Soon after his release last year, BP acknowledged that it urged the British government to sign a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya, but stressed it did not specify Al-Megrahi’s case. It reiterated that stance this week when four US Democratic senators asked the State Department to investigate whether there was a quid pro quo for the Lockerbie bomber’s release.
“The evidence here may be circumstantial but if I were a prosecutor, I’d love to take this case to a jury,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, one of the four lawmakers. While the State Department was noncommittal, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced this week it would hold a hearing on the case this month.
Al-Megrahi served eight years of a life sentence for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, most of them Americans. Last August, Scotland’s government released him on compassionate grounds and he returned to Libya.
As outrage swirled on both sides of the Atlantic, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied giving any assurances to Libya’s leaders that the bomber would be freed in exchange for oil contracts. BP acknowledged in a statement at the time that it “did bring to the attention of the UK government in late 2007 our concerns about the slow progress in concluding a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya. Like many others, we were aware that delay might have negative consequences for UK commercial interests, including ratification of BP’s exploration agreement.”
“We were not talking about the Al-Megrahi case because we were fully aware that this was solely a matter for the Scottish Executive and not the UK authorities,” BP said. Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary who freed Al-Megrahi, said Friday he had no contact with BP as he decided the Libyan’s fate.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters this week that the department is reviewing the senators’ request, but added there are practical questions of “our ability to inquire as to a conversation that might been alleged to have taken place between a private company, a government and another devolved government.” Crowley said that the US has maintained that releasing Al-Megrahi was a mistake.
Schumer and Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, are trying to tie the Lockerbie issue to the Gulf oil spill, arguing that evidence suggests the company put profit ahead of people in the latter case.
“The question we now have to answer is, was this corporation willing to trade justice in the murder of 270 innocent people for oil profits?” they asked. Answering that question, they said, “will help us understand if BP might use blood money to pay claims for damage in the Gulf of Mexico.” In a letter to company chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg and CEO Tony Hayward, the senators demanded records of any BP communications with Libya, Britain, Scotland and others concerning Al-Megrahi and the prisoner transfer agreement.
