The killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in public view and for no apparent reason remains one of the most notorious murders of recent decades. For sixteen years there have been few signs of any serious attempts to locate and bring to justice the perpetrator of this outrage. Finally, this April, in an outstanding piece of investigative journalism, a re-examination of the pathological and ballistical evidence strongly contests the official version of that tragic event in St James’s Sq.(1)
Why would the Libyans do it?
There is no need here to rehearse the details of that sensational episode. Fairly quickly after this appalling crime, expressions of disquiet with official explanations were voiced. If guns had been taken into the Libyan embassy, surely the intelligence agencies would have known? If there had been a Libyan embassy plan to fire at the anti-Gaddafi demonstrators on that fateful day on 17 April 1984, wouldn’t this have been discovered by the authorities? After all, surveillance operations on the embassies of unfriendly states were common practice long before the early 1980s. A combination of phone taps, electronic bugs, decoded telegrams, photographs of all entrants to the building and sources within should have alerted the authorities to impending danger. Surely the Libyan gunman would have been under strict orders to avoid at all costs any possibility of hitting a police officer with the predictable and very costly consequences for the Libyan regime and economy? And why did the Thatcher government allow the 22 employees of the embassy to leave the country without hindrance?
Hints from Ministers
The then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, was so unhappy with the performance of MI5 that he threatened a drastic reorganisation. Reliable press sources believe that the Security Service retaliated by spreading rumours about Brittan’s sex life, even producing anonymous fliers containing these allegations.(2) Alan Clark, a former Thatcherite Defence Minister, remarked years later of this incident that ‘more lay below the surface than appears to view’.(3) Was he hinting at the delicate situation that the government was in with regard to their urgent need of greater supplies of Libyan oil in order to prepare for the forthcoming struggle with the British coal communities and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)?(4) Having ostentatiously broken off all relations with Libya, such a secret deal could only have been brokered at a price, and perhaps that price involved the treatment of embassy staff.
The demonisation of Gaddafi
This murder, and the later much publicised embrace of a senior NUM officer, Roger Windsor, by the ‘mad dog of Tripoli’ at a most critical stage (28 October) of the Coal Dispute, advanced the demonisation of Gaddafi in the Western media.(5) An American-led campaign to present Libya as a major centre of international terrorism was so successful that British agreement was secured for bombing raids, from British bases, on Gaddafi’s family and military targets in April 1986.(6) Two and a half years later, after early clear evidence of the culpability of Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the finger of guilt for the Lockerbie air disaster was pointed at Libya.(7) The demonisation of Libya, justified or not, was complete.
‘The bullet was not fired from the embasssy.’
We can now turn to the new Channel Four analysis of the key events in St James’s Square. The combined evidence of many distinguished experts, including Professor Bernard Knight, one of the Home Office’s most eminent pathologists with over 40 year experience, Lieutenant Colonel George Styles, a leading weapons expert with 26 years in the British Army, and Dr Hugh Thomas, a former chief consultant surgeon to the Army, one of the leading gunshot experts in the world, suggests that the bullet which killed Yvonne Fletcher came not from a Stirling submachine gun fired from the first floor of the embassy, but was a single shot from the upper floor from another building. Amazingly, it turns out that this was the original judgement of Dr Ian West, the Home Office pathologist, which he then changed at the inquest.(8) The programme also found out that a videotape, shot by a Libyan student, which seriously undermines the analysis of police ballistics experts, had not been presented in evidence at the inquest, even though the police had a copy. Interviews with security officers and residents from St James’s Square established that there had been a major intelligence operation (25 to 40 personnel) based on the top two floors of no. 3 for four to five weeks prior to the day of the anti-Gaddafi demonstration by the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, an organisation financed by the CIA. Unbelievably, this operation was wound up the day before the demonstration! Dr Thomas is convinced that the single bullet which killed the police officer was fired from the top two floors of either no. 3, or from no. 8, which had been briefly rented by an American oil company.
‘Preposterous trash’
To any open-minded viewer, this investigation was bound to make the next day’s headlines. In fact, almost all of the rest of the media totally ignored the story. Alive to the complexities of Western/Libyan relationships from their interest in Lockerbie, the silence was broken by the persistent men of British politics, Tam Dalyell and Sir Teddy Taylor. At some length in the House of Commons in May, they raised their concerns with David Maclean, the Home Office Minister. In the presence of Fletcher’s parents the Minister denounced the programme as ‘preposterous trash’. While it was also ‘obscene’, ‘offensive’, and ‘feverish’, the adjective used no less than seven times was ‘preposterous’.(9) Mr and Mrs Fletcher, in a rare interview, expressed their frustration with the lack of answers from the government.(10)
A second set of parliamentary questions from Tam Dalyell received a similar response from the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, who stonewalled the question asking if the police had interviewed those members of the intelligence services who witnessed the exchange of signals between the embassy and Tripoli, which would have revealed any plan to use guns. While he would not comment on matters relating to Security Service operations, he did, however, confirm that the police are reviewing the documentary to consider why the Libyan student’s video had not been available to the inquest.
‘Blood money’ and the ‘lost’ civil servant
Sir Teddy Taylor’s suspicions about this affair were compounded by the response of the Foreign Office (FO) to his offer to help resolve the disagreements between Libya and the UK. Their first response was negative, but when he persisted, the FO advised him that he should secure a public expression of regret from Libya for the death and a donation to a police charity, and that both actions must be supported by the President. Taylor returned from Libya, after a fruitful meeting with the Colonel, with both a letter of regret and a cheque for £250,000. He was then summoned to a private meeting with Douglas Hurd, and told that evidence of Libya’s involvement with Lockerbie made it impossible to proceed. Soon after, it was leaked from a British embassy that Gaddafi had offered £250,000 ‘blood money’ in recompense for the Fletcher murder, and that the government had rejected it with contempt. When Taylor protested vigorously, pointing out that he had sent copies of all correspondence to the head of the Libyan desk at the FO, he was advised that the official concerned had left public service, that there was no knowledge of his whereabouts, and that the correspondence could not be found. Our persistent MP was so affronted that he employed a private detective who quickly found the ‘lost’ civil servant sitting in our Prague embassy!(11)
From Cold War to ‘counter-terrorism’
The Reaganite assertion of military power was two-fold: a drive to finally liberate ‘the evil empire’, and a new strategy of ‘counter-terrorism’. ‘Terrorism’ is a convenient way to generate a new kind of wartime atmosphere, which mobilises public opinion, imposes allied cohesion, and is excellent for the arms trade. The Libyan ‘threat’ has been invaluable for this purpose, whatever the reality of the Libyan role in terrorism.(12)
There is more and more evidence pointing to the possibility that the Libyans are falsely accused over the Lockerbie disaster. The evidence produced by the Fulcrum team suggests that it is possible that there was an attempt to further demonise the Libyan leader in London in 1984 which then became one of the two excuses for the attempted assassination of the Libyan head of state in 1986. Was a British police officer’s life sacrificed on the altar of state terrorism?
Notes
- Broadcast on 10 April 1996, as part of the Channel Four Dispatches series, ‘Murder in St James’s Square’, Fulcrum Productions, director/producer Richard Belfield, investigator Joe Layburn.
- Guardian, 27 July 1984, Observer, 1 July 1984. See also Private Eye, 29 June 1984,
- Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: MI5, Maxwell and the Scargill Affair, Verso, London, 1994, p. 103.
- Milne, p. 215
- Milne, Ch. 4 ‘The Strange World of Roger Windsor’. It suggests that Windsor may have been an MI5 agent, and that his Libyan contact, Mohammed Altaf Abbasi, also worked for the security services.
- E.P.Thompson, Mary Kaldor et al, Mad Dogs:US Raids on Libya, Pluto, London, 1986.
- Donald Goddard with Lester Coleman, Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie – Inside the DIA, BCA, London, 1993. Peter Smith, ‘Lockerbie, the Octopus and the Maltese Double Cross’, Lobster 27, June 1994.
- Dr West was the pathologist at the trial of Colin Wallace.
- Hansard, 8 May 1996.
- Keith Potter, ‘Seeking the Truth’, Police Review, 31 May 1996. Understandably, the police service are not prepared to drop their interest in this unsolved murder.
- Sir Teddy Taylor, ‘Who Really Killed WPC Fletcher?’, the Spectator, 29 June 1996
- William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, pp. 280-89. Excellent analysis of US/Libyan relationships.