Terrorist release probe rejected
Cameron: No signs BP was involved
WASHINGTON – British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday rejected calls for an investigation of the British government’s release last year of an American-killing terrorist, dismissing charges that oil giant BP engineered the release to win oil business in Libya.
Making his first visit to the White House since taking office in May, Cameron condemned the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber – just as he did a year ago when he was leading the Conservative Party opposition to the British government led then by the Labor Party.
“This was the biggest mass murderer in British history and there was no business in letting him out of prison,” Cameron said.
The release last year was controversial and emotion-charged for the families of those killed when a bomb blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people, 189 of them Americans.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was convicted in the bombing. He was serving a life sentence when Scottish authorities released him last August to return to Libya, saying he had cancer and less than three months to live. He received a hero’s welcome in Libya and is still alive.
Cameron said he’s seen no evidence to support allegations that oil giant BP pressured the British government in Scotland to release the terrorist in exchange for Libyan oil contracts.
“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the Scottish government were in any way swayed by BP,” Cameron said at a joint news conference at the White House with President Barack Obama.
Lacking any evidence of a prisoner-for-oil swap, he said, “I don’t need an inquiry to tell me what was a bad decision. It was a bad decision.”