3 July 1988
Taking off over the Persian Gulf, Iran air flight 655 was stuck by two surface to air missiles. These were fired from the USS Vincennes, a US Navy Battle cruiser that had strayed into Iranian waters. All 290 people onboard were killed, including 66 children. It was a tragic mistake and one the US did not want to take responsibility for.
Over 3,000 miles away in Dalkeith, Corinne Mitchell likely paid scant attention to this tragedy. Her mind was otherwise occupied. Her second child was born just three weeks later.
21 December 1988
Pan Am flight PA103 breaks apart over the Scottish borders. 259 passengers and crew and 11 residents of Lockerbie are killed.
Lockerbie is just 66 miles from Dalkeith where Corinne and her husband Phil are tired parents preparing for Christmas. They would likely have watched the harrowing scenes while passing their baby between them. Their son is just six months old, the milestones of this age include the ability to sit up, laugh and recognise family members. The same processes that jail one man for the wreckage over Lockerbie will destroy that son’s future entirely. But the man known as the Lockerbie bomber will receive some compassion from Scotland. Their child will not.
3 May 2000
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah go on trial, accused on planting the bomb that detonated onboard flight PA103. In the intervening years crippling sanctions have been placed on Libya. Nelson Mandela is sympathetic towards Gaddafi and it was with his persuasion that the men were released for trial. But Mandela warns that ‘no one country should be complainant, prosecutor and judge’.
One country is: Scotland.
Mandela will later visit Megrahi in Barlinnie prison, appeal for his better treatment and state that it is unacceptable that he should endure "psychological persecution”.
Luke Mitchell is eleven. He is still at Primary School but he has just four family Christmases left in the jar. When those years are up, his psychological persecution will be entirely acceptable and profitable.
Turn Turn Turn to Libya
Until 1990, the Lockerbie investigation placed much of its focus on The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the belief that Lockerbie was a revenge attack following the downing of the Iranian flight 655. Those investigations were abruptly shelved.
In 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the gulf war began. It was now dangerous to treat Iran, on the border of 13 countries including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, as an aggressor.
The Lockerbie investigation abruptly turned to Libya.
The murderer who was and then wasn’t covered in blood.
In the summer of 2003, fourteen-year-old Jodi Jones was found murdered in woodland near Dalkeith. She had been killed in a frenzied attack that continued after her death.
What calculating murderer would attack on a bright summer day, just as offices and business close, by a well-used path, the traffic on which they could not control? The injuries indicated a psychotic attack. Police believed the killer would be covered in blood. They appealed for five days to find the owner of an unattended moped seen at the murder scene and the boys seen riding it. When the moped boys came forward, they revealed the moped had been scrapped within hours of the murder. The riders were two teenagers, one was Jodi’s teenage cousin, a local cannabis dealer who claimed he had been told not to come forward by his, and the victim’s, grandmother.
The police raised the theory that Jodi may have stumbled upon her killer engaging in a sex act and been killed in a rage of sexual embarrassment. Another explanation was a frenzied killer in the grip of drug induced psychosis.
When the family produced pictures of Jodi, these images were of a small child. Grainy, pixellated images of a teenage girl gradually followed and the police investigation moved slowly.
When the investigation focused on Jodi’s boyfriend, Luke Mitchell, Jodi’s family were cooperative, though none of the early theories applied to him. As with Lockerbie this required a complete shift. A killer who left nothing at the scene and took nothing, a killer without defensive wounds, a killer not even fully grown - just an inch taller than Jodi without knowledge of restraint techniques but who somehow effortlessly bound his victim, a killer not mentally ill but intelligent and evil. A killer a month from his fifteenth birthday.
And the suspects in both cases, at first glance so far removed from one another, were linked not just by the processes of Scottish justice but by one man: Lord Alan Turnbull. And the failures of process and investigation and the unanswered questions in both cases show a remarkable similarity.
Metamorphosis of memory
Flawed identification comes up repeatedly in miscarriages of justice. Our memories are unreliable and malleable. See how well the descriptions below match the suspects.
Dock identification is banned in most western countries on the grounds that it is highly prejudicial to the accused in the dock. Yet Andrina Bryson could not do it. Luke Mitchell later praised Bryson for having the guts to state that he was not the person she saw. Nonetheless the judges at trial and appeal, accepted the identification she claimed to have made in her statement.
When Lorraine Fleming was asked to identify the youth she saw, she looked at Luke and said, “not sure” and then, when pressed on whether he looked the same replied, “his eyes do.” Rosemary Walsh was worse, she said his head was different.
The Judges accepted Tony Gauci’s identification of Megrahi was “not absolutely positive”. Gauci himself, did not insist otherwise having made eighteen, often contradictory, statements. Over ten years had elapsed since an unremarkable sale in his shop but, the Scottish judges argued, the openness of his uncertainty made it certain enough to be safe.
In 2002, a US crime dept suggested payments of 2 million dollars to Tony Gauci and one million to his brother Paul.
These identifications were the major planks that placed the accused where the crown needed them to be.
In both cases the photo identifications failed to follow basic procedure, the pictures of Megrahi and Mitchell stood out glaringly in the lineups and those identifying them (with the possible exception of Andrina Bryson) had seen both suspects in the news.
Inconvenient Accomplices
Neither could have done it alone.
The Crowns case is that Megrahi required Fhimah’s knowledge of airport security and could not have smuggled the bomb alone.
The Crowns case is that in order for Luke to have been seen out within half an hour of the murder, Corinne Mitchell had to assist in the destruction of evidence.
Fhimah was found not guilty. Professor Hans Köchler, a UN trial observer called the split verdict “totally incomprehensible.”
Similarly, Corinne and Shane Mitchell had their charges dropped. Both trials progressed unimpeded by the great holes left, as though they could be filed under ‘not proven’, used only if and when convenient. Dropping the Mitchell's charges meant they didn’t need to be proven. I doubt that proving them had ever been the intention.
It was incomprehensible that Corinne could have obliterated a large coat in a small log burner, any more than she could make a pillow disappear by putting it in a toaster. She had to obliterate it for there to be no trace of a zip or button. The neighbours describe a “funny smell” not the thick plumes of smoke and crackling flames of someone on the other side of the fence desperately trying to destroy a large coat.
Shane Mitchells charges were dropped immediately before he gave evidence. Donald Findlay, defending Luke, could see nothing in the police interrogation of Shane that alluded to the crime of perverting the course of justice. Shane’s confusions and revisions were not beneficial to his brother. If the purpose of those charges was to destroy Shane’s nerves, they certainly accomplished that. The police could have arrested all three members of the family at the same time if only the dawn raid been earlier. Instead they set up a roadblock, let Shane leave for work, dragged him from his car, injured him, pressed him against the road and threatened him with three years in jail. Shane’s transcripts show him to be nervous, upset and contradictory but one thing is clear and consistent; that the day was entirely unremarkable, so unremarkable he couldn’t remember it. Had his wee brother of whom he said, ‘I’ve never seen him hurt a fly’, returned home after the most brutal murder Scotland had seen in decades, that would not be the case.
Speaking in the Daily Record, Lord Turnbull explained, “In Luke Mitchell’s case, I was involved even before he first appeared in court in April last year. That means right from the very start, the depute is provided with witness and police statements. What I find effective is to spend time in the early stages of the case with the procurator fiscal.”
Turnbull goes on to say that he met regularly with Jodi’s mother early on. When you see how the family’s statements changed, and how they clung to those revisions, focusing on a lack of emotion (see Shock Horror) you come to the horrible realisation that Luke Mitchell stood no chance at all. Turnbull’s prosecution had more money, the ear of the procurator fiscal, over a year of preparation and a media urging them to make the kill. The defence had limited time and funds and faced the rage of the biggest media orchestrated lynch mob I’ve ever seen in Scotland.
Lord Turnbull worked to bring the very charges he sought to prosecute. The procurator fiscal initially rejected bringing charges due to lack of evidence but with little revision, another application was accepted. All the while Turnbull worked in the wings of a high-profile case that he knew would prove a shrewd career move. Turnbull’s early involvement may explain why Lothian and Borders Police flew out to the FBI, who worked closely with Turnbull on the Lockerbie trial, rather than driving down to the London Metropolitan Police, who could also have provided a profile. Former members of the London MET have spoken out, supporting the FBI, that the evidence is not there to convict Mitchell.
To see what Lord Turnbull sees.
Unlike other western countries where everything is disclosed to the relevant parties, Scotland has often found ways round the disclosure of information that the prosecution finds inconvenient. The Crown deal the cards. They talk about ‘meeting disclosure obligations’ but do so in whimsical ways. For example, you would think in the case of the Lockerbie bomb, if Frankfurt airport had no security breaches whatsoever but Heathrow had a break-in and the only sighting of a suitcase like the one that contained the bomb, that would be disclosed.
You would think that.
The Lockerbie trial judges knew about the suitcase sighting and they agreed the Heathrow employee gave compelling evidence. Nonetheless they decided that the bomb was planted in Frankfurt. The Heathrow break-in was described as the biggest security breach at Heathrow in seventeen years. Yet these statements were omitted from the police report to the crown. This was then withheld from the defence, later to emerge at the first appeal.
Lord Turnbull had access to the unredacted cables showing conversations between the CIA and their star witness, the farcical Majid Giaka.
Gaika had nothing at all to say about Lockerbie until two and a half years after the bombing when he fled Libya. He sought refuge in the USA as a CIA informant but his handlers found him needy and desperate. He begged the CIA to pay for sham surgery in order to keep him out of the army. In a desperate attempt to give his handlers something he claimed that Gaddafi was a freemason. At many points, the CIA wanted to fire Gaika. Yet he was the man who convinced Scottish judges that Megrahi was a senior intelligence officer.
And if Lord Turnbull’s assurances had been taken, the defence would not have known how unreliable Gaika was. Had Turnbull’s assurances that the defence did not need to see the unredacted cables been accepted, it is possible that Fhimah would also have been found guilty. When the defence saw the unredacted cables they decided that the repeated pleas for money, support to set up a car rental business and unnecessary surgery were relevant to the defence.
Turnbull, the man who thought otherwise, might also have thought the statements about a positive identification of a man seen following Jodi Jones might also be, like so much else, conveniently irrelevant. The defence did not know the full extent of what were, the last positive sightings of Jodi Jones alive.
Disclosure failures run through the Scottish justice system as water descends from high ground, building to huge issues, to be dammed by the people who presided over them in the first place. It’s quite a living and the Scottish establishment don’t take kindly to cases being taken to the supreme court in London.
The Scottish Police Services Authority owns the labs doing the testing. If they don’t want independent testing or a second opinion for the defence, they are well placed to make it difficult. It’s not just labs. The Scottish Criminal Records Office provided fingerprint evidence that saw David Asbury suffer a miscarriage of justice, five years in jail and a police officer, Shirley McKie, dragged through the courts for refusing to support the fingerprint error. I say error, for all the world it looked like corruption.
I am aware that this article could extend and extend with examples of disclosure failures and police corruption. There are too many. More will come and if the victims are orphans of another scandal, Scottish drug deaths, neither you nor I are likely to ever know their names.
The Scottish Tabloids have repeatedly cheered Lord Turnbull on and he has repaid the particularly fawning Daily Record, with an exclusive. The Crown have also primed the Daily Record when they sought to fend off attack on their conduct over Lockerbie. It is interesting that they approach the journalists least likely to challenge them and the paper most likely to act as a rottweiler to those challenging their convictions.
The Daily Record informed their readers that Corinne Mitchell visited her son every Tuesday. She was beaten in the prison car park. One article covered Luke Mitchells first night in Polmont. It described the make, colour and model of Corinnes car - a brick was soon thrown through it while she was driving. The article described her clothes and how long it took her to reach the prison. Phillip Mitchell had similar treatment, though naturally they paid no attention to what he was wearing. Yet this is not what makes the article horrific, it is the information purportedly from within Polmont Young Offenders institute itself.
New inmates are stripped and searched on the way in as a matter of routine. Then, according to the Record, Luke was taken to a temporary cell in an area where inmates were expected to slop out - in breach of human rights. He then has a chance to make a phone call but, claims the source, his mum’s mobile number is not on the list of approved numbers. IF true, the omission would be an act of gross incompetence or wanton cruelty. The headline of the article is ‘Luke cries for his mummy’ which shows how far emotion would have got him. The source informs The Daily Record, ‘no one cares what he wants.’
The day before he thought he was going home.
It must have been the end of innocence. A dark awakening plummeting down with the force of a locomotive, destroying the innocent belief he’d clung to that establishing the circumstances of his girlfriend’s death would matter more than his humiliation and character assassination. A girl both wild and wise, who had only ever written about him lovingly. The hair, sperm and saliva found on her body were of no importance. What were the last text messages she sent from her mum’s phone? Deleted and never recovered. Who had she been smoking cannabis with mere hours before she died? None of this truly mattered to the hundreds who stuck their nose in the trough and would go on doing so for the next twenty years.
To The Daily Record, Luke offered good returns. They obtained some of his private letters from prison, they took advantage of his loneliness and frustration by posing as a prospective girlfriend and printing his reply (in which he apologised for being suspicious). They reported that he feared for his life and suffered chest pains. When his grandmother suddenly died they reported she ‘dropped dead’ and later that he was seeing a bereavement councillor and rarely came out of his cell.
More recently they complained that he compounded the suffering of the Jones family by not going silently.
The end still to be written…
Megrahi died, gasping for breath, surrounded by family at home in Libya after the Scottish government granted him compassionate release. This was granted in the wake of a damning report into the Lockerbie trial. The Libyan government had paid for Megrahi’s legal costs and looked after his family.
Corinne lost everything and ended up living in desperate poverty, such that her health would never recover. Her own mother must have seen the direction of travel. Ruby Guetta was a remarkable woman, working full-time even in her 90s. Ruby tried but failed to raise some desperately needed money from the tabloids. The caravan park she set up with her husband was burnt down repeatedly until there was nothing left to salvage, then her daughter lost her home. The Daily Record reported on the sale of the house, noting it was sold on the cheap, due to its history. For her attempts to help her daughter and grandson, the Scottish media accused her of greed, an accusation The Daily Record repeated when they reported that she ‘dropped dead on Christmas eve.’
While we cannot undo what we have done, if we act now, Corinne may see her son free, exonerated and supported. Time for that is fast running out.
It is now Corinne Mitchell who struggles for breath. For years it has been an effort to talk and she has barely seen her son, being too ill for the journey to Lanarkshire. Being locked in captivity at fifteen is to slowly loose the family of your childhood as decades pass. That he has been a model prisoner means nothing while he maintains innocence.
The Scotland I was born into no longer exists. A civilized country does not treat human beings like vermin. Lockerbie may have been revenge, cruel and horrible. Jodi Jones was likely killed by madness wielding a blade but what is done by our society, in the pretence of justice, is evil.
Is this what we want the unborn of Scotland to inherit?
Sources
The case for full disclosure of laboratory case files | Law Society of Scotland - By Professor Allan Jamieson, Carrie Mullen. Pay attention to the third paragraph.
On non-disclosure at the Lockerbie trial. "I emphatically do not accept that what lies behind the blanked-out sections is of no interest to a cross-examiner... Further, I challenge the right of the Crown to determine for the Defence what is or is not of relevance to the Defence case." Lord Advocate Colin Boyd QC, 21 Sept 2000, trial transcript p6093 - 6101
Transcripts from the Luke Mitchell trial. Lorraine Fleming (Dock ID p356) and Rosemary Walsh (Dock ID p492)
Scotland's Shame: Why Lockerbie Still Matters by John Ashton (Published by Birlinn Limited 2013)
From 2006 to 2009 John Ashton was a researcher with the legal team representing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
With thanks to John Smythe Investigates.
"History will show that the genesis of the destruction of our criminal justice system was the appointment of career prosecutors as law officers. This has led to the unholy, unhealthy alliance of law officers and law makers: MacAskill and Mulholland, in the same bed. There is no separation of powers. Constitutionally, the system now is morally and mortally flawed."
Jock Thomson QC 2012
Professor Timothy Valentine wrote a 70 page document covering the Lockerbie investigation. He was also quoted in a BBC documentary on the Luke Mitchell case. A curious coincidence.
The Amanda Knox/Raffaele Sollecito case in Perugia, Italy is a reminder of how important full disclosure of DNA and other forensic evidence is. There is no legitimate reason not to provide this information to the defense.
Thrown to the wolves...led by the lying 'wannabe reporters' Actual wolves wouldn't have ripped him as far apart as the corrupt, greedy 🐀🐀 did! # corrupttothecore