THE GUARDIAN: Kenny MacAskill, who released Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, will not fly to US for Senate foreign relations committee
The Scottish justice minister has been accused of "running a mile" from a US inquiry into the release of the Libyan jailed for the Lockerbie bombing.
Labour and Tory leaders said Kenny MacAskill, of the Scottish National Party, had no justification for refusing a "perfectly legitimate" request to give evidence before a powerful US Senate committee on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's release next week.
The Senate foreign relations committee is to hold hearings next Thursday into allegations, ignited by the Gulf oil spill controversy, that the British oil giant BP influenced a UK government prisoner transfer treaty with Libya to win lucrative contracts there.
The hearing has reignited the controversy over al-Megrahi's compassionate release from Greenock prison last August, partway through his life sentence for planting the bomb which killed 270 mainly American passengers and crew on a Pan Am flight to New York over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.
Al-Megrahi, who still insists he is innocent, had been fighting an appeal against his conviction but dropped it two weeks before his release because he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate cancer and wanted to return home to die.
Richard Baker, Labour justice spokesman at the Scottish parliament, said: "There is a legitimacy for the US senators, they represent so many of the families who lost loved ones on that flight, I think it's a perfectly legitimate request."
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Baker added: "I think it speaks volumes about the lack of confidence [MacAskill] has now in his own decision that he is running a mile from any scrutiny of it." >>> Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent | Friday, July 23, 2010
