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Dr Jim Swire |
Lockerbie: is break-in the key?
A SIGNIFICANT key to the Lockerbie bombing mystery still requires a full judicial investigation.
It touches on a break-in that occurred near to where the baggage was stored at Heathrow for the ill-fated Pan Am Flight 103 on which nearly 270 people died.
Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the Lockerbie disaster, believes there is a link between the break-in and the bombing of the plane. Over the years, Dr Swire, who has, with great scrutiny, investigated the bombing, has been exchanging notes with Charles Norrie, a Canonbury Grove computer engineer whose brother Tony was killed in a terrorist attack on a French airliner in Africa.
The Libyans were found guilty of the crime more than 20 years ago and Mr Norrie received a million euros in compensation from the country.
Mr Norrie, who was naturally drawn to his own investigation of the Lockerbie bombing, has concluded after years of research that the CIA is partly responsible for the disaster – that, in fact, its operatives helped to plant the bomb on the airliner.
All this may sound outlandish, but in the recent splurge of media coverage of the release of al-Megrahi, little space has been given to a significant weight of legal opinion that feels that if his case had gone to appeal before Scottish judges, as planned, a miscarriage of justice may have been found.
And this, to some extent, would have turned on the mystery of the burgled baggage at Heathrow airport.
I met Dr Swire, a Scottish medical man, several times after Lockerbie and admired his shrewd mind. He struck me as the sort of man who would never reach a conclusion until he had tested all conceivable possibilities.
He has pursued the baggage angle for years and is convinced therein lies a key to a mystery that the Scottish hearing into the bombing never resolved.
He told me this week that the very fact that Mr Norrie, who lost his brother in a proven Libyan attack, believes al-Megrahi was not guilty over Lockerbie is remarkable to the point that it should make one doubt the accepted version of the crime. |
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