This is the text of a letter written by Dr Jim Swire, campaigner and Committee member of Justice for Megrahi

Sir,

Last week an hour long TV programme was shown, funded by Arabic money, on the Al-Jazeera channel. I watched it with Tam Dalyell, with mutual astonishment..

It was a documentary about the Lockerbie trial of the Libyan Al-Megrahi. It made a key issue the diary of a Scottish policeman.

It has been the case for a number of years now, that material has been available on the internet, including this diary, quite apart from the defects evident in the trial itself, which indicate a dire need for reappraisal of the trial verdict.

The protestations from our SNP government over the role of the London Supreme Court in questioning Scottish criminal verdicts underline the desperate importance of our having a Criminal Justice system that is, and is seen to be, above reproach. If we don't see to that, no doubt others eventually will.

The Al-Jazeera programme used material from the diary of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Bell, who had performed a key role in the Scottish police inquiries in Malta. The existence of this diary had been known to the trial court but the contents were not ordered to be produced. The contents were much later posted on the internet by the Megrahi defence team, following the abandonment of the second appeal upon the repatriation of Megrahi..

The diary shows that Harry Bell was aware all along that the chief identification witness from Malta, the shopkeeper Gauci, was increasingly avaricious concerning the offer of $2,000,000 to him from the US Rewards for 'justice' programme in Washington, available if, and only if, his evidence led to Megrahi's conviction.

The documentary also highlighted the astonishing provision of 'all expenses paid' holidays in Scotland for the shopkeeper, before he gave his evidence.

During this documentary Lord Peter Fraser, who was Lord Advocate at the relevant times, explained that he was unaware of this offer of money to this key witness, at the time of the trial, but now that it seemed to have been shown to have been the case, he did not believe that the bribe, for such it surely was, had affected Gauci's evidence given under oath in court.

Are we in Scotland to await overwhelming intervention from other countries to define whether the Megrahi verdict should stand, or do we have the courage to clear up what may have been the worst judicial verdict ever made under Scottish law, for ourselves?

If we do not do so ourselves, our criminal justice system will be seen as unfit for purpose, when outsiders clinch the issue as they eventually will.

Knowing as we now do, that the investigating Scottish police must also have known that Heathrow Airport had been broken into 16 hours before the Lockerbie disaster, and that this fact, which also suggested a far simpler explanation as to how the bomb might have been smuggled on board, was kept out of the trial court's sight, until after the verdict, a Scotland-based inquiry will have to pay very close attention to the role of the investigating police, not just the quality of the evidence led in court.

It would appear to a layman that a bribed witness's evidence should be of little value in a criminal court where 'reasonable doubt' has to be excluded. Perhaps initially Lord Fraser would care to explain the position he took 'on camera'.

Dr Jim Swire, father of Lockerbie victim Flora