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Hippiekinkster -> RE: Latest GOP-Libya gripe...you should have done it sooner?!?!?! (10/24/2011 6:47:56 PM)
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About that Lockerbie thing...
"The identification of Megrahi
In summary (and for my own amusement, cribbing from Rupert Murdoch's "SKy News" channel as the main source) -
- This guy's conviction is now regarded as completely unsafe. The key witness who ID-ed him in court had previously given a quite different to uselessly vague description, etc. Plus the witness merely linked the guy to a t-shirt like that believed to have been packed with the bomb - not the most definite piece of evidence:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sto…§ioncode=26
Central to al-Megrahi's conviction in 2001 was the testimony of Tony Gauci, a shopkeeper in Malta. Gauci told a court sitting in the Netherlands that al-Megrahi, who worked in Malta for the Libyan state airline, "resembled a lot" a customer who had supposedly bought a T-shirt on December 7 1988, a fortnight before the bombing.
Among the wreckage of Pan Am 103 were remnants of such a T-shirt that had been in the suitcase containing the bomb.
This tiny piece of evidence mattered because:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics…
The Crown called 227 witnesses to make its case, but it was the evidence of one shopkeeper that secured Megrahi's conviction.
Tony Gauci, who ran Mary's House, a scruffy haberdashery in a busy street in the Maltese port of Sliema, sold six items of clothing and an umbrella to a Libyan customer near the end of 1988.
Charred fragments of the same clothes - a baby's blue romper suit, men's trousers, shirts and cardigans - were found in the wreckage and traced by their labels to his shop.
Gauci first saw a photograph of Megrahi in 1991 - three years after the bombing and nine months before the Libyans were charged - and over the years made no fewer than 19 statements about the appearance of the purchaser.
His descriptions varied and he was only ever able to identify Megrahi as "resembling" the man in his shop.
*By the time he gave evidence at the Scottish court complex on an old military base outside Utrecht, he was being asked to identify a single customer who had visited his gloomy store 12 years earlier.&
Gauci pointed at Megrahi and told the judges: "This is the man I say resembles a lot the man who came into the shop."
But he also agreed under cross-examination that over the preceding years he had identified several different people as "the Libyan""
(courtesy Mouse at FL)
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