On 25 August 2009 Paul Brandon wrote:
Please note that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was not convicted of
_committing_ mass murder.
He was convicted on the grounds that a Maltese shopkeeper said
that he had purchased a shirt whose remnants were found wrapped
around the bomb
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111881314>.
I'll leave alternative explanations to the readers.
Paul, I don't understand this. You've conflated what Megrahi was
convicted of, and the evidence on which he was convicted. As the
Scottish Daily Record says: "In January 2001, Megrahi was found guilty
of mass murder and jailed for life with a minimum term of 20 years."
http://tinyurl.com/n88a9p
Incidentally, the cited NPR article does not say quite what Paul states
above. It says "largely" on the grounds of that evidence. My
recollection of seeing a TV programme about the evidence some years ago
is that there was considerably more to it than that. (A first appeal by
Megrahi was turned down by the appeal court.) Nevertheless I am of the
view that the conviction was unsafe, on the grounds that a major item
in the evidence was the Maltese shopkeeper's identification of Megrahi,
and that such witness identification is inherently unreliable.
I was of the opinion that, had the second appeal gone ahead,
significant information about the episode might well have emerged. This
is not the view of Professor Peter Duff, who spent three-and-a-half
years reviewing the case as a member of the Scottish Criminal Cases
Review Commission:
"I think it highly unlikely that the truth is out there and would have
emerged as a result of the appeal. I don't know if it's out there any
more."
http://tinyurl.com/n88a9p
Incidentally, I wonder how those in the Libyan welcome home crowd who
waved Scottish flags got hold of them. I find it difficult to imagine
that Scottish flags are obtainable by individuals at short notice in
Libya.
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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