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Seven months on, and Megrahi is still alive. Why?
The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing continues to defy doctors’ predictions
It will be seven months at the end of this week since medical experts examined Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi at Greenock Prison in Scotland and gave him less than three months to live. He continues to confound the doctors and is said to be seeing out his days in a luxury villa in Tripoli.
It was on July 28 that he was visited by a team of doctors who declared his prostate cancer was so advanced that he would be dead inside 90 days. As a result, he was released by the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya, where he received a hero's reception.
His life is now a far cry from the one he experienced in Scotland. He lives with his family in a two-storey villa in a plush suburb of the Libyan capital, where he entertains visitors in a large tent erected in the garden while a policeman guards the gates.
The question that nags at the Scottish judiciary and the families of those who died when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky in 1988 is: did Megrahi hoodwink them into granting him his freedom?
Since his release in August it has emerged that the Libyan government paid for some of the medical evidence that led to the decision to free him, and that since his return to Libya he has undergone chemotherapy treatment with the drug Docetaxel.
According to a Sunday Telegraph report in September, the doctors who received a "consultancy fee" from Tripoli included Professor Karol Sikora, who this weekend admitted to the same paper that the fact that the convicted bomber is still alive might be "difficult" for the families of the victims.
Prof Sikora believes Megrahi may have survived so long due to the psychological boost of being free. "It's stimulated him to have a remarkable recovery," he told the newspaper.
But he added that Megrahi was unlikely to survive for much longer. "My information from Tripoli is that it's not going to be long... They stopped any active treatment in December and he has just been going downhill very slowly at home. The quality of his life is not good – he is a dying man."
That is at odds with the view of another person involved in monitoring Megrahi’s condition. The source told the Telegraph: "Megrahi is still the same as ever. His condition has not deteriorated."
Should any doctor have offered their opinion on Megrahi's chances when he was yet to undergo chemotherapy? One man who believes not is the prostate cancer specialist Dr Chris Parker of the Royal Marsden Hospital.
"Studies show experts are very poor at trying to predict how long an individual patient will live for," said Parker. He also said that the average prognosis for survival after a course of Docetaxel was 12 months.
Which means Kenny MacAskill faces the very real possibility of Megrahi still being with us for the first anniversary of his release. On the other hand, the Telegraph's source monitoring his health in Tripoli said: "There is no sign of him dying any time yet - but who knows? It’s totally unpredictable." ·
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There are cures for cancer, the government and big pharma will not let you have them I know them, and I would share them with anyone who asked me, These are age old cures that work, not some expensive patented drug from the pharmaceutical companies
One is above us in the sky all the time, The sun prevents cancer
as does cholesterol in your skin and exposure to the sun, Its UVA that causes cancer, but all sunscreens only block UVB they have partial UVA only
Thats why skin cancer rates are rising.... by the way I could wax lyrical on this Its out there if you want to find it.
He has survived because he is now getting sun exposure No one with dark skin in Scotland can make Vitamin D which prevents cancer.
All this is predicated on Megrahi being guilty, when he quite evidently isn't. So the gouls waiting for him to die are waiting for the wrong man, and the real bombers have remained free. It is impossible to guess how long a patient has, especially as chemotherapy can extend life, estimates are just that, estimates. The families of the British victims are not as universally convinced as the American families appear to be of Megrahi's guilt, perhaps Americans are more used to uncritically swallowing the official government line and ignoring the evidence. In this case the evidence was so flimsy that one of those charged with conspiracy [that's always with one or more others remember] was aquitted. So Megrahi is supposed to have conspired with himself. Makes perfect sense, to a moron. The pity of it all is that in order to get a few months or a year of his life back to spend with his family, Megrahi had to drop his appeal against conviction, thus enabling the disgraceful miscarriage to remain, and for there to be no further investigations of the crime. A fudge that lets the UK and USA off the hook, and the double-dealing, drug smuggling, CIA-led conspiracy will never be fully revealed. This was all about targeting Libya which the US had in its sights. The most likely bombers were a Palestinian cell in Germany funded by Iran, which had suffered a civil aircraft, crash shot down by US missiles some time previously. Tit for tat anyone?
Don't worry about Megrahi, he is an innocent man. Be more concerned about Ronnie Biggs he was also released as a dying man. How is he?