"I just think it is absolutely wrong to release someone who has been imprisoned based on the evidence about his involvement in such a horrendous crime," Hillary Clinton said in press reports, published today (19 August).
The US Secretary of State made this "uncharacteristically undiplomatic" comments, as the BBC correspondent in Washington called them, after a Scottish court allowed Megrahi to drop his appeal, opening the way for his possible return to Libya on humanitarian grounds. Megrahi is said to be dying from prostate cancer.
Some 198 Americans were among those killed in the Lockerbie disaster.
"I knew a lot of these families. I talked with them about what a horror they experienced," Clinton said.
Family members are reported to be divided over the possible release of Megrahi. Some appear to doubt his guilt. Professor Robert Black from the University of Edinburgh, who has a special interest in the Lockerbie case, as well as another high profile international jurist, Dr Hans Köchler, UN observer at the Lockerbie trial, have expressed the view that the court had sentenced Megrahi under political pressure from Washington and London, and with meagre and doubtful proofs.
In fact, a retrial, as Megrahi had requested, might have cleared the Libyan national and embarrassed Western capitals, the two experts indicated.
According to an investigative article published years ago in the Guardian by journalist Paul Foot, who is now deceased, Libya was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. Foot argues that the perpetrators were Arab terrorists based in Syria, who plotted the bombing at the request of Iran, as an act of revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian aircraft by a US battleship in 1988.
Foot maintains that in April 1989 the then US president George Bush senior asked British prime minister Margaret Thatcher not to proceed with investigating the Syrian trail. He argues that at the time the US and British armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein's occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from Syria, and therefore Libya was singled out as the perpetrator.
