THE DECISION of the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to release on compassionate grounds the only man convicted of the murder of 270 people in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie is welcome. But the return to Libya yesterday of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi leaves open for many who have followed the case a number of unresolved doubts about responsibility for the outrage.
Megrahi (57), a former Libyan intelligence officer, now reported by the prison authorities to be terminally ill with aggressive prostate cancer, was convicted in 2001 in an international court in Holland and sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland. In giving the rationale for his release yesterday, Mr McCaskill made clear he stood over the conviction and spoke of Megrahi’s lack of contrition. He added that the Scottish government would willingly co-operate with an independent inquiry into the case that has been sought by many relatives of victims and by politicians and legal figures. This inquiry is now sorely needed.
Many relatives of those who died, mostly among the 46 British and one Irish family, including the likes of Jim Swire and Pamela Dix, have long believed in Megrahi’s innocence or wrongful conviction. And for them, the latter’s decision earlier this week to suspend his legal appeal to pave the way for a humanitarian release has given his freedom a bittersweet quality. They fear that without an independent inquiry crucial discrepancies in the case against Megrahi will never be examined.
The appeal – Megrahi’s second – had been initiated by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) after it identified in June 2007 “six grounds where it believes that a miscarriage of justice may have occured”. The commission, a statutory body made up of senior police officers and lawyers, questioned crucial identification testimony and found that there was no evidence that Megrahi was in Malta at a time when key ingredients of the bomb suitcase were purchased there.
Mr Swire, who lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora, yesterday told the BBC that: “I don’t believe for a moment that this man was involved in the way that he was found to have been involved. I feel despondent that the west and Scotland didn’t have the guts to allow this man’s second appeal to continue because I am convinced had they done so it would have overturned the verdict against him”.
Although Libya accepted responsibility in 2003 for the Lockerbie attack, and agreed to pay $2.7 billion in victim compensation, the SCCRC significantly said it did not view the admission as amounting to confirmation by Libya of Megrahi’s guilt.
In Tripoli, which is continuing its gradual recovery from international pariah status and the days of United Nations sanctions, yesterday’s decision will unfortunately be used as a propaganda coup by Col Muammar Gadafy, particularly in the face of the vehement protests the decision has prompted from Washington. That is unfortunate, but a necessary price for what was a just and humane decision.