President Gadafy's qualified agreement to a trial in The Hague of two Libyan nationals accused of the bombing of the Pan American airliner which disintegrated over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988, killing 270 people, makes it obligatory for the US and Britain to produce credible new evidence of guilt. Certainly, the revealed forensic, documentary and testimonial evidence assembled against the two men accused, Mr Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Mr al-Amin Khalifa Fhima, appears to be inconclusive. Thus, their trial before a fair-minded court in a neutral country could lead to the Libyans' acquittal.
The prosecution claims the explosion was caused by Semtex set off by a Swiss-made trigger concealed in a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder wrapped in clothing packed into a copper-brown suitcase. This, it is claimed, was sent from Malta to Frankfurt for forwarding to the US as unaccompanied luggage on Pan Am Flight 103.
However, several key allegations in the prosecution's case have been contested since the Libyans were indicted on November 13th, 1991. The first charge is that the trigger was one of 20 purchased in 1985 by the accused men, said to be Libyan intelligence agents. However, the British expert who examined the fragment found in the wreckage, Mr Thomas Hayes, said it is too tiny to make a definitive determination. East Germany, which supported a number of terrorist groups, also took delivery of triggers from the same firm. Palestinian intelligence claimed that one of these was obtained in Beirut by a freelance bomb maker who built the Pan Am bomb on behalf of Iran.
Second, although the clothing was traced to a Maltese manufacturer, the shopkeeper who allegedly sold the items initially identified a known Palestinian militant resident in Sweden rather than Mr al-Megrahi, and could not confirm the purchase date fixed by the prosecution. Third, a document prepared in 1995 by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation stated: "There is no concrete indication that any piece of luggage was unloaded from Air Malta 180, sent through the luggage routing system and then loaded on board Pan Am 103."
The FBI concluded that computer print-out evidence was unreliable. The case carrying the bomb could have come from another flight or was "a rogue bag inserted into the system", perhaps by baggage handlers. The Libyan motive for the bombing was said to be retaliation for the 1986 US air attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi. However, Tehran had a much more immediate motive: the July 1988 shooting down by a US warship in the Gulf of an Iranian passenger jet, with the loss of 290 lives. The then Iranian Interior Minister, Mr Ali Akbar Motashemi, was initially said to have commissioned a Syrian-sponsored Palestinian group, the Popular Front-General Command, to carry out the bombing.
Other possible culprits were Lebanese Shia militants seeking to kill CIA agents engaged in a hostage-rescue mission and drug smugglers targeting a "sting" operation mounted by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Operatives of both these US agencies died on Pan Am 103.
In 1990-91, when the indictments were being drawn up, Libya was chosen as "sole perpetrator" because the US and Britain did not want to alienate Iran or Syria during the crisis over Iraq's occupation of Kuwait or the start of the Middle East peace process. The problem with this is that if the "Libya as sole perpetrator" theory is not proven, the opportunity to trace the true bombers may have been lost. Reuters adds: The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, yesterday said Libya's apparently positive response to the US-British proposal for a trial at a neutral venue did not go far enough. "It doesn't meet the acid test of handing over the two accused to the Netherlands and until we get that, we can't be too confident or too optimistic about any response."