[This is the headline over an Associated Press report in the Los Angeles Times of 7 July 2010. It reads as follows:]
Four US senators are calling on Britain to investigate the circumstances of last year's release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie airliner bombing.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison in September because a doctor said the cancer-stricken man had only three months to live. However, the doctor later said al-Megrahi could live for another decade.
Al-Megrahi had served eight years of a life sentence for the Dec 21, 1988, bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 as it flew from London to New York.
Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer of New York and Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez of New Jersey requested the investigation Wednesday in a letter to the UK's ambassador to the US.
[The reply by the UK ambassador, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, to Senator Gillibrand can be read here. The reply to the senators from the Scottish Government Counsellor, North America, can be read here.
Many other organs of the media have since picked up the story, among them BBC News and STV News.]
Why do they insist on their probe looking only at the man's release? We know the answer, but the question is still worth asking.
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