Scotland Considers Freeing Lockerbie Bomber Early

Scottish officials said Thursday they were considering early release for the Lockerbie bomber — igniting debate between victims' relatives in the United States and Britain over whether he should be allowed to return home to Libya.

British media reports say Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi will soon be freed on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with cancer. The possibility of an imminent release has reignited the fierce debate about whether justice has been done for victims of the attack that killed 270 people — most of them Americans.

The Scottish government dismissed the reports by Sky News and BBC television that he would be released next week as speculation, and said Scotland's justice minister had yet to review all case information before deciding whether to release al-Megrahi. U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Washington had not been made aware of any final decision.

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"We have made our views clear to the U.K. government, to other authorities, that we believe that he should spend the rest of his time in jail," he said.

Neither the BBC nor Sky News cited sources for their reports. A decision had been expected by the end of August.

The man in charge of deciding al-Megrahi's fate insisted he was still considering his options.

"Clearly, he is terminally ill, and there are other factors," Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill told the BBC. "But I have made no decision as yet."

Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan secret service agent, is the sole person convicted for the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. He was arrested in 1991 in Libya, held under house arrest until handed over in 1998 and convicted in 2001 by a special Scottish court set held at Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands. His co-accused Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted, but al-Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.

He unsuccessfully appealed immediately after the trial. But a second appeal is currently under way in Edinburgh after a review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007 raised serious concerns over the evidence used to secure the conviction.