LOCKERBIE: SCOTTISH JUDGES IGNORED RULING BY ENGLISH LAW LORD Alan or Allen Feraday (born 23 December 1937), former head of the Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL) at the Royal Armaments Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) at Fort Halstead in Kent, is a self-professed forensic expert in electronics. Although not academically qualified for the role, Alan Feraday was often addressed as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ when he appeared as an expert electronics witness in a number of high profile terrorist bombing cases including Danny McNamee (1982), John Berry (1983), Patrick Magee (1984), Hassan Assali (1985), the Gibraltar shootings (March 1988) and the Lockerbie bombing (December 1988). Margaret Thatcher soon took an interest in Alan Feraday after his evidence in the 1986 Brighton bombing case where Patrick Magee was convicted, and was especially grateful for the exculpatory testimony Feraday gave at the Death on the Rock inquest in Gibraltar, when the SAS were alleged to have been operating a shoot to kill policy against three IRA bombers killed in March 1988. Following the sabotage of Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988, the director of the Forensic Explosives Laboratory Dr Thomas Hayes and his colleague Alan Feraday were tasked with the forensic investigation into the Lockerbie bombing, which was allocated the FEL case reference number PP8932. In the 1989 Queens Birthday Honours list, Feraday was awarded an OBE and took over as head of the FEL when Hayes retired to become a chiropodist in the latter part of 1989. Two years later, Feraday and Dr Hayes (who continued with the Lockerbie investigation on a part-time basis) compiled a Joint Forensic Report into case PP8932. The JFR identified the only piece of hard evidence in the Lockerbie case: a tiny fragment of printed circuit board that Feraday maintained had been the trigger for the Lockerbie bomb. On 28 September 1993, Alan Feraday’s career prospects suddenly appeared to be in tatters when, in overturning John Berrys conviction, Englands most senior judge, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Taylor of Gosforth, commented that although Feradays views were no doubt honestly held, his evidence had been expressed in terms that were dogmatic in the extreme and his conclusions were uncompromising and incriminating. LCJ Taylor went even further saying that in future Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics. In 1995, Alan Feraday saw the writing on the wall and, aged 58, took early retirement after 25 years service at the FEL when RARDE was subsumed into the less regal-sounding Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). How come then the main prosecution expert witness at the trial in June 2000 of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – who was convicted in January 2001 of the Lockerbie bombing – was none other than Alan Feraday? The obvious answer is that Scots Law Professor Robert Black arranged for the trial to be held in the Netherlands under Scottish Judges, where Feradays ban imposed by the English Law Lord could safely be ignored. (https://wikispooks/wiki/Alan_Feraday)
Posted on: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 19:55:22 +0000
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