Can US Navy SEALs shoot Lockerbie bomber dead?

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish jail in August 2009 on compassionate grounds.

London: A father who lost his daughter in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has said that he fears the US Navy SEALs team that killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Pakistan could target Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the atrocity.

Dr Jim Swire, who has long led a campaign on behalf of the Lockerbie victims’ families, said that the Navy SEALs could shoot dead al-Megrahi, who the US wants to put on trial.

“I am worried for him. I can just see the unit they sent to kill Osama bin Laden being sent to extract Megrahi,” the Telegraph reports.

“Presumably, they wouldn’t extract him, but kill him on the spot,” he added.

Dr Swire’s daughter Flora was killed in the bombing.

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, an aircraft flying from London’s Heathrow Airport to New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members.

Eleven people in Lockerbie, Scotland, were also killed as large sections of the plane fell in the town and destroyed several houses, bringing total fatalities to 270.

Al-Megrahi was convicted, by a panel of three Scottish judges sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands in January 2001, of 270 counts of murder for the bombing and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He was, however, released from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on ‘compassionate grounds’ after doctors ruled he would die from prostate cancer within three months.

He had served nearly eight years of a 27-year sentence for killing 270 people.

ANI

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