Lockerbie I

Yesterday was the anniversary of the release of the so-called Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbasset Ali Al- Megrahi and a lot of people – American Sentaors in particular - are getting very worked up about it. Mr Megrahi, it will be remembered, was convicted, on the basis of no firm evidence, of blowing up Pan AM flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie in 1988, and was released from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds because medical evidence indicated that he had no more than three months to live. The fact that he is alive and well 12 months later is not, apparently, in the strange, professedly Christian world that is the USA, grounds for rejoicing, but cause for ire, wrath and much wailing by people who think that his failure to die is the ultimate bad manners.


I care as little for Mr Megrahi as I do for American Senators, but I do have a passing interest in the Lockerbie bombing. I was, in a previous existence, an explosives engineer, and for a few short and fraught years edited the UK explosives industry’s trade journal. This role put me in contact with all sorts of interesting people whose jobs you have never heard of, but who, if you ever stop to think about it, must exist. Most interesting of all perhaps were the forensic scientists who went through the Lockerbie debris in an effort to piece together the evidence necessary to work out who did it.

Now, I am no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and while I have frequently been abducted by aliens, it has always been after eight pints, so I have tended to regard it entirely my own fault. However, I have always regarded the idea of the Libyans being responsible for Lockerbie as making no sense. I am not alone. This evidence for this view was laid out meticulously by the late Paul Foot of Private Eye, whom I briefly had the privilege to meet.

Paul Foot had not started digging when I was munching on vol au vents at the explosives industry seminar also attended by members of the Lockerbie explosives forensics team. Imagine my joy, therefore, when I discovered that they didn’t think the Libyans did it either.

The reasons for their doubt are technical and complex, but in short boil down to considerations about the size of the bomb. It was, in fact, the smallest amount of explosive capable of bringing a plane that size down. In order to work it had to be located very close to the skin of the aircraft and not go bang in the middle of a container full of clothes, in which case it is possible that no one would have known it had gone off until the baggage carousel. The thinking was that the Libyans simply lacked the intelligence resources necessary to calculate the bomb size and engineer its correct placement.

So next time the newspapers are banging on about Megrahi not doing the decent thing and turning his toes up you may prefer to wonder why they are not doing their job and trying to find who did kill 270 people over Lockerbie, or why the Libyans were put in the frame when a large part of the British security establishment doesn’t believe it was them at all.