I know there are those here (I'm British, and lived near Lockerbie at the time) who think Megrahi is innocent - although both the judges and the appeal court felt otherwise, and as a matter of law he remains guilty and has officially ceased denying his guilt. I've seen some claims that one witness from Malta was "coached", but nothing convincing to point the finger away from Libyan intelligence, the owners of the detonator used. I also found the lavish welcome he was given not just distasteful, but indicative of guilt: he was being welcomed as some sort of hero, not the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He had already been afforded multiple opportunities to present any exculpatory evidence, without managing to shed any reasonable doubt on his guilt: after N failed attempts, why expect attempt N+1 to produce the opposite result?

If Megrahi had actually managed to succeed in his second appeal and been acquitted, I would feel differently - but to let the worst convicted mass murderer in the country's history go free, guilty but lightly punished? A travesty.

"Secondly the plane might have been American but it was over UK soverign area, when the Americans let us try our criminals that kill over in the states we will no doubt go Quid-pro-Quo."

No - Libya, the US and US are all signatories to the Tokyo Convention, which grants the US jurisdiction in this case: that aircraft, and those on it, were under US jurisdiction at the time, not UK. Equally, a crime committed on board a British aircraft flying from LA to London is under UK jurisdiction, and I can't see the US quibbling: indeed, they signed up for international law which would specifically prohibit any such prosecution! (That's why you need to be 18 to get served alcohol on a British aircraft, 21 on an American one.) Of course, unlike Libya, the US generally extradites criminals to the UK to face justice, as well as vice versa, with a few shameful exceptions like McKinnon. In a nutshell: we HAVE that 'quid pro quo' already, and have done for decades - with Libya as well as the US, though Libya violated that agreement over Megrahi.

I did, though, appreciate the irony: since the US has much more extensive screening for prostate cancer and far higher survival rates as a result, Libya's insistence on a Scots court and prison rather than US may arguably have shortened his life sentence in an unanticipated way. As for the uncertain prognosis, at the time officials assured us he had no more than a few months, "certainly not into next year"... you agree that they were lying to us about that aspect at least? It's already been admitted that the medical evidence was much less clear cut and more blatantly cherry-picked than we were told at the time.

Moreover, it has now been pointed out that a UN Security Council Resolution required that the culprits were to serve their whole sentence in the UK, nowhere else.

I am sorry about your father, but not sorry to hear that the man who remains convicted of the worst mass murder ever committed in this area apparently faces a painful end. Mine is still alive - although his deputy at the time committed suicide shortly after said atrocity, unable to cope with the traumatic experience of the aftermath. The absurd hoops Libya made us jump through instead of extraditing Megrahi properly were, to me, disgusting and pointless: making us build a temporary court in a foreign country!? Insisting on a UK court rather than the correct US one at least made sense - obviously you go for the softer touch system given a choice - but the circus of moving hundreds of people a thousand miles away, just for the sake of it?