Handcuffed to Megrahi: Former Caithness police officer tells of Lockerbie link
A former Caithness police officer has been recalling the “very surreal” experience of being handcuffed to the Lockerbie bomber.
Steve MacDonald was in charge of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for an hour or more prior to the Libyan’s trial in 2000 and also had the task of strip-searching him.
Megrahi would later be convicted of murdering 270 people in the worst terrorist atrocity on UK soil.
All 243 passengers and 16 crew were killed along with 11 people on the ground after Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie in December 1988, less than an hour into its scheduled flight from Heathrow to New York.
Steve had a 30-year police career from 1988 until 2018, serving in the CID in Inverness for a time and later as a detective sergeant based in Wick.
Megrahi was tried in a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Steve’s involvement came about as he was an authorised firearms officer.
Steve, who will be 60 next month, shares some memories of his stint at Camp Zeist in a new recording for Wick Voices, the online oral history project of the Wick Society.
It comes at a time of renewed focus on Lockerbie following two recent TV dramatisations, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (Sky) and The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (BBC).
“There seems to be a resumed interest just now in what happened at Lockerbie,” Steve says in the recording. “There has been so much on TV lately.
“There has always been an interest in Lockerbie. But in the early 2000s this was when it kicked off again because now they had suspects, now they had a trial – things were starting to happen.
“There were two Libyan suspects that were taken into custody, and through great negotiations they were basically given up by Libya and taken to Holland.”
Steve worked there for three months from December 1999.
“My final day was pretty much immediately prior to the trial starting,” he explains. “I got tasked with going into the prison where there were two suspects [Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah].
“Basically I had the job of going in, strip-searching Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in his cell, getting handcuffed to him, taking him out into a van, taking him to the High Court of Justiciary, which was a two-minute drive from the prison, and giving him an orientation.
“It was quite an experience, because prior to going in there and seeing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was basically the number one suspect for the Lockerbie bombing, I read the indictment, the court paperwork with the official charges. And there were various charges of ‘you did enter Malta under a false passport’, etc, etc, but the final charge was: ‘On the 21st of December 1988, you did murder…’ And there were 270 names under that.
“It was quite a daunting thought, being right beside this guy, having to strip-search him, wondering what on earth sort of a guy he was. And I’ll tell you, he was intelligent, mannerly… He was no fool.
“I was in his presence for about an hour or an hour and a half, handcuffed to him, and that was my final day there. I gave him the orientation, showed him which way was east, which was very important to him, being Muslim, showed them where the prayer room was, because they were very, very religious.
“I spoke to him and he was asking me exactly what I was doing here… It was quite an informal chat, but very surreal.
“I followed what happened in the press, obviously. At the end of the trial, which lasted a good few months, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of murdering 270 people.
“He was the man that was convicted by a Scottish court of Scotland’s worst mass murder and the biggest terrorist incident on UK soil. Quite daunting.
“And of course all the details and all the anomalies have come out. It’s no secret, the doubts that people had whether he was guilty or not.”
Megrahi was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in jail. The verdict has twice been upheld in the appeal court. Fhimah was acquitted.
Megrahi was released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009 due to his terminal cancer diagnosis. He died in Libya in 2012, aged 60.
In the recording, Steve points out that “quite a few” other officers from Caithness were involved as well.
“That was quite a significant part of my police career,” he says. “It’s one I think about a lot, even to this day.
“When these programmes have been on TV I’ve watched them with great interest, and I’ve watched them for accuracy from my knowledge, and they’re pretty good. They are pretty accurate.”
Steve is originally from the Clachnaharry area of Inverness. After studying mechanical engineering at Inverness Technical College, he served an apprenticeship at AI Welders.
He presented programmes on Moray Firth Radio before joining the police.
Since retiring from the force he has been working as community payback officer at the Wick Criminal Justice Office.
In 2020, Steve got back into radio after a 32-year break. He presents a weekly show on the Thurso-based community radio station Caithness FM, playing music mainly from the 1980s and ’90s and interviewing local guests.
Wick Voices (www.wickvoices.co.uk) began in 2016. There are now 470 recordings freely available to listen to, with more being added regularly.
Collectively they have been listened to more than 647,000 times.