The truth will out

The only man to be convicted over the Lockerbie bombing may be gone, but the secrets behind the atrocity have not ... and surely, one day, they will emerge DAVID PRATT

IT was a surreal moment, one I will long remember. In the surrounding neighbourhood streets the shot-up cars and pockmarked walls scarred with bullets were testimony to the fierce battles that had gripped Tripoli as Libyan rebel fighters slowly but surely ousted the last remaining forces loyal to the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

It was the most unlikely of places to find oneself in a protracted conversation about the latest results of Scottish football matches and the performance of Glasgow Rangers.

Stranger still that the discussion I was having was with Abdel Nasser al Megrahi, the brother of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.

As we spoke it was hard to imagine that only yards away Megrahi lay bedridden and dying of cancer inside his family’s plush villa that sits in a narrow street surrounded by high walls and steel gates in Tripoli’s upmarket Hay Damascus district.

As we stood in the arched entrance to the Megrahi home the sound of desultory gunfire still echoed across the city.

Up until that moment the precise whereabouts of Megrahi had been the subject of considerable speculation as the country plummeted into full-scale civil war.

Had he been moved out of Tripoli, out of Libya itself even? No-one was certain.

Yet, finally, here was his brother confirming that throughout the last days of the Gaddafi regime, as fighting wracked the capital, Megrahi had been here all along, his sick bed a short walk from the Rixos hotel where for a time many foreign journalists had been under virtual house arrest by pro-gaddafi forces.

According to Abdel Nasser, his brother lay inside too feeble to move with an oxygen bottle by his bedside to help with his breathing. “He knew that the revolution was going on around us, but never spoke about politics. He just asked for his mother and father who have been by his bedside praying for him,” Abdel Nasser told me.

It was with some difficulty that I’d managed at last to steer our conversation away from the vagaries of Scottish football to the condition of his brother and the family’s predicament as Libya’s Arab Spring uprising reached its endgame. Scotland, its people and culture had clearly long filtered into the Megrahi family psyche.

At least 11 Megrahi family members had taken refuge in the villa during the worst of the fighting in Tripoli, and peering in through the front gate I noticed a plastic children’s swing and trampoline sitting on a lawn still lush despite the searing Libyan sun.

Asked if he, his family and brother had been afraid for their lives, Abdel Nasser only laughed.

“Only God can take life, so what do you mean exactly about him being scared about his life? He’s dying so why would he be scared of a bullet?”

Right now, he said, the Megrahis were just like any other family in Tripoli trying to live without electricity and water much of the time.

“Just before you arrived the water engineer was here to try and help repair our water supply. It has been difficult trying to care for my brother without water,” he explained.

But the Megrahis were not just any other family in Tripoli and, looking inside the villa’s grounds, I couldn’t help noticing that despite their water supply problems the swimming pool remained full in this, a city where water had become a precious commodity and many of its citizens had been unable to wash for days.

What would become of his brother, I asked Abdel Nasser, now that Libya had a new interim government in the shape of the National Transitional Council (NTC)? “Any future decisions over my brother’s status and all responsibility for his welfare, movement and monitoring will now be overseen by our new government,” he told me, still steadfastly but politely refusing my appeals to let me enter the house to see and talk with his ailing brother for myself. “This is a revolution of the people and we will see what the Libyan people feel about my brother.” SUCH remarks at the time would do little to quell the already-volatile political wrangle that had erupted between the British Government and the Libyan NTC who by then were at loggerheads over the vexed question of Megrahi’s extradition.

Only the day before I met Abdel Nasser, British Foreign Secretary William Hague had insisted that the NTC’S decision not to extradite Megrahi would not be the “last word”.

“We are happy at the news that the NTC will not agree to turn him over. It would be good too if they helped with treatment for him,” said Abdel Nasser, who also dismissed American calls for Megrahi to be sent to the US.

“The Americans should respect him as a human being because of his condition,” he said, clearly irritated and flanked by his longterm neighbour, a man called Hassan Salah who nodded in agreement.

Only on the subject of Jim Swire, the Scottish doctor whose daughter Flora was a victim of the Lockerbie attack, was he conciliatory.

“I want to thank Jim Swire for standing by my brother,” Abdel Nasser insisted. “He is a good man.”

Looking back now on that day in August last year as Libya stood on the brink of a new beginning, there was a renewed sense that before his death Megrahi would once and for all provide the crucial details revealing the truth behind the deadliest-ever terrorist strike on British soil.

That no such information was ultimately forthcoming not only leaves the relatives of victims without a satisfactory sense of closure, but in Libya itself leaves a fledgling nation still divided over Megrahi’s role and guilt.

For some, Megrahi and Lockerbie remains an embarrassing reminder of the crimes of the Gaddafi regime, for others he was nothing more than a scapegoat in a much larger murky geopolitical conspiracy involving the West. Such a take is understandable – over the years, after all, our dealings with Libya have never been known for their transparency (deals in the desert and all that).

All along Libya’s interim government, the National Transitional Council, has maintained the death of Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, would not mark an end to its investigations into Lockerbie.

For years now the focus has always been on Megrahi, but with his death other key Libyan intelligence godfathers will likely fall under the spotlight.

Men like former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa, once described in a 1995 British intelligence dossier as the chief of the “principal intelligence institution in Libya”.

Then there is Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law and former spy chief who was arrested in Mauritania and expected to stand trial either in Libya or at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

It is almost inconceivable that such men and others like them from the former regime do not hold vital information as to the truth behind Lockerbie.

Around the time last year I met Abdel Nasser al Megrahi at the family home in Tripoli, not far away the headquarters of the former regime’s intelligence service was, like many clandestine state institutions, being overrun by rebel forces.

In the process of this a wealth of intelligence data and files was seized, many pointing to those responsible for human rights abuses inside Libya under Gaddafi and the shadowy goings-on his regime’s agents participated in overseas. Just like the knowledge men like Koussa and Senussi hold, somewhere also among that mass of documents the truth about Lockerbie lies.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi may have gone to the grave, but it is almost certain the secrets of the Lockerbie bombing have not gone with him.