Britain: Why the Lockerbie bomber was pardoned

Did Britain trade a terrorist for oil? asked the London Sunday Times in an editorial. The cancer-stricken Lockerbie bomber, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was released from a Scottish prison last month on “compassionate grounds” and allowed to return to Libya to die. Al-Megrahi was the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. His release was met with international outrage, not least because cheering crowds greeted the convicted terrorist in Libya. But now a new reason for disapproval has emerged. There is a “strong suspicion that the release was the direct result of deals done in the desert” between the British and Libyan governments. A letter has surfaced from Justice Secretary Jack Straw to Scottish authorities instructing them that al-Megrahi should be included in a prisoner exchange with Libya. Shortly after that 2007 letter was sent, Libya approved a $25 billion deal with BP, the British oil group.

The British government is hiding behind the Scottish government, said the London Sun. The Scottish justice minister who approved the release, Kenny MacAskill, insists that the decision was his alone, and that no political or economic considerations swayed him. We don’t buy it. “How can he claim he acted independently while sniping repeatedly at U.K. ministers for leaving him in the lurch?” And how can he claim that oil interests didn’t pressure him when Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s own son has said no BP contract would be signed unless al-Megrahi was released? All signs point to a dirty deal that allowed a mass murderer to walk free.

But what if al-Megrahi is innocent? asked Pierre Prier in France’s Le Figaro. Many people believe he is. In the initial investigation of the Lockerbie bombing, most evidence pointed to Iran and its ally Syria. There was a clear motive: Just five months earlier, the U.S. had accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killing all 290 people aboard. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini promised America “a rain of blood” in return. Yet the early leads were abandoned, perhaps because the U.S. was preparing for the first Gulf War and needed “Iranian neutrality and the active support of Syria.” Instead, 18 months later, al-Megrahi was identified based on “the shred of a T-shirt wrapped around the fragment of a detonator timer.” The man who fingered him, a shopkeeper who’d sold the T-shirt, was given $2 million by the CIA in exchange for his testimony, a payoff the CIA claimed was part of its “witness protection program.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Because the evidence against him was so thin, al-Megrahi might well have had his conviction overturned on appeal in Scotland, said Glen Newey in the London Review of Books website. Such a spectacle would have “served nobody’s interests.” His release, ostensibly on compassionate grounds, was simply the best way out of a bad situation. Scotland is able to “rid itself of a high-profile prisoner with an unsafe conviction.” The U.K. government “can keep in with the Libyans and protect its commercial contracts.” Everybody wins.

Not quite, said Rachel Sylvester in the London Times. The release of the Lockerbie bomber “is the final nail in the coffin” for Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States. The White House is furious. The U.S. used to respect the U.K. Now “the bond of trust has been destroyed.”