The truth is rarely pure and never simple. So said Oscar Wilde. And since the outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial, held in the Netherlands, which saw Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi convicted of the murder of 270 people, the search for a pure and simple truth has been led by one man – Dr Jim Swire.

Jim Swire lost his 24 year-old daughter Flora when a bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 on Wednesday 21 December 1988 killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people in the town of Lockerbie. Ever since that day he has been trying to uncover exactly what happened, convinced that the only man convicted of murder has been the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. Amidst the murk and treachery of the Lockerbie bombing, the search for truth looks, from the outside, to be entirely futile. There are numerous players in this dark game of hide and seek; the Scottish criminal justice system; the governments of the United Kingdom, Scotland, the United States, Libya and Iran; secret service agencies including the FBI and MI5; and then there’s Dr Jim Swire.

Protempore on one good man’s fight for justice…...

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Missives and diktats
In the unrelenting world of 24-hour news coverage, it’s become far too easy for honourable, decent and honest people to be routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists. The simple act of questioning the official line on anything these days sees people described as deluded, misguided or nut cases. The machinery of government is run by press officers, whose job is to relay unrelenting press statements, missives and diktats, which are intended to seep into the nation’s consciousness and render any dissenting voices silent. Watch any episode of The Thick Of It and you’ll get the idea. But Jim Swire is a dissenting voice that refuses to hush up and go away. His concern is that the Scottish criminal justice system returned a verdict which is wrong and which has both deprived a man of his liberty, and the world of the truth about one of the most heinous acts of terrorist violence ever perpetrated on innocent civilians.

His concern is justified. Not only because the man lost his daughter and quite rightly wants to know who was responsible for her death, but because he wants the world to know the truth; and even the most amateur trawl through the events which led to al-Megrahi’s conviction and the statements of those involved at his trial, show that Jim Swire is not a man prone to daydreaming about conspiracies. He’s convinced that the evidence against al-Megrahi is, to say the least, flawed, and the conviction which flowed from it completely unsound.

It wouldn’t be possible in this short space to go over every shred of evidence in the Lockerbie trial but the Scottish court returned a unanimous verdict of guilty against al-Megrahi. The prosecution’s main witness was a guy called Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who, according to evidence led at the trial, sold the clothes which were said to have been wrapped around the improvised explosive device that brought the aircraft down. He was the only witness to link al-Megrahi directly to the device, and was therefore instrumental in convicting him.

However, you read the transcript of the trial, Gauci was uncertain about the dates on which he sold the clothes, and more importantly, could not be certain that he sold the clothes to al-Megrahi. When he attended an identity parade to identify the man to whom he sold the clothes, he picked out al-Megrahi. However, he later acknowledged that he had seen al-Megrahi’s photograph in a newspaper days before implicating him in the bomb plot. It’s also now well documented that he was paid $2 million for his evidence by the US authorities.

Not quite the full shilling
Lord Fraser of Carmylie – who was Lord Advocate at the time and ultimately responsible for the investigation into the Lockerbie bombing, and bringing al-Megrahi to trial – cast doubt upon the reliability of the main prosecution witness, one Tony Gauci, 5 years after the trial. According to the Sunday Times of October 23, 2005, Lord Fraser criticised the Maltese shopkeeper, for amongst other things, being ‘not quite the full shilling’ and ‘an apple short of a picnic’. The former Labour MP Tam Dalyell who played a crucial role in organising the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, described Lord Fraser’s comments as an ‘extraordinary development’: “I think there is an obligation for the chairman and members of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to ask Lord Fraser to see them and testify under oath – it’s that serious. Fraser should have said this at the time and, if not then, he was under a moral obligation to do so before the trial. I think there will be all sorts of consequences.”

One of those consequences is Dr Jim Swire. A man who has had his heart broken but whose spirit and sense of justice is strong. The very least he deserves is the pure and simple truth.

Protempore