Identification of the Toshiba radio from PA103

Rolfe · 21st January 2010, 04:15 PM

Staring with this post in the MST-13 timer thread, the subject of the radio in which the bomb was housed was raised.

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

Random thought on the 'red circle' photo that might well be going a bit too far "CT".

Hayes examines 12th May a bag of cloth containing debris, he notes that he finds fragments of plastic consistent with a radio, and fragments of what turn out to be the manual for a radio.

Was it ever established that the fragments of paper he found were from the SAME manual found elsewhere almost intact which was ultimately used to specify the exact make of radio?

The investigators were unable to specify the exact radio from the pieces of radio, they relied on the manual to do that, only if there were bits of manual found from two seperate manuals how reliable is that identification? The exact model is kind of important to the case as the one they claim it is was sold exclusively (almost) in Libya, other similar radios were not and were sold elsewhere.

This is a separate topic, really, and very interesting in its own right, so I thought it could do with a new thread. A few basic points.

Khreesat was using (among other things) Toshiba Bombeat radio-cassette reconders to make his bombs in Neuss, however the only one that was recovered used a mono radio. Abu Talb, I believe, said the PFLP-GC never used stereo models, I think because there wasn't so much room for the explosives.

After Lockerbie, bits of a radio-cassette player began to be discovered, and a small piece of printed circuit board found blasted into the luggage container was identified as part of Toshiba Bombeat - but a stereo model.

Exact identity of the model depended on parts of the manual which were apparently packed with the bomb radio, and enough of which were recovered to identify it. One version does this entirely from very small scraps that were blasted into parts of the clothes in the bomb suitcase, but in another version the nearly-intact manual, or at least a page of it, was recovered many miles away in Northumberland. How a page-sized part of a paper manual could have survived that explosion is unclear.

Various conclusions seem to be drawn as to the exact identity of the radio, and sometimes it's white but then there's black plastic as well. In the end it is decided that it's part of a batch that was only supplied to Libya - another solid brick in the wall incriminating Libya.

I'd like to figure out how well-founded the conclusion about the radio being the model it was said to be, and traceable to Libya, actually is. Sorry, some people might have to re-post some stuff.

Here's the relevant part from the court judgement, which presumably summarises the salient points the prosecution relied on.

Quote:

Within many of these items there were found fragments of what appeared to be parts of the primary suitcase, and also fragments of what appeared to have been a radio cassette player. Other similar fragments were found in clothing which from their charred appearance were considered to have been contained in the primary suitcase. In addition, when examining a data plate which had been attached to AVE 4041, Mr Claiden recovered a piece of debris which appeared to be a small piece of circuit board. The number of fragments associated with the clothing in close contact with the explosion and the extent of the shattering of these fragments indicated that the explosive charge had in all probability been located within the radio. It was known at that time that in October 1988 the West German police had recovered a Toshiba radio cassette player which had been modified to form an improvised explosive device. Mr Feraday visited West Germany to examine this device, and ascertained that the fragments in his possession and in particular the piece of circuit board recovered by Mr Claiden did not originate from the same model. However, he considered that there was a sufficient similarity to make it worth investigating other models of Toshiba players. It was found that there were seven models in which the printed circuit board bore precisely the same characteristics as the fragments. Subsequently, when the blast damaged clothing was examined in detail there were found embedded in two different Slalom brand shirts, a Babygro, and a pair of tartan checked trousers, fragments of paper which on examination proved to be from an owner’s manual for a Toshiba RT-SF 16 BomBeat radio cassette player. All the other fragments thought to have originated from the radio containing the explosive were consistent with having come from an RT-SF 16. Other fragments of plastic associated with the radio were found in other items of clothing considered to have been in the primary suitcase, namely a white T-shirt, cream pyjamas, a herringbone jacket, and brown herringbone trousers, as well as in the four items in which the fragments of paper were found. The conclusion reached by the forensic scientists was that the nature of the fragments and their distribution left no doubt that the explosive charge was contained within the Toshiba radio, and we agree with that conclusion. Having regard to the presence of fragments of an RT-SF 16 owner’s manual, we also accept that it was that model of Toshiba radio that was involved.

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 21st January 2010, 05:35 PM

I've been slow to come around on the radio itself issue. This thread would be a good spot to to discuss the radio model and what it means for the case.

On the white plastic I had this jotted down

Quote:

AG/145 – IED fragment
A piece of circuit board, pivotal to establishing the model of radio used for the bomb, found inside AG/117. The defense raised some questions to Allan Feraday about how it could deflect there naturally. Feraday on mis-diagnosing the radio case color (finally decided as black): “I thought we'd probably got a white case, because I'd got white fragments with that AG/145 fragment.”

AG/117 is a burnt information plate riveted to the outside of cargo container AVE4041. There's some controversy as well on how these fragments would get inside there. And then they're the wrong colored plastic? Very confusing... I'll come back later.

Rolfe · 22nd January 2010, 04:51 AM

I'm just copying over a couple of Buncrana's posts from the other thread.

Originally Posted by Buncrana

Well, manual intact or not, Feraday had reached completely different conclusions.

Originally Posted by de Braeckeleer

In a Letter titled “Lockerbie inquiries”, addressed to Detective Chief Superintendent Orr on 3rd February 1989, Feraday wrote the following:

“I have compared some fragments of electronic circuit board recovered at Lockerbie (Longtown) and marked as item AG/145 with various radio/cassette tape recorders. I am completely satisfied that these fragments originate from a Toshiba brand radio stereo cassette recorder types RT-8016 or RT-8026. These fragments are shattered in a manner consistent with their intimate involvement in a violent explosion, and I therefore conclude that the bomb was concealed in the aforementioned Toshiba type portable radio/cassette player.

The Toshiba RT-8016 and RT-8026 are visually similar and differ only in that the 8026 has a 3 band graphics equaliser on its front panel. Both sets measure 16 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches by 4 inches. The set used in the bomb possessed a white plastics case.”

Toshiba RT-8016 - http://www.shizaudio.ru/audio/./data/media/19/Toshiba_RT-8016.jpg

Toshiba RT-SF16 - http://www.shizaudio.ru/audio/./data...ba_RT-SF16.jpg

Originally Posted by Buncrana

And yet according to the Crown Office themselves,

Quote:

*Also embedded within that same clothing fragment were pieces of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio cassette recorder owner's manual. Separately, another fragment of the owner's manual was found on 22 December 1988 in Morpeth, Northumberland;

*The fragments of the owner's manual recovered from the grey Slalom shirt by the forensic scientists were found to have come from parts of the same page of the same manual, close to one another."

http://www.copfs.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/01/08115853

So, are they saying that this was one and the same manual? Some of it was embedded by the initial explosion into the shirt collar, while some of it was found in Northumberland virtually, according to the Horton's, unscathed? Surely not.

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 22nd January 2010, 05:20 AM

According to the court judgement, the bits of radio manual used to make the identification were small scraps recovered from four different items of cloth found on the ground. The paper seemed to have been blasted into the fabric by the explosion. This is just about credible, assuming the scraps were propelled into the cloth by something hard, which also shielded them as they moved at great speed away from the centre of the explosion. What is less credible is that enough remained to determine exactly which model of radio the manual referred to, given the amount of standard, repeated text on most of these things.

However, Mrs. Horton's find is different. She said she handed in a fairly substantial piece of paper to the police, either the intact manual or an intact page (possibly the cover?). She found this in her garden, the day after the crash. Her gripe was that at the time of the trial she was asked to confirm the identity of that exhibit, and she believed it had been tampered with - she said it was damaged and burned, which it hadn't been when she picked it up. The police line was that it had been damaged during forensic testing.

This is weird. First, while it's just conceivable that small scraps might have survived embedded in the cloth, as described, the chances of the intact manual or even an intact page surviving that explosion are lower than the proverbial snowball in hell. Second, if there were four separate punched-out scraps recovered, how exactly could the manual or even a page of it be recovered virtually intact?

Caustic Logic made an interesting suggestion. Suppose Mrs. Horton picked up some random piece of litter from her garden 60 or 70 miles away. Maybe it was a manual for a radio or something like that, they're not exactly uncommon. Maybe it was something that came down from PA103, or maybe not. But it can't have been something that was inches from that explosion! She didn't photocopy it, did she even take a note of what was written on it? She just handed it in.

Is it possible that during the investigation a page of the manual the authorities wanted it to be was substituted for whatever she handed in? And singed a bit to make it look as if it had indeed been near the explosion?

I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual.

I'm also intrigued by the comment that the compacted fragments found in the shirt (five leaves compacted together) came from the same page. How could that happen? I'd have assumed these leaves would have been consecutive pages. Did the hard object flying off the explosion fold and corrugate one page then?

It's all very peculiar.

Rolfe.

Buncrana · 22nd January 2010, 06:54 AM

Sorry, I meant to move those posts I made yesterday into this thread earlier. Thanks Rolfe.

I must admit, the Toshiba radio and the inconsistencies surrounding it's discovery and identification, is something I haven't looked at too much. Not because I'd never heard or thought of it's significance, but simply because of the sheer amount of reading, double-checking and learning process that is involved in some of the other aspects of the 103 bombing, investigation and trial.

Are the scraps identified by Hayes/Feraday part of one and the same manual of a relatively undamaged page found in Northumberland? It would seem that that is the position of both the prosecution and the Crown Office themselves. The scorched, compacted pieces as shown in the prosecutions production PP8932 claimed to wrapped around the bomb, also allowed one full page to escape from the initial Toshiba bomb, out of the suitcase, exit the baggage container and make it's way 60miles and 31,000 feet almost unscathed.

Surely, if not a piece of the same apparent manual, then why would it be presented in court? It was Libya who had (just like the timer fragment) made a specific order of these models of Toshiba, and therefore could not be a manual of UK model. So this sheet of the manual discovered by Mrs Horton, must've been of the model RT-SF16. However, as she herself claimed at Zeist, it had been severly damaged since she had found it, and it was now almost unrecognizable.

Link to the Horton's story - http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/news/nort...9310-21640187/

Rolfe · 22nd January 2010, 08:01 AM

Oh, thanks, I hadn't seen that. So the Hortons were finding quite a bit of debris from the crash, because of the high wind - Christmas cards and so on. This sets the scene a bit better. And among this stuff was ....

Quote:

.... part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible.

She later gave evidence at the trial of the Libyan man accused of the terrorist attack, but the evidence bag she was shown contained several pieces of paper.

She said: “It was in one piece when I found it but in the bag there were several pieces and the name Toshiba was only just discernable by then.

“When I found the piece of paper it was more or less intact, a bit tatty round the edges, but it definitely had Toshiba written across it.”

"part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible." How on earth is that supposed to have survived that explosion? Supposedly being right beside the radio when it exploded. It's ridiculous.

As others have said, radio-cassette players were common Christmas presents. It's perfectly possible there could have been others, boxed with their manuals, on that plane. Far enough away from the bomb to escape incineration and come down along with Christmas cards.

Mrs. Horton doesn't know the exact model number the piece she found referred to. She only knows it said "Toshiba". (God, the things were everywhere at that time! "Hey, Tosh, got a Toshiba?" was one of the most irritating adverts of all time.) And it sounds as if "Toshiba" was about all that was left legible by the time of the trial.

Suppose you have a bit of a random Toshiba manual that came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. And you want a particular Toshiba model, that was only supplied to Libya, to be implicated in this bombing. Maybe you do get a manual for the model in question and substitute a page of that for Mrs. Horton's page. Then you damage it a bit, partly to make it more plausible it was close to the explosion, and partly to obscure anything else she might have remembered about it that might lead to a suspicion it wasn't the same bit of paper.

It's at least as plausible a story as the idea that the same manual simultaneously had a few small scraps blasted hard into some of the clothes that were around the bomb, and yet at the same time one page survived "almost intact" to be blown over 60 miles in a 90mph gale, and come down just "a bit tatty round the edges".

Never mind how the fibreglass timer fragment couldn't have survived the explosion, how did a sheet of paper pull off that trick?

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 22nd January 2010, 08:12 AM

Originally Posted by Buncrana

.... the sheer amount of reading, double-checking and learning process that is involved in some of the other aspects of the 103 bombing, investigation and trial.

Indeed, that is an important point. Consider the disadvantage Megrahi was under. He didn't just have a team of prosecution lawyers ranges against him, he had a huge investigation effort - Scottish and English and FBI and everything - all dedicated to constructing a case against him.

This happens quite a lot. The police get an idea into their heads and run with it.They work with the prosecution to try to prove the case in court. The defence team have to make them prove it, or else the case falls. Theoretically. The defence team aren't just expected to be legal defence, they pretty much have to be their own detectives to try to find out how the police have got it wrong. Sometimes, though, this does lead to a miscarriage of justice.

This was a particularly hard one, because of the sheer complexity and amount of evidence to make sense of. Also, it's far harder to figure things out if the investigators are falsifying evidence, as might have been the case. Did Megrahi's defence team have a realistic chance of figuring out the flaws in the prosecution, in the time available?

I don't think so. I think they concentrated on the most obvious things, like the Gauci identification, and on trying to make the prosecution prove their case rather than on explaining what Megrahi was really up to with that coded passport that day. Nobody really predicted the Internet would give many people who are just interested the chance to look in detail at the evidence, at their leisure, and chew over the snags.

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 23rd January 2010, 03:11 AM

Okay, on the radio model, the first I heard of a significance vis-a-vis guilt was from R. Marquise:

Quote:

It was a senior Libyan official who had ordered the majority of all the Toshiba radios similar to that which carried the bomb. This official also talked in 1986 about putting a bag on a British or American flight from Malta. Ask why?

http://www.victimsofpanamflight103.org/node/99

The second part is the clue I need to name the official. The source for that is Giaka. As I just typed up elsewhere, as part of Giaka's qualifications as star witness:

Quote:

- Long-standing friendship with Said Rashid, head of the operations section, JSO (also involved, allegedly, in timer acquisition and other wickedness)
...
– Was asked by Said Rashid, in 1986, to write a report on whether a bomb cold be put on a British plane - had someone else look, who said yeah so he wrote the report saying so. The upper levels mulled the idea over...

- Turned said report in via his boss, “Lockerbie bomber” Megrahi, who definitely saw it. Megrahi later mentioned the idea back to Giaka and said “don’t rush things.”

mostly I got that info from the Opinion of the Court.

Okay, so it was Said Rashid, head of JSO operations section, who made some major order for the RT-SF16 model, to make sure people would guess it was probably theirs if they found one, then packed it with the highly unique identifiable timers he bought, apparently way too little explosive, and had it set to all blow up over land and leave the clues everywhere?

Does anyone happen to know what basis Mr. Marquise might have for claiming the JSO cornered the market on that model? Feraday?

ETA:

Quote:

Lord Boyd dealt with each piece of evidence, as follows:
_. Toshiba radio cassette fragment:
"evidence was obtained from Toshiba [by DERA's Alan Feraday] which showed that during October 1988 20,000 black Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio cassettes, the type used in the Pan Am bomb, were shipped to Libya. Of the total world-wide sales of that model 76% were sold to the General Electric Company's subsidiary in Libya, whose chairman was Said Rashid.[information added]"

http://intergritynews.wetpaint.com/p...Talk+Show+Host

Buncrana · 24th January 2010, 05:55 PM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Oh, thanks, I hadn't seen that. So the Hortons were finding quite a bit of debris from the crash, because of the high wind - Christmas cards and so on. This sets the scene a bit better. And among this stuff was ....

"part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible." How on earth is that supposed to have survived that explosion? Supposedly being right beside the radio when it exploded. It's ridiculous.

As others have said, radio-cassette players were common Christmas presents. It's perfectly possible there could have been others, boxed with their manuals, on that plane. Far enough away from the bomb to escape incineration and come down along with Christmas cards.

Mrs. Horton doesn't know the exact model number the piece she found referred to. She only knows it said "Toshiba". (God, the things were everywhere at that time! "Hey, Tosh, got a Toshiba?" was one of the most irritating adverts of all time.) And it sounds as if "Toshiba" was about all that was left legible by the time of the trial.

Suppose you have a bit of a random Toshiba manual that came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. And you want a particular Toshiba model, that was only supplied to Libya, to be implicated in this bombing. Maybe you do get a manual for the model in question and substitute a page of that for Mrs. Horton's page. Then you damage it a bit, partly to make it more plausible it was close to the explosion, and partly to obscure anything else she might have remembered about it that might lead to a suspicion it wasn't the same bit of paper.

It's at least as plausible a story as the idea that the same manual simultaneously had a few small scraps blasted hard into some of the clothes that were around the bomb, and yet at the same time one page survived "almost intact" to be blown over 60 miles in a 90mph gale, and come down just "a bit tatty round the edges".

Never mind how the fibreglass timer fragment couldn't have survived the explosion, how did a sheet of paper pull off that trick?

Rolfe.

Well, quite. According the recent tests carried out by Wyatt, not only was the survival of the fragment "unbelievable", but all trace of the timer and circuit board was "obliterated", and yet we have the Crown themselves supporting the Hayes/Feraday theory that the page found by the Horton's was part of the very same Toshiba manual contained around the bomb.

I agree with your suggestion about the manual, and it's plausible given the other anomalies surrounding the identification of the fragment and indeed the operation and housing of the bomb.

However, as you rightly point out, Toshiba radio cassettes were widely used during the 80's. So the page found by the Horton's could quite easily have been an innocent radio which had been carried by one of the passengers or crew. Surely, even the bungling Hayes/Feraday combo wouldn't have us believe that it came from the original device, when found 'almost intact' by the Horton's, together with the hope they wouldn't have remembered some of the other details noted aside from the make Toshiba?

If however, it was part of the housing of the actual bomb, and as impalusible as it seems, did somehow become blown out with the resulting explosion, and landed in the Horton's garden with the other debris they recovered. However, to the horror of the FBI, MI6 AND BKA, it showed a particular model (ie. Bombeat 453, as found by the BKA in Neuss) which they definitely did not want associated with the bombing, then that would also be good reason to have it damaged beyond recognition, and used as evidence that this was part of the bomb and was assigned to the Toshiba models apperently specifically ordered by Libya.

Both are possible I suppose, and I am thinking aloud here, but your scenario is certainly more plausible.

As it is, here is the photo (often wrongly referred to as the fragment of timer) of the initial chip, given reference AG145 -

Rolfe · 25th January 2010, 04:34 AM

Originally Posted by Buncrana

If however, it was part of the housing of the actual bomb, and as impalusible as it seems, did somehow become blown out with the resulting explosion, and landed in the Horton's garden with the other debris they recovered. However, to the horror of the FBI, MI6 AND BKA, it showed a particular model (ie. Bombeat 453, as found by the BKA in Neuss) which they definitely did not want associated with the bombing, then that would also be good reason to have it damaged beyond recognition, and used as evidence that this was part of the bomb and was assigned to the Toshiba models apperently specifically ordered by Libya.

I just can't swallow it. I'm prepared to consider that the timer fragment might have survived, despite Wyatt's tests, and even that the few, small scraps of manual might also have survived, blasted into pieces of cloth. I don't know enough about explosives to declare these to be impossible.

However, the idea that a complete page of the manual could survive, pretty much intact, and blowing free on the wind? Pull the other one! This becomes even more incredible when you consider these scraps that were blasted into the cloth. How did one page survive intact while other pages were mutilated to that extent? It's ridiculous.

I'm also very dubious that the exact model of radio could be deduced solely from the scraps recovered from the cloth, even if they were entirely genuine finds. Altogether, I find identification evidence which relies on the manual to be highly suspect.

Rolfe.

Buncrana · 26th January 2010, 05:08 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I just can't swallow it. I'm prepared to consider that the timer fragment might have survived, despite Wyatt's tests, and even that the few, small scraps of manual might also have survived, blasted into pieces of cloth. I don't know enough about explosives to declare these to be impossible.

However, the idea that a complete page of the manual could survive, pretty much intact, and blowing free on the wind? Pull the other one! This becomes even more incredible when you consider these scraps that were blasted into the cloth. How did one page survive intact while other pages were mutilated to that extent? It's ridiculous.

I'm also very dubious that the exact model of radio could be deduced solely from the scraps recovered from the cloth, even if they were entirely genuine finds. Altogether, I find identification evidence which relies on the manual to be highly suspect.

Rolfe.

I agree, the discovery by the Horton's quite simply could not possibly have been a page from the same manual we're led to believe concealed the bomb. It's simply inconceivable.

This an aspect that I'm astounded was not made more of by Megrahi's defense during the trial. Even accepting that it was from the page found by the Horton's, (as the court seemingly did!) why would such evidence be subjected to such 'tests' resulting in it being so dramatically changed from it's original state and then presented to a witness for them to confirm that this was their discovery?

I can understand and appreciate some tests and an evaluation of particular items of evidence found, but to the extent that the evidence then becomes altered beyond recognition? The page, and the claims made about it becoming altered due to the scientific and/or explosive testing, parallels the claims made by Bollier re:the fragment.

Rolfe · 26th January 2010, 09:54 AM

Altered by testing or not, I simply can't see how an item of that description could have survived.

I note the actual judgement only mentions the scraps found in the cloth, not the Horton page. I don't know if anything can be deduced from that. I do know Megrahi's defence missed quite a few tricks though, by accident or design.

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 26th January 2010, 05:25 PM

Great discussion! Sorry I haven't been involved more, but I like where you guys are taking it. If you have the transcripts handy, Feraday is quizzed about the Horton page. If I read it right, he says that page was received at RARDE May 11 1989. Isn't that the day before those other bits of manual were found inside PI/995?

Sorry, that's Day 18. Do a word search for "HIBA" with quotes.

Caustic Logic · 30th January 2010, 04:51 AM

Some interesting stuff put together here
http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/...rs-manual.html
What's up with the winning streak from mid-May to June 1? It starts with PT/2, found in clothes perchance the day after they ingested (at request I'd guess) the previously known manual fragment PK/689

3hundred whatever grams of semtex, dude.

May 16, I guess that's the exam of that one. In the meantime tho, on May 12, Hayes find PT/2 inside clothing, perfectly matching their control manual PT/1. Another found on May 18, 22, and June 1, each time in blast-damaged clothing later traced to Malta. The latter two were from the curiously symbolic blue babygro. There's probably others, but that's a partial list.

Buncrana · 30th January 2010, 08:29 AM

Okay, I've managed to track down the exact details of the fragments of the Toshiba Manual presented at Zeist. The portion(s) extracted by Hayes embedded in the Slalom shirt collar (PP 8932/PI 995) and that of Mrs Horton, found in her garden on 22 December.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

According to the court judgement, the bits of radio manual used to make the identification were small scraps recovered from four different items of cloth found on the ground. The paper seemed to have been blasted into the fabric by the explosion. This is just about credible, assuming the scraps were propelled into the cloth by something hard, which also shielded them as they moved at great speed away from the centre of the explosion. What is less credible is that enough remained to determine exactly which model of radio the manual referred to, given the amount of standard, repeated text on most of these things.

So far I've only managed to find 3 references to the Manual. The two productions Hayes and Mrs Horton's discoveries, and another extracted by Hayes from the Blue Babygrow determined to be in the primary suitcase.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

However, Mrs. Horton's find is different. She said she handed in a fairly substantial piece of paper to the police, either the intact manual or an intact page (possibly the cover?). She found this in her garden, the day after the crash. Her gripe was that at the time of the trial she was asked to confirm the identity of that exhibit, and she believed it had been tampered with - she said it was damaged and burned, which it hadn't been when she picked it up. The police line was that it had been damaged during forensic testing.

This is weird. First, while it's just conceivable that small scraps might have survived embedded in the cloth, as described, the chances of the intact manual or even an intact page surviving that explosion are lower than the proverbial snowball in hell. Second, if there were four separate punched-out scraps recovered, how exactly could the manual or even a page of it be recovered virtually intact?

Caustic Logic made an interesting suggestion. Suppose Mrs. Horton picked up some random piece of litter from her garden 60 or 70 miles away. Maybe it was a manual for a radio or something like that, they're not exactly uncommon. Maybe it was something that came down from PA103, or maybe not. But it can't have been something that was inches from that explosion! She didn't photocopy it, did she even take a note of what was written on it? She just handed it in.

Mrs Horton's full testimony at Zeist:

Originally Posted by Zeist Transcripts

(Day 06, pp962)

23 Q Mrs. Horton, what is your full name?

24 A Gwendoline.

25 Q And what's your address?

963

1 A xxxxxxxxx xxxx, xxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxx,

2 Northumberland.

3 Q And do you live there with your husband,

4 Robert?

5 A Robert Geoffrey, yes.

6 Q Do you remember coming to learn that

7 there had been a crash of an aeroplane in the Lockerbie

8 area on the 21st of December 1988?

9 A Yes.

10 Q When did you first learn of that?

11 A I think, if I remember rightly, we heard

12 it on the news that night. And then the following

13 morning a neighbour confirmed that this had happened.

14 Q On that following day, did you notice

15 something around the area where you lived?

16 A We did.

17 Q What did you notice?

18 A Just what we thought was just debris,

19 possibly from a passing car or something.

20 Q Yes.

21 A Until we were aware that there was also

22 a lot of debris in the fields surrounding our house.

23 Yes.

24 Q And was there a suggestion made to you

25 as to where that debris might have come from?

964

1 A Yes. Our neighbour, who had come up for

2 a coffee, said it was -- she understood it was from the

3 plane that had crashed, and that all the local farmers

4 were collecting it in the fields.

5 Q So having learned that, what did you

6 yourself and your husband do?

7 A We went out with the specific idea of

8 collecting this stuff, because this neighbour had said

9 to hand it in to the police. So we went out to collect

10 what we could.

11 Q And did you hand material in to the

12 police on that day?

13 A I can't remember if it was that day or

14 the following day.

15 Q How many times did you hand material in

16 to the police?

17 A Twice.

18 Q And how did you carry this stuff once

19 you'd gathered it?

20 A Just in a carrier bag, I think, at the

21 time.

22 Q I would like to ask you about one item

23 in particular. Do you remember coming upon a document

24 of some sort that made reference to a radio cassette

25 player?

965

1 A Yes, I do.

2 Q Can you describe what that item was

3 like?

4 A Well, from what I remember, it was

5 possibly about -- I know I'm supposed to say it. About

6 that kind of size, you know, about possibly eight by

7 eight, or something like that, inches.

8 Q Could you see writing on it?

9 A I could see writing, because I remarked

10 to my husband, "This appears to be from a cassette

11 player," or something like that. I do remember it was

12 something electrical.

13 Q And did you hand that item in to the

14 police?

15 A Yes, that went into the bag as well.

16 Q Right. I wonder if you would look,

17 please, at Label 24. You'll see there is a bag which

18 contains items there. Do you recognise anything?

19 A Well, not in its present state. I'm

20 sure when I handed it in, it was in one piece.

21 Q Yes.

22 A Yes.

23 Q Perhaps -- I wonder if it could be put

24 on the document imager, to see if we can see it. You

25 can see within the police plastic bag, I think as

966

1 you've described, more than one piece of a document.

2 And you can at least see writing on it?

3 A Yes.

4 Q Do I understand you to say that when you

5 handed it in, it was in one piece?

6 A It was in one piece, sir. I am

7 practically sure of that, yes.

8 Q But apart from that, you recognise the

9 item?

10 A Yes. Uh-huh.

11 Q Whereabouts did you find that item?

12 A In the fields -- we are a private house

13 on the roadside. In the field opposite, they are known

14 as the glebe fields, and it was in the bottom glebe

15 field, down beside the burn, down in the bottom. In

16 the dean.

17 Q Thank you very much.

18 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Taylor.

19 MR. TAYLOR: If Your Lordship could give me

20 one moment, please.

21 My Lord, I have no questions for the witness.

22 Thank you.

23 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Macleod.

24 MR. MACLEOD: I have no questions, My Lord.

25 LORD SUTHERLAND: Thank you, Mrs. Horton. You

967

1 are free to go. Thank you for coming.

2 THE WITNESS: Thank you.

So, Mrs Horton finally concedes, under some protest and clearly perplexed, that she does "recognise the Item? yes, uh-huh."

Quote:

Is it possible that during the investigation a page of the manual the authorities wanted it to be was substituted for whatever she handed in? And singed a bit to make it look as if it had indeed been near the explosion?

Well, that does seem plausible, although why not just find it in another area where Hayes is investigating? Why take your plot outwith the confines of those intimately involved in the examining pieces? Do we require a corroborating source, and one outwith the primary investigators, or indeed better still, a member of the public who found something very similar many years ago could provide this corroboration?

Quote:

I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual.

I'm also intrigued by the comment that the compacted fragments found in the shirt (five leaves compacted together) came from the same page. How could that happen? I'd have assumed these leaves would have been consecutive pages. Did the hard object flying off the explosion fold and corrugate one page then?

It's all very peculiar.

Rolfe.

Some further details of how the Zeist court (and more recently the Crown Office) viewed the connection between Hayes extraction from the short collar and Mrs Horton's discovery in Nrthumberland.

So, astoundingly, the Judges fully accept that Mrs Horton's find of an almost intact and recognisable page found about 60 miles east from Lockerbie, forms part of the same page of the manual that was extracted from a badly burned and damaged shirt collar found and logged by Gilchrist and McColm. Although, I'need to double-check the labels assigned to different photo's and evidence, I think the details and photo of the page of manual are on Caustic's post above and on the Lockerbie Divide site this morning.

Rolfe · 30th January 2010, 05:37 PM

Originally Posted by Buncrana

So, astoundingly, the Judges fully accept that Mrs Horton's find of an almost intact and recognisable page found about 60 miles east from Lockerbie, forms part of the same page of the manual that was extracted from a badly burned and damaged shirt collar found and logged by Gilchrist and McColm. Although, I'need to double-check the labels assigned to different photo's and evidence, I think the details and photo of the page of manual are on Caustic's post above and on the Lockerbie Divide site this morning.

Thanks for all that, Buncrana.

That is Completely. Bloody. Insane.

I've been prepared to believe it possible that a small piece of timer circuit board could have survived the "brisant explosion" by being blasted into fabric and blown rapidly away from the explosion. I've even been prepared to believe that a fragment or two of the paper manual might have been preserved in the same way, if a hard object had shielded them from the main blast.

I call total argument from incredulity on the concept that a free sheet of paper could have survived that lot, to show up on the ground 60+ miles away. And double incredulity that the five-fold fragment in the collar came from the same sheet of paper as the free section.

It's BARKING.

Either this is a complete incompetent muddle, with items not in the bomb bag being erroneously identified as being in the bag - and frankly once you get into that where does it stop, is the whole thing a complete mistake and the bomb never was in the Samsonite suitcase at all, was Gauci's mystery shopper just an innocent Lockerbie victim and so on - or somebody has been manipulating the findings.

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 30th January 2010, 05:39 PM

And talking of the blue babygro, remember the mountain rescue squad swore they'd found it intact....

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 30th January 2010, 06:01 PM

I do think the statement about the two find being from the same page is some kind of confusion. The details of each don't support that. One is most of a page, the other small bits of several pages.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual.

Au contraire. It was the radio itself that yilded no specific clues. AG/145 was not a fragment but a lump of 10 diff materias including that famous CB photo (the largest piece). And this itself just narrowed the models down to 7 possibilities, IIRC. Opinion of the Court, para 9

Quote:

All the other fragments thought to have originated from the radio containing the explosive were consistent with having come from an RT-SF 16.
[...]
Having regard to the presence of fragments of an RT-SF 16 owner’s manual, we also accept that it was that model of Toshiba radio that was involved.

And then of course this "clearly implicates Libya."

If it made more sense, then they'd have to dismiss it as not clear enough to become cartoonishly obvious clue against Libya #473. In retrospect they should have left the exact model uncertain. Dumbasses.

Sorry, I just can't help it sometimes.

Rolfe · 30th January 2010, 06:26 PM

Originally Posted by Caustic Logic

I do think the statement about the two find being from the same page is some kind of confusion. The details of each don't support that. One is most of a page, the other small bits of several pages.

Yes, that's what I thought. But then we have several statements that the five small pieces were all from a single page. Except that seems close to impossible to me.

Can you locate the actual quotes? I'm going to bed. I have a tennis match to watch at 8 o'clock in the morning!

Originally Posted by Caustic Logic

Au contraire. It was the radio itself that yilded no specific clues. AG/145 was not a fragment but a lump of 10 diff materias including that famous CB photo (the largest piece). And this itself just narrowed the models down to 7 possibilities, IIRC. Opinion of the Court, para 9

Indeedy. But the opinion of the court only lists four fragments found embedded in clothes as regards the manual fragments, not the Horton piece. So I wonder whether the story is that the manual could be identified from the small fragments teased out of the cloth, or if the Horton page was pivotal to the identification?

Then again, was it white or was it black?

If the entire tale that the radio was of a model which was (almost?) exclusively sold to Libya is based on the Horton fragment, then sorry, I call BS. I cannot possibly wrap my brain round the idea that that page survived a bang made by 450g Semtex only inches away. This is far more pivotal than questioning the plausibilily that the timer fragment might have survived.

Either some other passenger on that plane was coincidentally carrying a manual for one of the Libyan batch of radios, or that bloody thing is a plant. A much more obvious plant than the timer fragment.

Let's examine where that page might have come from if the whole story is legit - because it sure as hell didn't come from the bomb suitcase.

Maybe someone in Northumberland had one of the Libyan batch of radios, and threw away the manual, and a page just happened to get mixed in wth the Lockerbie debris. Yeah, right.

Maybe another passenger on the plane was carrying a manual for one of the Libyan batch of radios, and it fell free during the crash and a page came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. Yes, maybe. But if so, WHERE WAS THE RADIO? It's unlikely a manual on its own would be in someone's luggage, it would have been carried with the radio itself, probably wrapped as a gift. If something like that came apart to the point where the manual was blowing free, the radio would be in bits on the ground. Is it possible that might have been unremarked by the investigators?

I'm seriously calling plant on this, unless someone can come up with a more plausible explanation. I think the Hortons picked up a page of a Toshiba manual all right, either from the crashed plane or just local litter, but it was nothing to do with Libya. Or the IED. Later, this was substituted with a page of a manual relating to the Libya-only model, and beat up a bit so that Mrs. Horton wouldn't be able to be certain it wasn't the same thing.

Sure, there could have been other ways of getting that evidence in. But if you're a bent scientist combing the evidence, and you're aware of the page picked up in Northunberland, what better way to get your evidence in but to tie it to a real find by a real person who is perfectly on the level?

It's Hayes again, of course. I'm beginning to realise the suspect PI995 isn't the only bit of shenenigans he might be associated with. What else came up (apparently) in that fortninght in May when he was finding these great clues?

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 31st January 2010, 12:36 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Indeedy. But the opinion of the court only lists four fragments found embedded in clothes as regards the manual fragments, not the Horton piece. So I wonder whether the story is that the manual could be identified from the small fragments teased out of the cloth, or if the Horton page was pivotal to the identification?

True - somehow that picture (btw sorry it was so big) just sticks as "the manual" and I'm seeing them nodding their wigs on seeing it. THAT they can grasp... But as they say:

Quote:

Subsequently, when the blast damaged clothing was examined in detail there were found embedded in two different Slalom brand shirts, a Babygro, and a pair of tartan checked trousers, fragments of paper which on examination proved to be from an owner’s manual for a Toshiba RT-SF 16 BomBeat radio cassette player.

Specifically not mentioning the most clear fragment among them? A farking page with a few tears in it? And it's the page that says the model number and all, plain as day? Hmmm... apparently it didn't prove a strong contra-indication of the model, but somehow... (by being fake as all get out?) it's not AS convincing as the less telling parts that were lightly burnt and wadded up in the Maltese clothes.

So I still think the whole manual thing was faked and hard to believe. This page is just the icing on the cake of stupid. The long middle of your post is too good to add much to. My thoughts but better. This thing screams plant. The actual radio bits seem borderline plausible, but the paper manual, would you believe it? No, sir. No I wouldn't.

From what Buncrana shared, regarding debris across all the area, I'm presuming a manual page came from the plane. It was a PAGE, which means, not primary suitcase. Probably NOT RT-SF16, not neccessarily even a radio. Mrs. Horton remembered Toshiba. She was on record. They love the vox populi touch for public cases - real people who recall OOPS not quite the same thing, but...

This seems a compromise between "intact page found" and "damaged by farking bomb" - problem is, explicitly, the claim is "intact page damaged by bomb, subsequently damaged in forensics, examined as if all damage was from the bomb." It really does look like no damage was added, a bomb's worth of tearing, or even a bit less.

Quote:

Sure, there could have been other ways of getting that evidence in. But if you're a bent scientist combing the evidence, and you're aware of the page picked up in Northunberland, what better way to get your evidence in but to tie it to a real find by a real person who is perfectly on the level?

It's Hayes again, of course. I'm beginning to realise the suspect PI995 isn't the only bit of shenenigans he might be associated with. What else came up (apparently) in that fortninght in May when he was finding these great clues?

Well, that's a good question. But it was a fruitful time there. This page we're on about was taken in at RARDE May 11, sent for "non-destructive" finger print testing, recieved back and examed by Dr. Hayes in the state we see May 16. How is "non-destructive" fp test different from a normal one, does anyone know? Is it an Orwellian difference?

Quote:

I'm seriously calling plant on this, unless someone can come up with a more plausible explanation.

Uh,

uh...

This issue was already decided unanimously by three judges yadda yadda?

Caustic Logic · 31st January 2010, 12:52 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

But then we have several statements that the five small pieces were all from a single page. Except that seems close to impossible to me.

Can you locate the actual quotes? I'm going to bed. I have a tennis match to watch at 8 o'clock in the morning!

Certainly, I've got a little more of a run at it now.
day 20 3099-

Quote:

"The five fragments are all of approximately the same size, 20 millimetres by 15 millimetres, and outline shape as if generated by a single high speed fragment passing through a paper booklet. Four of the sheets bear printed black lettering on both surfaces whilst the fifth sheet is devoid of any printing on either surface."
"The two sides of all five fragments are shown in photographs 274 and 275. The sequence of the order of the layering of these sheets was in the order of (1) to (5) as depicted in these two photographs. A detailed comparison of the printed characters on sides A and B of the four printed sheets demonstrates a perfect sequential match with the back-to-back areas of pages 3 to 10 (inclusive) of the control sample of the Toshiba RT-SF16 owner's manual (item PT/1)."

Six sheets total for the booklet (three folded and stapled) and twelve sides so this sound like every page but the front or back cover. Other cover present as blank sheet? Seems unsure which.

And you get one guess what that fragment was that tore em out! Do Libyan manual bits surviving get more plausible if they're rushed off by bits of Libyan timer that survived? Can they include anything in this mix that's not Libyan?

Rolfe · 31st January 2010, 06:16 PM

Originally Posted by Caustic Logic

Six sheets total for the booklet (three folded and stapled) and twelve sides so this sound like every page but the front or back cover. Other cover present as blank sheet? Seems unsure which.

And you get one guess what that fragment was that tore em out! Do Libyan manual bits surviving get more plausible if they're rushed off by bits of Libyan timer that survived? Can they include anything in this mix that's not Libyan?

This makes better sense than some of the other versions I've read.

Actually, a lot of these manuals are many-folded blocks of paper made from a single large sheet with instructions in several languages. But it sounds as if this one wasn't like that, and six pages (probably three pages folded and stapled) is probably what they're describing.

So, the front cover flies free and more or less unpunctured, to be picked up in Northumberland, while the remaining five sheets are subjected to multiple punched-out holes caused by small hard objects being propelled against the manual. (I think it's the back cover that's blank.)

Does this sound likely to you?

It's only possible if the manual has been packed with the front cover open, which isn't all that likely to start with. And even if that had been the case, the chances of that sheet of paper surviving make the proverbial snowball in hell look like a good bet.

However, I don't think it was the timer fragment that was supposed to have preserved the bit in the shirt collar - I seem to remember they were in separate holes in the cloth - according to Hayes, that is.

Actually, I'm still wondering what the intact comparison manuals looked like for this radio - there's supposed to be a photo somewhere but I don't understand the court numbering reference system used in a lot of the posts. All the references to "same page" make me wonder if it might indeed have been one of these many-folded one-sheet things. Which would make the detaching of the front cover even more implausible.

Rolfe.

Ambrosia · 31st January 2010, 09:48 PM

extracts of Feradays testimony Day 18 about the identification of the Toshiba radio:

Originally Posted by Allen Feraday Trial evidence

(reformatted, numers in [brackets] are the original page numbers from where this transcript was copied, all emphasis is mine)

[Feraday is reading from production 181, this is the report by RARDE prepared by Feraday from his own notes and those of Hayes (who by the time this report was written had left RARDE), which both men signed off on.]

A "Consequently a visit was made to the Toshiba UK headquarters at Camberley, Surrey on the 2nd of February 1989 in an attempt to identify the Lockerbie fragments. Full cooperation was received from the Toshiba Company in supplying the service data sheets for all of their present and past portable radios and cassette players. After a search of over 130 different data sheets, the particular small diamond-shaped tracking pattern noted upon one of the

[3024]

Lockerbie circuit board fragments was tentatively identified as originating from a Toshiba brand portable radio/cassette player, model number RT-8016. A detailed examination of an unserviceable RT-8016 radio provided by the Toshiba Company that same day, the 2nd of February 1989, confirmed this similarity.
"Subsequently a visit was made to the headquarters of the Toshiba company in Japan, between 23rd of April 1989 and the 1st of May 1989, where it was learned that similar circuit boards to that noted in the model RT-8016 were in fact installed into seven different models of portable radio/cassette players manufactured by the Toshiba Company or assembled by their subsidiaries or agents. These seven models were all of a similar external appearance with only some minor cosmetic, voltage, and/or wavelength differences. These seven models were identified as follows:

"A, RT-8016, manufactured in Japan.
"B, RT-8026, manufactured in Japan.
"C, RT-SF16 BomBeat manufactured in Japan.
"D, RT-SF26, manufactured in Japan.
"E, RT-SF12(R), "Sugar," manufactured in Japan.
"F, ARS-8016 "Daewoo" assembled in South

[3025]

Korea.
"G, RT-SF16 Videocon Hi-Beat assembled in India.

"Subsequently, control samples of each of these different models were obtained, with the exception of the models RT-8026 and RT-SF26, which were stated to be out of production and unobtainable. Both of these two absent models were different from the
other five models in that they possessed a graphics equaliser panel mounted upon the front of the set and employed an additional graphics equaliser circuit board internally. The master negatives of this separate graphics equaliser circuit board panel were subsequently obtained from the Toshiba headquarters in Japan."

Q: Can we stop there just for a second, again, Mr. Feraday. Do we understand from what you've read to us that your first view on the matter was that the fragment AG/145 might have come from a printed circuit board such as would be found in a Toshiba radio/cassette player, model number RT-8016?

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Q: You made further inquiries and learned that similar circuit boards were included in a number of models, which included the RT-8016?

[3026]

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Q: Now, as far as you understood matters at that stage, was the circuit board used in the models you've read to us also used in the model such as you saw in West Germany?

A: It was not so, no.

Q: I see. Would you look for me at Label 330, please. And can you tell me what you have in front of you now, Mr. Feraday?

A: It is the box and a cassette radio, model RT-F453D, made by Toshiba.

Q: Now, that model, RT-453D, is that the same type as you saw in West Germany?

A: It is, sir, yes.

Q: And therefore the same as we saw in the photographs a moment ago?

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Q: Does it also have a name within its title?

A: Yes, it has the name "BomBeat" in its title.

Q: I see. And do we see that both on the box and on the player itself?

A: We do indeed. It's under the top

[3027]

left-hand side, where it says "Toshiba" on the radio, and it's also on the front of the box.

Q: How is that spelt, please, Mr. Feraday?

A: It's B-O-M-B-E-A-T.

Q: I see. And you would see that on the radio/cassette player that you had the opportunity of examining in West Germany?

A: That's correct, yes, sir.

Q: And from what you've just told us, in reading your report, one of the models which contained a similar printed circuit board to the model RT-8016 also contained the word "BomBeat" in its title?

A: That's correct, sir, yes, the one that I've marked "C," RT-SF16.

Q: But should we be clear in understanding that the RT-SF16 BomBeat has a different printed circuit board in it from the RT-F453?

A: That's correct. It has the circuit board in the -- RT-SF16 BomBeat, the one that I saw in Japan, it has a circuit board that is similar to the Lockerbie fragment.

Q: Yes.

A: It also has two speakers, not one speaker.

Q: So there is a visual difference as well?

[3028]

A: It physically looks similar to the 8016.

Q: So visually, there are differences between the two which share the common name "BomBeat"?

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Last week of April 1989, 5 months prior to the MST-13 fragment surfacing, a visit to Toshiba in Japan narrows down the radio type used to a maximum of 7 possibles.

Invstigators looked at Khreesats bomb with the icecube timer recovered by the initial Autumn Leaves raid, they note it's radio was called "BomBeat".

One radio the RT-SF16 was also called "BomBeat" although a different style.

Originally Posted by Feraday evidence

Q: Can we move on to page 107 of your report, where you left off.

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And you are beginning there, I think, to give us an explanation about some explosively damaged paper fragments. And again this is still by way of
introduction.

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Could you read that passage to us.

A: Yes, sir.
"On the 30th of June 1989, some explosively damaged paper fragments, which bore indications that they originated from the "owner's instruction manual" for a "Toshiba RT-SF16" radio/cassette player, were received at this laboratory, thus conclusively establishing which of the seven models of the Toshiba radio had been employed in the Lockerbie bomb.
Consequently the Toshiba model RT-SF16 radio/cassette

[3029]

player has been used as the control sample for comparison purposes with the recovered Lockerbie fragments as detailed below. It has been noted that
each control sample of Toshiba radio was packed inside a cardboard transit box complete with a black plastics electrical mains lead. Although many fragments of both charred cardboard and burnt soft plastics have been recovered from the Lockerbie debris, none of these fragments can be conclusively established to have originated from a Toshiba radio or its packing."

30th June the manual fragments point to the "BomBeat" model. Only this is a mistake.

Originally Posted by Feraday evidence

Q: You've just read to us from the introduction the view that this piece of paper fragment was received on the 30th of June of 1989?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Is that the correct date?

A: It is not, I'm afraid. It's a mistake that I made when I wrote the reports. And I think the correct date is the 11th of May 1989. And the error
arises on my part because sometimes items would come and go to the laboratory several times. They would be booked in and out several times.

Q: I wonder if we can just look at that and see, perhaps, an example that will explain what you are meaning. Would you look for me at Production No. 1497; we'll see it on the screen. Page 61. Thank you.
And do you see there a piece of paper which you would recognise as an examination note prepared by

[3031]

your colleague Dr. Hayes?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And do we see that it deals with the piece of paper that we've just been speaking about?

A: That's correct, yes, sir. It deals with PK/689.

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

[PK/689 is a photo of a piece of the front page of the RT-SF16 manual, you can see this in the photo CL linked in an above post]

Q: Yes. And the examination bears the date 16th May 1989?

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

16th May 1989 is the day after Hayes claimed examination of the grey shirt containing MST-13 fragment(PI/995), this is from page 57 of Hayes report, which is the first page in the report after the renumbered, "inserted" section dealing with PI/995. This evidence is being given late on Day 18, 2 days after Hayes testimony, which is presumably still fresh in the minds of the judges at this time

Q: Now, I am interested in looking at the information above the printed word "Examination." Do we see that the first information is "Received at RARDE (Superintendent Henderson)"?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And then there's a date given?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Is it the 11th of May 1989?

A: That's correct, sir, yes.

Q: Then underneath that, it says: "Passed to DC Jordan on same date for non-destructive" -- is that "fingerprints"?

A: "Fingerprints," I think that says.

Q: Do you know who DC Jordan is?

A: There were, in fact, DC Jordan both in the metropolitan police, who I suspect that's who that

[3032]

is. And there happens to also, I think, to be one in the Lockerbie team. But I suspect that this one is the one from Scotland Yard, because Scotland Yard were tasked to do the fingerprints for the Lockerbie inquiry.

Q: I see. And was it common to give items to other agencies for inquiries to be carried out?

A: Was it common, did you say?

Q: Yes.

A: Not common, no. It happened in a number of occasions. But I wouldn't say it was common, as such. It didn't certainly happen to all of them.

Q: And when it did happen, were records kept?

A: That's correct, yes, sir.

Q: I see. In order for this item to be examined for the presence of fingerprints by DC Jordan, where would it go?

A: It would go to the fingerprint laboratory in Lambeth in London.

Q: And that's therefore out of the control of RARDE, is it?

A: That's correct, sir.

Q: And do we see that the following line says: "Returned to RARDE on 16/5/89"?

[3033]

A: That's correct, yes, sir.

Q: And that's the same date as at the top of Dr. Hayes' examination note?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And then there is another piece of information on the next line, still above the printed word "examination." Can you read what that says?

A: Yes, sir, I think I can.

Q: What does it say?

A: I think it says: "Passed to DC Jordan on 16/5/89 for chemical treatment after photography."

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

There are corroborating records owing to this testing being referred to here that establish that PK/689 exists as part of the evidence 16th May 1989

Q: I see. And what sort of chemical treatment would that be a reference to?

A: I suspect that, presumably, their initial fingerprint examination could not be done properly without some kind of more invasive chemical fingerprint treatment. I suspect that's probably what it was.

Q: And in order for an examination of the sort described there to occur, where would the fragment go?

A: That would again go to the Lambeth laboratory.

Q: I see.

A: The Lambeth fingerprint laboratory.

[3034]

Q: And for each of these passings of the production from RARDE to DC Jordan and back again, would a record be kept?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And do you know whether or not the fragment PK/689 was passed to DC Jordan or anyone else for any other examination after the one that we've just looked at?

A: Without consulting the records, I don't know. I know that we -- it came and went several times. But I would have to consult the records, I'm afraid.

Q: I see. And how then -- now that we've seen that the item could move in and out of RARDE on a number of occasions for a number of reasons, and that there would be a record kept of the date, both of its arrival and its departure, how can you help us to understand why the date 30th June is given on page 107?

A: Well, I'm afraid that when I logged the whole list of comings and goings of items down when I wrote this report, I must have put my ruler across on
the wrong line for this. I didn't, obviously, go back to the beginning of when we first received it. I must have inadvertently picked a date when it did certainly come back after some treatment of some description on

[3035]

the 30th of June '89. But the truth is that we had received it before that. That wasn't the first time we received it.

Ambrosia · 31st January 2010, 10:06 PM

couple of things that jump out at me here:

i) People are creatures of habit. If we accept that the RTF-16 radio was the correct model, like the Khreesat bomb, it was named "BomBeat" Is it more likely that the same terrorist group will use a similar MO when they carry out attacks, and so the name "BomBeat" in the radios description points to the same perpetrators? Or is it more likely that the name is yet another coincidence, perhaps pointing to nothing more than the fact that terrorists share a twisted sense of wordplay.

ii) The *crucial* piece of manual PK/689 just happens to be examined on the day after the most crucial piece of evidence in the entire case is also examined by the same examiner?!

15th May, apparently, Hayes discovers the MST-13 fragment - the next day he examines PK/689, thats a hell of a 2 days, yet another coincidence? They're stacking up.

Finally of PK/689 on the 16th Hayes notes state that it was photographed. If this item was photographed, then PI/995 ought to have been as well, where are those photos?

Ambrosia · 1st February 2010, 12:52 AM

Originally Posted by Feraday Trail evidence Day 20

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

No evidence was given day 19, as difficulties in translation were being resolved

A "Many fragments originating from the owner's manual of a Toshiba RT-SF16 radio/cassette recorder have been recovered. These fragments, which are detailed below, are damaged consistent with their close involvement in a powerful explosion. They have been identified by a detailed comparison with the control sample of the owner's manual PT/1 (PR/111) which was removed from the box containing the sample
Toshiba RT-SF16 radio/cassette recorder (PR/105). The

[3094]

original positions of the fragments upon each page clearly indicate that the manual was not folded at the moment of explosion, apart from at its original stapled centre fold."

Q: And do you then begin to describe for us an item designated as PK/689?

A: That is correct, sir. Yes.

Q: Can we look at photograph 266, please. And could you perhaps read on, Mr. Feraday.

A: "When originally received at this laboratory, this item was apparently an irregularly
shaped single fragment of paper, shown in photograph 266, which measured approximately 135 millimetres by 125 millimetres. Detailed examination revealed the
fragment to consist of two overlaid sheets lightly adhering together, having the same irregular shape. On the upper surface of the two sheets, shown in photograph 267, were depicted (a) the legend" ... Hiba ... O cassette recorder ... SF16 ... BomBeat SF16"; and (b) apparent sets of operating instructions printed in several languages."

Q: Can we pause there for a moment, Mr. Feraday. Did your conclusion regarding the manual, that it was not folded, apart from its original stapled centre fold, cause you to come to any assessment

[3095]

regarding the manual?

A: Only, as I say, the manual, in my opinion, was not folded and that it appeared that a fragment had been blown out of -- during the explosion and had cut its way completely through the manual.

Q: What way would the manual have been folded if new?

A: It would have just been folded down the middle where the staple is, but not otherwise folded.

Q: Does that mean it would, if new, have been folded in the same way as you deduced this manual to have been folded?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Did the writing on this fragment assist you in identifying which model the fragments of printed circuit board had come from?

A: Yes, sir. It very much did.

Q: What view did you arrive at?

A: I came to the view that as the fragments and the paper fragments -- the fragments of circuit board and the paper fragments were both explosively damaged, that in all probability the fragments of circuit board originated from a BomBeat SF16.

Q: Thank you. Did you then go on to carry out a comparison of the information printed on both

[3096]

sides of the two sheets that we see in this photograph?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Do we see the results in photographs 269 to 272?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Could we see photographs 269 and 270, please. Do we see photograph 269 to the left, Mr. Feraday?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And do we see there that you have compared the fragment with the control sample owner's manual?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And where did that portion of the fragment correspond to?

A: It corresponded more or less to the centre of page 1 of the manual.

Q: Is that the outer cover?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: Thank you. And on page 2 -- photograph 270, do we see the other side of that
fragment?

A: That is correct, sir. That's the same fragment, just literally turned over.

[3097]

Q: And where did it correspond to on the control sample?

A: From the -- again, more or less the centre position of page 2, which is the rear of the front cover.

Q: Thank you. And have you drawn in red on the control sample the area which corresponds to the fragment?

A: As best as I could, sir, yes.

Q: Could we now see photographs 271 and 272. Is the fragment shown in these photographs the second of the two overlaid sheets?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: And do we see that the fragment corresponded with a portion of page 4 of the control sample?

A: One side of it -- of the fragment compared with page 3; and the other side of it, the
rear side of it, compared with page 4.

Q: Yes. And these are the pages following on from those that we looked at in the preceding photographs?

A: That is correct, sir. Yes.

Q: Could you return to your report and read

[3098]

to us what you described after drawing our attention to these photographs.

A: From, "on the lower surfaces"; is that it, sir? Page 112?

Q: Yes. From where you referred to the photographs 269 to 272, please.

A: Okay.

"A detailed comparison of the information printed on both sides of the two sheets, shown in the four photographs, 269 to 272, showed a perfect match in sequence and information detail with the corresponding areas of pages 1 to 4 of the Toshiba SF16 owner's manual (PT/1). These sheets appeared to have been violently impacted and disrupted and bore localised areas of blackening and scorching consistent with their
close explosives involvement."

So the Horton fragment (PK/689) is a large piece of the centre of the manual 135mm by 125mm, it's received by RARDE 11th May 1989, a piece Horton describes as about 8" by 8" (200mm square), it's photo'd 16th May before destructive testing. Horton ID's "Label 24" as what she found, but much more damaged than the condition she found it in. PK/689 is described in Ferdays reports as being a fragment punched out of the centre of the page. Feradays report describes a complete control manual as being:

Originally Posted by Feraday Trial evidence

The manual consists of a white paper booklet measuring 26 centimetres by 19 centimetres and incorporating three complete sheets of paper which are folded and stapled together in the centre to produce a booklet of twelve sides of paper.

Horton describes finding almost an intact page, 8" by 8"(20.3cm x 20.3cm) her dimensions match the size of an intact page.

If Mrs Horton is right and she found a whole page of manual which was actually the first 2 pages,(1,2,3 & 4) then the fragments from PI/995 which are

Originally Posted by Feraday Evidence

a perfect sequential match with the back-to-back areas of pages 3 to 10 (inclusive) of the control sample of the Toshiba RT-SF16 owner's manual (item PT/1)."

can't possibly be from the same manual.

Rolfe · 1st February 2010, 04:14 AM

A couple of quick points.

The Slalom shirt collar was examined on 12th May, not 15th (you may be mixing this up with 15th September, the date of the Feraday/Williamson memo). 12th May was a Friday, so the manual examination you refer to above was done the following Tuesday. Still a helluva few days. I'm still not convinced anything actually happened on these days though.

Khreesat's electronics stash. I don't put too much emphasis on this "BomBeat" thing. Khreesat was using a variety of electronics items for his bomb-making. There were a hi-fi tuner and a couple of VDUs as well as the radio-cassete player that was recovered. (Sorry, I don't know where to find the list of stuff right now, but it is available.) He didn't have a production run of identical IEDs.

I believe Abu Talb, at Camp Zeist, said he would never have used a stereo player because there wasn't enough room inside the casing to get enough explosive in. But do we actually believe a word Abu Talb says? And if the Lockerbie evidence is at all to be believed (which may be a bit of an "if"), then it self-evidently was possible to get enough explosive into a stereo player.

It seems to me that Khreesat was using an assortment of electronics products, so just about anything might have turned up in an incident. It's just this whole tenuous trail of a particular Toshiba model sold almost exclusively to Libya (to match the particular timer model sold exclusively to Libya) that is held to be so significant as far as the indictment goes.

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 1st February 2010, 04:18 AM

That extract from the evidence absolutely clarifies the structure of the manual - it really was a stapled booklet, not a folded wad. Stuff the centimetres, let's get this straight in inches.

Complete manual (control sample) 10½ x 7¾ inches. That's bigger than I had thought, not much smaller than an A4 page.
Mrs. Horton's estimate of what she found was about 8 x 8 inches, "almost intact, just a bit tatty round the edges".
That find, when examined at RARDE before any destructive testing, is recorded as 5½ x 5 inches.

Difficult to know how much to trust Mrs. Horton's memory - memory can play strange tricks, and it's noticeable she seems to be describing a find that was roughly square. Nevertheless, her description seems closer to an almost-intact page than to the large fragment blown out of the centre that Feraday describes. In particular, she says she remembers the word "Toshiba" on the find, but the word is partially obscured in the evidential fragment.

It's now clear that the piece of manual alleged to have been found by Mrs. Horton wasn't just one sheet but two, the first two of the six. Supposedly punched out of the middle of the manual by the explosion, presumably by something about 5 or 6 inches square being slammed into it. I'm guessing a chunk of the plastic casing of the radio, a circuit board from inside it, or maybe the tape transport if that was still in it. Presumably all 6 pages were punched out, but the other four became detached and were not recovered.

I totally don't buy it. That should have been incinerated.

Then we have the other much smaller fragments that were found in items of clothing. I find these a bit easier to swallow as regards actual survival. However, at least one of these finds was five sheets thick, thus implying that at least one of the two Horton pages was also represented in that compacted wad.

We can only account for that by assuming the area in question belonged to a part of the manual outwith the 5½ x 5 inch Horton fragment. So, one very big fragment, of which two leaves are recovered in a legible condition, and at least four much smaller fragments from elsewhere in the manual, compacted so that most of the leaves remained stuck together, heavily explosion-damaged.

All surviving and identifiable, having been right up close and personal with 450g of Semtex when it blew up.

Oh come on. Do they think the judges came up the Clyde on a banana boat? Apparently so.

Rolfe.

Ambrosia · 1st February 2010, 04:52 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

A couple of quick points.

The Slalom shirt collar was examined on 12th May, not 15th (you may be mixing this up with 15th September, the date of the Feraday/Williamson memo). 12th May was a Friday, so the manual examination you refer to above was done the following Tuesday.

I'm conflating dates on re-numbered pages actually. Yes my mistake.

12th May (Friday) Hayes examines PI/995, notes for this examination is pg 51.

15th May (Monday) pages 52-56 are about a different examination of evidence, these pages were previously numbered 51-55 and were renumbered for reasons never explained.

16th May (Tuesday) Hayes examines PK/689.

evidence number PI/991 is detailed on pg 49 of Hayes notes, dated 15th May 1989.

evidence number PT/30 was noted on page 90 of Hayes notes, 8th June 1989, and is both dated later than PT/35 and has a lower evidence number.

Ambrosia · 1st February 2010, 05:16 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I totally don't buy it. That should have been incinerated.

Then we have the other much smaller fragments that were found in items of clothing. I find these a bit easier to swallow as regards actual survival. However, at least one of these finds was five sheets thick, thus implying that at least one of the two Horton pages was also represented in that compacted wad.

We can only account for that by assuming the area in question belonged to a part of the manual outwith the 5½ x 5 inch Horton fragment. So, one very big fragment, of which two leaves are recovered in a legible condition, and at least four much smaller fragments from elsewhere in the manual, compacted so that most of the leaves remained stuck together, heavily explosion-damaged.

I don't have a problem with bits of manual surviving an explosion. If you lookat pictures of impacts on 9/11 we see paper raining down into the streets. A passport survived enough to be identified later. Granted those were low pressure cooler deflagrations rather than explosions, but who knows what random things might well survive.

When Feraday goes through all this at the trial he has a series of photographs pointing out exactly where each fragment came from, one wonders if Mrs Hortons memory is accurate whether the prosecution needed to cut bits of PK/689 off in order to account for these other much smaller scraps of manual found in the babygro and the Yorkie trousers etc.

Another point I thought about was this. We know that the radio itself could not be identified were it not for the manual. The innards of the radio could have come from 7 possible sources. How much of the manual is the same for each of those 7 radios? Do Toshiba write a whole new manual for each one? Do they just print alternative covers and keep the body of the manual the same? Was it ever established that the manual as found could *only* have come from this particular model, if say we discount PK/689 as possibly coming from a n other radio in someone elses luggage?

Was enough of the manual recovered in the tiny fragments that are almost certainly in the IED case, blasted into bits of clothing to positively ID it as a RTF-16 and *only* an RTF-16 manual?

Rolfe · 1st February 2010, 06:34 AM

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

I don't have a problem with bits of manual surviving an explosion. If you lookat pictures of impacts on 9/11 we see paper raining down into the streets. A passport survived enough to be identified later. Granted those were low pressure cooler deflagrations rather than explosions, but who knows what random things might well survive.

I don't see "9/11" as being comparable. Of course bits of paper were raining down. A couple of planes crashed into a couple of office blocks full of filing cabinets and desks covered in clutter and so on. The planes themselves were intact until they hit the buildings, and the fires were started by the engiges and fuel tanks - the fuselages themselves (where the passport and other paper would have been) didn't necessarily explode as such.

I don't doubt Mrs. Horton's description of what she saw in the Northumberland countryside after Lockerbie either. That included Christmas cards raining down. The actual explosion only damaged a relatively small number of suitcases, a couple of baggage containers and the outer skin of the aircraft. Paper in suitcases that came apart as the plane came apart, and paper in the cabin, would have blown all over the place.

I'm not even discounting the possibility that the small, compacted fragments might have survived, blasted into cloth as described. But once you start telling me that a 5" x 5" piece of two pages survived from the close vicinity of that explosion, blowing free in the wind, I baulk. We don't know of any paper on 9/11 that was so close to an explosion and survived, still legible. Oh wait, there weren't any explosives involved on 9/11.

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

When Feraday goes through all this at the trial he has a series of photographs pointing out exactly where each fragment came from, one wonders if Mrs Hortons memory is accurate whether the prosecution needed to cut bits of PK/689 off in order to account for these other much smaller scraps of manual found in the babygro and the Yorkie trousers etc.

I haven't seen the photographs, but I'm sure they were plausible to a degree. I'm assuming the four smaller fragments were from parts of the manual elsewhere than the Horton fragment.

I don't believe that what Mrs. Horton found was ever within inches of 450g of Semtex when it exploded. So I don't think it's a question of cutting anything off what she found, I think it's a question of tailoring a fragment of that manual (I imagine the police could have had as many copies as they wanted from Toshiba) so that it contained enough information to identify the exact model of radio (you know, this one model fortuitously sold only to Libya), and yet allowed for the other scraps still to have come from the same item.

Mrs. Horton picked up quite a few bits and pieces and handed them in to the police in a carrier bag. Obviously these included some sort of piece of paper that could plausibly be represented as that large fragment, ten years on, to a lady who probably hadn't looked at it all that closely at the time and certainly hadn't kept a copy. I think it could be that simple.

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

Another point I thought about was this. We know that the radio itself could not be identified were it not for the manual. The innards of the radio could have come from 7 possible sources. How much of the manual is the same for each of those 7 radios? Do Toshiba write a whole new manual for each one? Do they just print alternative covers and keep the body of the manual the same? Was it ever established that the manual as found could *only* have come from this particular model, if say we discount PK/689 as possibly coming from a n other radio in someone elses luggage?

Was enough of the manual recovered in the tiny fragments that are almost certainly in the IED case, blasted into bits of clothing to positively ID it as a RTF-16 and *only* an RTF-16 manual?

I had exactly the same thoughts, but I'm now wondering whether it actually matters. If the large Horton fragment was fabricated, then why bother sticking to the real fragments for the rest of the finds? Assuming there were any scraps of manual recovered from cloth actually picked up in Scotland in the first place. We're already very suspicious that PI995 is a plant, and that seems to contain the biggest of the scraps as well as the timer fragment. I don't know whether we have enough on the other scraps to assess whether they might also have been slipped in retrospectively late in 1989, but if they were that small, I wouldn't be surprised.

I very much doubt that these tiny scraps could identify the manual as coming from one particular model. As you say, these things tend to be a bit repetitve. Their presence within the Maltese clothing does however associate the manual definitely with the bomb suitcase, rather than having it originate from elsewhere in the plane. But we can hardly get a 5x5 chunk saying "... hiba ... o cassette recorder ... SF16 ... BomBeat SF16" into a shirt collar. So we really need that bigger piece to turn up separately - not so clearly associated with the explosion as it stands, but able to be tied in with the rest once you have the template of the sample manual.

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 1st February 2010, 07:19 AM

It occurs to me that the model of radio, in just the same way as the MST-13, doesn't in any way rule out Khreesat even if all this singularly implausible evidence is entirely genuine. We know Khreesat used a variety of electronics items for his bombs. We only have Abu Talb's word for it that the group never used a stereo radio-cassette recorder, and in the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davis, "he would say that, wouldn't he?"

The thing the investigators loved about this radio, just as they loved the same thing about the MST-13, was that it was supplied to Libya. Well, the PFLP-GC people were Arab. They travelled around in the Middle East. One of the Lockerbie commentators places Jibril in Libya itself at the relevant time. No great reason they couldn't have picked up one of these radios, really. Just as there's no great reason they couldn't have got hold of an MST-13 from Libya to "make the medicine better, stronger".

It's just that the radio identification depends on the manual, and the survival of the manual, much more so than the survival of the MST-13 fragment, really does seem extremely implausible.

I suppose I'm having my cake and eating it here. If we decide that the manual and the timer fragment were planted, then we really are in the territory of dirty work at the crossroads, full-blown conspiracy and all. But on the other hand if we decide these items are really and honestly kosher, then I still think this was Khreesat's work anyway. It was just really, really convenient he utilised two vital components for his IED that it just so happened were closely traceable to Libya.

But look at what was in that IED.

A bronze Samsonite hardshell suitcase. The one thing we don't have any trace on, according to the official theory.
Some clothes, which the bomber(s) conveniently bought brand new in a small shop only a couple of weeks before the explosion, so they could be traced there. (And it was a place where Megrahi and other Libyans were known to hang out.)
A Toshiba radio-cassette recorder of a model apparently wholly or overwhelmingly supplied as a batch to Libya, identified because the bombers generously packed the manual in the suitcase with it, in such a way that it wasn't instantly incinerated in the explosion.
An MST-13 timer, again a very limited edition model, supplied exclusively to Libya. Again the one little corner of the main circuit board that survived was luckily just about the only fragment distinctive enough to be identifiable.

If all of that is for real, then there's still no especial reason it couldn't have been Jibril's group, as I said. But if you wanted to aggregate as much circumstantial evidence as possible pointing to Libya, could you have done a better job on purpose?

I think the manual is more likely to be a plant than the timer fragment, based on survivability (or not) of the explosion. I do so wish Wyatt had considered that aspect in his tests. And if the manual is a plant, then it follows pretty closely that the probability of the timer fragment also being a plant is very high.

Rolfe.

Rolfe · 1st February 2010, 05:21 PM

Another vague thought. Feraday originally thought the radio was white. There were white pieces of plastic recorded. Then he changed his mind. The bits of plastic in PI995 were black.

I wonder where the other bits of black plastic were that helped change his mind? I wonder which of the seven possible models of radio was available in white, and where they were sold?

Rolfe.

Caustic Logic · 1st February 2010, 06:01 PM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

Another vague thought. Feraday originally thought the radio was white. There were white pieces of plastic recorded. Then he changed his mind. The bits of plastic in PI995 were black.

I wonder where the other bits of black plastic were that helped change his mind? I wonder which of the seven possible models of radio was available in white, and where they were sold?

Rolfe.

The SF 8016 was white, but otherwise looks like the same exact model. You re-posted the pics in post 3. That was the original lead with the Toshiba corp, and Feraday did report white plastics in Feb 89 IIRC as showing clearly a definitely white radio. I don't know yet what this was supposed to mean.

Then it was black, and I haven't yet seen how these two leads were ever reconciled. And it was also clearly the SF16, which is black and as we've seen indicates Libyan guilt, softly. By May 16 (says the papers) that info was available without the long process that it took to ID PT/35(b) and its links to Libya.

DeBraeckeleer has a good article on this issue. Bobby Ingram's story is sounding more relevant all the time, eh?

I think one issue we'll want to get at here is the collection of AG/145. Its bits were consistent with either model, and it was found with (including?) white plastic, found not in Maltese clothes but in the info plate from container AVE4041. So one wonders if the actual bomb was a white 8016? But I hear there are peculiarities about that too, like the deflection angle required for projectiles to have gotten in there. It may have been one plant job replaced with another, for all I know at his point. Sorry to be so vague, but I don't even remember where quite I saw that. But I will run across it again and the question is worth looking at.

Originally Posted by Rolfe

I think the manual is more likely to be a plant than the timer fragment, based on survivability (or not) of the explosion. I do so wish Wyatt had considered that aspect in his tests. And if the manual is a plant, then it follows pretty closely that the probability of the timer fragment also being a plant is very high.

I do agree with this. I'm still attached to the little suite of timer arguments I've come up with, but this stuff might have to take precedence.

Ambrosia · 1st February 2010, 06:37 PM

Originally Posted by Caustic Logic

The SF 8016 was white, but otherwise looks like the same exact model. You re-posted the pics in post 3. That was the original lead with the Toshiba corp, and Feraday did report white plastics in Feb 89 IIRC as showing clearly a definitely white radio. I don't know yet what this was supposed to mean.

Feradays testimony (reading from his own report) specifically states

Originally Posted by Feraday

Although many fragments of both charred cardboard and burnt soft plastics have been recovered from the Lockerbie debris, none of these fragments can be conclusively established to have originated from a Toshiba radio or its packing

How convenient.

I used to have a Toshiba casette radio very similar to the one used in the Lockerbie bomb. I also used to enjoy taking electronic stuff apart for no good reason when I was younger. There is a bunch of black plastic used in the internal construction of those radios regardless of the colour of the outside casing.

You can see this in the photo of the Toshiba radio taken apart, internal constuction contains black plastics.

Quote:

DeBraeckeleer has a good article on this issue.

The letter he quotes has Feraday satisfied that the radio was an 8026 type with white case entirely, it's the manual fragments that make him change his mind and those weren't examined till May as we have already noted.

Rolfe · 2nd February 2010, 05:09 AM

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

The letter he quotes has Feraday satisfied that the radio was an 8026 type with white case entirely, it's the manual fragments that make him change his mind and those weren't examined till May as we have already noted.

And were they even examined in May?

One of the things I've been trying to get a feel for is the time period of the switch in the investigation from honest assessment of the evidence as it came up, to trying to make it point a certain way.

I was about to post, assuming that happened, because I still entertain the possibility that no evidence was fabricated, and what actually happened was cumulative misinterpretation and misdirection until they were all baying after Libya and Megrahi with blinkers on. However, I stopped mid-sentence, because I think the details of the Horton fragment are close to convincing me that that had to have been fabricated.

I started looking at the timer fragment, because that's the one everybody gets excited about, and the thing people make documentaries about and so on. Mrs. Horton is a bit of a throwaway line in the only documentary she appears in, and the significance of what she's supposed to have found isn't really explored. But really, it's the alleged survival of that 5-inch square piece of paper, and its almost equally strong trail back to Libya, that's turning out to be the killer point for me.

Of course, we don't have the same provenance difficulties with the Horton fragment as with the timer fragment. Mrs. Horton found something, she remembers doing that, and she handed it in. Switching that something for a rather similar but on the other hand altogether different piece of paper isn't much of a problem. So we don't have re-numbered pages and altered labels to get excited about. We just have a piece of paper that's supposed to have survived an explosion that Wyatt couldn't even get a fibreglass circuit board to survive.

Right.

So when, really, did the point come when fabricated evidence was being introduced into the investigation? I don't think it was May, because so much of the timer fragment evidence suggests its May provenance was retrospective. That, to me, suggests that other fabricated evidence that seems to come up in May was retrospectively introduced too. I haven't seen any suggestion that the paper fragment was described on an interpolated page, but I don't think that's important. It's surprising that Hayes messed it up once, you wouldn't expect him to leave trails all over the place.

I appreciate your point about the Lambeth laboratory and the fingerprint testing, and you could be right about that. However, all the photography seems to have happened at RARDE (and we're getting a feel for their standards of photographic provenance), and I merely wonder whether in September or later (the point when I still think the fabrications were introduced), it was clear that a different piece of paper could be substituted without anyone at the Met being able (or willing, probably) to prove anything different.

I was leaning to a point later in 1989 for the introduction of fabrications, however your information about Hayes's employment history tends to nudge it all to an earlier date. I'm thinking that indeed the 15th September memo may represent activity surrounding the introduction of whatever fabrications were created - I suggest the entirety of PI995, the substitution of the RTF-16 manual pages for whatever Mrs. Horton found, and the addition of a few tiny scraps of manual to three other evidence bags.

(I still don't know what to make of the Gauci clothes, at all, so I'll continue to assume the bulk of these were not planted. It's hard to imagine how they could have been, as far as I can see.)

The fact that they were already messing with the evidence examined in mid-May (the genuine Horton fragment) could explain why the same time period was chosen to insert the de novo PI995 item. However, while the Horton fragment could be accommodated simply by substituting a new page for whatever Hayes wrote at the time, it was necessary to make room for an entire new page to describe PI995.

So, I still think this could fit a late summer 1989 decision to take active steps to implicate Libya rather than Iran, with the fabicated evidence being insinuated into the investigation, with retrospective provenance, in September. Or do you think the Lambeth involvement in June is enough to knock this idea on the head?

Bearing in mind that the Met itself doesn't eactly have a reputation for the fearless and singleminded pursuit of truth in all its forms.

Rolfe.

Buncrana · 2nd February 2010, 05:27 AM

Just quickly coming back to Mrs Horton's testimony, and I meant to raise this when I forsted posted it, is the sheer lack of interest or inquiry made by Megrahi's defense team.

(my bold and emphasis)

Originally Posted by Zeist Transcripts

16 Q Right. I wonder if you would look,

17 please, at Label 24. You'll see there is a bag which

18 contains items there. Do you recognise anything?

19 A Well, not in its present state. I'm

20 sure when I handed it in, it was in one piece.

21 Q Yes.

22 A Yes.
23 Q Perhaps -- I wonder if it could be put

24 on the document imager, to see if we can see it. You

25 can see within the police plastic bag, I think as

966

1 you've described, more than one piece of a document.

2 And you can at least see writing on it?

3 A Yes.

4 Q Do I understand you to say that when you

5 handed it in, it was in one piece?

6 A It was in one piece, sir. I am

7 practically sure of that, yes.
8 Q But apart from that, you recognise the

9 item?

10 A Yes. Uh-huh.

<snip>

17 Q Thank you very much.

18 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Taylor.

19 MR. TAYLOR: If Your Lordship could give me

20 one moment, please.

21 My Lord, I have no questions for the witness.

22 Thank you.

23 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Macleod.

24 MR. MACLEOD: I have no questions, My Lord.

What the hell were they thinking exactly?! An absolutely crucial point of evidence, and critical to the assertion by the prosecution that this evidence was from Toshiba used to conceal the bomb, and the precise model that, once again, points inescapably to Libya and thus their defendant!

A witness makes claims of tampering of her discovery in open court, and they have "no questions for the witness"??

Utterly bizarre.

Rolfe · 2nd February 2010, 06:01 AM

Hans Kochler is extremely critical of Megrahi's defence team in his report. There were manipulations there, of course. Someone left the team in protest over inteference by Libyan "advisors", and after that things are said to have gone downhill.

I've got a few thoughts about it all.

First, there was undoubtedly a lot of interference by Libyan lawyers, and I'm not convinced their objective was to get acquittals. It was all a fairly cosy arrangement; throw these two - or one of them at least - to the lions, pay up a few billion dollars, and then you get to play in the international community again. What would actually have happened to all that if Megrahi had also been acquitted?

The other point as regards the Libyans is, I rather think they were extremely keen to avoid anything significant about what Megrahi was really doing on and around 21st December 1988, and indeed about his work in general, coming out in court. He was in Malta, travelling on a "coded" diplomatic passport. Not an illegal false passport, a legal passport with a false name, issued to him because he was an intelligence officer. One way to counter charges that he was there to smuggle a bomb on board KM180 would have been to explain, with evidence, what he was really doing. But they very definitely didn't go there. My impression was they'd rather let him be convicted than let that come out in court.

Then again, the defence advocates and solicitors had one hell of a job. The prosecution had all the resources of the police at their disposal, to sift through the mountains of evidence and construct a case out of it all. The defence legal team have to to all the countering themselves - they have to be their own detectives, if you like. (This is why the Rumpole books are such fun - Rumpole is a barrister, but he's having to do the detective work to establish his clients' innocence, with both the police and the prosecution ranged against him.)

But what defence advocates tend to do at that point, is to fall back on forcing the prosecution to prove their case. The defence doesn't have to prove what did happen, it just has to cast reasonable doubt on the prosecution version. Given the mountains of evidence and the complexities of this case, I think they fixed on a certain number of areas where they thought the prosecution case was vulnerable. Giaka, obviously, and they scored a spectacular victory with that one. (They may have thought they'd won when he was thrown out.) The Erac printout, where the defence advocate spent a couple of days trying to show that tray 8849 could have been a number of other things and didn't necessarily come off KM180. The timer fragment, with it's glaring problems of provenance. Gauci's identification. The Bedford suitcase (they weren't told about the Heathrow break-in of course, or they could have made more of that).

I think they genuinely tried on these points, but they were only human, and they missed other tricks. The Horton pages being one of them. It's easy to concentrate on the timer and overlook the importance of the manual, as we've seen.

I also think there's a big leap between casting doubt on provenance, and trying to show alternative non-incriminating explanations for the evidence, and outright accusations of fabrication on the part of the investigating authorities. We see the defence skirt this when they cast doubt on the provenance of the timer fragment, but they never throw propriety to the winds and go all-out to prove it was a deliberate fabrication. If they'd challenged the Horton fragment as it should have been challenged, they'd more or less have been forced to do that, and I suspect that's a bridge too far for many lawyers, especially in a high-profile political and international case like this, with the CIA sitting at the elbows of the prosecution.

Rolfe.

Ambrosia · 2nd February 2010, 07:08 AM

Originally Posted by Rolfe

However, I stopped mid-sentence, because I think the details of the Horton fragment are close to convincing me that that had to have been fabricated.

But really, it's the alleged survival of that 5-inch square piece of paper, and its almost equally strong trail back to Libya, that's turning out to be the killer point for me.

We just have a piece of paper that's supposed to have survived an explosion that Wyatt couldn't even get a fibreglass circuit board to survive.

The point I was trying to make earlier with the comparison to 9/11, is that what you are saying about the 5x5 piece of manual being unable to survive the explosion, is the same argument from incredulity that we hear truthers giving over say the passport of one of the hijackers.

I appreciate that we are talking here about a papr manual that was packed inside a case in which 400+g of high explosives detonated, and that no explosives detonated at ground zero, so the physics are very very different.

FWIW I don't think it's possible the cover piece could have survived either, but I am not an explosives expert, I know almost nothing about explosives.

My point is that Hayes & Feraday are both scientists, neither of them baulked at the idea that a fragile paper fragment could have survived the explosion. There were explosives guys at the AAIB, there have been any number of people since then looking through the evidence, and no-one with any explosives training has stated that a paper manual could not have survived, or was highly unlikely to have done. The defense team at the original trial and at the appeal do not seem to have made that argument.

I'd guess that the reason the timer board should not have survived was it was in the radio and the manual was outside and might have been shielded from some of the forces involved in the explosion by the case of the radio as it was being blown apart.

I think that if we are talking about when evidence was planted/tampered with/fabricated to point at Libya then we are talking about dates between May and September 1989.

If we assume that PK/689 was a plant, it might well have been done to point to Khreesat, both radios called "Bombeat", PFLP-GC based in Libya, that kind of angle.

Buncrana · 2nd February 2010, 07:46 AM

Originally Posted by Ambrosia

The point I was trying to make earlier with the comparison to 9/11, is that what you are saying about the 5x5 piece of manual being unable to survive the explosion, is the same argument from incredulity that we hear truthers giving over say the passport of one of the hijackers.

I appreciate that we are talking here about a papr manual that was packed inside a case in which 400+g of high explosives detonated, and that no explosives detonated at ground zero, so the physics are very very different.

FWIW I don't think it's possible the cover piece could have survived either, but I am not an explosives expert, I know almost nothing about explosives.

My point is that Hayes & Feraday are both scientists, neither of them baulked at the idea that a fragile paper fragment could have survived the explosion. There were explosives guys at the AAIB, there have been any number of people since then looking through the evidence, and no-one with any explosives training has stated that a paper manual could not have survived, or was highly unlikely to have done. The defense team at the original trial and at the appeal do not seem to have made that argument.

I'd guess that the reason the timer board should not have survived was it was in the radio and the manual was outside and might have been shielded from some of the forces involved in the explosion by the case of the radio as it was being blown apart.

I think that if we are talking about when evidence was planted/tampered with/fabricated to point at Libya then we are talking about dates between May and September 1989.

If we assume that PK/689 was a plant, it might well have been done to point to Khreesat, both radios called "Bombeat", PFLP-GC based in Libya, that kind of angle.

I completely appreciate what your saying, but it wasn't an entire page that was presented as evidence. It was, as Mrs Horton stated, "well, not in it's present state", when presented to her at Zeist by the prosecution.

The scraps extracted by Feraday, that being the compacted pieces found in the collar, is just about plausible at a stretch, but an entire intact page as Mrs Horton described, is a stretch too far, and no doubt would raise questions from other Scientific observers. However, Mrs Horton's adamant discovery of an entire page is simply glossed over and presumably put down to her jaded and confused memory, 11 years after the fact. The prosecution presented a badly scortched and frayed piece of manual (which no one has really questioned), and the judges simply accepted this was Mrs Hortons find (with some testing done) and just enough was legible to point towards Libya, thus Megrahi.

Then my question is, if we're speculating that the manual was indeed a plant to help direct the judges, why take your plot outwith the confines of those intimately involved in the examining pieces? Do we require a corroborating source, and one outwith the primary investigators, or indeed better still, a member of the public who found something very similar many years ago could provide this corroboration?

Ambrosia · 2nd February 2010, 10:48 AM

Originally Posted by Buncrana

Then my question is, if we're speculating that the manual was indeed a plant to help direct the judges, why take your plot outwith the confines of those intimately involved in the examining pieces? Do we require a corroborating source, and one outwith the primary investigators, or indeed better still, a member of the public who found something very similar many years ago could provide this corroboration?

I am not sure what you mean here.

I believe that investigators framed Libya in general and Megrahi/Fhimah in particular for the bombing of 103 for politically motivated reasons. I also believe that any conspiracy involved here will have had to have been a simple one involving as few people as possible.

Other trial evidence that's pertinent to Mrs Horton.

Originally Posted by Trial evidence Day 6 pg967

EXAMINATION IN CHIEF BY MR. CAMPBELL:

Q: Mr. Walton, what is your full name?

A: Brian George Walton.

Q: And are you a retired police constable?

A: That's correct.

[...]

Q: Do you recall the night in which the Pan Am 103 aircraft crashed?

A: Yes, I do.

Q: In the period thereafter, did members of the public bring items of debris to the police station at Alnwick?

A: That's correct. Or we went out to various locations and collected debris.

Q: In some cases would people contact you and advise you that there was an item to be collected?

A: That's correct, yes.

Q: And on other occasions did members of the public attend at the police office with material?

A: That's correct, yes.

Q: Would you look, please, at Label 24. Is that an item which has a police label attached to it?

A: That's correct, yes.

Q: Of which force is the police label?

A: Lothian and Borders.

Q: Do you recognise the item that's attached?

A: From my recollection, it's a handbook,

[969]

pieces of an instruction handbook.

Q: Do you remember that item being handed in to you?

A: Yes, I do.

Q: Was it a lady who handed it in to you?

A: That's correct, yes.

Q: Mrs. Horton?

A: That's correct.

Q: And when you looked at the item, what struck you about it?

A: It had tiny bits of singeing on some of the edges of the pieces. At that time, obviously -- it was either the day after or the following day, either
the Thursday or the Friday; at that time it didn't have significance from -- that it obviously might have now, with hindsight knowledge. But at that time, I mean, it was just -- to me, it was debris possibly from the aircraft.

Q: And do I take it from that answer that it was handed in to you within one or two days after the --

A: I can't remember offhand whether it was the Thursday or the Friday. So that would be the 22nd or the 23rd.

Q: And what did you do with it?

[970]

A: Together with other pieces that Mrs. Horton handed to me, I bagged the stuff individually. Again, I can't remember now the full list, but there was this item, which I would place in a bag very -- I don't know if that's the original bag, but in a bag marked "Northumbria Police" --

Q: Is that bag marked "Northumbria Police"?

A: Right.

Q: Right. What did you do with the items once you'd bagged them, and with that item in particular?

A: They were registered in the property register at Alnwick police station. The property was put -- kept in the store there and eventually went to
the incident room at Hexham police station, where they were collating everything from Northumbria area.

Q: Thank you.

Thats the corroborating evidence from a police officer with 20 years experience. He says that PK689 was what Mrs Horton handed in. That it was singed.

21st January 2010, 04:15 PM	#1
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Identification of the Toshiba radio from PA103 Staring with this post in the MST-13 timer thread, the subject of the radio in which the bomb was housed was raised. Originally Posted by Ambrosia Random thought on the 'red circle' photo that might well be going a bit too far "CT". Hayes examines 12th May a bag of cloth containing debris, he notes that he finds fragments of plastic consistent with a radio, and fragments of what turn out to be the manual for a radio. Was it ever established that the fragments of paper he found were from the SAME manual found elsewhere almost intact which was ultimately used to specify the exact make of radio? The investigators were unable to specify the exact radio from the pieces of radio, they relied on the manual to do that, only if there were bits of manual found from two seperate manuals how reliable is that identification? The exact model is kind of important to the case as the one they claim it is was sold exclusively (almost) in Libya, other similar radios were not and were sold elsewhere. This is a separate topic, really, and very interesting in its own right, so I thought it could do with a new thread. A few basic points. Khreesat was using (among other things) Toshiba Bombeat radio-cassette reconders to make his bombs in Neuss, however the only one that was recovered used a mono radio. Abu Talb, I believe, said the PFLP-GC never used stereo models, I think because there wasn't so much room for the explosives. After Lockerbie, bits of a radio-cassette player began to be discovered, and a small piece of printed circuit board found blasted into the luggage container was identified as part of Toshiba Bombeat - but a stereo model. Exact identity of the model depended on parts of the manual which were apparently packed with the bomb radio, and enough of which were recovered to identify it. One version does this entirely from very small scraps that were blasted into parts of the clothes in the bomb suitcase, but in another version the nearly-intact manual, or at least a page of it, was recovered many miles away in Northumberland. How a page-sized part of a paper manual could have survived that explosion is unclear. Various conclusions seem to be drawn as to the exact identity of the radio, and sometimes it's white but then there's black plastic as well. In the end it is decided that it's part of a batch that was only supplied to Libya - another solid brick in the wall incriminating Libya. I'd like to figure out how well-founded the conclusion about the radio being the model it was said to be, and traceable to Libya, actually is. Sorry, some people might have to re-post some stuff. Here's the relevant part from the court judgement, which presumably summarises the salient points the prosecution relied on. Quote: Within many of these items there were found fragments of what appeared to be parts of the primary suitcase, and also fragments of what appeared to have been a radio cassette player. Other similar fragments were found in clothing which from their charred appearance were considered to have been contained in the primary suitcase. In addition, when examining a data plate which had been attached to AVE 4041, Mr Claiden recovered a piece of debris which appeared to be a small piece of circuit board. The number of fragments associated with the clothing in close contact with the explosion and the extent of the shattering of these fragments indicated that the explosive charge had in all probability been located within the radio. It was known at that time that in October 1988 the West German police had recovered a Toshiba radio cassette player which had been modified to form an improvised explosive device. Mr Feraday visited West Germany to examine this device, and ascertained that the fragments in his possession and in particular the piece of circuit board recovered by Mr Claiden did not originate from the same model. However, he considered that there was a sufficient similarity to make it worth investigating other models of Toshiba players. It was found that there were seven models in which the printed circuit board bore precisely the same characteristics as the fragments. Subsequently, when the blast damaged clothing was examined in detail there were found embedded in two different Slalom brand shirts, a Babygro, and a pair of tartan checked trousers, fragments of paper which on examination proved to be from an owner’s manual for a Toshiba RT-SF 16 BomBeat radio cassette player. All the other fragments thought to have originated from the radio containing the explosive were consistent with having come from an RT-SF 16. Other fragments of plastic associated with the radio were found in other items of clothing considered to have been in the primary suitcase, namely a white T-shirt, cream pyjamas, a herringbone jacket, and brown herringbone trousers, as well as in the four items in which the fragments of paper were found. The conclusion reached by the forensic scientists was that the nature of the fragments and their distribution left no doubt that the explosive charge was contained within the Toshiba radio, and we agree with that conclusion. Having regard to the presence of fragments of an RT-SF 16 owner’s manual, we also accept that it was that model of Toshiba radio that was involved. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

22nd January 2010, 04:51 AM	#3
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	I'm just copying over a couple of Buncrana's posts from the other thread. Originally Posted by Buncrana Well, manual intact or not, Feraday had reached completely different conclusions. Originally Posted by de Braeckeleer In a Letter titled “Lockerbie inquiries”, addressed to Detective Chief Superintendent Orr on 3rd February 1989, Feraday wrote the following: “I have compared some fragments of electronic circuit board recovered at Lockerbie (Longtown) and marked as item AG/145 with various radio/cassette tape recorders. I am completely satisfied that these fragments originate from a Toshiba brand radio stereo cassette recorder types RT-8016 or RT-8026. These fragments are shattered in a manner consistent with their intimate involvement in a violent explosion, and I therefore conclude that the bomb was concealed in the aforementioned Toshiba type portable radio/cassette player. The Toshiba RT-8016 and RT-8026 are visually similar and differ only in that the 8026 has a 3 band graphics equaliser on its front panel. Both sets measure 16 and a half inches by 5 and a half inches by 4 inches. The set used in the bomb possessed a white plastics case.” Toshiba RT-8016 - http://www.shizaudio.ru/audio/./data/media/19/Toshiba_RT-8016.jpg Toshiba RT-SF16 - http://www.shizaudio.ru/audio/./data...ba_RT-SF16.jpg Originally Posted by Buncrana And yet according to the Crown Office themselves, Quote: Also embedded within that same clothing fragment were pieces of a Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio cassette recorder owner's manual. Separately, another fragment of the owner's manual was found on 22 December 1988 in Morpeth, Northumberland; The fragments of the owner's manual recovered from the grey Slalom shirt by the forensic scientists were found to have come from parts of the same page of the same manual, close to one another." http://www.copfs.gov.uk/News/Releases/2010/01/08115853 So, are they saying that this was one and the same manual? Some of it was embedded by the initial explosion into the shirt collar, while some of it was found in Northumberland virtually, according to the Horton's, unscathed? Surely not. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

22nd January 2010, 06:54 AM	#5
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Sorry, I meant to move those posts I made yesterday into this thread earlier. Thanks Rolfe. I must admit, the Toshiba radio and the inconsistencies surrounding it's discovery and identification, is something I haven't looked at too much. Not because I'd never heard or thought of it's significance, but simply because of the sheer amount of reading, double-checking and learning process that is involved in some of the other aspects of the 103 bombing, investigation and trial. Are the scraps identified by Hayes/Feraday part of one and the same manual of a relatively undamaged page found in Northumberland? It would seem that that is the position of both the prosecution and the Crown Office themselves. The scorched, compacted pieces as shown in the prosecutions production PP8932 claimed to wrapped around the bomb, also allowed one full page to escape from the initial Toshiba bomb, out of the suitcase, exit the baggage container and make it's way 60miles and 31,000 feet almost unscathed. Surely, if not a piece of the same apparent manual, then why would it be presented in court? It was Libya who had (just like the timer fragment) made a specific order of these models of Toshiba, and therefore could not be a manual of UK model. So this sheet of the manual discovered by Mrs Horton, must've been of the model RT-SF16. However, as she herself claimed at Zeist, it had been severly damaged since she had found it, and it was now almost unrecognizable. Link to the Horton's story - http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/news/nort...9310-21640187/
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Last edited by Buncrana; 22nd January 2010 at 06:56 AM.

22nd January 2010, 08:01 AM	#6
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Oh, thanks, I hadn't seen that. So the Hortons were finding quite a bit of debris from the crash, because of the high wind - Christmas cards and so on. This sets the scene a bit better. And among this stuff was .... Quote: .... part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible. She later gave evidence at the trial of the Libyan man accused of the terrorist attack, but the evidence bag she was shown contained several pieces of paper. She said: “It was in one piece when I found it but in the bag there were several pieces and the name Toshiba was only just discernable by then. “When I found the piece of paper it was more or less intact, a bit tatty round the edges, but it definitely had Toshiba written across it.” "part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible." How on earth is that supposed to have survived that explosion? Supposedly being right beside the radio when it exploded. It's ridiculous. As others have said, radio-cassette players were common Christmas presents. It's perfectly possible there could have been others, boxed with their manuals, on that plane. Far enough away from the bomb to escape incineration and come down along with Christmas cards. Mrs. Horton doesn't know the exact model number the piece she found referred to. She only knows it said "Toshiba". (God, the things were everywhere at that time! "Hey, Tosh, got a Toshiba?" was one of the most irritating adverts of all time.) And it sounds as if "Toshiba" was about all that was left legible by the time of the trial. Suppose you have a bit of a random Toshiba manual that came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. And you want a particular Toshiba model, that was only supplied to Libya, to be implicated in this bombing. Maybe you do get a manual for the model in question and substitute a page of that for Mrs. Horton's page. Then you damage it a bit, partly to make it more plausible it was close to the explosion, and partly to obscure anything else she might have remembered about it that might lead to a suspicion it wasn't the same bit of paper. It's at least as plausible a story as the idea that the same manual simultaneously had a few small scraps blasted hard into some of the clothes that were around the bomb, and yet at the same time one page survived "almost intact" to be blown over 60 miles in a 90mph gale, and come down just "a bit tatty round the edges". Never mind how the fibreglass timer fragment couldn't have survived the explosion, how did a sheet of paper pull off that trick? Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

22nd January 2010, 08:12 AM	#7
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Buncrana .... the sheer amount of reading, double-checking and learning process that is involved in some of the other aspects of the 103 bombing, investigation and trial. Indeed, that is an important point. Consider the disadvantage Megrahi was under. He didn't just have a team of prosecution lawyers ranges against him, he had a huge investigation effort - Scottish and English and FBI and everything - all dedicated to constructing a case against him. This happens quite a lot. The police get an idea into their heads and run with it.They work with the prosecution to try to prove the case in court. The defence team have to make them prove it, or else the case falls. Theoretically. The defence team aren't just expected to be legal defence, they pretty much have to be their own detectives to try to find out how the police have got it wrong. Sometimes, though, this does lead to a miscarriage of justice. This was a particularly hard one, because of the sheer complexity and amount of evidence to make sense of. Also, it's far harder to figure things out if the investigators are falsifying evidence, as might have been the case. Did Megrahi's defence team have a realistic chance of figuring out the flaws in the prosecution, in the time available? I don't think so. I think they concentrated on the most obvious things, like the Gauci identification, and on trying to make the prosecution prove their case rather than on explaining what Megrahi was really up to with that coded passport that day. Nobody really predicted the Internet would give many people who are just interested the chance to look in detail at the evidence, at their leisure, and chew over the snags. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

21st January 2010, 05:35 PM	#2
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	I've been slow to come around on the radio itself issue. This thread would be a good spot to to discuss the radio model and what it means for the case. On the white plastic I had this jotted down Quote: AG/145 – IED fragment A piece of circuit board, pivotal to establishing the model of radio used for the bomb, found inside AG/117. The defense raised some questions to Allan Feraday about how it could deflect there naturally. Feraday on mis-diagnosing the radio case color (finally decided as black): “I thought we'd probably got a white case, because I'd got white fragments with that AG/145 fragment.” AG/117 is a burnt information plate riveted to the outside of cargo container AVE4041. There's some controversy as well on how these fragments would get inside there. And then they're the wrong colored plastic? Very confusing... I'll come back later.

22nd January 2010, 05:20 AM	#4
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	According to the court judgement, the bits of radio manual used to make the identification were small scraps recovered from four different items of cloth found on the ground. The paper seemed to have been blasted into the fabric by the explosion. This is just about credible, assuming the scraps were propelled into the cloth by something hard, which also shielded them as they moved at great speed away from the centre of the explosion. What is less credible is that enough remained to determine exactly which model of radio the manual referred to, given the amount of standard, repeated text on most of these things. However, Mrs. Horton's find is different. She said she handed in a fairly substantial piece of paper to the police, either the intact manual or an intact page (possibly the cover?). She found this in her garden, the day after the crash. Her gripe was that at the time of the trial she was asked to confirm the identity of that exhibit, and she believed it had been tampered with - she said it was damaged and burned, which it hadn't been when she picked it up. The police line was that it had been damaged during forensic testing. This is weird. First, while it's just conceivable that small scraps might have survived embedded in the cloth, as described, the chances of the intact manual or even an intact page surviving that explosion are lower than the proverbial snowball in hell. Second, if there were four separate punched-out scraps recovered, how exactly could the manual or even a page of it be recovered virtually intact? Caustic Logic made an interesting suggestion. Suppose Mrs. Horton picked up some random piece of litter from her garden 60 or 70 miles away. Maybe it was a manual for a radio or something like that, they're not exactly uncommon. Maybe it was something that came down from PA103, or maybe not. But it can't have been something that was inches from that explosion! She didn't photocopy it, did she even take a note of what was written on it? She just handed it in. Is it possible that during the investigation a page of the manual the authorities wanted it to be was substituted for whatever she handed in? And singed a bit to make it look as if it had indeed been near the explosion? I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual. I'm also intrigued by the comment that the compacted fragments found in the shirt (five leaves compacted together) came from the same page. How could that happen? I'd have assumed these leaves would have been consecutive pages. Did the hard object flying off the explosion fold and corrugate one page then? It's all very peculiar. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

23rd January 2010, 03:11 AM	#8
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Okay, on the radio model, the first I heard of a significance vis-a-vis guilt was from R. Marquise: Quote: It was a senior Libyan official who had ordered the majority of all the Toshiba radios similar to that which carried the bomb. This official also talked in 1986 about putting a bag on a British or American flight from Malta. Ask why? http://www.victimsofpanamflight103.org/node/99 The second part is the clue I need to name the official. The source for that is Giaka. As I just typed up elsewhere, as part of Giaka's qualifications as star witness: Quote: - Long-standing friendship with Said Rashid, head of the operations section, JSO (also involved, allegedly, in timer acquisition and other wickedness) ... – Was asked by Said Rashid, in 1986, to write a report on whether a bomb cold be put on a British plane - had someone else look, who said yeah so he wrote the report saying so. The upper levels mulled the idea over... - Turned said report in via his boss, “Lockerbie bomber” Megrahi, who definitely saw it. Megrahi later mentioned the idea back to Giaka and said “don’t rush things.” mostly I got that info from the Opinion of the Court. Okay, so it was Said Rashid, head of JSO operations section, who made some major order for the RT-SF16 model, to make sure people would guess it was probably theirs if they found one, then packed it with the highly unique identifiable timers he bought, apparently way too little explosive, and had it set to all blow up over land and leave the clues everywhere? Does anyone happen to know what basis Mr. Marquise might have for claiming the JSO cornered the market on that model? Feraday? ETA: Quote: Lord Boyd dealt with each piece of evidence, as follows: _. Toshiba radio cassette fragment: "evidence was obtained from Toshiba [by DERA's Alan Feraday] which showed that during October 1988 20,000 black Toshiba RT-SF 16 radio cassettes, the type used in the Pan Am bomb, were shipped to Libya. Of the total world-wide sales of that model 76% were sold to the General Electric Company's subsidiary in Libya, whose chairman was Said Rashid.[information added]" http://intergritynews.wetpaint.com/p...Talk+Show+Host
	Last edited by Caustic Logic; 23rd January 2010 at 04:47 AM.

24th January 2010, 05:55 PM	#9
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Originally Posted by Rolfe Oh, thanks, I hadn't seen that. So the Hortons were finding quite a bit of debris from the crash, because of the high wind - Christmas cards and so on. This sets the scene a bit better. And among this stuff was .... "part of a radio cassette manual with the word Toshiba clearly visible." How on earth is that supposed to have survived that explosion? Supposedly being right beside the radio when it exploded. It's ridiculous. As others have said, radio-cassette players were common Christmas presents. It's perfectly possible there could have been others, boxed with their manuals, on that plane. Far enough away from the bomb to escape incineration and come down along with Christmas cards. Mrs. Horton doesn't know the exact model number the piece she found referred to. She only knows it said "Toshiba". (God, the things were everywhere at that time! "Hey, Tosh, got a Toshiba?" was one of the most irritating adverts of all time.) And it sounds as if "Toshiba" was about all that was left legible by the time of the trial. Suppose you have a bit of a random Toshiba manual that came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. And you want a particular Toshiba model, that was only supplied to Libya, to be implicated in this bombing. Maybe you do get a manual for the model in question and substitute a page of that for Mrs. Horton's page. Then you damage it a bit, partly to make it more plausible it was close to the explosion, and partly to obscure anything else she might have remembered about it that might lead to a suspicion it wasn't the same bit of paper. It's at least as plausible a story as the idea that the same manual simultaneously had a few small scraps blasted hard into some of the clothes that were around the bomb, and yet at the same time one page survived "almost intact" to be blown over 60 miles in a 90mph gale, and come down just "a bit tatty round the edges". Never mind how the fibreglass timer fragment couldn't have survived the explosion, how did a sheet of paper pull off that trick? Rolfe. Well, quite. According the recent tests carried out by Wyatt, not only was the survival of the fragment "unbelievable", but all trace of the timer and circuit board was "obliterated", and yet we have the Crown themselves supporting the Hayes/Feraday theory that the page found by the Horton's was part of the very same Toshiba manual contained around the bomb. I agree with your suggestion about the manual, and it's plausible given the other anomalies surrounding the identification of the fragment and indeed the operation and housing of the bomb. However, as you rightly point out, Toshiba radio cassettes were widely used during the 80's. So the page found by the Horton's could quite easily have been an innocent radio which had been carried by one of the passengers or crew. Surely, even the bungling Hayes/Feraday combo wouldn't have us believe that it came from the original device, when found 'almost intact' by the Horton's, together with the hope they wouldn't have remembered some of the other details noted aside from the make Toshiba? If however, it was part of the housing of the actual bomb, and as impalusible as it seems, did somehow become blown out with the resulting explosion, and landed in the Horton's garden with the other debris they recovered. However, to the horror of the FBI, MI6 AND BKA, it showed a particular model (ie. Bombeat 453, as found by the BKA in Neuss) which they definitely did not want associated with the bombing, then that would also be good reason to have it damaged beyond recognition, and used as evidence that this was part of the bomb and was assigned to the Toshiba models apperently specifically ordered by Libya. Both are possible I suppose, and I am thinking aloud here, but your scenario is certainly more plausible. As it is, here is the photo (often wrongly referred to as the fragment of timer) of the initial chip, given reference AG145 -
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Last edited by Buncrana; 24th January 2010 at 05:58 PM.

25th January 2010, 04:34 AM	#10
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Buncrana If however, it was part of the housing of the actual bomb, and as impalusible as it seems, did somehow become blown out with the resulting explosion, and landed in the Horton's garden with the other debris they recovered. However, to the horror of the FBI, MI6 AND BKA, it showed a particular model (ie. Bombeat 453, as found by the BKA in Neuss) which they definitely did not want associated with the bombing, then that would also be good reason to have it damaged beyond recognition, and used as evidence that this was part of the bomb and was assigned to the Toshiba models apperently specifically ordered by Libya. I just can't swallow it. I'm prepared to consider that the timer fragment might have survived, despite Wyatt's tests, and even that the few, small scraps of manual might also have survived, blasted into pieces of cloth. I don't know enough about explosives to declare these to be impossible. However, the idea that a complete page of the manual could survive, pretty much intact, and blowing free on the wind? Pull the other one! This becomes even more incredible when you consider these scraps that were blasted into the cloth. How did one page survive intact while other pages were mutilated to that extent? It's ridiculous. I'm also very dubious that the exact model of radio could be deduced solely from the scraps recovered from the cloth, even if they were entirely genuine finds. Altogether, I find identification evidence which relies on the manual to be highly suspect. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

26th January 2010, 05:08 AM	#11
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Originally Posted by Rolfe I just can't swallow it. I'm prepared to consider that the timer fragment might have survived, despite Wyatt's tests, and even that the few, small scraps of manual might also have survived, blasted into pieces of cloth. I don't know enough about explosives to declare these to be impossible. However, the idea that a complete page of the manual could survive, pretty much intact, and blowing free on the wind? Pull the other one! This becomes even more incredible when you consider these scraps that were blasted into the cloth. How did one page survive intact while other pages were mutilated to that extent? It's ridiculous. I'm also very dubious that the exact model of radio could be deduced solely from the scraps recovered from the cloth, even if they were entirely genuine finds. Altogether, I find identification evidence which relies on the manual to be highly suspect. Rolfe. I agree, the discovery by the Horton's quite simply could not possibly have been a page from the same manual we're led to believe concealed the bomb. It's simply inconceivable. This an aspect that I'm astounded was not made more of by Megrahi's defense during the trial. Even accepting that it was from the page found by the Horton's, (as the court seemingly did!) why would such evidence be subjected to such 'tests' resulting in it being so dramatically changed from it's original state and then presented to a witness for them to confirm that this was their discovery? I can understand and appreciate some tests and an evaluation of particular items of evidence found, but to the extent that the evidence then becomes altered beyond recognition? The page, and the claims made about it becoming altered due to the scientific and/or explosive testing, parallels the claims made by Bollier re:the fragment.
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Last edited by Buncrana; 26th January 2010 at 05:12 AM.

26th January 2010, 09:54 AM	#12
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Altered by testing or not, I simply can't see how an item of that description could have survived. I note the actual judgement only mentions the scraps found in the cloth, not the Horton page. I don't know if anything can be deduced from that. I do know Megrahi's defence missed quite a few tricks though, by accident or design. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

26th January 2010, 05:25 PM	#13
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Great discussion! Sorry I haven't been involved more, but I like where you guys are taking it. If you have the transcripts handy, Feraday is quizzed about the Horton page. If I read it right, he says that page was received at RARDE May 11 1989. Isn't that the day before those other bits of manual were found inside PI/995? Sorry, that's Day 18. Do a word search for "HIBA" with quotes.

30th January 2010, 04:51 AM	#14
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Some interesting stuff put together here http://lockerbiedivide.blogspot.com/...rs-manual.html What's up with the winning streak from mid-May to June 1? It starts with PT/2, found in clothes perchance the day after they ingested (at request I'd guess) the previously known manual fragment PK/689 3hundred whatever grams of semtex, dude. May 16, I guess that's the exam of that one. In the meantime tho, on May 12, Hayes find PT/2 inside clothing, perfectly matching their control manual PT/1. Another found on May 18, 22, and June 1, each time in blast-damaged clothing later traced to Malta. The latter two were from the curiously symbolic blue babygro. There's probably others, but that's a partial list.

30th January 2010, 08:29 AM	#15
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Okay, I've managed to track down the exact details of the fragments of the Toshiba Manual presented at Zeist. The portion(s) extracted by Hayes embedded in the Slalom shirt collar (PP 8932/PI 995) and that of Mrs Horton, found in her garden on 22 December. Originally Posted by Rolfe According to the court judgement, the bits of radio manual used to make the identification were small scraps recovered from four different items of cloth found on the ground. The paper seemed to have been blasted into the fabric by the explosion. This is just about credible, assuming the scraps were propelled into the cloth by something hard, which also shielded them as they moved at great speed away from the centre of the explosion. What is less credible is that enough remained to determine exactly which model of radio the manual referred to, given the amount of standard, repeated text on most of these things. So far I've only managed to find 3 references to the Manual. The two productions Hayes and Mrs Horton's discoveries, and another extracted by Hayes from the Blue Babygrow determined to be in the primary suitcase. Originally Posted by Rolfe However, Mrs. Horton's find is different. She said she handed in a fairly substantial piece of paper to the police, either the intact manual or an intact page (possibly the cover?). She found this in her garden, the day after the crash. Her gripe was that at the time of the trial she was asked to confirm the identity of that exhibit, and she believed it had been tampered with - she said it was damaged and burned, which it hadn't been when she picked it up. The police line was that it had been damaged during forensic testing. This is weird. First, while it's just conceivable that small scraps might have survived embedded in the cloth, as described, the chances of the intact manual or even an intact page surviving that explosion are lower than the proverbial snowball in hell. Second, if there were four separate punched-out scraps recovered, how exactly could the manual or even a page of it be recovered virtually intact? Caustic Logic made an interesting suggestion. Suppose Mrs. Horton picked up some random piece of litter from her garden 60 or 70 miles away. Maybe it was a manual for a radio or something like that, they're not exactly uncommon. Maybe it was something that came down from PA103, or maybe not. But it can't have been something that was inches from that explosion! She didn't photocopy it, did she even take a note of what was written on it? She just handed it in. Mrs Horton's full testimony at Zeist: Originally Posted by Zeist Transcripts (Day 06, pp962) 23 Q Mrs. Horton, what is your full name? 24 A Gwendoline. 25 Q And what's your address? 963 1 A xxxxxxxxx xxxx, xxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxx, 2 Northumberland. 3 Q And do you live there with your husband, 4 Robert? 5 A Robert Geoffrey, yes. 6 Q Do you remember coming to learn that 7 there had been a crash of an aeroplane in the Lockerbie 8 area on the 21st of December 1988? 9 A Yes. 10 Q When did you first learn of that? 11 A I think, if I remember rightly, we heard 12 it on the news that night. And then the following 13 morning a neighbour confirmed that this had happened. 14 Q On that following day, did you notice 15 something around the area where you lived? 16 A We did. 17 Q What did you notice? 18 A Just what we thought was just debris, 19 possibly from a passing car or something. 20 Q Yes. 21 A Until we were aware that there was also 22 a lot of debris in the fields surrounding our house. 23 Yes. 24 Q And was there a suggestion made to you 25 as to where that debris might have come from? 964 1 A Yes. Our neighbour, who had come up for 2 a coffee, said it was -- she understood it was from the 3 plane that had crashed, and that all the local farmers 4 were collecting it in the fields. 5 Q So having learned that, what did you 6 yourself and your husband do? 7 A We went out with the specific idea of 8 collecting this stuff, because this neighbour had said 9 to hand it in to the police. So we went out to collect 10 what we could. 11 Q And did you hand material in to the 12 police on that day? 13 A I can't remember if it was that day or 14 the following day. 15 Q How many times did you hand material in 16 to the police? 17 A Twice. 18 Q And how did you carry this stuff once 19 you'd gathered it? 20 A Just in a carrier bag, I think, at the 21 time. 22 Q I would like to ask you about one item 23 in particular. Do you remember coming upon a document 24 of some sort that made reference to a radio cassette 25 player? 965 1 A Yes, I do. 2 Q Can you describe what that item was 3 like? 4 A Well, from what I remember, it was 5 possibly about -- I know I'm supposed to say it. About 6 that kind of size, you know, about possibly eight by 7 eight, or something like that, inches. 8 Q Could you see writing on it? 9 A I could see writing, because I remarked 10 to my husband, "This appears to be from a cassette 11 player," or something like that. I do remember it was 12 something electrical. 13 Q And did you hand that item in to the 14 police? 15 A Yes, that went into the bag as well. 16 Q Right. I wonder if you would look, 17 please, at Label 24. You'll see there is a bag which 18 contains items there. Do you recognise anything? 19 A Well, not in its present state. I'm 20 sure when I handed it in, it was in one piece. 21 Q Yes. 22 A Yes. 23 Q Perhaps -- I wonder if it could be put 24 on the document imager, to see if we can see it. You 25 can see within the police plastic bag, I think as 966 1 you've described, more than one piece of a document. 2 And you can at least see writing on it? 3 A Yes. 4 Q Do I understand you to say that when you 5 handed it in, it was in one piece? 6 A It was in one piece, sir. I am 7 practically sure of that, yes. 8 Q But apart from that, you recognise the 9 item? 10 A Yes. Uh-huh. 11 Q Whereabouts did you find that item? 12 A In the fields -- we are a private house 13 on the roadside. In the field opposite, they are known 14 as the glebe fields, and it was in the bottom glebe 15 field, down beside the burn, down in the bottom. In 16 the dean. 17 Q Thank you very much. 18 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Taylor. 19 MR. TAYLOR: If Your Lordship could give me 20 one moment, please. 21 My Lord, I have no questions for the witness. 22 Thank you. 23 LORD SUTHERLAND: Mr. Macleod. 24 MR. MACLEOD: I have no questions, My Lord. 25 LORD SUTHERLAND: Thank you, Mrs. Horton. You 967 1 are free to go. Thank you for coming. 2 THE WITNESS: Thank you. So, Mrs Horton finally concedes, under some protest and clearly perplexed, that she does "recognise the Item? yes, uh-huh." Quote: Is it possible that during the investigation a page of the manual the authorities wanted it to be was substituted for whatever she handed in? And singed a bit to make it look as if it had indeed been near the explosion? Well, that does seem plausible, although why not just find it in another area where Hayes is investigating? Why take your plot outwith the confines of those intimately involved in the examining pieces? Do we require a corroborating source, and one outwith the primary investigators, or indeed better still, a member of the public who found something very similar many years ago could provide this corroboration? Quote: I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual. I'm also intrigued by the comment that the compacted fragments found in the shirt (five leaves compacted together) came from the same page. How could that happen? I'd have assumed these leaves would have been consecutive pages. Did the hard object flying off the explosion fold and corrugate one page then? It's all very peculiar. Rolfe. Some further details of how the Zeist court (and more recently the Crown Office) viewed the connection between Hayes extraction from the short collar and Mrs Horton's discovery in Nrthumberland. Originally Posted by Zeist Transcripts. Day 78 pp9385 16 A day or so after the destruction of the 17 aircraft, near her house in Longhorsley, Morpeth, in 18 Northumberland, Mrs. Gwendolyn Horton found Label 24, a 19 fragment of the owner's manual for a Toshiba RT-SF16 20 radio/cassette player. Day 6, page 966. 21 On 13 January 1989, in the course of a search 22 in Sector I, Mr. Gilchrist recovered Label 168, which 23 was known as PI 995, a fragment of grey Slalom shirt. 24 In the course of his examination of that, 25 Dr. Hayes extracted Label 26, which included another 9386 1 fragment from the owner's manual. 2 Label Number 24 -- that's the fragment found 3 by Mrs. Horton -- and Label Number 26 were found to 4 match the control sample owner's manual. And although 5 they do not fit precisely together, they come from the 6 same page and are close together. 7 Another fragment which most probably emanated 8 from the owner's manual was Label 374, which was 9 extracted from a piece of blue Babygro, Label 190. 10 Page 2518 and 3110. So, astoundingly, the Judges fully accept that Mrs Horton's find of an almost intact and recognisable page found about 60 miles east from Lockerbie, forms part of the same page of the manual that was extracted from a badly burned and damaged shirt collar found and logged by Gilchrist and McColm. Although, I'need to double-check the labels assigned to different photo's and evidence, I think the details and photo of the page of manual are on Caustic's post above and on the Lockerbie Divide site this morning.
Buncrana Critical Thinker Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 458	Last edited by Buncrana; 30th January 2010 at 08:40 AM.

30th January 2010, 05:37 PM	#16
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Buncrana So, astoundingly, the Judges fully accept that Mrs Horton's find of an almost intact and recognisable page found about 60 miles east from Lockerbie, forms part of the same page of the manual that was extracted from a badly burned and damaged shirt collar found and logged by Gilchrist and McColm. Although, I'need to double-check the labels assigned to different photo's and evidence, I think the details and photo of the page of manual are on Caustic's post above and on the Lockerbie Divide site this morning. Thanks for all that, Buncrana. That is Completely. Bloody. Insane. I've been prepared to believe it possible that a small piece of timer circuit board could have survived the "brisant explosion" by being blasted into fabric and blown rapidly away from the explosion. I've even been prepared to believe that a fragment or two of the paper manual might have been preserved in the same way, if a hard object had shielded them from the main blast. I call total argument from incredulity on the concept that a free sheet of paper could have survived that lot, to show up on the ground 60+ miles away. And double incredulity that the five-fold fragment in the collar came from the same sheet of paper as the free section. It's BARKING. Either this is a complete incompetent muddle, with items not in the bomb bag being erroneously identified as being in the bag - and frankly once you get into that where does it stop, is the whole thing a complete mistake and the bomb never was in the Samsonite suitcase at all, was Gauci's mystery shopper just an innocent Lockerbie victim and so on - or somebody has been manipulating the findings. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

30th January 2010, 05:39 PM	#17
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	And talking of the blue babygro, remember the mountain rescue squad swore they'd found it intact.... Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

30th January 2010, 06:01 PM	#18
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	I do think the statement about the two find being from the same page is some kind of confusion. The details of each don't support that. One is most of a page, the other small bits of several pages. Originally Posted by Rolfe I'd have thought that would have been shot down in court - that it would be obvious such a large piece couldn't survive. And indeed the court doesn't seem to have relied on it for identification. But then we have the Crown Office even NOW declaring that Mrs. Horton's page was indeed the same manual. Au contraire. It was the radio itself that yilded no specific clues. AG/145 was not a fragment but a lump of 10 diff materias including that famous CB photo (the largest piece). And this itself just narrowed the models down to 7 possibilities, IIRC. Opinion of the Court, para 9 Quote: All the other fragments thought to have originated from the radio containing the explosive were consistent with having come from an RT-SF 16. [...] Having regard to the presence of fragments of an RT-SF 16 owner’s manual, we also accept that it was that model of Toshiba radio that was involved. And then of course this "clearly implicates Libya." If it made more sense, then they'd have to dismiss it as not clear enough to become cartoonishly obvious clue against Libya #473. In retrospect they should have left the exact model uncertain. Dumbasses. Sorry, I just can't help it sometimes.

30th January 2010, 06:26 PM	#19
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Caustic Logic I do think the statement about the two find being from the same page is some kind of confusion. The details of each don't support that. One is most of a page, the other small bits of several pages. Yes, that's what I thought. But then we have several statements that the five small pieces were all from a single page. Except that seems close to impossible to me. Can you locate the actual quotes? I'm going to bed. I have a tennis match to watch at 8 o'clock in the morning! Originally Posted by Caustic Logic Au contraire. It was the radio itself that yilded no specific clues. AG/145 was not a fragment but a lump of 10 diff materias including that famous CB photo (the largest piece). And this itself just narrowed the models down to 7 possibilities, IIRC. Opinion of the Court, para 9 Indeedy. But the opinion of the court only lists four fragments found embedded in clothes as regards the manual fragments, not the Horton piece. So I wonder whether the story is that the manual could be identified from the small fragments teased out of the cloth, or if the Horton page was pivotal to the identification? Then again, was it white or was it black? If the entire tale that the radio was of a model which was (almost?) exclusively sold to Libya is based on the Horton fragment, then sorry, I call BS. I cannot possibly wrap my brain round the idea that that page survived a bang made by 450g Semtex only inches away. This is far more pivotal than questioning the plausibilily that the timer fragment might have survived. Either some other passenger on that plane was coincidentally carrying a manual for one of the Libyan batch of radios, or that bloody thing is a plant. A much more obvious plant than the timer fragment. Let's examine where that page might have come from if the whole story is legit - because it sure as hell didn't come from the bomb suitcase. Maybe someone in Northumberland had one of the Libyan batch of radios, and threw away the manual, and a page just happened to get mixed in wth the Lockerbie debris. Yeah, right. Maybe another passenger on the plane was carrying a manual for one of the Libyan batch of radios, and it fell free during the crash and a page came down in Northumberland with the Christmas cards. Yes, maybe. But if so, WHERE WAS THE RADIO? It's unlikely a manual on its own would be in someone's luggage, it would have been carried with the radio itself, probably wrapped as a gift. If something like that came apart to the point where the manual was blowing free, the radio would be in bits on the ground. Is it possible that might have been unremarked by the investigators? I'm seriously calling plant on this, unless someone can come up with a more plausible explanation. I think the Hortons picked up a page of a Toshiba manual all right, either from the crashed plane or just local litter, but it was nothing to do with Libya. Or the IED. Later, this was substituted with a page of a manual relating to the Libya-only model, and beat up a bit so that Mrs. Horton wouldn't be able to be certain it wasn't the same thing. Sure, there could have been other ways of getting that evidence in. But if you're a bent scientist combing the evidence, and you're aware of the page picked up in Northunberland, what better way to get your evidence in but to tie it to a real find by a real person who is perfectly on the level? It's Hayes again, of course. I'm beginning to realise the suspect PI995 isn't the only bit of shenenigans he might be associated with. What else came up (apparently) in that fortninght in May when he was finding these great clues? Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012. Last edited by Rolfe; 30th January 2010 at 06:39 PM.

31st January 2010, 12:36 AM	#20
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Originally Posted by Rolfe Indeedy. But the opinion of the court only lists four fragments found embedded in clothes as regards the manual fragments, not the Horton piece. So I wonder whether the story is that the manual could be identified from the small fragments teased out of the cloth, or if the Horton page was pivotal to the identification? True - somehow that picture (btw sorry it was so big) just sticks as "the manual" and I'm seeing them nodding their wigs on seeing it. THAT they can grasp... But as they say: Quote: Subsequently, when the blast damaged clothing was examined in detail there were found embedded in two different Slalom brand shirts, a Babygro, and a pair of tartan checked trousers, fragments of paper which on examination proved to be from an owner’s manual for a Toshiba RT-SF 16 BomBeat radio cassette player. Specifically not mentioning the most clear fragment among them? A farking page with a few tears in it? And it's the page that says the model number and all, plain as day? Hmmm... apparently it didn't prove a strong contra-indication of the model, but somehow... (by being fake as all get out?) it's not AS convincing as the less telling parts that were lightly burnt and wadded up in the Maltese clothes. So I still think the whole manual thing was faked and hard to believe. This page is just the icing on the cake of stupid. The long middle of your post is too good to add much to. My thoughts but better. This thing screams plant. The actual radio bits seem borderline plausible, but the paper manual, would you believe it? No, sir. No I wouldn't. From what Buncrana shared, regarding debris across all the area, I'm presuming a manual page came from the plane. It was a PAGE, which means, not primary suitcase. Probably NOT RT-SF16, not neccessarily even a radio. Mrs. Horton remembered Toshiba. She was on record. They love the vox populi touch for public cases - real people who recall OOPS not quite the same thing, but... This seems a compromise between "intact page found" and "damaged by farking bomb" - problem is, explicitly, the claim is "intact page damaged by bomb, subsequently damaged in forensics, examined as if all damage was from the bomb." It really does look like no damage was added, a bomb's worth of tearing, or even a bit less. Quote: Sure, there could have been other ways of getting that evidence in. But if you're a bent scientist combing the evidence, and you're aware of the page picked up in Northunberland, what better way to get your evidence in but to tie it to a real find by a real person who is perfectly on the level? It's Hayes again, of course. I'm beginning to realise the suspect PI995 isn't the only bit of shenenigans he might be associated with. What else came up (apparently) in that fortninght in May when he was finding these great clues? Well, that's a good question. But it was a fruitful time there. This page we're on about was taken in at RARDE May 11, sent for "non-destructive" finger print testing, recieved back and examed by Dr. Hayes in the state we see May 16. How is "non-destructive" fp test different from a normal one, does anyone know? Is it an Orwellian difference? Quote: I'm seriously calling plant on this, unless someone can come up with a more plausible explanation. Uh, uh... This issue was already decided unanimously by three judges yadda yadda?
	Last edited by Caustic Logic; 31st January 2010 at 12:37 AM.

31st January 2010, 12:52 AM	#21
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Originally Posted by Rolfe But then we have several statements that the five small pieces were all from a single page. Except that seems close to impossible to me. Can you locate the actual quotes? I'm going to bed. I have a tennis match to watch at 8 o'clock in the morning! Certainly, I've got a little more of a run at it now. day 20 3099- Quote: "The five fragments are all of approximately the same size, 20 millimetres by 15 millimetres, and outline shape as if generated by a single high speed fragment passing through a paper booklet. Four of the sheets bear printed black lettering on both surfaces whilst the fifth sheet is devoid of any printing on either surface." "The two sides of all five fragments are shown in photographs 274 and 275. The sequence of the order of the layering of these sheets was in the order of (1) to (5) as depicted in these two photographs. A detailed comparison of the printed characters on sides A and B of the four printed sheets demonstrates a perfect sequential match with the back-to-back areas of pages 3 to 10 (inclusive) of the control sample of the Toshiba RT-SF16 owner's manual (item PT/1)." Six sheets total for the booklet (three folded and stapled) and twelve sides so this sound like every page but the front or back cover. Other cover present as blank sheet? Seems unsure which. And you get one guess what that fragment was that tore em out! Do Libyan manual bits surviving get more plausible if they're rushed off by bits of Libyan timer that survived? Can they include anything in this mix that's not Libyan?

31st January 2010, 06:16 PM	#22
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Caustic Logic Six sheets total for the booklet (three folded and stapled) and twelve sides so this sound like every page but the front or back cover. Other cover present as blank sheet? Seems unsure which. And you get one guess what that fragment was that tore em out! Do Libyan manual bits surviving get more plausible if they're rushed off by bits of Libyan timer that survived? Can they include anything in this mix that's not Libyan? This makes better sense than some of the other versions I've read. Actually, a lot of these manuals are many-folded blocks of paper made from a single large sheet with instructions in several languages. But it sounds as if this one wasn't like that, and six pages (probably three pages folded and stapled) is probably what they're describing. So, the front cover flies free and more or less unpunctured, to be picked up in Northumberland, while the remaining five sheets are subjected to multiple punched-out holes caused by small hard objects being propelled against the manual. (I think it's the back cover that's blank.) Does this sound likely to you? It's only possible if the manual has been packed with the front cover open, which isn't all that likely to start with. And even if that had been the case, the chances of that sheet of paper surviving make the proverbial snowball in hell look like a good bet. However, I don't think it was the timer fragment that was supposed to have preserved the bit in the shirt collar - I seem to remember they were in separate holes in the cloth - according to Hayes, that is. Actually, I'm still wondering what the intact comparison manuals looked like for this radio - there's supposed to be a photo somewhere but I don't understand the court numbering reference system used in a lot of the posts. All the references to "same page" make me wonder if it might indeed have been one of these many-folded one-sheet things. Which would make the detaching of the front cover even more implausible. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

31st January 2010, 09:48 PM	#23
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	extracts of Feradays testimony Day 18 about the identification of the Toshiba radio: Originally Posted by Allen Feraday Trial evidence (reformatted, numers in [brackets] are the original page numbers from where this transcript was copied, all emphasis is mine) [Feraday is reading from production 181, this is the report by RARDE prepared by Feraday from his own notes and those of Hayes (who by the time this report was written had left RARDE), which both men signed off on.] A "Consequently a visit was made to the Toshiba UK headquarters at Camberley, Surrey on the 2nd of February 1989 in an attempt to identify the Lockerbie fragments. Full cooperation was received from the Toshiba Company in supplying the service data sheets for all of their present and past portable radios and cassette players. After a search of over 130 different data sheets, the particular small diamond-shaped tracking pattern noted upon one of the [3024] Lockerbie circuit board fragments was tentatively identified as originating from a Toshiba brand portable radio/cassette player, model number RT-8016. A detailed examination of an unserviceable RT-8016 radio provided by the Toshiba Company that same day, the 2nd of February 1989, confirmed this similarity. "Subsequently a visit was made to the headquarters of the Toshiba company in Japan, between 23rd of April 1989 and the 1st of May 1989, where it was learned that similar circuit boards to that noted in the model RT-8016 were in fact installed into seven different models of portable radio/cassette players manufactured by the Toshiba Company or assembled by their subsidiaries or agents. These seven models were all of a similar external appearance with only some minor cosmetic, voltage, and/or wavelength differences. These seven models were identified as follows: "A, RT-8016, manufactured in Japan. "B, RT-8026, manufactured in Japan. "C, RT-SF16 BomBeat manufactured in Japan. "D, RT-SF26, manufactured in Japan. "E, RT-SF12(R), "Sugar," manufactured in Japan. "F, ARS-8016 "Daewoo" assembled in South [3025] Korea. "G, RT-SF16 Videocon Hi-Beat assembled in India. "Subsequently, control samples of each of these different models were obtained, with the exception of the models RT-8026 and RT-SF26, which were stated to be out of production and unobtainable. Both of these two absent models were different from the other five models in that they possessed a graphics equaliser panel mounted upon the front of the set and employed an additional graphics equaliser circuit board internally. The master negatives of this separate graphics equaliser circuit board panel were subsequently obtained from the Toshiba headquarters in Japan." Q: Can we stop there just for a second, again, Mr. Feraday. Do we understand from what you've read to us that your first view on the matter was that the fragment AG/145 might have come from a printed circuit board such as would be found in a Toshiba radio/cassette player, model number RT-8016? A: That's correct, sir, yes. Q: You made further inquiries and learned that similar circuit boards were included in a number of models, which included the RT-8016? [3026] A: That's correct, sir, yes. Q: Now, as far as you understood matters at that stage, was the circuit board used in the models you've read to us also used in the model such as you saw in West Germany? A: It was not so, no. Q: I see. Would you look for me at Label 330, please. And can you tell me what you have in front of you now, Mr. Feraday? A: It is the box and a cassette radio, model RT-F453D, made by Toshiba. Q: Now, that model, RT-453D, is that the same type as you saw in West Germany? A: It is, sir, yes. Q: And therefore the same as we saw in the photographs a moment ago? A: That's correct, sir, yes. Q: Does it also have a name within its title? A: Yes, it has the name "BomBeat" in its title. Q: I see. And do we see that both on the box and on the player itself? A: We do indeed. It's under the top [3027] left-hand side, where it says "Toshiba" on the radio, and it's also on the front of the box. Q: How is that spelt, please, Mr. Feraday? A: It's B-O-M-B-E-A-T. Q: I see. And you would see that on the radio/cassette player that you had the opportunity of examining in West Germany? A: That's correct, yes, sir. Q: And from what you've just told us, in reading your report, one of the models which contained a similar printed circuit board to the model RT-8016 also contained the word "BomBeat" in its title? A: That's correct, sir, yes, the one that I've marked "C," RT-SF16. Q: But should we be clear in understanding that the RT-SF16 BomBeat has a different printed circuit board in it from the RT-F453? A: That's correct. It has the circuit board in the -- RT-SF16 BomBeat, the one that I saw in Japan, it has a circuit board that is similar to the Lockerbie fragment. Q: Yes. A: It also has two speakers, not one speaker. Q: So there is a visual difference as well? [3028] A: It physically looks similar to the 8016. Q: So visually, there are differences between the two which share the common name "BomBeat"? A: That's correct, sir, yes. Last week of April 1989, 5 months prior to the MST-13 fragment surfacing, a visit to Toshiba in Japan narrows down the radio type used to a maximum of 7 possibles. Invstigators looked at Khreesats bomb with the icecube timer recovered by the initial Autumn Leaves raid, they note it's radio was called "BomBeat". One radio the RT-SF16 was also called "BomBeat" although a different style. Originally Posted by Feraday evidence Q: Can we move on to page 107 of your report, where you left off. A: Yes, sir. Q: And you are beginning there, I think, to give us an explanation about some explosively damaged paper fragments. And again this is still by way of introduction. A: Yes, sir. Q: Could you read that passage to us. A: Yes, sir. "On the 30th of June 1989, some explosively damaged paper fragments, which bore indications that they originated from the "owner's instruction manual" for a "Toshiba RT-SF16" radio/cassette player, were received at this laboratory, thus conclusively establishing which of the seven models of the Toshiba radio had been employed in the Lockerbie bomb. Consequently the Toshiba model RT-SF16 radio/cassette [3029] player has been used as the control sample for comparison purposes with the recovered Lockerbie fragments as detailed below. It has been noted that each control sample of Toshiba radio was packed inside a cardboard transit box complete with a black plastics electrical mains lead. Although many fragments of both charred cardboard and burnt soft plastics have been recovered from the Lockerbie debris, none of these fragments can be conclusively established to have originated from a Toshiba radio or its packing." 30th June the manual fragments point to the "BomBeat" model. Only this is a mistake. Originally Posted by Feraday evidence Q: You've just read to us from the introduction the view that this piece of paper fragment was received on the 30th of June of 1989? A: Yes, sir. Q: Is that the correct date? A: It is not, I'm afraid. It's a mistake that I made when I wrote the reports. And I think the correct date is the 11th of May 1989. And the error arises on my part because sometimes items would come and go to the laboratory several times. They would be booked in and out several times. Q: I wonder if we can just look at that and see, perhaps, an example that will explain what you are meaning. Would you look for me at Production No. 1497; we'll see it on the screen. Page 61. Thank you. And do you see there a piece of paper which you would recognise as an examination note prepared by [3031] your colleague Dr. Hayes? A: Yes, sir. Q: And do we see that it deals with the piece of paper that we've just been speaking about? A: That's correct, yes, sir. It deals with PK/689. Originally Posted by Ambrosia [PK/689 is a photo of a piece of the front page of the RT-SF16 manual, you can see this in the photo CL linked in an above post] Q: Yes. And the examination bears the date 16th May 1989? A: That's correct, sir, yes. Originally Posted by Ambrosia 16th May 1989 is the day after Hayes claimed examination of the grey shirt containing MST-13 fragment(PI/995), this is from page 57 of Hayes report, which is the first page in the report after the renumbered, "inserted" section dealing with PI/995. This evidence is being given late on Day 18, 2 days after Hayes testimony, which is presumably still fresh in the minds of the judges at this time Q: Now, I am interested in looking at the information above the printed word "Examination." Do we see that the first information is "Received at RARDE (Superintendent Henderson)"? A: Yes, sir. Q: And then there's a date given? A: Yes, sir. Q: Is it the 11th of May 1989? A: That's correct, sir, yes. Q: Then underneath that, it says: "Passed to DC Jordan on same date for non-destructive" -- is that "fingerprints"? A: "Fingerprints," I think that says. Q: Do you know who DC Jordan is? A: There were, in fact, DC Jordan both in the metropolitan police, who I suspect that's who that [3032] is. And there happens to also, I think, to be one in the Lockerbie team. But I suspect that this one is the one from Scotland Yard, because Scotland Yard were tasked to do the fingerprints for the Lockerbie inquiry. Q: I see. And was it common to give items to other agencies for inquiries to be carried out? A: Was it common, did you say? Q: Yes. A: Not common, no. It happened in a number of occasions. But I wouldn't say it was common, as such. It didn't certainly happen to all of them. Q: And when it did happen, were records kept? A: That's correct, yes, sir. Q: I see. In order for this item to be examined for the presence of fingerprints by DC Jordan, where would it go? A: It would go to the fingerprint laboratory in Lambeth in London. Q: And that's therefore out of the control of RARDE, is it? A: That's correct, sir. Q: And do we see that the following line says: "Returned to RARDE on 16/5/89"? [3033] A: That's correct, yes, sir. Q: And that's the same date as at the top of Dr. Hayes' examination note? A: Yes, sir. Q: And then there is another piece of information on the next line, still above the printed word "examination." Can you read what that says? A: Yes, sir, I think I can. Q: What does it say? A: I think it says: "Passed to DC Jordan on 16/5/89 for chemical treatment after photography." Originally Posted by Ambrosia There are corroborating records owing to this testing being referred to here that establish that PK/689 exists as part of the evidence 16th May 1989 Q: I see. And what sort of chemical treatment would that be a reference to? A: I suspect that, presumably, their initial fingerprint examination could not be done properly without some kind of more invasive chemical fingerprint treatment. I suspect that's probably what it was. Q: And in order for an examination of the sort described there to occur, where would the fragment go? A: That would again go to the Lambeth laboratory. Q: I see. A: The Lambeth fingerprint laboratory. [3034] Q: And for each of these passings of the production from RARDE to DC Jordan and back again, would a record be kept? A: Yes, sir. Q: And do you know whether or not the fragment PK/689 was passed to DC Jordan or anyone else for any other examination after the one that we've just looked at? A: Without consulting the records, I don't know. I know that we -- it came and went several times. But I would have to consult the records, I'm afraid. Q: I see. And how then -- now that we've seen that the item could move in and out of RARDE on a number of occasions for a number of reasons, and that there would be a record kept of the date, both of its arrival and its departure, how can you help us to understand why the date 30th June is given on page 107? A: Well, I'm afraid that when I logged the whole list of comings and goings of items down when I wrote this report, I must have put my ruler across on the wrong line for this. I didn't, obviously, go back to the beginning of when we first received it. I must have inadvertently picked a date when it did certainly come back after some treatment of some description on [3035] the 30th of June '89. But the truth is that we had received it before that. That wasn't the first time we received it.

31st January 2010, 10:06 PM	#24
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	couple of things that jump out at me here: i) People are creatures of habit. If we accept that the RTF-16 radio was the correct model, like the Khreesat bomb, it was named "BomBeat" Is it more likely that the same terrorist group will use a similar MO when they carry out attacks, and so the name "BomBeat" in the radios description points to the same perpetrators? Or is it more likely that the name is yet another coincidence, perhaps pointing to nothing more than the fact that terrorists share a twisted sense of wordplay. ii) The crucial piece of manual PK/689 just happens to be examined on the day after the most crucial piece of evidence in the entire case is also examined by the same examiner?! 15th May, apparently, Hayes discovers the MST-13 fragment - the next day he examines PK/689, thats a hell of a 2 days, yet another coincidence? They're stacking up. Finally of PK/689 on the 16th Hayes notes state that it was photographed. If this item was photographed, then PI/995 ought to have been as well, where are those photos?

1st February 2010, 12:52 AM	#25
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	Originally Posted by Feraday Trail evidence Day 20 Originally Posted by Ambrosia No evidence was given day 19, as difficulties in translation were being resolved A "Many fragments originating from the owner's manual of a Toshiba RT-SF16 radio/cassette recorder have been recovered. These fragments, which are detailed below, are damaged consistent with their close involvement in a powerful explosion. They have been identified by a detailed comparison with the control sample of the owner's manual PT/1 (PR/111) which was removed from the box containing the sample Toshiba RT-SF16 radio/cassette recorder (PR/105). The [3094] original positions of the fragments upon each page clearly indicate that the manual was not folded at the moment of explosion, apart from at its original stapled centre fold." Q: And do you then begin to describe for us an item designated as PK/689? A: That is correct, sir. Yes. Q: Can we look at photograph 266, please. And could you perhaps read on, Mr. Feraday. A: "When originally received at this laboratory, this item was apparently an irregularly shaped single fragment of paper, shown in photograph 266, which measured approximately 135 millimetres by 125 millimetres. Detailed examination revealed the fragment to consist of two overlaid sheets lightly adhering together, having the same irregular shape. On the upper surface of the two sheets, shown in photograph 267, were depicted (a) the legend" ... Hiba ... O cassette recorder ... SF16 ... BomBeat SF16"; and (b) apparent sets of operating instructions printed in several languages." Q: Can we pause there for a moment, Mr. Feraday. Did your conclusion regarding the manual, that it was not folded, apart from its original stapled centre fold, cause you to come to any assessment [3095] regarding the manual? A: Only, as I say, the manual, in my opinion, was not folded and that it appeared that a fragment had been blown out of -- during the explosion and had cut its way completely through the manual. Q: What way would the manual have been folded if new? A: It would have just been folded down the middle where the staple is, but not otherwise folded. Q: Does that mean it would, if new, have been folded in the same way as you deduced this manual to have been folded? A: Yes, sir. Q: Did the writing on this fragment assist you in identifying which model the fragments of printed circuit board had come from? A: Yes, sir. It very much did. Q: What view did you arrive at? A: I came to the view that as the fragments and the paper fragments -- the fragments of circuit board and the paper fragments were both explosively damaged, that in all probability the fragments of circuit board originated from a BomBeat SF16. Q: Thank you. Did you then go on to carry out a comparison of the information printed on both [3096] sides of the two sheets that we see in this photograph? A: Yes, sir. Q: Do we see the results in photographs 269 to 272? A: Yes, sir. Q: Could we see photographs 269 and 270, please. Do we see photograph 269 to the left, Mr. Feraday? A: Yes, sir. Q: And do we see there that you have compared the fragment with the control sample owner's manual? A: Yes, sir. Q: And where did that portion of the fragment correspond to? A: It corresponded more or less to the centre of page 1 of the manual. Q: Is that the outer cover? A: Yes, sir. Q: Thank you. And on page 2 -- photograph 270, do we see the other side of that fragment? A: That is correct, sir. That's the same fragment, just literally turned over. [3097] Q: And where did it correspond to on the control sample? A: From the -- again, more or less the centre position of page 2, which is the rear of the front cover. Q: Thank you. And have you drawn in red on the control sample the area which corresponds to the fragment? A: As best as I could, sir, yes. Q: Could we now see photographs 271 and 272. Is the fragment shown in these photographs the second of the two overlaid sheets? A: Yes, sir. Q: And do we see that the fragment corresponded with a portion of page 4 of the control sample? A: One side of it -- of the fragment compared with page 3; and the other side of it, the rear side of it, compared with page 4. Q: Yes. And these are the pages following on from those that we looked at in the preceding photographs? A: That is correct, sir. Yes. Q: Could you return to your report and read [3098] to us what you described after drawing our attention to these photographs. A: From, "on the lower surfaces"; is that it, sir? Page 112? Q: Yes. From where you referred to the photographs 269 to 272, please. A: Okay. "A detailed comparison of the information printed on both sides of the two sheets, shown in the four photographs, 269 to 272, showed a perfect match in sequence and information detail with the corresponding areas of pages 1 to 4 of the Toshiba SF16 owner's manual (PT/1). These sheets appeared to have been violently impacted and disrupted and bore localised areas of blackening and scorching consistent with their close explosives involvement." So the Horton fragment (PK/689) is a large piece of the centre of the manual 135mm by 125mm, it's received by RARDE 11th May 1989, a piece Horton describes as about 8" by 8" (200mm square), it's photo'd 16th May before destructive testing. Horton ID's "Label 24" as what she found, but much more damaged than the condition she found it in. PK/689 is described in Ferdays reports as being a fragment punched out of the centre of the page. Feradays report describes a complete control manual as being: Originally Posted by Feraday Trial evidence The manual consists of a white paper booklet measuring 26 centimetres by 19 centimetres and incorporating three complete sheets of paper which are folded and stapled together in the centre to produce a booklet of twelve sides of paper. Horton describes finding almost an intact page, 8" by 8"(20.3cm x 20.3cm) her dimensions match the size of an intact page. If Mrs Horton is right and she found a whole page of manual which was actually the first 2 pages,(1,2,3 & 4) then the fragments from PI/995 which are Originally Posted by Feraday Evidence a perfect sequential match with the back-to-back areas of pages 3 to 10 (inclusive) of the control sample of the Toshiba RT-SF16 owner's manual (item PT/1)." can't possibly be from the same manual.

1st February 2010, 04:14 AM	#26
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	A couple of quick points. The Slalom shirt collar was examined on 12th May, not 15th (you may be mixing this up with 15th September, the date of the Feraday/Williamson memo). 12th May was a Friday, so the manual examination you refer to above was done the following Tuesday. Still a helluva few days. I'm still not convinced anything actually happened on these days though. Khreesat's electronics stash. I don't put too much emphasis on this "BomBeat" thing. Khreesat was using a variety of electronics items for his bomb-making. There were a hi-fi tuner and a couple of VDUs as well as the radio-cassete player that was recovered. (Sorry, I don't know where to find the list of stuff right now, but it is available.) He didn't have a production run of identical IEDs. I believe Abu Talb, at Camp Zeist, said he would never have used a stereo player because there wasn't enough room inside the casing to get enough explosive in. But do we actually believe a word Abu Talb says? And if the Lockerbie evidence is at all to be believed (which may be a bit of an "if"), then it self-evidently was possible to get enough explosive into a stereo player. It seems to me that Khreesat was using an assortment of electronics products, so just about anything might have turned up in an incident. It's just this whole tenuous trail of a particular Toshiba model sold almost exclusively to Libya (to match the particular timer model sold exclusively to Libya) that is held to be so significant as far as the indictment goes. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012. Last edited by Rolfe; 1st February 2010 at 04:15 AM.

1st February 2010, 04:18 AM	#27
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	That extract from the evidence absolutely clarifies the structure of the manual - it really was a stapled booklet, not a folded wad. Stuff the centimetres, let's get this straight in inches. Complete manual (control sample) 10½ x 7¾ inches. That's bigger than I had thought, not much smaller than an A4 page. Mrs. Horton's estimate of what she found was about 8 x 8 inches, "almost intact, just a bit tatty round the edges". That find, when examined at RARDE before any destructive testing, is recorded as 5½ x 5 inches. Difficult to know how much to trust Mrs. Horton's memory - memory can play strange tricks, and it's noticeable she seems to be describing a find that was roughly square. Nevertheless, her description seems closer to an almost-intact page than to the large fragment blown out of the centre that Feraday describes. In particular, she says she remembers the word "Toshiba" on the find, but the word is partially obscured in the evidential fragment. It's now clear that the piece of manual alleged to have been found by Mrs. Horton wasn't just one sheet but two, the first two of the six. Supposedly punched out of the middle of the manual by the explosion, presumably by something about 5 or 6 inches square being slammed into it. I'm guessing a chunk of the plastic casing of the radio, a circuit board from inside it, or maybe the tape transport if that was still in it. Presumably all 6 pages were punched out, but the other four became detached and were not recovered. I totally don't buy it. That should have been incinerated. Then we have the other much smaller fragments that were found in items of clothing. I find these a bit easier to swallow as regards actual survival. However, at least one of these finds was five sheets thick, thus implying that at least one of the two Horton pages was also represented in that compacted wad. We can only account for that by assuming the area in question belonged to a part of the manual outwith the 5½ x 5 inch Horton fragment. So, one very big fragment, of which two leaves are recovered in a legible condition, and at least four much smaller fragments from elsewhere in the manual, compacted so that most of the leaves remained stuck together, heavily explosion-damaged. All surviving and identifiable, having been right up close and personal with 450g of Semtex when it blew up. Oh come on. Do they think the judges came up the Clyde on a banana boat? Apparently so. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

1st February 2010, 04:52 AM	#28
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	Originally Posted by Rolfe A couple of quick points. The Slalom shirt collar was examined on 12th May, not 15th (you may be mixing this up with 15th September, the date of the Feraday/Williamson memo). 12th May was a Friday, so the manual examination you refer to above was done the following Tuesday. I'm conflating dates on re-numbered pages actually. Yes my mistake. 12th May (Friday) Hayes examines PI/995, notes for this examination is pg 51. 15th May (Monday) pages 52-56 are about a different examination of evidence, these pages were previously numbered 51-55 and were renumbered for reasons never explained. 16th May (Tuesday) Hayes examines PK/689. evidence number PI/991 is detailed on pg 49 of Hayes notes, dated 15th May 1989. evidence number PT/30 was noted on page 90 of Hayes notes, 8th June 1989, and is both dated later than PT/35 and has a lower evidence number.

1st February 2010, 05:16 AM	#29
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	Originally Posted by Rolfe I totally don't buy it. That should have been incinerated. Then we have the other much smaller fragments that were found in items of clothing. I find these a bit easier to swallow as regards actual survival. However, at least one of these finds was five sheets thick, thus implying that at least one of the two Horton pages was also represented in that compacted wad. We can only account for that by assuming the area in question belonged to a part of the manual outwith the 5½ x 5 inch Horton fragment. So, one very big fragment, of which two leaves are recovered in a legible condition, and at least four much smaller fragments from elsewhere in the manual, compacted so that most of the leaves remained stuck together, heavily explosion-damaged. I don't have a problem with bits of manual surviving an explosion. If you lookat pictures of impacts on 9/11 we see paper raining down into the streets. A passport survived enough to be identified later. Granted those were low pressure cooler deflagrations rather than explosions, but who knows what random things might well survive. When Feraday goes through all this at the trial he has a series of photographs pointing out exactly where each fragment came from, one wonders if Mrs Hortons memory is accurate whether the prosecution needed to cut bits of PK/689 off in order to account for these other much smaller scraps of manual found in the babygro and the Yorkie trousers etc. Another point I thought about was this. We know that the radio itself could not be identified were it not for the manual. The innards of the radio could have come from 7 possible sources. How much of the manual is the same for each of those 7 radios? Do Toshiba write a whole new manual for each one? Do they just print alternative covers and keep the body of the manual the same? Was it ever established that the manual as found could only have come from this particular model, if say we discount PK/689 as possibly coming from a n other radio in someone elses luggage? Was enough of the manual recovered in the tiny fragments that are almost certainly in the IED case, blasted into bits of clothing to positively ID it as a RTF-16 and only an RTF-16 manual?

1st February 2010, 06:34 AM	#30
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Ambrosia I don't have a problem with bits of manual surviving an explosion. If you lookat pictures of impacts on 9/11 we see paper raining down into the streets. A passport survived enough to be identified later. Granted those were low pressure cooler deflagrations rather than explosions, but who knows what random things might well survive. I don't see "9/11" as being comparable. Of course bits of paper were raining down. A couple of planes crashed into a couple of office blocks full of filing cabinets and desks covered in clutter and so on. The planes themselves were intact until they hit the buildings, and the fires were started by the engiges and fuel tanks - the fuselages themselves (where the passport and other paper would have been) didn't necessarily explode as such. I don't doubt Mrs. Horton's description of what she saw in the Northumberland countryside after Lockerbie either. That included Christmas cards raining down. The actual explosion only damaged a relatively small number of suitcases, a couple of baggage containers and the outer skin of the aircraft. Paper in suitcases that came apart as the plane came apart, and paper in the cabin, would have blown all over the place. I'm not even discounting the possibility that the small, compacted fragments might have survived, blasted into cloth as described. But once you start telling me that a 5" x 5" piece of two pages survived from the close vicinity of that explosion, blowing free in the wind, I baulk. We don't know of any paper on 9/11 that was so close to an explosion and survived, still legible. Oh wait, there weren't any explosives involved on 9/11. Originally Posted by Ambrosia When Feraday goes through all this at the trial he has a series of photographs pointing out exactly where each fragment came from, one wonders if Mrs Hortons memory is accurate whether the prosecution needed to cut bits of PK/689 off in order to account for these other much smaller scraps of manual found in the babygro and the Yorkie trousers etc. I haven't seen the photographs, but I'm sure they were plausible to a degree. I'm assuming the four smaller fragments were from parts of the manual elsewhere than the Horton fragment. I don't believe that what Mrs. Horton found was ever within inches of 450g of Semtex when it exploded. So I don't think it's a question of cutting anything off what she found, I think it's a question of tailoring a fragment of that manual (I imagine the police could have had as many copies as they wanted from Toshiba) so that it contained enough information to identify the exact model of radio (you know, this one model fortuitously sold only to Libya), and yet allowed for the other scraps still to have come from the same item. Mrs. Horton picked up quite a few bits and pieces and handed them in to the police in a carrier bag. Obviously these included some sort of piece of paper that could plausibly be represented as that large fragment, ten years on, to a lady who probably hadn't looked at it all that closely at the time and certainly hadn't kept a copy. I think it could be that simple. Originally Posted by Ambrosia Another point I thought about was this. We know that the radio itself could not be identified were it not for the manual. The innards of the radio could have come from 7 possible sources. How much of the manual is the same for each of those 7 radios? Do Toshiba write a whole new manual for each one? Do they just print alternative covers and keep the body of the manual the same? Was it ever established that the manual as found could only have come from this particular model, if say we discount PK/689 as possibly coming from a n other radio in someone elses luggage? Was enough of the manual recovered in the tiny fragments that are almost certainly in the IED case, blasted into bits of clothing to positively ID it as a RTF-16 and only an RTF-16 manual? I had exactly the same thoughts, but I'm now wondering whether it actually matters. If the large Horton fragment was fabricated, then why bother sticking to the real fragments for the rest of the finds? Assuming there were any scraps of manual recovered from cloth actually picked up in Scotland in the first place. We're already very suspicious that PI995 is a plant, and that seems to contain the biggest of the scraps as well as the timer fragment. I don't know whether we have enough on the other scraps to assess whether they might also have been slipped in retrospectively late in 1989, but if they were that small, I wouldn't be surprised. I very much doubt that these tiny scraps could identify the manual as coming from one particular model. As you say, these things tend to be a bit repetitve. Their presence within the Maltese clothing does however associate the manual definitely with the bomb suitcase, rather than having it originate from elsewhere in the plane. But we can hardly get a 5x5 chunk saying "... hiba ... o cassette recorder ... SF16 ... BomBeat SF16" into a shirt collar. So we really need that bigger piece to turn up separately - not so clearly associated with the explosion as it stands, but able to be tied in with the rest once you have the template of the sample manual. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012. Last edited by Rolfe; 1st February 2010 at 06:42 AM.

1st February 2010, 07:19 AM	#31
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	It occurs to me that the model of radio, in just the same way as the MST-13, doesn't in any way rule out Khreesat even if all this singularly implausible evidence is entirely genuine. We know Khreesat used a variety of electronics items for his bombs. We only have Abu Talb's word for it that the group never used a stereo radio-cassette recorder, and in the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davis, "he would say that, wouldn't he?" The thing the investigators loved about this radio, just as they loved the same thing about the MST-13, was that it was supplied to Libya. Well, the PFLP-GC people were Arab. They travelled around in the Middle East. One of the Lockerbie commentators places Jibril in Libya itself at the relevant time. No great reason they couldn't have picked up one of these radios, really. Just as there's no great reason they couldn't have got hold of an MST-13 from Libya to "make the medicine better, stronger". It's just that the radio identification depends on the manual, and the survival of the manual, much more so than the survival of the MST-13 fragment, really does seem extremely implausible. I suppose I'm having my cake and eating it here. If we decide that the manual and the timer fragment were planted, then we really are in the territory of dirty work at the crossroads, full-blown conspiracy and all. But on the other hand if we decide these items are really and honestly kosher, then I still think this was Khreesat's work anyway. It was just really, really convenient he utilised two vital components for his IED that it just so happened were closely traceable to Libya. But look at what was in that IED. A bronze Samsonite hardshell suitcase. The one thing we don't have any trace on, according to the official theory. Some clothes, which the bomber(s) conveniently bought brand new in a small shop only a couple of weeks before the explosion, so they could be traced there. (And it was a place where Megrahi and other Libyans were known to hang out.) A Toshiba radio-cassette recorder of a model apparently wholly or overwhelmingly supplied as a batch to Libya, identified because the bombers generously packed the manual in the suitcase with it, in such a way that it wasn't instantly incinerated in the explosion. An MST-13 timer, again a very limited edition model, supplied exclusively to Libya. Again the one little corner of the main circuit board that survived was luckily just about the only fragment distinctive enough to be identifiable. If all of that is for real, then there's still no especial reason it couldn't have been Jibril's group, as I said. But if you wanted to aggregate as much circumstantial evidence as possible pointing to Libya, could you have done a better job on purpose? I think the manual is more likely to be a plant than the timer fragment, based on survivability (or not) of the explosion. I do so wish Wyatt had considered that aspect in his tests. And if the manual is a plant, then it follows pretty closely that the probability of the timer fragment also being a plant is very high. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

1st February 2010, 05:21 PM	#32
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Another vague thought. Feraday originally thought the radio was white. There were white pieces of plastic recorded. Then he changed his mind. The bits of plastic in PI995 were black. I wonder where the other bits of black plastic were that helped change his mind? I wonder which of the seven possible models of radio was available in white, and where they were sold? Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.

1st February 2010, 06:01 PM	#33
Caustic Logic Illuminator Join Date: Apr 2007 Posts: 4,494	Originally Posted by Rolfe Another vague thought. Feraday originally thought the radio was white. There were white pieces of plastic recorded. Then he changed his mind. The bits of plastic in PI995 were black. I wonder where the other bits of black plastic were that helped change his mind? I wonder which of the seven possible models of radio was available in white, and where they were sold? Rolfe. The SF 8016 was white, but otherwise looks like the same exact model. You re-posted the pics in post 3. That was the original lead with the Toshiba corp, and Feraday did report white plastics in Feb 89 IIRC as showing clearly a definitely white radio. I don't know yet what this was supposed to mean. Then it was black, and I haven't yet seen how these two leads were ever reconciled. And it was also clearly the SF16, which is black and as we've seen indicates Libyan guilt, softly. By May 16 (says the papers) that info was available without the long process that it took to ID PT/35(b) and its links to Libya. DeBraeckeleer has a good article on this issue. Bobby Ingram's story is sounding more relevant all the time, eh? I think one issue we'll want to get at here is the collection of AG/145. Its bits were consistent with either model, and it was found with (including?) white plastic, found not in Maltese clothes but in the info plate from container AVE4041. So one wonders if the actual bomb was a white 8016? But I hear there are peculiarities about that too, like the deflection angle required for projectiles to have gotten in there. It may have been one plant job replaced with another, for all I know at his point. Sorry to be so vague, but I don't even remember where quite I saw that. But I will run across it again and the question is worth looking at. Originally Posted by Rolfe I think the manual is more likely to be a plant than the timer fragment, based on survivability (or not) of the explosion. I do so wish Wyatt had considered that aspect in his tests. And if the manual is a plant, then it follows pretty closely that the probability of the timer fragment also being a plant is very high. I do agree with this. I'm still attached to the little suite of timer arguments I've come up with, but this stuff might have to take precedence.

1st February 2010, 06:37 PM	#34
Ambrosia Good of the Fods Join Date: Jun 2009 Posts: 2,675	Originally Posted by Caustic Logic The SF 8016 was white, but otherwise looks like the same exact model. You re-posted the pics in post 3. That was the original lead with the Toshiba corp, and Feraday did report white plastics in Feb 89 IIRC as showing clearly a definitely white radio. I don't know yet what this was supposed to mean. Feradays testimony (reading from his own report) specifically states Originally Posted by Feraday Although many fragments of both charred cardboard and burnt soft plastics have been recovered from the Lockerbie debris, none of these fragments can be conclusively established to have originated from a Toshiba radio or its packing How convenient. I used to have a Toshiba casette radio very similar to the one used in the Lockerbie bomb. I also used to enjoy taking electronic stuff apart for no good reason when I was younger. There is a bunch of black plastic used in the internal construction of those radios regardless of the colour of the outside casing. You can see this in the photo of the Toshiba radio taken apart, internal constuction contains black plastics. Quote: DeBraeckeleer has a good article on this issue. The letter he quotes has Feraday satisfied that the radio was an 8026 type with white case entirely, it's the manual fragments that make him change his mind and those weren't examined till May as we have already noted.

2nd February 2010, 05:09 AM	#35
Rolfe Adult human female Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: NT 150 511 Posts: 50,593	Originally Posted by Ambrosia The letter he quotes has Feraday satisfied that the radio was an 8026 type with white case entirely, it's the manual fragments that make him change his mind and those weren't examined till May as we have already noted. And were they even examined in May? One of the things I've been trying to get a feel for is the time period of the switch in the investigation from honest assessment of the evidence as it came up, to trying to make it point a certain way. I was about to post, assuming that happened, because I still entertain the possibility that no evidence was fabricated, and what actually happened was cumulative misinterpretation and misdirection until they were all baying after Libya and Megrahi with blinkers on. However, I stopped mid-sentence, because I think the details of the Horton fragment are close to convincing me that that had to have been fabricated. I started looking at the timer fragment, because that's the one everybody gets excited about, and the thing people make documentaries about and so on. Mrs. Horton is a bit of a throwaway line in the only documentary she appears in, and the significance of what she's supposed to have found isn't really explored. But really, it's the alleged survival of that 5-inch square piece of paper, and its almost equally strong trail back to Libya, that's turning out to be the killer point for me. Of course, we don't have the same provenance difficulties with the Horton fragment as with the timer fragment. Mrs. Horton found something, she remembers doing that, and she handed it in. Switching that something for a rather similar but on the other hand altogether different piece of paper isn't much of a problem. So we don't have re-numbered pages and altered labels to get excited about. We just have a piece of paper that's supposed to have survived an explosion that Wyatt couldn't even get a fibreglass circuit board to survive. Right. So when, really, did the point come when fabricated evidence was being introduced into the investigation? I don't think it was May, because so much of the timer fragment evidence suggests its May provenance was retrospective. That, to me, suggests that other fabricated evidence that seems to come up in May was retrospectively introduced too. I haven't seen any suggestion that the paper fragment was described on an interpolated page, but I don't think that's important. It's surprising that Hayes messed it up once, you wouldn't expect him to leave trails all over the place. I appreciate your point about the Lambeth laboratory and the fingerprint testing, and you could be right about that. However, all the photography seems to have happened at RARDE (and we're getting a feel for their standards of photographic provenance), and I merely wonder whether in September or later (the point when I still think the fabrications were introduced), it was clear that a different piece of paper could be substituted without anyone at the Met being able (or willing, probably) to prove anything different. I was leaning to a point later in 1989 for the introduction of fabrications, however your information about Hayes's employment history tends to nudge it all to an earlier date. I'm thinking that indeed the 15th September memo may represent activity surrounding the introduction of whatever fabrications were created - I suggest the entirety of PI995, the substitution of the RTF-16 manual pages for whatever Mrs. Horton found, and the addition of a few tiny scraps of manual to three other evidence bags. (I still don't know what to make of the Gauci clothes, at all, so I'll continue to assume the bulk of these were not planted. It's hard to imagine how they could have been, as far as I can see.) The fact that they were already messing with the evidence examined in mid-May (the genuine Horton fragment) could explain why the same time period was chosen to insert the de novo PI995 item. However, while the Horton fragment could be accommodated simply by substituting a new page for whatever Hayes wrote at the time, it was necessary to make room for an entire new page to describe PI995. So, I still think this could fit a late summer 1989 decision to take active steps to implicate Libya rather than Iran, with the fabicated evidence being insinuated into the investigation, with retrospective provenance, in September. Or do you think the Lambeth involvement in June is enough to knock this idea on the head? Bearing in mind that the Met itself doesn't eactly have a reputation for the fearless and singleminded pursuit of truth in all its forms. Rolfe.
	__________________ "The way we vote will depend, ultimately, on whether we are persuaded to hope or to fear." - Aonghas MacNeacail, June 2012.