Fresh questions on Lockerbie

Honest man in a web of secrecy, chief reporter Lucy Adams writes in the The Herald:

It was a winter's night in 1988. Tony Gauci was getting ready to close up Mary's House, his rather drab shop on Tower Road in Sliema, Malta. At about 6.30pm, a stranger entered the shop and bought a list of items so long and unlikely for conditions on the Mediterranean island that it became etched in Mr Gauci's memory.

From his recollection, when interviewed by the police nine months later, it was a rainy night in early December. His brother Paul, with whom he ran the store, was absent as he was watching football. The Christmas lights were not yet up. The customer's purchases included a baby sleepsuit, a tweed jacket and an umbrella. The charred remnants of these items were later found to have been inside a brown hardshell Samsonite suitcase that contained the bomb which blew up over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people.

When PanAm flight 103 exploded, the impact was such that the British Geological Survey registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale. Debris was strewn along an 81-mile corridor of Scottish countryside. Working out who was responsible was not going to be easy. But it had to be worked out. This was the biggest case ever dealt with by Scottish police forces and the worst terrorist atrocity on mainland Britain.

Officers believed if they could trace the clothes from the suitcase they would find their man and, once they linked the items to Mary's House, they began to feel optimistic. Eighteen years on, that optimism seems like a false dawn. Tony Gauci is, according to those who know him, a simple and honest Maltese shopkeeper whose only passion is for his racing pigeons. Unwittingly, he became caught up in one of the most controversial trials of the century..

The trial court referred to Mr Gauci as an "important witness" and said his identification of the Libyan as the clothes purchaser "should be treated as a highly important element in this case". Despite the inconsistencies in his 19 different statements to the police, even the appeal court described Mr Gauci as reliable. However, during the three-year investigation by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, new evidence came to light which indicated that four days before an ID parade at which he picked out Megrahi, Mr Gauci saw a photograph of the Libyan in a magazine article linking him to the bombing...