LOCKERBIE TRIAL: A MIXTURE OF GOOD AND BAD NEWS.

The long awaited verdict of the Lockerbie trial presented all parties concerned with a tragi-comic mixture of good and bad news. Starting with the defendants Abdul Baset Ali Al Megrahi and Lamine Al Amin Fhimah, they were found guilty and not guilty, respectively.

The three Scottish judges, found Mr Megrahi guilty of mass murder, sentencing him to life in prison. At the same time, they freed his co-defendant for lack of proof. The two were put on trial accused of bombing Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 270 people aboard and 11 people on the ground in December 1988.

The verdict left an open question: Since evidence that led to the arrest of the two in the first place indicates they were both working for the Libyan Intelligence Service, is it probable the organisation was that sophisticated that the two defendants were operating for two separate branches, independently of each other, without even knowing of each others existence?

For the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi the verdict was good news, in that his name was not dragged out in court as being the man responsible for the mass murder. The bad news however, is that it is not over; he has yet to admit Libyan intelligence service involvement and compensate the victims. However, even this bad news also carried good news in its inflated belly: giving, as it did, an opportunity for the eccentric colonel to hog the media stage.

Displaying the latest in his designer wardrobe and hugging the freed Al Amin Fhimah to his chest, he shouted from the roof tops giving long speeches -- one lasting three hours, during which hapless foreign correspondents had to sit patiently, waiting -- to no avail -- for the promised proof of Mr Megrahi's innocence -- as the Colonel denounced America and Britain. No new evidence or proof was found among the incomprehensible rhetoric that followed. Nevertheless the mass protest in the streets of Tripoli continued unabated, with two of Gadaffi's brainwashed subjects cutting their own throats.

For the families of the victims, at last the link between the terror over Lockerbie and Libya was established. The bad news was the strong fishy smell that pervaded the courtroom as the verdicts were announced. The most famous among them Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora perished on the doomed flight, found the contradiction in the verdict too much to bear and fainted in court.

Was it possible, even conceivable that Mr Megrahi acted alone? What was his motive? What did he gain? Who made the bombs, and who gave the orders?

The relatives called a press conference to rubbish both the CIA and the Scottish police evidence, and to call for a public inquiry.

For Britain and America, the good news is that the judges, by finding one of his agents guilty, managed to wipe the smile off Colonel Gadaffi's face (the Colonel had the early laughs of the saga in 1998 when he caught America and Britain off guard by suddenly handing over the two suspects to be tried in the specially established Scottish court at Camp Zest).

The bad news was that the verdict, as well as the demands made by relatives of the victims, present London and Washington with multiple headaches.

For eight years UN sanctions against Libya -- imposed in 1992 -- seemed more damaging to American and British interests than those of Libya. With generous oil revenues, the latter has often found ways around them. Most Arab nations refused to treat Libya as a pariah. And many non-Arab states have also grown restive at the idea of Libya's continued economic isolation. Rescinding the sanctions, which have been suspended for almost two years, and normalising relations with Libya now makes good political sense for both Britain and America, according to diplomatic sources. They want sanctions to be lifted, before America's errors with Saddam Hussein are repeated.

Sanctions are usually subject to a law of diminishing returns as they cannot achieve more they already have in moderating Libyan conduct, and returning Colonel Gadaffi to the kennel where a bark is worse than a toothless bite. Sanctions are only making the Libyan people suffer for the behaviour of a leader they did not freely choose, the diplomats argue.

The problem is how to convince public opinion in the West, which is stirred by calls from victims families and journalists, to re-establish normal relations with a regime whose leader is under investigation for mass murder?

Having already met three of the six conditions laid down by the UN, a senior British diplomat said Libya could be persuaded to meet most of the other conditions, including admitting responsibility.

But how can Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and US Secretary of State Colin Powell deal with growing pressure from victims families and journalists calling for a public inquiry?

Such an inquiry, to the horror of seasoned servants of British `creative diplomacy' over Lockerbie, might just lead the dogs to where the bodies were buried.

An inquiry could prove the verdict handed down in the Netherlands was a the culmination of the affair in an understanding summarised by veteran Middle East reporter Tim Llewellyn: "The verdict ending the Lockerbie affair has been a triumph of realpolitik over all the evidence and questions of motive."

For the philosophers of the conspiracy theory and their many disciples, it was all good news, as the trial progressed and the finger of accusation shifted, from Iran and Syria in 1989, across to Libya by 1991.

The British and American governments have been less than frank throughout the affair. They often appeared to know more than they would say, and seemed to accuse Gadaffi and Libya only after their investigation of a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist group became impolitic during the second Gulf war, leading to a quick re-shuffling of the cards of the main players.

The ending of the first Gulf war -- during which Iran and Syria were the villains and Saddam Hussein was the good guy -- and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, marked a turning point in London and Washington's attitude towards Iran and its ally Syria.

In preparation for Desert Storm, it was not only desirable but essential to appease Syria, give her a free hand in Lebanon, and to make sure Iran's then-new president Hashemi Rafsanjani resisted calls by the radicals to take Saddam's side against America and her allies.

President Rafsanjani, at the time promised, for example, to try to limit the threats contained in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Both Britain and America had hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. Europe and the United States wanted Iran and Syria's help in securing their release and, in Europe's case, promoting the cause of its peacetime business.

By 1991, new `firm evidence' linked Gadaffi, not Syria or Iran to the Lockerbie bombing. All the above was reprinted, reminding the already sceptical, public of the shifting sands of politics in Mid-East-western diplomacy, by cheeky journalists reporting the defence's speeches and sifting through evidence and history books during the trial.

From the word go, the prosecution had no `smoking gun' or any eyewitness to the crime to be presented at Camp Zest. Prosecutors had to ask judges to infer the defendants' guilt from circumstantial evidence. All the time correspondents for Arabic newspapers -- a vital source from which conspiracy theorists mine their raw material -- put their own spin on `yesterday in court.'

A defence lawyer mocked the prosecution case as an "inference upon an inference upon an inference -- leading to an inference."

Most unusually, the three judges were impressed by the prosecution's argument; they drew an inference from a mountain of detailed evidence which, they reckoned, established beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Megrahi planted the bomb. However, they failed to identify his motives, his accomplices or his gains despite calling 230 witnesses, including CIA agents and former intelligence agents from Libya's erstwhile Soviet-block allies.

Electronic circuit fragments recovered from the debris were traced to shipments of bomb triggers, timers received by Libyan intelligence. The man who made them also became a prosecution witness.

It was a replay, on a much bigger screen and in slow motion, of some episodes of an undeclared war from the days of the cold war, with evidence about Libyan intelligence officials plotting a retaliation for the 1986 American air strike on Tripoli, which was aimed at Colonel Gadaffi but killed among others, his adopted daughter.

That strike had been a punishment for Libya's alleged role in an attack on a Berlin discotheque that killed two American soldiers.

Conspiracy theories at the time said Libya was an easy target picked by the Americans. The real villains, they argued, were Iran and Syria, but they would have been much tougher opponents to bomb with impunity.

The defence strategy was to sow doubt by blaming a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist group -- the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- General Command -- which had been originally suspected of the bombing, on the orders of the Iranians, to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus by an American warship in the Gulf in July 1988.

A police raid on the group's hideouts in Germany two months before the Lockerbie bombing turned up Semtex-based explosives built into Toshiba cassette-recorders just like the one which caused the Lockerbie tragedy.

Defence lawyers also savaged some of the prosecution's main witnesses, including Abdul Majid Giaka, a Libyan double agent turned informant for the CIA, who claimed to have seen the two defendants smuggle a suspicious suitcase through Maltese customs on the eve of the explosion.

Mr Giaka became the subject of a series of amusing revelations. "He was only a painter with the maintenance department working in the intelligence building" said Colonel Gadaffi on 2 February. He went on to describe Giaka as "a car park attendant" in his marathon speech three days later.

During the trial, the defence revealed that Mr Giaka reported the information to his CIA handlers only when the Americans threatened to sack him unless he came up with some useful information.

In a meticulous 82-page verdict, the judges sieved through a spaghetti of evidence, dismissing the soggy points of the prosecution case, including much of Mr Giaka's testimony and conceded "there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications." They nevertheless concluded that what remained confirmed the guilt of Mr Al Megrahi.

The Foreign Office, might hide behind the civil case the families of Lockerbie victims are planning to file in the US against Colonel Gadaffi. Should they decide to delay the idea of a public inquiry until after the case -- which could run for years -- there is a slim chance the public will forget. A more likely scenario would be that the American victims' families might just co-ordinate with their equally aggrieved counterparts across the pond to outsmart Robin Cook and delay the civil suite until after the inquiry. Watch this space.