New Appeal Recommended In Lockerbie Case
EDINBURGH, Scotland — A former Libyan intelligence agent may have been wrongly convicted of the 1988 bombing of 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, including 179 Americans.
"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 summarizing its 800-page report.
The Court of Appeal will consider the report and decide whether 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.
Mr. Megrahi's lawyers claim that authorities in Britain and America tampered with evidence, disregarded witness statements, and steered investigators away from evidence that the bombing was an Iranian-financed plot carried out by Palestinian Arabs as revenge for the shooting down of a civilian Iranian airliner by American forces several months earlier.
The Reverend 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. Mr. Gauci claimed a man resembling Mr. 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.
Mr. Megrahi was convicted of the murder of the passengers who died when Flight 103 from London to New York was blown up over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988. An initial appeal was rejected in 2002. Another Libyan suspect was acquitted.
