As Dumfries and Galloway Chief Constable Patrick Shearer reminded us yesterday, the Camp Zeist court accepted the Crown’s position that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi acted in furtherance of the Libyan

Intelligence Service and did not act alone. At the time, it was hoped that further intelligence would bring other names into the frame, resulting in subsequent prosecutions, but this did not happen.

The news that a police review of the entire body of evidence is being undertaken following the dropping of the freed Libyan’s second appeal is, therefore, welcome, even if it falls short of a full cold case review. Forensic science has been refined considerably since the original investigation and it is possible that further tests on certain items could yield new leads, provided that they have not been contaminated. A cloud of uncertainty continues to hang over this case, robbing the relatives of the 270 people who died that night of the bleak satisfaction of knowing that justice had been done and lessons learned.

The view persists that the main suspect was not Libya but Iran, which had an obvious motive: revenge for the Iranian airliner shot down by the Americans earlier in 1988 with the loss of 290 lives. Suspicion initially focused on Ahmed Jibril, leader of a Syrian-based Palestinian terrorist group linked with Iran. Conspiracy theorists maintain that it became politically inconvenient to implicate either Iran or Syria at a time when the western allies needed their support during the first Gulf War. The more prosaic reason is that investigators failed to pinpoint any evidence that a prosecutor could use to convict either an Iranian official or Jibril. The same applies to Abu Talb, another Palestinian, later jailed for terrorist offences and who had circled the fateful day – December 21 – in his diary. Another aspect of the case that deserves further investigation is a suspicious break-in at the secure baggage area of Heath­row Airport the night before the explosion, an incident not raised at the original trial.

This police review of the Lockerbie case raises several questions. Given how much uncertainty surrounds what happened, would a major wide-ranging investigation not be more appropriate? And is it right to entrust such a review to just four officers from the Dumfries and Galloway force, headed by an officer who was involved in the original investigation? A limited review that does little more than cover old ground would serve little purpose except, possibly, to delay the wide-ranging independent government inquiry into the atrocity demanded by relatives of the British victims. As Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the disaster, argues in a letter published in The Herald today, the “ongoing criminal investigation” has been repeatedly used to deny relatives the full inquiry they demand and deserve.

Yesterday the British and Scottish Governments continued to play pass the parcel over who should call an inquiry. UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was a matter for the Scots because “that’s the way our system works”, while a Scottish Government spokesman insisted that any inquiry had to be convened “by those with required powers”. The telephone has been in common use in Britain for more than 100 years. It is not beyond the wit of ministers in London and Edinburgh to agree on the format, structure and remit of a Lockerbie inquiry that hopefully would answer some remaining questions without turning into the open-ended Bloody Sunday-style affair.

Truth is not the only victim to consider here. Those bereaved by this atrocity have waited too long for answers. As Pamela Dix, whose brother died at Lockerbie, put it: “It is unfinished business.”