A new look at Lockerbie

David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post has written a terrific article on Lockerbie - with new information that the wrong man might be sitting in jail...

To this day, it stands as the deadliest terrorist action ever to hit Great Britain. It saw the killing of more American civilians than any terrorist attack with the exception of 9/11. It prompted the most expensive criminal investigation in British history.

And it may now turn out to be Britain's gravest miscarriage of justice.

Nineteen years after Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland with the loss of all its passengers and crew, the perennial suspicion that the investigation was skewed and the wrong parties held responsible is hardening. If so, the implications are horrific, potentially implicating the American and British authorities in a cover-up which enabled the guilty state sponsors to evade punishment and, emboldened, to commission further murderous attacks.

On Thursday, a minor procedural hearing in an Edinburgh court marked the beginning of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi's appeal against his conviction for murder in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A Libyan intelligence officer and head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, Megrahi is one of only two people ever prosecuted in the case. He was indicted in 1991 along with Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, Libyan airlines' station manager at Malta's Luqa Airport, where the prosecution alleged that the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb began its journey. Ten years later, a panel of three Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah but convicted Megrahi; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a stipulation that he serve a minimum of 20 years in jail, later increased to 27 years - a curiously light term for mass murder. His first appeal was dismissed in 2002. Earlier this summer, after repeated rejections, he finally won leave to mount his second.

Libya's purported culpability is generally presented in the context of its various mid-1980s confrontations with the United States - notably Libya's bombing of a Berlin nightclub used by US troops, and US air attacks on targets in Benghazi and Tripoli in 1986, including a strike on the personal quarters of Col. Muammar Gaddafi in which his adopted daughter was killed.

Libya gave up Megrahi and Fhimah for trial after years of resistance and consequent UN sanctions, and then paid compensation to the Lockerbie victims' families as a condition for the lifting of those sanctions (which had cost it an estimated $30 billion). But Gaddafi savaged the Scottish judges when they found Megrahi guilty, Libya has never formally accepted specific responsibility for the bombing, and in 2004, its prime minister told the BBC that it had capitulated only because "we thought it was easier for us to buy peace."