Mick Hartley

More doubts about the official Lockerbie line:

Scottish police had information that might have changed the outcome of the Lockerbie bombing trial, a BBC TV programme has learned.

The information could have affected the credibility of key evidence, but was not passed to the defence team.

Libyan national Abdelbaset ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is serving life for killing 270 people in the 1988 bombing….

The prosecution case was that al-Megrahi took the bomb, wrapped in clothes bought from a shop in Malta, to the island's Luqa airport, where it was checked in and then transferred onto Pan Am flight 103.

A key witness against al-Megrahi was the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who owned Mary's House, where the police say the garments were bought.

He identified al-Megrahi as having been in his shop some weeks before the bombing.

The Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie reports that some of his evidence contradicted itself and that Mr Gauci had seen al-Megrahi's photograph in a magazine under a headline "Who planted the bomb?" a few days before he picked him out at an identity parade.

The SCCRC discovered this was the case, and this is one of the grounds on which they recommended that the case should be looked at again.

The BBC programme has discovered that the Scottish police knew Mr Gauci had looked at al-Megrahi's photograph just days before the line-up.

But contrary to police rules of disclosure, designed to ensure a fair trial, this crucial information was not passed on to the defence.

Mr al-Gaddafi [Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, son of the Libyan leader], who carries out political and diplomatic roles on behalf of his father, was interviewed in the programme about whether Libya truly accepts guilt for the Lockerbie bombing.

He admitted to the programme's producer Guy Smith that the Libyan government had merely accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing in order to get international sanctions lifted.

"Yes, we wrote a letter to the Security Council saying we are responsible for the acts of our employees… but it doesn't mean that we did it in fact.

"I admit that we played with words – we had to.

"What can you do? Without writing that letter we would not be able to get rid of sanctions."

Well, he's got a point, hasn't he? It may be cynical, as the BBC interviewer points out - provoking Gaddafi into a rant about the greed of the Lockerbie victims' families - but less so than what many suspect to be the truth of the matter: that Libya was a convenient scapegoat at a time when the real culprits, Iran, acting in retaliation for the downing by the US six months earlier of an Iranian Airbus A-300, needed to be kept onside during the build-up to the first Gulf War.

Though that, it has to be said, is only one possibility in what's turned out to be a conspiracy theorist's dream.