Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
Download 0.96 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Inquiries with the PCB industry
- (i) Delayed date of recording inventory log
- (ii) Unorthodox alteration of the exhibit label
- (iii) Altered pagination of RARDE forensic notes
- (iii, continued) RARDE notes subjected to ESDA testing for al-Megrahi’s second appeal
- (iv) Allocation of reference number
- (v) Omission to record descriptive detail of PT/35b contemporaneously with its discovery
- (vii) Issues arising from two photographs in the joint report At II , (2), (d)
- (viii) Inexplicable resort to Polaroid pictures
- (a) Police photographer on hand
- (ix) Assertion that no explosive residue test was ever carried out on PT/35b subsequently belied by discovery of a secret police report
- (x) Delayed delivery to the police
- 6. Chicken or the egg (a)
- Edwin Bollier’s later amended account (1993): supply of some MST-13 timers to the Stasi
- This was of considerable potential importance because the Stasi maintained close links with the PFLP-GC.
Contradictory reports For the record it should be noted that two reports inconsistent with this scenario appeared in print during the early 1990s. In one, it was Thurman himself who found the fragment in the shirt collar (Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau – Inside Today’s FBI, London: Macmillan, 1994). In a second account, the fragment was found in a field by a Scottish worker in April 1990 (Mark Perry, Eclipse – the Last Days of the CIA, Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 1992). These were almost certainly journalistic misunderstandings of semi-official briefings. It is unlikely Thurman would have taken a full year to identify the fragment after himself discovering it and equally unlikely that the shirt would have been found so long after completion of the fingertip search of the crash site environs (points made by Ashton and Ferguson, pp.168-169). Inquiries with the PCB industry According to evidence given at Zeist the Scottish police spent many months on fruitless inquiries into its origin within the printed circuit board industry. The breakthrough The breakthrough supposedly came after enlarged photographs of the fragment were forwarded by Scottish police to FBI headquarters in Washington DC. On 15 June, 1990, FBI forensic investigator James Thurman professed to identify it as part of a MEBO MST-13 electronic timer. Forensic comparison by RARDE subsequently confirmed the identification. (c) Anomalies and inconsistencies relating to the alleged recovery, documentation and examination of PT/35b There were a number of problematical anomalies or inconsistencies relating to the alleged discovery, recovery, documentation and examination of PT/35b. Some at least of these did not leave even the otherwise insouciant judges entirely untroubled. (i) Delayed date of recording inventory log Det Con Thomas Gilchrist, one of the two Scottish police officers who assumed responsibility for having found the shirt, was unable to explain why the collar had not been logged into the police property inventory until 17 January, 1989, four days after it was supposedly noticed during the sifting process. (ii) Unorthodox alteration of the exhibit label The police exhibit label had originally been marked “cloth (charred)” but the word “cloth” had been altered to “debris.” However, instead of striking through the word “cloth” and transparently writing “debris” alongside it, as normal prudence (and indeed standard police procedure) dictated, someone had gone to the trouble of carefully overwriting each letter in an apparent attempt to obliterate or disguise the previous word. Thus, the “C” had been converted to a “D”; the “L” to an “E”; the small “o” to half a “B”; the “T” to “R”; and so on. Peculiarly enough, the alterations were not initialled, which would normally be done as a matter of course and habit. The change was apparently unnoticed by anyone until the exhibit was produced in court. DC Gilchrist accepted that he must have been the person who made the alteration but professed no memory of having done so. However, he also positively denied that he had been asked to make the alteration, an assertion hardly consistent with professing a blank memory. Asked why he might have made the change, his explanation, according to the judges, was “at worst evasive and at best confusing.” In fact, there may well be an explanation – conjectured later – but it has nothing to do with DC Gilchrist. (iii) Altered pagination of RARDE forensic notes It was Dr Hayes of RARDE who professed to have discovered the fragment in the shirt. He too suffered from a memory gap, very unfortunately so given the crucial importance which attached to the fragment. Perhaps understandably, given the mass of material to be examined, he claimed to have no clear memory of making the original discovery and professed to rely on his notes, which dealt with the shirt collar PI/995 and fragment on page 51. But the subsequent pages, originally numbered 51-55, were overwritten 52-56, suggesting at first blush that the page dealing with the fragment had subsequently been inserted. Hayes described it as “an unfathomable mystery,” although he did make a stab at offering an explanation, suggesting that he might accidentally have given the page following page 51 the same number, only realising the error after writing the next few pages. Many years after Zeist the producers of documentaries made for BBC Scotland and Al-Jazeera Television which were broadcast on the day John Ashton’s book Megrahi: You Are My Jury was published (28 February, 2012) sought clarification on the repagination issue from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, RARDE’s successor establishment. Responding, Vicky Torraca, DSTL Public Relations and Media Manager, noted that the issue had been explored with Dr Hayes at length” in the trial. Nonetheless, she reiterated that “[i]t was standard practice to number pages in case files manually, usually at or near the end of the case, when the file was being assembled into a coherent form, suitable for indexing.” This could not be done until all, or at least most, of the examinations were complete and as it was a manual process and a large and complex case, there were many opportunities to make minor mistakes. For example, two pages could be turned over as one. Again, since case files were formed of loose leaf sheets, not bound books, a page could be missing from one collected sheaf of pages and inadvertently caught up in another bundle. Another possibility was the the same number could be written twice, particularly if the writer was interrupted while applying the numbering. In any event, and by contrast with the matter of the overwritten label, the judges perhaps understandably and with some justice dismissed the anomaly as “of no materiality.” (iii, continued) RARDE notes subjected to ESDA testing for al-Megrahi’s second appeal In pursuance of al-Megrahi’s second appeal the defence had Dr Hayes’s notes examined by the process known as electro-static deposition analysis (ESDA), successfully used in the early 1990s to prove the concoction of confessions in such notorious cases as the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, and a host of cases involving the West Midlands Crime Squad including the Carl Bridgewater killing. (For a description of the method and the cases see Wolchover, D. and Heaton-Armstrong, A, Confession Evidence, London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1996, 3-179 to 191 and noter-up at www.DavidWolchover.co.uk). The analysis revealed inden-tations on page 51 from notes written on page 50, to be expected if page 51 had been immediately beneath page 50 on the pad when page 50 was written. However, oddly, there were no indentations from page 51 on renumbered page 52 (formerly page 51). What obviously happened was that after page 50 was written Hayes for some reason removed page 51 from the pad, wrote up the notes on the finding of PT/35b elsewhere and then reinserted it. Why he did so remains unclear. (iv) Allocation of reference number Hayes was also unable to explain why PT/30, a PCB fragment from the radio-cassette player, appeared after the entry for PT/35b. The PT prefix was applied to all fragments that were recovered from other items by RARDE scientists but PT items were allocated numbers retrospectively rather than chronologically. Thus while the PT/35 fragments were supposedly recovered on 12 May, 1989, PT/30 was not recovered until 8 June, 1989. This anomaly too the judges professed to dismiss as of no materiality. (v) Omission to record descriptive detail of PT/35b contemporaneously with its discovery Interviewed by the SCCRC on 7 March 2006 Allen Feraday said that when Dr Hayes was dissecting PI/995, the shirt neck, and removed PT/35b from it he was sufficiently excited by his find to call him (Feraday) over. It was in May 1989 that the RARDE team were desperately trying (with some success) to find pieces of the Toshiba radio cassette player’s PCBs in order to get a better identification on it. Toshiba radio cassette player PCBs were brown but the fragment was green so it might conceivably have been part of the bomb circuitry itself and, indeed, Feraday recalled that they both instantly realised its potential significance as a possible component of the bomb. While, however, Hayes might therefore have been expected to make a very careful record of its appearance, all that he noted down was “a fragment of a green coloured circuit board” and supposedly filed it away in the basement until September. (vi) No sketch Hayes made a detailed sketch of a fragment of paper which he also removed from PI/995, as he did of PT/30, the PCB fragment from the Toshiba cassette-record player. However, despite its potential importance he made no sketch of PT/35b. (vii) Issues arising from two photographs in the joint report At II, (2), (d) above (p.7), we considered the potential implications of chronological inconsistencies relating to photographs of PI/995, Nos 116 and 117, in the joint report. Just as the inconsistencies may have a bearing on the sheets of the Toshiba user manual so, likewise, may they have a potential bearing on the provenance of PT/35B. (viii) Inexplicable resort to Polaroid pictures. Although Feraday professedly recognised that the fragment was potentially of considerable significance he failed to inform the police of the find for four months. Then on 15 September he sent DCI Williamson in Scotland Polaroid photographs of the fragment with a note apologising for their poor quality but claiming that it was “the best I can do in such a short time.” On the face of it this seems to have been an inexplicable statement on two counts: (a) Police photographer on hand RARDE were being assisted by a seconded police photographer who had been taking high quality pictures of the debris throughout 1989; and, (b) Purported availability of photo 117 In any event, if photo 117 had genuinely been taken on or about 12 May, 1989, ie, the date of the dissection and supposed extraction of PT/35b, then RARDE did have a close-up shot of the fragment supposedly taken at the time of the dissection. One possible implication of this is that any genuine photograph RARDE may have had taken of the array on the day of dissection did not depict PT/35b, but merely the original unidentifiable “fragment of green coloured circuit board” which was later claimed to be PT/35b. It would have been swapped for photo 117, taken later. For reasons which are set out later this almost certain did not happen and the Zeist judges did not regard the sending of an inferior Polaroid photograph to be of any significance. (ix) Assertion that no explosive residue test was ever carried out on PT/35b subsequently belied by discovery of a secret police report At Zeist Hayes testified that he never tested the fragment for explosive residue. In other circumstances the reasons he gave for this might have been understandable: its small size, the relative cost and effort involved, and its self-evident involvement in the explosion, having allegedly been found inside blast damaged clothes. Merely by looking at, he claimed, he could tell it that it was explosively damaged but, in any event, the chances of finding explosive residues were “vanishingly small.” James Thurman, the FBI investigator who played such a pivotal role in bringing forward the evidence which identified it as coming from a MEBO MST-13 timer, similarly claimed he had undertaken no test for residue and years later, in a Dutch TV interview, he likewise cited “budgetary reasons” (Lockerbie Revisited, aired 27.04.09). Given the enormous potential significance of the find and the huge geopolitical issues and juridical questions which were likely to arise from it Hayes’s apparent insouciance was lame, to say the least. Certainly when it came to trekking around Europe consulting electronics firms for help in identifying the fragment the Dumfries and Galloway police were unsparing of expense. Six years after Zeist a previously secret police memorandum dated 3 April, 1990 came to light which flatly contradicted Hayes’ evidence. It turned out that a residue test had after all been conducted. The author of the note, DC Entwistle, was reporting on a visit by French police investigating the 1989 destruction of UTA flight 772 over Niger (as to which see later) and quoted a statement made to the delegation that neither Exhibit PT/30, the PCB fragment identified as originating from a Toshiba RT-SF16 radio-cassette player, nor PT/35b bore any traces of explosive contamination. It must be said that the explanation for the absence of such traces given in the report to the French officers – that it was due to total consummation of the explosive material – rather begs the question of whether the items were ever contaminated in the first place. The explanation was doubtless predicated on the assumption that they had been in close proximity to the bomb, an assumption doubtless based on the supposition that it was found in the neck of a blast-damaged shirt. Whilst Dr Hayes’s claim at trial that PT/35b was not tested for explosive residue may be attributed to a false memory after 12 years, it raises the clear suspicion that the negative evidence was suppressed in order to avoid the raising of awkward doubts on provenance. (x) Delayed delivery to the police Given the urgency of the investigation it has been described as curious that PT/35b was not handed over to the police until January 1990, seven months after its supposed discovery in the shirt remnant (see Ashton, Megrahi, p.163). (xi) Queries revealed as to who actually found the fragment and when For the sake of completeness it ought to be mentioned that DI Williamson and Richard Marquise, head of the FBI’s Lockerbie investigation were both under the impression that it was Allen Feraday rather than Dr Hayes who had found the fragment. Marquise and the BKA also believed that it was found in January 1990 rather than May 1989. Citing a conversation with Det Supt Gordon Ferrie, BKA officer Helge Tepp stated that Ferrie had said the fragment had been found in the cuff of a Slalom shirt in January 1990, an assertion repeated by the US Justice Department when formally requesting the Swiss government for assistance in investigating the Mebo connection. (See Ashton, Megrahi, pp.164-165.) These differences may have been based on no more than misunderstanding, mishearing or mistaken recollection, but they have fuelled suggestions that PT35b was a plant, perhaps being surreptitiously substituted for a green fragment of circuit board originally extracted in good faith from the Slalom shirt collar PI/995. That supposition is dealt with later. (d) Insouciance of the Zeist judges Even discounting the information which came to light after the trial the Zeist judges had before them a long list of question marks hanging over the evidence relating to the provenance of PT/35b. Nonetheless, while signalling some sense of unease the judges were content not to let it disturb their equanimity: “While it is unfortunate that this particular item which turned out to be of major significance to this enquiry despite its miniscule size may not initially have been given the same meticulous treatment as most other items, we are nevertheless satisfied that the fragment was extracted by Dr Hayes in May 1989 from the remnant of the Slalom shirt found by DC Gilchrist and DC McColm.” It is proposed to return to the difficult question of whether the fragment may have been planted in order to incriminate Libya. (e) Miraculous survival of two chips and a scrap of paper In old time Chicago they used to say– “first time’s chance, second time’s coincidence, third time’s happenstance.” The aphorism might aptly be applied to the alleged finding of two PCB fragments which, taken together, appeared to point the finger of guilt at Libya. These were PT/35b, the 9 mm square fragment of an MST-13 PCB and the 10 x 6mm PCB fragment which led to the identification of the Toshiba RT-SF16 BomBeat radio-cassette player. From the “trial loading,” that is the simulated demonstration of how the bomb would have been packed in the BomBeat (exhibit PP8932; see eg Foot, p.4, for a photograph), it was established that the fragment would have come from a point on the intact PCB located no more than 1 inch from 450 grams of Semtex with only air between. The timer PCB fragment would have been no more than 2 inches away, again separated from the Semtex by air. It will be recalled that a controlled explosion carried out by Dr Roger King and Dr John Wyatt to replicate the Lockerbie bomb blast for the purposes of al-Megrahi’s second appeal did leave some PCB fragments (see above p.11). Nonetheless, rather than being reduced to at best unrecognisable slivers, even if not pure dust, what supposedly survives the Pan Am 103 explosion are two pieces of not insignificant size bearing clear features sufficient to allow identification of each of the two relevant devices from which they came. That one signature piece could have been preserved in some sort of blast-proof, conflagration-proof, protective cocoon, with not even any pitting and, in the case of the alleged Toshiba chip, the white printed characters still perfectly legible, when no other substantial pieces of the PCB of which it formed a part were found during the painstaking fingertip search conducted around Lockerbie must have seemed a stroke of amazing luck to the investigators. That two such signposting pieces, each providing evidence of the particular device from which it is said to have come and both neatly implicating Libya, should have survived in this way might not unfairly be described as defying the natural order. But in a case replete with miracles – or at any rate astonishing coincidences – one little miracle is perhaps not to be unexpected. And then we have the cover of the SF16 manual. It was a remarkably robust piece of paper. Not only had it, in the words of Dr Hayes, “survived a close-range explosion involvement,” resulting from a blast of 450 grams of Semtex which incinerated most of the radio-cassette player to which it would have been adjacent, but 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 all night long and into the next afternoon. It ought to have been papier-mâché. But it was the clue which identified the Toshiba model. So now we have a triple miracle. But this was perhaps only to be expected in a case abounding with – indeed dependent on – the most extraordinary coincidences. Lady Bracknell would have clucked herself silly!
One of the key questions which lie at the heart of establishing who destroyed Pan Am 103 is how the fragment PT/35b was linked to an MST-13 timer. Was this achieved by a virtuoso feat of genuinely inspirational detective work starting with an unidentified fragment among the debris and working back to the discovery of the existence of the Mebo type MST-13 timer and of the fact that only Libya had purchased the model? Conversely, were leading (though perhaps hidden) players in the investigation already well aware of the existence of the MST-13 timer, of its manufacturer/supplier and of the fact that Libya had purchased the whole production of the model in advance of the discovery of the fragment – indeed before the bombing itself? In other words, was this yet another extraordinary coincidence – that those key players were armed with full knowledge of the special link between the device and Libya and that the fragment of such a device then just happens to surface among the debris? Suppose the latter were to be the case coincidence might theoretically still be capable of providing a possible explanation for such an order of events. However, credibility might begin to be stretched in these circumstances, with coincidence giving way to convenience as a tempting explanation of the discovery of the fragment. Suppose on top of that it were to be found that key players had sought to conceal the fact that they were already well aware of the existence of the timer and its exclusive possession by Libya when the fragment was allegedly discovered. Not only that, but what if a key figure was suborned to make a very public spectacle of pretending that the discovery resulted from “old-fashioned” detective work with no element of prompting? In those circumstances the suspicion, indeed, inference, that a determination was made in the first instance to allege that such a timer was used in the bomb becomes even more compelling. From that – and given other evidence in the case – it might be but a short step to the conclusion that the fragment was planted. We shall therefore now seek to examine the vital questions of (i) sequence and (ii) concealment. (b) Origin and story of the MST-13 timer The story of the design and manufacture of the MST-13s and their sale to Libya A full but not necessarily complete or accurate account of the supply of MST-13 timers to the Libyan military was given to Lockerbie investigators by Edwin Bollier, co-owner of Mebo, and Mebo’s technician Ulrich Lumpert when they were interviewed by the Swiss and Scottish police and by the FBI over the course of three months during the autumn of 1990 [see Ashton, Megrahi, pp.66-70]. The account given was that in the summer of 1985 Bollier was requested by a departmental head in the JSO (a friend of al-Megrahi) to supply a large consignment of electronic timing devices to the Libyan army. Lumpert’s task was to design the timer, to be designated the MST-13. Most of the components were ordered off the shelf from various suppliers but the two circuit boards in each timer were designed by Lumpert and had to be specially ordered from the Swiss firm of Thüring. An initial order was placed in August for 20 boards of each type but 24 were supplied and a further 35 of each were ordered and delivered in November. However, Bollier stated that only 20 MST-13 timers were actually assembled and delivered to Libya and that the surplus PCBs were not used in any other device. He stated that he personally supplied all 20 timers to Libyan officials in three batches, the first batch, significantly being five timers. He said he personally attended military tests in the Sahara desert in which the timers were used to activate airborne bombs. Edwin Bollier’s later amended account (1993): supply of some MST-13 timers to the Stasi Until 1993 Bollier maintained that only 20 MST-13 timers were manufactured and that they were all supplied to Libya. Then, interviewed by the BKA (the W. German federal police) he changed tack. He now declared that his earlier statements were incorrect and that he had in fact supplied two prototypes of the timers to the Stasi, the East German security service. (See Ashton, Megrahi, p.79, for his possible motivation in giving this new information. Ashton and Ferguson, at p.232, wrote that he made this claim on the BBC Radio 4 programme File on Four, stating that he supplied “two or three” to the Stasi.) This was of considerable potential importance because the Stasi maintained close links with the PFLP-GC. In early 1994 Bollier claimed to have found an invoice indicating that he had sold seven, rather than two MST-13 timers to the Stasi, but suggested it might have been planted during a break-in at Mebo’s office. Although Ashton (Megrahi: You are My Witness, at p.79) suggests that the alteration in Bollier’s position “appeared to deal a major blow to the official account of Lockerbie” it must be observed that in the context of the enormous obstacle to that account offered by the bare exercise of applying simple logic to the Malta/ Frankfurt ingestion idea – a state of affairs which never deterred the Crown from pressing on regardless – Bollier’s amended story pales into insignificance. Directory: docs docs -> Application for acem docs -> Observational Assessment of Teaching Practices Teaching Assessment Initiative Proposal Submitted to The Teachers for a New Era project docs -> Traditional British values docs -> From Warfighters to Crimefighters: The Origins of Domestic Police Militarization docs -> Borzoi Club of America Register of Merit Program I. What is a Register Of Merit docs -> Protecting the rights of the child in the context of migration docs -> United Nations E/C. 12/Esp/5 docs -> 9th May 1950 the schuman declaration docs -> Getting To Outcomes® in Services for Homeless Veterans 10 Steps for Achieving Accountability Download 0.96 Mb. Share with your friends:
|