A sensible comment at last. Gute Nacht.

I haven't read Private Eye, but it would take a lot more than the above, or any similar purely circumstantial evidence I've seen up to now, to convince me.

Have to laugh at those who say it's a shame Gadaffi didn't go to trial as we would have found out the truth.
I doubt he would ever have recognised the truth had it bit him on the nose, so it would have been unlikely he would have told it with a death sentence hanging over him.

Private Eye???????? Well at least now I know where your far fetched opinions come from. Have you ever considered a more balanced information source?

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond says that he wants to see an inquiry into Gaddafi's death, and that he should have been brought to trial rather than killed (a view with which I agree, incidentally).



But where were our government's protests when Obama ordered the execution of bin Laden, al-Awlaki and thousands of others that the USA didn't like?



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15420312

I doubt if the UK or quite a few others were exactly too fond of them either and please don't shed any tears on my behalf.

Ich bedanke mich mein Herr.

Actually old son, I take all my information from a lot of sources, and each piece is tested and compared to what I know to be true. Every source has weight, some more than others, and private eye actually rates quite highly. Many times I saw them break stories before the main papers, and almost always they had the truth of it.

I quite understand that some people accept all they are fed from one source. Personally, I think that is rash, and leaves you open to deceit.

In such a case, you are looking to remove someone's freedom, in what would have been, in the old days, a capital case. In such a case, particular care needs to be addressed in presenting the case beyond all reasonable doubt, and if the accused can present reasonable doubt, they he simply cannot be found guilty.

Like a lot of cases of this nature, I have been sickened by those who scream for the accused's head, but impressed by the parents of Lockerbie victims who say they are unhappy with the verdict and want the truth, and not a quick conviction of a convenient victim.

I believe the private eye dossier was written by Paul Foot, a respected journalist. In al the data a few things stand out.

1. The witness who identified Megrahi was compromised by the Americans who allowed him to see Megrahi before the ID. He has since received a large payout from the Americans.

2. The witness states that Megrahi came into his shop with an umbrella on a rainy day. Megrahi states that he was never in Malta on a rainy day, and his visas and travel documents will verify this.

3. It is said that the only place that the bomb could have been put onto the plane was in Malta. Baggage handlers at Heathrow went on record as saying that when they went to load the suitcases onto the plane, the padlock had been cut, and there was one more bag than they had expected.

There are other interesting things, the fact that the Iranians paid a huge sum to a known terrorist group just after Lockerbie, that parts of the detonater were the same as others used by this group, that the handling of evidence was compromised and so on.

Now, after all that, I wouldn't give Megrahi a parking ticket, let alone a life sentence.

bil,

I'm done reading your copy of the Ladybird guide to World affairs in the late 20th Century (agnostics edition).

Feel free to pick it up next time you're passing

Well get a wig then!

Ich kann Sie nicht verstehen. Tut mir leid.

Well, if the Ladybird book tells me that a certain fungus is good to eat, and so do my other sources, then I concur that it really IS good to eat if everyone is saying it.

Besides, Paul Foot had a good reputation as a sound journalist. It's not like he was a writer for the Sun, or worse still the D Mail

He certainly wrote for the Sun and the Telegraph!

Its funny how Scottish law worked out in this case,but thats another story.

Well, like I say, I'm not happy with the soundness of the conviction, and I suspect that his release was also due in part to the fact that all the questionable stuff would have come out in Megrahi's appeal that was planned.

Personally, I would LOVE to see all this gone into in some depth, with all the much raked out for everyone to see. However, I also suspect that the US, the UK and the Scottish legal system will come out of it very badly, so we are unlikely to see the truth any time soon.

50 years I believe,just like Dr David Kelly.