This morning’s announcement* from the Crown Office that they have contacted Libya’s newly changed regime in an effort to seek “assistance with the investigation” into the Pan Am 103 atrocity is a dangerous, disgraceful and disrespectful charade.

The Crown Office are very careful to ration their public promulgations on this case, and seek refuge behind the convenient cover that the Pan Am 103 investigation is live and “it would not be appropriate to offer further comment”, which they have done today. This is their excuse to avoid answering any questions on their statement, and you can be certain that they will not elaborate further on it. This “live” investigation was described by MSP Christine Grahame as a “box ticking exercise”.

There is a coherent and active cohort in the Crown Office who are indeed very hard at work on this case: not to solve it, but to obstruct it and shore up the discredited Crown prosecution effort. The Crown Office claim that they will pursue any lines of inquiry, but if you have ever dealt with the Crown Office on this and seen the correspondence issued to the families, it is quite clear that they have expended an incredible amount of effort in frustrating any inquiry into their transparently flawed efforts. Their energy has been directed towards blocking the pursuit of leads and shoring up the manufactured case.

The UK has form at this exercise, as the recent revelations into the 1961 destruction of Dag Hammarskjold's flight over the Congo have shown, demonstrating the cold efficiency with which lies can be sustained and reinforced by officialdom.

Whilst they claim to be pursuing all leads, they have pointedly avoided looking at the actual leads that have arisen since the flawed conviction of Megrahi was brought in over a decade ago. They long ago lost the faith of the UK families, but they continue to operate as they have done today, constructing a PR case to support their broken investigation and to diffuse the inevitable criticism that will come their way once the extent of their culpability in this shameful episode is fully exposed, as it will be.

They vigorously opposed the SCCRC & ignored their conclusion that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place, while resisting any progress towards an inquiry.

They did not follow up EU explosives consultant John Wyatt's findings, which found that the explosives theory advanced by the Crown was impossible in physics.

They did not follow up Ulrich Lumpert's affidavit in 2007 in which he said he manufactured the "timer fragment" employed as evidence, and handed it to Scottish authorities.

They have not followed up on the revelation that the key Crown witness was bribed for his testimony.

The have not followed up on UN observer Hans Kochler's assessment that the conduct of the trial was so flawed it constituted a fresh criminal act in itself.

And of course the COPFS employed discredited fabricators Faraday and Hayes to present their forensic evidence, based on the noted flaws above.

This is a pitiful piece of theatre to shore up their bad work over the years.

We are left with an unsolved crime, a flawed Crown case that has been stripped down to the point of embarrassment, conspicuously suspicious intelligence service intervention during the trial process that the UN observer described as a crime, conspicuously suspicious political puppeteering between London, Tripoli and Washington, and an apparent miscarriage so horrendous as to be dangerous to those who have hung their reputations on it, and so ludicrous it defies every attempt to shore it up.

A Crown law officer, Norman MacFadyen, was reported to the police, by an MSP no less, now convener of the justice committee, for tampering with the evidence. There is now evidence of bribery of key witnesses, suppression of key evidence, and a consistent refusal by politicians from Margaret Thatcher down, to account for any of it.

You look at any story on a large scale, such as the hacking or expenses scandals, and chunks of the truth emerge into the public domain quite quickly, but it takes an event, like the leaking of the expenses disk to the Telegraph or a change of mood such as the Milly Dowler revelation, for the whole thing to reach a tipping point and for minds to be focused to clear it up, and for the real narrative to emerge. In the Pan Am 103 case, that focus point is coming.

The Justice Committee is about to deliberate on opening a full public inquiry. Today’s Crown Office statement must be viewed in the light of that as the PR exercise it truly is.

(an inquiry is also being resisted in the Dag Hammaskjold event too, incidentally)

An inquiry is only the beginning of what is needed. There has been malfeasance and transparent tampering in our justice system.

Abdel Jalil told an enthusiastic world media something they almost universally repeated without any conditionality or qualification; that Colonel Gadaffi was behind the Pan Am 103 atrocity. Neither he nor Moussa Koussa have elaborated on those sweeping statements, nor offered the vaguest indication of what sort of evidence or testimony might support such a claim. The Crown Office emerged from their highly choreographed meeting with Koussa and have yet to emit a peep about what was discussed, and are evidently none the richer in terms of useful information. Koussa in fact told Tam Dalyell in 2001 that he had nothing to do with these events.

The proven rendition of untried suspects through Prestwick, and the UK’s complicity in torture abroad is demonstrably evident, yet everyone in power is pretending didn't happen. This kind of realpolitik and political expediency taking precedence over justice is being replicated in the Pan Am 103 case today.

World scientific opinions says that the amount of semtex claimed at the Lockerbie trial to have destroyed Pan Am 103 would not even punch a hole in a 747, far less blow it apart. No one in government wants to allow an opportunity to investigate what caused that plane to founder.

That is where the Crown would be looking, if they really wanted to solve this case.

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*This is the statement issued by the Crown Office today.

"The trial court accepted that Mr Megrahi acted in furtherance of the Libyan intelligence services in an act of state sponsored terrorism and did not act alone.

"Lockerbie remains an open inquiry concerning the involvement of others with Mr Megrahi in the murder of 270 people.

"The Crown will continue to pursue lines of inquiry that become available and following recent events in Libya has asked the National Transitional Council, through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, for assistance with the investigation.

"In particular we have asked the NTC to make available to the Crown any documentary evidence and witnesses, which could assist in the ongoing inquiries.

"As the investigation remains live and in order to preserve the integrity of that investigation, it would not be appropriate to offer further comment."