Last week Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi – who was jailed for life for his role in the deaths of 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 – was freed from prison and sent home by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on humanitarian grounds.
However, the decision by the Scottish National Party government has been widely criticised across the Atlantic. Some have described it as a ‘huge mistake’ which will forever be regretted. The Scottish Labour Party leader Iain Gray argued that while it’s acceptable to “have sympathy for the family of a gravely ill prisoner”, the duty of the people of Scotland “is to honour and respect the victims of Lockerbie and have compassion for them”.
Indeed, there seems to be something extremely strange about the decision to release Megrahi after serving just eight years of his prison term. It has been suggested that the release is a part of a secret trade deal between the British and Libyan governments, an opinion publicly expressed by the son of Libyan leader Col Muammar al-Gaddafi.
Judging by that, we believe that the decision is completely flawed and detrimental to justice. It seems clear that, as human rights lawyer Jason McCue puts it: “The intended beneficiary of all this is Anglo-Libyan trade. It is politically short sighted of both governments and repugnant to the memories of the dead.”
Only time will tell if the decision to release Megrahi was a national disgrace for Britain.
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