WASHINGTON — Four senators from New Jersey and New York on Tuesday asked the U.S. State Department to investigate whether BP played a role in winning last year’s release of the man convicted of the Lockerbie airliner bombing, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi.
They said they were concerned BP may have put profits ahead of justice in the case, given the petroleum giant’s current handling of the Gulf oil spill.
BP signed a $900 million exploration agreement with Libya in May 2007, the same month that Britain and Libya inked a memorandum of understanding that paved the way for al-Megrahi’s release from a Scottish prison. At the time, BP said it told British officials to quickly seal a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya but did not mention al-Megrahi.
BP repeated Tuesday that it did not specifically talk about the al-Megrahi case.
Al-Megrahi served eight years of a life sentence for the Dec. 21, 1988, bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 as it flew over Lockerbie, Scotland, while traveling from London to New York. The bombing killed 270 people, most of them American.
He was released on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya in August of last year after doctors said the cancer-stricken man had only three months to live. But a doctor now says al-Megrahi could live for another decade, infuriating many, including the four senators, who are demanding that he be returned to Britain to serve out the rest of his sentence.
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