The Observer , UK
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2160655,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
Vital Lockerbie evidence 'was tampered with'
Fragments of bomb timer that helped to convict a Libyan ex-agent were
'practically carbonised' before the trial, says bankrupt Swiss businessman
Alex Duval Smith, Europe correspondent
Sunday September 2, 2007
The Observer
The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya
in
the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake.
Nearly two decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Scotland on 21
December, 1988, allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy
investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI
and
the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich
Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a
crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the
bombing
to the crime.
The disaster killed 270 people when the London to New York Boeing 747
exploded in mid-air. Britain and the US blamed Libya, saying that its
leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, wanted revenge for the US bombing of
Tripoli in 1986. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan
agent
Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life.
He is currently serving his sentence in Greenock prison, but later this
month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case,
after
the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled in June that there was
enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession,
which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will
strengthen Megrahi's appeal.
The Zurich-based Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two
decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as
is
Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer
switch
that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of
it had been found on a Scottish hillside.
Bollier, now 70, admits having done business with Libya. 'Two years before
Lockerbie, we sold 20 MST-13 timers to the Libyan military. FBI agents and
the Scottish investigators said one of those timers had been used to
detonate the bomb. We were shown a fuzzy photograph and I confirmed the
fragments looked as though they came from one of our timers.'
However, Bollier was uneasy with the photograph he had been shown and
asked
to see the fragments. He was finally given permission in 1998 and
travelled
to Dumfries to see the evidence.
'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our
prototype.
But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green
boards.
I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the
investigators this.'
Back in Switzerland, Bollier's company was in effect bankrupt, having
faced
a lawsuit from Pan Am and having lost major clients, such as the German
federal police to which Mebo supplied communications equipment.
In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial
at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial
was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had
to
say was ignored. A photograph of the fragments was produced in court and I
asked to see the pieces again. When they were brought to me, they were
practically carbonised. They had been tampered with since I had seen them
in
Dumfries.'
Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists
working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last
month, when Lumpert, one of his former employees, walked into a Zurich
police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.
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