of Reasons ‘deeply flawed’”). If the date given in the log is correct – and there is little reason to doubt its accuracy – page 51 must have been written up on or after 22 May, not as early as the 12th. Walker cogently asks why if the shirt neck was examined on 12 May RARDE would have waited ten days to photograph the wad of paper, PT35d (PT/2), and then taken it apart.The clear implication of this is that Dr Hayes’s claim that it was on that date that the shirt neck was examined and dissected and that PT/35d was then found and itself separated out into its constituent sheets is open to significant doubt. As Walker observes, while the date on page 51 may only be incorrect by a factor of a few days that inaccuracy may nonetheless be significant bearing in mind that the item said to be the manual cover found by the Hortons was only examined, it was said, on 16 May and photographed the day after that. Precisely what potentially sinister conclusions might be drawn from the totality of the various anomalies just reviewed is unclear. Walker notes with regret the failure of the SCCRC to obtain the photograph of the Horton item on its reception by RARDE on 11 May because a comparison with the two photographs taken on 17 May of what purported to be the Horton item would have resolved any doubts about whether they were one and the same or different items. If they were different items that would suggest that the item original recovered by Mr and Mrs Horton may have been substituted by a page from a manual brought back from Japan and that this was done in order to bolster the supposition that the bomb container was a Toshiba radio cassette player of a specification supplied in large numbers to Libya. (See further below, V, 5, (c), (vii) and (viii), and see also http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/, under “Primary Evid-ence: Toshiba Owner’s Manual” for a review of the chronology, details and oddities surrounding the designation of exhibit reference numbers).



Fragments of black plastic Establishing that the bomb was housed in an RT-SF16 BomBeat model provided a basis for casting suspicions on Libya, having regard to the sales figures there of that model. A number of fragments of black plastic were recovered from the clothing which the RARDE scientists thought had been in or near the primary suitcase (of which topic see below). The RARDE joint report had asserted that they had come from the casing of the radio-cassette player in which the bomb had been concealed. The plastic body of the RT-SF16 was of course black. For the purposes of al-Megrahi’s second, ultimately aborted, appeal, defence solicitors engaged a forensic scientist, Dr Roger King, to prepared a comprehensive report. One of his tasks was to analyse nine representative samples of the black plastic fragments and after subjecting them to standard infrared spectroscopy he found that eight of the nine did not match the casing. He was unable to determine whether they had come from another part of the radio that he could not test or the suitcase shell, or some other unidentified object close to the bomb (report, cited in Ashton, Megrahi, pp.410-411).

Conclusion reached on the back of three misleading assertions Although he had initially been so sure that the Toshiba PCB L106 fragment had come from a white bodied RT8016/8026 model Feraday now decided with equal fervour that it had after all come from a black-bodied RT-SF16. But to explain away the stark change of opinion the RARDE joint report co-authored by Dr Hayes and Allen Feraday attempted to play it down through three wholly erroneous statements:

(i) It was clearly suggested that the authors were unaware until the meeting in Tokyo at the end of April that the circuit board in question had been used in models other than the RT-8016 and RT-8026 whereas as early as 14 February, 1989, details of five models using the PCB had been furnished by Tokyo UK.

(ii) It was stated that the original identification of the RT-8016 on 2 February had been “tentatively” made, whereas Feraday had in fact expressed himself “completely satisfied” with the identification of the model as the RT-8016/8026.

(iii) The report stated that control samples of the RT-SF16 and other models were not obtained by RARDE until the Tokyo visit, whereas Feraday had in fact been supplied with two RT-SF16 examples on 21 March.



Was identification of the bomb housing as a RT-SF16 reliable? It is true that identifying the RT-SF16 BomBeat had some evidential significance in implicating Libya on the basis of the sales figures, but it hardly provided circumstantial proof, even when coupled with the contention that the bomb was triggered by an electronic timer of a kind exclusively supplied to the Libyan military. The latter topic is a crucial one we shall come to in due course. Insofar as the deficiencies and queries described in the above text might be suggestive of chicanery the motive for doing so seems clear enough despite what would have been a rather heavy-handed attempt to slant the case for only very marginal tactical gain.

(e) Attempts by the investigators to establish the exact

positioning of the bomb in container AVE4041

First or second layer? As already mentioned it was perceived as vitally important to establish in which layer of baggage in the portable container AVE4041the suitcase bomb had been positioned when detonation took place, whether resting on the floor with the Heathrow interline bags, or in the second or higher layer with luggage which had been transferred to Pan Am 103 from Pan Am 103A, the Frankfurt feeder flight. Expert consideration of this issue was one of the chief concerns of the Lockerbie investigation and in the trial at Camp van Zeist.

Controlled explosion tests initiated by RARDE at Indian Head and joint FAA/FBI tests in Atlantic City In order to determine the explosive content and ultimately the positioning of the bomb five controlled explosions devised by RARDE expert Allen Feraday were carried out in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the US Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technology Centre, Indian Head, Maryland, in April 1989. Two further relevant tests were carried out in July 1989 at FAA Headquarters in Atlantic City, New Jersey. All the tests involved using bombs housed within Toshiba RT-8016 radio cassette players, packed among clothing in a hardshell suitcase which, surrounded by other luggage, was placed in a container similar to AVE4041. In each test the container was placed adjacent to a fibreglass container replicating container AVN7511 which had been alongside AVE4041 on Pan Am 103 and had sustained blast damage. In the Indian Head tests the two containers were placed on a wooden test frame resting on the ground but in the July tests the two containers were placed in a section of fuselage of a decommissioned DC10 aircraft. Varying quantities of plastic explosive were used in the seven tests, ranging from 360 to 680 grams. The Indian Head test results were assessed in the RARDE joint report. The Atlantic City tests are discussed to later.


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