UN Lockerbie trial observer: Second appeal "absolutely essential"

May 17, 2009, 11:58 GMT

Valletta, Malta - The United Nations' observer in the Lockerbie bombing trial has said it is 'absolutely essential' that a second appeal goes ahead, despite the convicted man's ailing health, according to a report in Malta Sunday.

Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man serving a 27-year prison sentence for the December 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland, which left 270 dead, was not guilty as charged, Hans Koechler told The Sunday Times of Malta.

Koechler was handpicked by the then UN secretary general Kofi Annan to monitor proceedings in the trial held in the Netherlands in 2000. He concluded that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

Now, several years on, he stands by his conclusion.

'The international public deserve to know the truth - the full and uncensored truth - about the chain of events that led to the explosion of the American jetliner over Lockerbie,' Koechler told the newspaper.

He was speaking in the wake of a second appeal filed by al- Megrahi, which began in an Edinburgh court on April 28. There have been unconfirmed reports that the 57-year-old former Libyan intelligence officer may choose to drop his appeal and go home because of a recent prisoner transfer agreement between the Britain and Libya.

Al-Megrahi, who is suffering from prostate cancer in a prison near Glasgow, could choose to die at home. But dropping his appeal would leave him a condemned man.

Al-Megrahi was charged along with Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima with placing the bomb on board an Air Malta aircraft before it was transferred at Frankfurt airport onto the doomed Pan Am flight 103.

Al-Megrahi was convicted mainly as a result of the testimony of a Maltese shop owner who identified him as the man to whom he had sold the clothes in which the bomb was wrapped.

But Koechler said political expediency had guided the original verdict, claiming that it had reflected the political considerations related to the foreign policy interests of the involved states at that time.

Al-Megrahi's lawyers are arguing that the evidence against him in the original trial was 'wholly circumstantial.'

Koechler said he believed Britain should mandate an independent public investigation into the Lockerbie case as he expressed doubt that al-Megrahi's ongoing appeal, could be fair and impartial because of the 'outright interference of the British government trying to withhold certain sensitive evidence from the defence.'