Feraday notes. (Image from 12-7-9-11.blogspot.com/.) Alan Feraday appeared as an 'expert witness' at criminal trials leading to convictions, which were later overturned on appeal. (The Lockerbie Case: Alan Feraday and Wikipedia)On 9 January 2010, in The Independent (UK), famous journalist Richard Ingrams wrote (Richard Ingrams's Week: Confusing musings from Carey the columnist):
"Busily castigating the US intelligence services for their failures over the bomb attempt in a plane headed for Detroit, President Obama could well spend a moment or two of his time over their record with a previous and successful act of terrorism, the Lockerbie bombing of 1988.
"A BBC Newsnight report this week revived interest in the long-running Lockerbie saga when John Wyatt, an explosives expert employed by the UN, gave details of extensive tests he had conducted on a replica of the timer allegedly used to blow up the Pan Am plane.
"It was a fragment of such a timer that helped to convict Abdul al Megrahi of the bombing.
"Yet in none of Wyatt's 20 test explosions did any single identifiable fragment survive.
"In a lengthy email to President Obama before Christmas, Lockerbie campaigner Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the explosion, had already drawn his attention to the suspect evidence about the time given at Megrahi's trial by FBI agent Thomas Thurman who also featured in the Newsnight report.
"Dr Swire also referred the President to the fact that one of the key British witnesses for the prosecution, Alan Feraday of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, had been discredited in an IRA bombing case and that the Lord Chief Justice declared his evidence to be 'dogmatic in the extreme' and ruled that 'he should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in this field'.
"So who, Dr Swire asks, authorised the employment of Feraday in the Lockerbie case, and why?"
Do governments use 'experts' to fake evidence?
The Lockerbie Case: Alan Feraday and Wikipedia
Doubts over Lockerbie evidence
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1 comment:
The answer is yes, governments do use 'experts' to fake evidence.
Alan Feraday is one such 'expert' and his 'partner in crime' at the Fort Halstead forensic explosives laboratory, Dr Thomas Hayes, is another. Both Feraday and Hayes share the blame for fabricating the 'fragment of the imagination' that their US counterpart Thomas Thurman visually 'identified' as coming from a Swiss timer (MST-13). The fake timer fragment was the only hard piece of 'evidence' linking Libya and Abdelbaset Megrahi to the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103.
The UN observer at the Lockerbie trial, Dr Hans Köchler, has called for action to be taken against these wayward government forensic 'experts', and against the police and prosecutors involved in the fakery which led to Megrahi's wrongful conviction.
An online petition which calls for a United Nations inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing can be signed here.
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