Lockerbie bomber may be innocent

A FORMER Libyan intelligence agent may have been wrongly convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a judicial panel said yesterday, recommending that he be granted a new appeal.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who is serving a life sentence, was the only person convicted for the bombing, which killed 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground.

“The commission is of the view, based upon our lengthy investigations, new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice,” the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission said in a statement. The Court of Appeal will decide if an appeal is warranted.

The Libyan intelligence agent has always maintained his innocence, and the commission, an independent judicial body that investigates possible miscarriages of justice, appeared to side with him.

Al-Megrahi’s lawyers claim authorities in Britain and the US tampered with evidence, disregarded witness statements and steered investigators away from evidence that the bombing was an Iranian-financed plot.

The Rev Graham Forbes, the commission’s chairman, said: “Some of what we have discovered may imply innocence; some of what we have discovered may imply guilt. However, such matters are for a court to decide.”

The panel said it had identified six areas where it believed “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”, including the reliability of testimony from Tony Gauci, the proprietor of a boutique in Sliema, Malta. Gauci claimed a man resembling al-Megrahi entered his shop on December 7, 1988, and bought apparel that investigators say was wrapped around the bomb that was hidden in the Pan Am plane.

In 2003, the Libyan government agreed to pay $270 million (€200m) in compensation to families of the Lockerbie victims, under a deal which paved the way for the lifting of UN sanctions against Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. But Libyan authorities have never formally admitted guilt.