Lockerbie reward payouts for Tony Gauci ‘above board’ says chief investigator

Said a decision by FBI investigators to pay Lockerbie witness Tony Gauci and his brother Paul some USD 2 million was entirely in keeping with US Department of Justice policy, after the Sunday Times published extracts of police documents that said Gauci had a "clear desire to gain financial benefit" from his evidence.

The documents were were published last month by author John Ashton, and suggest that shopkeeper Gauci made it clear before the trial in 2000 that he wanted to be remunerated for his crucial evidence.

Former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Megrahi was jailed in January 2001 over the bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 in December 1988, which led to the deaths of 270 people. He was later released on compassionate grounds and died of cancer in Tripoli in May 2012.

Gauci's evidence was key because he identified a number of clothes fragments found at the crash site as having been brought from his shop 'Mary's House' in Sliema.

McCulloch, a former detective chief superintendent with Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, yesterday told Scottish newspaper The Scotsman that cash had "never been discussed with them at any time" prior to Megrahi's conviction.

But as the lead investigator into the atrocity, he wrote to the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in April 2002 to recommend that the Gauci brothers receive a reward of USD 3 million because he said they fit the criteria for its Reward for Justice programme.

McCulloch said that the brothers would have known about possible payments, but that nothing was offered at any stage before the trial. "From the outset, the Department of Justice had floated the idea of a reward to anyone who came forward... [but] it had never been discussed with them at any time prior to [the trial] - so it's absolutely above board. There is absolutely no suggestion that there was anything underhand. It was all above board."

The Crown Office stated last month: "No witness was offered any inducement by the Crown or the Scottish police before and during the trial and there is no evidence that any other law enforcement agency offered such an inducement."