Today, Abdul-Basit Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of planting the bomb which destroyed a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, was released on compassionate grounds as he is terminally ill with prostate cancer. This has understandably provoked a whole lot of controversy. Brett at Harry’s Place says that if you kill 270 people, you should die in jail.
I would agree, if I was absolutely convinced that Megrahi was guilty. In this case, there is a whole lot of doubt about whether he really did the deed; there has been much speculation that the real guilty party might have been Hizbullah or Abu Nidal. Not all of the people who say this are, as alleged in today’s Guardian, people making up conspiracy theories in desperate grief. If I was convinced he was guilty, his old age and illness would be no grounds for compassion, as I have argued in the past regarding child abusers who are brought to justice when old and sick. If he had served 20 years, it would be different, but he has been in jail for about 10 years, including the time he spent in detention while being tried. In the UK, although we rarely pass whole-life sentences, the minimum jail time for murder is usually 12 or 15 years, and that is when there is only one victim and no aggravating factors such as armed robbery, terrorism or sexual assault.
Even if he is guilty, the main perpetrators are still free and, indeed, western governments want to buy oil from and sell arms to them. Kill one person, you’re a murderer. Kill many more and you’re a politician. Myra Hindley was left to die in jail; General Pinochet was allowed to come to London for years to buy weapons until Labour came to power.
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Salam alaikoum I too am not convinced he is fully guilty. I think he was some kind of fall guy or patsy with at best a tangential connection. And I sound like a horrid fishwife here but that vid of him bouncing up the stairs to his plane- I have seen end stage cancer patients attempt walking. They don’t do stairs, at least not like that. Moving on…This whole case makes me sad- no justice was really served, they never caught the real bad guy.
DP: As-Salaamu ‘alaikum, I just watched it and he didn’t really bounce - he walked pretty slowly, but with no great difficulty, I admit. I would have thought his progress would have been a bit more painful given where his trouble is (assuming it’s not been removed along with other bits of his anatomy as is common with treatment for prostate cancer). Then again, I hardly think they’d risk another Ernest Saunders / Pinochet episode and cancer is not hard for medical experts to quantify. He was in British prison custody so I’m sure he couldn’t insist on “friendly” doctors.
I am not sure how true this is, but I heard one of the British victims’ father on the radio a few days ago (Five live). He was saying that he was 100% convinced that this guy is innocent and that there was a cover-up. He pointed to the fact that there was a break-in at Heathrow at the exact time when the baggage for that flight was there, this information witheld at the trial. I also heard something about the Maltese witness how identified Megrahi being paid $$$ by the CIA. As I said, these are things I heard on the radio, I am not sure how true they are.
Personally, I have no sympathy for Megrahi - after all he member of Qaddaffi’s secret police. Imagine how many wrongul imprisonments/extra-judicial killings him and his associates have been involded in?
The people who welcomed him like a star and those complaining are no better than each other. I hope this dies down quickly, or it will be one hell of an embarrassment for all people involved.