Straw Rips Salmond Over Lockerbie Bomber Release
David Rose writes at the Daily Mail:
Former UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has accused the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond of 'selective amnesia' over his role in freeing the Lockerbie bomber.
Mr Straw said that Mr Salmond and Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill both told him personally that they would be prepared to let Abdelbaset Al Megrahi go home to Libya in return for political concessions from Westminster.
The concessions were changes to the law in order to curb lawsuits from former prisoners in Scottish jails who had been forced to use 'slop-out' buckets in their cells instead of toilets and to give the Scottish Executive powers to regulate firearms.
Mr Salmond and Mr MacAskill have repeatedly denied seeking any deal over Megrahi, whom they freed on 'compassionate grounds' in August 2009, just eight years into a life sentence for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, which killed 270.
He was suffering from prostate cancer and supposed to have only three months to live but, having been given chemotherapy, he is still alive.
Mr Straw told The Mail on Sunday that last week he checked unpublished documents and official records of conversations he held with Mr Salmond and Mr MacAskill in the autumn of 2007.
At that time, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was threatening not to ratify an oil-drill-ing deal with BP unless Megrahi was included in a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) allowing him to return to Libya. Gaddafi got his way - and the oil deal, potentially worth many billions, went ahead.
Mr Straw said that Mr Salmond had already asked him the previous summer to change the law over the prisoners' damages claims for having to slop out - claims which he feared could cost Scotland £50 million.
'It does seem now that he has been suffering from selective amnesia,' Mr Straw said.
'What he's forgotten is that when I went to him in late 2007, asking him to agree to a PTA that would not exclude Megrahi, he indicated that he could be more accommodating if I could offer him two concessions - first to change the Scotland Act to make Scotland less vulnerable to paying compensation to prisoners for slopping out, and second to transfer responsibility for firearms from Westminster to Scotland.'
Last week, Prime Minister David Cameron called the decision to free Megrahi 'profoundly wrong', releasing a report into the affair by Britain's top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell.
Click here to read more.
