Pan Am Flight 103 bombing investigation
In Scotland, responsibility for the investigation of sudden deaths rests with the local Procurator Fiscal (public prosecutor), who attends the scene and may direct the police in the conduct of their inquiries.
The Procurator Fiscal holds a commission from the Lord Advocate, who is Scotland's chief law officer (and prior to devolution in 1999 was simultaneously a UK government minister).
Funding the investigation quickly became a political issue and Margaret Thatcher announced that central government, not the Scottish Office, would meet any additional costs involved.
On 27 December 2018, Wired, an online news website, published a long article; it highlights that the head of the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal division, Robert Mueller, oversaw the case.
Over a thousand police officers and soldiers carried out fingertip searches of the crash site that lasted for months, retrieving 4 million pieces[4] from the fields and forests of southern Scotland.
Every item picked up was tagged, placed in a clear plastic bag, labelled and taken to the gymnasium of a local school, where everything was X-rayed and checked for explosive residue with a gas chromatograph, after which the information was entered into the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System.
Investigators found an area on the left side of the lower fuselage in the forward cargo hold, directly under the aircraft's navigation and communications systems, where a small section of about 20-inch (0.51 m) square had been completely shattered, with signs of pitting and sooting.
The reconstruction of container AVE4041 showed blackening, pitting, and severe damage to the floor panel and other areas, indicating that what the investigators called a "high-energy event" had taken place inside it.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigators then conducted a series of tests in the United States, at which Alan Feraday of Britain's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) is understood to have been present.
The tests involved using metal containers loaded with luggage, and detonating plastic explosive within Toshiba radio cassette players in garment-filled suitcases, so as to replicate the sooting and pitting pattern of AVE4041.
DERA's Feraday and Dr. Thomas Hayes examined two strips of metal from AVE 4041, and found traces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) and cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, components of Semtex-H, a high-performance plastic explosive manufactured in Pardubice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic).
[7] In March 1990, Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel disclosed that the former communist regime had supplied a large consignment of Semtex through a company called Omnipol to the government of Libya.
The bomb, one of five, had been in the possession of members of the Damascus–based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), led by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain.
Further examination of the clothing believed to have been in the bomb suitcase found fragments of paper (from a booklet on the Toshiba RT-SF 16 Bombeat radio cassette player) embedded into two Slalom-brand men's shirts, a blue baby's jumpsuit of the Babygro Primark brand, and a pair of tartan trousers.
Fragments of plastic consistent with the material used on a Bombeat and pieces of loudspeaker mesh, were found embedded in other clothing which appeared to have been inside the bomb suitcase: a white, Abanderado-brand T-shirt; cream-coloured pyjamas; a fragment of a knitted, brown, woollen cardigan with the label "Puccini design"; a herringbone jacket; and brown herringbone material, some of which bore a label indicating it came from a pair of size-34 Yorkie-brand men's trousers.
Robert Ingram, a civilian search and rescue worker told the court that police had visited him some months after the crash to ask him to confirm finding items that he did not, in fact, recall recovering.
In August 1989, Scottish detectives flew to Malta to speak to the owner, who directed them to Yorkie's main outlet on the island—Mary's House in Sliema, run by Tony Gauci, who became the prosecution's most important witness.
[15] In the BBC Two The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie[16] shown on 31 August 2008, it was claimed that one significant reason for Megrahi's latest appeal was that Gauci, who had picked him out in a line-up, had seen a magazine photograph of him just four days before he made the identification.
Testimony indicated that on 13 January 1989, three weeks after the bombing, two Scottish detectives engaged in a line search in woods near Lockerbie came upon a piece of charred material, later identified as the neckband of a grey Slalom-brand shirt.
The next reference to this circuit board fragment was on 15 September 1989, when Alan Feraday of DERA sent a Polaroid photograph of it to the police officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector William Williamson, asking for help in identification and with a covering note saying this was "the best that I can do in such a short time".
Defence counsel contrasted Hayes' testimony with that of two of his colleagues (Elliott and Higgs) at DERA's forensic laboratory who, as revealed in the notorious Maguire Seven trial, had tested minute samples from underneath the fingernails of the suspects for explosives residue.
In another important development, a retired senior Scottish police chief added fuel to the timer fragment fire by claiming that the CIA planted this crucial piece of evidence.
A procedural hearing at the Appeal Court in Edinburgh took place on 11 October 2007, when prosecution and defence lawyers discussed legal issues with a panel of three judges.
[23] In January 2009, it was reported that although Megrahi's second appeal against conviction was scheduled to begin on 27 April 2009 the hearing could last as long as 12 months because of the complexity of the case and volume of material to be examined.
It emerged at the trial that one of the owners, Edwin Bollier, had sold twenty MST-13 timers (identical to the one found in Senegal) to Libya in 1985, in the hope of winning a contract to supply the Libyan military.
[28] In an affidavit before a Zürich notary, Lumpert stated that he had stolen a prototype MST-13 timer PC-board from Mebo and gave it without permission on 22 June 1989, to "an official person investigating the Lockerbie case".
[citation needed] Once alerted by Edwin Bollier of Mebo to the Megrahi–Fhimah friendship and business relationship, Scottish police obtained permission to search Fhimah's office in Malta.
