Lockerbie Bomber dies peaceably at home, age 60

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Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie Bomber convicted of killing 270 and diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2008, was released in August of 2009 under compassionate grounds (where’s the compassion toward the victims?) due to “a Scottish law that allows terminally ill prisoners to die at home. When he was freed, Mr. Megrahi was expected to live three months.

Instead of 3 months, he enjoyed almost 3 years of freedom, not including the 3 years it took before he was indicted, 8 more years before Qaddafi surrendered him for trial, followed by 2 more years before conviction on 2001.

All in all, he lived 22 years longer than the 259 unfortunates aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the 11 on ground; and 7 months longer than Qaddafi. A peaceful end in contrast to their violent deaths:

On Dec. 21, 1988, a bronze hard-shell Samsonite suitcase was loaded onto an Air Malta plane bound for Frankfurt. From Germany, the suitcase was transferred onto a flight to London. Upon arrival, the bag was placed inside the forward cargo bay of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

Bound for New York, Pan Am Flight 103 held 189 Americans, including a group of Syracuse University college students returning home for the holidays from a semester abroad.

The jet was cruising at 31,000 feet at 7:03 p.m. when a bomb hidden inside the Samsonite bag exploded. All 259 aboard died, and 11 people on the ground were killed when flaming chunks of the plane plummeted into the bucolic village of Lockerbie.

~~~

When he arrived in Tripoli in 2009, he was greeted by hundreds of jubilant Libyans, including some who wore shirts depicting his face. Others in the crowd waved Scottish flags, an apparently taunting gesture.

He earned a reputation as a national hero, and babies were reportedly named after him. He was granted an exclusive audience with Gaddafi.

The decision to allow his release enraged many of the families of Lockerbie bombing victims. President Obama called Mr. Megrahi’s release “a mistake.”

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was born April 1, 1952, in Tripoli. He studied in the United States during the 1970s and spoke fluent English. He received an engineering degree from Benghazi University in Libya.

Survivors include his wife, Aisha, and five children.

At home in Libya for the past two years, Mr. Megrahi lived in a resplendent villa in Tripoli, complete with a garden and swimming pool.

Until his death, Mr. Megrahi maintained his innocence, claiming that he was the victim of an international conspiracy.

“You judge me falsely,” Mr. Megrahi once told an American interviewer. “My life is clean.”

What if he were innocent? Unfortunately, the secrets and details of the plot to bomb Pan Am Flight 103 probably dies with Qaddafi and Megrahi.

Seattle Times:

After treatment at Tripoli’s most advanced cancer center, al-Megrahi lived with his family at a villa in Tripoli at the government’s expense. As civil war engulfed Libya in 2011, Western calls for his return to prison increased, especially after Gadhafi was overthrown and later killed by revolutionary forces.

Tripoli’s new leaders refused to return him but amid international pressures signaled a willingness to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case, still unresolved after nearly a quarter of a century of struggle among nations and investigations that spanned the globe, touching on Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians and Libyans.

The enigmatic al-Megrahi had been the central figure of the case for decades, reviled as a terrorist, but defended by many Libyans and even some world leaders as a victim of injustice whose trial, 12 years after the bombing, had been riddled with political overtones, memory gaps and flawed evidence.

His first cousin was Sa’id Rashid, a senior officer of Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat, the Libyan intelligence service, and a member of Gadhafi’s inner circle. Al-Megrahi was also a senior intelligence officer and director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.

U.S. intelligence officials said he became chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines as a cover for his secret work as a military procurer, enabling him to travel widely, often using aliases and false passports. As tensions between the United States and Libya mounted in the 1980s, prosecutors said, al-Megrahi was enlisted for an act of terrorism.

It was to be the worst in British history and a devastating strike against America.

~~~

While they had no direct proof, investigators believed the suitcase with the bomb had been fitted with routing tags for baggage handlers, put on a plane at Malta and flown to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a Boeing 727 feeder flight that connected to Pan Am 103 at London, then transferred to the doomed jetliner.

After a three-year investigation, al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the Libyan airline station manager in Malta, were indicted for mass murder in 1991. Libya refused to extradite them, and the United Nations imposed eight years of sanctions that cost Libya $30 billion.

Al-Megrahi lived under armed guard and worked as a teacher. Negotiations led by former President Nelson Mandela of South Africa produced a compromise in 1999 — the suspects’ surrender, and a trial by Scottish judges in the Netherlands.

The trial lasted 85 days. No witness connected the suspects directly to the bomb.

But one, Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper who sold the clothing forensic experts had linked to the bomb, identified al-Megrahi as the buyer, although he seemed doubtful and had picked others in photo displays.

The bomb’s timer was traced to a Zurich manufacturer, Mebo, whose owner, Edwin Bollier, testified that such devices had been sold to Libya. A fragment from the crash site was identified by a Mebo employee, Ulrich Lumpert.

Neither defendant testified. But a turncoat Libyan agent testified that plastic explosives had been stored in Fhimah’s desk in Malta, that al-Megrahi had brought a brown suitcase and that both men were at the Malta airport on the day the bomb was sent on its way.

On Jan. 31, 2001, the three-judge court found al-Megrahi guilty but acquitted Fhimah. The court called the case circumstantial, the evidence incomplete and some witnesses unreliable, but concluded that “there is nothing in the evidence which leaves us with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of al-Megrahi. Much of the evidence, however, was later challenged as unreliable.

It emerged that Gauci had failed repeatedly to identify Megrahi before the trial and had selected him only after seeing his picture in a magazine and being shown the same picture in court. The date of the clothing sale was also in doubt.

Investigators said Bollier, whom even the court called “untruthful and unreliable,” had changed his story repeatedly after taking money from Libya, and might have gone to Tripoli just before the attack to fit a timer and bomb into the cassette recorder. The implication that he was a conspirator was never pursued.

In 2007, Lumpert admitted that he had lied at the trial, stolen a timer and given it to a Lockerbie investigator. Moreover, the fragment he identified was never tested for explosives residue, although it was the only evidence of possible Libyan involvement.

The court’s inference that the bomb had been transferred from the Frankfurt feeder flight also was cast into doubt when a Heathrow security guard revealed that Pan Am’s baggage area had been broken into 17 hours before the bombing, a circumstance never explored.

Hans Koechler, a U.N. observer, called the trial “a spectacular miscarriage of justice,” words echoed by Mandela. Many legal experts, authors and investigative journalists challenged the evidence, calling al-Megrahi a scapegoat for a regime long identified with terrorism.

A boy stands stands in front of the main headstone in the Lockerbie memorial garden in Lockerbie, Scotland. Families of victims of the 1988 bombing stood sharply divided over reports that the former Libyan agent jailed for life for the attack is to be freed. David Moir-Reuters
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Prostate cancer is a weird disease.
If you get it while you are young, it kills you pretty fast.
(Remember Frank Zappa?)
But if you get it as an older man it can sit there for years and years and years.
My Great-uncle had it for 21 years!
He finally died of something else entirely unrelated!
al-Megrahi was not exacly suffering in the British prison.
He had a halal diet.
He had all of the religious literature he wanted.
He could take visitors.
He was getting world-class medical care.
But he was not home.
Sending him home meant he also had acclaim.
He also was feted.
He was looked upon as a hero.
So what.
He knew all that was conferred on him before.
It was just more blatant.
It didn’t give him one day more life.
He lived knowing he was dying all that time.
Anyway he might have been a scapegoat for the real planners all along.
We will never really know.

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A letter from the Defense Department was raised at a joint session of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees that noted the Pentagon was “dealing with the threat of violent Islamist extremism in the context of a broader threat of workplace violence.” Lawmakers blasted the language as dismissing the true nature of the tragedy.

May he rest in Hell!!