Gadaffi's Lockerbie claims don't add up
Wednesday August 26 2009
Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob (Letters, August 25) wrote that Colonel Gadaffi was right when he drew parallels between the hero's welcome of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and the welcomes given to the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor who were convicted of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV.
I have doubts about al-Megrahi's conviction. However, he was convicted in a democracy and had the right to appeal his conviction.
The infection of Libyan children with HIV was caused by the lack of safety standards in the Libyan health system.
Col Gadaffi did not want to acknowledge this fact. Therefore, he made the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor scapegoats for the infection and put them on trial in a kangaroo court.
Furthermore, whether or not the Libyan government was involved in the Lockerbie bombing, it is well known that Col Gadaffi supplied weapons to the Provisional IRA.
Ciaran Masterson
Carrickane, Cavan
The release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has been met with disdain by the American government.
The British and Scottish governments have also been put under pressure for the decision to release him amid allegations that it was fuelled by British-Libyan trade relations.
FBI director Robert Mueller, an investigator of the 1988 bombing, reacted strongly in a letter to the Scottish Justice Minister, Kenny MacAskill.
It seems that returning a convicted terrorist to his home country to die in dignity is wrong.
However, extracting a terrorist suspect from their homeland via rendition and torturing them for real and false confessions passes with substantial apathy from Clinton, Obama, Mueller et al.
Unsurprisingly, the death in a Libyan jail of rendition victim Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in May met with little or no reaction.
So why is the decision to let a man die in dignity lambasted by an establishment that is willing to allow a man to be tortured for what proved to be incorrect information linking Saddam Hussein to Al-Qa'ida?
Brian Strahan
Artane, Dublin 5
