[This is the heading over a letter from Dr Jim Swire in today's edition of The Daily Telegraph. A letter in the same terms appeared yesterday in The Malta Independent. The letter reads as follows:]
In demanding that Megrahi should now be removed from his family and returned to a Scottish jail, is not Senator Charles Schumer (report, November 21) revealing a lust for revenge?
If the senator looks at the context of the Lockerbie disaster, he must conclude that it was an act of revenge. Either by Iran, for the shooting down of her Airbus by the US missile cruiser Vincennes five months before Lockerbie, with the loss of 290 lives, or by Libya, for the bombing of Tripoli and Bengazi by the US Air Force in 1986 – an attack which led to the death of Gaddafi's daughter Hanna, aged 18 months, and around 30 other citizens.
If the senator goes to Tripoli and looks at the preserved remains of the bedroom in which Hanna died, he will see two pictures on the wall. One is of Hanna and one is of my daughter Flora (murdered at Lockerbie), taken when she too was 18 months old. Below these is a legend in Arabic and English, which says: "The consequence of the use of violence is the death of innocent people."
My own efforts to get the two accused Libyans to trial were specifically because I believed that was the best way of breaking the cycle of revenge attacks. Insistence on Scottish rather than US justice was specifically to avoid the death penalty.
I have had letters from America which have advocated the withholding of morphine from Megrahi "so that he would die in agony", I have heard one American call for the "nuking" of Tripoli.
Senator Schumer presumably still believes Megrahi to be guilty, despite the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's findings that there may have been a miscarriage of justice. Would the good senator, who cannot help representing a Christian country, like to consider whether he is acting in accordance with the words of a teacher who claimed that we should even (if we can) love our enemies?
Had the United States read the small print of Scottish law before agreeing that any sentence should be served in Scotland, it would have detected the precedent for compassionate release when death appeared likely within three months. Ask any doctor if he can predict the very day of a patient's death.
Adding to the suffering of the man found guilty of the Lockerbie disaster would risk increasing the motive for revenge by Libya again. Is that what the senator would like to see?
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