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In total, the publicly-touted evidence against the Libyans is profoundly flawed, say several respected legal experts in Britain. British law bans public discussion of a pending criminal case. But when top British attorney Michael Mansfield could speak freely, back in 1997, he summarized the Malta evidence this way for BBC Scotland: So far as the Maltese connection is concerned, the clothing, the identification ... all of that, I think add up to a situation in which were it to be presented to a court in the United Kingdom, it probably wouldn't even get past the doors. It would be declared at some point or another inadmissible ... because it is so fatally flawed at the very root. Pressed to respond to that kind of characterization, former Lockerbie investigators retreat to broad assertions that the evidence is in fact strong, despite appearances to the contrary. "What I do know is that the investigation finally led to conclude that that bomb was placed on an Air Malta flight and fed into Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt," says former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro. "You asked my opinion and my opinion is that the evidence is overwhelming and compelling, and. . .that the Scottish judges will see it that way," says "Buck" Revell, formerly head of the FBI's Lockerbie investigation. Both officials suggest there might be evidence against the Libyans that emerged after they left their respective agencies and of which even they are not aware. That's theoretically possible, legal experts say. But some observers point to signs of desperation - of a prosecution team grasping at the barest circumstantial evidence. In late summer, 1999, Scottish police gathered information at a hearing in Malta about a finding of Semtex plastic explosive on the island in the mid-1980s. George Grech, now Malta's Police Commissioner, was a district supervisor in 1985, when he found a quantity of Semtex buried alongside a murder victim near a stone tower in northern Malta. The Semtex was wrapped in an Arabic-language newspaper. Grech says Scottish investigators knew about the find as early as 1989, when they were first examining the Malta Connection. Lockerbie investigators showed little interest in the Semtex at the time, Grech says - and appropriately, he adds, since in his view there is no evidence whatever linking that found explosive to the Lockerbie bombing or the Libyan defendants. Nonetheless, with the trial approaching, Scottish police went back to Malta last summer and incorporated Grech's discovery of Semtex as circumstantial evidence into the pre-trial indictment of the Libyans. The new indictment refers to the defendants having high performance plastic explosives in their possession between 1 January 1985 and 21 December 1988 "in an area of ground near Ghallis Tower, Malta," the area where Grech found the explosives in 1985. The generally self-contained Grech gets animated when expressing his puzzlement that prosecutors would try to link that Semtex to the destruction of Pan Am 103. "I myself argued this question with them," Grech says. "Don't tell me somebody had already conceived to down an American airplane in 1985 already!" A senior legal expert in Scotland who has followed the Lockerbie case closely is sharply critical of the investigation itself. "This case has been handled very badly, and certainly not in accordance with expected standards," said the source, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of Britain's ban on public comment of a pending criminal case. "It's normal to investigate first and then indict. In this case, they have come to a conclusion and then investigated only events which fit their conclusion." |