I thank the committee for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the discussion. I declare an interest as a longstanding member of the Justice for Megrahi campaign, although I must also make it plain that I speak for myself.
I am pleased to hear what members have said about an update from SPICe. I looked at the website and it appeared that the briefing was last updated in 2012—although I may have that wrong.
I say to Liam Kerr that, although I agree that time has moved on since the petition was lodged, that is the case for many petitions. There is a certain elasticity in petitions lodged by the public—they are not court pleadings in which people must be held responsible for such things.
I have a few points to make, particularly for new members and younger members. Come December, it will be 30 years since the Lockerbie atrocity, and as the years pass, the security of the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has frayed at the edges. I am looking at some members of the committee and I would go so far as to say that some of them would have been children or teenagers when the atrocity occurred, although I recall it clearly.
This might be like a SPICe update. Megrahi abandoned his second appeal to secure compassionate release. Abandoning the appeal was not a prerequisite for that, although prison transfer was, but it was a belt-and-braces approach because Megrahi wanted to go home. The grounds of the second appeal to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission have never been tested in court. The SCCRC currently has a third application by Megrahi’s family. I wrote to the commission in September 2017 to ask it not to consider the third application until operation Sandwood had reached a conclusion. The report on that operation has been lodged.
I am happy to provide the committee with a copy of the reply to that letter, which I will quote so as not to distort what the commission’s chief executive said. The reply refers to operation Sandwood and says:
“It is certainly conceivable that the Board may consider that it requires a copy of the report prior to making any decision on referral, but there are too many imponderable factors at this stage to assess the probability of that outcome.”
There have been delays in operation Sandwood—the police inquiry into possible criminality in the case. I remind the committee that the operation was launched in February 2014, which is four years ago, and in March 2016, the Justice Committee was told by Deputy Chief Constable Iain Livingstone that the operation was “in its final stage”. Yesterday, I was advised by the committee clerks that one year on, Police Scotland, by telephone, yet again stated that operation Sandwood was in its final stage.
The Justice for Megrahi campaign and I appreciate that there are complexities in the inquiry, which may have caused the delay. However, I suggest that the committee should formally ask Police Scotland to provide some detail on the number of officer hours that have been spent on operation Sandwood since the committee was told in March 2016 that it was in its final stage and also to provide an end date.
I put on record that I am not making a criticism of Police Scotland, given that officer man hours will have to be taken from somewhere else in order to deal with operation Sandwood. However, the committee can apply pressure in order to get that information in a way that others cannot.
I also ask the committee to consider writing to the SCCRC to ask whether it has proceeded to stage 2 of its consideration process and if not, why not. In particular, I suggest that the committee ask whether the conclusion and report of operation Sandwood, which must also be referred thereafter to the Crown Office, is delaying matters.
I appreciate—as do many others—that the Justice Committee has kept the petition open and can keep the pressure up in respect of what is now a decades-old matter. Victims’ families and others, including Robert Forrester, are dying without knowing the truth about Lockerbie, whatever that may turn out to be. I understand that the committee is not a court of appeal, but it is able to bring pressure to bear on agencies to ensure that, one way or another—perhaps there is a referral from the SCCRC and it goes to appeal—we can at last draw a line under that atrocity, 30 years on.
My plea to the committee is that you more than continue the petition. I ask you to put your foot down on the accelerator and say to the agencies that, given that the committee has been told more than once that operation Sandwood is in its final stages and that that appears be a blockage to further referral to the SCCRC, you need to have more information so that the matter can be brought to a conclusion.