The wife of the Lockerbie bomber claims that her husband became a sacrificial lamb for the whole of Libya when he agreed to be tried for a crime that he says he did not commit.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi surrendered his freedom so that his country could free itself from United Nations sanctions and improve its global image, his wife Aisha said.
Mrs al-Megrahi gave a rare interview at the family home near Glasgow, close to the prison where her husband is serving a life sentence for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that claimed the lives of 270 people in 1988.
“He sacrificed himself for the sake of an entire nation,” she told The Times, in an interview conducted in Arabic. (...)
At times she appears optimistic, then she is overcome by sombre thoughts. “I’ve lost hope,” she said. “Even if they tell me he’ll be released I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes. Because we’ve been let down again and again.”
Asked how her husband feels about Lockerbie’s 20th anniversary – on Sunday – she said: “He wants the world to know that he’s innocent and that he feels for those innocent lives lost in the bombing . . . because he too has a family and parents.”
[From an article by Richard Kerbaj in The Times of 19 December. The complete article can be read here.]
On a Times link to this article, there is a Q and A section.
ReplyDeleteThis contains a telling comment by former Lord Advocate Peter Fraser:
"So could the CIA have planted the evidence?
“I don’t know,” says Lord Fraser. “No one ever came to me and said, ‘Now we can go for the Libyans’, it was never as straightforward as that. The CIA was extremely subtle."
People are welcome to follow this link and form a judgement.
But if we add the above comment to Frasers' formerly expressed doubts concerning the sole identification witness, Tony Gauci, then it is a fair conclusion that Fraser appears uncertain about both central grounds of the prosecution case.