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May 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By virtue of his job — he was head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA)
in Malta — Megrahi had access to Luqa airport and, according to prosecutors
at his trial, was able to load the bomb on board an Air Malta flight to
Frankfurt. This then connected with Pan Am flight 103 in London, while
Megrahi himself returned to Libya on a false passport.
At first, the Libyans adamantly refused to hand over Megrahi. But throughout
the 1990s, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime conducted tense and secret
negotiations with the West. Libya wanted to break out of the isolation
imposed by sanctions and exploit to the full its immense reserves of oil and
natural gas.
Gaddafi gradually realised that a full rapprochement with the West was
essential if Libya was to avoid long term stagnation and economic decline
that would eventually threaten his grip on power. Handing over Megrahi was a
necessary price to be paid.
In 1999 Megrahi was duly transferred to stand trial before a Scottish court.
As a face-saving formula for Gaddafi, this court was located inside a
military base in the Netherlands, allowing the Libyans to say that Megrahi
had been handed over to a neutral country.
With his co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, Megrahi was tried without a jury
by three Scottish judges. The trial lasted eight months, involved 235
witnesses and cost an estimated £60 million. Finally, in January 2001,
Megrahi was convicted of 270 murders. Fhimah was acquitted.
The judges found a “real and convincing pattern” placing Megrahi at all the
locations relevant to the bombing. He was sentenced to life imprisonment,
with a minimum of 27 years behind bars, and immediately transferred to a
Scottish prison.
After the court’s ruling, Libya officially accepted responsibility for the
Lockerbie atrocity and paid the victims’ relatives $2.7 billion in
compensation.
None the less, there were those who thought Megrahi’s conviction unsafe. The
case against him had relied on circumstantial evidence and a handful of
witnesses; doubts were raised about the details of the bomb timer, the
passage of the suitcase on its complex journey from Malta to London, and the
reliability of the Maltese shopkeeper whose testimony provided the crucial
link between Megrahi and the contents of the suitcase carrying the bomb.
An appeal against his conviction was heard in 2002, but a panel of five
Scottish judges upheld the original verdict. They accepted that much of the
evidence against Megrahi was circumstantial, but they remained convinced
that, taken together, the accumulation of testimony placing him in position
to carry out the bombing at every stage of the complex plot was enough to
warrant his conviction.
After his diagnosis with terminal prostate cancer in 2009, however, Megrahi
appeared to assume the status of a pawn in what some judged to be a complex
geopolitical game. He was released by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice
minister, in August 2009, ostensibly on “compassionate grounds”.
However, there were suspicions — repeatedly and hotly denied in both
Westminster and Edinburgh — that Megrahi was given his freedom to further
improve Anglo-Libyan relations. In particular, there were suggestions that
his release was tied to oil and trade deals between Britain and Libya.
This caused particular outrage in America, and Megrahi’s release led to a rare
public spat between London and Washington. No fewer than 180 of those who
died in the Lockerbie attack were American citizens, and the United States
felt entitled to demand that Megrahi should spend the rest of his life
behind bars.
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, telephoned MacAskill and urged him
not to free the Libyan. When this advice went unheeded, Robert Mueller, the
FBI director, wrote a passionate letter of protest to the Scottish minister.
President Barack Obama rang Gordon Brown to express in person America’s deep
“disappointment” over the decision.
But there were those who believed that the world had not been told the full
story of the Lockerbie atrocity, and Megrahi — far from being the guilty man
— was merely a “patsy” who had shouldered the blame for dark reasons of
political expediency.
Shortly before he was set free, Megrahi formally withdrew a second appeal
against his conviction. A release on compassionate grounds can be granted
irrespective of any outstanding proceedings, so there was no legal necessity
for this decision. Moreover, Megrahi abandoned the appeal a few days after
meeting MacAskill in Greenock prison. Some suggested that there was an
implicit deal: Megrahi got his freedom in return for dropping an appeal that
could have proved highly embarrassing for the reputation of Scottish
justice.
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al Megrahi was born on April 1 1952 in Tripoli, the
Libyan capital, and was distantly related to Gaddafi himself. A cousin, Said
Rashid, became a senior member of the Libyan intelligence service, and an
influential member of the government.
Megrahi had a good command of English and was educated in the United States.
During the 1970s he visited Britain “four or five times” — specifically
Cardiff, according to some sources, although the details are unclear. One
account says that he spent nine months studying there.
By the 1980s he was installed in Malta as security chief for Libyan Arab
Airlines. From his office there, Megrahi used as many as four false
passports for a variety of journeys, including to Zurich, where the timing
device for the Lockerbie bomb was made.
Megrahi also became director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli.
In the course of his trial, the prosecution, quoting FBI sources, claimed
these posts merely provided a cover for his work as an officer of the Libyan
intelligence service, Jamahiriya el-Mukhabarat. While Megrahi always
protested his innocence of the Lockerbie bombing, he never denied that he
had worked as a Libyan spy.
A smartly dressed family man, he did not appear to fit the stereotypical image
of an Arab terrorist. In television interviews shown at his trial, Megrahi
came across as gentle and mild-mannered. He told reporters: “I’m a quiet
man. I never had any problem with anybody.” And he claimed to feel sorry for
the victims of Lockerbie.
For a decade, however, his name had figured on the FBI’s top 10 “most wanted”
list. After his arrest in 1991 Megrahi spent eight years living under armed
guard — relying on a small state pension and his work as a teacher — before
being handed over for trial.
Having been convicted, Megrahi served the first part of his sentence in
Glasgow’s fearsome Barlinnie prison, where he was segregated in a
high-security area nicknamed “Gaddafi’s Cafe”, where there was said to be a
“sitting room” and a kitchen in which Halal food was specially prepared.
The former South African president, Nelson Mandela, who had helped broker the
deal which allowed the trial to take place, visited him there and called for
Megrahi to be moved to a Muslim country to avoid harassment from other
prisoners. In 2005 Megrahi was transferred to a prison at nearby Greenock,
where there were no special provisions and he mixed with other “lifers”.
When he met MacAskill shortly before his release, Megrahi told the minister of
his youngest child’s dream “that his father would pick him up from school to
show his friends that he does have a dad”.
Megrahi also told MacAskill that he realised how hard it would be to come to a
decision over his release. “As I turn now to face my God, to stand before
him, I have nothing to fear,” he added.
Megrahi returned to Libya to be greeted by scenes of jubilation, with some of
the crowd waving the Scottish Saltire. Gaddafi, apparently oblivious to the
huge embarrassment he was causing in Scotland, publicly embraced the bomber.
Megrahi returned to Libya to be greeted by scenes of jubilation, with some of
the crowd waving the Scottish Saltire. Gaddafi, apparently oblivious to the
huge embarrassment he was causing in Scotland, publicly embraced the bomber.
In the event, Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi survived for nearly three years
following his release, prompting scepticism about the state of his health in
2009. Last August, after Gaddafi’s fall, he was reported to be “in and out
of a coma” at his home in Tripoli. Libyan rebel leaders said that they would
not allow him to be extradited to the United States for trial, or to be
returned to prison in Scotland.
He is survived by his wife, Aisha, and their four sons and one daughter.
Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi, born April 1 1952, died May 20 2012
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