[This is the headline over a report published on the website of The Guardian on this date in 2008. It reads in part:]
A legal battle to release a secret intelligence report which could free the Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is to continue after judges ruled the foreign secretary had the right to suppress the document.
The ruling from the Lord Justice General, Lord Hamilton, dashes the hopes of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi that he would be quickly released.
It emerged last year that two secret papers had been given to the UK by a foreign government in September 1996, four years before al-Megrahi's trial began, but had never been disclosed to his defence team even though Scottish police and prosecutors had seen them.
Last July, the Scottish criminal cases review commission said that one of those documents raised further doubts about his guilt, and had played a key role in its decision to return al-Megrahi's conviction to the appeal court. It refused to disclose its contents or origin, however.
The Libyan's lawyers claim the document is essential to his appeal and are contesting the decision by the foreign secretary, David Miliband, to grant public interest immunity suppressing the papers on behalf of the British government.
The lawyers told three appeal judges last month that only the Lord Advocate, Elish Angiolini, had the right to withhold papers in a Scottish court and she had said she had no objection to them being released.
However, the judges ruled that the Lord Advocate had said that disclosure of those papers was a decision for the foreign secretary – an opinion they upheld. Al-Megrahi's lawyers will make a further attempt to force disclosure of the documents later this summer.
Miliband has told the court that releasing either document would cause "real harm" to the UK's national security, its counter-terrorism efforts and its relations with the country which supplied the papers.
Government lawyers have denied claims it came from the US government or the CIA, but said the foreign government involved had refused requests to release it.
Al-Megrahi, then a sanctions buster for Colonel Muammar Gadafy, was convicted in 2001 of murdering 270 passengers, crew and townspeople after planting a suitcase bomb in Malta which eventually blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, the small town in south west Scotland.
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