Lockerbie bomber alive and ‘writing his life story’

The Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, is not only outliving the three-month death sentence given him by doctors in Scotland last summer, he is well enough to write his life story, according to a report in the Sunday Mirror.

With his prostate cancer now apparently stabilised by a course of Docataxel, Megrahi is said to be writing the book in an effort to clear his name of the 1988 PanAm jet bombing that killed 270 people.

As The First Post reported last month, Megrahi was released from Greenock jail last August on compassionate grounds after a team of specialists concluded that he had only three months to live. However, at the end of February he passed the seven-month mark and a growing number of people - including families of the Lockerbie victims and politicians - have been asking whether the Scottish government was hoodwinked or whether the "compassionate grounds" were just an excuse.

According to a report in the Sun, the Conservatives' justice spokesman Bill Aitken has now joined the chorus of those asking Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill for an explanation.

Megrahi's condition is understood to have improved since returning to Tripoli because he has been given the cancer drug Docataxel, also known by the trade name Taxotere. If this is true, the question is why it could not have been administered in the prison hospital at Greenock, which would have meant there was no need to free him.

Aitken asked: "Was the existence of a drug which is reportedly now extending the life of the Lockerbie bomber included in any of the reports Kenny MacAskill read before making the decision to release him?"

Many continue to feel that the compassionate release was a convenient excuse and that Britain's need to restart trade with Libya was behind the controversial release.

The Sunday Mirror report claims that Megrahi has received substantial payments from the Libyan government and quotes Megrahi's brother Mohammed Ali as saying: "My brother sacrificed 10 years of his life to assist in the lifting of the economic blockade against Libya."

The Mirror report also includes the bizarre point that many Libyans have apparently named new-born children after the convicted bomber. Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theo died when the PanAm jet exploded over Lockerbie, said: "The thought that there are now lots of little babies who are going to grow up admiring a man responsible for a terrorist atrocity is terrible." ·