Starting with the defendants Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamine Fehima, were found, in that order, guilty and not guilty.

The Three Scottish judges, found  Mr Megrahi guilty of mass murder, sentencing him to life in prison. At the same time, they freed his co-defendant for lack of proof. The two  were put on trial accused of  bombing  Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 270 passengers and 11 people on the ground in December 1988.  The verdict left an open question: Since evidence, that lead to the arrest of the two in the first place indicates they  working for the same organisation, was The Libyan Intelligence Service, that sophisticated to the point that the two were operating for two branches independent from each other? 

For the Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi it was  good news as his name has not  been dragged out in court as responsible for the mass murder.  The bad news is that it is not over yet; he has to admit responsibility and compensate the victims. However, this bad news also carried good news in its inflated belly: giving more munition to the eccentric Colonel to fire his best weapon: hugging the freed man in public, displaying the latest in his designer wardrobe as he shouted from roof tops giving long speeches - one, during which poor foreign correspondent had to sit patiently, and applaud politely waiting fore 'the promised proof of Mr Megrahi's innocence, lasted three hours - denouncing America and Britain. No new evidence or proof was found among the incomprehensible rhetoric that was followed by mass protest in the streets of ' ALJAMHERIAH ( the republic of then masses)' with two of his brainwashed subjects cutting their own throats  DIY style.

For the Families of the victims  at last, the link between the terror over Lockerbie and Libya was established. The bad news was the strong fishy smell hitting their nostrils rather hard - the most famous among them Dr Jim Swayer found the contradiction in the verdict  too much to bear and fainted in court -. With many questions boiling their hearts like: was it possible, even conceivable  that Mr Megrahi acted alone? What was his motive? what did he gain? who made the bombs, and who gave orders? where are those who gave such orders? They called a press conference to rubbish the CIA and Scottish police evidence, and calling for a public inquiry.

For Britain and America, the good news  is the judges , by finding one of his agents guilty, managed to wipe the smile off Colonel Gaddafi's face (the colonel had the early laughs of the saga in 1998 when he caught America and Britain  off guard by suddenly handing over the two suspects to be tried in the specially set Scottish court at Camp Zest) .
The bad news was that the verdict and the victims families calls, present London and Washington with a multiple  headaches. 

For eight years UN sanctions against Libya -  imposed in 1992- seemed more hurtful to American and British companies more than did to Libya. With generous oil revenues, the latter has often found ways around them. 
Most Arab nations  refused to treat Libya as a pariah.  Many other countries have also grown restive at the idea of continuing Libya's isolation. Rescinding the sanctions, which have been suspended for almost two years, and normalising relations with Libya now makes good political sense for both Britain and America, according to American and British diplomats.. 

They want sanctions to  be lifted, before repeating America's errors with Saddam Hussein. Sanctions are usually subject to a law of diminishing returns as they can't achieve more what they did already in  moderating Libyan conduct, and returning Colonel Gaddafi to the kennel where a bark is worse than a toothless bite. Sanctions are only making the Libyan people suffer enough for a leader they did not freely choose, the diplomats argue.

The problem is, how to convince public opinion in the west, which is stirred by calls from victims families and journalists, to have normal relations with a regime whose leader is under investigation for mass murder? 

Having already met three of the six conditions laid down by the UN, a senior British diplomat said, Libya could be persuaded to meet most of the other conditions including admitting responsibility.

But how can Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and US Secretary of State Colin Powell deal with growing  pressure from victims families and journalists calling for a public inquiry?

Such inquiry, to the horror of seasoned servants of British ' creative diplomacy' over Lockerbie, might just lead the dogs to where the bodies were buried!

An inquiry could prove that the verdict was a the culmination of the affair in an understanding summarised by  veteran Middle East reporter Tim Llewellyn:'' the [ Verdict ending the ] Lockerbie affair has been a triumph of realpolitik over all the evidence and questions of motive.''

For the philosophers of the conspiracy theory and their many disciples, it was all good news, as the way the trial went, and the shifting of the finger of accusation 180 degrees from East- Iran & Syria in 1989 to West-  Libya- by 1991 was just another great evidence that their conspiracy theory is the prime mover of history events, especially when it comes to super powers relations with the region.

The British and American governments have also been less than frank throughout the affair. They often appeared to know more than they would say, and they seemed to accuse  Gaddafi Libya only after their investigation of a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist group became impolitic during the second Gulf war which lead to a quick shuffling of cards of main players. 

The ending of the first Gulf war - during which when Iran and Syria were the villains and Saddam Hussein was the good guy - and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, marked a turning point in London and Washington's attitude towards Iran and her ally Syria.

In preparation for Desert Storm,  it was not only desirable, but essential to appease Syria, give her a free hand in Lebanon, and to make sure Iran's - then- new president Hashemi Rafsanjani resist calls by the radicals to step on Saddam's side against America and her allies.

President Rafsnjani, at the time promised, for example, to try to limit the threats contained in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Both Britain and America had hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. The West Europeans and the United States wanted Iran's and Syria's  help in their release and, in Europe's case, its peacetime business.

Syria's role was also crucial in the war Against Saddam Hussein, and later accepting to attend Madrid conference to complete America's constrictive diplomacy in the Middle East.

By 1991, ' new firm evidence' linked Gaddafi, not Syria or Iran to the Lockerbie bombing. All the above was reprinted, reminding the ,  already sceptical, public of the shifting sands of politics in Mideast-western diplomacy and politics, by cheeky journalists reporting the defence's speeches and sifting through evidence and history books during the trial.

From the word go, the prosecution had no 'smoking gun' or any eyewitness to the crime to be presented at Camp Zest. Prosecutors had to ask judges to infer the defendants' guilt from circumstantial evidence. 
All the time, correspondents for Arabic newspapers - the very source from which conspiracy theorists mine their raw material - put their own spin on ' yesterday' in court. 

A defence lawyer mocked the prosecution  case as an ''inference upon an inference upon an inference-leading to an inference.'' 

Most unusually, the three judges were impressed by the prosecution argument; they drew an inference from a mountain of detailed evidence which they reckoned established beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Megrahi planted the bomb. But failing to identify his motives, his accomplices or his gains. Not many people can blame them really, as they were drowned by the Prosecutors' flood  of evidence and the findings of forensic science, calling 230 witnesses, including CIA agents and former intelligence agents from Libya's erstwhile Soviet-block allies.

Electronic circuits  fragments recovered from the debris were traced to shipments of bomb triggers-timers received by Libyan intelligence. The man who made them became also a prosecution witness.

It was a replay, on much bigger screen and in slow motion of some episodes of an undeclared war from the days of the cold war, with evidence about Libyan intelligence officials plotting a retaliation for the 1986 American air strike on Tripoli, which was aimed at Colonel Gaddafi but killed his adopted daughter. That strike, in its turn, had been a punishment for Libya's alleged role in an attack on a Berlin discotheque that killed two American soldiers.

Conspiracy theorist at the time, said Libya was an easy target picked by the Americans while - like Lockerbie - the real villains, they argued, were Iran and Syria, but they would have been much tougher opponents to bomb with impunity. 

The defence strategy was to sow doubt by blaming a Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist group-the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command-which had been originally suspected of the bombing, on the orders of the 
Iranians to avenge the shooting down of an Iranian Airbus in 1988 by an American warship in the Gulf in July 1988. A police raid on the group's hideouts in Germany two months before the Lockerbie bombing had turned up Semtex-based explosives built into Toshiba cassette-recorders. just like the one causing the Lockerbie tragedy. Defence lawyers also savaged some of the prosecution's main witnesses, including Abdul Majid Giaka, a Libyan double agent turned informant for the CIA who claimed to have seen the two defendants smuggle a suspicious suitcase through Maltese customs on the eve of the explosion. 
Mr Giaka became the subject of a series of amusing revelations.  ' 'He was only a painter with  maintenance in the intelligence building' said Colonel Gaddafi on February 2. Then he painted the man 'only a car park attendant' in his marathon speech three days later. During the trial, Mr Giaka, the defence pointed out, reported the information to his CIA handlers only a year and a half later, when the Americans threatened to sack him unless he came up with some useful information.
In a meticulous 82-page verdict, the judges sieved through a spaghetti of  evidence, dismissing the soggy  points of the prosecution case, including much of Mr Giaka's account testimony, and conceded that ''there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications.'' They nevertheless concluded that what remained confirms the guilt of Mr al-Megrahi.

The Foreign Office, might shield behind the civil suite which the families of victims are planning to file in the US against Colonel Gaddafi, and delay the idea of a public inquiry until after the case - which could run for years, hoping the public would forget. Or the victims' families might just co-ordinate with their equally grieved  counterparts across the pond to outsmart Robin Cook and delay the civil suite until after the inquiry. Watch this space.