U.S. & World

EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) ― Scottish officials said Thursday they were considering early release for the Lockerbie bomber - igniting debate between victims' relatives in the United States and Britain over whether he should be allowed to return home to Libya.

British media reports say Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi will soon be freed on compassionate grounds because he is terminally ill with cancer. The possibility of an imminent release has reignited the fierce debate about whether justice has been done for victims of the attack that killed 270 people - most of them Americans.

The Scottish government dismissed the reports by Sky News and BBC television that he would be released next week as speculation, and said Scotland's justice minister had yet to review all case information before deciding whether to release al-Megrahi. U.S. National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said he had no reason to believe Scotland had made a decision - and took the opportunity to restate U.S. opposition to his early release.

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Neither the BBC nor Sky News cited sources for their reports. A decision had been expected by the end of August.

The man in charge of deciding al-Megrahi's fate insisted he was still considering his options.

"Clearly, he is terminally ill, and there are other factors," Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill told the BBC. "But I have made no decision as yet."

Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan secret service agent, is the sole person convicted for the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. He was arrested in 1991 in Libya, held under house arrest until handed over in 1998 and convicted in 2001 by a special Scottish court set held at Kamp van Zeist in the Netherlands. His co-accused Amin Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted, but al-Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.

He unsuccessfully appealed immediately after the trial. But a second appeal is currently underway in Edinburgh after a review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007 raised serious concerns over the evidence used to secure the conviction.

Those conerns have convinced many British families that the full truth about the bombings has yet to be uncovered, and many in the U.K. had been looking forward to al-Megrahi's second appeal to find out more about the atrocity.

"Other people and other countries were involved in this," said the Rev. John Mosey, from Worcestershire, England, who lost his daughter Helga, 19. "We should show him some Christian compassion."

Jim Swire, who lost his 24-year-old daughter Flora in the blast and serves as a spokesman for many of the British victims, said "everything points to a miscarriage of justice" and said he would be "delighted" if al-Megrahi were sent home.

The possibility that al-Megrahi could leave his Scottish prison exposed long-standing trans-Atlantic disagreements between victims' families. Some U.S. relatives of the victims expressed outrage over the possibility that al-Megrahi would be freed early.

Susan Cohen of Cape May Court House, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, died in the attack, said the idea that al-Megrahi could be freed was a nightmare.

"This is total, pure, ugly appeasement of a terrorist dictator and a monster," Cohen said, arguing that that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi would feel vindicated if the convicted bomber could return to Libya.

"Al-Megrahi would be a star," she said, "and we will be left here in ashes and suffering."

Al-Megrahi's fate is of particular importance because his trial and conviction led to a massive shift in Libya's relationship with the West.

Gadhafi engineered a rapprochement with his former critics following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He renounced terrorism and voluntarily dismantled Libya's secret program to develop nuclear weapons - earning commitments from Britain and the United States to work together to contain the threat of international terrorism.

(© 2010 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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