Did Tony Blair Help Release The Lockerbie Bomber?

The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has accused former Labour government ministers of not revealing the complete truth relating to the early release of the Lockerbie bomber after seeing the report produced that stated that Labour had done "all it could" to set him free.

With in a few weeks of the diagnosis of Abdelbaset Megrahi with prostrate cancer members of the Libyan regime were meeting with some of Gordon Brown's most senior aides who were actively trying to engineer the release of the worst mass murderer ever known in Britain

The head of Gordon Brown's foreign and defence policy discussed the very sensitive issue of arranging a compassionate release for the Lockerbie bomber, Megrahi, and a minister from the Foreign office promised to write offering formal advice just a week later.

It seems that in a short period of just a couple of weeks in September and October 2008 that the UK government policy changed some what.

Megrahi's premature release had now become a burning issue of Labour's foreign policy.

The conclusion of Sir Gus O'Donnel the UK's most senior civil servant has concluded that a policy was progressively developed that Her Majesty's Labour Government should do all it could, while respecting devolved competencies, to facilitate an appeal by the Libyans to the Scottish Government.

At first the focus of the Libyan regime was to focus on agreeing a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between Britain and Libya. The intention of which would possibly see Megrahi serve the rest of his sentence in Libya.

I have no doubt that ex Prime Minister Brown thought, at the time, that he was a master diplomat but this has now exploded in his face. Clearly he knew what was happening. Mr Cameron told Parliament " Frankly this tells us something that was not made clear at the time".

He made it extremely clear that it went much deeper than the previous public accounts of both Gordon Brown and the former Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

Mr Cameron also said that "We weren't told about facilitating an appeal about facilitating contact or game plan,"

One paper issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth office in 2009 explains that there was a need to "actively but discreetly to ensure that Megrahi is transferred back to Libya. This seems to undermine considerably the stated position of the ex Labour PM Gordon Brown at that time and subsequently.


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