The misreporting of Operation Bird

A number of press reports on Operation Bird, including the original one published by Exaro news and the one in today’s Scotsman, claim that the Bird investigation would have been central to Abdelbaset’s second appeal. This is completely untrue. The investigation was commissioned in the run up to Abdelbaset’s first appeal, but its findings were not used because the investigation failed to turn up any hard evidence. It was rejected by the SCCRC for the same reason and because some of the findings were contradicted by known facts. For these reasons it would have played no part in Abdelbaset’s second appeal. My reservations about the investigation are set out in yesterday’s blog post.