Lockerbie bombing: A verdict of sorts

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "I'm enormously grateful that we have even one guilty verdict," said Bruce Smith, an American whose wife was among the 270 victims of the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had traveled to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands to hear the verdict of a Scottish court, sitting on "neutral" territory, on Wednesday, Jan. 31.

Only one of the two Libyans accused of the crime was found guilty. The other, Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, station manager for Libyan Arab Airlines at Malta in 1988, flies home a free man at once, with a fighter escort organized by the United Nations to ensure that there is no unauthorized attempt to revise the verdict.

Even the guilty verdict on the other alleged conspirator, Abdulbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, an acknowledged member of the Jamahiriya Security Organization (JSO), Libya's secret service, may yet be set aside on appeal -- and "Brother Colonel" Moammar Qaddafi, Libya's leader for the past 30 years, gets off scot free no matter what.

Speaking just before the three Scottish judges handed down their verdict at Camp Zeist, a British Foreign Office official volunteered the opinion that if the two Libyans were convicted, then that "would say something about Libya in 1988, but the Libya we're dealing with is that of 2001 ... Our judgment is done against present behavior."

Decode that gem of diplomatic prose, and the deal that the United States and Britain made with Libya becomes clear. If London and Washington could pin the bombing on the two alleged Libyan intelligence agents, then they would.

But nobody would insist that Qaddafi take personal responsibility for the affair or apologize for it.

This is the deal that Qaddafi sought from the moment that the US and Britain shifted their accusations about the bombing from Iran to Libya in 1990.

Until that time everybody had assumed that the downing of Pan Am 103 was an Iranian-backed operation, perhaps using Palestinians to do the dirty work, in retaliation for the deaths of 290 people in the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the US warship Vincennes five months earlier, in July 1988.

But then Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and Washington needed Iran to stay neutral in the war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait -- so suspicion about the bombing of Pan Am 103 suddenly switched from Iran to Libya.

Henceforward, that bomb was presumed to be an act of revenge for the 1986 US air attack on Libya that had killed Qaddafi's infant daughter, among other people, more than two years before Flight 103 went down over Scotland.

The switch in the investigation's target had cynical motives, but it did focus attention on the possibility that the suitcase which exploded and brought the airliner down had been put into the system as unaccompanied baggage by Libyan agents in Malta.

Qaddafi responded by protesting his innocence, but arresting the two Libyans accused of the deed and offering to try them under Libyan law.

Frustrated by his tactics, the U.S. and Britain got the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on air travel and arms exports to Libya in 1993, to be raised only when the two accused were handed over for trial in Britain.

But the sanctions were mostly symbolic, since they did not target Libya's crucial oil exports; Europe imports a great deal of oil from Libya.

Qaddafi understood that the two major English-speaking powers were looking for a deal, not a war, and as early as 1994 he offered to deliver the suspects up for trial outside Libya, provided it was on neutral territory.

After five years' hesitation, the Anglo-Americans bit the bullet and agreed. As soon as al-Megrahi and Fhimah were delivered to Camp Zeist last summer, sanctions against Libya were promptly suspended.

They are unlikely ever to be re-imposed, even if the conviction of al-Megrahi is upheld on appeal, and even if Libya refuses to pay the US$700 million in compensation for the victims that is demanded by the U.S. and British governments.

Only a Security Council resolution can re-activate sanctions, and either Russia or China can veto it. Neither country is particularly happy with the display of great-power arm-twisting that produced the present verdict.

Yet in the end, something was achieved. After listening to 230 witnesses and wading through 3 million words of transcripts, the court did produce a credible verdict. It rejected the evidence of the man whom the prosecution counted on most, turncoat JSO agent Abdul Majid Giaka, as a self-serving tissue of lies, and acquitted the Libyan Airlines station manager in Malta as probably an unwitting dupe of the spooks.

But it unanimously found JSO agent al-Megrahi guilty -- even though the evidence, as it acknowledged, was entirely circumstantial.

"We are aware," said the court in its judgment, "that...there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications. We are also aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified.

"However,...we are satisfied that the evidence...does fit together to form a real and convincing pattern."

It's a good a verdict as we're ever going to see. But nobody, except maybe al-Megrahi, will ever be punished for the massacre.