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Will the full Lockerbie story ever be told? Tim Cornwell LAST week, I had the privilege of sitting opposite Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the "second accused" in the bombing of Pan Am 103, the family man and former airline station manager acquitted of the cold-blooded slaying of 270 people. Subjecting him to a kind of amateur cross-examination, it was tempting to try and sit in judgment on a case whose truths have eluded the world for 13 years. A three-day visit to Libya climaxed with three separate encounters with Fhimah, running from general chit-chat to formal tape-recorded interview to table talk that ran till midnight over aromatic Arabic coffee. While the interview was arranged by the Libyan defence team, I did my best to rattle him a little. Fhimah was found not guilty by a Scottish court of the worst case of mass-murder in Scottish history; his associate and co-defendant, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was sentenced to life in prison. I did not cover the Lockerbie trial, except in talking to some of its victims on the other side of the Atlantic. But I read the verdict pretty thoroughly, and it seems to me that you could study the case for years and not be much wiser. Megrahi was convicted as the leading man of the plot to blow up Pan Am 103, a Libyan intelligence agent who assembled timers, explosives, and a Samonsite suitcase, with some clothes to fill it out. The case against Fhimah initially included exotic claims that he kept explosives for months in an airline desk drawer. But it came down that he somehow - the prosecution could never quite say how - helped put the bomb on route from Malta’s airport to Frankfurt, London and the Pan Am flight. The evidence against him was reduced to puzzling diary entries, flights, and phone calls, underlining the association with Megrahi. It simply wasn’t enough. The Libyans last week offered every welcome to me and Ian Rutherford, The Scotsman’s award-winning photographer. Most visitors to Tripoli expect to be watched closely, in a country that learned a few lessons from East Germany in state control, and I dare say we were too. But we experienced every courtesy of Arabic hospitality, from the moment of our arrival to the minute of our leaving, and we abused it to the full. Fhimah welcomed us to his home with coffee, sweet pastries and fruit and I pointed a tape recorder in his face and asked him for the explanations he never gave the court. Fhimah appeared uncomfortable, even angry, when pushed to explain all the to-ing and fro-ing between Malta and Tripoli by both Megrahi and himself, treated so suspiciously in the trial. He demanded that the tape be turned off, before continuing at the urging of the Libyans’ legal chief. "Let’s clear this now," he said, and talked on. It was a sharp reminder that the right to remain silent was designed for the innocent as well as the guilty. He gave a detailed accounting of his travels and meetings with Megrahi, a friend and senior colleague at Libyan Arab Airlines. They came out of hopes that Megrahi would help him win business for his travel agency with oil companies and the Paris-Dakar motor rally, he said. They set off for Malta together, shortly before the bombing, on a flight to look at carpets: Megrahi joined him only at the last minute at the airport, calling for him on the tannoy system. "I consider myself in a period of rest after all that period of suffering," said Fhimah, on extended leave from his job with the airline, describing the decade he spent as a suspect in the case. He blamed the death of his mother on the ordeal, saying she died at the age of 63 "in good health at that time but because of psychological pressure, because of the media bias, she couldn’t take it". He said the defence team made the decision for him not to testify because "there is no real evidence against me". The Libyan line, repeated over and over during our trip, by Fhimah and others, was that the Lockerbie trial was run by the Americans, first as a political show trial, and second as a matter of money, so that the Americans can claim billions of dollars in damages. The CIA was watching over the shoulder of Scottish prosecutors. "Sometimes we came to a point that we are afraid that the Scottish would believe the Americans because we knew the Americans they are playing," Fhimah said. "They make up stories. It’s the CIA. But with the Scottish people we are very relaxed because we knew that they are looking for the truth." Certainly, the Americans have long had hang-ups about Libya: Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi is one of their black-hat bad guys of the world, along with Fidel Castro in Cuba or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. But I don’t personally buy the money line, with its implication that the American families all want cash and we good Britons just want answers. Portraying the Americans as the real ones to blame, from global warming to global terrorism, is just a little too easy. The other line that the Libyans are promoting, however, is that we don’t speak Arabic and more broadly just don’t understand their world. Fhimah, the dispatcher whose job involved making sure Libyan planes departed safely, turned it into a joke. "We used to work for the crew department at Libyan Arab Airlines," he said. To laughter from those in the room, he went on: "This department used to be called ‘operations department’ but we found out the word ‘operation’ was misinterpreted so we changed the name ... when we said ‘captain’ to the pilots a lot of people think it was captain in the army or something." Take those trips between Malta and Tripoli, Fhima said. All very suspicious. But Malta was Libya’s gateway to Europe, a close trip by ferry or plane. It was no surprise that Megrahi was stopping over for a night or two. Malta was where you went, for nappies or chocolate or carpets, when Libya was in the throes of austerity programmes to pay for Gaddafi’s ambitious projects. But the leap of understanding is far more profound. You’re chatting to one Libyan official about the American elections, in which I briefly covered the brouhaha last year in West Palm Beach. Oh yes, I agreed, wealthy part of the world, full of Jewish retirees. "Well, the Jews controlled the election," he spits out, and the glimpse of the enemy mindset - for both America and the Jews - causes you to draw breath. My last taste of Libya was buying stamps at the airport for a daughter’s collection. Among Libyan traditional shoes, reptiles, birds or flowers are two special issues devoted to American Aggression, garish depictions of the bombing that killed 20 people, including Gaddafi’s adopted daughter. In translating something approaching half a million documents, from English to Arabic or vice-versa, one of the legal terms that posed the most trouble for the Libyans was "submission" - as in "my submission", or "I submit, m’lud". A trivial detail? "Submission" also happens to be a translation of the word Islam, a religion where the faithful promise submission to the will of God. The Middle East is described sometimes as just one giant conspiracy theory, and I have had just a very small taste of it, but it is about as foreign to a Scottish courtroom as it is possible to be. We got a verdict out of the trial, but a lot of people are unhappy with it. Just how we expected to take this theatre of passion and intrigue and turn it into an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey, I do not know. |
