British prime minister David Cameron is resisting calls for a full inquiry into the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish prison as US lawmakers said they would press their effort to examine the case.
Mr Cameron last night met a group of senators who will lead a congressional hearing into the matter, aiming to deflect their calls for a full probe with the offer to review documents and release more information.
He and US president Barack Obama yesterday repeated their condemnations of the release of Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi by authorities in Scotland last year. US lawmakers have questioned whether BP Plc lobbied to get al-Megrahi freed as the company sought agreements to drill for oil in Libya.
Both BP and the UK government have denied that it did so, and Mr Cameron said an inquiry would be pointless. "I don't need an inquiry to tell me what was a bad decision," Mr Cameron, who opposed al-Megrahi's release, said at a news conference yesterday with Mr Obama at the White House.
"The decision to release Megrahi was a decision made by the Scottish government, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that the Scottish government were in any way swayed by BP."
The renewed attention to the Lockerbie case has added to the friction between the US and UK resulting from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico triggered by the April 20th blowout of a company well that also killed 11 rig workers.
The incident was the biggest oil spill in US history.
Mr Obama said, adding that his administration expressed "very clearly our objections" before and after the decision was made.Mr Obama said he welcomed the review, saying all the facts must be revealed to satisfy questions. "All of us here in the United States were surprised, disappointed and angry about the release of the Lockerbie bomber,"
"We welcome any additional information," he said. "We should have all the facts. They should be laid out there."
Al-Megrahi was freed by Scotland, which has an independent justice system, on compassionate grounds in August 2009 because he was dying of cancer. He remains alive. The Libyan was jailed in 2001 for the 1988 killing of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, all Democrats, are pressing for an inquiry into the matter. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the case July 29th.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a July 19th letter to the four senators that the US is "encouraging" UK and Scottish authorities to review the circumstances of al- Megrahi's release "and to consider any new information that has come to light since" then.
After last evening's meeting with Cameron, Mr Lautenberg told reporters that the lawmakers "tried to get the point across that there's so much suspicion that surrounds this that we have to understand what happened".
"It's a question of believability between two countries that have had such a hard and fast relationship," Mr Lautenberg said. "Our request for an independent investigation is still on the table," Schumer said. "He said that it's not case closed."
BP previously has said that while it had lobbied the UK government to speed up a prisoner transfer deal with Libya, it never had any discussions about al-Megrahi with either the UK or Scottish government.
Bloomberg