Panel Casts Doubt on Guilt Of Libyan in Lockerbie Case

LONDON, June 28 -- The Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the 1988 bombing of an American jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice," an independent review board concluded Thursday, granting his request for an appeal.

Graham Forbes, chairman of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, said in a statement that "based upon our lengthy investigations, new evidence we have found and new evidence that was not before the trial court," the panel concluded that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi may have been wrongly convicted.

"The place for that matter to be determined is in the appeal court, to which we now refer the case," Forbes said.

A bomb hidden in a suitcase aboard Pan Am Flight 103 detonated at high altitude Dec. 21, 1988, killing all 259 people in the Boeing 747 and 11 on the ground in Lockerbie. Megrahi, the only person convicted in the plane's destruction, is serving a 27-year sentence in Scotland.

The ruling reopens the nearly two-decade-old question of who blew up the plane, which was en route from London to New York. The U.S. government, which has long asserted that Libya was behind the bombing, took Megrahi's conviction in 2001 as vindication of that view.

The Libyan government has taken responsibility for the bombing on grounds that Megrahi was in its employ, but it has not acknowledged any involvement by the country's leadership. In 2003, the government agreed to pay a total of $2.7 billion to relatives of the victims. That deal and the scrapping of its chemical and nuclear weapons programs helped Libya win the lifting of economic and diplomatic sanctions.

At a news conference in Glasgow, Scotland, Tony Kelly, Megrahi's attorney, read a statement from his client saying: "I was never in any doubt that a truly independent review of my case would have this outcome. I reiterate today what I have been saying since I was first indicted in 1991: I was not involved in the Lockerbie bombing in any way whatsoever." Megrahi lost an earlier appeal in 2002.

The independent commission's $2 million, three-year inquiry produced an 800-page report. Among the reasons cited for allowing an appeal were questions over the reliability of a key witness, the owner of a shop in Malta. He singled out Megrahi from a police lineup as the man who bought a piece of clothing that was found to have been in a suitcase that contained the bomb.

At Megrahi's trial, his defense team did not know that, before the lineup, the shop owner had seen Megrahi's photo in a magazine linking him to the bombing.

The prosecution argued that Megrahi bought the clothing at the Mary's House shop Dec. 7, 1988, but new evidence, the commission reported, suggests the clothing was bought before that date, at a time when there was no evidence Megrahi was in Malta.

The panel also said there was "no proper basis" for allegations that authorities had manipulated evidence to convict Megrahi.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the bombing victims, was quoted by Britain's Press Association as saying in Edinburgh, Scotland: "It's no good trying to have closure on false foundations if they are false. . . . A house built on sand cannot stand."

One theory that has never died is that Iranian-backed Palestinians carried out the bombing in retaliation for the deaths of 290 people aboard an Iranian airliner that a U.S. warship had mistakenly shot down six months earlier.

The case now goes to a panel of five appellate judges and will likely be heard in Edinburgh next year.

By Mary Jordan