SCOTTISH judges have refused an appeal by the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing – in a bid to clear his name eight years after he died from cancer.
The Court of Criminal Appeal had been asked to accept that no reasonable jury properly directed could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led, particularly that of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci.
He said Megrahi had bought clothes from him that were ultimately planted into a suitcase containing the bomb that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.
The second ground of appeal was that the failure to disclose information to the defence led to the trial being unfair and thus a miscarriage of justice.
This related to the reliability of Gauci’s identification of Megrahi.
The court rejected both grounds of appeal, but the family’s lawyer Aamer Anwar said they had instructed him to pursue a further appeal to the UK Supreme Court.
They are demanding the release of secret evidence held by the UK Government, which they believe incriminates others, but the foreign secretary has refused to do so.
Anwar said: “Significant material has been received by the legal team over the last several months, but especially since the announcement by Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr on December 21, 2020, where he stated that the USA wished to extradite a former Libyan Intelligence Officer, Abu Agila Mohammad Masud for the Lockerbie bombing, 32 years later.
“Masud’s confession to being involved in the conspiracy with al-Megrahi to blow up Pan Am flight 103, was supposedly ‘extracted’ by a ‘Libyan law enforcement agent’ in 2012, whilst in custody in a Libyan prison.
“No new information appeared to be presented by Attorney General Barr.”
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