A very apt cartoon carried in a national daily in Britain on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power shows Prime Minister Gordon Brown offering the Libyan leader the convicted Lockerbie bomber as a birthday gift. That is exactly how millions of people throughout the world interpreted the release from prison by Scotland, ostensibly on compassionate grounds, of Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie that killed 270 people.
However much British government ministers deny claims of a double deal with the Libyan government over the release, details of the story made public over the past few days strengthen suspicions that Mr al-Megrahi's release had more to do with Britain's "national interests" than with compassionate grounds. To make matters even more revolting, particularly to most families of the victims, Mr al-Megrahi was given a hero's welcome on his arrival in Tripoli from Scotland.
What prompted greater controversy were letters leaked to a newspaper showing that Britain's Justice Secretary Jack Straw had agreed not to exclude Mr al-Megrahi from a prisoner transfer deal in 2007 because of "overwhelming national interests". According to the newspaper, the Sunday Times (of London), Mr Straw wrote to his Scottish counterpart Kenny MacAskill on December 19, 2007, saying: "I had previously accepted the importance of the al-Megrahi issue to Scotland and said I would try to get an exclusion for him in the face of the agreement. I have not been able to secure an explicit exclusion. The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage and, in view of the overwhelming interests for the UK, I have agreed that in this instance the prisoner transfer agreement should be in the standard form and not mention any individual". Highly significant is that all this happened six weeks before an oil exploration contract for BP was ratified in Libya.
An agreement had been reached with Libya in 2003, following "painstaking, secret negotiations over months", that allowed the international atomic energy inspectors to supervise the dismantling of its nuclear weapons programme. This had led to Libya's normalisation of relations with the United Kingdom and with the West as a whole. Mr Straw said the prisoner transfer agreement was part of that agreement. However, he stressed that Mr al-Megrahi was not released under the prisoner transfer agreement and the issue had therefore become academic now.
It may very well be academic but a comment by Foreign Secretary David Milliband, given in a BBC interview, that the government did not want to see Mr al-Megrahi die in a Scottish prison has given a new twist to the whole issue. Mr Brown, Mr Straw and Mr Milliband are insisting that there has been no double dealing and that no pressure was placed on the Scottish government ahead of its decision to release Mr al-Megrahi. Well, they should find no difficulty then in accepting the call made by Conservative leader David Cameron for an independent inquiry.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg must have reflected the opinion of many when he said: "I feel that when someone is convicted in a court of law of murdering 270 innocent people there is no oil deal in the world that justifies overturning that ruling". The ruling might have been reviewed had the second appeal been heard. That possibility has now been lost.