Criminal Law & Justice Weekly

Vol. 175 23 July 2011

criminallawandjustice.co.uk

David Wolchover continues his analysis of why the trial court got it so wrong in the Lockerbie case

Heathrow: Certainty of the Bombs London Origin

Frankfurt. Experts from the Air Accident Investigations Board (AAIB) swiftly identified the blast-damaged portable container (AVE4041) in which the Samsonite suitcase bomb had been placed. They established that it had been set aside at Heathrow to collect interline luggage for Pan Am 103 (that is, transit baggage arriving at Heathrow from other airlines) as this accumulated during the afternoon and had then been wheeled out on to the tarmac to take the transatlantic luggage from the Frankfurt feeder flight directly across the tarmac to Maid of the Seas. What should have been decisive evidence in the case came from John Bedford, the Heathrow Pan Am baggage handler whose job it was to load the container with interline baggage items as and when they arrived in the interline shed, after they were x-rayed. He recalled that on the afternoon of December 23, he left the container while he took an extended tea-break lasting roughly half an hour. When he returned he noticed two items had been added to the luggage he had earlier loaded into the container, making a total of about 10 items. This was well before the arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt. Bedford described one of the two additional items as a maroony-brown hardshell suitcase, the type Samsonite make. He volunteered this information at his first police interview on January 3, 1989, although he no doubt realized the potentially ominous significance of the mysteriously appearing suitcases as soon as he heard about the fate of Pan Am 103, at which point it would probably have embossed itself on his memory, perhaps painfully so. The description could not have been prompted by the investigators because the suitcase containing the bomb was only identified as a bronze-coloured Samsonite hardshell several weeks later. The arrangement of the luggage as described by Bedford had been incorporated into the 1991 Fatal Accident Inquiry report findings, but not his assertion about the unexplained and mysterious appearance of the two bags or that one of them was a brown Samsonite. The Sheriff holding the inquiry simply accepted the proposition urged on him by the investigators that the bomb carrying Samsonite had come from Frankfurt. Bedford claimed that Sulkash Kamboj, one of the two security guards responsible for x-raying the luggage, told

e now come to the reason why we can be certain that the Lockerbie bomb was smuggled into the system at Heathrow and did not come by air from

him it was he who had placed the bag in AVE4041 after x-raying it, but Kamboj denied saying this. The Judges professed to prefer Bedfords recollection, perhaps because they supposed that if he had wanted to lie he could have kept quiet about the two bags altogether. On the other hand it is possible that he could have had a conscience and an anxious desire to help the investigation at the same time as wishing to distance himself from blame for disastrous neglect. The missing element in this saga is Parmar, the other guard who worked with Kamboj. He was not called as a witness, no reference was made to any statement from him and nothing appears to be known about him. Despite the conflict of evidence between Bedford and Kamboj they both attested to the chaotic, insecure conditions in the shed and airside at Heathrow generally in which anybody could approach a container with luggage and slip in another bag. No one disputed it. It should be added that Pan Ams Heathrow terminal and that of Iran Air were adjacent and they shared tarmac space.

Analysis

The explosion blasted a 20-inch hole in the left flank of the forward fuselage, causing instant cataclysmic decompression and within three seconds the shock waves had severed the cockpit section from the rest of the aircraft. What is of critical importance is that analysis by the AAIB experts established that the bomb suitcase ended up in the precise position where it would cause maximum damage, that is close to the fuselage skin, in an overhang section of the container designed to hug the curvature of the hull and lying flat with its handle inwards and its spine outwards. Not only had the suitcase been placed in the correct (outboard) position in the container, but the bomb had been packed to ensure the correct orientation, that is not centrally in the suitcase but to its extreme outboard side. This is a very non-intuitive way to pack such an item and suggests that whoever did the packing was anticipating that the suitcase would be placed in the container by someone who would ensure it went in that way round. Tellingly, the position Bedford described the mysterious suitcase to be in was only two or three inches from the position later determined to have been the centre of the explosion. Only a small adjustment to its placing, as might easily have happened when the Frankfurt luggage was being loaded in a hurry, would have put it in that position. The likelihood that such optimum positioning could have resulted

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Exploding Lockerbie Part 2

Criminal Law & Justice Weekly by chance to a suitcase travelling unaccompanied from Malta or Frankfurt is slim. But determined and knowledgeable terrorists would hardly have left matters to chance. Only hands-on action by an accomplice at Heathrow could have ensured the necessary control over the positioning of the bag, which was crucial to the capacity of the small amount of Semtex to cripple the plane. In that event it would have been wholly pointless sending it from Malta, with the repeated, serious risk of interception, or even Frankfurt. If the suitcase Bedford saw was not the bomb suitcase, what was it and what became of it? Meticulous detective work by the Scottish policeman, DC Derek Henderson, had originally established that no passenger on Pan Am 103 was carrying anything that could be described as a maroon or brown hardshell bag and none of the passengers whose luggage might have ended up in container AVE4041 had such a bag. The only suitcase of that description recovered at Lockerbie was the one blown to pieces by the bomb inside it. So how did the Crown deal with what ought to have been an end to any notion that the bomb had come from Frankfurt? First, they adopted the simple ploy of sweeping DC Hendersons inquiries under the carpet. He had been called to testify at the 1991 FAI to show that the bomb bag must have been unaccompanied rather than carried by an unwitting mule or suicide bomber. He repeated that evidence at the 1992 civil action in the US. His findings also meant that the Samsonite Bedford described could not have been legitimate passenger luggage either. But this appears not to have been noticed by the Sheriff, who was content to go along with the Crowns heavy hints that it would not seek to discourage a finding that the bag containing the device came to Frankfurt as an interline bag. However, the trial at Camp Zeist was a different matter. With defence lawyers closely scrutinising the evidence it appears to have dawned on someone that the Bedford bag could not simply be waved aside. The neat solution was to avoid calling Henderson and to make no reference to the result of his inquiries showing no passenger on 103 had travelled with a maroon or brown hardshell. This opened up the possibility of a second such bag one carried legitimately with the consequent conclusion that the Samsonite suitcase seen by Bedford was no more than ordinary interline luggage. The Crown could have called as a live witness the actual baggage handler whose job it had been to load the Frankfurt baggage into the container on the tarmac (Sidhu). It was open to them to ask the witness who had helped Sidhu load the container (Sandhu) questions about the loading. They chose neither course. Instead, they were content to rely on the answer to a question asked by counsel defending Fhimah (al-Megrahis acquitted co-accused) of the witness whose job it had merely been to load the already closed container on to the aircraft (Crabtree). He gave evidence before Sandhu and agreed with the trite suggestion that loaders might move bags around within the base of a container to make for a better fit, a bit of re-jigging. (The question seems to have been intended to establish the possibility that the case seen by Bedford might have been moved slightly and was indeed the bomb carrier.) The approximately 10 interline cases Bedford counted before the Frankfurt baggage had arrived consisted of seven

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or eight cases placed upright (ie, with their handles up) on the floor across the back of the container and the two mysteriously-added bags which were lying in front of them flat on the floor. Together, these nine or 10 cases covered almost all the floor area. The Judges found that a large navy-blue canvas Tourister case belonging to a Patricia Coyle, which had come from Vienna via Frankfurt, had been under the bomb bag. For reasons which are canvassed later this seems unlikely but even supposing their assumption was correct its implications seem implausible. It would have meant that if the Samsonite bag Bedford had described was not the bomb bag, Sidhu would have had to lift it off the floor of the container (as there was no space remaining to slide it aside), replace it with the Coyle bag, place an almost identical bag carrying the bomb on top of the Coyle bag and then put the original Samsonite (which Bedford had seen) somewhere else. That was exactly what the Judges impliedly determined had happened. To do so they obligingly picked up Crabtrees generalised acquiescence to the suggestion put to him and ran with it, fashioning bricks out of straw to erect an elaborate edifice of improbability. It is true that in giving judgment of guilt they used tentative language. Thus, if there was such a rearrangement, the suitcase described by Bedford might have been placed at some more remote corner of the container. This is a different proposition from that put to Crabtree. But in the light of their finding that the bomb had come from Frankfurt (on its way from Luqa) their implied conclusion in effect could only have been that Sidhu had carried out six actions. He must have: (a) decided when he saw Coyles case coming off the conveyer from the Boeing 727 on flight 103A that, perhaps because of its size, it had to go on the floor of the container (even though a decision to place a soft-sided case on the floor instead of a hardshell seems unnatural); (b) accordingly, removed Bedfords case from the floor; (c) placed Coyles bag where the Samsonite seen by Bedford had been; (d) instead of then doing what would have been most natural, ie, putting the Bedford Samsonite straight back on top of Coyles bag, he placed on it an identical suitcase carrying the bomb which just happened to be coming off the conveyer at that moment from the Frankfurt flight; (e) by chance placed it so that the side along which the radio was packed was protruding into the overhang of the container; and (f) waited until the container was almost full before placing the Bedford bag somewhere else.

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Where?

According to this conjecture he would either have put it in some remote corner of the container away from those 25 bags which showed direct blast damage and which were the only bags for which detailed forensic evidence was presented, or else put it with the last few bags surplus to the containers capacity which were loose-loaded into the belly of the aircraft. The problem with either option is that no brown Samsonite, apart from the bomb suitcase, was ever recovered. So to avoid the absurdity implied in their conjecture that the bag Bedford had seen must have vanished they appear

Criminal Law & Justice Weekly conveniently to have gone along with the Crowns lame explanation that not all items of luggage were recovered. But what exactly might such a suggestion involve? When the 747s fuel laden wing assembly fell on Sherwood Crescent it exploded into an inferno which consumed aircraft debris, houses, victims on the ground and several passengers. Whether any suitcases disappeared into the flames is uncertain but hundreds of suitcases littered the hillsides around Tundergarth some miles away, suggesting that the bulk of the luggage fell well away from Sherwood Crescent. The Winterhope reservoir was searched by police divers so any luggage would have been recovered from the water. For the Bedford suitcase to have gone into the flames would have taken the conjecture into an even more attenuated order of coincidence. Not only did an innocent bag distinct from, but identical to, that carrying the bomb mysteriously appear in the container in Bedfords absence (with Iran Air next door). Not only did he notice that it was in almost the optimum position for doing maximum damage (had it been a bomb). Not only did an identical bag carrying the bomb happen to come down the conveyer at the very moment after the Bedford bag had been lifted out to be make room for the Coyle bag. Not only was the new identical bag laid on top of the Coyle bag instead of the Bedford bag and the Bedford bag placed somewhere else. Not only did DC Hendersons thorough inquiries miss the fact that a passenger was travelling with the clone of the bomb bag. But, if the Judges implied thinking is to be believed, added to all those coincidences we have yet one more. While the dismembered parts of the container and most, if not all, of the luggage that must have been in it were found dispersed over a wide area and recovered, the innocent clone of the bomb bag just happens by remarkable chance to fall into the flames of Sherwood Crescent. Sidhus imagined exercise in unhurriedly and fastidiously rearranging the baggage, as if he had all the time in the world to make a perfect fit, hardly squares with the late arrival of the feeder flight from Frankfurt and the fact that he had less than 15 minutes to load the container with luggage accompanying the 49 passengers who were booked through to New York from Frankfurt before Maid of the Seas was due to leave the gate. Indeed, in cross-examination Sandhu admitted it was a rush job. In fact, the courts finding that the bomb suitcase was on top of the Coyle bag seems inherently doubtful. The Samsonite was nine inches deep. The Tourister case, being on the large side, could have been 10 inches deep. Peter Claiden, the AAIB expert estimated that the explosion was 10 inches from the floor of the container and two inches into the overhang section. Dr Hayes of RARDE stated that allowing for the Semtex being packed in the radio cassette recorder the explosion could not have been right up at the edge of the case. So the 10 inches would be too high for the bomb bag to have been resting on the horizontal section of the container floor and also it could not then have protruded into the overhang part. While on the other hand, the second layer could account for the two-inch protrusion into the overhang, the 10 inches from floor to explosion would be a bit too low for the second layer. AAIB experts noted the absence of

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pitting in the container floor and concluded that there must have been something in between. William Taylor QC for al-Megrahi suggested a solution as to how these facts might be reconciled. Although a bag resting entirely on the horizontal part of the floor could not protrude into the overhang section, Sidhu need only have pushed the case noticed by Bedford about six inches to the left (to fit in something small to its right) for the sloping part of the floor to have pushed the left-hand side of the case two or three inches upwards. With the Toshiba packed along that side, either on the top, or on the bottom if the case was placed upside-down in the container, this would have put it into more or less the exact position for the explosion to have been consistent with the 10-inch distance from the container floor estimated by Claiden. The articles of clothing in the Samsonite could then have shielded the container floor from pitting by the explosion (see, http:// forums.randi.org.showthread.php?postid=6900174 for a helpful diagram of this possibility). The possibility that Sidhu might in this way have pushed the bag Bedford had noticed slightly to the left of where Bedford had observed it to be lying to achieve not quite the position the terrorist intended but if anything a slightly better position, and the one at which the bomb in fact exploded seems a more credible and measured proposition than the series of outlandish coincidences implied by the courts finding. But in the end Taylors eminently reasonable submission was simply ignored. Subsequently to the trial but before the appeal in 2002 it was disclosed that at some time in the two hours before 00:35 on December 21, 1988, a padlock had been cut through on a door giving access to the Pan Am baggage build-up area at Heathrow. This had not been disclosed to the defence prior to the trial, supposedly because the police had lost the original report. The defence argued that this further weakened the proposition that the suitcase had started its journey in Malta. The appeal court dismissed the new evidence as mere coincidence, a characterization which surely takes the biscuit considering how the Judges resorted to coincidence upon coincidence to justify dismissing the exculpatory impact of the undisputed existence of the suitcase attested to by Bedford. It beggars belief that al-Megrahis conviction could have been sustained on the basis of such manifest improbability. Would the same Judges have acquitted a defendant because the chance that DNA was not his was only a billion to one? The fact remains that Bedfords sighting, before the arrival of PA103A from Frankfurt, of a suitcase identical to that in which the bomb was found to have been packed, in virtually the position in the container in which the bomb was set off, rules out any question of the bomb having come from Frankfurt in an identical suitcase. Common sense and pure logic decree that it must have been the bag Bedford saw which carried the bomb.

Improbability That the Bomb was Flown From Frankfurt

Reinforcing the Heathrow origin of the bomb is the difficulty of explaining how a suitcase containing a radiocassette player could have got past Maiers x-ray screening

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Criminal Law & Justice Weekly at Frankfurt and circumvented the reconciliation procedure attested to by ONeil. It is almost inconceivable that the terrorists used an electronic timer to bring down the plane only 38 minutes into its flight where such a device would have given them the option to destroy it half way across the North Atlantic. Logic dictates that they used a barometric trigger. The main problem for the terrorists in sending a bomb from Frankfurt equipped with a barometric trigger with a delay timer is that it would have had to be primed at Heathrow by an accomplice plugging in the main switch. (At the same time the accomplice would have had to position the suitcase for optimum effect.) He would have needed to be present on the tarmac with the loaders if he was not one of them. He would have had to open the suitcase, rummage around for the radio-cassette player, taking care not to disturb its carefullyarranged position within the bag, plug in the main switch and close the suitcase. He would have had to do all this without being noticed by the loaders. He would then have to contrive to be the one who placed it in the optimum position in the container. He would have had to accomplish this under the pressure of the rush job. If he was not a loader it is impossible to envisage how he could have managed any of this. There is no suggestion that either Sidhu or Sandhu was an accomplice, but even if one or other was a terrorist could he really have acted without the other noticing? The risk of challenge and discovery would have been incalculable. There would have been no need to take such an absurd risk. Far simpler, safer and more effective would it have been to take the completed bomb to London by rail or road and ferry. No x-ray check at Ostende, Calais or Dover. None at Gothenberg or Harwich (on the basis that it may have come via possible accomplices of the PFLP-GC based in Sweden, eg Mohammed Abu Talb). Plug in the main switch at leisure, transport the suitcase to Heathrow and break in to the deserted terminal at midnight to secrete the thing for later collection. Withdraw for the night, and observe the airport during the morning for signs that the broken padlock had triggered extra vigilance. Once reassured, the terrorist could take advantage of the lax security to use one of the hundreds of airside passes which were unaccounted-for to reach the Pan Am baggage build-up area without carrying anything so incriminating as a Semtex-laden suitcase, then retrieve it from its hiding place and so look like any other baggage handler dealing with a stray item. He would then have to wait for Bedford to take his tea-break and then position it in the container out of sight of any prying eyes. There would have been no point in Ahmed Jibril arranging for a loader at Frankfurt to get a bomb bag into the system instead of a drugs bag. The possible involvement of a CIA-protected drug route may have been a thrilling diversion in all the conspiracy-mongering, but it was, and remains, a complete red herring.

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The True Culprits?

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In November 1989 Marwan Khreesat, one of the two men arrested by the BKA on 26 October, 1988, was interviewed in Amman by Edward Marshman, an agent of the FBI. Khreesat told Marshman that he worked for Jordans Mukabaret intelligence service, which doubtless meant he was a proxy asset

of the CIA, to which Jordanian intelligence has historically been close. He said he had been ordered to infiltrate the PFLP-GC in Germany, using his much respected bomb-making skills, an assertion which was not without foundation. It would explain why after being arrested with an improvised bomb in the car and giving the BKA a frank account of his involvement in bomb-making for the PFLP-GC he was eventually discharged by a judge for lack of evidence in what was palpably an exercise in judicial collusion. In 2001, the Jordanian government refused permission for him to travel to Camp Zeist to give evidence for the defence. It had been agreed as part of the deal which allowed the trial to be heard by Scottish judges in Holland without a jury that the normal common law rules of evidence would be relaxed, allowing hearsay to be adduced. (In fact it may have been admissible under existing statute.) Accordingly, Edward Marshman was called by the defence to repeat what Khreesat had told him in 1989. Khreesat gave Marshman a detailed account of his activities in Germany which were generally borne out by the BKA record of Autumn Leaves. The salient points were as follows: He would manufacture improvised bombs with which the PFLP-GCs German cell would attempt to destroy civil aircraft in flight. Abu Elias, an expert in airport security, would smuggle the bombs on to aircraft, although Khreesat was not told how. Khreesat stressed that his instructions from his Jordanian controllers were to make inoperable devices, but he said he felt this was an unrealistic expectation while under the watchful eye of Abu Elias, an assertion borne out by the death of the BKA bomb disposal expert in 1989. On October 24, Khreesat told Marshman, he started making five bombs but broke off to take a shower. While in the shower Dalkamoni knocked on the door and told him he was leaving for Frankfurt. On resuming work on the bombs he saw that the fifth device had disappeared. Next day he telephoned his case officer in Jordan with the news that he had prepared a device which had been given to Abu Elias. Later in the day Khreesat and Dalkamoni called in at Dsseldorf airport where they picked up and discussed timetables (including Pan American ones). The day after that, October 26, they were stopped in their car by the BKA who found the Toshiba RT-F453D under a blanket. The flat where Khreesat had been staying was searched and police found incriminating articles. By the time Marshman interviewed Khreesat, RARDE were claiming to have established that the bomb had been housed in a Toshiba stereo machine (the SF16). Could this have been why, according to Marshman, Khreesat maintained he had never used a stereo model and could not therefore be responsible for building the device which brought down Maid of the Seas? When the BKA raided 16 Isarstrasse, the address in Neuss where Khreesat had been making his bombs, they noted 12 unmodified stereo radio-cassette players which they left there. Why had so many stereo models been obtained if Khreesat was not going to use them? But there is contradictory evidence of what Khreesat told Marshman. He was interviewed by defence solicitors in June 2000 and admitted to using both mono and stereo models. He also appears to have given this information to his Jordanian controllers, who passed it on to the CIA, early in 1989.

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Criminal Law & Justice Weekly From a Toshiba catalogue he purported to identify the radio-cassette player which had been passed to Elias as a bronze RT-F423 model. By November, 1989, it had been determined from some bits of plastic that the Toshiba which destroyed Pan Am 103 was a black bodied model. So this may have been a further way by which he may have sought or been allowed to distance himself from the fatal device. By 2000 he was not under the same pressure or had forgotten his earlier assertions. If Khreesat was to be believed, a Toshiba-concealed bomb had been given to Abu Elias and was unaccounted for. And this seems not to be the only improvised bomb in the gangs possession which was never seized. At least two other Toshiba radio-cassette player bombs were mentioned by Dalkamoni to the BKA, one which Ramzi Diab (one of the men rounded up on October 26) had handed him on October 18, 1988, and a second which Khreesat had brought from Amman. A total of at least three deadly devices are a lot of which to lose track. The Judges also heard from Mohammed Abu Talb, who was brought from prison in Sweden where he was serving a life sentence for terrorist acts. Although he purported to testify on behalf of the Crown that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie it emerged from his evidence that a terrorist gang financed by Iran and harboured by Syria were at large in Germany in December, 1988, making bombs disguised in Toshiba radio-cassette players to blow up airliners in flight. Abu Talb himself had been arrested in possession of clothes traced back to the Maltese manufacturers who had supplied Gaucis shop. He had been in Malta between October 19
SOURCES Primary documentation
Report into the accident to Boeing 747-121, N739PA at Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland on December 21, 1988, Department of Transport, Air Accidents Investigation Branch aircraft accident report 2/90, August 6, 1990. Determination of the Fatal Accident Inquiry relating to the Lockerbie air disaster, October 1, 1990 to February 14, 1991, and Note dated March 18, 1991. Transcripts of the proceedings of the Scottish court at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, May 3, 2000 to January 31, 2001 Opinion of the High Court of Justiciary at Camp Zeist, case no. 1475/99, HM v. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. Opinion of the Appeal Court, High Court of Justiciary, appeal no. C104/01, appeal against conviction by Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. March 14, 2002. Press release from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission on the referral of the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi to the High Court of Justiciary, June 28, 2007. Documents prepared for al-Megrahis abandoned second appeal, available at www.megrahimystory.net

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and 26, 1988, and could have been there on November 23, 1988, the date more likely than July 7, to have been the date of purchase. Yet the Judges inexplicably found that while there was a great deal of suspicion against Abu Talb and his circle there was no evidence to indicate that they had either the means or the intention to destroy a civil aircraft in December, 1988. In the words of the late journalist and trial observer Paul Foot: No means, that is, beyond working with a bomb-maker who specialized in disguising explosive devices in cassette recorders so that they could be smuggled on to aircraft. No intention except visits to airports and the studying of aircraft schedules, including some from Pan Am (p.24). One can only wonder at the sinking feeling Khreesats CIA controllers must have experienced at the news about Pan Am 103, akin perhaps to that felt by Bedford: the realization that a bomb improvised by their own proxy for the purpose of maintaining his cover on their behalf might actually have ended up being used to bring down the Pan Am Jumbo Jet. With the loss of 259 mainly American lives the mea culpa of an admission to human error would have been guaranteed to cut little ice among the public they served. What action might they have contemplated? To whom might they have spoken? Within hours of the atrocity numerous personnel in US government service were engaged across the crash site in various unexplained activities not necessarily connected with assisting the regular police or AAIB officials. On December 28, 1988, seven days after Lockerbie, when there was as yet no evidence ostensibly pointing to Libyan culpability, Ronald Reagan in one of the last acts of his Presidency, extended sanctions against Libya and threatened renewed bombing raids.

Conclusion

Selected commentary
Ashton, J. and Ferguson, I., Cover-up of Convenience: the hidden scandal of Lockerbie, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001. Emerson, S., and Duffy, B., The Fall of Pan Am 103: inside the Lockerbie investigation, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1990. Foot, P., Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice. London: Pressdram, 2001. Leppard, D., On the Trail of Terror: the inside story of the Lockerbie investigation, London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. Marquise, R. A., Scotbom: evidence and the Lockerbie investigation, New York: Algora Publishing, 2001.

It will have become apparent from the analysis of the evidence before the court offered here that wherever the bomb which destroyed Pan Am 103 was built the Samsonite hardshell bag in which it was packed could not have come from Luqa as an anonymous item of baggage on KM180, or from Frankfurt on PA103A. It should have been as plain as a pikestaff that it was smuggled into the system at Heathrow. Why the Judges lost sight of the wood for the trees is not a matter which warrants conjecture. That they did so is beyond doubt. When asked by Lord Maclean to confirm that al-Megrahis Abdusamad passport was never used again after December 21, 1988, William Taylor QC said we dont know that, to which Lord Maclean riposted Yes I do and gave the reference. The Judge got the acerbic reply he truly deserved: Thank you. I am corrected. So your Lordship has asked me a question to which your Lordship already had the answer. The application of a sight more judicial cleverness and rather less too cleverness by half might have delivered a truer verdict. J
Author details

The author is a barrister and Head of Chambers Emeritus at 7 Bell Yard, Temple Bar, London WC2A 2JR.

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