Official: Lockerbie bomber release in UK interests

Britain's interests in Libya would have been badly damaged had the Lockerbie bomber died in a Scottish prison, the foreign secretary said Monday.

But David Miliband denied that those fears played any role in the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi in August, a decision he stressed was taken by authorities in Scotland independently of the government in London.

Miliband said Libyan authorities had "become increasingly concerned" about al-Megrahi's fate after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in September 2008, suggesting that they had repeatedly lobbied the government over the issue. But he said British officials always made clear "that the decision on (al-)Megrahi's fate was exclusively for Scottish ministers and the Scottish judicial system."

Nevertheless, he said, the officials in London "had a responsibility to consider the consequences of any Scottish decision."

"We assessed that although the decision was not one for the U.K. government, British interests - including those of U.K. nationals, British business and possibly security cooperation - would be damaged, perhaps badly, if (al-)Megrahi were to die in a Scottish prison rather than in Libya," he told the House of Commons.

Al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, was released from prison Aug. 20 and returned to Libya where he was hospitalized. It was a move which outraged many American families of 270 victims of the bombing and raised questions over the nature of Britain's relationship with Moammar Gadhafi's authoritarian regime.

Some of the U.S. victims' families have suggested that a British-Libyan prisoner swap deal, which came into effect shortly before al-Megrahi's release, was motivated in part by a desire to secure access to Libya's vast energy reserves. British Justice Secretary Jack Straw seemed to endorse that claim when he said last month that trade played "a very big part" in the negotiations over the deal.

Miliband echoed Straw's assertion Monday, explaining that refusing to sign such a deal with Libya "would have set back our wider national and commercial interests."

But he defended the arrangement, noting that it did not specifically affect al-Megrahi and that, in any case, Scottish officials refused al-Megrahi's application to be sent back to a Libyan prison, instead choosing to free him outright on compassionate grounds.

Opposition lawmakers criticized the decision. Conservative parliamentarian Malcolm Rifkind accused Miliband of paying "more attention to the views of the Libyan government ... than to the views of the U.S."

Miliband countered that, as a student in New York at the time, he could "well imagine the passion and emotion" surrounding the issue, but said that Libya's dramatic turn toward the West after the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Megrahi's cancer could not have been anticipated.