First minister Alex Salmond has just issued this statement. It appears that he is still desperately clinging to the fiction that Abdelbaset’s conviction is safe. Maybe someone should tell him that appeals are not adjudicated according to the number of grounds the SCCRC acepted and rejected.
I welcome the publication in full of this report, which is something that the Scottish Government has been doing everything in our powers to facilitate.
While the report shows that there were six grounds on which it believed a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, it also rejected 45 of the 48 grounds submitted by Megrahi, and in particular it upheld the forensic basis of the case leading to Malta and to Libyan involvement.
The SCCRC of course missed the crucial forensic evidence concerning the timer fragment PT/35b, which breaks the link to Libya. Furthermore it did not consider the evidence from Luqa and Frankfurt airports, which was the basis of the Malta connection.