Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction


Deducing the location of the primary suitcase from its dimensions and those of the Tourister



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Deducing the location of the primary suitcase from its dimensions and those of the Tourister The Samsonite containing the bomb was nine inches deep. The Coyle Tourister case, being on the large side, could have been ten inches deep. As we have seen, Peter Claiden, the AAIB expert, estimated that the explosion was ten inches from the floor of the container and two inches into the overhang section (see II, 2, (e) and (f), above). Dr Thomas Hayes of RARDE stated that allowing for the Semtex being packed in the radio-cassette player the explosion could not have been right up at the edge of the case. So the ten inches would be too high for the bomb bag to have been resting on the horizontal section of the container floor and also it could not then have protruded into the overhang part. While on the other hand the second layer could account for the two-inch protrusion into the overhang, the ten inches from floor to explosion would be a bit too low for the second layer. AAIB experts noted the absence of pitting in the container floor and concluded that there must have been something in between. William Taylor QC for Megrahi suggested a solution as to how these facts might be reconciled.

Persuasive argument that the bomb bag was only partly resting on the floor of the container Although a bag resting entirely on the horizontal part of the floor could not protrude into the overhang section Taylor suggested that Sidhu need only have moved the case noticed by Bedford a few inches to the left (to fit in something small to its right) for the sloping part of the floor to have pushed the left-hand side of the case two or three inches upwards. As an alternative to Taylor’s surmise, it could have been wedged in that position when originally placed in the container and Bedford had simply not noticed that it was resting at a slight angle on the step of the overhang. With the Toshiba packed along that side, either on the top, or on the bottom if the case was placed upside-down in the container, this would have put it into more or less the exact position for the explosion to have been consistent with the ten-inch distance from the container floor estimated by Claiden. Another possibility (already mentioned at VI, 3, (h), at p.64) is that it may have shifted to the optimum position as a result of turbulence or the aircraft banking. (For a scale blueprint of the container in situ in the aircraft, showing the bomb suitcase in this dislodged position see Lockerbie: London Origin Theory, JREF forum, eleven pages, http://forums. randi.org/ showthread. php?t=165824, page 1, and for a photograph of the trial loading see Fig. 5, above.)

The absence of pitting in the container floor explained As mentioned earlier (see II, 2, (e)) the relative absence of pitting in the container base can be explained not by the presence of an innocent suitcase acting as a buffer but by the possibility that one end of the bomb suitcase was resting on the angled overhang while the other end was resting on the container floor so that most of the underside of the suitcase was not actually in contact with the base of the container (for a photograph of the trial loading, see Fig. 5, p.12, above). In addition, the clothing in the Samsonite, which included a tweed jacket, could have served to shield the floor surface from the effects of the blast.

The Bedford bag laid or pushed into the overhang: a more reasonable scenario than the series of coincidences necessitated by the court’s finding If the bag had not orginally been placed slightly into the overhang and therefore at a slight angle the possibility that Sidhu might in this way have pushed the bag Bedford had noticed – slightly to the left of where Bedford had recalled it to have been resting – to achieve not quite the position the terrorist intended but if anything a slightly better position and the one at which the bomb in fact exploded seems a far more credible and measured proposition than the series of outlandish coincidences implied by the court’s finding. In the end, however, William Taylor’s eminently reasonable submission was simply ignored.

Conclusion: the bomb bag was smuggled into the system at Heathrow and did not come from Frankfurt It beggars belief that al-Megrahi’s conviction could have been sustained on the basis of such manifest improbability. Would the same judges have acquitted a defendant because the chance that DNA was not his was “only” a billion to one?! The fact remains that John Bedford’s sighting, before the arrival of PA103A from Frankfurt, of a suitcase more or less identical to that in which the bomb was found to have been packed, in virtually the position in the container in which the bomb was set off, rules out any question of the bomb having come from Frankfurt in an identical suitcase. Coupled with the manifest improbability of the terrorists introducing the bomb bag into the system at some remote airport when it would have been far less chancy to do so illicitly at Heathrow (as already fully explained), common sense and pure logic decrees that it must have been one of the two mysterious bags Bedford saw which carried the bomb.

An incisive comment on the impact of the error The successive failure of the original investigators, of the Crown’s legal team and of the trial and appeal courts at Zeist, to undertake an effective sensible assessment of the implications of the condition of the luggage in container AVE4041 proved to be catastrophic. Dr Kerr’s incisive judgment, so movingly expressed, on the impact of those failures should bring tears of shame to the eyes of all those involved:

“The AAIB inspectors and the forensic investigators jumped to the wrong conclusion at an early stage in the investigation, based on only a small subset of the available information (the condition of the container itself). The full dataset was never assembled and interpreted. If it had been, it would have shown without doubt that this conclusion was wrong. . . . Months investigating Frankfurt, years investigating Malta, indictments against a couple of people who happened to be going about their business on Malta that morning, eight years of punitive sanctions against Libya which destroyed the economy and social cohesion of the country, a three-ring-circus of a trial in a specially-built court in the Netherlands, the conviction of one of the people who happened to be on Malta that day, his eventual release under circumstances that turned the Scottish government into an international hate icon, and UK and US support for the Libyan rebels in the overthrow of Gaddafi in 2011 – not to mention the x-ray operator at Frankfurt who was assumed to have missed the bomb suitcase transiting from the Malta flight apparently being hounded to his grave by the accusation. All that, for want of someone having enough nous to spot and solve a jigsaw which was right there in front of them all the time.” (“The real case for the Heathrow introduction,” above.)

(i) Examination of the question whether a barometric bomb

might have been sent from Frankfurt

Thirty-eight minutes with a stand-alone timer: coincidence or mimicry? If the Lockerbie bomb was controlled by a Mebo MST-13 stand-alone timer this would mean that the terrorists chose to set a detonation time from take-off which, as we have seen, at 38 minutes just happened to be the most likely take-off to detonation time of the barometric-capacitor device concealed in the Toshiba BomBeat seized by the BKA from the PFLP-GC cell at Neuss on 26 October, 1988. Was this not the sort of a coincidence without which a work of fiction might have seemed disappointingly anti-climactic in the light of all the other coincidences on which the Crown built their case at Zeist? If it was not a coincidence, then the terrorists – whoever they were – must have deliberately chosen that time in order for some reason to imitate the time to detonation of the Neuss BomBeat and thus implicate the PFLP-GC. How such an alien group might have been privy to the working details of the PFLP-GC’s hallmark bomb-design and why anyway they would not have wanted to take credit for such a triumph par excellence in the annals of iniquity are matters of speculation beyond the scope of this monograph. Supposing Libyan terrorists, for example and in particular Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, had gone to the considerable trouble of implicating Jibril’s faction by timing the detonation at 38 minutes it might be regarded as surprising that with the very real risk that the plane might come down over land they nonetheless wrapped the bomb in clothing which led directly back to themselves. Quite apart from all these points it is almost inconceivable that the terrorists used an electronic timer to bring down the plane only 38 minutes into its flight where such a device would have given them the option to destroy it half way across the North Atlantic. If the bomb suitcase had been sent from Malta or Frankfurt with no opportunity to place it against the hull of Pan Am 103 it might have seemed essential to set a long delay in order to provide the best possible chance that a merely crippled aircraft would be too far from land to avoid ditching, or more probably plunging, into the sea. Conversely, if it was smuggled airside at Heathrow, the terrorists would have retained the option of placing it against the hull and guaranteeing immediate cataclysmic destruction of the plane wherever it was on its journey.

Logic points irresistibly to a barometric-capacitor device In short, simple logic dictates that the terrorists used the classic PFLP-GC barometric trigger and capacitor delay timer and the assumption must be that the bomb was indeed controlled by such means.

Problem with sending a barometric-capacitor bomb from Frankfurt Let us assume for argument’s sake that the terrorists used a PFLP-GC type barometric-capacitor bomb similar to the one seized at Neuss on 26 October 1988 and sent it to Heathrow from Malta via Frankfurt, or merely from Frankfurt, with the primary intention of destroying Pan Am 103. The main problem with this is that the bomb would have had to be primed at Heathrow by an accomplice plugging in the main switch. It could not have been primed at Frankfurt because it would have been likely to detonate during the feeder flight Pan Am 103A. The accomplice would also have had to position the suitcase for optimum effect. To that end he would have needed to be present on the tarmac with the loaders if he was not actually one of them. He would have had to find a moment to open the suitcase, rummage around in it for the radio cassette player, taking care not to disturb its carefully arranged position within the bag, plug in the main switch and close the suitcase. He would have had to do all this without being noticed by the loaders or, as the case might be, the other loaders. And as if that were not enough he would then have to contrive to be the one who placed it in the optimum position in the container. He would have had to accomplish this under the pressure of the “rush job.” If he was not a loader it is impossible to envisage how he could have managed any of this. There is no suggestion that either Sidhu or Sandhu was an accomplice, but even if one or other was a terrorist could he really have acted without the other noticing? The risk of challenge and discovery would have been incalculable.

A terrorist plan which actually allowed for malfunction? We have already examined the possible implications of RARDE expert Alan Feraday’s conjecture that a barometric bomb could have malfunctioned on Pan Am 103A but then detonated on board Pan Am 103. Suppose that the terrorists actually built into their scheme the possibility of such a failure. What might this have involved? Might the terrorists have smuggled the bomb suitcase on board the Boeing 727 operating Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow with the deliberate intention of destroying it, less ambitiously in terms of passenger numbers than a corresponding retaliation for IranAir 655? Might they have been aware that the capacitor could be temperamental and might not work initially but might work on a subsequent flight as a result of self-correction? Then exactly as they had anticipated this might occur the temperamental capacitor failed to charge on the way from Frankfurt, the suitcase was then transferred to PA103 in accordance with their back-up plan to have a second bite at the cherry if the bomb failed to detonate on the first leg and the capacitor having been altered by its experience on the first leg it then, most obligingly, somehow allowed itself to be nudged into action on the second flight. With the capacitor partially charged when the current ceased as Pan Am 103A descended into Heathrow the dissipation of that partial state of charge was slowed by the transistor. Retaining some of its partial charge when Pan Am 103 bound for JFK reached the requisite cabin altitude for the barometric switch to turn on the current, the 35 to 45 minutes it would normally take the capacitor to charge up fully when doing so from zero charge was reduced to 31 minutes. It would probably not matter where in the hold of the narrow-bodied Boeing 727 the bomb was placed. It would probably have stood a good chance of bringing down the plane wherever it was located in the hold (as was the fate of the similarly narrow-bodied Swissair Coronado on 21 February, 1970). But the same could not of course be said of the 747 on Pan Am 103. If the plan involved having the Samsonite bag labelled for transfer to that flight in case the bomb failed to detonate on 103A it would have had to be positioned with precision at Heathrow if the terrorists were to be sure of bringing down Clipper Maid of the Seas. However, in spite of having millions of dollars at their disposal they had no one in their pay available at Heathrow to do the job and were forced instead to rely on mere chance. Nonetheless, an extraordinary sequence of misfortunes for the luckless passengers and crew then follow like clockwork: the unwitting loader Sidhu positioned the bomb suitcase exactly where it needed to be to destroy the giant plane outright, in place of the almost identical suitcase noticed earlier by John Bedford; the capacitor corrects itself and causes the bomb to detonate; the identical Bedford suitcase then disappears without trace, perhaps falling into the flames of Sherwood Crescent when pretty well all the other bags in and around the container fall miles away on Tundergarth; DC Derek Henderson’s otherwise meticulous inquiries miss the fact that a legitimate passenger was travelling with a replica of the bomb suitcase.

Absurdity of planning for a self-correcting contingency It might be asked whether the terrorists would really have formulated a plan which was contingent on the remote possibility that in the event of a failure to charge on the first leg it would charge up on the second? In other words, if insurance back-up in the event of capacitor failure was thought to be necessary why rely on the slim hope that it might be nudged into action on the second leg as the result of some freak effect resulting from the first leg? It would surely be much more sensible to place two bombs on board the same aircraft, either in one suitcase or each in its own suitcase, in the hope that at least one would detonate. It would surely have been more sensible and straightforward simply to put two different appliances in one suitcase to avert suspicion, a Toshiba radio cassette player for one bomb, say, and some other type of suitable portable electronic device for the other.

Unanticipated malfunction Supposing however that there was no follow-up, or back-up, intent. The plan was simply to destroy 103A but the suitcase carrying the bomb was labelled for onward transfer to JFK. The capacitor failed to work properly, the suitcase was transferred to Pan Am 103 at Heathrow, the capacitor’s function was restored and the bomb was detonated. If there was no follow-up plan the terrorists would have been unlikely to arrange for labelling on the suitcase directing its transfer to flight 103. It could simply have been labelled for Heathrow as the final destination. That it would have had to bear a suitable label for JFK to get it on board 103 would imply that the terrorists intended what would otherwise have been a quite pointless transfer. The only possible reason for intending such a transfer would have been that the terrorists had in contemplation the possibility that the capacitor might fail on the Frankfurt to Heathrow flight and that there should be a second opportunity for detonation – on flight 103. That being the case the terrorists would surely have had arrangements in hand to position the suitcase correctly in the container and yet that they appear to have taken no steps to do so and nonetheless it ended up exactly where it needed to be, displacing the identical Bedford suitcase which thereafter disappeared. That this could only have happened by “sorrowful mischance” follows from the fact that if the loader Amarjit Singh Sidhu, evidently a Punjabi, had had any Islamic terrorist affiliations this would almost certainly have come to light. It is assumed his bona fides were rigorously checked. In any event it would not explain the additional element of the Bedford replica suitcase and if Bedford too had been in the plot it would certainly be odd that he mentioned the suitcase he had seen.

(j) The cut padlock mystery

The incident Subsequently to the trial the Daily Mirror reported that at some time in the two hours before 00:35hrs on 21 December, 1988, a hefty padlock on the doors between the Terminal 3 check-in area and baggage build-up area had been cut through “like butter.”

Trial non-disclosure The incident was never disclosed to the defence before or during the trial. Formal disclosure was only made to the defence for the purposes of the appeal in 2002. It was claimed that it had not been disclosed to the defence prior to the trial because, supposedly, the police had lost the original report.

Impact It is hardly fanciful to suspect the break-in implied by the cut padlock as evidence of the smuggling of the primary suitcase from landside to airside at Heathrow. Not surprisingly campaigners against al-Megrahi’s conviction have tended to see the very failure to disclose it before trial as indicative at the very least of a recognition by the authorities of the extent to which it potentially undermines the Malta origin basis of the Crown’s case. Some have seen the desire to exculpate Heathrow as the baser motive for non-disclosure.

Dismissal as “coincidence” However, on appeal the judges dismissed the new evidence as mere coincidence, a characterisation which surely takes the biscuit considering how the Crown, the trial judges and they themselves, the appeal court, had resorted to coincidence upon coincidence to justify dismissing the exculpatory impact of the undisputed Bedford evidence. (For a comperehensive account of the issue see Ashton, Megrahi: You Are My Jury, pp.280-281)

The “coincidence” arguments In favour of “coincide-ence” Alan Turnbull QC for the Crown argued that evidence given by Heathrow officials Myers (security officer), Harris (security manager) and Willis (baggage manager) indicated that the door was almost certainly broken open by airport ground staff wishing to avoid a circuitous journey on foot between the restricted “airside” part of the airport and the “landside” part, about which a number of staff had complained. Turnbull argued that since it was widely known among the Heathrow workforce that a person could get from landside to airside during working hours without being challenged or searched it would have been illogical for terrorists to draw attention to themselves by breaking in, especially at night. Turnbull contended that it would have been nonsensical to carry the case hundreds of yards to the interline shed, especially as it would have to be X-rayed there. It would have been far easier to leave the suitcase in the baggage build-up area where the Heathrow check-in luggage was stored and to which the door with the broken padlock directly led. If the bag had been infiltrated at around midnight, he argued, the terrorists might have been expected to reduce any risk of detection by targeting one of the two earlier transatlantic flights, 11.00 or 13.00 hrs.

Counter-argument The counter-argument to the latter point, of course, is that having cut the padlock to gain access to the shed the terrorists might have thought it prudent to watch and wait for a few hours to determine if the interference had been noticed. They might therefore have deliberately and patiently avoided planting the bomb on an earlier flight and opted instead to do so on a later one.

Staff break-in rejected The appeal judges dismissed sd conjecture the theory that the padlock must have been broken by staff seeking a shortcut. However, in order to avoid causing offence no one canvassed another possibility: that it was attributable to theft activity by staff. The story of the cut-padlock was originally broken by the Daily Mirror on 11 September 2001 and, as John Ashton aptly remarks (Megrahi, p.275), momentarily caused a sensation only to be quickly forgotten amid the horrors of that day. The break-in was reportedly described by Raymond Manly, the security officer who discovered it, as the “worst security breach” he had come across in his 17 years of service at Heathrow.This may be doubted and the “quote” was perhaps a reflection of a wish by the Mirror reporter to underline the potential importance of the story. Criminal lawyers practicing in the London area during the 1970s and 1980s will recall innumerable trials for Heathrow baggage handler theft conspiracies.

The two-edged sword It will be argued in the next section that the most effective way of smuggling the case into the container would have avoided a surreptitious night-time intrusion. The present writer therefore no longer subscribes to the scenario envisaged in “Exploding Lockerbie,” part 2 (175 CL&JW, at p.448, col 2). There can be little doubt that Turnbull’s argument effectively put paid to the notion that the break-in was carried out in order to get the suitcase to the interline shed. But that hardly means that the padlock was not cut by the terrorists. There would have been no need to carry the suitcase openly for hundreds of yards airside for the simple reason that the interline shed was quite close to a gate being used by IranAir for docking and loading on 21 December (as to which see further below at §VII, 7, (b)). If the suitcase was placed in AVE4041 with the co-operation of, or indeed by, someone connected with IranAir on the Iranian government payroll there would have been no need for any elaborate hazardous subterfuges. Turnbull’s argument that the terrorists would have risked drawing attention to themselves is a two-edged sword: it is entirely feasible to argue the very opposite, that they cut the padlock for the precise purpose of drawing attention away from the involvement of IranAir.

(k) Conjectures of detail regarding a Heathrow ingestion

To Heathrow by ferry at less risk There would have been no need to take such an absurd risk. It would have involved significantly less hazard to take the completed bomb to London by rail or road and ferry. There would be no x-ray check at Ostend, Calais or Dover, nor any at Gothenberg or Harwich (assuming that it may have come via possible accomplices of the PFLP-GC based in Sweden, eg Mohammed Abu Talb).The main switch could be plugged in at leisure and the suitcase taken to Heathrow where it could have been introduced into the interline shed.

An earlier scenario repudiated In “Exploding Lockerbie,” part 2, it was suggested that infiltration could well have involved cutting the padlock to the baggage build-up area using a pair of bolt cutters perhaps left by a confederate working for a certain airline. The terrorist might then have discreetly kept watch during the morning for signs that the broken padlock had triggered extra vigilance. Once reassured, the terrorist could take advantage of the notoriously lax security to use one of the hundreds of airside passes which were unaccounted-for to reach the Pan Am baggage build-up area without carrying anything so incriminating as a bomb concealed in a suitcase, retrieve it from its hiding place and take it to the interline shed looking like any other baggage handler dealing with a stray item. He would then merely have to wait for Bedford to take his tea-break and then carefully position it in the container out of sight of any prying eyes. The chances are Bedford would never notice the extra bag. Very possibly, it was suggested, Kamboj was also absent or in a part of the shed with no view of the container. However it is now suggested (as it was in “A Postcript on Lockerbie”) that it is more likely that the terrorists eschewed such elaborate and risky “cloak and dagger” stratagems.


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