We were right to complain about Lockerbie prisoner pact, says SNP

[This is the headline over an article in today's issue of The Times. It refers to the report in yesterday's issue of The Observer that forms the subject-matter of the blog post that can be read here. The article in The Times reads in part:]

The Scottish government claimed last night it had been fully justified in protesting that Tony Blair’s Government had kept it in the dark about a prisoner transfer agreement negotiated between the UK and Libya.

Its comments came after the publication of e-mails in a Sunday newspaper which revealed that the Government at Westminster had tried to secure the backing of the Scottish government for the deal — which allowed for the release of the Lockerbie bomber — weeks after it had agreed to it in principle in 2007.

The disclosure of the prisoner transfer agreement led to furious exchanges between the UK Government and Alex Salmond’s Scottish Administration, with the Scots saying that they had not been consulted. While the Blair Government responded by saying that the agreement did not specifically refer to Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, in Greenock jail at the time, Mr Salmond pointed out that he was the only Libyan prisoner held in the UK.

A Scottish government spokesman said last night: “This confirms everything that the Scottish government said at the time about how UK ministers kept Scotland in the dark about the prisoner transfer agreement [PTA] process being negotiated by Tony Blair with Libya.

“When we did find out about it, UK ministers at first agreed to our request to have anyone involved in the Lockerbie atrocity excluded from the PTA, but they then reneged on that.”

The e-mails exchanged between both sides in the dispute show civil servants in Whitehall sought to convene a meeting with their Scottish justice counterparts “to establish the UK’s negotiating position” only at the end of June 2007 or the beginning of July 2007. This was more than a month after Mr Blair signed a memorandum of understanding with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in which both sides agreed to a binding deal to exchange prisoners.

The e-mails can be seen as bolstering claims that the Blair Government was keen to sign the agreement, which has since being linked with wider deals covering arms exports and oil.

In the same month the memorandum was signed, BP agreed a billion-dollar oil deal with Libya, and Britain agreed to sell the former pariah Libyan state water cannons. (...)

The e-mails will serve to reinforce suspicions that the UK Government was willing to ride roughshod over Scottish sensitivities when it came to the Lockerbie bomber.

In an emergency statement at Holyrood at the time, Mr Salmond expressed his fury that the understanding signed between Blair and the Libyans did not specifically exclude al-Megrahi. Over the next few months, Mr Salmond made several requests for al-Megrahi to be excluded from the agreement. In December 2007, Jack Straw finally wrote to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, to say that he had been unable to secure such an exclusion and that time had run out.

In the event, the prisoner transfer agreement was not used in the case of al-Megrahi. To the undisguised fury of American relatives of the 270 Lockerbie victims, he was released on the ground of compassion by Mr MacAskill in August last year. The reason for his release was that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and he had only about three months to live. (...)