Alex Massie Alex Massie

Lockerbie-for-Oil?

Pete suggests there’s little more to say about the Sunday Times story on the UK government’s attitude towards the release of the Abdelbaset ali al-Megrahi. The suggestion given by the paper – and increasingly assumed to be true by everyone else – is that Megrahi was freed for fear that keeping him in prison in Scotland would jeopardise potentially £15bn worth of business for BP in Libya.

The implication is that, like the war in Iraq, it’s all about the oil. Well, we had to reach this point eventually, I guess. Nonetheless, though it’s written by my old friend Jason Allardyce, there’s a little less to the Sunday Times’s story than first appears. That’s because the letters the paper has obtained have nothing to do with the decision to actually release Megrahi.

The clue is in the first paragraph:

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Emphasis added. In other words, this has almost nothing to do with the actual decision to release Megrahi. Rather London agreed to Libyan demands that Megrahi, then the only Libyan serving time in a British prison, be included in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement between the two countries. But including Megrahi in the PTA – which displeased the Scottish authorities – is not the same as releasing him. Note too how the newspaper carefully talks about a “return to Libya”, not release. That’s because the PTA, like other agreements of this sort, provides for returning prisoners to serve out the rest of their terms in their own country. It says nothing about releasing them.

Granted, the Americans believe they had an understanding that Megrahi would serve his entire sentence in Scotland.

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