From Reuters

Lockerbie lawyers demand secret foreign evidence

Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:55pm BST

A successful appeal would throw the case wide open after nearly two decades. It is unclear how Libya would respond.

The North African state has paid more than $2 billion to victims' families on the basis that its agent Megrahi was guilty, a move that has helped its international rehabilitation after long being regarded by the West as a pariah state.

The original trial was told the bomb was triggered by a digital timer called an MST-13, manufactured by a Swiss firm. The court accepted evidence from one of the firm's partners that he had supplied 20 sample MST-13s to Libya in 1985 and 1986.

Some victims' relatives and observers of the case have questioned the evidence relating to the timer, which came from minute fragments discovered among the airliner's wreckage.

Swire has long believed the timer was not an MST-13 but a pressure-triggered device of a kind used by the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), which fell under strong international suspicion in the immediate aftermath of Lockerbie.

He said the source of the missing document might be Israel, Jordan or Germany. West Germany authorities had investigated the PFLP-GC, and the feeder flight for the doomed plane had taken off from Frankfurt.

Dr Jim Swire (jim@swirefamily.net)