Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi seen at pro-Gaddafi rally in Tripoli

[seafan]

Source: UK Guardian

Libyan state television has broadcast footage apparently showing Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, at a gathering in support of Muammar Gaddafi.

Still alive almost two years after he was released from prison in Scotland and sent home on compassionate grounds due to terminal cancer, Megrahi appeared to be frail and was sitting in a wheelchair.

.....

The former Libyan intelligence agent had been expected to live for only three months when he was released from a Scottish prison after serving nearly eight years of a 27-year sentence for killing 270 people.

.....

David Cameron came under fresh pressure earlier this year to order an independent inquiry into the release of Megrahi after US senators accused the UK of "cutting deals" to set him free.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/27/lockerbie-bomber-al-megrahi-in-tripoli

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And what David Cameron essentially said was:

Oh, no. There is no need for any inquiry into the allegations that Megrahi was released in exchange for advancing an oil deal for BP. So stop saying that.

[JohnyCanuck]

1. "There is no need for any inquiry into the allegations

that Megrahi was released in exchange for advancing an oil deal for BP" ...... or for that matter, that Megrahi was released in order to forestall his planned appeal in which the evidence his lawyer was going to introduce would show that his original conviction was quite likely a travesty of justice, in that he was the victim of a frameup.

Police chief- Lockerbie evidence was faked

Published Date: 28 August 2005

By MARCELLO MEGA
A FORMER Scottish police chief has given lawyers a signed statement claiming that key evidence in the Lockerbie bombing trial was fabricated.

The retired officer - of assistant chief constable rank or higher - has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.

The police chief, whose identity has not yet been revealed, gave the statement to lawyers representing Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison.

The evidence will form a crucial part of Megrahi's attempt to have a retrial ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC). The claims pose a potentially devastating threat to the reputation of the entire Scottish legal system.

http://news.scotsman.com/lockerbie/Police-chief-Lockerbie-evidence-was.2656485.jp

Megrahi was framed

by John Pilger

snip

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988, in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of "strategic interests".

“The endgame came down to damage limitation," said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, "because the evidence amassed by appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice." New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft - he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shopowner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognise him in the courtroom.

snip

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in "neutral" Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a "mass of conflicting evidence" and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance. Their 90-page "opinion", wrote Foot, "is a remarkable document that claims an honoured place in the history of British miscarriages of justice". (His report, Lockerbie - the Flight from Justice, can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5.)

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt cancelled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the "architect" of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr on 11 January 1990, she agreed to "low-key" the disaster after their intelligence services had reported "beyond doubt" that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group, contracted by Tehran, as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship's captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer".

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/09/pilger-megrahi-justice

[Wilms]

2. You got it! n/t

[daleo]

3. Gwynne Dyer

wrote about this too, recently. He's awfully sharp.

[jberryhill]

4. There, you see, the trip home certainly improved his health /nt