The Times' obit also noted that during the 85-day trial, "None of the witnesses connected the suspects directly to the bomb. But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing that forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified Mr. Megrahi as the buyer, although Mr. Gauci seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays. ...
"The bomb's timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert. Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in [Megrahi's co-defendant's] desk in Malta, that Mr. Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase, and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way."
In finding Megrahi guilty, the Scottish court admitted that the case was "circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable," but concluded that "there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt" of Megrahi.
However, the evidence later came under increasing doubt. The Times wrote: "It emerged that Mr. Gauci had repeatedly failed to identify Mr. Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his photograph in a magazine and being shown the same photo in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt." Scottish authorities learned, too, that the U.S. Justice Department paid Gauci $2 million for his testimony.
As for the bomb's timer, the Times noted that the court called Bollier "untruthful and unreliable" and "In 2007, Mr. Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for residue of explosives, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.
"The court's inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight was also cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am's baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored. Hans Kochler, a United Nations observer, called the trial 'a spectacular miscarriage of justice,' words echoed by [South African President Nelson] Mandela."
In other words, Megrahi's conviction looked to have been a case of gross prosecutorial misconduct, relying on testimony from perjurers and failing to pursue promising leads (like the possibility that the bomb was introduced at Heathrow, not transferred from plane to plane to plane). And those problems were known prior to Megrahi's return to Libya in 2009 and prior to the U.S.-supported air war against Gaddafi in 2011.
Yet, Andrea Mitchell at MSNBC and pretty much everyone else in the MSM repeated endlessly that Megrahi was "the Lockerbie bomber" and that Libya was responsible for the atrocity, thus further justifying the "humanitarian intervention" that slaughtered Gaddafi's soldiers and enabled rebel militias to capture Tripoli in summer 2011.
Al-Qaeda Hotbed
Similarly, there was scant U.S. media attention given to evidence that eastern Libya, the heart of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, indeed was a hotbed for Islamic militancy, with that region supplying the most per-capita militants fighting U.S. troops in Iraq, often under the banner of Al-Qaeda.
Despite that evidence, Gaddafi's claim that he was battling Islamic terrorists in the Benghazi region was mocked or ignored. It didn't even matter that his claim was corroborated by a report from U.S. analysts Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.
In their report, "Al-Qaeda's Foreign Fighters in Iraq," Felter and Fishman analyzed Al-Qaeda documents captured in 2007 showing personnel records of militants who flocked to Iraq for the war against the Americans. The documents showed eastern Libya providing a surprising number of suicide bombers who traveled to Iraq to kill American troops.
Felter and Fishman wrote that these so-called Sinjar Records disclosed that while Saudis comprised the largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq, Libyans represented the largest per-capita contingent by far. Those Libyans came overwhelmingly from towns and cities in the east.
"The vast majority of Libyan fighters that included their hometown in the Sinjar Records resided in the country's Northeast, particularly the coastal cities of Darnah 60.2% (53) and Benghazi 23.9% (21)," Felter and Fishman wrote, adding that Abu Layth al'Libi, Emir of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), "reinforced Benghazi and Darnah's importance to Libyan jihadis in his announcement that LIFG had joined al-Qa'ida."
Some important Al-Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan's tribal regions also were believed to have come from Libya. For instance, "Atiyah," who was guiding the anti-U.S. war strategy in Iraq, was identified as a Libyan named Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.
It was Atiyah who urged a strategy of creating a quagmire for U.S. forces in Iraq, buying time for Al-Qaeda Central to rebuild its strength in Pakistan. "Prolonging the war [in Iraq] is in our interest," Atiyah said in a letter that upbraided Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for his hasty and reckless actions in Iraq.
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