Quote:
the case against Al Megrahi was that, on the 7th of December, be bought items of clothing from a shop in Malta which were packed in the suitcase which exploded and brought down Pam Am 103.
They came to this conclusion because of shrards of clothing with remnants of the detonator bearing the name of a shop run in Malta by the chief witness for the prosecution (a man called Tony Gauci). Tony Gauci remembered serving a Liyban-looking person a pair of trousers a few weeks before the bombing, but stated that the man was in his 50s and over 6 feet tall (at the time Al Megrahi was in his 30s and was half a foot smaller). Gauci did finally pick Al Megrahi out in a line-up, but only days after pictures of Al Megrahi was plastered across magazines and papers. This IN itself, if the Court had known about it, would have made this evidence unsafe.
The date of the 7th December was important as this was a day when Al Megrahi was in Malta (he was chief of security for Liyba's national airline, so visited this and other airports on a regular basis): this date was fixed because of a key point by Gauci: that there was an international football match on television. There were two games in those weeks: the 7th December and the 23rd of November. Gauci then made a very key statement: he remembered specifically that, after the gentleman he served had bought the trousers, he at the last minute bought an umbrella because it was raining heavily outside. Investigators checked the weather reports for those days: it indeed did rain heavily on the 23rd of November (when Al Megrahi wasn't in Malta) but didn't rain at all on the 7th December (when he was).
So, in a nutshell, Tony Gauci claimed to have served a man who was 20 years older and half a foot taller and resembled Al Megrahi, two weeks before Al Megrahi was actually in Malta.
