Scotland's terrible compassion for terror

On 21 December 1988, Libyan agents blew Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie. Bodies were scattered over Scotland's countryside in the worst terrorist atrocity ever carried out in Britain. Among the 270 dead were 35 students from New York's Syracuse University. They never came home for Christmas.

For this awful act of mass murder, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted by a group of Scottish judges in a specially created court in the Netherlands and sentenced to life in prison on 31 January 2001.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi is now a free man. He was released last Thursday and returned to a hero's welcome in Tripoli. My immediate reaction to the news was one of disbelief and disgust.

According to the Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, the release was a gesture of "compassion" because of al-Megrahi's prostate cancer. But I don't accept this because, first of all, Scotland is required to provide medical services for prisoners and many people would say that the care available under Britain's National Health Service is far better than that provided by the Libyan dictatorship.

"How could it be unjust for a person guilty of a crime like this to die in prison?"

Secondly, when interviewed on television, MacAskill argued that to keep al-Megrahi in prison until he died would be to choose vengeance, not justice. But this is simply wrong. The reason civilized countries have courts is to decide what is a just punishment for a crime. So how could it be unjust for a person guilty of a crime like this to die in prison?

And as for "compassion", if there is to be compassion for a mass murderer, surely there should be compassion for the families of his victims? Instead, they have been betrayed. The Scottish government released Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi from prison, but the Scottish government will never release the dead of Lockerbie from their graves. This is the terrible truth.