Lockerbie bomber 'a shell of a man'

[This is the headline over report just issued by The Press Association. It reads as follows:]

The Lockerbie bomber has been tracked down to his villa in the Libyan capital, where he is apparently comatose and near death, it has emerged.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was found bedridden, surrounded by his family in their grand home in an up-market part of Tripoli. His relatives allowed a reporting team from American news channel CNN to enter the house, which they said had been ransacked by looters who plundered all his medicine.

Oxygen and a fluids drip are all that are keeping him alive, according to his family.

His son Khaled al-Megrahi said he had no idea how much longer his father had to live, but insisted he should be able to spend his last few days in peace at home. "There is no doctor, there is nobody to ask and we don't have a phoneline to call anybody," he told the broadcaster.

His family said he had not been eating and they did not know how to treat him.

CNN reporter Nic Robertson said Megrahi looked far worse than he had done when he last saw him two years ago and described his appearance as "much iller, much sicker, his face is sunken...just a shell of the man he was". He added: "I was shocked when I walked into the room and saw him in such a state."

Megrahi was convicted and imprisoned in Scotland for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people. He was granted compassionate release in 2009 on the basis that he was expected to die from prostate cancer within months. But he survived and was residing in Tripoli until the Gaddafi regime fell.

Britain and the new Libyan government were at loggerheads over whether the bomber - and also Yvonne Fletcher's suspected killer - could be removed from the conflict-torn country. Pressure has been growing for Megrahi to be brought back to jail in the UK in the wake of the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi's regime.

The Scottish Government and East Renfrewshire Council issued a joint statement to say there had been contact through Megrahi's family over the weekend.

It said: "Speculation about Al Megrahi in recent days has been unhelpful, unnecessary and indeed ill-informed. As has always been said, Al Megrahi is dying of a terminal disease, and matters regarding his medical condition should really be left there."

[Related reports in The Herald can be read here; in The Scotsman here; in The Guardian here. The report in The Times (behind the paywall) contains the following:]

“He is innocent,” Mohamed al-Alagi [Justice Minister in the Libyan Transitional National Council] told The Times, reflecting a widespread view within Libya. “We will not hand over any Libyan citizen. It was Gaddafi who handed over Libyan citizens,” said Mr al-Alagi, who helped defend al-Megrahi at his trial in the Netherlands.

[The full account of his tracing of Megrahi by CNN's Nic Robertson can be read here.]