The Lockerbie Deal

April 28, 2011 11:49 AM

How Britain's largest corporations helped engineer the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.
posted by reenum (10 comments total)

Required reading.
posted by Ironmouth at 11:54 AM on April 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

He wasn't released under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement, and the conspiracy theory about slopping out turned out to be wrong when the full documents were released - see here. This is an old article from January, which you've linked to and matters have moved on with the release of the documents.

The article you link to also makes a big deal of Sikora's report, but Sikora's report was not considered as part of the release process, so again it's irrelevant.
posted by Flitcraft at 12:26 PM on April 28, 2011

Sounds like Blair suffered from a serious case of Iraq-envy.

I can just picture him skipping around the Downing Street office singing "anything Georgie can do I can do too... Anything Georgie can do I can do better..."
posted by xqwzts at 12:26 PM on April 28, 2011

What's funny is that the whole point was to improve relations with Gadaffi, in order to improve relations for BP to drill for oil. Also interesting is that Megrahi is apparently claiming that he blackmailed Gadaffi, or at least I remember hearing something like that.
posted by delmoi at 12:38 PM on April 28, 2011

Magrahi was innocent. watch the maltese double cross. The bit where the head of security for BA and the PI in New York say "i have seen the manifests for the Air Malta flight, there was no unnaccompanied bag on the plane" essentially destroys the argument chain.
posted by marienbad at 1:13 PM on April 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

For almost two decades, Libya had been the Irish Republican Army’s main supplier of arms and high explosives—matériel used in a conflict which caused approximately a thousand deaths.

Well, to be fair, during that period the United States of America had been the Irish Republican Army's main foreign supplier of funding (mostly via Irish-American terrorist fellow travellers such as the Muslim-baiting Peter King) and none of the principals involved in that were extradited by the UK or Ireland or have brought to justice.

Also, during 2009 various "realpolitik" politicians such as McCain and Lieberman had obviously forgotten how unreliable Gadaffi had proven to be, repeatedly, and entertained fantasies of clinching lucrative weapons and trade deals with him. Sucking up to Gadaffi was in fashion then.
posted by meehawl at 1:13 PM on April 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

I have also seen The Maltese Double Cross - already a complex story back in 1994. As you say I think it made a convincing case for Magrahi's innocence.

But if Magrahi was just put on trial as a Libyan-supplied scapegoat to serve time for a bomb planted by somebody else then why did Gadaffi submit somebody who he would subsequently want to get freed so much? And who was the 'somebody else' that actually planted the bomb? It seems one of these cases where it is very hard to understand the underlying motive of just about everybody.
posted by rongorongo at 3:02 PM on April 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

What happened to al-Megrahi in the end? Is he alive? Where is he?
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:53 PM on April 28, 2011

[following up own message;sorry]. After spending an interesting hour or so reading the Wikipedia Page on Pan-Am Flight 103 I found this link to an interview with the former Libyan justice minister from February this year. The minister claimed that Gadaffi ordered al-Megrahi to place a bomb on the flight. To prevent this information becoming public in a follow-up inquest Gadaffi did everything in his power to try to get Megrahi back to Libya. Whether or not Megrahi was directly involved or not this would provide a plausible explanation for Gadaffi's manoeuvring.
posted by rongorongo at 4:35 PM on April 28, 2011

I can't help but see the comments from the former justice minister as buying favour from the west by giving them the information they want, in the same way as the Iraqi informant did regarding WMDs. There's no reason Qadaffi would need to get Megrahi released before his death to hide the information... he has already paid the damages, Megrahi having been found guilty.

The fact that the court case was full of paid-off witnesses and police evidence having been burned and the like means I'm glad of the outcome, since at best the right man was in jail for the wrong reasons.

As it is, I suspect Paul Foot was closer to the truth.
posted by opsin at 12:33 PM on April 29, 2011 [1 favorite]