http://www.cnn.com/...
Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection with the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, died Sunday, the Libyan government and a family member said. He was 60.
The former intelligence officer, who had suffered from prostate cancer, will be buried Monday, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Al Megrahi's cousin Omer al-Gharyani told CNN he was with al Megrahi at the Tripoli hospital when he died.
His death came more than two years after he was freed from a life sentence in Scotland on the grounds that he was dying.
The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was the world's deadliest act of air terrorism until the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, according to the FBI.
American and British investigators who painstakingly pieced together the wreckage of the Pan Am 103 found it had been destroyed by a bomb, and they accused al Megrahi and another man of planting it.
Al Megrahi -- once the security chief for Libyan Arab Airlines -- and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah were Libyan intelligence agents, the United States and Britain charged, indicting them in November 1991 on 270 counts of murder and conspiracy to murder.
The bombing of Pan Am 103 was the single worst act of terrorism against American civilians prior to 9/11. Of the 270 people killed, 189 were Americans. Including 35 students from Syracuse University and the CIA's deputy Beirut Station Chief.
In 2009, courtesy political wrangling from the British government (perhaps egged on by British Petroleum) the Scottish government released Megrahi on 'compassionate grounds' tied to his supposedly late-stage terminal prostate cancer (funny...I thought 'life in prison' meant exactly that.)
He returned to Tripoli, Libya with great fanfare. His jet personally greeted by Gaddafi himself and throngs of loyalist supporters. And curiously, he hung on for almost three more years despite being given only months, even weeks to live by British medical testimony.
Amidst the 2011 Libyan Uprising, defecting government officials came forward to say that indeed Megrahi had been ordered to commit the bombing on behalf of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Amidst that violence, media watchers spotted a wheelchair-bound Megrahi at at least one of Gaddafi's 'green rallies' in Tripoli's main square.
After the fall of Tripoli, CNN's Nic Robertson and his film crew found Megrahi, bed-ridden and almost comatose, living in a lush compound south of the Capital.
Alas, the world being finally rid of this convicted terrorist is bittersweet. Megrahi was one of the few men that could have provided testimony against other Libyan government officials, namely 'Abdullah El-Senussi', Gaddafi's brother-in-law and head of intelligence arrested in Mauritania earlier this year. Senussi has been convicted in absentia in France for the similar bombing of UTA Flight 772, and has been indicted by the ICC for war crimes committed during the 2011 war.