LONDON – The decision by Scottish authorities to release the only person convicted of the deadly bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was “wrong and misguided,” but there’s no evidence to suggest that Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was returned to Libya in return for lucrative oil deals, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said in a letter to U.S. officials.

Hague’s letter to Sen. John Kerry, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, was released by the Foreign Office on Saturday. Hague says that he, like British Prime Minister David Cameron, disagreed with al-Megrahi’s release, but that the decision was for Scotland alone, and that he has seen nothing which shows the oil company interfered in the process.

“There is no evidence that corroborates in any way the allegation of BP’s involvement in the Scottish executive’s entirely separate decision to release Mr. Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009, nor any suggestion that the Scottish executive decided to release him on compassionate grounds in order to facilitate oil deals for BP,” says Hague’s July 22 letter to Kerry, D-Mass.

“None of our searches of U.K. government material to date have produced any record of an attempt by BP to influence either the U.K. government or the Scottish executive with regard to Mr. Megrahi’s release.”

The correspondence comes ahead of a hearing this week in Washington into the circumstances surrounding the release of al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 of the attack on the jetliner in the skies above the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland. The Dec. 21, 1988, bombing killed 259 people — mostly Americans — on board the plane, and another 11 on the ground.

Al-Megrahi was sentenced to life in a Scottish prison, with a minimum of 27 years, but in September 2008 was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.

Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill decided last August to release al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, believing that the 58-year-old had less than three months to live. In May, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, said al-Megrahi was still alive but “very sick.”

The decision to release al-Megrahi outraged the families of the U.S. victims of the attack, and was criticized both by President Obama and FBI director Robert Mueller.

 

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