| http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=101885
Lockerbie: Free my friend too Tim Cornwell HE IS a celebrity back home, an outwardly thoughtful, appealing and well-spoken family man. As we speak, a child dashes into his comfortable three-storey home in the heart of Tripoli and hands him a tape-recording of a poem which has been dedicated to him. He is seen, his eldest son says, as a man with a “white heart”. The prosecution at his trial before Scottish judges in Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands thought differently. Its lawyers believed he, along with his co-accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was responsible for bombing Pan Am 103 in December 1988 over Lockerbie, and for killing 270 people in Scotland’s worst case of mass murder. But, while his friend was convicted six months ago, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, was cleared. He returned to a hero’s welcome. He has agreed to give his first full interview, and it is to The Scotsman. It is to last five hours and runs from his lawyer’s room to his home and his local football club. He is sometimes open; often, nervous. There lingers, of course, a whiff of suspicion about Fhimah. Even as they acquitted him, the judges voiced uncertainty. They noted his trip from Tripoli to Malta two days before the bombing with Megrahi was unexplained; and pointed to his now infamous diary entry. It referred to securing airline tags – spelled “taggs” – which, the prosecution claimed, sped the bag containing the bomb on its fatal flight. And even the arrival of the smiling boy with the famous poet’s tape-recording may be a public relations stunt. In Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, it is impossible to tell. Fhimah has agreed to speak only to push the case for an appeal for Megrahi, leave for which was formally granted at the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday. The preliminary hearing is set for October. The prosecution claimed Fhimah, 44, a father of seven and a former Libyan airline manager at Malta’s Luqa airport, was, because of his airline expertise, key to the plot that saw the bomb-laden Samsonite suitcase shipped from Malta to Frankfurt, London and obliteration over Lockerbie. But its arguments foundered, as did claims he was a Libyan intelligence agent, or his newly-formed travel agency was a front for Libyan agents. His defence claimed, apparently persuasively, he was an “innocent dupe”. But Fhimah says something odd: “Whoever was planning to bomb the aircraft, he didn’t know where the aircraft would come down. Scotland was involved by chance.” It begs the question: how would he know that? “The Scottish people became the victims by accident. You are dealing with a plane that was flying all over the land. I know this as an airline official.” Fhimah, in the interview arranged by Megrahi’s Libyan legal team, says: “I am totally convinced he is innocent. I hope the appeal judges study this case carefully.” But, for the first time, he describes in detail his movements in the days and hours before the bombing. The diary, he says, left in an office of his business partner in Malta, “was the source of all my trouble”. The prosecution, he insists, took a simple reminder to bring more tags to Malta’s airline manager and then made it into a conspiracy. The journey from Tripoli with Megrahi, he says, was a last-minute, spur-of-the moment affair: a you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours trip to buy carpets for Megrahi’s home. The quid pro quo: Megrahi was holding out the contract for an oil company, through his brother-in-law, for Fhimah’s new travel agency. It would have been important to land it. But what about the phone call, early on the morning the bomb was allegedly dispatched, from Megrahi to Fhimah’s home? Once again, the prosecution’s suggestion that Fhimah drove Megrahi to the airport fell apart, unsubstantiated. The phone call, it was said, was too short to have been answered. Why, then, was nobody home? Fhimah, aware his wife is close by, offers only mystery. Close to midnight, in his home, he laughs it off. He was alone. He used to live in Malta. He had just flown in that night. Men do what men do. He said enigmatically: “I have a lot of friends, in a lot of places I used to visit. I don’t want to go into details.” Three years after this nudge-nudge episode, in November 1991, the BBC World Service broadcast the names of the two accused. He was arrested. Fhimah describes returning home from Tunis, ready to start his early shift as a flight dispatcher to find neighbours crowded outside his house and his family weeping. No-one around him thinks he was guilty. A friend stops to tell me: “How can a man, who cannot hurt a mouse, plant a bomb in a plane?’’ Now it is Fhimah’s mission to try to claim the same for Megrahi. ===================================== Megrahi given go-ahead for appeal THE Libyan jailed for life for the Lockerbie bombing has been given official clearance to appeal against his conviction. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, 49, was granted leave to appeal after his grounds for alleging he had suffered a miscarriage of justice were examined by a judge. It is standard practice in Scotland for prospective appeals to go through a "sift" to ensure only those with a stateable case go forward to a full court hearing. Few people had doubted that it would be anything more than a formal exercise in the Lockerbie case. In January, Megrahi was told he would serve at least 20 years in jail after being found guilty by three judges at the Scottish court in the Netherlands. Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted. The appeal by Megrahi, to be heard by a bench of five judges, will take place at Kamp van Zeist, near Utrecht, the military base where the trial was held and where he is now in custody. If the conviction is upheld, he will be transferred to a prison in Scotland to complete the sentence. A preliminary hearing in the Netherlands is expected to be scheduled within the next few weeks. A timetable will be drawn up for the appeal, which is unlikely to begin before next year. JOHN ROBERTSON |
