Meeting Megrahi in hospital

[What follows are excerpts from the blog post on
4 Snowblog by Jonathan Miller, one of the Channel 4 journalists who took the film of Abdelbaset Megrahi in hospital in Tripoli.]

At 4.30pm I met the Lockerbie bomber.

It looked to me as though Abdel Basset al-Megrahi wasn’t long for this world. If he was going to face sentencing “by a higher power,” I wanted to get in there first and fast.

His release on compassionate grounds denied him his chance to clear his name in court. He maintained his innocence, but he’d go down in history as the man who killed 270 people on a Pan Am Jumbo.

If he really was dying, this might be his very last chance to speak to the world.

But as I was soon to discover, Mr al-Megrahi really was dying. I think. (...)

I planned out my questions as we raced down wide avenues, hung with vast portraits of Brother Leader Muammar Gaddafi, Guide of the Revolution, King of Kings.

Our world exclusive would involve a searching interrogation and cross-examination of the Lockerbie bomber.

Arriving at the hospital, armed police amazingly waved us through barriers; we were escorted into the private wing. This really was happening.

In an anti-chamber with oversized faux-leather armchairs, under a monstrous flat screen TV showing looped images of Gaddafi’s heroic revolutionary exploits, we waited.

Khaled, the bomber’s friendly 22-year-old son walked in; followed by Mohammed, his son-in-law. He had a tartan strip on his shirt collar. “I spent a long time in Scotland,” he said.

“You will have to be fast,” he added, in perfect English. “He is very sick. Very tired. Oh, and no questions.”

No questions? What?

I followed Mohammed down the corridor, past the policeman on the door and into the darkened room, where in the green gloaming, the convicted bomber lay propped up by pillows, gasping and rasping into an oxygen mask. Abdel Basset al-Megrahi was clearly not at all well.

I stood for a moment taking in the scene.

If this was stage-managed to make it look like al-Megrahi wasn’t long for this world, it was pretty convincing.

Family loitering around the bedside, Mrs al-Megrahi in a black cloak and hijab, looking teary – looking like she was already in mourning.

It was like a scene from an oil painting of man on deathbed.

There was the big picture of the Colonel on the wall above, the Koran beside him. And al-Megrahi himself just lay there, literally croaking as monitors beeped and drips dripped.

I asked my question anyway and felt awkward to doing so; there was no answer; there would be no answers.

This was all we were ever meant to see. The message was the message.

Al-Megrahi was dying; he’d take his secrets with him to the grave; Libya would move on. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi would no longer be have to be haunted by the inconvenient ghosts of the past.