In Lockerbie case, its guilty until proven innocent

The families of Pan Am flight 103 victims that was bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, deserve truthful answers about what occurred on the flight that brought their loved ones down. And the two accused Libyan nationals�Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah�deserve a fair trial.

But the media reports coming out of Camp Zeist, Netherlands, a neutral country using Scottish judges and law for the case, indicate that the two Libyans and, even moreso, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi are guilty of the crime before the trial starts.

In fact, some of the American family members of victims are charging the U.S. government with settling for the two Libyans in order to let Col. Gadhafi off the hook.

The Pan Am flight went down shortly after it left a London airport. Along with the 259 killed on board, mostly Americans, 11 victims on the ground died.

For nearly a decade, the United States has held the government of Libya responsible for the bombing and urged the United Nations to apply sanctions to the North African country that has caused the deaths of thousands of innocent Libyans.

The U.S. and Britain were so determined to get their hands on the accused suspects that they vowed not to lift the sanctions until Col. Gadhafi turned them over for trial. The two were turned over last year, but not before African nations standing with Col. Gadhafi vowed to ignore the ban on air travel into and out of Libya, which brought the United States quickly to the table to discuss a resolution to the problem.

When the bombing of Flight 103 first occurred, the U.S. and Britain blamed it on two Palestinian liberation groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and the lesser known Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF). However, journalists and other observers suggest that when the political waters shifted�the U.S. wanted better relations with Syria, which allegedly controlled the Palestinian groups�the blame for the PanAm bombing shifted to Libya.

And there are other things to be concerned about if this is to be a fair trial and if finding the truth is the objective:

• Under questioning from Richard Keen, a defense lawyer for one of the Libyans, police officer Stephen Comerford said he saw CIA agents remove sensitive materials from the site of the crash. But, he quickly retracted his statement made under oath when prosecutor Alan Turnbull realized what the witness was saying and rushed to the witness stand to convince Mr. Comerford that he had misunderstood the defense lawyer�s question.

• Another police witness, Archibald Tait, said he was part of a Lockerbie probe in Washington D.C., where he was instructed to purchase two Toshiba recorders of the type found by German police in the possession of PFLP-GC members, prepared as a bomb.

Mr. Al-Megrahi and Mr. Fhimah deny placing a bomb in a suitcase in Malta, which joined the Pan Am flight at Frankfurt, heading for London and New York. The defense is expected to argue that the PFLP-GC in fact placed the bomb at Frankfurt-am-Main airport.

A British Channel Four documentary about Lockerbie in the mid-1990s and subsequent media reports suggest that PFLP-GC convicted bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat was in fact a double agent working for the CIA, which explains why he was quickly released by the German Bundeskriminalamt in 1988, despite being caught with a bomb.

The prosecution�s case is not easy. In this case, the defense doesn�t have to prove their innocence. All they have to do, according to the Scottish law, is sow a seed of sufficient doubt over the prosecution�s case.

And with the shenanigans that have occurred even before the trial got started, that shouldn�t be hard to do.

That�s unfortunate because the pain of the family isn�t eased and the suspects are not given their just due in a court when the law is being used as a tool for political purposes.