Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
(o) Televised football Anthony Gauci’s claim that at the time of the sale his brother Paul was at home watching football on TV
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- Paul is shown the fixture schedules but remains uncertain
- Paul is shown the kick-off times but supposedly refuses to make a statement
- Likely date Paul was not in the shop at the material time: 23 November
- Trial
- Paul not called at trial
- Significance (a) of David Wright’s anecdote: Gauci’s memory for long past sales was poor
- Significance (b) of David Wright’s anecdote: possible confusion between the two sales
- 10. Trial Court Findings on the Purchase Date and Inferences (a)
- 11. Lack of transparency in the total interview process
- V. Electronic Timer or Barometric Trigger 1. Implicating Libya with an electronic timer
- 2. The inherent (and decisive) advantage of the barometric trigger
(o) Televised football Anthony Gauci’s claim that at the time of the sale his brother Paul was at home watching football on TV In his statement of 1 September, 1989, Anthony Gauci said he was alone in the shop on the afternoon of the sale as his brother Paul had gone home to watch a televised football match and he suggested that Paul might be able to identify the date and day from the game. For his part Paul initially confirmed that he had taken the afternoon off to watch football on TV on a day in November or December. However, he was unable to recall the date or the match beyond saying that it probably featured either Italy in the European Nations Cup or an Italian club team in a European competition and would have been on one of the Italian RAI channels. Paul is shown the fixture schedules but remains uncertain So advised the police went away to do some research on fixtures and discovered that the only afternoon matches during the relevant period were UEFA Cup third round matches and that the home and away legs of each fixture were held on Wednesday, 23 November and exactly a fortnight later, Wednesday, 7 December, 1988. Accord-ingly, on 19 October, 1989, they showed Paul fixture lists for those dates and he then recalled watching both legs of the Dynamo Dresden versus Roma fixture. He went on to claim that on one of those two dates he had in fact watched two afternoon games and that as two games had been televised on the afternoon of 23 November but only one on 7 December, he implied that it must have been on 23 November that he was absent from the shop for the whole afternoon. However, as Ashton notes (Megrahi, p.92), Paul’s recollection seemed confusing in that he stated that if he watched the game following the Roma v Dynamo Dresden match on 7 December then he would only have watched the first few minutes of the second half and would then have gone to Tower Road but “not necessarily to my shop.” He would visit shopkeepers there, he said. In other words, he appeared to be suggesting, it was possible that on going to Tower Road he may have spent the whole of his time there with other shopkeepers, but, equally, he could have called in at Mary’s House some time before closing time on 7 December. It would help, he said, if the police could obtain the kick-off times. Paul is shown the kick-off times but supposedly refuses to make a statement The police duly obliged and on 14 December, 1989, they showed Paul Gauci the televised football listings for the two dates published in The Times of Malta. The Dynamo Dresden v. Roma game on 23 November kicked off at 5pm and ended at 6.45pm, followed immediately by the start of the next match. That would clearly have accounted for his absence from the shop at the time of the sale, since the afternoon opening hours were 4 to 7pm. The reverse fixture on 7 December began at 1pm, ended at 2.45, and was followed by Juventus v. Standard Liege beginning at 4.45 and ending at 6.30pm. Would he have been likely to spend two hours at home instead of going to help in the shop? For unaccountable reasons Paul supposedly refused to give a statement and the interviewing officer, Det. Sgt. Crawford, noted that in his statement of 19 October Paul had said he returned to Tower Road but did not go to Mary’s House “right away” – which, it is to be observed, was most definitely not what he had said. Crawford also purported to note that Paul had agreed that the probable date was 7 December, which, again, is not what he had said. Likely date Paul was not in the shop at the material time: 23 November As Ashton points out (Megrahi, p.99) Paul could easily have watched the whole of the Juventus game on 7 December and still made it to Tower Road to chat to his fellow shopkeepers, or in good time to arrive at Mary’s House before closing time. If, on the other hand, as Paul had suggested, and DS Crawford had understood him to assert, hehad left home to go to Tower Road only a few minutes into the second half he would have had ample time to reach the shop by 6pm at the latest, and would have been present at the time of the sale, had it taken place on that date. Since Anthony was clear that Paul was not present it would follow that the sale could not have taken place on 7 December Trial At the trial no evidence was led about any televised football matches Paul had watched. For the first time, Anthony Gauci said that Paul had arrived and he had asked him to keep an eye on the shop while he, Anthony, took the purchases out to the taxi. He explained that Paul “must have been watching football, and when he comes late, that is what usually happens, so I think that was what happened that day.” This conveniently tallied with Paul’s 19 October, 1989, statement that on 7 December he may have watched the first half of the Juventus match and a little of the second half and that he may then have ended up at the shop before closing time. The joint minute In a joint minute between the parties at Zeist it was agreed that football had been broadcast on Italian TV channels on Wednesday, 23 November and 7 December, 1988. Paul not called at trial Taking all the football evidence together (including Paul Gauci’s statements) it was tolerably clear that Paul was most likely to have been absent from the shop in the late afternoon/early evening of 23 November, 1988. That tied in neatly with Abu Talb’s possible presence in Malta on that date but more significantly failed to support 7 December as the date of sale, a date when al-Megrahi’s was in Malta. It is perhaps little wonder that the prosecution declined to call Paul Gauci and the defence plainly regarded him as a witness with whom they preferred not to let their barge pole come into contact. (p) The sale recalled by David Wright A sale in November 1988 That Gauci is likely to have had little real memory of the circumstances of the sale or of the purchaser is powerfully indicated in an intriguing statement made to the police by David Wright, a witness from the North East of England (statement S5114). Mr Wright had spent holidays in Sliema and had become friendly with Gauci through their mutual interest in racing pigeons. In November 1989 he contacted police after seeing a television programme in which it was reported that a pair of trousers bought from Mary’s House was believed to have been in the bomb suitcase. He recalled that one day in November 1988 he had been with Gauci in the shop when two Arab-looking men, whom Gauci mutteringly referred to as “Libyan pigs.” Both men were smartly dressed, spoke in English, were friendly, said they were in Malta for a conference and were staying at the Sliema Holiday Inn. Over the course of the half hour they were in the shop they both purchased a selection of items. One bought two pairs of trousers, one pair of which was dark, six pairs of boxers, six pairs of socks, two vests and some stockings. The other bought a pair of light brown trousers, two pairs of boxers and six pairs of socks. Both bought plastic macs and possibly other items. They paid in US dollars. One was in his mid thirties, about 5ft 9in tall and had quite dark skin; the other was about 50, stocky and had greying hair. Three months later Wright saw a BBC TV news item featuring a Libyan government spokesman discussing chemical weapons production whom he was convinced was one of the two men. David Wright’s anecdote is significant in two respects. Significance (a) of David Wright’s anecdote: Gauci’s memory for long past sales was poor David Wright stated that when he returned to the shop in October 1989 Gauci seemed to have no memory of the men. This tends to indicate that Gauci’s long term memory of routine transactions in the shop was poor. However Ashton sought to proffer a possible explanation for Gauci’s supposedly vivid memory of the sale of the bomb suitcase contents in contrast with his complete absence of any memory of the sale witnessed by Wright. It was that the former was “arguably . . . less routine” because the man apparently did not care what he bought. This is plainly a more diffidently formulated explanation of why Gauci may have remembered the sale than that which was proffered by Ashton and his co-author Ian Ferguson in Cover Up of Convenience (at p.359) over a decade earlier. In that work they had suggested that the purchaser had done just about everything possible to draw attention to himself short of “prancing round naked.” Indeed, their assumption that the behaviour was memorable formed the basis of their suggestion that it may have been deliberately aimed at incriminating Libya: “He had chosen a small shop, in which he was the only customer, and had bought a random collection of clothes without bothering to try them on. He had then asked for them to be wrapped and, just in case the shopkeeper had not had a proper look at him, returned for the clothes in a taxi. The bombers had then left all the labels in the clothes, increasing the risk of the trail leading back to the island. It was surely not beyond the realms of possibility that they had used a Libyan proxy to buy the clothes and thereby lay a false trail back to Tripoli.” It is not clear what should have been so starkly memorable about an undiscriminating or indecisive shopper. That the man might readily have fallen in with prompts to buy the sort of items usually stocked in a clothes shop will no doubt be a common enough response to the efforts of many an experienced and lubricious salesman. It may be thought that there would have been nothing particularly memorable to Gauci about a customer readily adopting the suggestions of such a shop owner as he was. By contrast, the mere presence in the shop of Gauci’s fellow racing pigeon enthusiast ought if anything to have have served as a significant memory trigger for the sale which took place when the friend was there and yet Gauci had no memory of it. The point to be made is this: if Gauci had no memory of that episode is it likely that he would nonetheless have had a memory of the sale of the items which may have been in the Lockerbie bomb suitcase?
It may be tempting to conjecture whether the sale witnessed by Wright might not itself have been the one Gauci was thinking about, albeit in a much distorted form, when he professed to remember the sale of the items which may have been in the bomb suitcase. However, any challenge to Gauci’s reliability is not dependent on such a possibility. If there were in fact two distinct sales but with some common features what may simply have occurred was a cross-contamination of memory. In his report Prof Valentine suggested that in recalling an event particularly after a long delay Gauci was likely to have experienced interference from the memory of other transactions, with resulting confusion as to matters of detail. 10. Trial Court Findings on the Purchase Date and Inferences (a) Findings Dealing with the date of the purchase the trial court inferred that:- (i) It was midweek, by which Gauci meant a Wednesday. (ii) Paul had been watching football on the date of the purchase and this would have been either 23 November or 7 December (both Wednesdays). (iii) The records of rainfall did not rule out 7 December as the date of purchase. (iv) Although it remained unclear whether or not the Christmas lights were up on the day of purchase this was not inconsistent with Gauci’s “rather confused” recollection that the date of purchase was about the time the lights were being put up. (v) This was consistent with Gauci’s memory that the date was about two weeks before Christmas (vi) The date was therefore 7 December, 1988. Putting that inference together with the other evidence the court found that it was al Megrahi who bought the clothes and that he did so in the knowledge that they were to be used in construction of the bomb. (b) Strained inferences\ The court’s reasoning was palpably defective. As to (i), Gauci’s explanation of his use of “midweek” to mean Wednesday was hesitant and very belated. As to (ii), the trial court misconstrued the terms of the joint minute to mean that it was agreed only that matches were broadcast at certain times on the two dates when in fact there was no basis for inferring that these were the only dates between 18 November and 21 December on which matches were broadcast. The appeal court agreed with the defence submission on this point but dismissed its materiality, presumably because 23 November remained a potentially viable (and exculpatory) date for the purchase. (On the other hand, it could have been another Wednesday, or, for that matter any other weekday, or even day of the week.) However, the real puzzle is (iv) combined with (v). Having repeatedly stated to the police that he could not remember the date, having repeatedly insisted to them that the Christmas lights were not up, he suddenly remembers, at the trial – twelve years after the event – that it was about two weeks before Christmas and the lights were up, expediently altering this to “putting up the lights” when confronted with his earlier position. Yet picking about amongst the debris of his confusion and inconsistency the court arbitrarily settles for the belatedly recalled two-week reference point and puts it into the mixture with Gauci’s tentative suggestion of a Wednesday, the erroneously interpreted football minute and the slim-possibility-of-a-brief-rain-shower evidence. The conclusion? The purchase had to be on Wednesday, 7 December, the very date al-Megrahi happened to be in Malta. Thus, because al-Megrahi supposedly resembled the purchaser (as did Abu Talb) – though by no stretch of imagination either the police sketch or the photofit – he must have been the purchaser, a conclusion reinforced in the trial court’s mind by his undisputed presence in Malta on 21 December and their arbitrary finding that in spite of evidence pointing to the contrary, which they acknowledged was sound, the bag had that day been loaded onto KM180 at Luqa. Even if the date had been 7 December, al-Megrahi’s presence in Sliema would not make him the purchaser. Yet what is the justification for all this? The purported answer is circumstantial evidence – squeezing proof from the combination of a number of innocuous ingredients. But if the ingredients are themselves inherently defective the combination can hardly make up the deficit. Having regard to the actual thinking involved in the judgment of guilt there is some irony in the words of caution with which the judges admonished themselves: “We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring other parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified” (para 89).
As we have seen, the case against al-Megrahi is shot through with deficiencies apparent on the face of the record. However, quite apart from those defects, the prosecution was inherently vitiated by the fact that, so far as is known, no audio-recordings (let alone video recordings) were made of any of the police interviews with Gauci. So the world will never know for certain what subtle influences might have induced Anthony Gauci to recall an incident which both common sense and psychological principles seem to dictate he would have been unlikely to remember. This manifest lack of transparency is one which continues to pose a very serious problem for criminal justice, one which the present author and his long-time collaborator, Anthony Heaton-Armstrong, have been focusing on in print for almost as far back as Lockerbie itself (see www.DavidWolchover.co.uk for a full biography.) Considering the length of time between the downing of Pan Am 103 and Gauci’s first interview it is a shortcoming which of itself and without more would have diminished greatly the safety of al-Megrahi’s conviction. V. Electronic Timer or Barometric Trigger? 1. Implicating Libya with an electronic timer In the first few months after the destruction of Pan Am 103 the general thrust of suspicion focused on the PFLP-GC. That organisation was known to have developed expertise in building and planting improvised bombs on civil airliners and the hallmark of the typical PFLP-GC device was the barometric pressure trigger, which would work automatically when the plane had reached a certain altitude. A mere two months before Lockerbie the West German BKA had arrested members of the West German cell in possession of a completed bomb equipped with just such a trigger. Based on information sourced probably from Israel’s Mossad and the CIA the Western intelligence community believed that the terror group was planning to destroy an American airliner in flight. For reasons which remain notoriously unclear but which sensitive guesswork can intelligently conjecture, the process of attributing blame shifted to Libya, a change of direction largely initiated by American investigators. Lying at the very heart of the change was the question whether or not the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was operated by an altitude sensitive trigger characteristic of PFLP-GC devices. The case against al-Megrahi and therefore against Libya was predicated on the supposition that the bomb in a suitcase which destroyed the Pan Am jumbo jet had originally been introduced into the baggage system at Malta, that it had been flown to Frankfurt, transferred on to a Pan Am feeder flight bound for Heathrow, where it was loaded on to the doomed plane. To prove this contention it was essential to show that detonation must have been by means of a simple electronic countdown timer with the time to detonation set in Malta before the bomb was smuggled into the system many hours beforehand. A PFLP-GC barometric pressure trigger once set to function would cause detonation the first time it was born aloft. If detonation were required to be delayed until the third leg of a multiple flight journey the process of setting it to function would have to be delayed until it was on the ground prior to leaving on the third, fatal, leg. This would mean that if the suitcase containing the bomb was sent from Malta to Heathrow via Frankfurt with the objective of blowing up a transatlantic flight out of Heathrow the bomb could not be set to operate before leaving from Malta or Frankfurt. Priming it would have to await arrival at Heathrow. However, if it had to be primed at Heathrow, there would be little point in sending it from Malta. Far more certain would it be to introduce it from landside into the airside baggage system at Heathrow. However, if for some obscure reasoning the terrorists had deemed it more advantageous to subject their plan to the far greater risks and uncertainties involved in a multi-leg journey from Malta they would have needed to utilise a method of detonation quite different from the barometric-pressure-controlled Toshiba device seized from the PFLP-GC in Germany. Such a convoluted journey would clearly have required the use of a stand-alone electronic timer which would cause detonation at the allotted time irrespective of whether it was in the air or on the tarmac. Use of such a timer would tend to point away from PFLP-GC culpability. If the particular electronic timer were associated with Libya that would tend to throw suspicion on that country’s culpability. The investigators thought they could prove the use of such a timer: allegedly found in the neck of the blast-damaged remnant of a Slalom brand shirt supposed to have been packed in the Samsonite hardshell suitcase with the Toshiba bomb was Zeist trial Crown exhibit PT35b. This was the fingernail size fragment of a printed circuit board (PCB) which bore marks supposedly identifying it as part of an MST-13 electronic clock timer, designed and manufactured by the Swiss company Mebo to a special order placed by the Libyan military. It was originally supposed that all 20 manufactured were supplied exclusively to Libya, but later information suggested that at least two and possibly as many as seven may had also have been supplied to the Stasi, the East German intelligence agency which had close links with both Mebo and the PFLP-GC. 2. The inherent (and decisive) advantage of the barometric trigger The possibility that the evidence of the discovery of the fragment was concocted has been the subject matter of almost endless rumour, innuendo and debate. At the Zeist trial the defence adopted a low key policy of casting doubt as to its provenance without making any explicit allegations. But in the end the contention that the bomb was operated by an MST-13 timer bears little serious inquiry. The most powerful indication of what method of triggering the bomb the terrorists employed will depend on an examination of the inherent pros and cons of the one against the other. It is an examination which will show the inherent improbability of the use by the terrorists of a digital electronic clock timer. (a) The original PFLP-GC designed barometric trigger Barometer controlled bombs ideal for destroying planes in flight Successful destruction of an airliner in flight using a bomb planted on board obviously depends on ensuring that the aircraft is actually in flight when the bomb detonates. Given the vagaries of delay and cancellation endemic in airline timetabling, a stand-alone timer-operated bomb can rarely be guaranteed to detonate when the aircraft is in the air. It may go off when the plane is still on the ground through a delay in departure or a flight cancellation. To address this problem the bomb-makers of the PFLP-GC devised the altitude sensitive barometric trigger. The principle on which it worked was ingeniously simple. Atmospheric pressure diminishes with altitude at an almost constant rate. The relationship is shown in the graph depicted in Fig. 6, below, from which it can be seen that at 15 degrees centigrade the atmospheric pressure at sea level is 100 kiloPascals, that is 1000 millibars (mb). Clearly this differs from the rate of decrease within the fuselage of a modern airliner, which is pressurised. That relationship is explained later but for the moment it can be said that as an aircraft climbs the air pressure within its fuselage also drops, although at a rate which differs from the decrease in the actual atmospheric pressure. As the air pressure in the fuselage drops so the barometric component in the bomb registers a physical response. At a preset position in that response an electrical circuit closes, a current flows from a set of 1.5 volt AA batteries. In the original bombs designed and fashioned by the PFLP-GC, the current flowed directly to a stubby pencil-sized detonator buried in the plastic explosive and activated it. 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