Word: megrahi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...announcement, MacAskill said his decision was not influenced by questions of whether Al-Megrahi's conviction was legitimate. However, he also said he felt that "there remain concerns [around] some of the wider issues of the Lockerbie atrocity. There are questions to be asked and answered." Doubt in Al-Megrahi's guilt is relatively widespread in Britain, even among legal experts, close observers of the trial and the families of some of the victims. Robert Black, a professor emeritus of Scots Law at Edinburgh University and one of the legal architects of the Camp Zeist trial, tells TIME that...
...Richard Marquise, who was the FBI special agent in charge of the U.S. investigation into the bombing, calls the release "very disappointing." In an unusual move, Marquise and his counterpart in Scotland, Stuart Henderson, the retired senior investigating officer for Lockerbie, had written to MacAskill to argue against Al-Megrahi's release, reiterating their belief that the evidence gathered against him was compelling. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and seven senators, including Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, also wrote protest letters to MacAskill. After MacAskill's announcement, the White House put out a statement saying it "deeply regrets...
...Many of those who aren't convinced of Al-Megrahi's guilt say their greatest regret is that he abandoned the appeal to overturn his conviction last week, presumably to clear the way for his release. Juval Aviv, a private investigator who was hired by Pan Am's insurance company to investigate the bombing, tells TIME that "as time has passed, flaws in the trial and in the evidence used to convict Mr. Al-Megrahi have been revealed. A new trial could have shone a light on a lot of things that were buried in the rush to convict...
...Retired FBI agent Marquise believes that Al-Megrahi's release leaves the search for justice incomplete for a different reason. He feels frustrated that Al-Megrahi remains the only man convicted of a crime that was almost certainly not the work of one person. "He's got a lot of questions to answer, but now he's gone he's unlikely to do so," Marquise says. "The case is now closed, I'm afraid. And that's very disappointing...
Though investigators initially suspected a Palestinian terrorist group backed by Iran or Syria, the charred contents of one recovered suitcase - which included bits of a Toshiba radio-cassette player and scraps of clothing with Maltese labels - eventually led officials to a Libyan man named Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of murder in 2001, and remains the only person to have served time for the atrocity. But after serving eight years, Al-Megrahi, who suffers from terminal prostate cancer, was freed Aug. 20 from a Scottish prison on "compassionate grounds." The decision to release the 57-year...