A week after documents made public by Wikileaks revealed that the British government secretly worked with Libyan authorities to secure the release of the terrorist behind the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing, British authorities have admitted their government did an fact help Libya seek his release from Scotland:
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government and BP Plc were cleared of lobbying Scottish politicians to free Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi in a report that said U.K. officials helped Libya seek his release.
Al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie in 1988, was freed in 2009 by the Scottish government on the grounds that he would die from prostate cancer within months. He returned to his native Libya to a hero’s welcome and is still alive.
“The former government took great effort not to communicate to the Scottish government its underlying desire to see Megrahi released before he died,” Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, the U.K.’s top civil servant, wrote in the report published in London today. Brown’s administration “considered that any attempts to pressurize or lobby the Scottish government could be counterproductive to achieving this outcome.”
The release of Al-Megrahi under Scottish law on compassionate grounds sparked outrage in the U.S. and allegations the U.K. wanted him returned to Libya to bolster trade with Africa’s third-largest oil producer. Brown, who lost power in May elections, said at the time the rapprochement with Libya was chiefly about fighting terrorism and not trade.
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Publicly, Brown’s government refused to say what its position was on the release. Privately, it had decided to “do all it could” to help the Libyans get Al-Megrahi home, according to O’Donnell. It ratified the prisoner transfer agreement, and explained the legal procedure for compassionate release to the Libyans, the report said.
Cameron ordered the review in July last year. He was under pressure from U.S. lawmakers who wanted to know whether BP’s drilling program in Libya was related to the release. Cameron said today there was no need to undertake a public inquiry.
I can't wait for the next Wikileaks shoe to drop debunking the impossible-to-believe claim that neither the UK nor BP did anything to lobby or influence the Scottish government.