Lockerbie doubts

Citing flawed evidence and a suspect Maltese witness, Magnus Linklater writes in today's London Times that 'it's time to look again' at the Malta link in the Lockerbie case:

From the clothing in which the cassette player had been wrapped, detectives were able to trace it back to Malta, and there close questioning of the shop owner where the clothes had been bought implicated two agents of the Libyan intelligence service. It was, said Lord Fraser at the time, old-fashioned detective work of the highest order — and it was enough to secure al-Megrahi’s conviction in 2001. The complications of a Middle East link were shelved. There the matter might well have rested, save for a series of allegations that have emerged over the past year, and which suggest that this apparently watertight evidence may be not only flawed, but might possibly have been tampered with..

All this might easily be dismissed as the conspiracy fog that tends to gather around cases of this kind. Except that last weekend Lord Fraser himself, who was in charge of the Crown evidence, suggested that he too had begun to have doubts. In an interview with The Sunday Times he said that the Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, whose identification of the two Libyans was central to the prosecution case, might not have been a reliable witness. He was, said Lord Fraser, a “weak point” in the case, who might have been “easily led”. He added: “Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy . . .” ...

Lockerbie background from the Guardian and CNN;
MaltaMedia special feature