Here's another example. A new revelation concerning the Lockerbie bombing:
Zurich - A Swiss businessman on Monday claimed that a key piece of evidence in the Lockerbie trial was faked, following a French press report that one of his employees had lied to Scottish investigators.
Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss-based Mebo group, told reporters that one of his employees had supplied Scottish investigators with a stolen timing device, which was then presented in the trial as having been found amidst the plane's wreckage.
Mebo makes electronic equipment for the security forces.
In fact, Mebo employee Ulrich Lumpert has now admitted that the device he handed over to Scottish investigators was one he himself had stolen from the company, rather than part of a batch delivered to Libya in the 1980s.
"The exhibits were manipulated and used to make a link between Libya and the attack," Bollier told reporters.
Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988, killing 270 people in what was Britain's worst terrorist atrocity.
Former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi was convicted by a trio of Scottish judges sitting in a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 of being behind the blast, and was jailed for a total of 27 years.
Lumpert was also a witness at Megrahi's trial.
Monday's edition of Le Figaro reported that he had now gone back on his story in a sworn declaration to a Zurich court.
"I stole a prototype MST-13 timing device... Gave it without permission on June 22, 1989, to a person who was officially investigating the Lockerbie affair," Lumpert said in the new statement, Le Figaro reported.
"When I realised that the MST-13 had been used ill-advisedly, I decided to stay silent, as it could have been extremely dangerous for me," he added.
Lumpert did not explain the motives behind his actions.
The conviction of the former Libyan agent remains shrouded in controversy, with many campaigners and relatives of the Lockerbie victims instead pointing the finger of blame at an Iranian-backed Palestinian militant group.
In June, Megrahi won the right to a new appeal against his sentence in the Scottish courts, after the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found he "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice" at his 2001 trial. - Sapa-AFP
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