Culprits of Lockerbie a treatise Concerning the Destruction
(g) Conflicts over exchanges after Bedford noticed the extra bags in AVE4041 Conflicting accounts of Bedford and Kamboj
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- Reconciling the conflict
- Position of the bomb suitcase
- Position of the Samsonite-type suitcase noticed by Bedford was virtually the same as that of the bomb suitcase
- Fundamental paradox involved in the Crown’s second layer contention
- Suitcase under the bomb suitcase would have been pulverised
- Fragments revealed no sign of any innocent or unidentified suitcase beneath the bomb
- Inherent self-proof that primary suitcase was resting on the container floor
- What became of the suitcase noticed by Bedford if it was not carrying the bomb
- The way the Crown dealt with the matter of the mysterious suitcase seen by Bedford
- Neither loader called by the Crown
- Implausible implications of the court’s unlikely finding that the bomb bag was in the second layer
- The implied determination
- Court’s lame solution to the question of the missing innocent Bedford bag: not all bags recovered
- Implications of non-recovery
- The bizarre legion of coincidences implied by the court’s judgement that the bag seen by Bedford was not the primary suitcase
- Rush job” rules out careful rearrangement
- Examination of the condition of the blast damaged luggage, the container and the airframe shows up the basic error of the Zeist trial court’s finding that the bomb bag was in the second layer
- Coyle bag insufficiently damaged
- Nature of blast damage to two suitcases positioned upright and end-on behind the bomb suitcase shows it was resting on the container base
(g) Conflicts over exchanges after Bedford noticed the extra bags in AVE4041 Conflicting accounts of Bedford and Kamboj In his police interview on January 9, 1989, Bedford told the police that he had asked Sulkash Kamboj if he knew about the two extra items and that Kamboj had replied that after running the bags through the x-ray he had put them in the container. But to the police Kamboj consistently denied having put them in the container; it was not his job to do so he maintained, and he repeated this at the Fatal Accident Inquiry. In evidence in chief at Zeist he accepted that x-ray operators might sometimes – and exceptionally – help out airline staff with loading and since he now had no specific memory of the events of the fatal day he rather hesitantly conceded that he “would not quarrel with” Bedford’s assertion. However, on being referred in cross-examination to his much earlier statements (when his memory of the events would have been much better) he reiterated his firm denial of having loaded the two bags in the container in Bedford’s absence. It may have been his momentary concession which led the court to prefer Bedford’s account, although they were probably influenced as much by the perception that if he, Bedford, had wanted to lie to cover up for his neglect he could have done so about the appearance of the two cases in the suitcases altogether. On the other hand, it is by no means inconceivable that he could have had a conscience and an anxious desire to help the investigation at the same time as wishing to avoid blame for disastrous neglect. Reconciling the conflict It is difficult to reach any firm conclusion as to whose account may have been true. If the two suitcases had x-ray sticky tape around them Bedford would naturally have assumed Kamboj (or his fellow x-ray operator Parmar) had x-rayed them and helpfully put them in the container. In that case he would have had a good enough reason for not consulting Kamboj about them, although curiously he was not asked at the trial if he had noticed whether they displayed x-ray tape. So it is likely he would only have consulted Kamboj if the cases did not display tape, in which case he would surely have queried Kamboj’s assurance by pointing to the absence of tape and they would probably have resolved the problem by x-raying them just to be on the safe side. They would both have been sure to recall such an episode. On this reasoning Bedford more likely than not did not consult Kamboj. But if Bedford was saying Kamboj had volunteered that he had loaded the two cases it may be queried why, on the assumption that the cases displayed x-ray tape, there would have been any need to make such an announcement. It would have been obvious. In fact, there is no need to question Bedford’s honesty. He may have assumed Kamboj had loaded the bags and had a false memory that Kamboj had actually said so. In fact of course it was almost certainly the terrorist and not Kamboj who placed the left hand bag in the container and used one of the items already in the container to wedge it in position. Parmar The missing element in the story is Parmar, the other guard who worked with Kamboj. He was not called as a witness, no reference was made to any statement from him and nothing appears to be known about him. We shall return to that issue later (at (k), p.70). Consensus on chaotic conditions Despite the conflict of evidence between Bedford and Kamboj they both attested to the chaotic, insecure conditions in the shed and airside at Heathrow generally in which “anybody” could approach a container with luggage and slip in another bag. No one disputed it. Reference is made at VII, 7, (b) to the interline shed’s close proximity to Pier 5, at which an aircraft from a certain significant airline was docked that afternoon. (h) Demonstration of why the bag noticed by John Bedford must have contained the bomb It is now established beyond a peradventure that the suitcase carrying the bomb–
The following paragraphs show precisely why we can be certain of this. (It is necessary to stress that much of the text in these paragraphs was originally published in the author’s 2011 Criminal Law and Justice Weekly article “Exploding Lockerbie,” cited at the end of this treatise and prepared with the assistance of a person who insisted on anonymity.) Position of the bomb suitcase As already noted, the explosion blasted a 20-inch (0.51m) hole in the left flank of the forward fuselage, causing instant cataclysmic decompression and within three seconds the shock waves had severed the cockpit section from the rest of the aircraft. What is of critical importance is that the bomb suitcase ended up in the precise position where it would cause maximum damage, that is, close to the fuselage skin in an overhang section of the container designed to hug the curvature of the hull and lying flat with its handle inwards and its spine outwards. Not only had the suitcase been placed in the correct (outboard) position in the container, but the bomb had been packed to ensure the correct orientation, that is not centrally in the suitcase but to its extreme outboard side. This is a very non-intuitive way to pack such an item and strongly suggests that whoever was doing the packing was anticipating that the suitcase would be placed in the container by someone who could and would ensure it went in that way round. Position of the Samsonite-type suitcase noticed by Bedford was virtually the same as that of the bomb suitcase Tellingly, the position John Bedford described one of the two mysterious suitcases to be in was only two or three inches from the position later determined to have been the centre of the explosion. Only a small adjustment to its placing, as might easily have happened when the Frankfurt luggage was being loaded in a hurry, would have put it in exactly that position. If the brown hardshell suitcase noticed by Bedford adjacent to the overhang had not been wedged into position tightly by the suitcase he described next to it, it might, as Dr Morag Kerr suggests in her article “Adequately Explained by Stupidity,” have moved into the exact position to do the maximum damage as the result of being shifted by in-flight turbulence or banking. The likelihood that such optimum positioning could have resulted by chance to a suitcase travelling unaccompanied from Malta or even from Frankfurt is incredibly slim. But determined and knowledgeable terrorists would hardly have left matters to chance. Only hands-on action by an accomplice at Heathrow could have ensured the necessary control over the positioning of the bag, which was crucial to the capacity of the small amount of Semtex to cripple the plane. In that event it would have been wholly pointless sending it from Malta, with the repeated, serious risk of interception, or even Frankfurt. Fundamental paradox involved in the Crown’s second layer contention In 1989 the police had opted for the assumption that the primary suitcase (ie the one packed with the bomb) must have been in the second layer in AVE4041, must therefore have come from Frankfurt, and was not the suitcase noticed by Bedford, even though the description given by Bedford more or less exactly matched it. The difficulty with this is that it raises a fundamental problem cogently demonstrated by Dr Kerr on the basis of the following propositions: (1) Sidhu The baggage handler Sidhu was insistent he had not moved any of the bags originally in the container before those from Pan Am 103A were added. (2) Suitcase under the bomb suitcase would have been pulverised A suitcase directly beneath the bomb suitcase and resting on the container base would inevitably have been “pulverised,” as she puts it. (3) All innocent Heathrow items were more or less intact All the luggage items identified as being legitimately in the container at Heathrow before the arrival of PanAm 103A were recovered and none had sustained that sort of damage. (4)Fragments revealed no sign of any innocent or unidentified suitcase beneath the bomb From the myriad fragments of debris recovered in the comprehensive sweep by searchers of the crash site investigators were able to isolate all those which had come from items of luggage stowed in the immediate vicinity of the bomb. Of the items in that category apart from the bomb suitcase the scientists were able to attribute everything to known items of luggage whether Heathrow or Frankfurt items. There was no sign of any innocent or unidentified suitcase in the mix that might have been loaded at Heathrow and upon which the bomb suitcase might have been resting, brown Samsonite hardshell or otherwise. On the basis of these propositions, Dr Kerr argues, it is not possible for both planks of the 1989 police reasoning to be simultaneously true. If Sidhu never moved the Heathrow-origin luggage, as the police accepted in 1989, then the Bedford-noted suitcase would have remained on the bottom layer and must have contained the bomb because the remains of only one pulverised suitcase were found – that which contained the bomb. If, conversely, as the police assumed, no allowance could be made for the possibility that the bomb suitcase was resting on the container floor, then Sidhu, contrary to what he asserted and to what was believed, must have moved the Bedford suitcase, which, as Dr Kerr so succinctly and decisively points out, “. . . demolishes the argument used in 1989 to exclude that case from being in the second layer, and again leaves the possibility of its being the bomb wide open. . . . The only brown Samsonite hardshell suitcase seen by any witness, which had appeared mysteriously in almost the exact position of the explosion, and which the police knew about less than three weeks after the disaster, was ruled out on the basis of an absolute logical impossibility. Once this paradox is identified, the crucial dilemma is clear. Which is less credible? Sidhu’s statement that he [never] move[d] the Heathrow-origin luggage, or the forensic [science] conclusion that the bomb suitcase had been on the second layer. Because one of these is simply wrong.” Inherent self-proof that primary suitcase was resting on the container floor In any event, it must be observed, irrespective of any judgment on Sidhu’s reliability, the fact that the remains of no second “pulverised” suitcase in addition to the bomb suitcase were ever found proves conclusively that, notwithstanding the thrust of the 1989 scientific findings, the bomb suitcase must have been resting on the container floor when the bomb detonated. If the Bedford suitcase was not the primary suitcase then it must have been removed on the tarmac by Sidhu who replaced it by a virtual clone containing the bomb which by chance had come off the feeder flight. What became of the suitcase noticed by Bedford if it was not carrying the bomb? If one of the two suitcases Bedford saw was not the bomb suitcase, what was it and what became of it? Meticulous detective work by the Dumfries and Galloway police officer Detective Constable Derek Henderson had originally established that no passenger on Pan Am 103 was carrying anything that could be described as a maroon or brown hardshell bag and none of the passengers whose luggage might have ended up in the container AVE4041 had such a bag. (Doubts expressed by Ashton and Ferguson, p.123, as to the cogency of the officer’s labours do not show that he could have missed a bag.) At the same time, the only suitcase of that description recovered at Lockerbie was the one blown to pieces by the bomb inside it. (The unaccompanied brown Samsonite hardshell belonging to Captain Hubbard which was found at the crash site could not have been the one seen by Bedford as it must have arrived on PA103A.) The way the Crown dealt with the matter of the mysterious suitcase seen by Bedford How, then, did the Crown deal with what ought to have been an end to any notion that the bomb had come from Frankfurt? First – extraordinary as it may seem – they adopted the simple ploy of sweeping Henderson’s inquiries under the carpet. He had been called to testify at the 1991 FAI in order to show that the bomb bag must have been unaccompanied rather than carried by an unwitting mule or suicide bomber. He repeated that evidence at the 1992 civil action in the US. His findings also meant that the Samsonite Bedford described could not have been legitimate passenger luggage either. But this appears not to have been noticed by the Sheriff, who was content to go along with the Crown’s heavy hints that it “would not seek to discourage a finding that the bag containing the device came to Frankfurt as an interline bag.” However, the trial at Camp Zeist was a different matter. With defence lawyers closely scrutinising the evidence it appears to have dawned on someone that the Bedford bag could not simply be waved aside. The neat solution was to avoid calling Henderson and to make no reference to the result of his inquiries showing no passenger on 103 had travelled with a maroon or brown hardshell. This therefore opened up the possibility of a second such bag – one carried legitimately – and the likelihood that the Samsonite suitcase seen by Bedford was no more than ordinary interline luggage. Neither loader called by the Crown The Crown could have called as a live witness the actual baggage handler whose job it had been to load the Frankfurt baggage into the container on the tarmac (Sidhu). It was open to them to ask the witness who had helped Sidhu load the container (Sandhu) questions about the loading. They chose neither course. Instead, they were quietly content to rely on the answer to a question asked by counsel representing Fhima (al-Megrahi’s acquitted co-accused) of the witness whose job it had merely been to load the already closed container on to the aircraft (Crabtree). He gave evidence before Sandhu and agreed with the trite suggestion that loaders might move bags around within the base of a container to make for a better fit, a “bit of re-jigging.” (The question seems to have been intended to establish the possibility that the case seen by Bedford might have been moved slightly and was indeed the bomb carrier.) Implausible implications of the court’s unlikely finding that the bomb bag was in the second layer The ten interline cases Bedford counted before the Frankfurt baggage had arrived consisted of eight cases placed upright (ie with their handles up) on the floor and across the back of the container and the two mysteriously added bags which were lying in front of them flat on the floor. Together, these ten cases covered almost all the floor area. The judges found that a large navy-blue canvas “Tourister” case belonging to Lockerbie victim Patricia Coyle, which had come from Vienna via Frankfurt, had been under the bomb bag rather than in the second layer on top of it. For intrinsic reasons based on the observed blast damage to the relevant items of luggage this has now been shown by Dr Kerr to be inconceivable. (These are dealt with later.) However, even in the absence of the availability of such unassailable concrete evidence the circumstantial implications of the judges’ finding seem wholly implausible. It would have meant that if the Samsonite bag Bedford had described was not the bomb bag, Sidhu would have had to lift it off the floor of the container (as there was no space remaining to slide it aside), replace it with the Coyle bag, place an almost identical bag carrying the bomb on top of the Coyle bag and then put the original “innocent” Samsonite-type suitcase (which Bedford had seen) somewhere else. The implied determination That was exactly what the judges impliedly determined had happened. To do so they obligingly picked up Crabtree’s generalised acquiescence to the suggestion put to him and ran with it, forming bricks out of straw to construct an elaborate edifice of improbability. It is true that in giving judgment of guilt they used tentative language. Thus, “if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Mr Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container.” This is a very different proposition from that put to Crabtree. But in the light of their finding that the bomb had come from Frankfurt (on its way from Luqa) their implied conclusion in effect could only have been that Sidhu had carried out six actions (contrary to his three statements to the police and his evidence at Dumfries. He must have:- (a) decided when he saw Coyle’s case coming off the conveyer from the Boeing 727 on flight 103A that, perhaps because of its size, it had to go on the floor of the container (even though a decision to place a soft-sided case on the floor instead of a hardshell seems an unnatural one); (b) accordingly, removed Bedford’s case from the floor; (c) placed Coyle’s navy-blue bag where the Samsonite seen by Bedford had been; (d) instead of then doing what would have been most natural, that is putting the Bedford Samsonite straight back on top of Coyle’s bag, he placed on it an identical suitcase carrying the bomb which just happened to be coming off the conveyer at that moment from the Frankfurt flight; (e) by horrible chance placed it so that the side along which the radio was packed was protruding into the overhang of the container; and (f) waited until the container was almost full before placing the Bedford bag somewhere else. Court’s lame solution to the question of the missing innocent Bedford bag: not all bags recovered If the judges were right where might the Bedford bag have ended up? If they were right and it had been moved Sidhu would either have put it in some remote corner of the container away from those 25 bags which showed direct blast damage and which were the only bags to be examined forensically in detail or else put it with the last few bags surplus to the container’s capacity which were loose-loaded into the belly of the aircraft. The problem with either option is that no brown Samsonite, apart from the bomb suitcase and one of the two Hubbard suitcases (which arrived on PA103A), was ever recovered. So to avoid the awkward absurdity implied in their conjecture – that the bag Bedford had seen must simply have vanished – they appear conveniently to have gone along with the Crown’s lame explanation that not all items of luggage were recovered. But what exactly might such a suggestion involve? Implications of non-recovery When the 747’s fuel laden wing assembly fell on Sherwood Crescent it caused an inferno which consumed aircraft debris, houses, victims on the ground and a number of passengers. Whether any suitcases disappeared into the flames is unknown but hundreds of suitcases littered the hillsides around Tundergarth some miles away, suggesting that the great bulk of the luggage fell well away from Sherwood Crescent. The Winterhope reservoir was searched by police divers so any luggage would also have been recovered from the water. The bizarre legion of coincidences implied by the court’s judgement that the bag seen by Bedford was not the primary suitcase For the Bedford suitcase to have gone into the flames would have taken the conjecture into an even more attenuated order of coincidence. Thus:
But, if the implied thinking of the judges is to be believed, added to all those coincidences we have yet one more. While the dismembered parts of the container and most if not all of the luggage that must have been in it were found dispersed over a very wide area and recovered, the innocent clone of the bomb bag just happens by remarkable chance to fall into the inferno of Sherwood Crescent. “Rush job” rules out careful rearrangement Sidhu’s imagined exercise in unhurriedly and fastidiously rearranging the baggage as if he had all the time in the world to make a perfect fit hardly squares with the facts, as already mentioned, that the original items were already positioned well enough, that he had to work in the dark and the pouring rain and in an icy gale, and, above all, that with the late arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt he had less than 15 minutes to load the container with luggage accompanying the 49 passengers who were booked through to New York from Frankfurt before Maid of the Seas was due to leave the gate. In short, as Sandhu himself admitted in cross-examination, it was a “rush job.” Examination of the condition of the blast damaged luggage, the container and the airframe shows up the basic error of the Zeist trial court’s finding that the bomb bag was in the second layer on top of Patricia Coyle’s blue “Tourister” case As already mentioned the Zeist trial court found that the Coyle “Tourister” bag which had come in from Frankfurt on PanAm 103A was on the base of the container with the bomb suitcase on top of it. We have shown how absurd is the notion that it ended up in that position, involving as it must Sidhu fastidiously but unwittingly switching it with the Samsonsite-type bag seen by John Bedford and then placing on top of it the brown Samsonite bomb bag (identical to the Bedford bag) which just happened to be coming down the rocket, with the Bedford bag then disappearing without trace. Quite apart from that circumstantial improbability, the distribution of blast damage and debris, as Dr Kerr has now decisively demonstrated in her groundbreaking study, for the following reasons the Coyle bag could not conceivably have been on the base of the container with the bomb bag above it.
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